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Aug. 17, 2021 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

50:14

Afghanistan Falls As The U.S. Ignores Its Past Failures... Again

As harrowing images of Afghanis trying to escape the Taliban continue to broadcast, hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss where we went wrong and why the United States continues to make the same mistakes. To gain access to the weekly Weekender episode and so much more, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	I made a commitment to the brave men and women who serve this nation that I wasn't going to ask them to continue to risk their lives in a military action that should have ended long ago.
	Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as a young man.
	I will not do it in Afghanistan.
	I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference, nor will I shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today and how we must move forward from here.
	I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.
	Hey, everybody.
	Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
	I'm here with Nick Halseman.
	Nick, I'm hot today.
	Okay.
	I'm coming in hot.
	Um, of course the conversation of the moment, uh, carrying on from where we left off on, uh, last week's, uh, weekender episode, uh, Afghanistan has completely gone to shit.
	Uh, there aren't any good answers.
	It is one of the worst imaginable situations, uh, that could have come from all of this.
	Uh, every, everybody's opinion on this is terrible.
	The way that our society and politics is handling this is terrible.
	I know this is shocking, but the way that our media is handling this is terrible.
	I'm hot, Nick.
	I'm hot today.
	There's no way around it.
	There's nothing to do with it.
	Well, let's just through, and we just heard President Biden speak about this, and I would like to maybe, not necessarily shine any light on this, but at least sort of acknowledge that we had a President of the United States who went before the country and acknowledged that it's a shitshow, right?
	He really said, this is not going well.
	It is not nearly what we said it was going to be.
	And that's, first of all, from the last few years, that's a big step to hear that.
	At least I liked what he said.
	He seems to be willing to just blow up our entire foreign policy the last hundred years.
	Well, and I want to go ahead and I want to get a couple of things on the record before we talk about anything else.
	And we're going to delve into both of these things, but both things need to be said.
	Whether you like what has happened or you don't, and by the way, if you like what has happened over the past couple of days, I don't know what to tell you.
	Joe Biden doing this was an act of political courage.
	He knew no matter what happened, he was going to get dinged for it.
	But he also knew that it was wrong to be in Afghanistan any longer.
	It seems like he actually had convictions about this.
	And everybody that I've talked to who has been in his orbit has told me that this has been one of his main goals as president of the United States and one of the main goals of his political life over the last few years.
	The next thing is we shouldn't have invaded Afghanistan in the first place.
	We had the opportunity to get out of there in December of 2001.
	We could have taken that situation, gotten out of it, but instead the Bush administration decided that they wanted to build states and nations, which is absolutely absurd.
	Now, with both of those things established, and we have to go into both of those even more, holy hell is this a terrible situation all the way around, and it is, this is going to be one of those moments That I think we're going to remember probably for the rest of our lives as one of those days where you realize that the American empire or the American empire reality is we have all been living in.
	You grew up in the late 70s, 80s.
	I grew up in the 80s and the 90s.
	The reality that we lived in that had been constructed, particularly in the era of Reagan, that's done.
	And things are changing.
	What it's changing to, that's a different conversation altogether.
	But I do believe that this is going to be one of those things that we're going to remember for a very, very long time for a lot of different reasons.
	Well, here's the thing.
	I mean, we're seeing the exact same footage in Afghanistan as we saw in Vietnam in 1975.
	There is actually footage of planes trying to take off and people hanging onto the planes and falling off as well, like we saw today and yesterday.
	So, my take on that, though, is that, I mean, you could probably, you know, credit Reagan, I suppose, for erasing our memory of that, because it doesn't... Vietnam and the fall of Saigon does not resonate, you know, and hasn't resonated for a long time in the way you just kind of described it.
	Now, this is a different era where we have social media and a lot more focus on these things, so it is possible, yes, we are all going to remember this for a lot longer, If we want to touch upon this politically and what that means for Biden now, one of the reasons why he's doing it today or now is that it's so much ahead of the midterms and then certainly the 2024 election that I think he's banking on the fact that people will not have it really fresh in their minds or thinking about it much when it comes down to the vote, which is probably not to be cynical about it.
	I think that's part of his calculations.
	Well, I'll take that a step forward.
	And this was something I wanted to talk about today.
	And I sort of wrote about it a little bit on Substack today.
	Um, you know, we live in an accelerated culture where we turn the other way from mass tragedies every day now.
	Yeah.
	Uh, we're in the middle of a pandemic that is just, I mean, what are we fourth, fifth wave?
	I don't even, I can't even keep track anymore.
	Uh, as we're watching now, our children are being fed into the mouth of the pandemic and we're just sort of watching and we're like, Oh my God, can you believe that?
	Hey, I'm going to go out to brunch.
	It'll be great.
	The truth of it is it's a shit show over on Twitter.
	It's a shit show on all social media and on the news media.
	People haven't thought about Afghanistan in a long time.
	They didn't think about Iraq for a long time.
	One of the benefits of American empire was it just happened and you didn't have to think about it all the time.
	Like when these wars started, people paid attention to them and eventually it's like, man, this is a bummer.
	Hey, have you got the new iPhone?
	Right.
	And, and you're exactly right.
	This might be one of the things that as of right now feels like it's a giant seismic event, but in the American political societal consciousness, it might not be that large, which is its own indictment.
	Here's a thought though, which is kind of depressing.
