Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism w/ Scott Horton
Aired: 2021-02-11
Duration: 01:33:36


=== The SOHO Forum Debate Series (01:18) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:05]  Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by the SOHO Forum, the wonderful debate series run by the great Gene Epstein, sponsored by the wonderful Reason magazine.
[00:00:18]  Of course, this is the debate series that I've debated in in the past.
[00:00:21]  I've done stand-up comedy to open them up.
[00:00:24]  I've been the moderator at them.
[00:00:26]  I love this series so much.
[00:00:27]  It's one of the things I've missed the most since this crazy lockdown regime started is that we haven't been able to do these live events.
[00:00:36]  And so I'm thrilled to announce that the Soho Forum is doing their first live event since back in March.
[00:00:42]  It's going to be Thursday, February 18th at 5 p.m.
[00:00:46]  It'll take place in the Villages, Florida.
[00:00:49]  It's a debate between Joe Mackey and Yaron Brook.
[00:00:52]  The resolution reads, a clearly articulated purpose, consciously embodied by the leadership, should be an essential element in all business organizations while also enhancing shareholder value.
[00:01:04]  Sounds like a really fascinating debate to me.
[00:01:06]  If you're anywhere near the Villages, Florida, make sure you go check that out.
[00:01:10]  To get all the information, go to thesohoforum.org.
[00:01:14]  Make sure you support this debate series.
[00:01:17]  It's run by really great people.

=== A Masterpiece on Reagan Policy (12:21) ===

[00:01:19]  They put on a really interesting, fantastic event.
[00:01:22]  They've been doing events online throughout the pandemic, but this is the first live one that we've gotten in quite a while.
[00:01:28]  So very exciting news.
[00:01:29]  Go to thesohoforum.org for more information.
[00:01:33]  All right, let's start the show.
[00:01:36]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:01:38]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:01:40]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:01:44]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:01:49]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:01:54]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:01:58]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:02:01]  What's up, everybody?
[00:02:03]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:02:06]  This is an episode that a lot of my people have been looking forward to because they knew this was coming.
[00:02:11]  Of course, I had to have the great Scott Horton on to talk about his new book, which is really a masterpiece.
[00:02:18]  I loved it and I can't recommend it highly enough.
[00:02:21]  Scott is just one of the best people we have in this movement.
[00:02:25]  I've learned so much from him.
[00:02:27]  And I've just, I'm lucky to have Scott as a friend and a mentor and a teacher in many ways.
[00:02:35]  And the book is just such a great title.
[00:02:38]  Every time I say it, I feel like Scott Horton's yelling it at me.
[00:02:42]  Enough already.
[00:02:44]  Time to end the war on terrorism.
[00:02:46]  The wars on terrorism.
[00:02:48]  Excuse me.
[00:02:49]  And okay, so Scott, I'm going to give you a real Kathy Newman interview here.
[00:02:54]  Why do you love terrorism?
[00:02:57]  And aren't you really saying that we should be fighting wars for terrorism?
[00:03:02]  Yeah.
[00:03:02]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:03:05]  Actually, that's half the book, Dave.
[00:03:07]  We switched back and forth.
[00:03:08]  I had my mom read it.
[00:03:09]  Thank you, by the way.
[00:03:11]  I had my mom read it and she said, oh, what fun.
[00:03:13]  You know, I lost track.
[00:03:14]  I was trying to keep count, but I lost track of how many times we switched sides.
[00:03:18]  Yeah, it really.
[00:03:19]  Well, it is something.
[00:03:20]  And in the book, well, it's interesting because you tried to write this book a couple times, I think, right?
[00:03:27]  And the product of you trying to write this book was your other great book, Fool's Errand, because basically the Afghanistan chapter just became an entire book, right?
[00:03:37]  Exactly.
[00:03:37]  Totally.
[00:03:38]  I got bogged down in the Afghan quagmire, as so many before me have.
[00:03:42]  You were just like so many great empires.
[00:03:44]  You got bogged down in Afghanistan, but at least you didn't lose blood and treasure.
[00:03:49]  You actually, you know, you made some money and didn't have to bleed.
[00:03:52]  Maybe got it.
[00:03:54]  I bet if we calculated it up, it's lower than the minimum wage when I made off of that book for the time I put into it.
[00:04:00]  Well, the labor theory of value, I got completely ripped off, but I'm not a communist, so don't worry.
[00:04:05]  But that's right.
[00:04:05]  So that's already been long debunked.
[00:04:07]  And look, you just did some more work to debunk that theory.
[00:04:10]  So there you go.
[00:04:12]  So what I loved about this book was, and knowing you, I could tell that each one of these chapters, you could have turned into an entire book.
[00:04:21]  And you had to fight to make sure that you kept to your original promise that I'm going to put out one book that explains all of these wars.
[00:04:30]  And you tell the story, which is really what's amazing about it.
[00:04:35]  It takes you through history.
[00:04:37]  I thought it was really your masterpiece.
[00:04:41]  It's a little over 300 pages.
[00:04:43]  If anybody wants to get this book and read this book, you will understand what's going on with American foreign policy.
[00:04:50]  You'll have a huge leg up on any talking head, anybody who's writing for any of these corporate press publications, and you'll be prepared to jump into the Scott Horton show and really understand what's going on now because you're going to understand the story and the major players.
[00:05:08]  So I think it was great that you were able to do this in a way where you explained all of these different wars and explained the history.
[00:05:15]  And the other thing, my major takeaway from the book was that it was like this was the once and for all nail in the coffin proof of the blowback theory.
[00:05:27]  Like you can't actually look at all of this and not understand that everything that we're currently involved in is blowback from American foreign policy.
[00:05:36]  I feel like so often the blowback conversation with which Ron Paul really popularized.
[00:05:43]  I mean, there were people who knew it, but he was the first guy on a major stage and really the only guy since on a huge major stage who really explained that terrorism and everything we're dealing with today was a result of blowback.
[00:05:54]  A lot of times this argument gets bogged down into like, do they hate us because we've bombed them or do they hate us because of their religious extremists or things like that?
[00:06:05]  But almost even leaving that aside, once you just go through the history of every foreign policy, major foreign policy decision that we've made since Jimmy Carter, you realize that this is all just the roosters coming home to nest.
[00:06:18]  Is that the right saying?
[00:06:19]  You know what I mean.
[00:06:20]  This is all just a result of the decisions we made.
[00:06:22]  And that's where the book starts.
[00:06:24]  The book starts with the beginning, right?
[00:06:27]  With Carter and the decisions that what happens in 1979, where you have this huge moment where in 1979, you have the decision to start arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to try to lure the Saudis, excuse me, to lure the Soviets in.
[00:06:50]  And then you also have the Iranian revolution.
[00:06:53]  Right.
[00:06:54]  And all the consequences of that.
[00:06:56]  So just I'll start there in just a sec, but to go back to what you were saying, as I've tried to explain this book to people, you know, like friends and family, what is this thing anyway kind of do?
[00:07:08]  I don't know if I've brought this up in interviews, but, you know, basically, there's not too much secret history here.
[00:07:16]  This is not so much like, oh, the underground, like operation, something you've never heard of before, that the secret kind of thing.
[00:07:23]  What it really is, is it's explaining the history of the last 40 years as you remember it, but just making sense out of it all for you and in a row.
[00:07:32]  And so I saw actually someone tweeted today.
[00:07:35]  Well, geez, I feel like a lot of this history, other people have gone over it before.
[00:07:38]  This is not really new.
[00:07:40]  But then again, you're all kind of weaving it together in a way that explains it in a way I never heard before.
[00:07:45]  And I'm going, yeah, exactly.
[00:07:46]  That's what I'm trying to do, right?
[00:07:47]  I'm, there's some original reporting in there, but very little.
[00:07:51]  I mean, most of this is my synthesis of other people's work as I've paid attention to it.
[00:07:55]  I mean, that's really, I'm a radio host, right?
[00:07:57]  I interview people about what they know is kind of my thing.
[00:08:01]  So, um, and yeah, there are some covert operations and stuff in it.
[00:08:05]  But essentially, everybody's mom and dad know that Ronald Reagan backed Saddam against Iran in the 1980s, right?
[00:08:12]  That's not like a big secret conspiracy theory that I'm blowing the lid off of or anything like that.
[00:08:16]  It's just I'm explaining how Carter's policy led to Reagan's policy and then how Reagan's policy led to Bush and Clinton's policy and how this all makes sense in a row.
[00:08:26]  In fact, we're doing this video series.
[00:08:29]  Thanks for tweeting it out a couple of times here, where this great video director, Gus Cantavaro, came and filmed me sitting in this chair facing that way and going through the whole book.
[00:08:38]  One day, we just came and knocked the whole thing out.
[00:08:41]  And we're putting those out chapter by chapter and Iraq War II comes out tonight.
[00:08:46]  But on the Bill Clinton one, when we put up the Bill Clinton years, the first comment or one of the first comments says, aha, dots connected.
[00:08:53]  Thank you.
[00:08:54]  Right.
[00:08:55]  So in other words, I wasn't really teaching him new history that he didn't know of.
[00:08:59]  Everybody knows about Iraq War I.
[00:09:00]  A lot of people even know about the Shiite uprising after Iraq War I, but they never had anybody explain to him why Bush betrayed the uprising that he'd encouraged.
[00:09:09]  And they never explained what that had to do with Reagan's policy before or Clinton's policy to come in a way where that's all I'm doing is I'm just, this is my one thing I've paid attention to all this time in a row.
[00:09:19]  So I'm just saying, and because I'm a libertarian, that means I'm not a partisan.
[00:09:23]  I have no reason to pull pun, no incentive whatsoever to favor any of these presidents.
[00:09:27]  So I'm just telling it to you straight.
[00:09:29]  This is what Carter did, Reagan, Bush, and all the way through.
[00:09:32]  And that's why everything sucks today.
[00:09:34]  But I think you're, that's a really important point that I think there's, I think for the average normies, I mean, look, there are certainly parts of the book that I think the normie doesn't even know about at all, like the Somalia chapter.
[00:09:45]  I don't think the average person knows anything about what's going on in Somali or, you know, like in Somalia.
[00:09:51]  You know, but then again, it's not a secret, right?
[00:09:53]  It's just ignored.
[00:09:54]  It's exactly.
[00:09:54]  You know what I mean?
[00:09:55]  It's not like a covert kind of a exactly.
[00:09:58]  But the thing that's the bigger, more important thing that you do in the book, not that it's not important to, you know, teach some people about what's going on in Somalia because it is really important and really awful.
[00:10:09]  But I think most regular people, while they know about all of that stuff, it's compartmentalized.
[00:10:16]  So the story of where we are right now starts with 9-11, and then we fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[00:10:23]  And pretty much everyone knows the wars didn't go good.
[00:10:25]  You know, like that's what they know.
[00:10:26]  They know that Iraq was a disaster.
[00:10:28]  It was, it was lies and stuff like that.
[00:10:29]  Pretty much everyone knows that.
[00:10:30]  And Afghanistan just didn't work out.
[00:10:32]  You know, it's like we're still there for 20 years and the mission just isn't working.
[00:10:35]  That to me is like what most people know.
[00:10:38]  But when most people think about these wars, they're not really thinking about 1979 or how those pieces connect.
[00:10:45]  And that's what you do in the book is and of course in this condensed video series, which is really great also.
[00:10:49]  People should check that out.
[00:10:50]  Is that you're taking them through step by step and how it's all very interconnected.
[00:10:54]  Right.
[00:10:55]  And now you got to understand about me, right?
[00:10:57]  I'm 44 and I remember all of this like it was yesterday when, you know, the Reagan years, Christian Hassoi and Madonna and the thriller album and all of that stuff.
[00:11:06]  Like that was my era when I was a kid.
[00:11:08]  It was still the Cold War years.
[00:11:10]  I remember the fall of the wall and I remember the rise of the new world order, as Bush Sr. called it when he invaded the Middle East.
[00:11:18]  I suffered through eight years of Bill Clinton and paying attention through the eyes of hate the entire time, you know, that critical eye the entire time.
[00:11:26]  So to younger people, this might seem like ancient history, like World War II or Korea seemed to me, right?
[00:11:34]  But essentially, this is my lifetime worth of foreign policy from about the time I was in preschool all the way through.
[00:11:40]  I'm not saying I was paying attention when I was in the threes at Briar Patch, but I am saying that I do remember even the early Reagan years somewhat.
[00:11:50]  And so the context to me is not too hard, right?
[00:11:53]  You know, 1987 was the day before yesterday to me.
[00:11:56]  So that helps me in being able to tell the story.
[00:12:01]  And a lot of people coming after me, younger than me, you know, could probably use the benefit of going back to before their times in that way.
[00:12:10]  And then for the people older than me, again, they all know this history.
[00:12:14]  They just ain't heard it quite retold by me once through.
[00:12:17]  And then once they do, they know that, yeah, this is right.
[00:12:20]  And this is how I keep winning the Hawks over because the Hawks know a lot about this stuff.
[00:12:24]  But as you said, in small pieces without, you know, compartmentalized in a way.
[00:12:29]  Iraq War I here, Iraq War II here, Afghanistan here and Libya over there.
[00:12:33]  And without the through line of why these things happened and whose agenda it was and all that stuff.
[00:12:38]  So, but then once I explain it, they go, oh, man.
[00:12:41]  And I kind of feel bad too, because I do see a lot of guys like, you know, I don't know, it's probably a small percentage, but there's a substantial minority of my audience who are anti-war veterans of these wars.
[00:12:52]  And they talk about how like, you know, damn it, I learned the truth about all this stuff from Horton.
[00:12:58]  I know he's right about this stuff.
[00:13:00]  This is the stuff that never made sense to me.
[00:13:02]  Now it makes sense.
[00:13:03]  Now I know.
[00:13:05]  But then also I know that's kind of really hard for them too, because of, oh, this is a lot easier for me when I believed in what I'd done.
[00:13:12]  Now I got to reassess all of this stuff, which I'm not trying to put it on them.
[00:13:15]  I mean, and none of my work focuses on blaming the infantry for this stuff.
[00:13:19]  This is all about the civilian decision makers and the generals at the top, you know, but it shouldn't have been done.
[00:13:28]  And frankly, you know, the guys that fought in them should have known better.
[00:13:31]  Not getting, you join the army now.
[00:13:33]  You're not going up against the Wehrmacht in an open field in France where everybody on the other side deserves to die and you don't have to worry about it.
[00:13:40]  You know what I mean?

