Dec. 12, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:33
3928 Endless War | Scott Horton and Stefan Molyneux
Scott Horton is the managing director of the Libertarian Institute, the host of Antiwar Radio and the Scott Horton Show, the Opinion Editor of Antiwar.com and the author of “Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan.”Website: http://www.scotthorton.orgTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/scotthortonshowBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/fools-errandYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
So I'm here with Scott Horton.
He is the Managing Director of the Libertarian Institute, the host of the most excellent Anti-War Radio and the Scott Horton Show, the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, and the author of what we're going to talk about today.
It's very, very important stuff to wrap your head around.
Fool's Errand. Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
We'll put the link to that below. You can check out Scott's work at scothorton.org.
And you can follow him on twitter.com forward slash scothortonshow.
Scott, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thanks very much for having me on.
I appreciate it. It is grim, but powerful reading, and I really wanted to thank you for taking the time to gather the information about the book.
I've read a lot of it in various bits and pieces, but you put it together in a very compelling fashion.
So, for a lot of my younger listeners, they kind of don't know a time when America hasn't been engaged in its longest war.
I mean, if the Iraq War were a person, it would be able to drive now, soon it would be able to join the military.
Ironically enough. So let's go back to the beginning because whenever you try to pick up history late in the game, it's almost inevitable we get things wrong.
So let's talk about some of the origins behind this story that, you know, Bin Laden hates America, hates the West, and just decided to kill people for some Islamic ideological reason.
Let's go back to a time where When America did work with bin Laden to take down a superpower, just not their own.
Right. Well, so, yeah, we could go back to TR or Woodrow Wilson, but now let's stick with Jimmy Carter, right?
1979, America's locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but it's the aftermath of Vietnam.
The American people have Vietnam syndrome, and that means that they don't really want to go off on these missions anymore.
And so, Basically, they were just resident to intervene anywhere in Africa and Latin America or anything.
And so, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the other leading lights of the Cold War in America, they had a stroke of genius in a sense, in a short-term sense, that, hey, you know what?
Instead of containing communism, let's trick it into overexpansion.
Let's lure them into their own Vietnam in order to bog them down and break their bank.
And Zbigniew Brzezinski bragged, this was Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, David Rockefeller's protege.
And they bragged that after backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan for six months before the Soviet invasion of Christmas 1979, that he sent a message to Jimmy Carter and said, now we will give them their own Vietnam.
This was the plan from the beginning.
It was to trick the Soviet Union into overexpansion.
So, that's what happened.
America, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan worked together to back, along with Egypt and whichever other friendly governments in the region, to not just back the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, but to back what were called the Arab Afghans, which were basically troublemakers from around the Middle East, who their government sent off to Afghanistan to go fight and die, to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
And to get them out of their hair, so to speak.
And it worked.
And if you ask the Reaganites, there's no question that Ronald Reagan's policy in Afghanistan and his, you know, missile buildup and brinksmanship in the Cold War broke the bank of the Soviet Union and drove it finally out of business.
The oil crash of the late 1980s really finished him off.
And the thing of it is, is that the Bin Ladenites saw the same thing.
The Mujahideen and particularly these Arab Afghans, they took credit themselves.
Never mind the CIA and their Stinger missiles and all of that.
It was faith in God and AK-47s that brought down the Soviet Union.
One of the most powerful empires in history.
And I tell the story in my book of the great war reporter, Eric Margulies, who met with Abdul Azam, who was Bin Laden 1.0 basically, who ran what became Al-Qaeda then.
And he met with Azam in Pakistan in 1986.
And Azam told Margulies, as soon as we're done with the Soviet Union, we're coming for you next.
And then we're going to liberate Jerusalem.
We're going to liberate the Middle East from the American empire.
And Margulies, he was an Ike Eisenhower Republican, was in the army during Vietnam, right-wing, conservative, American patriot.
And he's over there, very sympathetic to the Freedom Fighters cause.
And he was confused.
He really was like, you know, I've only ever heard a communist, a pro-Soviet communist, call America an empire.
Here we are helping you fight the Soviet Union.
And this is how ungrateful you are.
You call us an empire. You say you're going to target us next.
It made no sense to him. But then very soon it did.
And he came to realize the degree of American dominance in the Middle East, the degree of American control over the governments of the regions, and then especially our bases.
Are combat forces stationed in the Middle East?
And so he saw this coming from way back then.
And then so what we have, of course, with the end of the Cold War, is that Bush announced the new order, Bush Sr., and they went and they found an excuse to escalate their, quote, military footprint in the Middle East.
And they put huge amounts of bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, etc., In order, which Kuwait's not the peninsula, but still right there adjacent, in order to wage the war against Iraq.
After, as I know you know, Bush Sr.'s government had basically given Saddam the green light to at least invade the northern part of Kuwait, to occupy the northern oil fields, to put them in check for overproducing under the share oil wells and, you know, We're good to go.
And then it was really the English who insisted that we do something about it.
And then Bush Senior went ahead and took the bait and went for it.
And then with that occupation, especially that escalated occupation of Saudi Arabia, Bush Senior then made an enemy out of Ronald Reagan's pet Mujahideen and turned them against the United States.
And Bill Clinton, of course, just continued that same policy.
As I repeatedly complain about in the book, I think I used the phrase three or four times, That the Americans considered the Bill Clinton years to be peacetime.
There was no major official war then.
He had a little occupation of Haiti, a regime change here and there, maybe some peacekeepers in Bosnia, but people didn't even really pay any attention to that.
The Kosovo War of 1999 is just swept under the rug.
And especially people do not realize, or if they do, they kind of compartmentalize it, they don't cross-reference it with everything else they know, that America was laying siege to Iraq, that the sanctions, the economic embargo that we put on Iraq before the Iraq War, the first Iraq War in 1990-91, that they were never lifted.
