All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Dec. 10, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
59:07
20241210_scott-horton-vs-general-wesley-clark-on-syria-ukra
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
America's Treasonous Shift 00:02:54
America is back on the side of al-Qaeda.
Quite frankly, it's treason.
I know that the general is frustrated that America has to deal from a position of weakness here, but what are our other alternatives?
Putin does believe he's going to win.
There's no doubt about that.
Europe has population, it has technology, it has investment resources, it's everything that Russia wants.
This is going to be the great challenge for Donald Trump.
If he wants to make America great, he can't do it by sacrificing Europe.
Let's not let Putin talk us into the inevitability of Russian victory.
He wants territory.
This is Mother Russia.
They lost half of Russia to the Germans.
They still won.
This is about whether there's going to be a Ukraine or not.
And we've got a guy who's the top deal maker in the world, according to him.
And I hope Donald Trump can follow through on his pledge and end this war in 24 hours.
The world is still trying to make sense of Bashar al-Assad's spectacular downfall in Syria.
On the one hand, this was a popular and organic uprising against a brutal dictator.
On the other, President Biden says that his demise is directly thanks to Israel and Ukraine for weakening Iran and Russia, backed all the way by the United States.
Experts are now praising the reinvention and reformed vision of the man who led the rebellion.
Battleberry cynics are wondering when the U.S. and its allies learned to trust a group with explicit links to al-Qaeda.
Doubtless, there are many crosswires here, and many of them lead in opposing directions to the United States and to Russia.
Over the next hour, we're going to untangle them with the help of two guests who are returning by popular demand.
Last week, we had an illuminating debate about the United States' role in Ukraine's war.
Two guests in particular felt they had more to discuss with each other, and the audience agreed.
Scott Horton is the author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
Wesley Clark retired as a full-star general after 38 years in the U.S. Army, serving as a supreme ally commander of NATO.
Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for coming back and facing off against each other.
After that last debate last week, which was fascinating, there was a lot of response from, as you know, I think both of you, from a lot of people who watched it saying, what I would really like to see is Scott Horton and General Clark going at it one-to-one and really trying to get some clarity about their differences of opinion over this.
So that's why we've got you back together and I appreciate you agreeing to do this.
I would say that General Clark, I gave you a lot of time the other day deliberately because I found what you were saying were fascinating.
Here, if we can, I'd like to keep the responses slightly trimmer so that we can get more of a debate going than people talking perhaps for too long in one slab.
So with that in mind, let me start with you, Scott.
I want to start with Syria.
We are going to come to Ukraine, which is the main purpose of getting you back together.
Jolani and Regional Finance 00:03:57
But on Syria, what is your view about what has really happened here?
Well, obviously, you have what amounted to a secular dictatorship there that, you know, was they had some phony elections from time to time, but essentially it was a strong-armed dictatorship that obviously, when it came down to it, lacked the popular support that they needed to stay in power.
But I'm extremely worried about the near-term and medium-term future here because the group that has taken over HTS really is Al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria.
Their leader, Jolani, announced, he said, we are the Mujahideen.
This is what he said in his speech at the mosque, and we have taken over the country.
This is a man who literally fought against Americans in Fallujah in Iraq War II and was sent by the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, then renamed the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to go and start the war in Syria in 2011 or to take over the war.
And in fact, Victoria Newland was the State Department spokesman at the time and or spokeswoman, and she put out a statement saying that people should know Jabba al-Nusra is just an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That's what they are, al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria.
And American and Allied support for al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army and associated groups, Jaish al-Islam and others, back 10 years ago, it backfired because instead of everyone marching east, pardon me, west toward Damascus, they went east and they consolidated a state in eastern Syria and then eventually they conquered all of western Iraq, creating the caliphate and necessitating Iraq War III.
Now, that was under Baghdadi, who had split from Jolani, and Jolani is now clearly under the public relations care of the West and is taking their advice to moderate his positions.
However, he's now in charge of a country full of millions of Shiite Arabs and secular Sunnis, Christians of all different descriptions, and people who are certainly not going to be welcome to help rule the regime with him and may very well be under threat.
And it remains to be seen how well he will be able to control his new legions who truly are bin Ladenite terrorists.
General Clark, I mean, my understanding of the situation is not too dissimilar to what Scott has just laid out.
I mean, this guy who's now running the rebels and taking over is somebody who was part of al-Qaeda.
It's more complex and he's tried to move away from the more extremist elements of that part of his past.
But would you take issue with Scott's framing of where this now is in Syria?
Not much issue.
Yeah.
And I would tell you this, Piers, that when you're looking at this region, you can never exclude the role of states in the region.
They finance the terrorists.
Different states finance different groups of terrorists.
And ISIS actually had relations, had talked to Turkey and the Kurds before they went into Mosul.
At least that's what I'm informed by people in the region who were in a position to know.
So these states aren't strangers to this.
I see Turkey's hand behind this.
President Erdogan for a long time has had expanded visions in the region.
You know, Syria and Lebanon and Palestine were all under the Ottoman Empire.
And Erdogan has ambitions to be a more greater stabilizing force in the region.
Neoconservative Shiite Alliances 00:04:53
Let's put it that way.
And, you know, we've used and abused the Kurds for the last 50 years.
We used them against Saddam Hussein.
We abandoned them.
We used them again.
We supported them.
And now they're at risk again.
And we've got U.S. troops in there with them.
And there's already fighting.
