"President Trump's New Pax Americana" - Col. Douglas Macgregor Speaks at RPI Media & War Conference
Do we have any reason at all to hope for a less militaristic foreign policy under President Trump? Col. Macgregor has seen war up close and he's had enough of the US empire. In his Media & War speech he offers a way out of the neocon militarism that dominates Washington.
Do we have any reason at all to hope for a less militaristic foreign policy under President Trump? Col. Macgregor has seen war up close and he's had enough of the US empire. In his Media & War speech he offers a way out of the neocon militarism that dominates Washington.
Do we have any reason at all to hope for a less militaristic foreign policy under President Trump? Col. Macgregor has seen war up close and he's had enough of the US empire. In his Media & War speech he offers a way out of the neocon militarism that dominates Washington.
We first met Colonel McGregor when we were doing Ron Paul's Thursday lunches.
I know I keep talking about him, but I think it was really an important period.
We needed to be able to communicate with Republican members who were concerned about the Iraq war, with people who they were comfortable with, who were not necessarily peacenicks, nothing that there's anything wrong with that.
But Colonel McGregor is a military man.
He's a man who doesn't like stupid wars.
And he came and he gave a great talk, and I think people were very excited.
And we've been in touch off and on over the years.
And then I got some emails, some clips, people saying, you got to watch this guy on Tucker Carlson.
And I watched a couple.
And I hate to say this because I don't want to jinx him.
I think he's the only reason to watch cable TV.
But then I saw Colonel McGregor.
And if you haven't seen the clip of him and Tucker talking about Iran, it is really, it's very rare when you stand up and cheer for broadcast television, but the two of them did such a terrific job.
And at that moment, the next day, I got to the office and I asked Dr. Paul, what do you think about inviting the colonel out to talk to us?
Because look at the, we sat and watched it together.
I said, look at this segment.
You know, this is so well put.
So with that, thankfully, Colonel McGregor immediately accepted and we're very happy to have him and looking forward to hearing his presentation.
Colonel McGregor.
Oh, okay.
Going Into Reserve00:15:49
Can we get rid of this thing?
Thank you.
Podiums are for pastors, priests, and proctologists.
I am not one of those.
Look, I'm very happy to be here, as you will discover in the course of the next 15 to 20 minutes.
And the first thing I want to do is pay tribute to all of you, because this is a group of people who are both informed and devoted to the nation, your patriots, and I appreciate you very much.
Now, some of you may not know about this.
I don't know how many of you live in the Washington area, but you're very fortunate to be here on a Saturday because during the week, things are different.
I know because when I was an officer in the War Plans Division of the Army staff in 1995, one of my duties, routine duties, was every morning at 6 a.m. I had to go down into the basement of the Pentagon, unlock this special room with a steel door.
I would go in and flip a switch.
Now, this switch was very important because it was linked to all of these sound barriers that you see on the Beltway, on the Dulles Toll Road.
All of these sound barriers are really microwave emitters.
And the microwave energy begins to pick up at 6, and it really runs all the way until noon until the same officer, duty officer in that day goes down to the basement, turns it off.
Now, there's a reason for this.
It is critical to turn everyone's brain to mush on the way into work in Washington and the Pentagon.
This ensures there will be no original ideas, creativity, or innovation anywhere inside the Beltway.
Now, it has to be turned off at noon because, you see, the brains have to recover over the next several hours so that people can actually go home and then find their way back to their jobs.
And that's what Washington is all about.
No change.
No change.
And a large part of that is because no change means that the money continues to flow in all of these same directions from year to year.
Now, my journey to the conference is a little different from others because I was a lifelong professional soldier.
And I really didn't begin to think about many of these issues until I ended up on the battlefield.
That's not unusual.
You have to have a seminal event that induces some thinking.
And the event for me was in 1991.
I led the lead element of the 7th Corps in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the 2nd Squadron, 1,100 men.
We had 42 tanks, 42 Bradleys, eight guns.
And we were the lead element across 120 miles of flat open desert.
It took us two days to cover that because we were constantly stopped so that people could make decisions as to whether or not we should continue.
It was very frustrating because that's really the distance from here to Philadelphia, except that there are no rivers, there are no obstacles, it's just flat open desert.
Finally, we got there and then we're held back again and again.
And then late on the afternoon of the 26th of February, we were finally released to go forward and quote-unquote make contact with what we were told was the Republican Guard.