That the policy was regime change at all costs, and they kept this full-scale embargo on.
Now, even when we put an embargo on Cuba, they could still trade with the USSR, and they could still trade with other countries, just not with us, and just not, you know, other people who were determined to do business with us instead of Cuba, right?
But there was still a loophole, right?
There was still a backdoor. With Iraq, no.
It was a UN Security Council resolution.
It was an entire global world law that you can't trade with the Iraqis.
And they just starved them to death.
The same thing America's doing in Yemen right now.
And you know, I don't quote this in the book because I don't want to sound like I'm too sympathetic or whatever to this point of view, but it's just recruitment shtick.
It's not my point of view. I can disclaim it here with you more easily.
Just trying to get across the way that they were looking at this, okay?
And I don't even know if this is true about the Quran, but I did read where Osama Bin Laden cited the Quran or claimed to be citing the Quran and said, once there was a woman who had a little cat and she wouldn't feed it, but nor would she let it go out to try to fend for itself.
And so then Allah sent her to hell forever for that.
That is absolutely crossing the line.
You can't do that. Well, so what do you think God's going to do to Bill Clinton?
What do you think... What's the responsibility of the American people for starving innocent men, women, and children to death in Iraq under this blockade?
No spare parts for your trucks, no chlorine for your water, which we deliberately bombed.
We, Colin Powell and Bush senior government, bombed their waterworks, bombed their electricity, bombed their sewage.
And as I cite in the book, they openly declared this was for the purpose of waging war against the civilian population of Iraq, to make them so uncomfortable They would rise up and overthrow Saddam.
And so Osama, and it was really Egyptian Islamic Jihad, merged with the Islam group, became Al-Qaeda.
And their entire point was the genocide, frankly, being waged against the people of Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia.
And that that was the primary casus belli for the Al-Qaeda war against the United States.
And of course, the other real half of that was American unlimited support for Israel in their occupations of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and at that time their You know, 10, 15-year occupation of southern Lebanon as well.
It is quite mad to think of the relationship just by the by between the successive American administrations and Saddam Hussein.
You know, help him into power to begin with, then give him permission to invade a country, then kick back at him for invading the country, and then promise people who want to overthrow Saddam Hussein that you're going to support him, support them, rather, and then end up supporting Saddam Hussein and getting them all killed, and then...
And blockading and starving and robbing of medicine the general population to the point where they're completely debilitated and grief-stricken and then saying, well, now it's up to you to rise up against this guy.
I mean, it is truly deranged.
And then, of course, invading again in 2003 because there was 9-11, which, of course, Saddam Hussein had nothing direct to do with.
It is truly mad. And it does, of course, beg the question, what the hell is it all for?
And the only thing that seems to be consistent We're good to go.
Which is going to be surprising for people is to think of America as an empire because, of course, we think of a Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and so on.
We think of it as direct military occupation around the world and in the installation of white people in charge of brown countries and so on.
But the American empire is a bit more subtle and a bit more military basis plus arms sales plus influence as a whole.
Can you help people understand how the Sobriquay of empire could be applied to the United States at the moment?
Yeah. Well, you're right.
And Alfred McCoy was actually on the show talking about this the other day about The supreme contradiction between the American established world order at the end of World War II under the United Nations Charter, which establishes that all the world shall be divided by nation states, while at the same time demanding this, as you describe it, this doctrine of eternal dominance over all of the world.
And so what we have then is a lot of coup d'etats and a lot of CIA and a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering.
And then occasionally, when it comes down to it, with these rogue states that must be dealt with, they go ahead and do the worst, like the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But for the most part, it's a system, as you say, of corporate state power.
To go back to the Bill Clinton years, the typical form of the American empire there was just the IMF and the World Bank coming in.
What they do, of course, is, and many people are familiar with this, it's the economic hitman model, right?
So they threaten and or bribe the leaders of the sovereign state to sign up for huge development loans that they'll never be able to pay back.
And then when they default, then the connected corporations get to buy up or just take They're public resources.
They're publicly controlled resources, such as public lands, their water, and whatever resources they want, mining and whatever.
And the people, of course, are the ones who end up getting screwed.
And the sovereign leader, so-called, gets his golden parachute and his Swiss bank account and that kind of thing.
And then that's basically how they get away with exploiting the third world.
Now, in Europe, we have The NATO alliance, which, as I forget who coined this originally, but it's to keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in.
So that the continent is, in other words, so that America and Europe never get into a fight.
We keep Europe under our system of dominance, and they go along with that, because that means we pick up the tab for all their militarism too.
And then, of course, in the case of Russia, They're guilty of the ultimate sin right now of being independent from the American empire starting in the year 2000 when Yeltsin stepped down and handed it over to Putin.
And so that's why Russia is always, you know, considered a threat.
It's the same reason North Korea, Iran or Cuba are always called threats.
It's because they have independence from us.
They have the ability to defend themselves.
So that's what we call a threat, that they could, you know, maintain resistance from our aggression.
Right. Now, the goal, of course, that Bin Laden had in provoking America through the 9-11 attacks, it is always amazing to me, Scott.
That history is considered to be this big mystery when it seems that when you read original documents, it's blindingly obvious.
I mean, he stated exactly...
I mean, this isn't even a con because he's openly stating exactly what he wanted to achieve with the 9-11 attacks, what exactly his motivations were.
And even with the motivations clear and the goals that he wanted to achieve explicitly and clearly stated in the documents that were publicly available, freely available, America did exactly...
What he wanted them to do.
And that, of course, with the compliance of the mainstream media and a lot of people in academia who weren't pushing back against it.
But to me, if you're doing exactly what your enemy, your big enemy, wants you to do, I'm not sure how you can claim that this is a wise move.
And how is it possible that people simply don't?
Well, let's talk about what he was complaining about and what he wanted to achieve with 9-11, and then we can talk about how people fell into this trap so easily.