	Can we fairly acknowledge or safely acknowledge that all of the Benghazi investigations deeply hurt Hillary's 2016 run?
	Uh, I have to imagine that it probably took a small toll, but there was also, what, 30 years of negative conspiracy theories and coverage of her, for sure?
	I mean, listen, we don't know about the emails, short without the Benghazi investigation, so you could argue it's completely connected.
	So, the fear would be, or if it's political we're talking about right now, is that the Republicans will be able to keep this front and center.
	You know, here's how I liken it, it's like, People in America now have like a gun, a proverbial gun, pointed at their political enemies, and they're just looking for whatever bullet they can shove into that chamber at any time.
	So this is the one today, you know, they're gonna shove in Afghanistan, and they're gonna shove in CRT, whatever, you know what I mean?
	So it's almost like it doesn't matter what the issue is, they're just looking for some sort of ammunition anytime they can kind of reload that gun.
	Well, and real fast, Nick, can you fact check for me on a couple of things here?
	I can.
	20 years in Afghanistan.
	I assume that was just one party that oversaw all of that, correct?
	That would not be correct.
	Oh wait, the Democrats and the Republicans both screwed this up in different ways?
	Sure, yeah, yeah.
	That's shocking.
	Hey, can you check your notes for one more thing for me?
	The intelligence community, I assume that's just one party, right?
	Yeah, not so much, Jared.
	Oh wait, what about the military?
	Is that just one party?
	No.
	Wait, so what you're telling me is that right now we are looking at a massive, massive failure all the way through American leadership?
	I am.
	That's crazy!
	Because that's almost what we talk about all the time, the fact that these people who are in charge and who are a ruling class are not up to the job and what continues to happen is they keep making the same mistakes and then their reactions are the reactions to the mistakes that they have already made.
	In this situation, the most damning part of all of this that nobody wants to talk about is American intelligence didn't understand That the Afghan people were not going to fight when they left?
	That they just loved freedom and the American way so much that they were going to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their family?
	That is delusional batshit crazy.
	And they really, and this honestly, and to bring it down into base terms, they're getting high off their own supply, man.
	Like, if you really believe the mythology of what America means to everybody, and if you just fly the right flag in front of all people, they will suddenly fall in line and do what you want them to do, that is mass delusional batshit crazy.
	And that's what we should be talking about today.
	But wait a minute, Jared.
	Biden said today, and I quote, this did unfold more quickly than anticipated.
	No shit.
	I mean, that is putting it as mildly as possible.
	The forces, the moment that they heard that the Taliban was near, holding their guns, they put their guns down.
	They stripped out of their uniforms.
	They put on traditional dress and they said, welcome back, baby.
	We're ready to go.
	What took you so long?
	This was a massive intelligence failure, and it's not because they didn't have data.
	It's because they believed their own bullshit, which is the American way that is the problem.
	If only there was a way we could have had any evidence to prove that this was never going to work.
	And by the way, if only we could have told, someone could have spoken up in 2000 or 2001 when this was happening and said, you know what, this isn't going to work as nation building.
	So if you want to put this on the foot of the feet of anybody, right?
	Because I know, listen, it didn't, I want to give a little bit of credit at least to Biden in the sense that this is completely snafu'd and they're now going to send more troops into the, to the airport.
	to secure it and try and get thousands of people out who want to leave.
	Now, the Taliban in the past would have never gone out publicly and said, hey, if you want to leave, we're not going to shoot you in the back.
	I even saw a video today where they were talking about how women and girls could go to schools, but I have a feeling they're going to twist that and lawyer those words out.
	Yeah, I don't feel very confident.
	And it wouldn't last long.
	I think that would be, you know, and it's at the whim of whoever happens to walk by with a gun who's in the Taliban.
	Like, that's the problem with that whole thing.
	So I don't want to give credence to that.
	But at the very least, to hear them go like live on, you know, American TV and, you know, maybe they're lying, maybe they're not.
	But at the very least, there is an effort now to try and do something right.
	And if they can get out a whole bunch of people and get them to any other country so they're not subject to the terror of the Taliban, then okay, then that's something.
	But remember, do you remember how many people the United States accepted from Vietnam?
	How many Vietnamese?
	Through the course of that, the end, do you know how many people it was?
	I'm sorry, were people on social media talking about how they were bringing terrorism with them?
	I'm trying to keep track of history.
	No, but we're kind of, I think people are comparing numbers here, like, because it was in the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people who were escaping the North Vietnamese.
	So, you know, we're not even close to doing anything like that, which is what we probably should be doing in Afghanistan.
	I think, well, look at the number of people who live there.
	I think it's at least comparable or not more to Vietnam.
	So we would, you know, hell, Canada is taking more people per capita than we are right now.
	Well, I'm glad you brought up the refugees because number one, all of the Republicans right now who applauded Donald Trump for this deal, which we got to point out that Donald Trump was the person who signed this deal.
	And if Biden wouldn't have went ahead and gone ahead with this, we probably would have been in the middle of a hot civil war.
	So, for anybody who really wants to talk about this situation, do you want to send your kids into this?
	Well wait, walk through that, because in theory, if he didn't do anything after May 1st, it would have just been status quo until we decided to do something, right?
	After we made a deal with them.
	Oh, I see what you mean.
	So you're picturing May 1st and we made a deal and all of a sudden we get to November and we haven't been pulling anybody out and they're going to get upset.