=== Why Sheath Underwear Works (03:46) ===

[00:13:41]  This is not that.
[00:13:42]  This is the era of you're going to be patrolling some other guy's neighborhood and killing him for defending it.
[00:13:48]  And it's not right.
[00:13:50]  But then that's not what they're sold, right?
[00:13:52]  They're sold, you're going to go protect your country and fight for freedom and fight the enemy.
[00:13:56]  And why would the government use you as a soldier against someone if they didn't need to?
[00:14:01]  Right.
[00:14:01]  It's all the legitimacy is all baked in.
[00:14:05]  When you're 17 and 18, so you don't know any better at all.
[00:14:08]  And they also, no, look, I mean, they bribe and propagandize some of the most vulnerable 17 and 18 year olds in the country.
[00:14:17]  It's not as if they're going to affluent areas and taking private school kids, you know, who have had like some wonderful education.
[00:14:24]  They go to kids who have very little opportunity and they lie and they lie to them.
[00:14:29]  And in many cases, one of the most tragic things about, you know, this whole deal is that they take, you know, like what is a really noble impulse in many senses, you know, like, hey, I would risk my life to defend the Bill of Rights in my country and my family and my town.
[00:14:47]  And that is something that any, you know, like any functioning society would need that.
[00:14:51]  This is the clip that I said that went super viral on Tim Poole's show.
[00:14:55]  But I was like, you know, it's like, that's such a noble thing for a great society to have.
[00:14:59]  Some really tough men who'd be willing to die in order to protect their family and the families around them.
[00:15:05]  And then the same, I said the same thing with like the woke left, like caring about the marginalized.
[00:15:10]  That's something any moral society would need.
[00:15:12]  Yet these two kind of noble impulses are manipulated to just be like slaughtering people in third world countries and then, you know, I don't know, attacking people for every dumb reason under the sun.
[00:15:25]  Hey, guys, let's take a quick second.
[00:15:27]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear.
[00:15:31]  Sheath makes the most comfortable boxer briefs I've ever worn in my life.
[00:15:35]  I am wearing a pair as I speak to you right now.
[00:15:38]  If you're sick of boxers that are too loose or briefs that are too tight, Sheath is for you.
[00:15:43]  The stretchy fabric is made out of moisture wicking technology.
[00:15:46]  They feel super soft, keep everything cool, comfortable, and right in place.
[00:15:50]  It's the perfect underwear for working out.
[00:15:52]  Plus, the most unique thing about Sheath Underwear is they have these dual pouches that are designed to separate your man parts, keep things right where they belong, make sure they're not sticking together.
[00:16:03]  It's huge for working out or being in hot environments.
[00:16:06]  One reviewer actually described the dual pouch system as weird at first because new things always seem weird.
[00:16:11]  But after a few seconds, it felt absolutely fantastic, more mobile and drama-free.
[00:16:16]  I got to say, I completely agree with that commentar.
[00:16:19]  That's exactly what my experience was.
[00:16:21]  I was a little skeptical at first, but then I loved them.
[00:16:23]  But by the way, if you don't want to use the pouches, you don't have to.
[00:16:26]  You can just wear them like regular underwear.
[00:16:28]  Then they'll just be the most comfortable pair of box briefs you've ever worn in your life.
[00:16:33]  I highly recommend Sheath Underwear.
[00:16:34]  Plus, the owner is a huge fan of the show and they support us.
[00:16:38]  So make sure you go support them as well.
[00:16:40]  Go to sheathunderwear.com and get the most comfortable underwear you'll ever own.
[00:16:44]  And if you use the promo code problem20, they're going to give you 20% off your order.
[00:16:50]  That's sheathunderwear.com.
[00:16:51]  The promo code is problem20 for 20% off your order.
[00:16:55]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:16:57]  And look, before I do the history here real quick, and I'll do the super fast forward version if I possibly can, but I think anybody could tell, take a look at our situation with Russia right now.
[00:17:05]  The red flag came down 30 years ago, Christmas Day, 1991.
[00:17:12]  They brought down the red flag and put up the red, white, and blue, right?
[00:17:15]  So if you were to describe Vladimir Putin's politics, he's essentially a right-wing, you know, a pretty nationalist, conservative Republican is what he is, right?
[00:17:26]  He's an Orthodox Christian.