Well, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that, as you say, he said it over and over again, that what he was trying to do was provoke an overreaction by America.
He was trying to get, first and foremost, to get America to invade Afghanistan.
And if a million Afghans died, like in the war against the Russians, oh, well, it's all for the greater good Allah's plan or whatever was the rationalization.
You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet and all of that kind of thing.
And yet, ultimately, over the long term, If it breaks the American empire, it'll be worth it.
And I think he probably underestimated the power of America's economic strength versus the Soviet Union and the length of time it would take to really completely break us.
But that was the plan. You're familiar with Mitchell and Jessen, the contractor psychologist torturers for the CIA. Well, this kook from, I forgot his position, I think he used to work in the Bush White House.
Mark Thiessen was a speech writer for Bush Jr.
and then now writes for the Washington Post.
And he had a thing recently where he's quoting from Mitchell's book.
And he's saying, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling them, Oh yeah, no, the last thing we wanted you to do was invade Afghanistan.
No, we thought that by knocking down your towers, we would make you run away like a tiny little pathetic feminine coward.
And then Thies incites this as authoritative instead of the proof that Horton was right all along.
See, this is what they're doing.
They're jerking your chain.
They're trying to get you to destroy yourself.
How could a group of 400 Mujahideen, which is all Al-Qaeda was in 2001, 400 men, how could they take down the world's superpower?
Only by breaking our bank.
Only by fooling the American people.
By giving the Republicans in power the excuse to take advantage of, to increase the size of that military footprint.
And look exactly what Bush did.
Not only did he go to Afghanistan, he thought, the American people are so upset, I can get a bonus war out of this.
I'm going to do one more.
And then for a year and a half, they lied.
He said Saddam was making nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and he was going to give them to Osama bin Laden to use against us.
And so that was the excuse then to invade Iraq, which I quote the former CIA, or I don't think I quote this in the book, but the former CIA analyst Michael Schuyers said that Iraq was the hoped for, but unexpected gift to bin Laden, that he wouldn't have been able to believe it, that we would get rid of the secular, socialist, fascist, infidel Saddam Hussein.
For him. And turn all of Western Iraq into jihadistan the way that they did.
And then, this is the part that really gets me, Stephan, I know you watch all this like the slowest motion train wreckers like me, is that Obama, who, well, I'll get back to who in a second, Obama took the Mujahideen side.
Right? So you have in Libya and in Syria.
So you have after Reagan's war in Afghanistan in the 80s, the bad guys come home and turn into Al-Qaeda, our enemy.
Then Bush makes a major screw-up.
This was not why he did it, but it's a huge effect of Iraq War II is that all of Western and Northwestern Iraq fell into the hands of a bunch of jihadis for quite a while and then again.
But then Obama took their side right as the Navy SEALs are killing Bin Laden in Pakistan in the spring of 2011, which, yes, he did die there that day.
My wife is an investigative reporter and she nailed it down that night, had all the sources.
But right as Obama's killing him, he's taken all of al-Qaeda, all of Osama's men's side in the war in Libya against Gaddafi.
The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia, they were the Libyan veterans of Iraq War II. And then he turned right around and he started backing the same guys in Syria, too.
This is how, in the Benghazi crisis, that Ambassador Stevens was murdered in 2012.
Because he was stationed in the middle of a hornet's nest.
He had America backing their enemies.
Just because we're giving them guns and money doesn't mean they like us now.
And so, and in fact, there's a little side story if you got a minute.
You're familiar, probably you've heard the name, Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, who was an Al-Qaeda guy that Bush and Cheney tortured into pointing a finger at Saddam Hussein and saying that Saddam had taught them how to hijack planes and how to make chemical weapons, which was a complete lie.
Well, his brother was a guy named Sheikh Yahya al-Libi.
And Obama, you know, obviously from Libya as well, Obama killed him with a drone strike in Pakistan in 2012.
And right after that, in July 2012, right after that, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al-Qaeda, put out a podcast saying, hey, you know, you guys in Libya, you loyal Al-Qaeda Mujahideen in Libya, who are working with the Americans now, taking their guns and money, well, the anniversary of September 11th is coming up, and it's time to avenge Sheikh Yahya Alibi, who they murdered here in Pakistan in this drone strike.
And then, I hate to give the credit to her, but I think it was Rachel Maddow, Stephan, who was the one who got this right, that what happened to Ambassador Stevens, and this is before she changed her story to fit the narrative, don't get me wrong, but she right away put this together, that this was an Al-Qaeda attack because America was helping their Al-Qaeda friends, but the Al-Qaeda didn't think of them as friends.
And that this was revenge for the killing of Al-Libi, his brother, the original Al-Libi's brother in Pakistan.
Then they turned right around. New York Times quotes Hillary Clinton, says this was the bank shot to take these Mujahideen and the guns and send them on to Syria, where we supported for years.
It took three years of supporting the Mujahideen until they finally blew up into the actual Islamic State.
Then we had to fight a three-year war to destroy the Islamic State, which is finally where we are right now.
So, now you want to talk about what Bin Laden was trying to achieve.
This is beyond his wildest dreams.
I mean, the only way they could do better now would be if they bombed Tehran and overthrew the Shiite mullahs, the Ayatollah, and their regime in Iran.
And remember that, all the time, whenever you hear these hawks demonizing Iran and demonizing Hezbollah for whatever their agenda is, which is Israel, that What they're really saying is exactly what Ayman al-Zawahiri would have them say.
He would have them prioritize Iran and Hezbollah.
And for that matter, their Shiite friends who we've been backing in Iraq since 2003 as our enemies, which is only to the benefit of Al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State.
There is a horrible kind of asymmetry in modern warfare as well, because, I mean, I grew up in the 60s and the 70s, so my big reference point was the massive waves of tanks and weaponry and airplanes and so on in the Second World War, which, I mean, like the First World War, ground almost all participants down to a state of economic exhaustion.