	Nick, I don't know how to tell you this, but Donald Trump didn't give people a lot of confidence that America was going to go through with its treatment.
	So, one of these things is, it's fighting season, man.
	It's time to go.
	And they were ready.
	Obviously, the Taliban had gotten its forces together.
	And by the way, not just their forces, but they were going into towns and cities and people are like, let's go, baby.
	Let's do it.
	So this was a situation that was gaining power and momentum.
	First and foremost.
	Hang on for one second on that one.
	Because, you know, some of the troops hadn't been paid for months, like they were pissed at the Americans for that.
	So it wasn't necessarily like they welcomed them in.
	I think there maybe was a Well, you also have the Taliban coming down the road and the United States government isn't getting back to you about whether or not you're going to have visas or safe passage out of the country.
	You start making choices.
	Right?
	But let's point out that Donald Trump made a deal to try and get himself re-elected.
	It had nothing to do with America, it had nothing to do with our allies on the ground, had nothing to do with strategic purposes.
	He did it for himself.
	Shocker, I know.
	But let's go ahead and let's look at the situation on the ground right now with these refugees.
	The Republican Party that was cheering Trump on as he made this deal.
	And by the way, if you go and look, the Republican Party has scrubbed all records of them cheering this thing on.
	So what are they going to do now?
	They're going to call Biden a traitor for fulfilling the agreement that Trump made.
	They're already calling for the 25th Amendment.
	They're already saying that he's incapable of doing the job.
	Shocker.
	They're going to talk about these refugees.
	They're going to say because they might be Muslim, that they might be terrorists.
	And listen, that's the Republican Party.
	We expect that from them.
	You know what's coming across the line right now?
	Emmanuel Macron in France.
	One of the great liberal leaders of Western democracy.
	And by the way, we haven't talked about Macron on this podcast yet.
	My official stance?
	Huge weirdo.
	Massive weirdo.
	I just want that on the record.
	So Emmanuel Macron... But you hate France now?
	I got problems with France, but that's another thing altogether.
	Emmanuel Macron, who, by the way, is supposed to be one of these great Western democratic leaders, right?
	What does he do?
	Is he like, I'm going to open up the country.
	I'm going to bring these people in.
	Of course not.
	He's looking on his right.
	He's seeing people like Le Pen.
	He's seeing white nationals.
	He's seeing anti-immigration parties building.
	And he says, I'm going to go to the EU and put in strict limitations on refugees from Afghanistan.
	So this in all facets, and listen, this is going to sound hyperbolic.
	It probably should.
	It's actually realistic.
	This is the failure of liberal democracy in our times.
	This is the project that we've all been living in for forever.
	We have reached the point where the people who are supposed to carry out liberal democracy are incapable of doing it.
	And meanwhile, the corporations and the private individuals They raked in the money by the fucking boatload on this thing.
	We didn't get a democratic Afghanistan.
	We didn't get a sea change in Afghanistan.
	We gave up tons of our money, and which we gotta talk about that, how much fucking money we didn't spend on everything else.
	We gave up the lives and and the health of our soldiers and we gave all of our attention to Afghanistan.
	And who benefited?
	The wealthy and the powerful who went over there and run operations and gathered resources.
	And by the way, we can't get into it too much today, The heroin trade.
	Like, this thing is bad all the way around.
	Period.
	Right.
	Because the next question would be, as the Taliban goes through these towns and they're paying everybody because they hadn't been paid before and it's easy to get them to shift allegiances that way, where is that money coming from?
	And certainly the poppy fields are one of those places.
	You know, I just keep coming back to that last action hero when the guy comes out of the screen and he kills somebody and nobody cares and he realizes that in the real world of where we live in, law doesn't really mean much.
	I have a feeling they could have done this before the U.S.
	got left.
	There was 2,000 troops and there's 38,000 Taliban who are trained who can easily coerce everybody else in these towns to have to follow them because they're brutal and they don't follow the laws of war.
	The presence of the United States there didn't really, it was almost a sham to begin with, like the myth.
	When we had 100,000 troops in there, okay, fine, I could see how they could keep control across the whole country, but I have a feeling in the last 10 years, they could have done this at any time they wanted to, and no one would have really stopped them.
	Now they were doing some bombing, and apparently Trump was bombing way more than Obama had ever done to try and keep the peace, but at some point, That was gonna fall apart as well as we all know that is in Vietnam that bombing doesn't work either Anyway, so that the worry then is it's like we talked about this before in America, you know It's enough people decided that they don't want to follow laws.
	Then the laws don't really exist A hundred thousand percent.
	Mirrors, you know, are you buying the image, the mirror imagery we're seeing now of the insurgency in January 6th and the Taliban going through the town halls and the, you know, the official buildings in Afghanistan?
	A hundred thousand percent.
	A hundred thousand percent.
	This is what happens when the facade of civilization starts to break down.
	I mean, that's what it is.
	Really, really is like this whole time that we were in Afghanistan.
	And by the way, it wasn't like we eradicated the Taliban.
	We like push them off to the side.
	Meanwhile, a ton of these people made a ton of money as warlords.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, they just sort of hung around.
	They probably even had weapons that we had given them at some point.
	Like, there were tons of reasons for them to be operating and biding their time.
	It's not like the war was even being prosecuted.
	Like, every now and then you would have a sect of them that would come in and get into a fracas.