=== The Trillion Dollar Military Buildup (12:55) ===

[00:17:27]  He's not a communist.
[00:17:29]  He is not a revolutionary.
[00:17:31]  He's not a Russian imperialist, been on expansion into Eastern Europe and Southern Asia.
[00:17:37]  He's a hard-ass right-wing, essentially autocrat.
[00:17:43]  You know, but he could just be a dictator and he's not to keep standing for election and things like this.
[00:17:47]  So, you know, our republic is pretty flawed too.
[00:17:50]  I think you may have noticed.
[00:17:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:17:53]  But so we don't have any real reason for competition with the Russians right now at all.
[00:17:58]  Everybody can tell.
[00:17:59]  It's so blatant, unless you're just, you know, just the son of a senator and got no clue whatsoever.
[00:18:06]  But anybody with the slightest cynical eye to see can see that America's policy in Europe is about selling long-range bombers, which threaten the existence of all of mankind, but make a pretty penny for the investors in Lockheed and the people who run that company and their vested interest.
[00:18:26]  And it's the same thing with our China policy.
[00:18:28]  It's all just about selling hardtop aircraft carriers and submarines.
[00:18:32]  And, you know, they ran this great thing where everybody's known that aircraft carriers have been obsolete since World War II and any major power conflict, right?
[00:18:39]  So then they ran this giant thing in Reuters put in there by Northrop Grumman or whoever it was that, you know what, Dave, you're right, that actually we can't really fight a naval war with Japan because they can sink our zillion-dollar aircraft carriers with million-dollar missiles and with their supersonic sea skimming missiles.
[00:19:00]  And so they go, you know what?
[00:19:01]  You're right.
[00:19:02]  So that's just why we need a bigger and better fleet of B-1 bombers completely, you know, redone so we can take them from the air instead.
[00:19:10]  It's just about making money.
[00:19:11]  It's just a racket.
[00:19:12]  It's what, you know, Ronald Reagan's former budget director, David Stockman, he calls it the great deformation, where America adopted this national security state.
[00:19:23]  It's like this alien force, this parasite stuck to our national government.
[00:19:27]  And they, you know, really with the National Security Act of 1947.
[00:19:31]  And then ever since then, there's just no stopping them.
[00:19:34]  It's the bureaucracy of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the firms that sell them the weapons for all the contractors that furnish the intelligence.
[00:19:44]  It's just when I was a kid, Ross Perot called it the special interest.
[00:19:48]  You know, the special interest.
[00:19:50]  I never knew what that meant.
[00:19:51]  What does that mean?
[00:19:51]  The special interest.
[00:19:52]  That means the people who are reaching into the U.S. Treasury till to take all the money out of it in the name of the emergency, whichever emergency you got.
[00:20:02]  Yeah.
[00:20:02]  That's when you, when you see, you know, just like the numbers of like total federal government spending, you know, and it'll be, I mean, I don't even know what it's going to be this year, like five, six trillion.
[00:20:12]  I haven't looked at what the final number for 2020 was going to be.
[00:20:16]  But you look at that and you go, man, that's a lot of money.
[00:20:19]  Like understand, try to put that in perspective.
[00:20:22]  Like the biggest business you can think of doesn't spend anywhere near that much money, you know, like not even a fraction of it.
[00:20:29]  And you're like, wait, that's a ton of money that's just coming out of the federal treasury.
[00:20:34]  It's going somewhere.
[00:20:35]  Right.
[00:20:36]  Where does that go?
[00:20:37]  Who's getting their hands on that money?
[00:20:39]  Because man, that is, I mean, if you're moving $5 trillion in a year, that is power.
[00:20:45]  That is bigger than entire economies out there.
[00:20:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:20:48]  So that's, and, and so, and that's basically what this is, is just different groups competing on who can get their hands on some of that $5 trillion.
[00:20:58]  And the empire gets around a trillion of that a year if you add it all up.
[00:21:03]  And so it's yeah, the military strategist William S. Lind, he said, you got to understand, man, this is just Washington, D.C. is not the capital of a republic at all anymore.
[00:21:13]  It's simply an imperial court and military budget, the Pentagon budget, and this ghost energy, you know, has the nukes and the VA and whatever, but all that combined.
[00:21:23]  It's the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
[00:21:26]  There's never been anything like it before.
[00:21:28]  But somehow it's supposed to remain free of corruption because of the pretty white marble of the monuments they built to themselves in D.C.
[00:21:37]  It's just supposed to keep it all pure.
[00:21:39]  And yet it's not.
[00:21:40]  And the thing is purely corrupt.
[00:21:42]  And anybody who's not in on it, has the slightest education in it can see all the perverse incentives involved in the arms manufacturers, all of the private contracting firms of every description, all the banks.
[00:21:56]  Just think of all the money the banks make just from servicing a transaction from the federal government paying Lockheed and then Lockheed depositing that money in their account.
[00:22:06]  Whatever you're talking zillions a year, every year, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars is going to these groups that then when you look at the budgets of the think tanks that come up with all the studies for all the bogus arguments for keeping the empire going, you're talking the lowest amounts of chump change.
[00:22:23]  You're talking literally a few hundred thousand dollars.
[00:22:26]  You have Lockheed and Northrop and Boeing.
[00:22:30]  They'll all give the Council on Foreign Relations a few hundred thousand dollars each.
[00:22:34]  They give the Atlantic Council and the Center for New American Security a few hundred thousand dollars each, maybe a million, couple of million dollars.
[00:22:42]  This is not doesn't even count as remainders on the checks that they're cashing from the U.S. government, but it's enough that they recycle that slightest bit back in and they have enough to buy up all the ads on TV to keep all the news channels dependent on them.
[00:22:57]  We've spoken about that before.
[00:23:00]  And the steak dinners, I mean, think about what's the budget for Lockheed to buy steak dinners for congressmen, maybe a little entertainment at night if they'd like to have some fun, something like this.
[00:23:09]  We're talking a couple of million dollars a year, not even, not even.
[00:23:13]  You're talking nothing, right?
[00:23:14]  And then, but then they cash checks for hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
[00:23:19]  And for what?
[00:23:20]  To make planes that don't fly.
[00:23:23]  Our recent, just now for two months, two and a half months, what here, Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, said that the F-35 is a piece of shit.
[00:23:36]  In other words, it's not fast.
[00:23:38]  It's not stealth.
[00:23:39]  It can't turn.
[00:23:40]  It can't climb.
[00:23:42]  It can't deliver weapons to targets.
[00:23:45]  It can't communicate with the other planes.
[00:23:48]  It can't shoot.
[00:23:49]  The camera doesn't work.
[00:23:50]  If you eject the helmet, it'll cut your head off.
[00:23:54]  It's a piece of shit.
[00:23:56]  And we spent more than a trillion dollars on it.
[00:24:00]  And if they put the F-35 up against the Russians' latest, you know, MiG, they could be creamed and they know it.
[00:24:08]  It's just nothing but a project to separate you from your dollars.
[00:24:11]  That's all it is.
[00:24:13]  But it's still incredibly dangerous, right?
[00:24:16]  Because they're picking fights with sovereign nations that can hit back, especially in the case of Russia and China.
[00:24:22]  You know, Russia's got thousands and thousands of nukes.
[00:24:25]  It's unimaginable.
[00:24:26]  Hey, China only has 200 or 300, Dave.
[00:24:29]  Well, that's enough for them to erase all of everything between Canada and Mexico of any significance in one day.
[00:24:36]  In one day, they'd kill every major city in our country and end our civilization forever because some jerk wants to sell a boat that he knows if we got in a fight would sink with all its sailors straight to the bottom.
[00:24:51]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  And this is, and this is what American working class, middle class families are robbed every year of a third to 50% of their income to make sure that we, you know, keep up with these ridiculous war weapons that are never going to be used.
[00:25:10]  I mean, the truth is, it's like we're building up, it's the real irony of this whole thing, as you just kind of, you know, alluded to, is that we're building up a military as if we were going to fight a war with Russia or with China or something like that, as if another world war could pop up and we would have to be prepared for that.
[00:25:32]  Except the only problem is that there can't be another world war.
[00:25:36]  We can never fight enough.
[00:25:38]  It's the great Albert Einstein quote, which I always butcher, but went something like, I can't tell you what weapons will be used in World War III, but I can tell you for sure that World War IV will be fought with sticks and rocks.
[00:25:49]  Because once we got the nuke and then Russia got the nuke, once it was all over, there was no more ever going to fight another World War style direct conflict war.
[00:26:01]  So this whole thing that we're preparing for can never be fought because if we ever did go to a real flat out war like that, we all have the tools at this point to just destroy civilization.
[00:26:11]  So let's pray to God we don't ever do that.
[00:26:15]  But so this is all just a dumb game.
[00:26:17]  There's no need to have any of it.
[00:26:18]  Yeah, but so there's a real catch there, right?
[00:26:20]  Which is these wars must never be fought, but they can be fought.
[00:26:25]  All right.
[00:26:26]  They absolutely can.
[00:26:27]  And you want to have a nightmare or two, man, go and read the doomsday machine by Daniel Ellsberg, confessions of a nuclear war planner, where, oh yeah, no, the Russians have, just like in Dr. Strangelove, the Russians built a doomsday machine that if they're all dead, the computers will go ahead and kill us all too, after the fact.
[00:26:46]  Anyway, even after the Russians or their military has been completely destroyed.
[00:26:52]  The Americans and the Russians, both, our government and their government are prepared to destroy all life on earth.
[00:26:58]  And unlike in the mythology, we're like, oh, the president has this football.
[00:27:03]  As Ellsberg reports, there are probably 50,000 different people who have the authority to launch a nuclear weapon right now in the United States and in the other countries.
[00:27:12]  It's not just the presidents, right?
[00:27:14]  I mean, what if so many nuke DC, the guys out in the Pacific have to have their battlefield command control over these weapons and the decisions to use them?
[00:27:22]  And they do.
[00:27:23]  They do.
[00:27:24]  And so the Dr. Strangelove scenario where some crazy colonel decides today's the day is totally possible.
[00:27:32]  And Ellsberg actually talks about going to see going to see Dr. Strangelove with his colleague from the Rand Corporation when it came out.
[00:27:40]  And as they walked out in the bright sunlight of the afternoon after seeing the movie, they said, that's not satire.
[00:27:46]  That's a documentary.
[00:27:49]  And they were the men who knew.
[00:27:50]  I mean, Daniel Ellsberg is the guy who redrew the plan for how to fight a thermonuclear war with Russia.
[00:27:56]  He is the expert.
[00:27:57]  He is the authoritative source to tell you how this is.
[00:28:02]  And there were so many close calls during the Cold War.
[00:28:05]  It's amazing that we never had an H-bomb war.
[00:28:08]  I mean, there was a time there's like 20 significant, almost nuclear wars that took place.
[00:28:15]  There have been plenty of books about this.
[00:28:16]  One of them, they dropped an H-bomb.
[00:28:18]  The Americans dropped an H-bomb over North Carolina and eight out of the nine fail safes failed.
[00:28:23]  The last one prevented the thing from going off.
[00:28:26]  But if it had gone off, they would have, to save face, they would have had to pretend that it was the Russians who did it and killed every human on earth rather than admit that, oops, we screwed up and nuked our own state accidentally.
[00:28:38]  They would have just gone with it from there.
[00:28:41]  And there's a million of them.
[00:28:43]  There's a million of them.
[00:28:44]  But must never be fought and can never be fought are different, man.
[00:28:47]  And they really are ready.
[00:28:49]  They really are ready.
[00:28:51]  Here's one more thing about this, and I'll shut up about Russia.
[00:28:55]  And China too.
[00:28:57]  They talk about, if you read the think tank studies and the, you know, the Pentagon claims and their strategic plans, whatever, they talk about conflict with Russia and China as though we don't have nukes in the sense of like, you know, it goes without saying, of course we got nukes.
[00:29:14]  Everybody knows we have nukes.
[00:29:15]  But then because it goes without saying, it goes unsaid.
[00:29:19]  And so then they'll go plan after plan after plan.
[00:29:22]  Here's how we'll fight a conventional war with Russia in Eastern Europe.
[00:29:25]  But no, here's not how you'll fight a conventional war against Russia and Eastern Europe.
[00:29:30]  If you do that, it will go nuclear and then we'll all die.
[00:29:33]  So stop pretending like you can fight a conventional war with Russia and Eastern Europe.
[00:29:38]  But that's no way to get your study written, right?
[00:29:40]  That, well, we can't fight because then the nukes go off and so I can't finish writing my study.
[00:29:45]  And so they talk about over and over, they plan for war as though, and think about this.
[00:29:50]  Like, let's say the Americans could really build up their technological advantage where they could really take on the Russian and Chinese militaries in a week with conventional firepower and just completely wipe them out.
[00:30:01]  Well, what do you think the Russians and the Chinese are going to do then?
[00:30:05]  Just say, okay, Uncle Sam, boy, you beat me fair and square that time.
[00:30:10]  And not nuke, I don't know, Los Angeles for starters.
[00:30:16]  I mean, the Americans, they do have this mindset that the other side, they're just going to have to sit there and take it.