But it's very different now when you have state actors versus insurgents.
There is an asymmetry both in terms of propaganda and in terms of simple finances that attacking and invading is hundreds if not thousands of times more expensive than defending and avoiding.
You know, the guys in Kevlar are costing you a hundred times more than the guys in the back of a pickup truck in flip-flops.
And so this economic asymmetry, which I think first emerged in the Afghanistan war, when you could take down a $15 million MiG with a $20,000 Stinger missile, there's only a certain amount of math that can be encapsulated in that without one side caving in.
And so that, the capacity to get the American troops out of Saudi Arabia, out of the peninsula as a whole, which I think you point out in the book, 95% of educated Saudi males between 25 and 41 agreed with bin Laden's goals.
This was very common, just as I'm sure the vast majority of Americans didn't want King George's troops in America in the 18th century.
And so this asymmetry in terms of it's really expensive to attack and it's really, really cheap to defend and to sort of fight and run sort of stuff, combined with when you are attacking, you are always going to have civilian casualties because...
Half of the people who are fighting you are not state combatants, if not more.
And so you get this, oh, here's pictures of these children blown up.
Here's children of this wedding party that was drone struck.
So you get this asymmetry of propaganda and this asymmetry Of economic catastrophe that makes these kinds of invasions fundamentally unwinnable.
This is a story that needs to be told to the Western public, because even if you don't have any particular moral qualms, which you should, about what's going on in the Middle East and the destruction of vast swaths of the Muslim population, other populations, it is going to destroy your economy as surely as it did the Soviets.
Well, and you know, a huge part of this, too, is the asymmetry of the violence, where Bill Clinton can kill a million people from 35,000 feet.
And no Americans died under Bill Clinton in Iraq.
They died in other places, a few in other places.
But, you know, Saddam Hussein never shot down one plane over Iraq that was bombing his country on average every other day for eight years straight.
Killed hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people in those bombings.
And then look at Iraq War II. In Iraq War II, a million people died.
A million. We lost 4,500 guys.
And that's bad for those 4,500 families and etc.
I'm not playing that down. I'm playing up what has happened to these people at the hands of the US government.
And, you know, the amount of, well, just Think about putting your shoe on the other foot for just a second.
It's the same thing with Israel-Palestine.
What if it was the Palestinian Muslims and Christians who had won the last few wars, and they had the Israeli Jews locked up in the ghetto of the Gaza Strip, locked up in the West Bank with checkpoints and militarism, a foreign military occupation over them.
How in the world would we be reacting then?
How would the Western world react to that?
If the shoe was on the other foot for one day over there, And just think, I mean, well, I think you're Canadian, right?
I'm a Texan. So imagine, and anyone can imagine this, what do you think the Texans would do if some foreign Navy tried to come and take Houston away from us?
Or if, for that matter, Governor Abbott said, yeah, no, you can go ahead and station Iranian or Saudi or Chinese troops and have a big military base here, and then you can launch endless war against the people of Mexico from your bases in Texas, we would kill them.
It's as simple as that. We would shoot them until they were all dead.
And that would include any of the quizzling traders who allowed them to do it on our side too.
Is that hard to understand?
It's as simple as that.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I made this sort of case before on the show and I just want to make it again very briefly here.
The shock of horror, the rage that Americans felt on that terrible day, September 11th, 2001, the desire to strike back, the feeling of community, the feeling of wanting to unleash the dogs of war.
Well, imagine if that was happening every day in your country.
Every. Single. Day.
Which, proportionate to population, it is in some of the Middle Eastern countries.
So, it is simply a matter of empathy.
To put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand what drives it.
It is not some abstract ideology.
It is not a hatred of the West for its freedoms.
And it is simply, if you kill people mercilessly, relentlessly, And if you starve them, if you deprive them of medicines, if you deprive them of clean water, if you deprive them of functioning state systems, however brutal or repressive they may appear to us from the outside, that is where they are in the stage of their political development.
If this happens, that you have to watch your child die in your arms for lack of antibiotics because the Americans won't let any of that medicine into the country.
It is not hard to imagine or to understand the motivations.
We've all been there in times of this kind of rage when we feel that we've been really struck against or harmed.
And this lack of understanding of this and this ascribing it to a hatred of America's virtue, it is not America's virtues that have produced this kind of blowback.
It is the terrible vices.
Right. And this, you know, I love telling the story of the great Harry Brown, the libertarian presidential candidate from 96 and 2000, and how He wrote this article that they published on Antiwar.com on September the 12th, 2001.
And it was called, When Will We Ever Learn?
And it was about just what you just said.
And people completely freaked out.
I mean, he must have got a thousand death threats.
I mean, how dare you on September the 12th go around saying that?
Well, you know, Bill Clinton brought this on with all the killing that he did or whatever.
You know, he made the point very simply.
And then Harry said, now listen, That's exactly how they feel.
This rage where you want to murder me just for telling you the truth.
Okay? That's how angry you are.
That's how angry they are.
Now you understand.
See? That's what it is.
People get mad when you kill them.
You know? When they have survivors who died.
3,000 people dead in New York.
That's, you know, I don't know who everybody, but Under the rules of the Kevin Bacon game, that's a lot of people who know somebody who lost somebody there.
You know, my wife, she had an office in the North Tower.
The only reason she's not dead is because she was deathly sick and was with her parents down in Florida at that time.
Otherwise, you know, I'd have never known her.
So this is the kind of thing where people, as I say in the book, people from, look, Muslims from California Join the U.S. Army to go and fight against the terrorists who attacked us, quote, unquote, us, America, on September 11th, right?
That's not because of radical Islam makes them do it.
That's because of solidarity with the dead victims and their survivors.