Well, we did, we ran into lots of Iraqi army units on the way up there, most of whom, after the exchange of 10 or 12 shots, quickly surrendered and were very happy to become POWs.
And as we discovered, most of them were farmers from the Euphrates River Valley who had been forced at gunpoint into the Iraqi army.
But the Republican Guard was different.
They actually were in prepared defenses and they put up resistance.
It wasn't particularly good.
In the space of about 20 minutes, we smashed through and destroyed this unit of 2,300 men, about 39 tanks, another 100 armored vehicles, 30 or 40 guns of different types and kinds and bunkers and so forth.
And then once again, we were stopped, this time by me, because we ran out of things to shoot.
It was a sandstorm.
The sandstorm started to lift, and I said, good Lord, where are we?
And we found out subsequently, we were along a north-south grid line called the 73 Easting.
We were actually at 738, almost to the 74.
We reported this.
I found out that we had not taken any losses to that point, that we had come through this thing unscathed.
Oh, we'd run over a few things.
We drove through a lot of artillery.
One man broke his leg inside a tank.
He was the driver, and the round went off next to him.
But we had a few wheeled vehicles that ran over miles, but nothing earth-shaking.
And suddenly I was ordered to fall back again.
Well, I declined to do so, and we ended up staying there.
And then we were subject to counterattacks of various types and kinds.
And then finally, they managed to hit a Bradley, destroyed this Bradley, killed one of the gunners, a very fine young man, and I'll tell you about him in a minute, and wounded six people.
We continued to stay and fight.
And then the next morning, we were told we were going into reserve.
And a few hours later, we were told the war was going to end.
And we were all standing around saying, when are we going to continue the pursuit?
Where's the rest of the Republican Guard?
Of course, we didn't know at the time that the Republican Guard had long since abandoned Kuwait and Iraq south of the Euphrates.
We've hit the rear guard of the Republican Guard Corps.
We didn't even hit the main body.
They'd already gotten away.
So then we find out this war is going to end and we all say, well, listen, let's go.
Let's continue.
But we were told, no, stand by.
Ended up on the Euphrates River Valley, dealing with thousands of people coming out of Iraq.
And we were there through April and May.
Finally, we were withdrawn, and then the Iraqi Shiites, this was an area of Shiites near An-Nasaria, came out of their homes saying to us, Don't leave, don't leave, we'll all be killed.
Don't leave.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
They were killed.
And we wondered why the President of the United States was encouraging the Shiites in southern Iraq and the Kurds in northern Iraq to try and overthrow Saddam Hussein when the reason given for the early termination was of the war was that we wanted to leave him in power.
Well, I thought this was awfully odd.
When I got on the plane on my way back, I wondered what I was going to tell Sergeant Nels Muller's family.
Exactly what did Sergeant Mueller die for?
What was the point?
Especially since most of us were convinced in 1991 that in 10 years we'd be back.
We were wrong.
It was 12 years.
Sergeant Nels Mueller was straight out of central casting.
You know the movies, John Wayne.
They bring in the new kid, and he's handsome and young and exuberant.
That was Sergeant Mueller, fine young man.
His father was a Lutheran pastor.
And I did see his parents, and I was absolved of that responsibility because they thanked us for doing all that we could to keep him alive.
And we did.
But unfortunately, there was not very much left of Sergeant Mueller.
He fit into a small plastic sandwich bag.
That was it.
That's all there was.
So I left this war behind me with very serious reservations about what was the point.
If we were not going to eliminate Saddam Hussein, who was ultimately at the center of the problem, why did we bother?
Couldn't we have negotiated something?
And why did we run this enormous air campaign that was so destructive all over Iraq?
Why didn't we gather together the Iraqi soldiers that we captured who said, please go and remove Saddam Hussein.
We'll come with you.
Why didn't we do something with them?
But these were matters decided at a very high level.
Several years later, I was the director of joint operations at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
And I was surprised in the spring of 1998 to discover that key figures in the Clinton administration had made the decision to bomb the Serbs.
Bomb the Serbs.
So I said to the Supreme Commander, why are we bombing the Serbs?
We don't need to bomb the Serbs.
I mean, the Germans will put up 6 billion marks just to move populations around, build new housing, give the Serbs their portion of Kosovo, give the rest of it to the Albanians.
We don't need to do anything.
He said to me, he said, you have to understand that if NATO is not out of area doing something, NATO is out of business.
And I thought, well, if the interests that brought NATO into existence no longer exist, perhaps NATO should go out of business.