=== Cold War Mindset and Peril (17:50) ===

[00:30:23]  And that goes to the war on terrorism here too, and the blowback theory, like you're talking about here.
[00:30:28]  It's not theory.
[00:30:28]  It's gravity's a theory too.
[00:30:32]  These are the consequences, as Ron Paul said when he schooled Rudy Giuliani.
[00:30:36]  He's thinking go around the world doing whatever you want to these people violently, to these people, and that you'll suffer no consequences and that you can just do that.
[00:30:46]  Well, then we do that at our own peril.
[00:30:49]  You're putting us in danger with this blind spot, this ignorance and refusal to accept that people will fight back.
[00:30:55]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
[00:30:57]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show.
[00:30:59]  This is for fans who are over 21 years old.
[00:31:03]  We've got something you're going to love, and it's hempiredirect.com.
[00:31:07]  HempireDirect.com can legally sell you Delta 8 THC in 42 states.
[00:31:13]  And Hempire Direct has great prices.
[00:31:15]  If you use our promo code, GasDabs, you'll get $5 off any of their products.
[00:31:21]  Delta 8 THC distillate syringes for dabbing, only $15.
[00:31:26]  Delta 8 gummies for $15.
[00:31:29]  One gram of Delta 8 dab diamonds for only $15.
[00:31:33]  So once more, that's hempiredirect.com for high quality lab test verified Delta 8 THC.
[00:31:40]  For those of you who haven't heard of it, just remember when you had never heard of CBD, it's just like that.
[00:31:46]  The big difference between Delta 8 THC and CBD, of course, is that the Delta 8 THC does get you high, but it's legal in 42 states.
[00:31:54]  Go to hempiredirect.com.
[00:31:56]  Use that promo code GasDabs.
[00:31:58]  And right now, if you go to their site, you can enter for a chance to win a $999 dab rig.
[00:32:05]  So that's pretty cool.
[00:32:06]  One last time, go to hempiredirect.com or click the link in the episode description.
[00:32:11]  Use the promo code GASDABS for $5 off your order.
[00:32:15]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:32:17]  You know, I don't know if you saw, I used this one before.
[00:32:20]  Sorry, I'm not very original, but in The Onion has a book of our dumb century that's a headline from each page of the, uh, from each year of the 20th century.
[00:32:29]  There's lots of great stuff in there.
[00:32:31]  Holy shit, man, lands on fucking moon and all this great stuff.
[00:32:34]  Um, but then um, there's one from like 1902 or something where Zulu seize London, hold queen at spear point.
[00:32:44]  And, you know, because they're making the joke about how the British, of course, can wage their wars all over the world, but nobody can wage a war back against England.
[00:32:51]  They're just too far away and nobody's got a navy that can match them or get there or whatever.
[00:32:56]  That's the joke.
[00:32:57]  But then the joke is now that actually, yeah, the British better be careful what they do in, say, southern Africa, because a Zulu could get on an airplane and crash it into the old Bailey if he felt like it.
[00:33:10]  You know, they, it's, it is no longer the old days where the Western empires can get away with doing whatever they think that they feel like doing to the East, whether the Russians, the Chinese, or anybody else, without having to suffer immediate consequences from it, or I don't know, immediate, but certain consequences from it.
[00:33:30]  That's the lesson of September 11th.
[00:33:31]  We should have just quit right there.
[00:33:32]  Look at this.
[00:33:33]  These people who had no power whatsoever, they sent a squad of five guys to hijack one of our Boeings and crash it into and kill thousands of people, right?
[00:33:46]  That's still all it took is a little bit of creativity and men with sneakers, right?
[00:33:52]  It didn't take anything.
[00:33:54]  It took no power.
[00:33:55]  It took no, they didn't have to have their own fighter jets.
[00:33:57]  They didn't have to control so much as a county seat in the Nangarhar province, right?
[00:34:02]  All they had to do was send a group of five guys to seize a plane and kamikaze it.
[00:34:07]  And so at that point, that should have been, you know what?
[00:34:09]  The lesson of the Clinton years is that we thought we could get away with this stuff and it turns out we can't.
[00:34:15]  But instead, the lesson, of course, was today's the first day in history and now we better start getting away with stuff.
[00:34:20]  And that was, yeah, one of the points that you go over in the book, because there are these different, there are kind of these different points throughout American history, as you were just pointing to with 9-11, but there are different points in American history where you could say, okay, this was the origin, or this is where we could have gone in a different way, you know, where this is where everything fell apart.
[00:34:40]  Or, you know, people talk to talk about, you know, Woodrow Wilson's administration or, you know, creating, you know, getting us into World War I. That's a great, the, the, um, aftermath of World War II, where we really become the dominant global empire, you know, almost by default because the British Empire collapses and the Russians are so beat up that, I mean, they have a little bit of an empire, but no one has what we have and we have the nuke and all of this stuff.
[00:35:06]  But one of the points that you talk about in the book pretty early on is around 1989.
[00:35:12]  And this is the one that always sticks out to me as where the true opportunity, if there ever was one, to rein this whole thing in came about.
[00:35:22]  And this is when the Soviets are driven out of Afghanistan.
[00:35:26]  It finally starts to dawn on the intelligence class and people like that that like, ooh, the Soviet Union is not doing very well.
[00:35:35]  And that, oh my God, this whole thing might actually go in a bad direction for them.
[00:35:40]  And it's almost as if there's this opportunity that comes about to say, ooh, we can now re-question the entire Cold War foreign policy.
[00:35:52]  And there are a few people who actually do.
[00:35:54]  You quote a passage from Russell Kirk in the book, which, you know, a really heroic stand that this guy, Mr. Conservative, who was his famous book?
[00:36:06]  The Conscience of a Conservative.
[00:36:07]  The Conscience of a Conservative.
[00:36:08]  Now, me and you would disagree with Russell Kirk on probably like a million different things.
[00:36:12]  And he had bad policies all throughout the Cold War, but he was one of the guys who really believed that this whole Cold War was about the Soviet Union.
[00:36:22]  And it was the stuff that if you remember Bill Buckley wrote about, you know, basically during the height of the Cold War that, you know, libertarians really are right about everything, but the real problem is we have these God, you know, godless commies.
[00:36:36]  And so we have to build up this big totalitarian bureaucracy or whatever in order to fight the one abroad.
[00:36:42]  Of course, Murray Rothbard tore this apart at the time.
[00:36:44]  But regardless, after that was over, the perpetual excuse for the military industrial complex, the Soviet Union, they fell.
[00:36:53]  That was the opportunity to say, okay, now let's enjoy the victory of the Cold War.
[00:36:59]  Now we can enjoy the spoils.
[00:37:02]  And instead, as the book details, we went in a rather tragic direction.
[00:37:06]  Yeah, that's totally right.
[00:37:07]  I mean, if you want to, you could be Pat Buchanan.
[00:37:10]  You could rationalize anything we did in the Cold War, even the Vietnam War, support for Osama and friends in Afghanistan, whatever you want.
[00:37:18]  It's the Soviet Union.
[00:37:20]  What an emergency.
[00:37:22]  But now that the Soviet Union is gone, hey, and yeah, it was.
[00:37:27]  Russell Kirk was, you know, really one of the leading founders of the conservative movement after World War II.
[00:37:33]  It was Gene Kirkpatrick, who I quote, who wrote in the national interest semi-famously that we should be a normal country in a normal time.
[00:37:41]  Now that the emergency is over, we can encourage democracy around the world, but we should not be using force and spreading our own society too thin and trying to remake the world.
[00:37:51]  That's a fool's errand.
[00:37:52]  Don't do that.
[00:37:54]  And Pat Buchanan, of course, who was the world's most right-wing hawk when it came to containing communism, said, that's it.
[00:38:01]  Communists are over.
[00:38:03]  And in fact, you know, the John Burchess and some other more conspiracy-minded right-wingers were saying, no, it's all a trick.
[00:38:07]  You can't believe them.
[00:38:08]  And Pat was like, guys, the Red Army's gone, man.
[00:38:12]  They're back behind the Ural Mountains.
[00:38:14]  It is over.
[00:38:16]  It is over, man.
[00:38:17]  We can just end, we can end NATO right now, bring them home.
[00:38:21]  And I really regret, you know, I didn't pay much attention to Pat in 92.
[00:38:25]  I was paying attention to that election.
[00:38:27]  But what I did know Pat Buchanan in 92 was the blacks and the homos and the women and the bad trade deals.
[00:38:37]  But Pat, oh, and the abortions, the culture war.
[00:38:41]  But Pat, man, what if he'd come out and said, hey, everybody, we've got to renounce empire.
[00:38:47]  We've got to renounce military dominance.
[00:38:51]  The left, the right, the left coast, the right coast, town and country, black and white, everyone in America who is not in on it wants to be a normal country in a normal time.
[00:39:04]  The Soviet Union is gone.
[00:39:06]  Let's bring our troops home.
[00:39:07]  Let's be a limited constitutional republic and make money.
[00:39:11]  And if that had been what he said, and if that had been the contrast between him and H.W. Bush in the primary in 88, man, we would have at least had a contest.
[00:39:22]  We had at least known, you know, or and I guess he ran against it.
[00:39:26]  He wasn't right.
[00:39:27]  Here's the thing, right?
[00:39:27]  And this is why it all fell apart.
[00:39:29]  And leaving apart the fact that Pat Buchanan is just, he had the whole Cold War thing so wrong.