Simple as that. Well, this idea that it's poverty or religious ideology that drives people, there's a lot of empirical evidence, as you point out in the book, Scott, to push back against that, that the majority of people are called terrorists and so on, from upper middle class families, pretty well educated, and not particularly adherent to more fundamentalist versions of Islamic texts.
And that the suicide bombers, let's talk a little bit about that, because that, of course, is considered to be one of the great evils of this endless war, that the suicide bombers are pretty common relative to two things, of course, military occupation, and a great divergence of ideologies.
Right.
So the best examples of this are Iraq, 2003.
Muslims everywhere, millions of them, right?
Arabs almost, well, the Kurds are Kurds, but they're Sunni Muslims.
And then you have the Sunni and Shiite Arabs there.
No suicide bombings ever in the history of Iraq until Bush invaded in 2003.
And then they started almost immediately because it was not just America coming.
Which America's army is made up of white, black, and Hispanic men who speak English, who almost are entirely Christian and are from North America, right?
They come, and not only do they come, they say, we are here to remake your civilization.
We are here to not just overthrow this, but we're going to create a, quote, democracy and put the Shiite supermajority in charge, which just means civil war to, you know, as the majority kicks the Sunnis, the Sunni minority out of the last of their power.
And lo and behold, a suicide terror campaign begins, led by Bin Ladenites.
Yes, Zarqawi and those guys, political radicals.
At the same time, there was a genocide.
Well, I don't know if it was a genocide.
It was a horrible war going on in Western Sudan.
We hear a lot about South Sudan now because there's problems there.
But in Western Sudan, remember George Clooney and all of the hype about the The deaths in Darfur, the Darfur region, this is in 2003, 4, 5.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
Maybe half a million people were killed.
All of them Sunnis.
All of them Arabs. No suicide attacks.
None. Right?
So what's the key to the puzzle?
The key is, it's the difference between the occupied and the occupiers.
It's the difference between people being killed and people knowing that whoever survives Is going to be completely dominated, maybe have their God taken away from them, have their entire social system taken away from them, their entire way of life destroyed.
You know what I mean?
It's the difference between the South of America being invaded and conquered by the Mexicans versus invaded and conquered by the Yankees.
You know? Invaded and conquered by the Yankees is bad enough.
But if we're invaded and conquered by the Mexicans or by the Chinese or by the Algerian superpower from 300 years from now or something, that would be a much different dilemma.
And the reaction would be that much stronger because of the difference between the occupiers and the occupied.
And so this is why we see just a couple of thousand miles east of Arabia, we see the island of Sri Lanka off the coast of India.
Where it's the Sinhalese Buddhists versus the Marxist, Hindu, atheist, Sri Lankans.
Oh, the Tamil Tigers?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Tamil Tigers.
And they were the leaders in suicide attacks from 1980 until 2003 when Bush invaded Iraq.
And there's not a Muslim in sight.
Mohammed hasn't ever been to Sri Lanka.
Man, nobody's ever heard of Mohammed there.
Has nothing to do with Islam whatsoever.
Has everything to do with the difference, the degree of difference between the oppressor and the victims.
This authorization to use military force, you touch on this, and Congress, I think most of the people in Congress thought that they were just talking about the short-term invasion of Afghanistan, but It really was kind of a blank check that was used as the legal basis for six other interventions in the 15 years since.
So people say, well, we had to do something about 9-11 and Ron Paul, of course, I think, as you point out in the book, had...
A fairly good or rational, or at least limited, response.
So I wonder if you can talk about how the dominoes have fallen in terms of civil liberties, domestic liberties, and authorizations for wars, and what else might have been done other than that.
Yeah. Well, you know, Ron did vote for the authorization.
He was under a lot of pressure to do so, and I think he probably would have been re-elected if he hadn't, I think.
And I've asked him about this before on the show, and he said that, hey, look, I mean...
The authorization was to get the guys that were responsible for the attack, and that was legit.
In fact, The Democrats had taken the worst language out of the authorization.
Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle in the House and the Senate, they had taken out the worst of the authorization that made it so obviously a Gulf of Tonk and Blake check that, you know, Dick Cheney may hereby kill whoever he feels like from now on without limit or whatever the language was.
And they stripped that out and they tried to make it much more specific.
But then, as you say, they just ran wild with it.
Now, what What Ron Paul proposed instead was a letter of mark and reprisal, which is the power of the Congress to declare war on a group less than a state, which typically speaking would be like a band of pirates somewhere.
I've talked with Dr.
Paul about this too. You know, people really harp on, if they criticize this, they always harp on the idea that you would hire Blackwater mercenaries to go do the job rather than sending the Special Operations Command.
But that's not really the point.
The point is who the authorization is against.
And in the case of the letter of Mark and Reprisal after September 11th, it was to get Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.
Capture or kill them.
And it could have been But it also could have very well just been the Navy SEALs and the Delta Force.
As it was, of course, as I tell the story in the book, they refused to dispatch the Marines or the Army Rangers that the CIA and the Delta Force were begging for, for reinforcements, as Osama bin Laden was getting away at Tora Bora.
So what the hell? If you sent Blackwater, or hell, if you sent Stanley Smith Security Company, they might have done a better job than Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet over there.
They got away.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri, both.
And, you know, 200 or so of their guys.
Killed about half of them, and 200, you know, the other half got away.
And then, so, but as you said, though, the authorization to use military force has remained, and I've read one account that said 14 different military sub-authorizations have come under the AUMF. And so I lost track, if that's true, because I know that they bombed Pakistan under the same authorization.
Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, strikes against ISIS in Libya, and then they invoked the AUMF in Iraq and Syria for Iraq War III. But then So Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso.
I don't think... We're still not at 14.
So, oh, the Panguisi Gorge or whichever it is in former Soviet Georgia.
The Philippines. I'm still short.
I'm not keeping exact count here, but I'm still only at like 10, right?
So, but there have been...