There was fighting between some Turkish-supported Syrian National Army troops and the Syria Democratic Front, which we're supporting.
And so this is a really unsettled situation.
We just don't know how it's going to turn out.
Before I go...
One thing, though, that is good, at least thus far, is that they've said the government of Syria should stay in place and the army should stay in place.
And they learned more maybe from our experience in Iraq.
or when you're going to go in and take over, you don't immediately destroy all the authority.
Who has control of the intelligence?
Because there's going to be a lot of score settling here.
Yeah.
I mean, Scott, a Lebanese friend of mine said to me today, if you look at Iran after the Shah was deposed, if you look at Iraq after Saddam was deposed, if you look at almost Libya with Gaddafi, if you look at the history in the last few decades of dictators being deposed or alleged dictators, that the future can often be as bad, if not worse, certainly in the aftermath for a few years.
I mean, I agree.
Listen, I'd like to go back, Pierce, to something that General Clark is probably most famous for in the world, more than even the Serbia war, is his statement from 2002 about a secret plan that he had seen in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon to take out seven countries in five years.
And that plan, that's the neoconservatives' plan.
That's the Wolfowitz-Richard Pearl doctrine.
And it was based on the thinking of Pearl and David Wormser, the clean break strategy from 1996.
And what they said, it's a little bit complicated, but what they said was Israel's problem is Hezbollah on their northern border.
And what they wanted to do was dump Oslo and take the Palestinian territories.
But they couldn't do that as long as they had a threat from Hezbollah on their northern border.
And they said the problem is Hezbollah is armed by Iran by way of Syria.
And then nonsensically, Pierce, they said the way to solve this was to get rid of Saddam Hussein, secular Sunni, Saddam Hussein, the roadblock in the Shiite crescent.
Get rid of him.
And David Wormser and Richard Pearl thought that would give Turkey and Jordan dominance over the Iraqi Shia supermajority.
And then they would have the Iraqi clergy tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice with Israel.
Well, that didn't work at all.
And Iraq War II was a disaster.
It put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawah Party, and their great advisor, the Ayatollah Sistani.
That's who rules Baghdad now because of Iraq War II.
So then they launched a policy.
And everyone, I beg you to read this.
It's Seymour Hirsch in the New Yorker magazine.
It's called the Redirection, and it's from 2007.
And what it is, is Khalil Zad and Abrams, two card-carrying neoconservatives.
They said, we screwed up.
We just put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad.
Now we have to try to make up for that fact by overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
And this policy was adopted by W. Bush before Barack Obama ever came to town.
And if you go back, and I document this in my previous book enough already, if you go back and look at the dawn of the intervention in the Syria war in 2011 and 12, it was the neoconservative war party that puts Israel first.
They said, yes, we should support even bin Ladenites, even after September 11th, even after Iraq War II, where they killed 4,000 of our guys of the 4,500 who died in Iraq War II, because they hate the Shiites more.
They hate Iran, now Baghdad, Damascus, which is Alawite but allied with Iran, of course, and Hezbollah.
That's the neoconservatives enemy, is the Shiite alliance.
But it wasn't Hezbollah that knocked our towers down.
That was the bin Ladenites.
They weren't sent by Iran, Iraq, or Syria, the axis of evil.
They were from our allied states.
They hated us because we're too close to Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
So here we are.
It's America's Sunni alliance versus Iran's Shiite alliance.
And America is back on the side of al-Qaeda because of the interests of a foreign power.
And quite frankly, it's treason.
Joe Biden announced he's going to give aid to the new bin Ladenite government in Damascus now yesterday.
Wolfowitz and Iraq War 00:02:57
It's incredible, but that's the answer.
That's why.
Okay.
I want to play, out of fairness to General Clark, I want to play the clip that Scott referenced there of you back from 2002.
So let's listen to this.
Right after 9-11, about 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me.
And one of the generals called me in.
He said, sir, you got to come in.
You've got to come in and talk to me a second.
I said, well, you're too busy.
He said, no, no.
He says, we've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
This was on or about the 20th of September.
I said, we're going to war with Iraq.
Why?
He said, I don't know.
He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?
He said, no, no.
He says, there's nothing new that way.
They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later.
And by that time, we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper and he said, I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense's office today.
And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
General Clark, aside from the fact that you have aged extremely well since that clip, given we're 22 years later, so congratulations on your gene pool.
When you hear yourself talking then, I mean, you sound almost incredulous about what you were learning there.
What do you feel about it?
Actually, you know when it started, Piers, is 1991.
I went in to see Under Secretary Wolfowitz in May of 91.
He told me, I said, you've got to be proud of how the troops have done in the Gulf War, right?
He said, yeah, but President Bush said they're going to get rid of Saddam.
He said, I don't think that's going to happen.
He said, but we've got maybe five to ten years to get rid of all these old Soviet surrogate countries, governments like Iraq and Syria and Libya and so forth before the next great superpower comes along.
I said, five to ten years we're going to attack them.
And he said, well, and I said, who's the next superpower?
Is it China?
He said, well, and then he sort of faded off like it's a Friday afternoon.
I don't want to think about it anymore.
Scale of Shia Terrorism 00:15:33
But they actually put together a plan.
They took it apparently to Brince Goecroft, who was George H. Bush's national security advisor.
And General Scowcroft said, let's hold on this until after the election.
The election didn't work out for them.
They left.
I came into the Pentagon in the spring of 94.
They said, what's the national security strategy?