	But in this case, why didn't they go in over the past year or so?
	Because they didn't want to bring in more troops.
	They were just waiting this thing out.
	They knew that Americans were eventually going to pull out, and they saw the writing on the wall here.
	In this case, going back to what you were saying about the airport, they don't want to go in there and start a live war against the American troops, right?
	Like, they're just like, yeah, get out of here!
	Like, we're gonna have a great time once you leave.
	We're gonna reinstall everybody that was already there, and this facade of Western civilization that Americans imported and basically set up.
	I was talking about it on a live stream last night.
	It's like one of those old western movie sets where it's like you're riding through the town on your horse and it's like oh there's the general store and then a wind knocks it over because just you know like a flat surface that looks like the front of a building.
	None of it was real.
	It was just Afghans like being like well what do you want from us?
	Okay we'll do that.
	Are you guys gonna leave anytime soon?
	Because once you do we're back to where we were.
	You can't force people to accept your version of reality.
	And America has to keep learning this.
	Starting from the first time that we stepped foot in a colony that we were invading or places we were taking over, you can't make people do it.
	It doesn't matter how many guns you have.
	It doesn't matter how many troops you have.
	If people don't want your civilization, you're not going to give it to them.
	Well here's an interesting concept because Spencer Ackerman is a guy who's got a sub stack and on Twitter and actually Jason Needleman who we've had on the show who's a political science professor was telling me that there isn't necessarily a significant fear of Al Qaeda kind of training to attack us on U.S.
	soil right now.
	That's not really the biggest issue they have.
	Dude, they got everything that they wanted!
	Everything that they wanted!
	Because here's the thing.
	They did everything that they wanted.
	And so my argument would be this.
	Remember what happened the last time they let that happen?
	They lived 20 years in the wilderness.
	Now, I know that they'll play the long game, right?
	And they have no problem waiting it out.
	Ask the Russians or ask the Soviets.
	Ask the British in the late 1800s. 19th century.
	They defeated the French!
	That's insane.
	Like, that's the other problem is this very piece of land.
	We keep seeing this over and over again and they won't listen.
	At least maybe in Vietnam, you might have argued, well, we hadn't done anything there before, so we didn't know any better.
	But at least they're the French.
	Yeah, we want them to beat the French.
	And we're like, yeah, we want a piece of that.
	Well, don't forget the domino theory.
	Right.
	Which is, again, the same thing they're now going to say about Al-Qaeda.
	So that's the real question is, is Al-Qaeda ever going to be able to reconstitute the way it was anyway?
	Or whatever you want to call it.
	It might not be that specific terrorist group.
	But my instinct, for some reason, is that the Taliban would be like, we want Sharia law.
	We want a closed border where we can have our own little piece of the place.
	And as long as we don't have American infidels on our land, Well, I want to say one thing that I think I've said on the podcast before, but in case I haven't, I want to go ahead and put it on the record.
	to have to leave again.
	That's my take on it right now.
	I don't know if that's right or not, but I feel like that would be a reasonable idea for how they want to run the country going forward.
	Well, I want to say one thing that I think I've said on the podcast before, but in case I haven't, I want to go ahead and put it on the record, which is Al-Qaeda was a myth.
	It was this big, giant narrative that the Bush administration and the media created in order to have the war on terror.
	This was a relatively small group of people.
	And by the way, for anybody at home, anybody want to take a guess on how much the attacks of September 11th cost?
	Anybody? $600,000.
	$600,000 to draw the most powerful empire in the history of the world into two major wars over the course of two decades, cost trillions of dollars, create militarism, make them spend all political and cultural capital that they had accrued since World War II, embrace militarism, embrace torture, lose any and all trust of all other places,
	Put their forces in, I want to say it was like a hundred countries, something like that.
	Bleed our social safety net, hold back progress, and completely screw up our entire democratic process.
	Why would they, why do they want to reconstitute?
	They got everything that they wanted.
	They won in this situation.
	They got everything that they wanted from the very beginning.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And it plunged us into recessions and chaos with our country as well.
	But I think that if I listen to what you just said again very carefully, I might be hearing that you're saying that 9-11 was an inside job?
	Did you say that?
	Are you going on the record to say that?
	I think you said that.
	No, I'm not saying that.
	I am saying that the Al-Qaeda group spent $600,000 to make that happen.
	And I'm saying that the Bush administration should have stopped it.
	They knew it was coming.
	They had been warned about it over and over and over again.
	And either through an unwillingness to actually confront it or an incapability to confront it, it happened.
	And then they were like, how are we going to take advantage of this?
	And then that's where that went from there.
	Al Qaeda got everything that they wanted.
	By the way, you know, the interesting thing we can predict on this is that the same thing will happen in Iraq.
	Right?
	Because we went to Iraq, we propped it up, and that's the other thing, when you have these kind of countries that like fake democracy, right?
	Like, when totalitarianism is already there, they're like, wait, we could just fake all this and everyone will be like, great, pass in the back, great, like Egypt, you know?
	And by the way, Iraq is probably that way now anyway, right?
	I don't think these elections are that free and fair, whatever they're doing there now.
	So it's like that could easily be a thing where – I mean how many troops – I don't want to put you on the spot because I don't know.
	We have a lot of troops in Iraq still, right?
	Do anybody know how many?
	We drew down on that quite a bit.
