Scott Horton and James Smith dissect U.S. imperial overreach, exposing false justifications for wars in Iraq and Libya alongside the collapse of the Afghan National Army into ethnic militias. They critique the military-industrial complex's pivot to China as a distraction from domestic surveillance and the Pentagon's potential pressure tactics regarding over-the-horizon strikes. Ultimately, the episode argues that American foreign policy is driven by special interests rather than national security, leaving Afghanistan to fragment while the U.S. retreats in a manner reminiscent of Saigon. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fact Checking Real Time Lies00:13:54
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, a bonus episode or a makeup episode is maybe more accurate because I missed a few episodes when I was out at Freedom Fest.
And so I'm recording a couple extra ones this week for all you good people.
Get some extra content this week.
And it's been a while since I've had my favorite person to talk to on the show.
So I figured, why not have the great Scott Horton, author of Enough Already, author of Fool's Eren, the editor at the most important project in the world, which is antiwar.com, and one of the founders of the Libertarian Institute, the great Scott Horton.
How are you doing, brother?
I'm doing great.
How are you doing, man?
Very good.
Very good.
Happy to talk to you, as always.
Don't forget, I have a show, the Scott Horton Show, and I've done 5,500-something interviews for you too, all at scotthorton.org.
I know it's a long list of things.
It is.
But if you really want to understand what's going on in foreign policy, the Scott Horton show is where you got to go.
And I know I say this a lot, but this is really true.
I've heard this from so many people where they go, man, I was just so intimidated to jump into the Scott Horton show because like, I don't know who all the players are and I don't know who all the conflicts are.
And then they're like, and then I listen to like four, five, six episodes and I'm like, oh, okay, I think I'm getting it.
I think I'm starting to follow it.
And then like 10 episodes in and you're like, I understand, I got it all now.
You know what I mean?
I remember you said to me one time where we were almost, I don't know if we were exactly arguing, but we were saying like, I was like, you know, I don't know, maybe some people just can't keep all of this stuff together in their heads.
And you use the example to me of when you listen to sports radio and people call in and they know every ball and strike that's ever been thrown in the history of the Dodgers, you know, and you're like, oh, yeah, no, people actually can keep a lot of stuff in their head.
It just seems daunting at first.
But once you dive into it, you end up figuring all this stuff out.
Yeah.
Well, look, I've been around the block a few times, Dave, and I come to find out that everybody is really smart about something.
You know what I mean?
Got to give them credit.
So it's just, although, you know, it's a little bothersome that foreign policy is sort of like a weird niche kind of thing that only some people are interested in because it's something that we're all at least a little bit responsible for in a way, you know?
Not like it's our fault, really, but we should still kind of try to take responsibility to do something about it.
But to a lot of people, it's just all so far away and even long ago, they don't even know that it's wartime right now.
They think it is peacetime right now.
And so there's an incongruity there.
You know what I mean?
Where like people are really excited about this stuff when it's getting started.
Yeah.
You know?
Right.
But anyway.
Well, you know, I guess there's maybe I'm being too kind to the average person here, but there's almost something where like what if we weren't in a world empire, that's kind of the correct attitude to have.
Like, what's going on in the border skirmish between Syria and Iraq?
I don't care.
Like, what the hell does that have to do with me?
Like, why would I even really care if there was like a dispute between Arizona and Texas?
I don't know.
I mean, like, it just really has nothing to do with me or my life.
So I kind of understand that impulse, but it's a little bit different when, you know, your elected representatives are like starving the people there.
It's a little bit more of an onus.
But yeah, no, like you're really on to something there that it's supposed to feel strange that the USA is the world empire.
That's the job of the evil monarchs of the old world.
This is where our ancestors came to be free of that.
And now here we are making all of the same worst mistakes, you know, and you know, the last time we did a podcast, it's a it's hard to keep track because me and you talk so much, but the last time we talked on my show, we were, we did the episode in Pittsburgh on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
And one of the things that you said that I thought was so true was you were like, look, it's like to the average person, if they just consume anything from the corporate press, well, then you already know what the story is.
And the story is simply that Israel just wants to be free and live their lives.
And then these damn Palestinians keep launching these missiles at them.
And so what would you do?
I mean, don't they have a right to defend themselves?
And that's the story.
And it's, and if that was the story and that was the entirety of the story, then of course, like, yeah, what, what else could you say?
So in the same sense, I mean, the corporate press will barely tell you that we're at war with Syria or that we're at war with in Yemen, with, you know, on the Saudi side of the Yemen conflict.
Like these things just don't even come up.
Like it's a, so it almost, I feel like the, the initial impulse, understandably so, is like when you'll be like, you know, we're conducting a war of genocide in Yemen.
And they'll be like, I would have heard about that.
Like someone would have mentioned something about it.
And that's why what we're all doing, these like alternative media type shows or whatever, I think are a worthy venture because like someone's got to start telling people like, no, this is actually what's going on.
And it's like about a thousand times more important than anything that'll be in the CNN rundown today.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Hey, look, if you check out the antiwar.com blog, just slash blog, you'll see Daniel Larrison has a piece about this new study out where more Americans wrongly believe that Iran has nukes than know correctly that Israel does.
Yeah, that says it all right there.
I mean, it's really hard.
Yeah, which really raises the question to me about all the pissing in the wind I've been doing for the last 20 years, trying to explain the truth of that to the very small segment of people who would try to understand.
In fact, I just met an Iranian expat the other day, a young lady at Freedom Fest, who it took me a good 15 minutes to get all the way through the case to explain why the Ayatollah doesn't have nukes.
And she's from there and rightfully hates the guy, but that doesn't mean he's making nukes just because he's a bad guy.
I told her, I'm a bad guy.
Doesn't mean I'm making nukes.
You know, these things are not necessarily causational and that kind of deal.
In this case, the Ayatollah knows he can't make a nuke without us knowing he's trying to.
And he knows the Americans are committed to nuking Tehran before they let Tehran get a nuke.
So instead, their policy is, hey, look, don't shoot, hands up, books open.
We're not making nukes.
We could, though, but we're not.
That's their stance.
That's been their stance for 20 years, for God's sake.
Yeah, it's like if somebody like, you know, if you were like, I don't know, trying to think of an analogy, but if you have like surrounded by a SWAT team, you know, and you got red dots all over you and there's a knife on the ground, like, are you going to lunge for the knife?
I mean, it's just certain death if you do.
So unless you have a death wish, like, why would you?
You just want to do whatever you can to get them to not shoot.
But to what you said before, there's almost, there's, there's a case for like defeatism or pessimism, as you kind of indicated, like, what the hell am I doing if all these people don't know this?
But then there's also kind of a case for optimism in that, because, you know, you think to yourself, well, man, maybe if the American people had a clue of what was going on, they really would have a different attitude about this.
Is that, well, wait a minute, they lie to us all the time because apparently they think it's necessary to.
So then, yeah, if you knew the truth, then you'd be pissed off.
And if we were all pissed off, then it would count for something.
Yeah.
So I try to make this case quite a bit, right?
And I say, I said this when I was on Matt Kibbe when he interviewed me recently.
And I think I've probably said this a bunch of times on this show, that I go, look, the fact that it wasn't like 9-11 happened and we invaded Iraq, right?
They took a full year of propaganda to really beat the war drums.
And there's something about that that's a real like ray of hope in a weird way, because you can like from a Miscession deduction, you can say that if they did that, then they believed they needed to.
At least they believe, it's not proof that they needed to.
Like maybe they could have just invaded Iraq the day after 9-11 and it just would have happened the same way, but they felt that they needed to drum up this popular support.
And if that's the case, then in a way, that's our opening that, okay, they need to propagandize the people.
So then we can fight them on that battle, right?
Because we're not going to be able to fight the federal government in like a direct violent conflict.
That won't work out for us very well.
So, but maybe we could fight them on the propaganda battle.
And especially today, like it's a very different world in 2021 than in 2002.
I mean, there's way less trust in media.
There's way more alternative voices out of there out there.
People get fact check and fact checked in real time.
There are these compilation videos of the hypocrisy of people.
You know, like I just saw one the other, the one earlier today.
I forget who put it out where it's Biden, you know, just being an idiot, being Biden.
But they ask at one point where they were like, they, you know, you said if you get the vaccine, you would never, you don't need to wear a mask.
And he goes, I never said that.
And then literally right after that in the video is Joe Biden going, if you get vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask.
Let me repeat myself.
If you get vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask.
So it's just like this, there's something beautiful about that where their propaganda machine does not work as well when people can undermine it in real time.
And the video had like 3 million views on it.
It's like, oh, this is a lot of people see this.
So that's a, that's a, you know, case for optimism.
Yeah.
Well, and look, it took 20 years, but I think the people are really over the Middle East wars.
You know, they don't want to hear that.
And look, they lied.
I mean, this doesn't really count in the Middle East, but Bill Clinton lied in Kosovo in 99 and said that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 innocent Albanian civilians, which was an absolute hoax.
Never happened at all.