I said, I don't know, but what about the stuff that Wolfowitz was proposing?
Nobody'd ever heard of it.
It got resurrected in a study that was paid for by the Israelis, Richard Pearl.
And that's the study that said that if you want to protect Israel and you want Israel to succeed and have peace negotiations work, then you've got to get rid of the states that are surrounding on the periphery that are preventing Yasra Arafat from making an agreement.
And so this led to all that followed.
So I don't, I'm not, I'm not that far off.
It's just that, you know, right now I don't know for sure exactly whether the Sunni terrorists that comprise HTS have changed their spots.
I don't really see their, I don't know their independence from Turkey.
My guess would be that President Erdogan helped them, maneuvered them around.
He certainly was the first national leader to speak out on their behalf.
I suspect that Turkey told Russia, don't worry about your bases there.
We'll protect them.
You can stay.
But you remember when this first started, Russia was bombing, and then they stopped.
And that's when the state-to-state discussions began.
And I think there was a sort of agreement on this.
Russia would like to get its troops back so it can handle Ukraine anyway.
It was a little embarrassing for Russia, but they'd like to get their troops back and they'd like to keep their bases.
And Turkey would like to have greater influence in the region and especially to work against the Kurds.
And to do that, this is a sort of roundabout way to do it.
And then they're sort of gambling that they can control the devils that they're working with in there.
I don't know how this is going to work out.
And I don't know what assistance the United States is going to provide because we're working with the Syria Democratic Forces and the Kurds up there in the Northeast.
And that's probably not going to be a smooth relationship, at least initially.
Point that Scott made, which is it's almost beyond parody that the United States is ending up now sending support to somebody who was al-Qaeda's representative.
I mean, there is a perversity to that, isn't there?
I mean, al-Qaeda responsible for one of the worst terror attacks on American mainland in history, the worst, in fact.
And now they're supporting the guy who was one of the key members of that organization?
Well, it's not like...
Yes, yes, it's always difficult.
Look, there is Shia terrorism and there's Sunni terrorism.
The Shia terrorism is normally state organized.
The Shia terrorism, sorry, the Sunni terrorism is normally not state organized.
It's independent of that.
And so the United States has been working on a state-to-state basis.
It's tried to restore the government in Iraq.
It's trying to, it's going to try to help a government emerge in Syria.
But underneath this, the United States, of course, has to be concerned about terrorism.
And, you know, it just remains to be seen.
It's the $64,000 question at this point is who are these people?
Who are they listening to?
Did they really change their spots?
Yeah, I completely agree.
Let's move on to why I got you guys back together, because I found last week's debate about Ukraine fascinating.
There have been developments since then.
Both Donald Trump and President Zelensky, they've both come out now with statements, Scott, about, I mean, it looks to me like Trump is desperate to do a deal.
He infers that Russia will want to do a deal because of the casualty rate on the battlefield in Ukraine, which is so bad for the Russians now.
They're recruiting North Korean troops to come and join them because they simply can't get the manpower.
And the report is that up to 2,000 Russians a day are being killed, which is staggering.
You also have Zelensky for the first time in the last week clearly signaling that he is prepared to do a peace deal and inferring that as part of that, he accepts that Ukraine will have to cede some territory.
So where do you think we're going to be with Ukraine, first of all, in the next six months?
Well, I'm really not sure.
I definitely am very pleased to hear Donald Trump insist that we have to have a negotiated solution.
All due respect to the general, when we were on last week, Jank Younger asked, but general, what if Ukraine can't?
And General Clark simply dismissed the premise of the question and said, nope, it's the Russians who must be made to fail.
But the thing of it is, is that's really not based in reality.
That's like saying, well, the Taliban just can't be allowed to win or Ho Chi Minh just can't be allowed to win.
They're going to win.
And the question is how bad it's going to be.
As everyone has agreed, including Biden, we're not sending the 82nd airborne in there or the U.S. Navy to reverse Russian gains on the ground.
There's no way we're willing to risk that level of war between NATO and the Russian Federation to reverse Russia's gains on the ground.
And the Ukrainians don't have the manpower to do it.
As even Kamala Harris has explained, Russia is a bigger country.
They have more men and they have not even engaged in a full-scale mobilization yet.
They are, for public relations purposes, obviously keeping this so-called police action, a special military operation, not a full-scale war.
They could escalate.
They could expand conscription and escalate the war terribly.
Right now, Ukraine has lost four major oblasts, they call them, these large counties basically, or provinces in the Far East and south of the country.
And right now, Kharkiv is still in Ukrainian hands.
Odessa is still in Ukrainian hands.
And I would remind everyone back in the fall of 22, the Ukrainians had a brilliant feint in Kherson and then a major move and they liberated all of Kharkiv, Oblast, and some of Luhansk.
And this was the high watermark of Ukraine's effort in the war.
And at that time, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the currently serving then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, both said, negotiate now.
Deal now while you're only this far behind and not worse.
But they were overruled by the Wendies, people like Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who'd never been in a fight in their lives, who just said, no, we're going to do the escalation.
We're going to do the winter surge.
And then it became the spring surge.
Sorry, they called it the escalation.
And then they launched it in the summer and it was a disaster.
In the summer of 23, they didn't get anywhere.
And it's been all downhill for them since then.
And yes, the Russians are suffering horrible casualty rates.
The war is an absolute horror show on the ground there, but the Ukrainians are too.
And momentum is on the Russian side.