	But I also want to push back on one thing, which is the idea that their elections are free and fair to begin with.
	The United States went over and created parties and groups that were then put in front of these people and they had to choose between them.
	Like it was never a matter of them actually choosing their progress in the same way that America never really has allowed nations ruled by people of color to make decisions for themselves.
	They'll allow you to make a decision.
	If you make the wrong decision, we'll go in and kill your ass, or we'll overthrow you, or we'll throw millions upon millions of dollars and have the CIA go in, sow misinformation and ruin your life, and then put somebody else in front.
	Like, it's not free and fair.
	It's a facsimile of a facsimile of democracy.
	Right.
	And by the way, we're kind of in that realm here with our democracy.
	A quick Google look on the PBS website, which I'm assuming would be accurate.
	We have 2,500 US troops right now in Iraq.
	That number is very similar.
	It sounds very familiar, doesn't it to you?
	I'm telling you right now, in Iraq, they keep looking around going, you know, jeez, look how easy it was to take over Afghanistan once they started pulling away.
	I bet you it wouldn't be that much harder with a few thousand troops that are concentrated in one area of Iraq.
	As it is, they're probably not really controlling most of Iraq now.
	So, this is the domino theory that they've been talking about, but it doesn't necessarily mean that communism is taking over, or even terrorism is taking over.
	It simply means that there are countries that have a certain way that they decide they want to be run by these tyrannical leaders.
	What are we supposed to do about that all the way over here?
	And here's the thing about it, and a lot of people have been posing this to me over the past couple of days.
	There's no good answer.
	There's no good answer.
	Right.
	Kill Osama Bin Laden.
	Kill the head of the Taliban.
	What's that going to do?
	Well, yeah, like I mean, oh, bin Laden, like you can sit here and you can say, yeah, he deserved to die.
	I mean, it would have been great if we could have captured him.
	But, you know, we killed him.
	And that makes sense.
	This is a person who was the, you know, the architect of September 11th.
	He had that coming.
	Again, we could have ended in Afghanistan in December of 2001.
	That could have been there.
	Iraq, we never should have gone on in the first place.
	So when people ask me, should we stay there forever or should we let this happen?
	My answer is, man, I want to take you back in time to when I was protesting against this shit.
	And when I was telling you that we shouldn't do any of it.
	And people who knew better, and by the way, this goes out to your Chuck Todd's.
	This goes out to your Sunday morning hosts, your cable news stuff, and for anybody who watches that stuff and everyone's always had like a little idea in the back of the head, they're like, man, cable news is kind of problematic and weird and I don't always know what they're talking about.
	They're talking about American empire.
	These are people who truly believe that America really should press its thumbs on the scales around the world and that we have been ordained as some sort of a leader, as if we're some sort of chosen race.
	Guess what that is?
	That's white supremacy.
	That's jingoism.
	That's chauvinism.
	There's a problem.
	And this is one of the issues.
	I am not happy that people are suffering.
	I'm not happy that gay people are probably going to be targeted and women are going to be targeted.
	All that is tragic.
	And that some of our allies are probably going to get hurt.
	All that is absolutely tragic.
	I wish we had never put them in that position in the first place.
	That's what I wish.
	And the repercussions of that and the consequences of that are going to ring out for God knows how long.
	We've been watching it for 20 years now.
	Well, you know, we mentioned this in the last podcast how JFK had established us as the police of democracy and freedom around the world, which sounded very noble.
	The only time I could think about it where it was noble was World War II, when we had to go in, and by the way, only because we were attacked, surprisingly, in Pearl Harbor, you know, and to save the Holocaust, to stop the Holocaust from happening or continuing.
	Let me let me tell you one quick little tidbit that I don't think most people know.
	I didn't know it until I was writing American Rule, which is when when FDR, Churchill and Stalin were meeting to discuss all of this stuff like the post-war world after we beat Hitler.
	The big conversation was called the Four Policemen Theory.
	The idea was that the US, Britain, Russia, and China would control the world in four spheres.
	And basically, everyone would have to give up all of their weapons down to rifles.
	And there would be, like, no more war, there would be no more scarcity, there would be, like, you know, human liberty and democracy, as all four of these powers sort of worked in concert.
	Now, as I say that, listen, I'm not naive enough to think that that wouldn't have ended up in some really gnarly situations with two on two, three on one, all of that.
	But the point is, we decided we didn't want that.
	We decided after FDR died, and when Truman came in, that a Cold War was necessary.
	And you're exactly right.
	We were on the right side in World War II.
	But what did we do at the end of it?
	We said, hey Nazis, send over all of your weapons specialists, all of your scientists.
	We'll take them.
	By the way, fascists over here in Europe, yeah, you're on our side now.
	Here's some money, here's some military support.
	You're now on our side against Russia.
	Hey, down in South America and in Africa.
	Oh, you're a dictator.
	Uh, are you a capitalist, too?
	Fantastic, you're on our side.
	Hey, Japan, uh, you operated on a bunch of individuals, like human beings.
	Come on over.
	That's fine.
	We'll talk about that.
	We'll figure it out.
	By the way, Russia, ball's in your court now.
	That's what we ended up doing.
	We squandered all of that for the pursuit of American empire.
	Look where the fuck it got us.
	Look where we are in 2021.
	None of it worked.
	None of it actually had the intended consequences.
	And now we're watching the fallout.