People still say that.
People still say that when they tell the story of the intention for Kosovo, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, you can read John Pilger about that because, you know, for whatever reason, back then, I guess Louis Free had all this, whatever he had over Bill Clinton.
I don't know.
He was in charge of going over there and finding the mass graves.
The FBI was in charge of going to find the mass graves.
And they're like, yeah, no, there's one over that hill.
Yeah, no, there's not.
Oh, there's, there's a bunch of people buried in that mine shaft.
Yeah, no, there's not.
I went, checked a couple of things.
And then they went home after a couple of weeks.
There's just nobody to be found.
They found six, 7,000 bodies.
They were all fighting age males.
Maybe some of them had been massacred, but it was certainly no genocide.
And many of them, you know, must have been actual fighters.
But anyway, and then look, Bush lied that the Taliban refused to negotiate over bin Laden and just buffaloed us straight into that war with the Taliban.
We never needed to fight at all.
And then, of course, they lied about the weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged alliance with al-Qaeda.
And I don't think they've really bothered lying about Somalia.
They just started killing Somalis.
But then in Libya, they lied that Gaddafi was on the verge of killing 100,000 people or more.
It's really 500 or 700,000 people in the city of Benghazi, which is a completely ridiculous lie, of course.
And then in Syria, they lied that Assad started it by just butchering his own people for no reason, but for the fun of it, I guess, and that America and our allies were helping the poor people defend themselves from him, which is completely, you know, the other way around.
And then I don't know they lied so much about the start of Iraq War III, other than, geez, how did this Baghdadi guy create this caliphate all of a sudden?
That's a big enough lie right there.
Just the omission of, you know, how this had happened when it was the Syrian war that led to it.
And then, yeah, I think by Yemen, they didn't even really bother lying, right?
They just kind of put a press release in the New York Times a couple of months later going, well, this is how we kind of did it.
They didn't even make an announcement.
You know, I don't know.
It's, yeah, it's there, they sure are dumbing down the BS here.
And I think, and look, in fact, the big lie about the Yemen war is that it's the Saudi-led coalition, right?
When the Yemenis call it the U.S.-Saudi war, they're under no illusions.
Why would they be?
That's an F-15 Eagle up there dropping bombs.
You know what I mean?
No matter the color of the princeling fly in the thing.
And so, you know, America is the world empire and they understand that.
So now, how could anyone believe in any of this anymore?
You know, like some substantial, substantial minority or maybe more, I don't know, but yeah, at least a substantial minority of my audience, Dave, are anti-war vets of all these wars, of all services and special operations guys, Green Berets and Rangers and, you know, all different Marsock.
America As World Empire00:02:02
I think I had a guy and Navy guys and whoever, hundreds of them, you know, that I've heard from over the years that I've met.
I spent the last few months going, giving all these speeches to Libertarian Party events.
And I'm meeting gigantic warriors coming to me with a tear in their eye, talking about now at least finally I understand what mess I was in over there.
And, you know, I knew it wasn't right, but now I know what it was, you know, and I'm meeting these people by the score, you know, which is a lot.
That's two dozen.
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No, it's interesting.
It's you know, I really this is something, and I think I've talked about this with you before, but this was something that I've really like turned around on since my early days as a libertarian and being anti-war.
Cops Versus Soldiers Resistance00:16:06
I was anti-war before I was a libertarian, and actually, that's what brought me into libertarianism.
Is that I heard Ron Paul in the Giuliani moment, and I went, That's he's actually making the anti-war case better than any of the Democrats, you know, like the Democrats were like, Oh, Bush was wrong for going into Iraq.
And, you know, at the time, they sounded pretty good saying that, but he actually broke down why 9-11 happened to begin with.
I just found that so compelling and it was so obviously true.
And I was really, I was younger and more ignorant and more of a dick in those days.
I've chilled out a little bit, but I was more of just like a militant atheist.
Uh, and like, you know, I was really unrelated, but I was really hard on the troops.
And I was like, Well, what are they other than the hired mass murderers of the state?
And basically, like, you know, there's all a bunch of killers.
And what really turned me around on that, uh, the first thing was seeing how that the active duty military were donating to Ron Paul more than anyone else, and in fact, more than all the other candidates combined.
And that was a really, I was like, oh, wow, that's and the vets, yeah, that really says something, you know what I mean?
Like, that's oh, okay, so they're supposed supporting the most anti-war politician in history, like that they're supporting that guy, that kind of says something different.
And then, you know, just meeting more uh vets and kind of reading more and learning more about it.
And you just realize how much these this whole system just preys on on so many of these kids.
I mean, they just look, sure, there are like psychopathic people who go into the military because that's the excuse to go get your killing out.
Those people exist, but they prey on you know, they bribe and propagandize some of the these like kids who have really no other options in their life.
And they and they really kind of trick them into going there.
And seeing, you know, some of these people, especially having Dan McKnight on the show, meeting Tyler Lindholm at Freedom Fest, and see some of these guys who really are, you realize these are guys who really would like if there really was a threat to me and your family, they would go out and put their lives on the line to defend it.
And they're just so, they just feel so betrayed that that noble instinct of theirs was played on in order to dupe them into fighting these wars for these war profiteers.
Yeah, they're just turning all around on that.
Yeah, I've had people over the years ask me why I'm so hard on cops compared to soldiers when the level of violence, really, even by the soldiers, is so much higher, too.
And, you know, I don't know, like, may have some of it may just be selection bias.
You know, everybody knows veterans.
Everybody, you know, I just spent my whole life.
It was everybody's a veteran.
People's dads are veterans.
I mean, my dad, my grandfather was a - a lot of guys.
Yeah, everybody's grandfather was in World War II.
Yeah.
And a lot of people around just, you know, skaters I've known my whole life and skaters' dads I've known my whole life.
And I drove a cab forever.
I must have met, you know, a thousand vets of different types in my cab.
I drove for seven or eight years, something like that.
And skateboarders I've known as I've gotten older, you know, who've been in the army and back.
Some of them have been to war and back.
And so, and I just haven't really been around cops.
So I always hated cops ever since I was 11 or something.
So ever since I first started skateboarding.
So I just, you know, I never have had any like, you know, friend cops to humanize them at all, right?
They're just always and and they're older and they can quit at any time, you know, where a soldier and the level of propaganda about what a hero you are for being a cop compared to being a private in the army and going and serving your country, you know, in battle against the lethal threat to your nation's very existence and all of that.
It's just, it doesn't really compare.
And as you were saying, or I don't know, you're at least implying, I forgot your exact words, but the youth of the average recruit into the army in the Marine Corps.
These are 17, 18-year-old kids who don't know anything except if they have a dad, he and the coach and the minister and whoever all agree that this is the right thing to do no matter what.
And in fact, you know, people recognize this who got to that.
There's this whole dissonance too, where even if Barack Obama's the president and even if the war is a total disaster, it's still the right thing to go and join.
It's like it's, it's a whole separate category of question.
The reason you join the army is whether it's going to be good for you, whether it's going to be good for getting into college, whether it's going to be good for stability for your family or to get out of going to jail or, you know, some kind of deal.
You know, your uncles and your father and your grandfather, they were all military men.
And so now you're going to go and be in milk.
So Obama's triple in a war we already lost in Afghanistan is not even one of the questions on the list of whether this is the right thing to do or not.
And then it's like, okay, well, how the hell did I end up here?
Yeah.
And, you know, I just, I just cracked into this book about these guys in the Petch Valley.
However, you pronounce it there.
Like in, I guess, northern Nangahar province near the Pakistani border there.
And, you know, this thing is like 600 pages.
It's this massive saga of these guys in this valley on the far side of the asset of the world from here, getting shot up and shooting people up for no reason at all.
And I'm skipping to the end here, but we lost anyway.
And now we're leaving anyway, more or less.
And yeah, anyway, I'm sorry.
I'm off on the tangent there, but just, yeah.
Well, I agree.
I do agree with you.
And I think that it's not just, it's that cops are older.
They can quit.
And also at the risk of sounding of being, as I was accused the other day on Twitter of being a xenophobic, there's something about being at war with your own people.
That was what I was just going to say.
That just is, there's something so much more perverse about that.
And I and you can quit at any time too.
You could go, you know what?
That wasn't right.
And I'm going to go work at Burger King tomorrow.
And it'd be as simple as that.
It's not as simple as that when you're in the Petch Valley, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's right.
I remember hearing the one of the guys who started the tap out.
I can't remember which one it was, but you know the tap out brand, the like UFC shirts.
It was one of the guys who started that company, which really just like, they blew up.
Like the UFC was so nothing when they first started.
And then the UFC blew up and became huge.
And so their brand became huge.
And, you know, and he, one of them was a cop and he quit to go start that.
And he, he told the story of it on some radio show once.
And his story was about he was like, it was some Mexican dude that he had to arrest because he caught him like, I think driving with a suspended license or driving without a license or something like that.
And that was like the policy of their department was you have to bring him in.
You have to bring him in.