[00:39:35]  And I remember Tom Woods actually, it was really one of my favorite Tom Woods show episodes ever was when he had Pat Buchanan on and he pushed him on the war in Vietnam.
[00:39:45]  And, you know, he didn't get him to admit it, but he got him to, he goes, but you have to admit, Pat, that everything you care about with this culture war stuff.
[00:39:53]  I mean, look at what Vietnam did to the culture.
[00:39:56]  It literally, like, like, if you're Mr. Pat Buchanan, who just hates to see a hippie uprising, well, then you got to at least acknowledge that Vietnam was the worst thing ever for your culture.
[00:40:06]  And we didn't even get anything for it.
[00:40:08]  It's not like you sacrificed the culture for nothing.
[00:40:11]  But what happened with the Pat Buchanan thing, which is interesting, is that he was.
[00:40:15]  So in 88, he was still supporting, you know, the Reagan vice president going forward.
[00:40:20]  So he was still, but by 92, he was challenging.
[00:40:23]  And he did say some of what you're saying, not as good as you just said it, but he said some of that on the campaign trail.
[00:40:30]  However, his famous speech at the Republican National Convention that everyone knows, the culture war speech, was after he was defeated and decided to support George H.W. Bush for re-election.
[00:40:43]  So he couldn't, he wasn't there to talk about any of the contrast.
[00:40:46]  He was there to talk about the contrast between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.
[00:40:51]  And what, and of course, so the whole speech is about the culture war stuff.
[00:40:55]  And the whole speech is about how they're environmentalists, they like trannies, they like that, you know, whatever the thing was at the time in 92.
[00:41:03]  And so he didn't even get on his biggest, you know, platform, he didn't get one word out about the Persian Gulf War.
[00:41:11]  So it's just, you know, a tragedy.
[00:41:14]  But as and that we never had a choice, right?
[00:41:16]  It was right at the turning point, the end of the Cold War.
[00:41:18]  Your choice is H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton, who a day after defeating him became his stepson.
[00:41:24]  Right, right, exactly.
[00:41:26]  They had opted into the family.
[00:41:28]  But as you had sold cocaine together in the Reagan years, of course, during Iran-Contra.
[00:41:32]  Yeah.
[00:41:32]  So they had some common ground to unite around.
[00:41:36]  Hey, remember the good old days?
[00:41:37]  And American people didn't have a choice.
[00:41:39]  It's either going to be like this or it's going to be like this.
[00:41:42]  Right.
[00:41:42]  And that's, and that's your choice.
[00:41:43]  Which way like this do you like?
[00:41:45]  But as you point out in the book, it's like, particularly with, you know, the benefit of hindsight, but even right at the time to see.
[00:41:53]  I mean, if there ever was an opportunity, it's like, okay, the Soviet Union just collapsed by the kind of early neoconservative, hawkish worldview.
[00:42:06]  It collapsed because of the war in Afghanistan, right?
[00:42:10]  Like this is their view that they had this victory.
[00:42:13]  Right.
[00:42:14]  And they take that as a major part.
[00:42:16]  Like guys like me and you might focus more on like the economic unsustainability of communism and things like that, but they really were taking it as a feather in their cap.
[00:42:25]  We beat the Soviet Union with this war in Afghanistan.
[00:42:28]  So not only is your enemy, your excuse for, you know, this military industrial complex gone, but you also have a real-time lesson in how much this can destroy a country to get involved in this in this crazy, you know, militaristic activity around the world.
[00:42:46]  Which is why we didn't come in the first place, right?
[00:42:47]  It was to give them their own Vietnam.
[00:42:50]  So here we are replicating their Afghanistan, which was us replicating their Vietnam.
[00:42:57]  Now we're just doing it to ourselves again.
[00:42:59]  And it's so funny to like, when you think about, you know, if you look back at like the last hundred years, you know, and you think about all of the reasons that you could, even in the best case scenario where someone could really convince you that this is a war, you have to go fight.
[00:43:13]  And I don't think there's a single example, to be honest, in the last hundred years that America should have fought.
[00:43:18]  But regardless, even if you think the, you know, maybe like, okay, we got hit on Pearl Harbor, ignore the stuff about FDR, what he did before Pearl Harbor, just think Pearl Harbor and Nazis and this, or if you just want to think about something else here, even you could have some argument, right, in like Korea or Vietnam where you're like, but it's the Soviet Union and that we can't let them take this.
[00:43:39]  But to think that when we had this opportunity to go back to being a normal country, it was over a slant drilling dispute between Kuwait and Iraq after a war that we had sided with Saddam and armed him against Iran and they were having some deal.
[00:44:01]  And you go through in the book how just how awful even the U.S. mismanaged the negotiation process between Kuwait and Saddam.
[00:44:09]  This thing that easily could have been figured out.
[00:44:11]  Saddam Hussein was just in crazy debt and couldn't figure out how to pay back the Saudis and all these other people he owed money to.
[00:44:18]  And, you know, and it seemed like Kuwait was kind of cheating on the deal of this shared oil resource that they have.
[00:44:24]  But the idea that that was the thing that had to keep us as an empire, you're like, oh my God, it's not 9-11 or Pearl Harbor or anything like that.
[00:44:33]  It's a little oil dispute between two tiny little countries, one really tiny little country that have nothing to do with American interests or American defense or anything.
[00:44:46]  And then this, you see where this becomes this domino effect that once we get involved with that, it's like, boom, This leads to everything that leads to 9-11 that leads to the terror wars to the disaster we're in today.
[00:44:59]  Yep.
[00:45:00]  And as I show in the book, the guys at Central Command and the CIA were telling the Kuwaitis, man, screw Saddam Hussein.
[00:45:06]  You guys should give him your big middle finger.
[00:45:08]  While the DIA back at the Pentagon was going, hey, I think Saddam's serious.
[00:45:12]  We ought to look out.
[00:45:13]  And the State Department is going, yeah, you know, we're a little bit concerned, but we're frankly not that concerned.
[00:45:20]  And, you know, you don't have to be any kind of conspiracist.
[00:45:23]  I mean, look at Stephen Walt from Harvard Magazine writing at foreignpolicy.com, who I quote in both books, saying that, well, you know, I think I quoted Fool's Aaron too.
[00:45:34]  He says, well, you know, when Glaspie tells the American ambassador, when she tells Saddam Hussein that, look, George Bush is not looking to have a war in the Middle East.
[00:45:44]  Now, you might say that that's her dissuading him and saying, don't do this because we don't want to have a war.
[00:45:49]  But come on, this is diplomatic language.
[00:45:53]  And if you're the Iraqis, it'd be just as easy.
[00:45:56]  Let's say it's an accident.
[00:45:57]  It's still just as easy to read into that, that George Bush is not going to launch a war against you if you do this.
[00:46:05]  He doesn't want to have a war in the Middle East.
[00:46:07]  And after all, as you just said, one of these countries is tiny.
[00:46:10]  Saddam Hussein wasn't planning a war against Kuwait.
[00:46:13]  He was planning on driving right down Main Street, which is exactly what he did, a coup de Maine, they call it, right?
[00:46:19]  Like Hitler and Austria.
[00:46:20]  Just roll right in and take over.
[00:46:22]  There's no war.
[00:46:23]  And so when she says, well, the president doesn't want to have a war, sounds like a green light to Saddam.
[00:46:29]  No reason to think that he would read that any other way.
[00:46:32]  And then there are many other statements about how we're not interested in your border dispute with Kuwait.
[00:46:37]  And Secretary Baker has asked me to emphasize this to you and all this.
[00:46:41]  And then we know from Bob Woodward's reporting and others that right after the invasion, when the Bush Senior National Security Council came together, they all decided they weren't going to do anything about it.
[00:46:51]  James Baker didn't care.
[00:46:52]  He told them, go ahead.
[00:46:53]  Now, they didn't think he was going to take the whole country.
[00:46:55]  It's pretty clear that they thought he was just going to invade the northern oil fields.
[00:46:58]  And that was what they meant to convey.
[00:47:00]  Let's go ahead and take the northern oil fields.
[00:47:02]  And then he thought, geez, the Americans got my back.
[00:47:04]  I might as well march all the way to the sea.
[00:47:06]  Why not?
[00:47:06]  You know?
[00:47:08]  So, but then they decided that we don't give, we don't care.
[00:47:12]  Colin Powell, James Baker, and Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, all of them came together and said, we're drawing the line at Saudi Arabia.
[00:47:20]  But then the next day, that was that night.
[00:47:24]  The next day, Margaret Thatcher said to H.W. Bush in front of some reporters in Aspen, Colorado, well, you're not going to go wobbly on me now, are you, Bush?
[00:47:34]  In other words, you're not going to be less of a man than a woman.
[00:47:40]  And Bush said, this will not stand.
[00:47:42]  Look at how macho I am, blah, blah, blah.
[00:47:45]  Which, you know, he was a baseball player in college and stuff.
[00:47:48]  He didn't have to do this.
[00:47:49]  He already knew that he was a man.
[00:47:52]  You know, Margaret Thatcher, who cares what she says?
[00:47:55]  How could he have been so intimidated?
[00:47:58]  You know, Bill Hicks pointed out at the time, though, this is a guy in Cover Newsweek, wimp president.
[00:48:03]  He's such a wimp, isn't he, George Bush?
[00:48:05]  That was the narrative.
[00:48:05]  You got to have a narrative.
[00:48:06]  He's such a wimp.
[00:48:08]  And then as Bill Hicks said, I think rightly, boy, it's kind of stuck in this guy's craw a little bit.
[00:48:12]  I'll show you, wimp.