So it's, I know that the general is frustrated that America has to deal from a position of weakness here.
But what are our other alternatives other than sending in Navy destroyers and the American Air Force and Army to reverse the gains on the ground, which I know that I can't imagine that he's in favor of doing?
General Clark, it's interesting.
My brother was an Army colonel in the British Army for 35 years.
And when I went to interview President Zelensky in about the four months after the war began in 2022, and I came back and I said, there is not a chance in hell these guys are going to give an inch to Putin.
They're not going to cede an inch of land.
And they shouldn't.
And we had a very vigorous debate about this.
And I said, why should anyone want a Russian dictator to be able to illegally invade a sovereign democratic European country and just take what he wants and kill loads of people in the process?
And he said, I'll tell you why.
He said, because Putin has sold this to his people, that it was NATO encroachment and the threat of that, which is why he's doing this as a security operation to protect the national interest of Russia on its border.
But secondly, he said he has overpowering military might.
And ultimately, that will mean that Ukraine cannot win this war.
And I spoke to him yesterday, and I had to basically cede that I feel like he's been proven right.
Now, it may not look like a glorious victory for Russia, but ultimately, it is highly likely, I would think, unless you think otherwise, that Ukraine is going to have to cede most, if not all, of the territory that Russia has taken, isn't it?
Well, I don't think there's any reason or nor does it make a good negotiating posture to sort of advance this at this point.
I think if you go back and look at this, first of all, the U.S. intelligence agencies failed from the beginning to really appreciate what was going on in Ukraine.
We didn't have coverage.
The diplomats didn't understand that Ukraine was a different country than Russia.
Most of the people that studied the Soviet Union went to Moscow after the war.
They didn't go to Ukraine.
They took the Russian view of it.
And so we had really sort of bad guidance at the outset.
In 2014, the United States basically said, well, you know, Ukraine can't defend itself.
Just give up Crimea.
We told them to give up Crimea.
That wasn't enough.
Putin then decided he would try to take Donbass.
I was in, when I was over there on the 31st of March, 1st, 2nd, 3rd of April of 2014, Ukrainians came to me and said, we have 50,000 people.
We stayed in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia.
We held those against the party of regents, which was the Yanukovych's party, the Russian party there.
We defended it.
We fought for 30 days.
We stayed.
We wouldn't let them have the administration.
So there was a widespread effort.
The United States really wasn't engaged in it, didn't understand it, didn't have much to do with it, really.
Victoria Newland sort of spoke out of turn.
She got chastised for that.
Obama was trying to use Putin to help with Iran.
And suddenly this thing pops up like, what the hell?
We had already outsourced our foreign policy in Europe essentially to Angela Merkel.
Angela Merkel, in the way that Europeans do, they sort of blunder in, well, let's all get together and share our interests.
And of course, Putin is a geostrategist.
He's not an economist.
He doesn't care about trade.
He wants territory.
And from the time he became the president in 2000, he wanted to take over the space of the Soviet Union.
He still does.
So there have been a lot of misestimates.
And I wouldn't quote Mike Mullen or Mark Milley, although they're both good men.
They weren't there.
They weren't on the ground.
They didn't see the intensity of the Ukrainians' resistance.
As to what happens now, I think there's still determination in Ukraine to stay and fight.
This is about whether there's going to be a Ukraine or not.
Now, Putin does believe he's going to win.
There's no doubt about that.
He thinks that, and he's not going to say, okay, I'm ready for negotiations because I've lost a few troops.
This is mother Russia.
They lost half of Russia to the Germans.
They still won.
So he is fully engaged in this.
And this is going to be the great challenge for Donald Trump.
If he wants to make America great, he can't do it by sacrificing Europe because Europe is the geostrategic prize that both Russia and China crave.
And Europe is there for the Americans right now.
Now, you may not want to think in terms of geostrategy.
Most Americans don't, but most of the rest of the world does.
And so I think when Donald Trump is speaking, and I heard him speak on the last interview he made, and he talked about NATO, he sounds pretty strong.
I think he's going to recognize that he's going to have to find a win-win solution out of this.
And it can't simply be that we abandon Ukraine.
Putin wants all of Eastern Europe back, and he wants the rest of Europe neutralized.
And look, Europe has population, it has technology, it has investment resources, it has markets, it's everything that China wants, and it's also what Russia wants.
And it wants us.
So if you want to be the great leader of the world, take what's there that we already have.
We have to find a way through this.
And so I wouldn't start by saying it's inevitable that Ukraine has to give up half its territory or something like this.
Let's let the reinforcing forces go in.
Let's not talk defeatism at this stage.
Let's not let Putin talk us into the inevitability of Russian victory.
It's only inevitable if we believe it's inevitable.
And that's all his work.
He's got agents and people who will carry his talking points all through the West, every country.
And believe me, in every country in Europe, there are people who will say, if Ukraine falls, don't worry about it.
Don't worry.
We can deal with Putin.
He's somebody we can work with.
And this whole thing, and that's Putin's plan.
He doesn't want a military aggression in Europe.
He doesn't want to use nuclear weapons.
He's an intelligence guy.
He wants it to fall to him.
And he's good at it.
He's the senior statesman in the world today.
He knows what he's doing.
So he's going to dangle opportunities for President Trump.
He's going to make it seem like, well, if you give us Ukraine, I'm sure we can work together against China.
Or it's going to be like, if you give up Ukraine, I'm sure we're going to be able to solve the problem of Iran and the Middle East and so forth.