And so he's finds and he's like, I have to like, I'll get fucked.
Once you scan it, like you'll be in a bunch of trouble if you don't bring him in.
So he's got the guy in his back seat and he goes and the guy's just crying and the guy's crying and he's like, that's it.
I'm ruined.
He's like, I'm going to, I'm going to lose my job.
I'm going to be a no-show at my job tomorrow.
That's it.
I'm ruined.
My wife's going to leave me.
My life is over.
Like you just ruined me.
And he said he knew the guy wasn't lying.
Like he's just been around enough that he just knew the guy was telling the truth.
Like he's actually ruining this guy's life.
And he's like, I just can't do this to people anymore.
And he quit.
He went and started a t-shirt company.
And like, it's just like, you have that option.
You could just stop ruining people's lives and quit.
It's that easy.
No repercussions, nothing.
Seriously, man, my friend Chris, he wouldn't mind me saying he's my worst.
He's the worst person I know.
Like, that's a personal friend of mine.
He's a horrible son of a bitch.
He was an old cab driver friend of mine.
And he would hang out in front of the jail on Sunday mornings and stuff and get the long rides out of there from all the people who got, you know, out of the drunk tank or whatever.
And he would hang around the cops enough.
And we all drove Crown Victoria's together.
So for that was they considered us kind of like junior friends of theirs or something.
So he joined the cops.
But the deal was he had to work at the Travis County Jail for 10 months or a year before you get to go out on patrol and be a deputy.
And so he's Travis County Sheriff.
And they had the reputation, at least when I was growing up, of being the least worse out of the three major agencies around here.
Anyway, he quit, you know, before even the 10 months was up.
He couldn't stand it.
And he's a horrible guy, Dave.
He really is.
But, you know, he knew enough about George Washington and the Bill of Rights and stuff like that to know that these people are only suspects and we're in charge.
They're in our custody, meaning it's our job to protect their rights until they've had their fair trial.
We're not here to punish them in any way, right?
And then, and yet, no, we completely dehumanize them.
Like, I don't know if he told me any like particular stories, but just like the routine stuff.
No, you can't have a pencil, no, you know, whatever kind of thing.
Just treating everybody like they're the lowest kind of criminal, a convicted, violent felon, which, you know, anyway, and when they're just not, when they're just regular people in the holding cell or whatever, this kind of deal.
And he just couldn't be a part of that anymore.
He just couldn't stand it.
Absolutely couldn't stand it and quit before he even got started being an actual cop out there.
Yeah.
So yeah, when you have that option and it's that easy, it's just, it's, yeah, I get it.
It's hard to feel as much sympathy for the people there.
So and seriously, here's the other thing about it too: is the soldiers, what they go through over there, you know, really bad stuff, watching their friends get killed.
Yeah.
You kind of got to give points for that too.
That like, look, I ain't mad at you.
I'm just saying the eggheads who wrote this policy were making some really bad calls.
That's the argument, right?
And neither of my books is an attack on the soldiers, you know, anything like that.
No, I think both your books are books that a lot of soldiers would read and really love.
Yeah, apparently, yeah, that's so.
I mean, I wrote it with all due respect to them.
I wasn't going after them, you know, and I think they can tell that.
Yeah.
And this is what they did.
This is what these idiots did, you know?
And when you look at the idiots, the idiots, it's all the guys at the Pentagon and the White House and the National Security Council and the think tanks and the CIA, right?
The national security states, not the captains in the field, other than certain war crimes and things like that, particularly very bad things on the tactical level.
But that's not what the story's about overall.
Yeah.
No, that's right.
And you are actually, and of course, this is because you're an invading force and all of that, which isn't completely different from the cops in certain situations, but that you are almost guaranteed to be met with legit resistance and not seen as a legitimate authority by the people that you're, you know, by the community you're entering.
And so, again, not that that's completely different than cops, but in certain cases.
But the truth is that I think a lot of it, if you talk to soldiers, almost always what they'll tell you is that it's about, you know, number one, getting, you know, surviving and going home to your family and all that, but it's about the guy next to you.
And like, it's kind of like you have this kind of, you know, like they've been in boot camp together, they've been in training together.
You develop friendships.
And then it's like, well, I don't know.
People are shooting at us and we're going to try to shoot at them and take them out before us.
So it's just, it's a very different situation than pulling some guy over for, you know, having whatever, switching lanes or something, and then taking him in for a suspended license and ruining his life.
Like that's, it's just, it's not the same situation.
So you know, what you also hear from soldiers is it's just a job.
Yeah.
I heard that one a million times over.
It's just a job.
It doesn't mean a thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that.
Depends on your role in the thing, I guess, you know?
Yeah, that's well, that's not helping in my case.
Any all right.
So speaking of uh wars, um, so I wanted to ask you, because I don't know, we haven't talked about this on the show, and I don't even know if me and you have talked about this that much.
And we talk all the time, so that's kind of surprising, but there's always other stuff to talk about.
But, you know, the situation with Afghanistan now, you're the guy who wrote the book on it, which by the way, if you guys haven't read Fool's Eren, time to end the war in Afghanistan, phenomenal.
There's also a great chapter about Afghanistan in Enough Already, which you can see what Fool's Eren was going to be until Scott got just had too much stuff to say and wrote all or what, yeah, yeah, what enough already was going to be and then turned into Fool's Eren.
Anyway, but so Joe Biden, right, he pushed back.
Donald Trump had this timeline to end the war in Afghanistan.
He made it in May of 2021 like an idiot that is just rely on getting re-elected in order to, you know, like who, when you lose the popular vote and win the election by such a razor-thin margin, if you wanted to do something really important, you'd think you'd make it happen in your first term.
But anyway, so he set it up to be in May.
Biden comes in, says, no, May, ending a 20-year war in May is just too ridiculous.
So we'll end it a few months later in September on September 11th.
And this is what they've been saying.
It's been met with a lot of pushback amongst the establishment, you know, all types of people in the corporate press, politicians, you know, George W. Bush and a whole bunch of former elected officials where, oh, this is crazy and it's reckless to end this war in only 20 years.
I mean, come on, we're just getting started here.
But from my perspective, I was skeptical of this always from the beginning.
I just, I'm like, I won't believe it until I see it that we're actually going to end this war.
But I know just, what was it, just a week and a half ago, like two weeks, there was an attack on the Taliban.
That certainly didn't seem like a good sign to me.
Seems to be a weird thing if you're working out a deal to end to be, you know, escalating things.
So I'm just curious what, like, what exactly is going on?
What do you think about this?
Very impending.
We're only a little more than a month out now from this date of when we're supposed to be leaving.
Man, you're asking all the right questions, bringing up all the right points there.
So on the last thing first, there, this recent airstrike or series of airstrikes against the Taliban.
I mean, to me, more than anything on the ground there, it seems like that represents what's going on on the ground in Virginia and in Washington and Pentagon pressure on the White House.
Like in other words, it must have been the Pentagon.
I don't know this from reporting, but I'm just, you know, looking at it.
Kremlinologist, armchair guy here.
The Pentagon must have gotten the White House to agree on some kind of lines that if the Taliban does this, you'll let us hit them then, at least, right?
Kind of thing.
And the worst interpretation of that, of course, would be that the Pentagon's trying to break the ceasefire and trying to get the Taliban to do something stupid and give them an excuse to stay.
And what the Taliban are doing now is, frankly, a large-scale assault across the whole country, on including now even some of the provincial capitals.
And I think they probably are surprised even by the momentum with which they are being able to move forward.
Counterinsurgency Strategy Failures00:05:58
And the Afghan National Army is either retreating or simply dissolving in the face of their advance.
But, you know, they've been smart enough for the last, what, you know, many years, really.
They could have seized some of these provincial capitals, you know, quite a long time ago, but they've refrained from doing so because that's what'll bring on the B1 bomber strikes, right?
It's better to remain dispersed as an insurgency and not, you know, really take over provincial capital, which requires, you know, heavy garrisons of men, you know, in ways that are easy to drop bombs on, you know, in areas that are easy to kill.
So, um, but they've done everything but that.
And they've even got a strategy where they're seizing a lot of areas around Kunduz in the north of the country, trying to head off the Northern Alliance at the past, so to speak, and seized border crossings into Uzbekistan and all that on the northern border.
And this is, by the way, you didn't ask this, but it's one of the major questions behind all this: why is this happening now?
Why are we leaving now?
And the answer is because America lost the war and the Taliban won the war.
And that's basically the deal.
If they wanted to start this war again and try to maintain the status quo, they would need a lot of troops.
And frankly, the last time they did a surge, it was only counterproductive.
It was, you know, the so-called advances of the surge only lasted as long as the troop escalation did.
And then once they withdrew the troops, there were actually even more Taliban to take the place of the ones that they had pushed aside because of all the outrages of the surge.
It just recruited that many more people.
This was the McChrystal insurgency math.
Exactly.
Barack Obama, David Petraeus, and Stanley McChrystal in the big surge of 2009 through 12 there.