=== Iraq War One and a Half (14:21) ===

[00:48:13]  Come on, fuckers.
[00:48:14]  Come on.
[00:48:16]  You know, and then, so once she called him out, then he spent six months building up troops to invade in Saudi and refusing to negotiate the whole time.
[00:48:25]  Saddam Hussein's like, come on, man.
[00:48:26]  I work for you guys anyway.
[00:48:27]  Like, what do you want me to do?
[00:48:29]  Give me a little bit of face savings so I can back down out of here.
[00:48:32]  And his final offer was, I'll leave if you guys just promise to leave eventually.
[00:48:37]  America will leave the Middle East.
[00:48:39]  We'll pull your bases out.
[00:48:40]  Oh, and Israel will promise to one day negotiate over the West Bank and Gaza.
[00:48:46]  In other words, nothing.
[00:48:47]  In other words, give him some words.
[00:48:49]  Give him no real concession at all.
[00:48:53]  Give him a check that he cannot cash or do anything with other than say, look at me, I got the slightest bit of face saving to pull out of Kuwait.
[00:49:01]  And they wouldn't let him do it.
[00:49:02]  And of course, you know, he might have been overthrown.
[00:49:05]  And they knew that too.
[00:49:06]  Inside the government, their estimates were if he pulls out without saving face at all, without getting any concessions at all, then that really makes him a weak leader inside the Both party military and he could get overthrown that way.
[00:49:19]  So it's a matter of self-protection that he has to save some face to still be to remain as the strongman.
[00:49:25]  So their calculation was, let's not let him save any face at all.
[00:49:28]  Let's refuse to make any concession at all.
[00:49:30]  Let's say that any negotiation would be a reward.
[00:49:33]  And so therefore we can't.
[00:49:35]  And it was all just a cynical plot to start a war, dude.
[00:49:38]  It's like high school kids pretend like there's a negotiation when they just want a fist fight.
[00:49:43]  Let them fight.
[00:49:44]  There's not an argument that's being had here.
[00:49:47]  They're just looking to squabble, you know?
[00:49:50]  Yeah, no, that's, that's right.
[00:49:52]  And so I, all right, we're not, obviously, we're not going to be able to, you know, like talk about everything that's in the book on this episode, but I just want to talk about, you know, like a couple more things from around this time period, because I do think that this is the stuff that people don't know as well, or if they do know, maybe don't connect it as well.
[00:50:10]  But one of the things that goes largely unknown in the American mind is what you dub Iraq War 1.5 and you spend or one and a half and you spend a chapter in the book on that.
[00:50:26]  And I feel like, you know, people know.
[00:50:29]  I'm old enough to remember, you know, Bill Clinton having, you know, news conferences about what he's going to do to Saddam and all this stuff.
[00:50:37]  But it's kind of like everyone knows that George H.W. Bush fought a war in Iraq.
[00:50:41]  And then everyone knows that his son went in there and took Saddam out and that the war became a disaster.
[00:50:47]  But there's not too much time spent on what Bill Clinton did to the country of Iraq.
[00:50:53]  And that was one of Osama bin Laden's main grievances with the United States of America.
[00:50:59]  And this was a brutal period of time for the Iraqi people.
[00:51:04]  You know, perhaps not as bad as after George W. Bush invaded, but pretty damn bad.
[00:51:10]  I mean, different estimates of the amount of deaths they are there range in the hundreds of thousands.
[00:51:15]  And I've seen that some of those numbers have been challenged before, but basically most of the estimates are like in the hundreds of thousands, enormous numbers of children starving to death, dying of malnutrition and things like that.
[00:51:28]  And this was all because of the sanctions regime that gets put on Iraq and the bombing campaigns of Bill Clinton.
[00:51:34]  So tell people a little bit about Iraq War one and a half.
[00:51:38]  Well, I think you characterize that whole thing well as far as kind of the way it's played down or ignored.
[00:51:45]  There's kind of a metaphor there with, you know, from our more current era when in the Obama years, Jeremy Scahill, the leftist reporter, went on the Bill Maher show on HBO and is like, man, these drone bombings, this is wrong, killing women and children at these weddings and making everything worse.
[00:52:02]  And Bill Maher is kind of the center.
[00:52:06]  There he stands, the center.
[00:52:08]  Politically incorrect as show used to be called.
[00:52:10]  Can you believe that?
[00:52:11]  Anyway, so he says, yeah, but compared to George W. Bush sending the entire 3rd Infantry Division and Marine Corps into Iraq, a drone is hardly anything at all, right?
[00:52:22]  So who cares?
[00:52:24]  And Scahill's going, no, it's still wrong and it still creates blowback and still whatever, still, still, still.
[00:52:30]  But to Marr, come on, how does this compare to what we were just doing, which is so much worse?
[00:52:35]  And that's the only grade that he, the only way that he can look at it.
[00:52:38]  And by the way, this is before, this is before the claim of what aboutism became popular, which the liberals really loved during Trump.
[00:52:46]  Like if you ever pointed out that like all these horrible things happened under Obama or something, it was what aboutism?
[00:52:51]  We can only talk about Donald Trump right now.
[00:52:53]  But that was their whole game during Obama.
[00:52:56]  It was like, well, what about Bush?
[00:52:59]  Okay.
[00:52:59]  And same thing happened with Clinton and the previous Bush was the previous Bush, no, he didn't go all the way to Baghdad, thank God, but he waged one hell of a big war for six weeks there.
[00:53:10]  So then that meant that in contrast to that, whatever was the aftermath was low level, nothing that regular people don't pay attention to.
[00:53:19]  News junkies might pay attention.
[00:53:21]  The whole country tuned into the war.
[00:53:23]  Operation Yellow Ribbon, how exciting.
[00:53:25]  Now it's over.
[00:53:26]  They pull out of Kuwait.
[00:53:27]  The war is over.
[00:53:28]  Now I go back to my job and nobody pays much attention again.
[00:53:32]  And the level of violence under Bill Clinton just, as you said, you knew there was something going on there, but the comparison to Iraq War I made it seem unimportant.
[00:53:42]  And after all, words like sanctions, you know, are kind of, it's a euphemism for an embargo.
[00:53:51]  Even what's an embargo?
[00:53:52]  A blockade.
[00:53:53]  Okay, now that makes sense.
[00:53:54]  I can picture ships preventing other ships from getting to port.
[00:53:57]  Okay.
[00:53:57]  But that was what it was.
[00:53:59]  It was a virtual blockade.
[00:54:00]  It was a U.N. Security Council set of mandates of sanctions against Iraq that forbid any other country in the world from trading with them.
[00:54:09]  I think the Cubans tried to trade a little with them because they don't give a damn, but what do they have to trade?
[00:54:13]  Yeah, they don't have much.
[00:54:15]  Yeah.
[00:54:16]  So, you know, they were completely screwed.
[00:54:19]  And it was all in the name of, and they admitted from the very beginning, that this was all in the name of making the Iraqi civilian population so miserable that they would overthrow Saddam Hussein.
[00:54:30]  And they also, in fact, explained that this is why we bombed the waterworks, the sewage, the electricity, the bridges, the civilian infrastructure of the country.
[00:54:41]  And then they, you know, argued.
[00:54:44]  It was a U.S. Air Force officer arguing in the Washington Post that, look, man, yes, we bombed all that infrastructure.
[00:54:50]  And why do we do it?
[00:54:51]  We did it to make the effect of the sanctions stronger.
[00:54:55]  We did it to make it where it would be harder for these people to recover.
[00:54:59]  And the fact is we're just not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein.
[00:55:03]  Get rid of this guy and we'll allow you to fix your electricity.
[00:55:07]  This is in 92.
[00:55:08]  Okay.
[00:55:09]  This is before Bill is even elected, before he even takes power to continue the same policy for another eight years straight.
[00:55:17]  I'm sorry, go ahead with the.
[00:55:18]  No, I was just, as you're mentioning this, and I'm just thinking about it.
[00:55:22]  Has there been a politician in Congress or the Senate or has there ever been one besides Ron Paul, which is what this always comes down to?
[00:55:34]  But was there anyone else who ever just said the simple fact that sanctions are an act of war?
[00:55:40]  I feel like Ant or Kucinich or somebody very emotional like that.
[00:55:46]  Yeah, maybe Kucinich said it.
[00:55:47]  I don't even know.
[00:55:48]  Because even like some of the other ones, you know, like the guys that are okay on this stuff, like Tulsi never said that.
[00:55:54]  Rand Paul, Justin Amash, none of those guys ever said that.
[00:55:57]  Like I'm saying, it feels like Ron Paul's the only one who ever pointed out that this is war.
[00:56:02]  What you're doing to someone right here is war.
[00:56:04]  You are intentionally.
[00:56:06]  Put you on the other foot.
[00:56:07]  Yeah.
[00:56:08]  China and Europe and Russia decide that they're going to outlaw trade with the United States of America.
[00:56:16]  You're going to take that line down?
[00:56:18]  They're going to say that they're going to impoverish our children because they're hoping that that will then push us toward overthrowing the government because they don't like the government that we're in.
[00:56:30]  So they're just going to take, and in this case, of course, we're talking about countries far poorer than the poorest person you know, that we're going to impoverish them even more and hope that that kind of leads toward the political end.
[00:56:42]  And like, oh, will this, will this kill people?
[00:56:44]  Yeah, like lots of people will die over it and stuff.
[00:56:46]  And yeah, that's right.
[00:56:47]  But we're just doing that.
[00:56:48]  Listen, man, I can explain this because it was me.
[00:56:51]  I was four and I don't care because whatever, man, I was 14 and 15 years old during the start of Iraq War I.
[00:56:56]  And frankly, I was a sociopath and I didn't give a damn how many Iraqis got exploded to death.
[00:57:03]  I just wanted to see some explosions, man.
[00:57:05]  Supersonic jets and tanks and fireballs and whatever.
[00:57:09]  And you're telling me that Iraqi civilians are going to, I don't, I just don't care.
[00:57:14]  I just don't care.
[00:57:15]  It has nothing to do with anything.
[00:57:16]  You know, oh, they bombed a shelter and some civilians died.
[00:57:20]  Boohoo for them.
[00:57:21]  That was my 15-year-old brain reflecting exactly the public consensus of the entire country.
[00:57:30]  And the entire country, essentially, other than really the far left and very interested libertarians and a few paleos and whatever.
[00:57:39]  The entire consensus was essentially that, look, man, as you all know, these all are all sand and words.
[00:57:47]  They're all camel jockeys.
[00:57:49]  They're all towel heads.
[00:57:51]  They're Muslims even because nobody even knows what a Muslim is.
[00:57:55]  So they're just these Muslims, these crazy Muslims.
[00:57:58]  And who really gives a damn what happens to them?
[00:58:01]  They might as well be on the far side of Mars from here.
[00:58:04]  It's no different than 14 or 15 year old me kicking over an ant pile on the way walking from one place to another.
[00:58:12]  That was my attitude about it as a ninth grader, Dave.
[00:58:15]  That was the attitude of the American public at large about the war and about the aftermath.
[00:58:21]  I mean, and look at who's crying about it, right?
[00:58:23]  In the 1990s, if you wanted to know about America's sanctions regime against Iraq and the horror these people were suffering, you had to go to Kathy Kelly, the sweetest lady in all of North America, right?
[00:58:37]  In other words, you can dismiss her.
[00:58:40]  In other words, nobody cares what Kathy Kelly says because her heart is just gushing blood.
[00:58:45]  She's such a bleeding heart.
[00:58:47]  She's the most crybabious lady.
[00:58:50]  I'm not making fun.
[00:58:51]  I worship her.
[00:58:51]  I love this woman, but I'm just saying, voices in the wilderness, this very sensitive woman saying boohoo for the little children.
[00:59:01]  That narrative just helps make it even more irrelevant, in fact.
[00:59:06]  Because if she's the only one crying, then that just proves by relief that everybody else knows this is the way it has to be.
[00:59:12]  Saddam Hussein, he's this terrible threat.
[00:59:14]  You know, I really did cut a lot.
[00:59:15]  You mentioned I tried to write this book twice.
[00:59:17]  The first time it became the book about Afghanistan.
[00:59:19]  The second time it became a book about Iraq.
[00:59:22]  And I had to, it was becoming one.
[00:59:24]  And I had to throw it out and start over because I was just getting bogged down and I had to end up cutting a lot of stuff out, a lot of research that I did.
[00:59:31]  And there's one quote that I think is in the Afghan book because I'm explaining this as the lead up to September 11th and stuff, where there's a quote from Rod Nordland, who's still a very prominent journalist.
[00:59:41]  He was writing at New Newsweek at the time, saying that, well, look, I mean, we can't find him, but apparently the consensus is Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction.
[00:59:51]  That if we lifted the sanctions regime, he could get a nuclear weapon in no time flat, which is, of course, a complete ridiculous lie.
[00:59:59]  That essentially there's no choice in the matter.
[01:00:02]  Things have to stay this way until Saddam Hussein is gone.
[01:00:05]  This is the consensus in all of Washington, D.C., all the liberals and all the conservatives.
[01:00:10]  Well, there you go.
[01:00:11]  Ingrid agree.
[01:00:12]  And that's, it's just, that's it.
[01:00:14]  What else are we going to do?
[01:00:15]  We can't do anything until Saddam is gone.
[01:00:17]  And then that was the basis for the Regime Change Act of 1998 that the neocons pushed and Bill Clinton signed and Ron Paul warned was a premature declaration of war that will be enforced in a matter of very few years indeed.
[01:00:31]  Yeah, of course, that's that's all that's sprinkled throughout the book, which of course, in any Scott Horton book, there's going to be sprinkled in Ron Paul getting it right in real time and warning exactly what's about to happen.
[01:00:44]  I tried not to overdo it too much.
[01:00:45]  No, it wasn't too much.
[01:00:46]  It was perfect.
[01:00:47]  It was just right in this book.
[01:00:49]  And he's why I was so good on this back then.
[01:00:51]  And he gets all the credit for me doing better at the time, too.
[01:00:54]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
[01:00:56]  I want to thank our sponsor for today's show, which is yokratom.com, home of the $60 kilo.
[01:01:02]  That's the world's best value in Kratom, shipped right to your door.
[01:01:06]  No questions asked.
[01:01:07]  Now, if you've never heard of Kratom before, just ignore this ad.
[01:01:10]  We're not talking to you.
[01:01:11]  No need to hear this and go try Kratom.
[01:01:14]  But if you're currently a fan of Kratom, then celebrate your freedom at yokratom.com, home of the $60 kilo, which is unheard of.
[01:01:21]  YoKratom.com is one of the biggest sellers of Kratom nationwide, and they made yokratom.com so you can buy directly at wholesale prices.
[01:01:28]  This is quality stuff.
[01:01:29]  We've heard feedback from the fans.
[01:01:31]  They confirm it's solid.
[01:01:33]  And like I said, it's the only place where you can get a kilo for $60.
[01:01:36]  So one last time, if you're currently a fan of Kratom, go to yokratom.com and get yourself a $60 kilo.
[01:01:43]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[01:01:45]  One of the in the chapter on Iraq in your new book, Enough Already, which by the way, if you guys have not bought already, go buy it.
[01:01:53]  You have to read this book enough already.
[01:01:56]  And but in the chapter on Iraq, which you had to throw out from making an entire book, but you still got the chapter into this book, you lay out the case, I think, pretty conclusively that they, which is the most important thing, I think, at this point with Iraq to get straight, because basically everybody admits it was a disaster.
[01:02:17]  I mean, even John McCain wrote in his book before he died that, oh, yeah, I guess in hindsight, we really shouldn't have fought that war in Iraq.
[01:02:24]  You know, so if John McCain admits it, then, okay, the consensus went from we need to fight.
[01:02:28]  This is the consensus that is a disaster.
[01:02:30]  The only thing that's really in dispute is did they get it wrong or did they lie us into the war in Iraq?