He's going to, well, he's playing big picture stuff.
It's not just about Ukraine.
Ukraine's just a chip on the board as far as Putin is concerned.
And we have to think in the same scale.
And at the same time, just as Scott's saying, we're worried about terrorists, too.
Yeah, Ms. Scott, I have to say, I do agree with a lot of what General Clark says.
I mean, I just find the way that we have, I think the West and America, and oddly, a lot of Republicans actually in America, the way that they've done a complete U-turn on what they used to have as a collective view about a Russian dictator is that they've now moved to almost a policy of appeasing Vladimir Putin, you know, and being frightened by his nuclear saber rattling and saying, you know, we shouldn't get involved.
Ukraine as a NATO Chip 00:15:22
We should give him what he wants.
How does that help America's, all the West in general's national interest?
Well, the problem is the general is truncating all the antecedents.
And there's a lot to argue about in terms of Putin's motives here.
He just wants to retake all of Eastern Europe.
Last week, he said he even wants, he has to go all the way to the Balkans, conquer the former Yugoslavia so he can fight China.
I mean, I don't have any idea really why he thinks that, but there's really no reason to think that that's true.
I mean, Vladimir Putin essentially is a bureaucrat, not a romantic.
He's a technocrat who, as even the last chair of NATO said, he went to war to prevent the encroachment of NATO closer to his borders.
And you don't have to agree.
The book, again, is called Provoked, Not Justified.
You don't have to agree that he had the right to do what he did to understand that America engaged in reckless policies in Ukraine.
Many scholars on the American side say it was the worst of all worlds.
We promised them repeatedly, including in 21, we're going to bring you into NATO.
We're going to bring you into NATO.
We're going to increase and improve your interoperability between your military and ours, making them essentially a de facto member more and more, but without the war guarantee.
So in other words, just getting them into worse trouble.
And you know, there's a great journalist named Zach Dorfman who wrote a piece, a series at the beginning of the war based on CIA sources for Yahoo News.
And the CIA sources told him, and these are the guys who were in charge of importing and distributing the American weapons.
And he said, listen, the calibration is off.
We keep trying to tell our bosses to tell the politicians all these weapons that we're pouring in.
It's not enough to deter Putin, but it is enough to provoke him.
We're essentially putting our friends in a position to get into a terrible fight, that then we're not willing to help them truly win.
And I have to point out here, Pierce, that the general, again, refused to answer the question about how this is actually supposed to work.
As your brother-in-law, the military expert says, they are overmatched on the battlefield.
Even if Britain and Germany and Poland tried to intervene, it would take the United States of America.
It would take the 82nd Airborne, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy to reverse these gains.
They tried putting in tanks.
They tried putting in F-16s.
They put in the HIMARS and the ATACOMs and different weapon systems.
That doesn't make the difference.
And I'm sure you saw, guys, both of you, in the last week, the Associated Press had a story that said they've had 100,000 deserters on the Ukrainian side.
Their casualties are roughly equivalent to the Russian casualties.
We don't know for sure.
Both sides embellish the others and play down their own.
But they have suffered inordinate casualties.
And you have American politicians demanding that they lower the conscription age and lower the age at which they send boys to go to the front line to die.
And so to just dismiss Mark Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time and had access to every last bit of classified data about what was going on in the war, and to say, well, he just didn't understand the high morale that the Ukrainian forces on the ground have.
And that's what makes the difference.
And that's just a pipe dream.
This is literally no different, Pierce, than if 10 years ago Clark had said, and I'm not saying he did.
I don't remember his position at the time.
But if anyone else had said 10 years ago that, no, the surge in Afghanistan is going to work.
And the Taliban, they just must not be allowed to win.
Why, if they win, just think about their appetite.
They might go to Tajikistan next.
You can make up whatever you want about it.
But the reality was that the coalition that America built in Kabul was never going to be able to keep the Pashtun plurality down.
Just like the coalition we put together here is not able to hold off the Russians.
Again, as Kamala Harris said, it's a bigger country, a wealthier country, a more heavily armed country.
And they don't even need to take a boat like Taiwan.
It's literally right across their land border for them to drive right across.
And so we end up repeatedly at, yeah, but Putin just must not be allowed when they do not have an answer to how are you going to stop them then.
Okay, General, your response to that.
Well, first of all, I wouldn't have said the surge would work in Afghanistan.
From the beginning, I said there wasn't the right plan in Afghanistan.
I was against the invasion of Iraq.
It's not something the U.S. needed to do.
And an occupation is not something the U.S. Army can do, especially not in a Muslim country.
So let's forget about for a minute the comparison between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine.
That's irrelevant.
What's relevant here is how you want to shape the future of Europe for the United States best benefit.
And if you believe the best benefit is to simply accede to Russia's supposed superiority, then I can show you all the documents in which Putin has said he wants one space from the Atlantic to Vladivostok.
And if you look at the December 2021 documents, he wants the neutralization.
He wants NATO rolled back to pre-1997.
He wants the countries in Eastern Europe out of NATO.
He wants to reestablish control over the Baltics.
And as the generals in Moscow told me in 1995, when we were going to put the first NATO force into Bosnia, he said, you're coming into our part of Europe.
And there was never any question about it.
And it's not just Putin.
It's the way Russia thinks.
It's Russian imperialism.
So the Balkans is their part of Europe.