And even McCrystal, right?
So just for people who don't know, that McChrystal's thing, and this is hardcore Warhawk, who is furious at Obama for not giving him, you know, more troops or for setting the timetable of when they'd have to leave.
But even he admitted that insurgency math, I forget the exact numbers, but he was like, well, 10 minus two equals 25.
You know, that every time you kill these insurgents, then all of a sudden this rallies all of their brothers and cousins and sons to join the insurgency.
And so every time you kill them, you're getting more and more resistance, which on a human level makes a whole lot of sense.
Yeah.
And he's also the guy who recently gave a speech, what, three or four years ago, three years ago, I guess, during Trump, where he recounted the advice that he gave to Stanley, pardon me, H.R. McMaster, General H.R. McMaster, who was one of Petraeus's guys, who had become Trump's national security advisor, his first national or second national security advisor.
And he said, and my advice to McMaster was to just muddle through.
That was the American strategy for Mr. Genius counterinsurgency.
If only Michael Hastings hadn't gotten him fired for telling the truth about him in the Rolling Stone, the runaway general, read it.
And it's a great piece, never mind the part about the scandal about McChrystal and his men badmouthing Joe Biden and all of that.
His story about the Afghan war there is a masterpiece, the great Michael Hastings, there.
But yeah, so that surge was only counterproductive.
So, you know, just like a lot of people said all along, you could send in the entire army active force of 500,000 men and wage a full-scale terror campaign against the men of Pashtunistan and hope to somehow eradicate the Taliban.
You could carpet bomb them with H-bombs, or you can admit that these people won't be tamed, not by the likes of the North Americans.
They won't.
And that's it.
So just quit.
What the hell are we fighting for anyway?
They're not the ones who knocked the towers down.
They sent their foreign foreign minister Watakil to warn.
And he sent his guy to warn the American embassy in Pakistan that there's an attack coming up.
And they didn't learn about it from Bin Laden, who didn't tell them.
They learned about it from an Uzbek member of bin Laden's group who, you know, informed on them to the Taliban.
So we never had to fight him in the first place, never had to change the regime in Kabul and could have essentially left everything alone.
In fact, at the very beginning of the war, it's in Bob Woodward's book, Bush at War, which he got this straight out of the National Security Council notes and, you know, interviews with the principals that the CIA and Connolly Zeris didn't want to fight the Taliban.
They said, let's just kill the Arabs there and let's try to show the Taliban that, look, we're not going after you.
We're really trying to split off bin Laden and his men only.
And they, and Rumsfeld and all them overruled it, they wanted to expand the war and keep it expanded and expand it all the way to the Mediterranean Sea if they could.
And so, you know, that was shot down.
But, you know, in fact, in 2016, Gary Bernson, who was the second CIA commander on scene there and who was the commander during most of the Tora Bora debacle, he did an interview with Michael Hirsch, the HIRSH, the Newsweek reporter, where he said, you know, sound just like me.
You know, come to think of it, this whole thing really could have been over by Christmas 2001.
If we just focused on Al-Qaeda alone, got bin Laden and Zawahiri at Tora Bora, chased him across the line into Pakistan if we had to, and wrapped it up then.
The whole war could have been over then.
No stories out of the Petch Valley or the Corongall Valley or all the guys dying for, you know, Helman province down there, fighting for Marja and Senjin and all this stuff.
Sanjan, I just met a Marine who was in all this shit in Helmand the other day.
I met a bunch of guys who fought there.
RockAuto Parts Sponsorship00:02:32
You know, anyway, it's nuts, Dave.
Seriously, the whole 21st century so far, it just didn't have to be this way at all.
We didn't have to have a war on terrorism at all.
He got it from Gary Bernstein himself right there.
The whole thing could have been over by 2001.
And Longnaz Wahiri dead.
Game canceled.
You know, now let's get our troops out of Saudi Arabia and cut off the Israelis.
They got plenty of F-60s and killed people with already.
It's the tragic thing about reading your two books there, Fools Aaron and Enough Already, is the tragic thing that really jumps at you.
It's also like one of the most compelling things, just in terms of as a read, you know, like reading the books, is that it's almost like you're showing at every step, you can say the line, it didn't have to be this way.
Like it's, it's, and you do specifically use that line, but it's almost like you, you just kind of are demonstrating at every single step.
You're like, okay, well, right here, it didn't have to be this way.
And then five years later, again, it didn't have to be this way.
Like we have all these opportunities to just not do this.
But we all know what the history is.
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All right, let's get back in the chat.
So, okay, so what do you think?
What's going on here?
Yeah, get me back on track here.
Yeah, what's going to happen here with this September withdrawal date?
Beijing And Taiwan Tensions00:13:41
Okay, so they left Kandahar Airfield.
They turned it over to the Afghan National Army, which I guess is holding on to it for now.
And they left Bagram Air Base, and which, man, I wouldn't have never believed it, Dave.
Honestly, I'm, you know, I could go back and say Biden should have stuck with Trump's deal and got out by the end of May because now it's fighting season, right?
You want to have that decent interval, as they said in Vietnam, like in other words, telling the commies, look, just don't march on Saigon yet.
Let us be gone long enough for the American people to forget about it and turn away to other interests and then take the South and so as not to embarrass us too much, you know, decent interval.
Well, they had a deal to get out, you know, at the beginning of the fighting season.
Now they're getting out halfway through it, right?
So the Taliban have been making all of these gains and humiliating the hell out of them, but they're still leaving anyway.
And, you know, frankly, you know, not to give the guy credit, I don't know.
It is what it is, but Joe Biden in 2009 was telling Obama to do the most minimal surge and to not fight the Taliban.
If the Taliban win the civil war with the government that we created there, screw them, man.
It's not worth fighting for that.
That we should only be hunting Arab international terrorists there and we shouldn't be doing anything else.
That's our only thing.
Well, that's a really interesting point and an interesting angle.
And I remember always saying this on the show, and I've said this to you, like on phone calls and stuff too, but it is kind of an interesting read on Joe Biden.
And I know you've brought up the point about his son and what happened to him over in Iraq.
And I don't know.
I don't want to like armchair psychoanalyze the guy or anything, but Joe Biden is.
No, you can quote him.
I mean, he said, look, you're not sending my other son or sending anybody's son to go and fight just for women's rights in Afghanistan.
We're not doing that.
That's too much.
And Joe Biden is no question about it.
He's a career politician and he's a corrupt guy.
And he is certainly, even before he developed his borderline dementia, was never really a super bright guy.
Always thought he was a really bright guy, but never really was a very bright guy.
But he's kind of like, I don't know.
He ain't like Dick Cheney or something like that.
He's like the guy who's taking money from the credit card companies under the table and like, ah, we got a good, like, sweet deal.
It worked out here.
But he's never really been like bought in to the farm.
He was really bad on Iraq War II.
Well, okay, you're not, you're right about that.
He sold the, that's a good point.
He sold the shit out of Iraq War II and shamed the people who weren't on board with Iraq War II.
But I will say that George W. Bush and Barack Obama's defense secretary, because of course, Barack Obama, after running against George W. Bush's foreign policy, keeps his defense secretary on, Robert Gates said, blasted Joe Biden in his book and said that he's been wrong about every foreign policy decision.
And it's kind of like I think I said to you on the phone once, I go, it's kind of like if Hitler said, you've been wrong on the Jews the whole time.
Like that, that basically means you've been pretty good on the, like it's like if Bush's defense secretary says you've been wrong on foreign policy, that's to me like a glowing endorsement of like how, you know, where you're actually at on this.
So it's, you know, I just wonder, because it seems to me, maybe I'm wrong, but it does kind of seem, and it's hard to imagine because he's like, so, I mean, it seems like you can't even put a sentence together, but it seems like he doesn't want to be in this war anymore.
Like he genuinely, I think for political reasons, he felt like he couldn't do it on Trump's timeline, that he had to make it something else to say, no, no, no, of course Trump is the worst person in the world.
So it's not his thing.
It's my own thing.
I was smart to push back a few months, which is, I'm not excusing that.
That's pretty evil to extend a war purely for political reasons.
But it does seem like he wants to get out, but I don't know.
It seems like Obama, you know, had some inclinations to want to do some of the right things on foreign policy and just got rolled by the Pentagon and the generals.
It seemed like Trump wanted to and just got rolled.
Is this guy, this, this dementia patient really going to be the one who's able to get it done?
That seems unlikely.
You know, I got to say, I mean, the worst part of this, not to go off on this tangent, but, you know, it's not just him, right?
Like there's a faction, you know, maybe the majority of the foreign policy establishment now favors withdrawal from Afghanistan because we got to give up something in the pivot to China.
We just can't be spread too, too thin.
So we're going to have to back off in some places so we can be worse in a much worse situation and pick a fight with a nuclear power and all this madness.
And you can read, it's funny, you read anything in a major newspaper or, you know, thehill.com or the Wall Street Journal or anything that says, yes, we should go ahead and get out of Afghanistan.
It always says so we can turn to China at the end.