You know, it's basically a blank check.
It is a Gulf of Tonkin resolution for endless war against anywhere there's a black guy or an Arab or someone who can credibly accused of being a Muslim and has a rifle that you can say he's a militant bombing with a drone.
And so now, of course, when I mentioned Mali, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and all that, that's all the results of Obama's war for al-Qaeda in Libya in 2011 is that the jihad then spread from there.
And, you know, Boko Haram down in Nigeria already existed.
But then they made friends with all the Libyan veterans of Iraq War II, and now they're that much worse.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the issues going on in Afghanistan at the moment that makes...
I mean, the goals keep changing, and it is really like trying to grab a big bloody pile of jello.
But as far as corruption, a lack of...
Of an end goal.
The drug war, the sort of transfer of, or the transition from a fairly complex agricultural society into a society, half of the economy, as you point out in the book, is dedicated to raising poppies, to transporting opium, to helping get lots of people around the world addicted to opiates and so on.
And the resurgence of acceptance of child rape and corruption and the use of the military.
The American military as a kind of, oh, I don't like this guy.
Yeah, yeah, he's an insurgent.
What you really got to do is go and blow him up.
And the use of them as kind of like hitmen, which is really horrifying.
So what are the major issues that you feel make the, or you argue make, winning the war, whatever that would mean in Afghanistan, fundamentally impossible based upon a significant amount of accumulated evidence?
Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, everything that you just said there, that the government that America has created there has no legitimacy whatsoever and would fall apart immediately if we weren't propping it up full stop.
That's it. And then, in a larger sense than that, we're fighting to put together a ruling coalition of small minority groups against a big Really plurality.
They're not the majority of the country, but the Pashtuns are about 40%.
And then the other 60% is divided by the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Hazaras, Turkmen, and other smaller minority ethnic and tribal groups there.
And so we're taking this collection of these much smaller, like 10% each type ethnic factions, and we're trying to voice that coalition on the plurality Pashtun population of the country.
And then I guess if people want to be a purist and say, no, that's not true.
There are posh students that have political power there too.
Yeah, maybe, but that doesn't mean that the posh student population has any political representation whatsoever.
Only the very worst of their warlords who we empower to abuse the hell out of them, right?
You know, we install Boss Hogg in charge over your county and we go, well, you know, he's got the same skin tone as you.
You better be happy. And that's not good enough, right?
So that's what we've done to those people.
And so that's why We're fighting an insurgency that cannot win, that we cannot defeat.
In Iraq War II, we were fighting for the Shiite super majority Arab population, 60% against the former 20% Sunni minority ruling coalition, right?
So that was a horrible bloody war.
But at the end of the day, it was attainable.
We got to the point where the Shiites took all of Baghdad, kicked all the Sunnis out, they won the civil war.
In this case, we're fighting a war that cannot possibly be won.
We're pushing a boulder up a hill that's over vertical.
It just is not going to go.
It is, of course, one of the great, cold, hard Machiavellian lessons in politics and power to look at Donald Trump's tweets about Afghanistan and the unwinnability, bring the boys back home, and then the actions that he's been taken after achieving the presidency.
It's not really talked about that much, which it should be, of course.
It's a good point to criticize him on.
What has Donald Trump done since achieving power and where do you think he should take things?
Yeah, it's a real shame, you know.
He used to say, probably a year and a half ago in the campaign, he would say, Obama and Hillary created ISIS. And they freaked out, right?
But then somebody asked him, oh yeah, well, what do you mean by that?
And he goes, well, they backed the jihadists in Libya and in Syria.
And then they pull the troops out of Iraq, so there was no one there to stop ISIS from taking over Iraq.
So, in the context of those first two points, the third point actually is somewhat true, right?
If you're going to back al-Qaeda in Syria, Stefan, you better leave your troops in Iraq so they don't take over Mosul, right?
Like, this is a more narrow argument.
But, by the time he was elected, he dropped the first two points.
Now, how did Obama create ISIS? It wasn't that he backed the jihadists in Libya and in Syria.
His advisors got to him on that.
Now, how did he create ISIS? He pulled the troops out of Iraq.
Never pull your troops out of anywhere ever.
And then he said this in his speech on August 21st, when he announced he was authorizing a new surge of troops, Marines and Rangers and others, to go and double down again in the war there.
And he invoked this political lesson, right?
That's what it is. It's a political lesson.
He would look bad if he pulled the troops out of Afghanistan.
Then anything bad that happens in Afghanistan after that is his fault.
Now, anything bad that happens in Afghanistan while we're there, well, you know, that's all just to spite our best efforts to do the right thing.
But anything bad that happens there after we leave, oh man, that's basically treason.
You can't ever leave anywhere ever.
And look, we're only in the first year of his presidency right now.
So he's going to pull all the troops out and then sit here and coast for another three, four years with Lindsey Graham and whoever replaces McCain and the amigos up there in the Senate and all the hawks criticizing him for being weak like Obama and pulling troops out leading to a crisis, which I'm here to promise you, and as I say in the book, when America does leave Afghanistan, it's going to be a bloody mess.
It's going to be an absolute disaster.
I mean, hey, maybe not.
Maybe they can work things out.
Maybe they're tired of fighting.
But I'm not here to predict roses and sunshine.
I mean, my whole point is that America has backed factions that have no legitimate standing to power.
It's a distortion in the market.
It's an inflation of their power.
And so when we leave, there's a correction coming.
And I don't know whether the Taliban will probably try to take over Kabul.
I kind of hope they won't and think they might not try it because, you know, why buy it off more than you can chew?
Why not just settle for Pashtunistan and real autonomy there?
It seems like they could do that.
But the argument that, you know, Trump has, you know, made himself, you know, basically, you know, submitted to on behalf of his generals is that he can't ever leave because whenever this correction happens, it'll be his fault.
Right.