=== Lying Us Into War (15:52) ===

[01:02:35]  And you really go through a case that, no, they lied us into this war in Iraq, as Trump said, Trump said, they lied.
[01:02:43]  They big, big time lied.
[01:02:46]  But I remember talking about this last year, I guess it was, almost about a year ago, when Nancy Pelosi, who look, say whatever you want to about Nancy Pelosi, she voted against the war in Iraq.
[01:03:00]  And I'll give her credit for that.
[01:03:01]  I'll give credit to anyone who voted against the biggest foreign policy blunder in modern American history.
[01:03:07]  But she said, and it was like shocking.
[01:03:09]  I did a whole podcast on this.
[01:03:12]  But she said, and now keep in mind that her point was to prove how much we had to impeach Donald Trump over Ukraine gate.
[01:03:20]  That's what she was saying, right?
[01:03:21]  That's because even though, as we've now learned, there was a federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden going on here, forget all of that.
[01:03:30]  But she was telling you that we had to impeach.
[01:03:32]  This is how bad UkraineGate is.
[01:03:34]  And she goes, look, a lot of people wanted me to impeach George W. Bush.
[01:03:40]  And I was on the intelligence committee and I saw the real intelligence and I saw how George W. Bush was misrepresenting.
[01:03:50]  She didn't use the word lying, but she goes, misrepresenting the intelligence.
[01:03:54]  And I still didn't impeach George W. Bush.
[01:03:58]  So now her angle on this is, so you know, when I impeach a president, I really mean it.
[01:04:05]  But to any sane human being looking at that, you go, wait a minute.
[01:04:09]  So you're telling me point blank that lying a country into a war, a war which we are still in to this day, that this is not an impeachable offense, but asking some Ukrainian to maybe look into Hunter and Joe Biden and maybe we don't give you some aid, which we end up giving you more aid than the last guy gave you anyway afterward.
[01:04:32]  That's impeachable.
[01:04:33]  But lying us into war, that one, I was, you know, people wanted me to impeach him for it, but I was like, hey, let's be judicious.
[01:04:41]  Let's not just go willy-nilly impeaching people.
[01:04:43]  Well, go back and remember too.
[01:04:44]  Now, she voted right based on that intelligence she had, as you said, but she didn't tell everyone, look, they're lying.
[01:04:51]  Yeah.
[01:04:51]  I have top secret clearance.
[01:04:53]  I've seen the documents and they don't say what they say they say.
[01:04:57]  She didn't say that.
[01:04:59]  And she was also.
[01:05:01]  And by the way, and this is just, it's the way the current federal government works now, because nobody puts any pressure on the House to ever exercise their actual control.
[01:05:13]  But she also funded the thing all the way through.
[01:05:15]  I mean, to the point where she was the speaker from 2006 on, she was the speaker.
[01:05:20]  I mean, anything that happens from the United States federal government, the House has to fund it.
[01:05:25]  And nobody ever holds them accountable for that.
[01:05:28]  They could go, well, I voted against the thing.
[01:05:29]  It's like, okay, well, you voted against it, but then you funded it the whole time.
[01:05:32]  So that, you know, how if you really wanted to stand by your vote, you could have just never, you know, anyway.
[01:05:39]  No, it was worse than that, right?
[01:05:40]  Because they climbed on Cindy Sheehan's back in 2005 and 2006 and used the anti-war movement to get to seize both houses in the elections of 06 and then turned right around and funded the war and not just escalation.
[01:05:56]  The surge sworn in in 07 and the massive surge and everything and sold everybody out.
[01:06:01]  Used all those people's goodwill from the anti-Iraq war movement and just turned them into a bunch of damn Democrats with it.
[01:06:08]  It was horrifying.
[01:06:09]  But yeah, they did lie and they knew they were lying.
[01:06:12]  And the first thing they're lying about was their motives for doing it.
[01:06:15]  None of them thought, oh, no, Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
[01:06:19]  He's going to give them to Osama bin Laden to use against us.
[01:06:22]  None of them.
[01:06:23]  No one in the administration believed that.
[01:06:25]  That was just a stupid lie.
[01:06:27]  That was the excuse.
[01:06:29]  And Wolfowitz later admitted it.
[01:06:31]  Well, we settled on that for bureaucratic reasons.
[01:06:34]  And what does that mean?
[01:06:35]  That means that the justice minister in Great Britain and Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, were afraid that they would go to prison if they launched an aggressive war, which is against the law.
[01:06:48]  And so if you launch an aggressive war, the only way for that to be legal is if you get a U.N. Security Council resolution first that says you can launch this war.
[01:06:56]  And they knew that they probably couldn't get a resolution, but they at least wanted to try to twist it and say we are enforcing previous U.N. Security Council resolutions that say this guy's not allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction.
[01:07:09]  And we claim he has them.
[01:07:10]  And so maybe the UNSC won't authorize a new war, but oh, well, we claim we're enforcing international law here.
[01:07:17]  And that's our theory to keep us out of prison for launching an aggressive war.
[01:07:22]  You know, simple as that.
[01:07:23]  It was Colin Powell who insists they want to go to Iraq right away.
[01:07:25]  It was Powell that insists, we got to go through the U.N. We've got to have at least a semblance that we tried to follow the law here or we could really get in trouble, which of course is a joke, right?
[01:07:34]  A cop could come to your house and murder your whole family and walk.
[01:07:38]  Colin Powell could lie us into war 100 times over and never be held accountable by any rule of law.
[01:07:44]  What a dumbass our Secretary of State was that he thought that there was a rule of law that could apply to him.
[01:07:50]  As Al Gore said, there's no controlling legal authority over me.
[01:07:55]  You know, yeah, that's exactly right.
[01:07:57]  There's not.
[01:07:58]  As you just quoted Nancy Pelosi saying, there's no oversight when a Bush starts a war.
[01:08:03]  There's nobody going to be held accountable for this thing.
[01:08:06]  Even if he sat on that intel committee and knew they lied about every bit of it.
[01:08:10]  It's amazing because all that matters.
[01:08:12]  And I remember Jeff Dice was making this point when he was on the show.
[01:08:17]  And he was just a very simple, really libertarian point in essence, but he was just going, look, all that matters is what's enforced.
[01:08:24]  It doesn't matter what's written down on a piece of paper somewhere.
[01:08:27]  Like that's just words on a piece of paper.
[01:08:28]  All that matters is what men with guns come to enforce.
[01:08:31]  That's all that matters.
[01:08:32]  So if the speed limit is 55 miles per hour, but they don't pull you over unless you're doing 65, well, then the speed limit is 65 miles per hour.
[01:08:41]  Like that's all that matters.
[01:08:42]  And the truth is that all of these other things about laws, it's all just kind of theories and beliefs and what potion is written down.
[01:08:50]  I mean, it's all the time I've brought up like more times than I could count on cable news shows that Clapper committed perjury.
[01:08:57]  You know, just like throw that out there and just be like, you know, I mean, he literally said that the NSA was not involved in any bulk data collection.
[01:09:05]  Like just straight up said that to Congress in a congressional hearing.
[01:09:10]  And you'll go, yeah, isn't that like against the law?
[01:09:12]  And everyone goes, it's a good point.
[01:09:13]  It's a good point.
[01:09:14]  That is against the law.
[01:09:15]  So anyway, moving on, it's just like, yeah, like that's just, there's never going to be any.
[01:09:20]  Now, if somebody on Trump's team lied to Mueller about sending an email on the third when they sent it on the 13th, that person's going to jail because you are not allowed to lie to Congress.
[01:09:33]  You are not allowed to lie to the FBI.
[01:09:35]  So who goes to jail and who doesn't is completely determined by political will.
[01:09:39]  It's not determined by laws.
[01:09:41]  It's determined by what, where there's actually will to prosecute people.
[01:09:45]  And, you know, there's no will to prosecute people for war crimes.
[01:09:48]  That's just, that's been shown over and over.
[01:09:50]  Occasionally, low-level people, if they, you know, don't follow the orders and end up going off killing a whole bunch of people, occasionally, they'll usually get a pardon from President Trump.
[01:10:00]  Or like Abu Ghraib, you had no one above officer grade, right?
[01:10:04]  A bunch of enlisted guys from the National Guard night shift got punished for what was the CIA's policy.
[01:10:10]  Right, right, exactly.
[01:10:11]  So occasionally, so there'll be a fall man or a fall woman, you know, who's a very low level, but there's never any real will to prosecute people.
[01:10:20]  And one of the my favorite political moments ever, perversely, it was awful, but was when Obama, you know, he had gotten a lot of pressure because much like Joe Biden, it's hard for people.
[01:10:32]  Again, there's so many younger people who listen to this show that even 2008, I know was like, you know, a long time ago to them.
[01:10:38]  I mean, 2008, 12 years ago.
[01:10:40]  If you're a 20-year-old listening to this show, you're like, I don't know, you're a fucking eight.
[01:10:44]  I get it, you know?
[01:10:46]  But if you think like this last year with like the Black Lives Matter movement and stuff like that, if you think progressives got behind Joe Biden, I mean, they really were just against Donald Trump and maybe there was some hope that he'd do something good, but progressives really believed in Barack Obama.
[01:11:01]  I mean, this guy was like a community organizer who is a member of like a black church and was like, and actually was not that bad as a senator.
[01:11:12]  Like he, because he was just opposing everything that George W. Bush did, he was, he actually had some decent takes when he was in the Senate.
[01:11:21]  But the progressives, the hardcore progressives really, really believed in Barack Obama.
[01:11:26]  And so there was all this pressure on him to prosecute the Bush era war crimes.
[01:11:32]  And he actually had to address it.
[01:11:34]  And he gave a speech about it in which the speech where he said, you know, look, we tortured some folks and things like this.
[01:11:41]  And he goes, he basically said, he goes, yes, we tortured some folks.
[01:11:45]  Yes, crimes were committed.
[01:11:47]  But now is not the time to look back.
[01:11:51]  Now is the time to look forward, which I always, to this day, is just one of the most hilarious things ever.
[01:11:58]  Now is not the time to look back.
[01:12:00]  Well, like, here's the thing about prosecuting crime.
[01:12:03]  You kind of have to look back.
[01:12:05]  It's really the only way to do it.
[01:12:08]  It's just the only, I mean, wouldn't that be like a wonderful defense for you to give like at a murder trial?
[01:12:13]  You'd be like, your honor, your honor.
[01:12:15]  We got to move forward.
[01:12:17]  Come on.
[01:12:18]  Let's look to the future.
[01:12:20]  When they actually did hire, they said, you know what?
[01:12:23]  The CIA did murder these at least two guys that we're admitting to.
[01:12:27]  So we are going to have this former federal prosecutor or this current federal prosecutor look into that and view maybe we should have a preliminary investigation to see if we should have a preliminary investigation to consider prosecuting these men.
[01:12:41]  And that man was John Durham.
[01:12:43]  And John Durham said, nope, CIA can murder whoever they want.
[01:12:46]  And this is the same guy who was then brought on to get to the bottom of the Russiagate hoax for us by Barr.
[01:12:53]  By Bob, by William Barr, yeah.
[01:12:56]  To get to the bottom of the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA's plot to frame Trump for treason with Russia.
[01:13:03]  This is the very same guy who helped let the CIA get away with torture and murder.
[01:13:07]  Which, by the way, I've brought this exact point up before, and I like that because what happens, and this is what always happens, like this is the game that the duopoly plays is that they'll be like, so, you know, you have everybody on Fox News and the Republicans calling Obama weak on defense.
[01:13:26]  And then he goes, no, no, I'm not weak.
[01:13:28]  I mean, look what I did, all this stuff here.
[01:13:30]  And then that almost gives him cover for being what he actually is, which is like a psychopathic war hawk, right?
[01:13:38]  Same thing with Trump on Russia, too.
[01:13:40]  No matter how bad he was on Russia, they attacked him for being a Russian agent, which is covered to be worse and worse and worse.
[01:13:46]  And specifically with Barr, when Barr would come out and say anything reasonable about the whole Russia Gate hoax, then MSNBC and the New York Times and all the progressive publications, they go, he's just Trump's man.
[01:14:01]  Trump has politicized the Justice Department.
[01:14:04]  But then what that ends up doing, right?
[01:14:06]  This is the brilliant game that they play.
[01:14:09]  Then that ends up convincing all these Trump supporters, relax.
[01:14:13]  We got our guy in the Justice Department now, and he's going to get to the bottom of this.
[01:14:18]  I cannot tell you how many people were telling me.
[01:14:21]  They go, dude, I know you're upset about this, this whole framing Donald Trump for treason, but don't worry because Barr's got all these investigations going and he's going to get to the bottom of this.
[01:14:32]  He started a global investigation.
[01:14:35]  And we're going to, I've been telling them this whole time, I go, Barr is going to produce nothing.
[01:14:39]  I promise you.
[01:14:40]  He's not.
[01:14:41]  Why are you trusting MSNBC?
[01:14:43]  He's not what they tell you he is.
[01:14:45]  Barr isn't Trump's guy.
[01:14:47]  Barr's Bush's guy.
[01:14:49]  Okay.
[01:14:49]  So don't buy for a second that he, and now, and I was so vindicated when I found out that when it came out that during his impeachment, there was Hunter Biden was under federal criminal investigation and not one word of it was leaked.
[01:15:05]  Not one word.
[01:15:06]  Barr sat there with his mouth shut, never even told Trump.
[01:15:10]  And we know he didn't tell Trump because it wouldn't have been possible for Donald Trump to keep that to himself.
[01:15:14]  And not only that, but nobody leaked.
[01:15:16]  Nobody at DOJ said a word about it for two years, even as you say, while Trump is being impeached for trying to get a foreign.
[01:15:25]  And when didn't he try to get William Barr at least once to get the Ukrainians to start the thing for him?
[01:15:33]  Yeah.
[01:15:33]  I mean, man.
[01:15:34]  Where did they get him good?
[01:15:35]  See, this is the whole thing about, and there's this big, I'm off on a tangent here, but here's this big article in Time magazine that all the right-wingers are passing around on Twitter and saying, see, this is how it proves how they stole the election from Trump.
[01:15:47]  But like, actually, it proves how they just out foxed the hell out of him.
[01:15:52]  They played the game.
[01:15:54]  They screwed him good, but by the rules, right?
[01:15:57]  Like, it wasn't stealing ballots as it was this kind of stuff.
[01:16:02]  Keeping it secret that Hunter, how could they possibly have kept that from being leaked?
[01:16:07]  By what blood oath did they keep that secret from leaking out of the DOJ?
[01:16:12]  Hold on.
[01:16:12]  But it really shows you huge.
[01:16:15]  It's really revealing.
[01:16:16]  It's really revealing that they were able to keep that because you see all these other leaks come out and you realize, oh, no, no, no.
[01:16:22]  If they want to keep something from leaking, they are capable of that.
[01:16:25]  It's not just that they don't have control of this whole thing.
[01:16:28]  So yeah, that, you know, I like that Curtis Yarvin guy.
[01:16:32]  I think he said, it might have been on one of Pete's podcasts, but I liked the way he said it.
[01:16:38]  He goes, he goes, I don't know.
[01:16:40]  If they stole the election, they stole it fair and square.
[01:16:43]  It's just kind of like whatever.
[01:16:45]  He goes, even.
[01:16:46]  Yeah.
[01:16:47]  I mean, the Republicans' whole thing is kicking off anybody whose last name is Jackson or Johnson off the list and pretending that they can't tell that they all have different middle initials and different birthdays.
[01:16:57]  If they're black, kick them off of the rolls.
[01:16:59]  That's been the Republican Party's way since Richard Nixon.
[01:17:03]  And so it's only a question, just like in Afghanistan, Dave, the only question is who stole the election from the other guy better, not who won it.
[01:17:10]  Right.
[01:17:11]  He used the Curtis Yarvin guy, which I really like.
[01:17:13]  I don't agree with him about a lot of his stuff, but he has really great.
[01:17:17]  Pete talks to him a lot.
[01:17:18]  He's like a right-wing guy.
[01:17:20]  He's a former libertarian, but he has some great analogies and thought experiments and stuff.
[01:17:26]  But he compared it to Water Polo, which I don't even know the game of Water Polo, but he's like, you know, Water Polo, like you're in the water playing this game and the ref is outside.
[01:17:35]  So basically whatever happens under the water is like fair game.
[01:17:38]  The ref's not underwater.
[01:17:39]  I can't see that.
[01:17:40]  So he's like, that's what elections are, basically.
[01:17:42]  He's like, I don't know.
[01:17:43]  He's like, if you're vote harvesting and you can steal a few votes here or there or something like that, that's part of the game.
[01:17:47]  Like you got to be better at that than the other team is.
[01:17:50]  And so, but this stuff and the time article thing is what was really amazing about it is that they're just that lady was just sitting there telling you, yeah, of course, it's a conspiracy.
[01:18:00]  But the conspiracy isn't this secret thing that you don't already know about.
[01:18:04]  The conspiracy is all of these CEOs of big corporations who are in bed with the government, people connected with the Democrats and the Republicans, all working together to make sure we get the result that we wanted.
[01:18:17]  And that's the conspiracy in plain sight.
[01:18:20]  Okay, hold on.
[01:18:20]  Listen, we're coming up against the end of time because I am on I have limited time for the rest of the show here.