Sucks.
You know, as the editor of anti-war.com, see a lot of these like, oh, this is really good.
Oh, man.
You know, over and over again.
I'll tell you, there's been a lot of that that I've noticed just over the last, you know, I mean, really, it's been, it's been the entire Trump for the entire Trump four years, where there'll be these right-wingers who are like really good on foreign policy criticisms, but then it always comes to China.
It's the kind of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, even Trump himself from the very beginning.
It was like, you know, always like this great enemy that is China.
And I see a lot of people buying into this, really buying into.
Them and Saddam Hussein, they're allied with Al-Qaeda and they're going to give them chemical weapons against us.
Yes.
Same thing over and over again, man.
Right, right.
And all of these things where it's like, you know, you just kind of notice the like selective outrage and the, you know, we're so outraged about their human rights rights abuses.
Meanwhile, we'll work with these groups who are just like, you know, butcherers.
This is what I wish I had said when I was on the Tim Poole show and he was so hawkish on China that time.
Yeah, I think he falls into that too.
Yeah, I only thought of this the other day, but I made a big deal about it at the time because I was trying to burn it in my brain so I'd remember it for later, but I did space out.
But it only just occurred to me this great quote from Rex Tillerson.
It's yes, it's a Bob Woodward book.
It's the, it's Rage, the second Bob Woodward book about Trump, but it's a direct quote in an on-the-record interview with Tillerson.
So it's not like hearsay or anything like that.
It's, you know, Woodward interviewed Tillerson and Tillerson's telling him the story.
And then Tillerson's story is that what he says is, I forgot who he's addressing when he says this in the book, but he says, listen, China threatens American domination of the Pacific.
There you have it.
Right.
Okay.
I mean, I'm sorry, but I'm not concerned about that, right?
And what he's saying there is the entire Pacific Ocean is an American lake.
And that's it.
And the Chinese are saying, we beg to differ.
We think it might only be a 98% American lake.
And Rex Tillerson is saying, damn it, something absolutely has to be done about this.
Let's double our naval force, whatever we have to do to, you know, the Thudicides trap or whatever.
Oh, a new empire is rising.
And that means it has to fight the old empire.
Well, yeah, but what if the old empire isn't supposed to be an empire in the first place?
And then the people of that country somehow made it not one.
And then we didn't care about the rise of a new empire.
And really, if you're honest about it, who thinks that China is going to invade Afghanistan or Kyrgyzstan or Outer Mongolia?
And they have no motive to do that.
They might retake Taiwan, but that seems like the kind of thing that would come at the end of a chain reaction of a lot of bad American policy decisions and possibly Taiwanese ones playing into.
And look, I'm not saying that Beijing are a bunch of nice guys, but you know, it's just like in Crimea.
The status quo held for 30 years.
Then what happened?
Obama kicked the status quo over and did a coup and overthrew the government in Kiev for the second time in 10 years.
W. Bush had done it before in 2004.
And then the Russians decided that, you know what, we're retaking the Crimean Peninsula.
The status quo had held.
I think that's probably the most likely way we'd have a conflict over Taiwan.
It would be, and you know, Gareth has a new one about you have more separatist parties and more radical parties coming to power in Taiwan at the present time as well.
But you know what?
Like you said, if there's a border skirmish between Iraq and Syria, what difference does it make?
What difference does it make to you whether Beijing rules over Taipei and the Taiwanese island or not?
Really doesn't make a difference.
And I know you're not willing to trade Los Angeles for Taipei and then lose Taipei anyway.
Well, right.
I mean, it's, it's, look, I mean, I like I was, I was talking about this in my recent episode that I did on Cuba, where I was saying, look, my position more or less on this is like, I root for them.
I root for the freedom of all people.
And I hope that they're not oppressed.
And I hope that they, you know what I mean, enjoy as much liberty as they can and all of that.
But the idea, it's like this empire mentality that you even think you somehow have a role to play in this.
I mean, it's like as simple.
The example I used on the show was I was like, almost like, it's like, you know, when people go, like, well, we got to do something about Taiwan.
You know, can't let that happen.
It's like as if there's like a dispute between your neighbors, like a married couple, and you think one of them's right and the other one's wrong.
And you go, well, we got to do something about that.
Like, the question is, who the fuck do you think you are that you're even in a position?
And then, by the way, make it worse, your marriage is falling apart while you're worrying about what they're, you know what I mean?
Like they're, well, we got to do something about this dispute and their marriage.
Like, fix your marriage first, because that's like your business.
And also recognize that like that, like maybe you can't do anything.
Who the fuck do you think you are?
Like, you're not like that.
that that's another fucking man and his wife.
Maybe you can't impose your will on them and that's just not an option.
And so just to go like even one step further than what you were saying, it's like, look, I hope that Taiwan and Hong Kong, I hope they all keep their independence and I hope the people there are as free as they can be.
But the question becomes, would I be willing to sacrifice one of my children in that struggle?
And the answer is an obvious no.
Like, of course not.
And so it's really just not our business to enforce it one way or the other.
And the fear that they would take over some of these puny countries around, I don't mean that as an insult, but just smaller, weaker countries.
I mean, look, I hope they don't, but we're currently in the business of slaughtering people in these smaller, weaker countries.
And does anyone really think, like, short, look, I don't believe in this, like, these war guarantees or in NATO or in states at all.
But does anyone really think that what they're going to mess with like a NATO country or they're going to mess with like one of our allies or with the United States of America?
I mean, the idea is so preposterous.
It's as preposterous as saying that Iran or Iraq are a threat to the United States of America.
It's just not going to happen.
So what is all of this?
Like, if it first, and particularly for so many of these right-wingers who seemingly have learned their lesson over the foreign policy blunders of the 21st century, what are you even talking about?
Picking on this country with thousands of H-bombs?
What are we going to do?
Hey, you know, by the way, when I did that panel discussion, that was moderated by Grover Norquist the other day at Freedom House.
Oh, that one.
Yeah, the second one.
But did they release the first one?
Do you know?
Is that out on the video anymore?
I wish they were.
No, you'll know.
You'll know when it's out, I'm sure.
That's so good.
But no, and the second one, Grover Norquist pointed out that, look, China's surrounded by countries that hate and or fear them.
And, you know, you got North and South Korea are certainly very jealous of their independence from Beijing and, you know, are a separate people, have no desire to be ruled by Beijing.
Then there's Japan and their, you know, historical enmity.
Then, you know, Vietnam and all the countries, you know, Laos and Cambodia and Thailand and all of that area are, you know, I don't know exactly their various degrees of historical grudges.
I know the Vietnamese hate them and have fought for their independence from them, you know, over and over and over again throughout time.
And then, you know, I don't know exactly like the situation with the politics in Mongolia right now, but, you know, certainly the Russians on their northern border are armed to the teeth with H-bombs and have no intention of giving up Siberia to the Chinese or anything like that.
And I don't know anyone who makes the case that China is going to march into and take over Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan or anything.
Crypto And Gold Investments00:02:26
The argument is they're going to build a highway and sell cheap crap up and down a highway that cuts across the middle of Eurasia.
And I think if we don't have that imperialist mindset that you're talking about, then we would just look at that as the greatest invention in the history of mankind.
A highway and a railway and a fiber optic line and a power line from Shanghai to Lisbon.
Neat.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Yeah, well, one of the great things that you said, I won't give away too much more, although I did say on my, I did an episode like recapping Freedom Fest, and I was talking about how great your panel was.
I mean, that panel you're talking about was great too, but I was talking about the kind of debate panel that you did, which I hope is released.
But one of the great things you did, and it was a great way, you know, you're in classic Hortonian fashion, attacking the right from the right, because Freedom Fest was a mix of libertarians and right-wingers, you know, and Republicans and stuff in the crowd.
And you said at one point, you were like, hey, does anyone here think that this communist party that's ruling over this fascistic government is like a great economic system that's going to be so prosperous, that's going to be so prosperous that they're going to be able to maintain this world empire that's bankrupting us to maintain?
Do you really think China is rich enough to afford what we can't afford?
And, you know, of course, everyone in the crowd is like, well, no, I mean, free market capitalism will lead to a lot more prosperity than that.
It's like, right.
Okay.
So even with our more, more of a market economy than China has, not by that much these days, but still, you know, in many ways, more.
So we can't afford it either, right?
So what is the answer here?
If you're saying there's going to be some type of like economic competition, well, then what do you, you all know what the answer is here to make us as free market capitalists is freaking possible.
That's the answer to winning that game.
If we know what's going on, that's communism anyway.
Right.
Communism is preventing people from trading with each other.
Yeah.
So let's do the opposite of what they're doing.
But even if you look at what they're doing, right, with all of these government programs to build these pipelines and highways and ghost cities and all the stuff China's doing, I mean, it's like if we had any, if these, if the right-wingers here had any confidence, like real confidence in free markets, wouldn't you realize this is all doomed to fail anyway?
This isn't going to succeed.