They're working very hard right now with Mr. Vucich and Dodik in Republika Srpska to cause problems there and make difficulties for the Dayton Peace Agreement, which Richard Holbrook and our team helped negotiate and bring to a conclusion.
And so, yes, they have ambitions.
And if you talk to the people in the region, they understand this very well, that it's not just about Ukraine or Moldova or Georgia.
Just over the weekend, people from Georgia are calling me and said, you got to help.
You got to help Georgia.
I mean, they're taking over.
They've got about 20% of Georgia they occupied after 2008.
They move the markers about 100 meters every six months or a year in Georgia and challenge the Georgians to resist it.
And Georgia wants to be part of the West.
That's why there's hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating.
And yet, if the West is silent, if we don't use our influence there, yes, Putin will take it.
It's not what people want.
And so it comes back to how do you view the role of the United States?
Are we a nation that can try to help others reach what we have and what they aspire to?
Or are we just an historic anomaly that should shrink back in and say, oh, thank goodness we're protected by two oceans?
Because we know those two oceans don't work anymore.
They worked for a long time.
If you want safety and security, if you want our values, if you want democracy, you have to be able to have a foreign policy that reaches out with all the elements of national power beyond the borders of America.
If you want to make America great again, as Donald Trump says he wants to do, he's going to have to face the fact, as H.R. McMaster said the other day.
Look, it's not just Russia.
It's not just Europe.
It's Iran.
It's North Korea.
It's China.
It's Russia.
They work increasingly closely together to confound and disrupt and reduce America's influence in the world.
And that's bad for everyone in this country.
I'm sorry about Afghanistan.
I'm sorry about Iraq.
I'm sorry about all the military men we left over there that died over there, the mistakes that were made by the Pentagon.
I wasn't there.
If I had been, I think it would have been different.
But, you know, most of these mistakes that have been made have been made by politicians.
And in the case of Ukraine, President Obama never understood it.
He had outsourced our foreign policies to Germany.
He was facing toward Asia.
They didn't get it.
President Biden, I would have counseled, and I tried to counsel publicly.
When you meet Putin in Geneva, tell him no.
Tell him you're not going to be able to advance.
We already knew in the spring of 2021 that he was planning to attack Ukraine.
We could have said to him, You go into Ukraine, we're going to do everything we can to stop you, and we will stop you.
Instead, we said, Well, we hope you'll be a gentleman and a statesman.
That's not using American power.
I hope Donald Trump, and I think he does, understand the use of power.
You have to use power in this world.
And we're coming to, it's what Xi Jinping told Putin a year and a half ago.
He said, change is not seen in 100 years, and we are driving it.
We've had 75 pretty good years since the Second World War.
If we like the world as it's emerged, if we like mostly a rule of law, if we like travel, if we like relatively corrupt free government, relatively open opportunities to express differences of opinion, then you're going to have to stand up for those values and fight for them because you're not going to have them in China or Russia or if China and Russia have control over the United States.
So, Scott, I mean, again, I find myself nodding to the principle there.
I mean, if you don't stand up the United States for democracy and freedom, where it gets attacked with impunity, then where does that leave the world when you have this axis of China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, who would relish a United States that is impotent in the face of attack on democracy and freedom?
All right.
Well, first of all, I would like to go back to the earlier point he was making about the military threat that Russia poses.
I would cite Victoria Newland, you know, by the rules of confirmation bias.
If she agrees with me, then that means I'm definitely right.
And Victoria Newland says the current war proves that Russia is a total paper tiger.
They're a threat to the eastern and southern four provinces of Ukraine, but they can't even take Kiev.
The idea that they're going to march on Warsaw, that they're a threat to Berlin, that they're coming for the Baltics and everyone next.
You hear Clark use the word like to.
Putin would like to rule Portugal and all the land from there to the Yucatan Peninsula.
So what?
That doesn't mean anything.
He has no ability to do that whatsoever.
It's not just the NATO threat.
He doesn't have the armed force to be able to, or the secret spy force to be able to establish the political hegemony that Clark describes here.
It's just a fantasy.
But I want to go back to the 1990s because General Clark, sir, in fact, you were right the first time.
In the 1990s, it was not the Secretary of State, it was the Secretary of Defense, William Perry, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shaley Kashvili, and the chief of the CIA's policy planning on the joint staff, General Wesley Clark, who tried to push the partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion.
And it wasn't because, as he implied a week ago, well, it would be a hassle and we're busy at the Pentagon.
That's not what it was.
It was because General, well, I don't know Clark's motivations, and he can explain his own thinking at the time.
But Perry and Shaakashvili said explicitly that this will be an unnecessary provocation against the Russians.
That, of course, they accepted that America is not leaving Europe, all other things being equal, they're staying there.
But they said, we have to bring Russia in first.
And then, if not into NATO, then into the Partnership for Peace or use the CSCE or these other organizations that Russia and Ukraine were already members of.
That way, yes, of course, we want to guarantee, this is them talking, of course, we want to guarantee the sovereignty and the protection of Hungary and the Baltics and Poland and all our new Eastern European friends, these newly liberated states from Russia.
But we can't do it in a way where we're simply dividing Europe by moving the line further east, but leaving Europe divided.
Because if it's all ultimately pointed at Russia, then we're going to get a response.
And as George Kennan said in his famous interview with Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he said, I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen.
He said, everyone who's telling us now that NATO expansion is just fine and it won't cause a problem with the Russians, the Russians will react.
And when they do, these very same men will tell us, see, that's just how the Russians are.