Then in 2002, I was brought back because of my background and experience in the Middle East at that point to plan the advance on Baghdad because the army generals once again wanted a million man march.
And I managed to get them to adopt something different.
But I then was depressed when I discovered suddenly we were going to occupy, dismantle the government, and rebuild it in our image, creating the first liberal democracy in the Middle East.
My papers went in, and I retired not long thereafter.
And I found a book several years later.
It was very intriguing.
It was entitled The Revolution.
So I picked it up.
I said, well, this should be good.
And I began reading this work by a congressman from Texas.
I'm not from Texas.
It's a big place.
There are lots of congressmen.
And I started reading it.
And he says, this is wasteful, stupid, and counterproductive to do these things.
And we should reduce defense spending and get out of end these interventions and forestall bankruptcy.
I said, where is this man being?
He's brilliant.
And so I voted for him.
Now, several years later, because my candidate lost, I began listening to another man who showed up and said, NATO's obsolete.
What are we doing in Afghanistan?
Why are we in Iraq?
Why are we guarding the borders of Iraq and Syria, the borders of Afghanistan and Korea?
Why aren't we guarding our own borders?
Why are we in these places?
And I said, you know, this sounds a lot like Ron Paul.
Well, admittedly, a little more profane and not quite as eloquent, but, you know, nevertheless, I thought this was a pretty good idea, and he started talking about America first.
So I signed on, and I have stayed signed on because I believe the Cold War and the Second World War are behind us, not in front of us.
I believe very strongly that there is, as President Trump said as a candidate and has said subsequently, common ground between ourselves and those that we have classified as permanent opponents and adversaries.
There is the opportunity to demonstrate a decent respect for the cultures and the interests of other peoples, not simply our own.
There is an opportunity to stop trying to export liberal democracy at gunpoint and create something in a different world that has no business existing there.
So today, today, I watch television as the rest of you do, although some of you watch things I don't.
I mean, Larry has convinced me that I need to sell my Exxon mobile stock.
Dr. Whitehead has convinced me that I should unplug every electrical appliance in the house.
But what I do see most of the time when I turn on the television is this program.
It's the same program on almost every channel.
It is why I hate Trump and You Should Hate Him Too.
It's the same thing over and over and over again.
And right now, this man is trying to end the potential for conflict and crisis on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia because he knows that Chinese are not interested in going to war with us.
China is not building itself up into a great military power to overwhelm the rest of the world.
There's no evidence for that.
The Chinese are paranoid about the potential for the United States Navy to bottle them up in their ports and deny them access to the South China Sea, which is vital to their economy and existence.
They've had that happen before with the Royal Navy and the Japanese.
They are worried about Taiwan because Taiwan was always the unsinkable carrier for the Imperial Japanese Air Force and Army.
So, yes, they do have some concerns.
But President Trump was smart enough to know there's no reason for war.
Yes, we need to stop the theft of our intellectual property by a group of people that cannot create and innovate on their own.
We must trade with everyone but on a level playing field.
We must control our borders and deal with the criminality and the corruption inside the United States, not just Washington.
And I'm talking about the criminality and the corruption spilling into this country over the Mexican border from Central America.
We have to do things differently.
Now, the question arises: why hasn't President Trump been more successful thus far in pursuing all of these aims?
There's a simple answer, ladies and gentlemen.
Like most presidents, he comes to his office with very little experience in foreign and defense policy.
And I know he spent a couple of years at the military academy, but he doesn't know much about the real military in this country.
Ladies and gentlemen, right now we have 38 four-star generals and admirals for a force of a little over 1 million men.
Here's a little fact.
At the height of the Second World War, when we had 8.2 million men in the United States Army and the United States Army Air Corps, we had four four-star generals.
Marshall, MacArthur, Arnold, Eisenhower.
Overstaffed Armed Forces00:01:02
That's all.
How could we have possibly won without the help of all those dozens of additional generals?
And these generals are a product of the last 25, 27 years.
These are the men who signed on unconditionally, without question, for the dumb policies, the bad strategy, not just for external operations, but for what's happened to their own services.
And our services are not in great shape, ladies and gentlemen.
And the solution to their problems is not more money.
That won't fix them.
Right now, the armed forces is just a big tribute to the Second World War.
It's a permanent cash cow.
And that has to be addressed.
But Donald Trump can't do that until the people who are surrounding him are new and different.
Because the ones who are there now will obstruct, because they are the products of the very things that we are all against.