So, if we're talking about an economic war, which is how Trump would phrase it and Bannon would and people like that, it's like, okay, well, then what's the answer?
We need to deregulate the fuck out of our economy.
We need to lower taxes and like really free up our markets.
And then we're guaranteed to win this thing.
But so it's like, it's almost like we're trying, it's like, listen, we're committing suicide and these guys might still be around after we're done committing suicide.
So I'm really concerned about that because then they'll be dominant.
Well, the answer there isn't try to murder them.
It's stop killing yourself.
Yeah, get your own house in order.
That's it.
And look, in China, they central plan families.
And so then what does that mean?
They outlawed having more than one kid because they're common.
So they can't afford more customers, as Jacob Hornberger says.
Government, they're the only people who complain about having too many customers.
Well, in China, there's total government and they have way too many customers.
They couldn't starve them all to death.
So they made it a crime to have more than one kid.
And now they have this horrible aging population crash coming.
David Stockman, the great libertarian economist and political firebomb thrower, he calls it the great Chinese Ponzi is his name for the country itself.
The whole thing is a massive Ponzi scheme, a massive inflationary bubble of 10 different proportions all over the place that has a massive correction coming on a 2008 type scale and all of these social problems caused by, as you're saying, the political nature of all of their economic decisions that they're making, huge ones and massive distortions and prices throughout their markets and whatever.
So, you know, look, the bottom line, and we're going to pivot right back.
And we got a great segue from China right back in Afghanistan if we still got time.
Yeah, yeah.
Here's the problem, Dave.
China isn't trying to take over the world.
The problem is America can't keep dominating the world as much as they could before, right?
And this is in certainly it's in both books.
It's definitely in the most recent book.
And this is no secret uncovered by me.
Anybody can read all into this, but it's just one key document that, you know, it's almost like NSC 68 from the dawn of the Cold War.
This is the defense planning guidance from 2002.
Paul Wolfowitz and Zame Khalilzad and Scooter Libby and these guys, they wrote it and then they rewrote it.
But basically what it says is now that the Soviet Union is gone, it's our unipolar moment to dominate the world.
And we're going to make it our way.
And we're going to set it up where we expand our military, you know, across the world in this empire of bases in a way to dominate the Middle East, to dominate East Asia, to eventually figure out how to dominate Eastern Europe and even Central Asia, and then to never permit the rise of a near-peer competitor.
Any, you know, obviously China and Russia are the major implied powers there.
But also Germany and Japan again, if it comes to that, or any combination of nations, if the Europeans, God forbid, align with the Russians against us or something like that, that we will never allow that to happen.
We will make sure that we have the permanent, dominant military force on the entire planet.
And then with that, economic and political dominance of every other kind of description.
But see, even at the time, the neocons call it like Krauthammer called it in foreign policy and foreign affairs, pardon me, it's our unipolar moment.
We have the chance to rule the world for just a little while.
While, you know, at the fall of communism, you're going to have through globalization, all this massive increase in market economics all around the world.
And you're going to have, you know, marginal powers, which frankly, China is a marginal power other than its size and its H-bomb arsenal, which is still only, it's a few hundred, but a few hundred is plenty.
But other than that, this is a country that's just coming up from communism, which had completely decimated this society.
Right.
And so, you know, in 30 years ago, when Krauthammer's writing this and Scooter Libby and them are writing this, China is a distant, you know, obvious in 20 or 30 years. they're going to be something we have to deal with kind of a deal.
And then, but so now they're supposed to recognize that, okay, the unipolar moment is over.
If they were ever supposed to do that, which they weren't, you try to dominate the whole planet to make it their way for just a little while.
Now the little while is over.
You're going to have to treat these middle-ranked powers with some kind of respect as independent nations in the world.
And instead, it's what we get, you know, like from Rex Tillerson there.
They threaten our domination of everything when we're not supposed to be doing that in the first place.
And so that's how that's the way out of the Thudicity's trap is to not be an empire and to just say, you know what?
And look, to a degree, Milton Friedman was right that if we make the Chinese rich, we'll make them free, er, you know, and they'll end up more and more like us.
Now, I think if George Bush hadn't set us on a course of, you know, absolutely just humiliating and disgracing the American creed of liberty and justice and self-government and the rule of law and all this stuff for the last 20 years, I think, you know, we could have set a lot better example for China and other countries in the world to follow.
And so just making a mockery out of the whole damn thing.
But in any case, I think the people of China are freer, if only because they're more wealthy in so many ways.
And the wealthier they get, the freer they get.
And yes, it's still a, you know, it's not a free society by any measure, but that doesn't make them a threat to us.
And it's the same mistake that the Iranian expat girl was making.
The Ayatollah is a bad guy.
And so he's probably making nukes, right?
And the Chinese have a totalitarian system.
So they're probably a threat to us.
But those things don't necessarily follow at all.
Take Mullah Omar and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They never want a world revolution like Osama bin Laden.
They just wanted to rule Afghanistan, you know, same as they want right now.
It's really, and this is exactly why, like, why Ron Paul's campaign was just so great.
Nine, I know I talk about this all the time.
And sometimes people are like, or just let the Ron Paul thing go, but I never will because it's just the greatest.
He's the greatest American of all time.
But the thing is that, you know, when Donald Trump would, Donald Trump rightly blasted so many things about the ruling elite and the establishment politicians and the legacy media and all of this.
I mean, he was so justified in his critique of how, you know, look at what you guys have done.
You know, literally, you've blown trillions of dollars in the Middle East for nothing.
You guys have made these deals that do nothing for us.
It's all these people.
You've, you know, you're ruining the country, essentially.
Like it was, you know, he was right about all of that.
But he always ended up pointing the finger at these like scapegoats.
You know, it's well, the, the, like, whether or not he directly said it, it was always like what his people would, well, the, the problem is the Mexicans or the Chinese or the fucking, you know, like whatever it is, all these, but Ron Paul pointed the finger at the correct enemies.
He was always like, look, here is the problem.
It's like the Federal Reserve and the military industrial complex and the whole like cronyism that's that's ruling over this country.
And it's so interesting to see, it's like, yeah, look, it is right.
Like it's this false dichotomy that you were just pointing at.
It's not that we're sitting here saying, like, oh, the Chinese government are really great and treat their people really well.
It's like they are a freaking creepy, scary, authoritarian, fascist government.
The Chinese social credit system, you know, you look into stuff like that, it is so creepy what they do to their people.
But that can be true.
And what you just said about how it's still a hell of a lot better than it was under Mao Sedong can also be true.
And then on top of that, what can also be true is like, well, what's really the threat of the Chinese social credit system coming here?
Well, Biden's administration was the one floating out these vaccine passport apps where they can trace your medical information and your location and create a national chaos system.
It's not the Chinese who are imposing that on us.
It's our own government who's floating out these ideas.
And in the same way that, like, you know, you'll see, you know, like MSNBC will be flipping out about like, you know, Charlottesville.
Oh, there are the 200 fucking neo-Nazis marched down on this thing.
And this is the rise of fascism.
And then, you know, Fox News or whatever, they'll flip out about there were Black Panthers who were at this voting booth and they were trying to intimidate people to do this or like whatever.
And like everyone, but you're like, oh, I mean, if you guys are really worried about fascism, well, like, look at it.
I mean, it's, it's right here.
And then you have like John Brennan talking about all the domestic terrorists who are just like insurgents and everything.
And you're like, okay, like, what is really more of a realistic threat to you and your liberty and prosperity and family and all of that?
Is it the Chinese government making it not only the long shot that they even take over their region and become a little Asian empire, but then make it what through Europe or all the way across the Pacific and get over here to us?
Or is it like that our government is actually able to get away with the shit that they clearly want to?
You know what I mean?
Like if there was no pushback from the American people, we'd already have vaccine passports.
There'd be walled off Washington, D.C. Capitol.
I mean, like they, you know, they'd probably lock down a whole bunch of these states again if they could get away with it.
So like, who's the who's the threat really coming from?
And it's so obvious.
And on China, too, and we're going to segue back in Afghanistan in just one second.
Yes.
I love to recommend this great article to people.
It's by Lou Rockwell from probably 10 years ago.
Remember, it was kind of a scandal for a while that you had lead paint on some toys coming in from China.
And they had kind of a big thing about that.
Lou Rockwell wrote this piece.
It's called From Death Camp to Civilization.
And he's basically saying, Look here, shut up.
You know what?
What's happened in China since the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the right wing of the Communist Party, so to speak, there is the greatest miracle in history, essentially, because here you have, you know, just this absolute world historical tragedy where the communists had just completely reduced Chinese civilization to the ground.
It's just, you know, they died by the tens of millions in those famines.
I mean, villages resorting to cannibalistic raids on each other to eat each other's kids.
Yeah, numbers.
Absolutely out of control.
Numbers dwarfing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined in terms of numbers of deaths.
So what happened was Deng Xiaoping said, to get rich is glorious.
Let's go ahead and have property and trade because what the hell were we thinking, right?