	Anybody who's over 70 years old who supported our incursion into Afghanistan should just get punched in the face because you had lived through this already.
	You had seen this in Vietnam and with Nixon.
	It's the exact same thing.
	It's like the Pentagon Papers never happened and we never like you want to go trust everybody again like this is going to work.
	We're going to find out that they were lying and they're going to find out all the evidence from the generals that were lying about all this stuff just like Westmoreland.
	That's already coming out.
	Yeah, so this is just Westmoreland all over again.
	It's Oliver North all over again.
	It's like we, it is, we are doomed to do the same thing over and over again.
	There's more of us, I think, that are recognizing that and upset about this.
	You know, obviously because if everybody voted, you know, the Republicans would be out of a job.
	They wouldn't really, you know, a lot of them wouldn't win.
	But there's enough of them that they are able to continue this myth Going forward.
	I guess it's the it's the just the built-in.
	We have to be positive about America We have to believe in America.
	We have to we can't say anything about we can't look at it out of that out of that way That prism and so as a result like they're willing to just buy this shit and to support it no matter what You are right that the amount of money just even the sheer economics of it if these people are really about you know capitalism it's it's like the biggest waste of all time, but again instead what they want to do is Yeah, I mean, 100%.
	And I want to say, this is a very elementary thing to say, but we have to remind ourselves of this all the time.
	you know, the other side, because they don't like them.
	And it's going to turn into even more of an intractable situation that's never going to change. - Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent.
	And I want to say, this is a very elementary thing to say, but we have to remind ourselves of this all the time.
	The government is supposed to represent us.
	It's supposed to be something that is there doing our business on our behalf, right?
	It's not supposed to be running all these wars and lying to us about it.
	This is its own idea, which is, unfortunately, a very Nazi-istic, fascistic idea, which is state above people.
	Shut up, people.
	We have business to do.
	And a lot of this is about the idea of geopolitics, which treats all of the world like it's a big game of risk.
	Right.
	We're just we got to move people over here.
	We move people over here.
	Oh, don't worry.
	We'll put we'll pit them against them and do this.
	Well, guess what gets lost in all that human beings, the lives of human beings, the people in Afghanistan who have been murdered, who have been disabled, who have been displaced and who are now suffering the consequences of all that, but also here in America.
	All the people who could have lived longer, better lives.
	All the people who could have got an education.
	The, you know, the infrastructure that we could have had.
	None of that is being discussed.
	None of that.
	We could have used those trillions of dollars to have made all of those programs better, plus also probably fought climate change.
	And you know, if we would have done all of that, we wouldn't be in a situation where we're at right now, where fascism and authoritarianism is rising every single day.
	This is a consequence of empire and militarism and austerity.
	All those things come together and it creates what we have now.
	Well, let's not forget, at the very least, they were justified to go into Afghanistan in the very beginning.
	Now, the argument would then be, well, you know, we didn't get attacked since then.
	Clearly, that must be because we were there.
	You know, again, this is the assumptions that people make.
	Real fast, Nick, just so I can refresh my memory, because I'm glad that we went back in time for a second, back to September 11th.
	The people who attacked us on September 11th, they were from Afghanistan, right?
	Yeah, that's a negative.
	Wait, they weren't from Afghanistan?
	No.
	Well, we must have invaded the country where those people were from, correct?
	Oh, Jared.
	I hate to break it to you, but no, most of those were Saudis.
	Oh, they were from Saudi Arabia?
	Our Saudi Arabian allies that we can never hold accountable for the things that they do.
	That's so weird, Nick.
	That's really strange to hear that that's how that played out.
	Now, let's ask you this.
	Why are we willing to get out of Afghanistan, but not necessarily willing to get out of Iraq?
	That's an interesting take as well.
	Perhaps it's because and we keep seeing fucking Trump even today or yesterday say, you know, we pulled out of Turkey or somewhere, but we kept the oil, right?
	He keeps saying that like these what we committed war crimes, which is that what that would have been if we were like, you know, stealing oil from another from a sovereign country.
	But clearly, to answer my question, like Walden, great.
	Why are we still in Iraq?
	If we're so hell bent on getting out of these places and not having forever wars, I mean, you know, should we stop there?
	Because again, the answer would then, why are we in South Korea?
	You know, we're still there after all these years.
	We're still in Germany, right?
	Like, it's an interesting question.
	And that's the one time when you hear some of the libertarians, at least the libertarians from 20 years ago.
	Who was it?
	Well, who are the terrorists?
	And who have the terrorists always been?
	His big platform was we're going to get all of our troops back to America so we can save all that money.
	I think that was his thing.
	And that resonated with me.
	I'm like, you know.
	But again, that is the fear.
	If we're not out there, you know, getting the terrorists distracted out there, then they're going to come attack us here.
	I mean, that's the idea.
	Again, I don't know if that's a myth or not, but that would be the argument against leaving.
	Well, who are the terrorists?
	And who have the terrorists always been?
	It's people who oppose American hegemony.
	It's whoever doesn't agree with American hegemony.
	Like, yeah, maybe some of them are violent and some of them have plots.
	You're not going to stop it.
	Like, if you want to be the premier empire in the world, which is what America has desired and lusted after, there are going to be people who oppose you.
	There are going to be people who are pissed off that you show up in their country or you support causes that cause them harm.
	That is impossible to stop.