=== Wars For Terrorism Explained (15:08) ===

[01:18:28]  And we're not going to cover everything that's in the book.
[01:18:30]  And this is why people need to go get the book and they got to read it.
[01:18:33]  There's a phenomenal chapter in there on there's a chapter on Syria, a chapter on Yemen, a chapter on Libya.
[01:18:40]  Really goes through all of the foreign policy.
[01:18:42]  Um that, since what we've been talking about, you know, since before 9-11, after 9-11, all of that.
[01:18:48]  But while you're here, I want to ask you something that's not exactly direct, that's not in the book, but kind of related to the book and in the news.
[01:18:54]  Um, so we don't really need to talk about Yemen.
[01:18:58]  Me and you have done several podcasts on the, the horrific, you know, war in Yemen and the crisis there.
[01:19:03]  But there does seem to be some news that might lead one to be cautiously optimistic about the tone that the Biden campaign has taken with Syria so, i'm excuse me, with Yemen.
[01:19:15]  So I I just wanted to kind of get your take on that.
[01:19:18]  Should I be feeling good about this?
[01:19:20]  Should I get cautious?
[01:19:22]  Well, because he's he, so he's announced that they're they're cutting off um arms to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen.
[01:19:30]  Of course, that's not cutting off all arms to Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia.
[01:19:34]  But what are your thoughts on this?
[01:19:36]  Well, you know I haven't read um.
[01:19:38]  You know in-depth reporting on the process and how it's changed lately.
[01:19:42]  I really should catch up on that.
[01:19:44]  I bet you there's a piece or two in the post, in the WALL street journal or whatever about exactly how it's playing out.
[01:19:50]  But basically here's, you know, my best understanding of this and for your audience, just so you know, and for people who don't know me, i'm absolutely not a partisan and i'm no defender of Joe Biden, so nothing i'm saying here comes from a place of trying to put a positive spin on the new administration or anything like that.
[01:20:08]  If you read the book, I predicted that he would do the right thing here um, and end the war.
[01:20:14]  And by end the war I don't mean end the war.
[01:20:16]  By end the war, I mean switch sides again back to the war against Al-Qaeda, when the current war is for them.
[01:20:22]  And so um, the message that that Biden put out, he said we're we're ceasing all offensive support for the war, but we're still going to provide defensive support.
[01:20:33]  And a lot of people thought oh, that's a big loophole, they're just going to keep the whole war going.
[01:20:37]  Of course, everything is defense, and the other guy always started it and whatever you know, but in this case I don't read it that way I and in fact um uh, Jack Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, I think the next day clarified that yes, that means that we are canceling intelligence, logistic and maintenance support for the Saudi war.
[01:20:56]  In other words, as i've been explaining, the Americans have been running the war for the Saudis all along, and now that has ceased.
[01:21:04]  As Kirby put it, according to the president's order.
[01:21:06]  He wanted that ended.
[01:21:07]  It's ended, that's it, and so that means um, you know, no more, uh intel on who we should hit, no more logistics on how we're going to hit them, and no more maintenance and all the care and feeding of their military supplies and no more resupply of their bombs and um, you're right though, that there are some loopholes there.
[01:21:30]  One thing that uh Hassan Al-tayyeb pointed out to me uh, from the Friends Committee ON National Legislation, the Quaker Group, that an F-15 needs new tires every time it lands, and so we could just turn that off in a moment.
[01:21:44]  Joe Biden could turn that off in a moment.
[01:21:46]  No new tires.
[01:21:48]  I don't think they've gone that far, or I don't know at least, how far they're they're going with that.
[01:21:53]  But when they said defensive support only, I took that to mean that we're going to make sure they have plenty of Patriot missiles and Aegis radars and whatever anti-drone and anti-missile tech, Iron Dome type stuff, because the Houthis have been getting successful missile and drone attacks off against Saudi.
[01:22:10]  So what Biden was really doing there, I think, was saying, hey, hey, hey, we're not abandoning our friends and leaving them high and dry here in the face of a merciless Houthi assault, but we're not going to help them wage the war against these people anymore either.
[01:22:25]  And the reason I think that's right is because there are, first and foremost, are people in the government who really regret that they helped start this war in 2015, just because they're human men at all.
[01:22:38]  I mean, they might be scumbag Democrats, but they should never have done this.
[01:22:42]  And they know it.
[01:22:43]  And it's been an absolute catastrophe, Operation Decisive Storm.
[01:22:47]  And here we are six years later and probably half a million dead people, you know, innocent civilians.
[01:22:52]  And those numbers are very high, but I guarantee you we're going to find out later that that's right.
[01:22:58]  Right now, the official numbers in the hundreds of 100 and something thousand, but guarantee you, we're going to find out later.
[01:23:04]  It's much more.
[01:23:05]  But anyway, also, there has been incredible grassroots support.
[01:23:10]  I mean, Dave, there is no Yemeni lobby, no Houthi lobby anywhere in America.
[01:23:14]  They have no oil resources.
[01:23:15]  They're not allies with the Israelis and the Saudis.
[01:23:18]  They're the enemies here.
[01:23:19]  They have no influence in Washington, D.C. whatsoever.
[01:23:22]  The only people who care about them is just regular ass plain old Americans doing retail grassroots level politics.
[01:23:30]  And there ain't no George Soros or any other money bags behind this.
[01:23:34]  This is the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Quakers, Code Pink, and a few other groups, you know, Arab groups that you've never heard of, you know, who get no publicity, who have just been up on Capitol Hill for years here screaming about this and doing everything they can to organize telephone campaigns and email campaigns and whatever grassroots stuff.
[01:23:55]  So you don't hear me usually selling the power of retail politics very hard.
[01:24:00]  I'm not much of a believer or practice in it.
[01:24:02]  You know, I'm a radio guy, but I've seen it done.
[01:24:05]  And that's the only reason at all that any movement here has happened at all is because of American citizens refusing to accept.
[01:24:12]  And by the way, in the midst of a complete and total media blackout, as this made the news that MSNBC didn't utter the word Yemen for 365 days in a row, man, not once, right?
[01:24:23]  That made the news that Yemen didn't make the news at all.
[01:24:27]  Even when there was some movement in the Senate.
[01:24:31]  I mean, even when they couldn't blame it all on Trump.
[01:24:33]  Yeah.
[01:24:34]  Yeah.
[01:24:34]  Right.
[01:24:34]  Even when they could have said this is Trump's worst sin, they couldn't because it was Obama's worst sin too.
[01:24:39]  So they couldn't say a thing about it.
[01:24:41]  But the people did this anyway.
[01:24:43]  And they pushed, they got Congress to pass the war powers resolutions twice, which Trump vetoed.
[01:24:48]  And they put major pressure on the Democrats.
[01:24:51]  And we did, you know, we had this the first Monday after Biden was sworn in was the day of action where everybody called their congressmen and called their senators and sent emails and called the White House and let them know that we really care about this.
[01:25:04]  This is not over.
[01:25:05]  You swore you're going to end the war and we're holding you to your promise.
[01:25:08]  And it worked.
[01:25:10]  And, you know, I think I forget now.
[01:25:13]  You know, Thad Russell said to me that that famous New York Times article, long, bloody, and indecisive, but we have to placate the Saudis.
[01:25:21]  He said in that same article, they say Biden was against it.
[01:25:23]  I don't remember that.
[01:25:24]  I need to go back and read that article.
[01:25:26]  But he supposedly was skeptical on Libya.
[01:25:29]  Apparently, I've never heard any reporting about him opposing intervention in Syria in the first place.
[01:25:34]  But I know that when he gave his speech at Harvard, blaming everything on our allies after the fact, that pretty much sounded like he was vindicating his own arguments.
[01:25:42]  You know, I think I do think that Biden had been really burned by Iraq War II and really regretted that.
[01:25:47]  So I think he never really believed in this war in Yemen.
[01:25:50]  I know in Gates in Gates' book, he said that Biden was against Libya for sure.
[01:25:57]  I know that.
[01:25:57]  Yeah, I know that.
[01:25:58]  Biden was against Libya.
[01:26:00]  And so now, again, as you said, or you didn't say this.
[01:26:04]  This was in the book.
[01:26:04]  Was it in the book or did you say this?
[01:26:06]  But whatever you said at one point, probably both.
[01:26:09]  But you said, I think in the book about Colin Powell, where you're like, look, Colin Powell was kind of against the war in Iraq and a lot of these other things, but he still didn't quit.
[01:26:20]  I mean, he still could have just said no.
[01:26:23]  And instead, he went and sold the lie to the United Nations.
[01:26:26]  So you can, you know, a tiny bit of credit, I suppose, for being against it in closed doors.
[01:26:33]  But no, this is not at all a compliment to Joe Biden.
[01:26:37]  Joe Biden was the vice president for the for the presidency that started this war of genocide.
[01:26:45]  So for almost two years, right?
[01:26:47]  For like a full year and 10 months before they left office.
[01:26:51]  So even if he was against Libya, even if he was against Syria, even if he was against Yemen, none of them were enough to make him speak out about it or quit or anything like that.
[01:27:01]  So he's not anyone confused me with like arguing the case for Biden here.
[01:27:05]  I'm only telling you like I'm I'm Howard Kosell without the voice just calling the score for you here.
[01:27:11]  No, well, listen, this is part of the context of why I think that this is not BS, that they are ending it is because I just think Biden never really had his heart in it in the first place.
[01:27:20]  And one more thing here.
[01:27:21]  But I'm also fine to give him credit.
[01:27:23]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:24]  No, I, yeah, I'll give him credit too, but nothing more than that.
[01:27:27]  Yeah.
[01:27:28]  Exactly.
[01:27:28]  But yeah, then the new Secretary of Defense, by the way, is the guy who was backing the Houthis against Al-Qaeda in 2015 before Obama made him.
[01:27:37]  Again, another guy who knew better, was against it, clicked his heels and obeyed his orders anyway.
[01:27:42]  But at least he was really mad about it.
[01:27:44]  I mean, Mark Perry says he was really pissed and he wrote a letter or he was going to write a letter to Obama telling him to go to hell over it and his buddies at the Pentagon talked him out of it.
[01:27:53]  So I think that's part of the reason to believe why they're really making the change in this policy here is because Lloyd Austin was the head of CENTCOM at the time and he was passing intel to the Houthis to use to kill Al-Qaeda before Obama made him turn around and betray them and take Al-Qaeda's side, which as a four-star general who's like essentially apolitical.
[01:28:17]  I mean, I know he sat on the board at Raytheon and everything like that, but he's not a partisan, you know, in any sense.
[01:28:23]  He's a he's a professional as far as that goes.
[01:28:25]  And from that point of view, how in the world can you prefer bombing the Houthis to bombing al-Qaeda?
[01:28:30]  Yeah.
[01:28:31]  Because Al-Qaeda put a hole in the side of the Pentagon, you know, not the fucking Houthis.
[01:28:36]  So from his point of view, you know, and by the way, just so nobody gets me wrong, the war against Al-Qaeda in Yemen from 2009 through 2015 was an absolute horror show and a disaster and was only counterproductive and only made matters worse there.
[01:28:54]  So the fact that we're switching back to that war is horrible, but it's still a 99% improvement over the current war against the the Houthis and the civilian population there, which as we've discussed before, is absolutely as bad as Iraq War II, as bad as any sin any group of American politicians have ever committed.
[01:29:13]  And they burnt Japan to the ground.
[01:29:16]  And in many ways, it's the most purely immoral in terms of the way it's being waged out of any of the wars.
[01:29:24]  The fact that it's the Saudis conducting it, with basically all the American help they could possibly need, makes them not have to deal with even any of just the kind of first world restrictions that we have on the way we conduct wars where like, you're not gonna, you know, be like deliberately going after food supplies and things like that, and it's, it's, you're right, it is almost out of World War Ii, something where we give them all the modern technology and they fight it in a primitive third world kind of way.
[01:29:53]  It's, it's just, it's like the the greatest sin, you know uh imaginable um, and so if that is if, if that does end up really, you know, if the situation improves at all, that is great.
[01:30:04]  And even though your, your book is uh, you know the, the subtitle is, you know, time to end the war on terrorism, but of course we, we want to end those wars, but we'd really like to end the wars for terrorism as well, because that is that is, you know, the.
[01:30:19]  The truth is that, you know the, the original war in Yemen, you know, could be classified as a war on terrorism.
[01:30:26]  Um, and uh, I don't think anything in Iraq really could be classified as a war on terrorism, although I suppose, after we took out Saddam Hussein, we were fighting.
[01:30:37]  You know, some of the Iraq guys who we drew in uh to the country building up the Islamic state.
[01:30:42]  Then we had to fight them too, so that's great.
[01:30:44]  So, Iraq there yeah Iraq, war three.
[01:30:47]  I suppose you could count in there, but Libya, Syria and the latest war in Yemen were all wars for terrorism.
[01:30:54]  We were all fighting on the side of the terrorists.
[01:30:57]  So yeah, that's that's the, the worst and most you know, difficult to actually imagine.
[01:31:03]  I mean, you know, you think, as as you were talking about, you know the, the war in Yemen.
[01:31:06]  You just imagine someone almost like if they were like in a coma from the year 2014 to 2020, and then they come out of it and they're back in the Pentagon and they're like, we're still fighting the war in Yemen.
[01:31:17]  All right, how's it going?
[01:31:18]  Are we beating Al-Qaeda up?
[01:31:19]  And you're like, all right, you might want to sit down for this one.
[01:31:21]  We're actually we're, we're still there, but we're fighting for Al-Qaeda now and yeah, we're gonna switch back again in six years after we've killed a couple of hundred thousand innocent people.
[01:31:32]  Yeah really babies, oh geez, all right.
[01:31:35]  Well listen, I got to wrap up because I got another show I got to go record.
[01:31:39]  But listen people, you have to go buy this book.
[01:31:42]  Why I?
[01:31:42]  I do not demand much from my audience.
[01:31:44]  I demand you buy this book.
[01:31:46]  I demand you read this book and then you loan it to a friend so they can read it as well too, or buy two copies if you can afford to, and I really hope you like it.
[01:31:55]  Yeah it, the book is phenomenal.
[01:31:57]  I'm telling you you're gonna love it.
[01:31:59]  If you enjoy these interviews, there's no way you're not gonna love the book.
[01:32:02]  It's called enough already, time to end the war on Terrorism uh, and you can get it at Amazon.
[01:32:09]  You can get it.
[01:32:09]  It's all over the place, right?
[01:32:10]  And I believe you have videos too Dave, oh yeah, and the videos are up on your youtube channel.
[01:32:15]  What's the youtube channel?
[01:32:16]  It's youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show, and so far we got six chapters.
[01:32:20]  Chapter seven, Iraq War Two uh, goes up tonight.
[01:32:24]  Okay, awesome.
[01:32:24]  And then I heard I think I heard you say that you're gonna put an audio book out soon.
[01:32:29]  Yes, i've begun working on it um, but i've been signing and packing up books by the hundreds over here, so i'm a little behind on the audio book.
[01:32:37]  It's going to be a couple of months before the audio book is ready.
[01:32:40]  Okay, cool enough.
[01:32:41]  Go grab the book.
[01:32:42]  Make sure.
[01:32:43]  Go and go check out the videos.
[01:32:45]  Let me say real quick too.
[01:32:46]  It's not just on Amazon.
[01:32:48]  I know there are a lot of Amazon boycotters out there and for very good reasons, but it's on Google Play and Kobo Books and Smash Words and Scribd and not Apple Books.
[01:32:57]  Yeah, everything but Apple Books.
[01:32:58]  You can get at least the EPUB version out there.
[01:33:01]  All right.
[01:33:03]  And Barnes and Nobles as well.
[01:33:04]  There you go.
[01:33:05]  Bookstores are still a thing, I suppose.
[01:33:07]  Powell's books.
[01:33:08]  Yeah.
[01:33:09]  There you go.
[01:33:10]  All right.
[01:33:10]  Well, thank you very much for taking the time.
[01:33:12]  Of course, we'll talk soon about a bunch more of this awful stuff.
[01:33:16]  And it'll be fun to talk to you through the Biden presidency to see where all of this goes.
[01:33:23]  Hopefully, maybe a little bit of good news there on Yemen.
[01:33:25]  I'm sure there'll be other areas where he's very bad, looking bad on Afghanistan.
[01:33:29]  We'll talk about that next time.
[01:33:31]  All right.
[01:33:32]  Scott Horton, thank you so much.
[01:33:33]  Thank you for everybody listening.
[01:33:35]  See you guys later.
[01:33:36]  Peace.