And that's why we need NATO to defend Europe.
But you see, as Kennan himself said, X himself said, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We're the ones making it happen.
And General Clark and his leaders at the Pentagon knew better.
And then it was the Weenies.
It was Talbot and Lake and Holbrook who won and why?
Because Holbrook talks louder is why they won and got their policy, which ended up being at the detriment of all of us.
And Clark said a week ago, no, Clinton was right to overrule me.
I didn't know what I was talking about.
But here we are in the middle of a horrible war, which is the direct result of Bill Clinton ignoring Secretary Perry's advice.
And as I ended last week saying, Perry now says that he regrets that he didn't resign.
And he even, you can read it in The Guardian, he even takes full responsibility, personal, full responsibility for what he calls the deterioration of American and Russian relations since that time because he didn't do every possible thing he could to stop Bill Clinton in his folly.
General Clark, is it possible that both things are true at the same time?
That Vladimir Putin is a ruthless Russian dictator, who if you give him an inch, will take a mile, but that also NATO was encroaching nearer and nearer to Russian borders, and that Putin would have understandably viewed that as an aggressive maneuver by NATO.
Putin vs Encroaching NATO 00:04:47
In other words, could the two things be right?
Well, I think you have to go back to the fall of the Soviet Union and look at things there.
And so in the climatic meeting in December of 1991, as Yeltsin said and to the Belarus Lukashenko and to the Ukrainian president, said, who is this Mikhail Sergeyevich to tell us we have to have a union?
We are independent countries.
We are our own countries.
We are Ukraine, Belarus, Russia.
What is this union?
And so that's how the Soviet Union dissolved.
And I've heard this from people who were actually there.
That was the discussion.
And so I think when you looked at this, what I found in the spring of 94, when I did the first Ukrainian U.S. staff talks, in the summer of 94, I did the first Russian U.S. staff talks.
Russian generals said to me, they said, when will your NATO ships be in our port of Riga?
I said, well, since right now, it's not your port.
It belongs to a country of Latvia, and that's an independent country.
Now, the more you keep asking this question, the sooner those ships will be there, because the people in Eastern Europe were terrified that Russia would come back.
And that's why Bill Clinton made the decision.
Now, I love Secretary Perry's great man and great leader, but he wasn't doing those discussions.
He didn't feel that.
He didn't feel what Clinton felt.
And, you know, one of the basic principles that we've had going forward, really, since the Treaty of Westphalia, is respect for state boundaries.
And so these were independent countries, and they wanted to be independent countries.
They did not want to be re-subjugated by Moscow.
And so the thinking at the time was, we'll make the right arrangements with Russia.
We'll smooth this out.
But what we didn't understand at the time was the extraordinary grip that the Russian intelligence apparatus had in Russia.
It was never shattered.
The Soviet Union broke apart.
The intelligence agencies never broke apart.
They put their money in the West.
They trained their people to run for office.
They kept their relationships, you know, once KGB, always KGB.
And it's bound by a code of death.
And it's a very, very strong collegial relationship.
And what Vladimir Putin learned to do in St. Petersburg was work with the criminal organizations that had emerged that were there all the time, but got a lot stronger after 1991.
And now you have a sort of mafia intelligence state.
That's not what Bill Perry thought was going to happen in Russia.
That's not the Russia that signed the agreement to respect the boundaries of Ukraine.
That's not the way we were approaching it.
We were respecting Russia as a state.
We were hoping for the aspirations of the Russian people.
We wanted the culture, the history, the friendship historically between the United States and Russia.
But it was denied us by the re-emergence and strengthening of the Russian intelligence apparatus, which since Vladimir Lenin has always needed an enemy.
They cannot work within their borders.
They must have an enemy.
This was the whole point of the Communist International.
And they're adroitly working today throughout Europe with espionage and sabotage and manipulating elections.
You probably saw that the Constitutional Court in Romania threw out the presidential election through because of manipulation there by, look, this is a serious threat to democracy.
And if we believe as we believe about our values and the importance of individual dignity and the rights of people and conscience, and there's never been a time in human history when so many people had freedom.
If we want to preserve that, then we're going to have to stand up for what we believe.
And yes, Russia looks powerful.
Russia looks frightening.
Putin is a, you know, he's a killer.
Democratic Threats in Romania 00:07:50
That's what President Biden said.
But President Biden didn't put the power behind his values.
He didn't give Ukraine enough to really roll it back.
And I could go through many, many episodes of what's happened since 2022 and discuss this with Scott.
But the essence of it is that there was never a policy that Ukraine would win.
I don't know what the policy was.
Maybe it was like, let's just get through the next election so Donald Trump doesn't criticize me for starting World War III.
And then maybe I can rally the people of the West and tell them the truth about this.
But President Biden never went to the American people and explained in clear terms on a repetitive basis to rally the West the way that, let's say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did.
And it takes leadership.
This is a profound challenge.
And I think Donald Trump is going to see it.
And I hope Donald Trump will rally the West to face this challenge.
He says he knows Vladimir Putin very well.
Well, if he knows him that well, he knows he's playing with a mafia chieftain.
And you play with the mafia, got to go from a position of power.
We have the power now.
Don't surrender it.
Scope, final words to you.
Well, I would say our current CIA director, William Burns, he was the ambassador to Moscow in the W. Bush years, in the late W. Bush years.
And he warned Connollyza Rice in his Net Means Nyet memo against the Bucharest Declaration and the half membership action plan to promise to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO someday.