And so, and, you know, in fact, I just saw on Twitter someone had, you know, pictures of Shanghai, 1990, and then Shanghai, 2000, and Shanghai, you know, 2021 or whatever it was.
And just huge buildup.
In fact, you know, it's famous.
You'll see people when they're anti-communist will show you pictures of North and South Korea.
And South Korea is all lit up and North Korea is in darkness.
But also Shanghai is all lit up too, right?
But the deal is just a few years ago, somebody did an update of that picture.
And now South Korea is way more lit up than ever before.
North Korea is still in darkness, but Shanghai has grown by 10 times since the last time you saw that same picture.
You know what I mean?
It's just incredible to see.
Like it's the update of the same shot of Korea at night, you know.
And so we ought to all be celebrating this, right?
This is, you know, the greatest advancement in the standard of living for the most number of people in the shortest amount of time, however your XYZ axis works there that anybody ever accomplished ever by simply letting these people be entrepreneurial and go about their lives like their culture already had it anyway.
And so, yeah, the first thing we should be doing is congratulating them.
And then we should be wondering that, gee, what are they going to do with that aircraft carrier that runs on diesel that they bought from the Russians that barely runs?
And the second one that they're trying to, you know, come on, they're not building a massive deepwater navy to try to challenge us.
Uyghurs At Taliban Camps00:02:04
In fact, at that Freedom Fest thing, if I remember it right, when I said, who thinks, who here thinks that the Chinese are going to come here?
They're going to cross the Pacific Ocean and come to North America?
And I got some booze on that.
They're like, come on, everybody knows that they're going to, what, they're going to build 50,000 troop ships?
How many troop ships would it take?
You know, they're going to somehow, they're going to invade Siberia and then build some massive new bridge across the Bering Sea and then roll into Alaska.
How is this supposed to work without us picking them off like, you know, chocolate covered cherries or whatever on the way over the, across the ocean?
I mean, this is just pure fantasy, completely ridiculous.
Fun if you're into being scared about stuff, but not realistic.
But now, so here's our segue back in Afghanistan, where I got us way off track a long time ago.
Is the Chinese are saying to the Taliban, hey, man, we want you to break off your ties with these militant Uyghur groups.
And there's this thing called ETIM, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which the Americans under Trump and Pompeo took them off of the terrorist list.
But in 2010, the Americans bombed them at a training camp.
They were there with the Taliban on a Taliban target there.
And so this is really an interesting thing, right?
Because there's all these claims of genocide against the Muslim population of the Xinjiang province in western China, which these guys called East Turkestan.
And they want to break it off.
And now, going back to before the terror war, I have it on very good authority from Eric Margulies, a friend of mine and great foreign correspondent, that in the summer of 2001, he saw these Uyghurs, some Uyghurs, training at al-Qaeda training camps backed by the Americans in Afghanistan, just in, you know, the months before the September 11th attacks.
Blue Light Glasses Sponsor00:03:10
He saw it with his own eyes.
And they were for use against China.
And then when America invaded in 2001, some of these same guys, presumably, I guess, I don't know, but many Uyghurs, a couple of handfuls of Uyghurs, presumably some of these same men were rounded up and shipped off to Guantanamo to be tortured and have been held in Guantanamo for years, right?
Then the next time we hear about these guys, they're fighting on Obama and Osama's side in Syria.
And they were traveling by the thousands.
You know, there's this kind of Turkic pipeline run by the Turks, who are, of course, the principal backers of Jabat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria during that time.
And so he, you know, Erdogan was running this rat line.
And this is, that's the name of the article, too, from Seymour Hirsch, the red line and the rat line.
It's the article about how they took all the weapons and jihadists from Libya and shipped them to Syria and did the false flag sarin attack of in Ghouta in August of 2013.
But in that same article, he says, listen, man, I got it on good authority here from my sources in the Defense Department that there's, I think I'm almost certain Davey says in there, there's something like 20,000 Uyghur fighters who are on the side of the jihadists fighting in the war in Syria.
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Bill Roggio On Takeover00:15:29
You're familiar with the DOD back in the Kurds fighting against the CIA's backed and Turkish-backed Al-Qaeda fighters there.
But then there's, and then we had the Iraqi Shiite militias, which America fought Iraq War II for, which is why they were doing the war in Syria because they were mad about that and trying to spite those Shiites.
Well, those Shiite militias, America fought Iraq War II for, they were coming across the border into Syria to fight with Bashar al-Assad's government against the American-backed terrorists, just as the al-Qaeda and Iraq terrorists were going into Syria to fight on America's side against the Shiites.
Well, then in Afghanistan, this is right during the surge in 2011 and 12.
So you have Afghan Taliban who are feeling the heat down in Hellman province, who, and I'm not sure, Hellman, but anyway, during the surge there from Kandahar or wherever in South and East Afghanistan, who they were traveling also to Syria to fight on the CIA and Al-Qaeda's side, the Afghan Taliban were.
And the Hazaras, who are the Afghan Shiites, who America has been backing for the last 20 years, well, they're very close to Iran because they're Shiites, right?
And so they were traveling to Syria, our allies in Afghanistan against the Taliban to fight on Assad and Iran and Hezbollah and Russia's side to protect the Syrian state there from the American and Turkish and Israeli and Qatari and Saudi-backed suicide bomber hedgehopper murderer dudes.
Well, now the Uyghurs were part of that same coalition too, the American and al-Qaeda side there in Syria.
And some of them were involved in the Islamic State Caliphate there for a while.
But now thousands of them are coming home to China and coming to Afghanistan and hanging around with the Taliban.
And now Lawrence Wilkerson gave a speech at a Ron Paul event in 2018 where he said the idea would be for the Americans that in the event of a war with China, that we would use these guys.
And then I'm so sorry, Dave.
I'm spacing on my footnote here.
I'm on the inside, just kicking myself.
But I was just reading a thing.
Man, what was it about these guys are kind of being given safe haven in Uzbekistan.
Somebody's keeping them safe in Uzbekistan on the American side, I think.
I'm so sorry.
I'm forgetting where I read that.
But so this is what the Chinese say is, yeah, we're cracking down on the Uyghurs because we have an Islamist terrorism problem.
So that's why we're doing what we're doing.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
That is what the Chinese government is saying, more or less, is that it's because there's so many terrorists amongst this group.
Now, of course, not defending the Chinese government there.
And I'm sure that a lot of innocent Uyghurs have been sent to some of these work camps and stuff.
And I'm sure the Chinese government is doing fucked up things to Uyghurs who weren't a part of any of this.
But it is interesting to kind of get the full story and understand that it's a little bit more complicated than they've just, you know, like, oh my God, they hate Uyghurs so much that they're.
Especially for the American right, you know, who what if there were 50 million Muslims in the Western United States and there was like an ongoing foreign-backed bin Ladenite movement among them?
What would the American right say about that?
They would say reopen Manzanar and put them all in the camps.
Did you ever see that?
And we know they would because Michelle Malkin wrote a book like that 20 years ago.
That's right.
It's called round them all up and put them in the camps.
You know what's so funny about Michelle Malkin?
Because I had her on my show.
But the funny thing is that like that book that you're talking about was when she was completely accepted in Conservatism Inc.
Right.
Like that wasn't what got her out of it.
Racist.
Okay.
And now like I want to show you this.
But I'm just saying now that she's like critical of Israel and against the foreign interventions and all that, now they're like, oh, she's like a racist or all this.
But when she just wanted to intern, justify the internment of the Japanese, that's she was completely cool with Sean Hannity and all that at that point.
Yep.
And, you know, on the Bill Maher show and whatever else, too.
We can talk about internment in polite society.
What's the big deal, Dave?
You're such an old-fashioned stickler, you know?
But now listen, so I want to recommend to people that they follow Bill Roggio.
It's R-O-G-G-I-O.
Yeah, just like I thought.
Bill Rogio.
And now he's a hawk, man.
He's from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which those guys are constantly putting on anti-Iran hoaxes and stuff like that.
But I don't think he's usually part of that.
But I respect the guy because he's a very meticulous, fast, fact-based guy.
Not that he's always right about every little detail, but he does the long war journal and he has an ongoing, you know, Twitter panic right now about the Taliban takeover of so much of Afghanistan, which I really do need to address about how it ain't over yet there a little bit.
But I just wanted to point this out.
Bill Roggio, if you look at his Twitter feed, it's this panic.
Oh my god, the Taliban's taking over this.
The pressure on Lashkarga and pressure on Herat and pressure on Kandahar City.
And what's going to happen?
They close the airport in Herat.
And oh my God, and they're taking Kanduz.
And oh no, they retreated again.
What's going to happen?
Here he says the Taliban will stop supporting ETIM and TTP.
That's the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.
And TPP is an associate group.
I forget what he's referring to there.
But the Taliban will stop supporting ETIM and TTP when China stops oppressing Uyghurs, which means never.
And then he has the quote: Chinese officials have expressed hope that the Taliban will fight against the East Turkestan Islamic movement.