	This idea that we were going to go around the world and make it safe for freedom or whatever, it was about expanding markets.
	It was about gathering resources and getting footholds in other countries so that we could hop to other countries and then do things there.
	The whole point of it is, throughout history, what we've been taught, there is no way to change everyone's mind.
	There's no way to have total hegemony and every time you try and do it, you destroy yourself.
	It doesn't work.
	The War on Terror was absolute bullshit from the very beginning, cooked up by Straussians, who didn't even really believe it in the first place, and saw it as a really handy cover story for furthering American hegemony.
	That is one of those main arguments.
	that the central tenet to al-Qaeda's mission was, or the reason why they were so upset and wanted to attack the United States is because there were so many infidels in their lands.
	That was what they would say.
	We're upset, we're attacking, because they're in Saudi Arabia, they're in the Middle East.
	We want them gone from there.
	The idea being that if we were gone from there, then they don't want to attack us anymore.
	That is one of those main arguments.
	I can tell you what the fuck it wasn't, which is that they hated our freedom.
	Which is one of the most absurd things that ever got cooked up.
	Yes, you could say that it was like where we were and how many places that we were active in and how we were doing this and how we were doing that.
	The whole point, and this is something I've been screaming from the rooftops, and it isn't popular.
	We need to pull back Empire.
	We can't afford it.
	We can't continue it.
	It was foolhardy and destructive in the first place, and it's corroded us.
	It has unleashed poison in the American body and around the world.
	This goes back to what you were saying about bases.
	What we're watching today is one of the reasons why a base never gets shut down.
	Why we never bring troops home.
	Why?
	Because you take a political hit.
	There's always a political hit and that's why the budget for the military always grows and grows and grows.
	You have to always pretend like you are on the side of growing the military or otherwise you're seen as weak, which is one of the biggest traps that the Democratic Party has fallen into over the past few decades.
	Well, what happens if there is a horrible humanitarian crisis in the country that we, you know, we would have expected to help with?
	I don't know.
	Call our friends.
	They'll be there.
	One of the things that pisses me off about all of this is H.W.
	Bush, particularly in the post-Russian world.
	And by the way, for those who don't know this, the Iraqi war, the Persian Gulf War, the first one was sort of unnecessary.
	And it was created in order to bring together an international order.
	And by the way, everybody, put your hands over your kids' ears.
	It was to create a new world order in which America and Russia and all of the major quote-unquote democracies came together to confront threats.
	And that would be your policemen that we're always talking about.
	Oh, I thought you were going to give HBW a little credit here, like, for doing it properly.
	Wait, oh, after he was part of giving them weapons and gas and intelligence, and when we fought Iraq, we were fighting them while they were using weapons and intelligence and technologies that we gave them so that they would gas the Iranians?
	Well, anyway, my whole point is that W. Bush ruined the international order that his dad had created.
	And when we win it alone in Iraq, in a totally illegal war crime of a conflict, he destroyed what you're talking about.
	If there's humanitarian crisis, the big nations of the world, I guess, should come together and fix it together.
	That way it's not a pursuit of money and wealth, even though they always turn it into that.
	And that's how they always make this shit.
	No, I agree.
	I mean, the golden rule is, you know, seven on one.
	And so certainly that's that would help.
	You know, I guess the point is, because they're all going to try and, you know, plunder the countries are going to try and, quote unquote, save.
	But when you have enough of them, it kind of probably balances out a little bit where then becomes a little bit of a righteous thing.
	It's still where you can save lives and help restore order.
	And by the way, like we have to talk about this very, very quickly, at least in passing.
	Were we told post-Soviet implosion that American capitalism would just go around the world and all people had to do was get a look at a good pair of Levi's and maybe listen to a little bit of Tom Petty and the next thing you knew they'd be voting in elections and opening up their markets?
	Like, hasn't that been proven to be complete and utter bullshit?
	And again, it's one public intellectual, think tank member, military advocate, one media member after another, too, and a bunch of Republican and Democratic politicians who have believed one of the biggest self-perpetuated lies that had absolutely no merit whatsoever.
	And they were like, yeah, go ahead and send our sons and daughters out to die for this thing.
	I thought it was Bruce Springsteen.
	Was it Tom Petty?
	I'm sorry, I don't want to make light of that because what you're saying is absolutely, it's devastatingly true.
	And by the way, the fact that we don't have a draft either takes away, I mean, if you're looking for a reason why there was such a big backlash against the Vietnam War, it was because of the draft.
	So all of a sudden, if you remove that, interestingly enough, We don't have the same kind of passion to like to oppose these kind of things because of that.
	And it's almost like the politicians figure out, well, we could probably bribe a whole bunch of people to join the army anyway, give them a couple extra perks and say they can go to college later or whatever.
	And all poor people, obviously, or mostly poor people, right?
	And we'll still have to be able to keep the army filled up.
	And then we'll take away, though, the huge agitator of what people would get really upset with about wars and allow us to prosecute these wars easier.
	That's a fascinating concept as well to understand, because I'm glad that there isn't a draft.
	But then again, I'm also upset that there isn't enough public pushback and political pressure to stop this bullshit.
	Yeah, it's weird how the anti-war movement on the left went away once you got rid of the draft.
	It's really strange how that happened.
	Like, you know, all these white middle-class kids were joining up, you know, with civil rights people in the counterculture and the next thing you know the draft goes away and all of a sudden they're hanging out and talking on iPhones.