It's the same reason Janet Yellen better keep printing money to prevent the next bubble from popping.
Right.
Well, he would have had to have done it right when he got into office.
And that way, I mean, the moment you, you know, you break it, you bought it, as the old statement had it way back in the day, that you'd have to do it right when you got into power.
And then you could say, well, this is all the result.
And of course, there are massive amounts of think tank and media and so on that are heavily influenced by the military-industrial complex that would go and say, look at all these terrible things, here are all these pictures of dead people, here are all these pictures of civil war.
This is what happens when you pull out in an attempt to try and get people to go back in, because it's a license to print money off human blood.
Right. Yeah. So now to your first point, absolutely.
He could have said, this is Bush and Obama's war.
I mean, if anybody could have said that, Hillary Clinton couldn't say that.
It's her war too. But Donald Trump, sure as hell, could have said that.
Still could, right?
He's Donald Trump. He can say whatever he wants.
He can flip flop all around if he wants.
He could say right now that, you know what?
This is stupid. This is all David Petraeus's fault.
This is all Bush and Obama's fault.
We're not responsible for the government in Kabul.
The Pashtun tribesmen are not the enemies of the United States of America.
And I'm calling this stupid thing off.
And you know what? Here's the thing about it.
Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat.
Barack Obama is a Clinton, right?
Donald Trump is a Republican.
And not only is he Republican, he's literally a skyscraper tycoon from Manhattan.
Well, he's really from Queens, but you know what I mean.
And so the point being that he could do Nixon goes to China over and over again.
No problem. All he has to do is take General Mattis with him.
You got my right flank, General?
Yes, sir, sir. All right, then.
We're going to Moscow.
We're going to Beijing. We're going to Pyongyang.
We're going to Tehran.
We're making peace.
We're getting out of Afghanistan.
The war against the Islamic State is over.
The Syrians and the Iraqis and whoever can finish mopping up what's left of the al-Nusra Front and the other CIA terrorists there, we're done.
And he could do that.
And say, yeah, what?
I mean, what are you going to do? Call him a weak, pinko, liberal commie who's appeasing our enemies?
Or are you going to go, look, he's doing this because he's smart.
He's doing this because this is why people voted for him.
It's because he promised no more era of Bush and Clinton.
No more era of these people and their horrible wars.
And that's what the people wanted, an end to the era of Bush and Clinton.
So this is how he delivers.
And then seriously, what are the Democrats going to do?
Are they going to run against him on the fact that he's a weak coward who made peace with everybody?
They wouldn't. They wouldn't be able to.
And they would have to say, well, he was great on getting along with the Iranians, but he's still really bad on whatever other issues, which he's bad on plenty of things, right?
Well, here's the thing. I mean, this is a fundamental delusion, Scott, that people need to really shake out of the cobwebs of their mind, which is, I mean, just look at Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. has one of the highest murder rates in America.
And Congress and the American government, well, they have pretty much complete dominion over it.
And they've been hundreds of years of shared history.
There's a shared religion, for the most part.
There is a shared culture.
And there's complete dominance of the American government.
And they still can't stamp out one of the highest murder rates in America.
So if Congress can't fix the neighborhoods right outside their own windows, the idea that they can fix...
Cultures and countries completely on the other side of the world, but there's no shared language, no shared religion, no shared history, no common goals, no appeal to nationalism is a complete fantasy.
Here's a sentence that really blew my mind in your book.
The financial cost has been over a trillion dollars with unimaginable and incalculable sacrifices made in terms of opportunity costs.
Again, as the Special Inspector General and others have pointed out, the reconstruction of Afghanistan has cost more than the entire Marshall Plan for aid to Western Europe after World War II. There's no more military power to throw at it.
There's no more money to throw at it.
At what point can people look in the mirror, hold up their bloody hands and say, this won't work?
Yeah. Well, I honestly, I think Sort of like I was just saying about Nixon could go to China and shake hands with Mao Zedong and Donald Trump could make peace, not that he has, that I think ultimately we got to attack the right from the right.
I mean, nobody really, everyone assumes that liberals and leftists are anti-war and for the most part they are.
I mean, the center left Democrat types aren't, but the rank and file people are, but nobody cares.
Right? Because the idea is, well, so what?
You're a wimp and if there was a big fight and we needed you, you wouldn't be available anyway, right?
So just leave it to the tough guys.
They know what to do. So what we need then is a movement, especially of veterans and especially combat veterans, And high-level military officers, colonels and generals, to say that's enough of this, you know?
And I think without that, we're not gonna get anywhere.
But because, you know, right now, as you know, at virtually every church, at the airport, at every public institution, oh, everyone stop and worship our heroes, support the troops, let the troop get on the plane before you, this, that.
All this, you know, kind of obliterates the true narrative that everybody knows.
None of this is legitimate anymore, if it ever was.
You can't fall for this anymore at this point, but it's going to take someone who is a two-star general, it's going to take somebody who lost his leg over there in the Korengal Valley to say, listen, supporting the troops means opposing the war.
Not supporting the war.
Not supporting the mission to make them feel good.
Opposing the war. Because that's your responsibility as the civilian population of the country to decide when or when it's not worth it.
To sacrifice the lives of soldiers, to make them kill people, and to risk their lives doing so, that part is our job.
We're not supposed to defer to the soldiers.
If the soldier says hoorah and wants to go, we're supposed to let that be the driver of our foreign policy?
No. That's our job.
He trusts us.
To decide. The reason he says hoorah is because he thinks as a 19-year-old that the grown-ups have decided that this is a good idea, that this is necessary, that he's fighting to protect freedom.
So what we need then is right-wingers and especially veterans to say, well, that's just not true.
It's a waste of money, as you just said.
It's breaking our bank. It's destroying constitutional federalism and the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers.
It's creating a centralization of police power in D.C. Unimaginable, even in the 1990s, what's going on now with the spying and all the rest of it.