And I had missed this.
I only reread this in my book and noticed the other day that he actually thought that Connollyzer Rice agreed with him.
Secretary of State Rice agreed with him.
And we know for a fact that Secretary Gates agreed with him, Secretary of Defense Gates, because he wrote about it in his memoir too.
They all thought that it was a horrible idea to give a membership action plan to Ukraine, that it would just cause a problem.
That was the one and only reason.
The same for the French and the same for the Germans.
That was why they were against it.
And according to our current CIA director Burns, the reason they did it anyway was legacy building for W. Bush.
See, his legacy was supposed to be a Rock War II, but that was a complete disaster.
And then he tried to privatize Social Security, but nobody would go for that.
So what was his legacy other than failure?
So he had to do something great for himself.
Over Fiona Hill explained to the New York Times the entire National Security Council was against it.
Burns says the entire embassy in Moscow was against it.
The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense were against it.
And the President of France and the Chancellor of Germany were against it, all for one reason, unnecessary provocation against the Russians.
And many people, including Kissinger, Brzezinski, Ken Pollock, and all of the all-stars of the Council on Foreign Relations, including some of Brzezinski and Kissinger among the most vociferous of the NATO expanders.
Even they said, but we need to come up with a special arrangement for Ukraine.
We need to give them something like the neutrality that Austria had during the last Cold War, because it's such an important country to Russia.
And because, as the general says, so many people in Ukraine, not all of them, but so many want to be out from under Russia.
It's such a contentious issue.
We should have a new treaty that solidifies neutrality permanently to prevent this from blowing up into war.
They said it for years and years and years, and then they didn't follow their own best advice.
And it led to this crisis.
And they knew exactly what was going to happen.
And so that really essentially should be the end of it.
I mean, Robert Kagan himself, Victoria Newland's wife, Bill Kristol's writing partner, who developed the entire doctrine of benevolent global hegemony, he recently wrote, essentially, I quote him at the end of the book to ruin the book for you, everyone.
He says, essentially, Horton's right about everything.
Yes, it's true that our presence in the Middle East helped provoke the September 11th attacks.
Our presence after Iraq War I helped provoke September 11th and the horrible terror war that came after that.
And yes, it's true.
Our intervention in Eastern Europe helped lead to the war in Ukraine.
And then Robert Kagan himself said, you know, we got to reflect on the fact that it never really bothered us that Russia dominated Ukraine during the Cold War.
It's so far from America's true national interest.
I would point out, as the general well knows, that Eisenhower turned his back on Hungary and LBJ turned his back on Czechoslovakia and Ronald Reagan turned his back on Poland and said, we'll even help to provoke these conflicts,
but we're not going east of Germany to get involved in a conflict with Russia because quite frankly, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland are too far east of America's vital national interests to risk war with Russia.
Now, obviously, we've moved that line so far east.
I guess I would ask the general, should we just give an Article 5 war guarantee to every nation state on the planet, knowing that then no one will dare try to ever attack anyone else again, because then they'll be messing with us?
Because obviously that might work until it stops working, in which case we have a lot of war guarantees to fulfill.
A lot of wars.
Well, let me already have a $36 trillion national debt.
Okay, well, out of courtesy to the general, given you've asked a direct question, let me end with the general, give you the last word and answer that question.
Well, Piers, I think we can debate all of these issues.
This is the first time we've talked about the 2008 invitation, and that's a whole new subject, and that's worthy of a discussion in itself.
But the point is this, we are where we are.
We've had various failures of policy.
We have lots of things we can look at going back.
But going forward is what we need to consider.
And going forward, we've got to find a way to come out of this, preserving Ukraine, preserving the principles of state sovereignty.
And we've got to find a way to roll back Putin's aggressive tendencies against the rest of Europe.
How we do that, how we do it successfully, how we do it without conflict, well, that requires the genius of leadership.
And we've got a guy who's coming to be president who's the top deal maker in the world, according to him.
And he shows a pretty good sense for how to use power.
We've got the power.
Can we use it effectively?
We haven't.
You know, when we had it under Obama, we didn't use it to deal effectively with Putin.
We brought Putin in.
We were afraid of provoking Putin when the Ukrainians asked to defend their own territory and could have defended it successfully in Crimea.
When they asked for assistance from us in 2014, we told them no lethal assistance.
We gave them some sleeping bags and some MREs, but we didn't help them defend their country.
They defended their country for 10 years against Russian attacks and Russia couldn't break through their line.
It wasn't until Putin really massed his forces.
So I think there's every reason to think there's a way forward in this without surrendering either our principles or the people of Ukraine.
It's up to presidential leadership, good common sense to solve this and end this instability and this chaos that's being provoked right now.
Finding Common Ground Forward 00:00:48
And until you're on the inside of it, you can't see all the handles and all the ways to do it.
I hope Keith Kellogg can.
He's a good man.
And I hope Donald Trump can follow through on his pledge and end this war in 24 hours.
General, thank you very much.
And Scott as well.
What a courteous and respectful debate.
I greatly appreciate the tone that you conducted.
I think viewers watching it will too.
I think you agreed actually with a lot more than I thought you might.
Ultimately, it's just the big picture calls where you disagree.
But I think there's a lot of common ground to be found.
And that's always a good debate where you feel that people on either side can agree at least on certain parts of this story.
Thank you both very much.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Piers.
Thank you both too.
Export Selection