	It's really odd.
	Well, take what you were just saying about not just sending out poor kids, which is exactly what our military has become, and it might be weird to think about but maybe that's One of the reasons we have so many poor people around, you know, and why we have a shrinking middle class.
	Maybe we need more kids who are more than willing to go pay for college.
	By going and laying their lives on the line.
	Maybe that's another reason why college is so expensive and why they won't make fat free.
	I don't know.
	I'm just riffing here.
	But you also think about the fact that it's not just the poor people now.
	We now have like killer robots that we just like let loose and then they'll fly around the world and they'll drone strike a wedding here or a birthday party there.
	And meanwhile, you kill an entire family.
	Don't even worry about whether or not you actually got your target.
	You kill an entire family and say, oh, that was an insurgency.
	And the next thing you know, everyone who knows them and cares about them hates America and doesn't want anything to do with our fucking elections.
	Because why would they want anything to do with the thing that killed all of the people that they care about?
	It doesn't work.
	And it's never worked.
	Anyone who thought it would was totally delusional about it.
	Right.
	So, I mean, I don't think we really get into the solution of this, because obviously soft power is generally the answer, right?
	You want to be in a situation across the world where enough people like you, or at least don't care to want to kill you, that keeps order and peace, right?
	Because they, you know, America, okay, we used to have that position, right?
	For a long time, it felt like across the world.
	We didn't have to deal with, you know, terrorist attacks, you know, like we do now, right?
	Like, there was a long time.
	Then again, it's all technology, it's harder to get here, whatever.
	But nonetheless, I think that that's the, that has to be the answer.
	We have to somehow, and if it's America for, or if it's, if we, you know, we come back to, you know, getting all of our troops out and not having presences in other countries, whatever that is, obviously, The opposite, what we're doing now is not the answer.
	I think that's the idea here, right?
	Like we have to stop doing that at the very least.
	We can figure out how to solve some of the other things, you know, later.
	But we have to stop inflaming, I think, is what we're saying.
	Well, who are we the envy of now?
	I mean, like we're having fights about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head while we're fighting about whether or not vaccines are like secret, you know, sauces from Microsoft.
	Like, and on top of that, like, We have a massive homeless epidemic because we don't care about people.
	We don't invest in anything.
	Our infrastructure is crumbling.
	You know, we can't even be an empire anymore.
	Like, what are people jealous of?
	A Trump presidency?
	I mean, what, what, what do people looking at us talking about soft power?
	We don't, uh, we don't carry out our agreements anymore.
	I mean, like, you know, we might, you know, Donald Trump might get elected next or Gordon Ramsey, I don't know, some other reality TV star, and they'll come in and completely void every agreement we've ever had because our government can't do anything anymore.
	So I, that soft power is totally non-existent right now.
	It's got to be at its lowest point pre-World War I?
	I guess I can't even I can't even think of the last time that America was probably in a position like this.
	Maybe when we sort of fought to a stalemate in 1812.
	Well, because even right when we were founded, it was a beacon of hope for a lot of people across the world to like this is going to be the could be great so everybody aspired to that so you know i used to think when i walked into costco for a long long time and i'd see everything there i'd look at and say this is why people want to come kill us like or hate us so much because it's such excess it's unbelievable right now though i almost feel like it's the vaccine people are looking at america thinking we can't get a vaccine i can't protect myself
	and meanwhile these assholes in america have a surplus and they don't want to take it like that to me would be the next level of like uh animosity towards the united united states kind of like just like the costco thing used to be well what have we birthed The main product of the United States of America is the corporation.
	The transnational corporation.
	Which, going back to what we were just talking about, that quote-unquote New World Order, into NAFTA, free trade, which was pushed by both parties, right?
	This free trade, the globalist society that we live in now, that was the main export of America.
	And although those corporations have grown larger than America, this is their base, this is their incubator, their crib that they came from.
	It has circled the world multiple times.
	Second and third world countries, the reason we call them that is because they're second and third on the list of importance when it comes to the conveyor belt of creating and consuming things.
	We have taken entire populations and turned them into workforces that are either enslaved or they're getting paid pennies on the hour to do backbreaking labor.
	So what is it?
	So what is it that we're supposed to give people besides this horseshit order that we've given to them?
	Really?
	I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know.
	I don't know either.
	We better figure it out fast, man.
	Like, we better figure out something better than this.
	Because this American Empire thing has completely fallen on its face.
	Like, we all knew that it would.
	So we gotta figure out something better.
	We gotta have an alternative.
	It needs to be more of a global conglomeration, right?
	We need to be less of a country and more of a global community.
	Well, you would think that even considering the dignity of other human beings around the world might be a step in the right direction.
	I don't know.
	So, it is a maddening, maddening moment.
	Like I said, I came in hot today.
	I appreciate sitting here going through all this thing.
	I'm sure we're going to talk more about this.
	A reminder, as always, that we will have an additional show for our patrons.
	All you have to do is go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	You'll get access to that and other additional material.
	We appreciate all of our patrons.
	You make this show go, and this show is growing every single day, and we are so thankful.
	Especially days like this where things are so infuriating and frustrating.
	We're so glad that we have a community of people.
	So thank you, as always.
	Until next time, you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
	SMH.
	You can find me, J.Y.
	Sexton.
	God, I'm pissed.
	All right, everybody.

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