And that the soldiers themselves are over it.
You know, I saw Colonel McGregor on Fox News on Tucker Carlson and McGregor and he wasn't being hyperbolic.
He was as cool as a cucumber.
And he said, listen, the force is broken.
The infantry, they do not believe in the mission anymore.
That's it. Game over.
It's time to come home. And he was talking about Afghanistan specifically.
But the same thing for the whole terror war.
You can't feel the broken force.
You can't send an infantry out there to conquer a country when they already know better now.
And I think if that's where they are, Then especially the right half of the American population has really got to catch up with them.
I know you remember that in 2007 and 8 and in 2011 and 12, Ron Paul made more, got more donations from active duty, military, enlisted and officers than all the other candidates combined on both sides.
In 2012 specifically, I know he made more than all the rest of the Republicans and Obama.
Oh, and it was the same in a way, too.
And Obama and Clinton and all the Republicans, John McCain and Mitt Romney, all of them combined.
Ron Paul got more donations from the enlisted men because they know better.
Hell, there was a poll in 2005 where in December 2005 were three quarters of the soldiers wanting to come home.
And that was from Afghanistan and Iraq.
They knew better by then.
Once Katrina drowned, right?
Once Katrina drowned, then the default presumption of the legitimacy and the brilliance and the competence of the Bush regime finally was dead.
You must presume the excellence of His Excellency or else you're the bad guy.
That finally died.
That finally drowned Katrina and the spell was broken.
And they've been over it since then.
Sorry I'm going on so long, but that's the real answer.
We need military leaders, retired ones, obviously.
We need religious leaders.
We need people who are dyed in the wool, hardcore capitalists, bow ties and not, to be anti-war and to prioritize their opposition to war.
And in fact, you know, let's talk about Yemen for a second here, if we can.
We're committing genocide right now.
The USA, for two and a half years, has been helping Saudi Arabia starve the population of the poorest country in the Middle East.
We've been doing it to Somalia since 2006.
I mean, really since 2001, but especially since 2006.
And now we're doing it to Yemen.
It's the poorest Arab country.
And because of IMF and World Bank gangsterism in the first place, they were forced or lured, bribed, extorted out of their sorghum and their local crops that they always sustained their population with.
We're lured into growing coffee and other crops for export on the global market.
Well, that's fine. If you can export your crops and then import food for money on the global market, wonderful.
Capitalism, which is great, until the USA lays siege to your country.
And now you have a country that was dependent on 90% of their food came from imports.
Sorry, my Sentences aren't stringing together perfectly here today.
They were dependent for 90% of their food on imports, and we put them under a blockade.
The only aid that's been getting in for two and a half years has been The emergency food aid from the Red Cross and so forth.
No international trade is allowed.
No just regular purchasing of food is allowed whatsoever.
And the Saudis have now cranked up the blockade in the last couple of weeks in response to the Yemenis firing a missile that almost hit the Riyadh airport but was shot down by Patriot missiles, I guess it was.
And so the lie here is that the Houthi force in Yemen is a proxy for Iranian power, and that this is the rise of the Iranian, you know, the new Persian Empire, and they're, you know, creating an outpost here in Yemen, which is just the furthest thing from the truth.
And all real experts on Yemen dispute that.
Even hardcore right-wing pro-war ones dispute that that's really true if they're, you know, being honest and detailed about it, you know, rather than just shouting slogans about it.
And that wouldn't be a good enough excuse anyway.
It is a deliberate war. Even the New York Times editorial said, it's clear the Saudi policy is to starve these people out.
It is to, again, like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to deliberately wage a war of starvation and illness against a civilian population to force them to submit.
And it hasn't worked in two and a half years.
I forgot the name of it, but it was like, Operation This Will Be Over by Tuesday or whatever, you know, one of these.
And now it's been two and a half years.
And people are dying. You know, the UN, occasionally, you see this number that 10,000 people have died.
Come on. Tens and tens and tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war.
And nobody knows, Stefan, and they're not going to know for years how many people have died of easily preventable diseases, of malnutrition.
Of this now the greatest cholera epidemic in recorded history is taking place.
A million people, 900,000 to a million people have cholera right now in Yemen.
And this is all because of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
I mean, the Saudis are doing it.
Everybody says the Saudi coalition this, the Saudi coalition that.
But America is the world empire, not Saudi Arabia.
They are the satellite. It's our Navy.
It's our planes doing the refueling of their planes.
We're the ones who sold them all their planes and all their bombs.
They just announced another $7 billion worth of weapons to them right now.
We're replenishing their stocks this whole time.
We've got American mercenaries doing all the carrying and feeding of the Saudi jets on their bases.
We have American spies, civilian and military, helping them pick out their targets.
This is America's war.
And again, look at the consequences of when Bill Clinton did this to the people of Iraq from bases in Saudi.
Now here we are teaming up with Saudi to do this to the people of Yemen.
And then in a couple of months or a couple of years, some Yemeni is going to kill a bunch of people.
And then every expert on Twitter is going to say, see Islam as the religion of violence and danger and death and hatred of all that is good, true and beautiful.
And we're going to sit here and pretend like we have no idea what they're pissed off about.
It is, to me, a very challenging hypothesis to maintain when the American government says we need a giant military because the world is so dangerous and then arms that world to the teeth.
Well, thanks, Scott, so much for your time today.
I really want to recommend, you know, this is one of these things that you're in America, you're a voter, you need to understand these issues so you can vote more intelligently.
You want to check out antiwar.com.
It's a great, great site.
And the book, of course, is Fool's Errant, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
We'll put a link to it below.
You can check out Scott's great work, scotthorton.org, and twitter.com forward slash scotthortonshow.
And of course, there is a Scott Horton Show itself.
Scott, thank you so much for your time and your passionate advocacy for peace.