So, in other words, the Chinese, this is in the news, that the Chinese said to the Taliban, geez, we'd really like it.
And by the way, the Chinese get along with the Taliban by way of Pakistan.
So they're very close with Pakistan.
So they should have some influence and would like to think at least that they can win some respect from the Taliban on that basis.
So they're saying, we would like to suggest to you very seriously that you not back these groups against us.
And he'll hear Bill Rogio immediately turns around and takes the Taliban's side and is almost like Viva Taliban here.
The Taliban will never give in to China and their oppression of the Uyghurs, says Bill Rogio.
And it's like that's the American empire.
That's the way they look at it.
Taliban and Shmaliban, you know who we really hate?
China.
And if we could go back to the good old days when Eric Margulies was watching CIA run or at least financed camps in Afghanistan training Uyghurs for use against China, and we could do that with the cooperation of the Taliban.
Well, great.
Let's do that.
Meanwhile, less than a year ago, we had the Joint Special Operations Command flying as the Taliban's air force.
They even had a plaque made, according to the Washington Post, in their office that said Taliban Air Force on it because they're flying drones as air cover for the Taliban against ISIS.
This group, ISIS-K, which is really mostly just Pakistanis, you know, refugees from last war.
I tell the story in Fool's Aaron, but you know, they can't keep their story straight.
They're not sure whose side they're supposed to be on or whose side they're against.
Here, they've been back in the same side as Russia and China.
I mean, pardon me, Russia and Iran and India this whole time.
When if you read Sabina Brzezinski in the Grand Chessboard, Zabina Brzezinski said, We need to back the China-Pakistan-Taliban axis of power in Afghanistan to keep the Iranians, the Russians, and the Indians out.
They switch back and forth all the time, over and over again.
And even Bill Rogio, in one long Twitter thread, goes from, oh my God, oh my God, the Taliban to Viva Taliban to right back to, oh my God, oh my God, the Taliban again, in without even catching his breath and even noticing the dissonance there whatsoever here.
And so then, what do you do with 20,000 extra Uyghur fighters?
I'm sure they're not all terrorists, but who's keeping them?
And what are the Chinese supposed to do about them?
And then, so I guess you can see, you know, let right-wingers puzzle that out between the left side of their brain and the right side of their brain about who they hate more, you know, Islamist fighters or the Chinese former communists who still have a communist party that rules everything but aren't really communists anymore.
Do you ever see you ever see that video, the cartoon thing they did where the like the there's like a southern hick meets a Taliban fighter and they just get along great?
Or see that is really funny thing where they just kind of like they're like, you know, he's like, or it's like, I hate you, Taliban.
And he's like, why do you hate me?
I hate you.
With you, they have this whole thing that he's like, I love God.
And he's like, I love God.
And then he's like, I hate these communists.
And he's like, I've killed communists.
They just keep going through it and they just get along.
Anyway, it's a funny video out there online.
He's from damn feminists and all the rest.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like all of them.
I know we're way over time here.
So let me just say, it's not completely.
Now, I think the game is pretty much up for the Afghan National Army and their Air Force.
All that is falling apart.
It's just a matter of time.
Okay.
It may be a little while, though, before the fall of Saigon in Kabul.
You know, essentially, the army is going to devolve to the base militias, the Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek based militia groups, essentially, to defend their territory.
And, you know, the country may really, you know, break apart more than anything.
The Taliban say they're determined to unify the country under a single federal government or, you know, a single national government.
I don't think that that'll be a very easy task for them.
And, you know, I did a great interview with Patrick Coburn, who knows a hell of a lot about it just yesterday.
It just posted today, I think, on the site, or it will post tonight or something, where, you know, he talks about the relative power of the Taliban and how it's not going to be that easy for them to just walk in to Kabul and the rest of the north of the country, probably.
And, you know, I was talking to him about this video I saw where Taliban commanders reading the riot act to this group of Hazaras in the Ghazni province and telling them, Welcome to the new world order, boys, and this kind of thing.
And Coburn says, yeah, but you know, there's 5 million Hazaras.
Yeah, that's a lot of Hazaras.
So, and they're maybe they're tired of fighting, man.
God help them.
You know, I don't know.
They, it's been 40 years of war over there.
And, you know, thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, for everything.
And so, um, and I guess it was Andropov or whoever.
Anyway, um, you know, but it's going to be a wreck.
And I'll tell you this.
Now, last thing here.
Um, and this is the all-important question I really should have addressed at the beginning: is what are the Americans exactly going to do?
As I said, they withdrew from Kandahar Airbase, uh, air base, they withdrew from Bagram Air Base.
Unbelievable.
I think that's where I went off on a tangent.
I just can't believe that.
But they still have like a division at the embassy, and there's a Turkish division controlling the airport in Kabul for now.
And I have an army officer who's telling me that he's got a group of paratroopers ready to go back to Bagram.
And I'm not sure why they wouldn't just go to the Kabul airport, but they're planning to be to re-seize the Bagram airbase for the fall of Saigon moment, for when everything goes absolutely to hell in Kabul and they get the last of the American personnel out.
They're going to take fly them all by helicopter, I guess, to Bagram and then fly them out from there.
So they're already planning on total catastrophe there.
And so, you know, I hope somebody's got a pool camera set up at the roof of the embassy helicopter landing pad there, you know, to get those iconic shots.
But essentially, they know the game is up for that and they're ready.
Now, and they are saying, well, we're going to keep this over-the-horizon strike capability.
But, and as you, as you mentioned at the beginning, they have been bombing the Taliban a little bit lately, but that either represents a major shift and we're going full back to air war against them, which I don't think, or that's really the Pentagon trying hard to push the White House to extend the thing.
But I don't really think that's probably going to fly.
And then where are they supposed to fly from over the horizon?
They're going to ask the Russians to pressure the Uzbeks to let us base there, or are they going to fly from Diego Garcia or Qatar, you know, fly, you know, all the way to Afghanistan to drop a couple of bombs and turn around and fly back again?
I guess I think I think F-18s can reach southern Afghanistan from carriers in the Indian Ocean there.
But I'm not sure about that anymore, man.
Now that I think about it, there's a huge mountain range they got to get over.
So, you know, I think the American role there is, you know, going to be mostly special operations forces and CIA embedded with the local militias trying to propose.
How it started.
How it started in 2001, right?
That's right.
Going out with a whimper, man.
It's so interesting, man.
And like, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
Like, I enjoy all of our conversations, but there's just something so interesting about like even the empire having to almost call it quits in this like longest war in American history with nothing to show for it.
I mean, like, I mean, nothing you could even spin into a like, well, this is what we accomplished here in this war.
And seeing these kind of, even if it is, which I assume, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I assume these strikes are the Pentagon trying to push Biden into some type of expanding conflict.
And then George W. Bush coming out and saying, you know, which he has nothing left at this point except to just say, I really think this is a mistake.
As if there's any value to George W. Bush's comment on how a war should be fought.
Like they just have nothing left, but even they can admit that you're just like, dude, you got a 20-year war here and you've got nothing.
And it's interesting to see even the empire, which I know I'm speaking as a collective, which isn't and is made up of different groups, but even them having to go like, we just, this, at a certain point, you got to just kind of call it like, call it, and let's go look for other conflicts to fight.
But this one just ain't going our way.
So anyway, it'll be interesting.
It's just, I'll be interested to have you back on after this September 11th date because it's it's coming up very soon here.
And that's all that's, you know, this, this war, I mean, all the wars, but this one particularly is, has been a special interest of yours.
It was the first book that you put out was all about this war.
And it's the longest war in American history.
And it is the war in response to 9-11, the first one.
War History Special Interest00:01:48
And so, yeah, it's a really interesting moment in American history to see it possibly coming to an end.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, let me just say that Jason Ditz and Dave deCamp at antiwar.com are absolutely doing work covering every bit of this.
News.antiwar.com.
And you can just keep track of, you know, every little thing.
They got the word cloud on the right side.
We just pick your topic by country.
We're bombing.
And they just got everything in the world there.
And so that's how I know all this stuff is because of their work.
Yeah.
That's like one of the cheat codes there, by the way.
People ask me sometimes, like, they're like, how do you know all this stuff about this?
And it's like, I really just found the people who know all this stuff.
And then I tell you what they're telling me.
And it's really that simple.
Like, it's like you need like for like philosophy and economics, you need Mises.org.
And you know what I mean?
And like Libertarian Institute.
And then for everything that's going on in foreign policy, you need antiwar.com and read Scott's books.
And then you pretty much know, you know, everything.
All right.
Let's wrap on that one.
Thank you, brother, as always for coming on.
If you haven't already, man, you got to read enough already.
Time to end the war on terrorism.
And more broadly, if you're really interested in this topic about Afghanistan, read Fool's Errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan.
Oh, by the way, for everybody watching on YouTube, check out my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Scott Horton show.
I've got all the interview archives there, but also there's a playlist of the video version of my book where I kind of walk you through the whole book there to introduce the topic.
Oh, awesome.
If you're interested in that, it's right there at the top of the page.