09/04/13 – Mark Kogan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, and our first guest today is Mark Kogan.
He's a lawyer working in public affairs in Washington, and he writes at policymike.com.
This one is called Millennials Have Been at War for Their Entire Adult Lives.
When is enough enough?
Welcome to the show, Mark.
How's it going?
It's great.
Thanks for having me.
I'm happy to be here.
I'm happy to have you here.
When is enough enough?
You know, I mean, I think that's really the question, and I think that's a question that the American people are answering pretty clearly, but that may not necessarily be making its way to Washington.
There are some on the Hill that are still kind of messing with that fight, as we saw in the Senate hearing yesterday on the Syria resolution, but I think that there's a big disconnect, especially between generations and between kind of the political day-to-day actors and the American people.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I swear I still feel 27, but I'm 37 now, and so I'm not a millennial.
I don't know what the hell I am.
I think I'm at the very tail end of Generation X, maybe, or maybe I'm at the very beginning of the one that came after that.
I don't know, but I was already in my 20s when 9-11 happened and all this work started, but you were what, 14, you say, in the article?
I was 14.
It was my freshman year of high school.
It was my second week of school.
I mean, I remember it very, very visibly, and it's scary to say that ever since then we've been at a constant state of war, and it seems that that's nowhere to stop.
I mean, how every couple of months we have some sort of, they call it, kinetic military actions now, but the machine keeps on churning in that sense, and the real question is, when do millennial voices get to contribute?
When do younger people get to say, look, we want to be part of this discussion because we don't necessarily agree with the approach that's being taken?
Right.
Well, you know, it's always really bothered me about, well, you know, friends of mine that have kids, and I got nieces and nephews and stuff like that, and it really has bothered me that they don't really know what peacetime is like.
I mean, for me, I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War in the Reagan years.
Detente was over, and it was kind of brinksmanship again and all that kind of thing for a while, and yeah, they were murdering Salvadorans like it was nothing, but it wasn't really wartime, you know what I mean?
It was basically peacetime, and the same thing even for the 90s.
Bill Clinton was murdering Iraqis all day long, but as far as the American people were concerned, it was an era of peace and security and no big deal kind of going on, and so, you know, it's bothersome enough having had to live through war since September 11th as an adult this whole time, but I try to put myself in the shoes of people who, especially those who were even younger than you at the time of September 11th, who literally their entire life, not just their entire adult life, but their entire life has been wartime.
They don't even know what it means to have peacetime, although maybe the first few years of the Obama administration might as well have been peacetime for as much attention as people were really paying to it, but...
That's exactly right, and that's the point I wanted to make, is that when we talk about it today, when we talk about being at war, you know, first off, the legal discussion, whether we're at war or not, is its own fight that's currently ongoing, but in terms of the psyche of the country and in terms of how the country acts and engages, this isn't World War II.
This isn't even Vietnam, and it's been going on for so long, and it's become such a normal part of life, especially, as you say, for younger people.
I have a sister who's 10 years younger, so she was just a baby when 9-11 happened.
She has no idea what it's like for the U.S. not to have troops deployed in combat zones, and there was a really powerful picture.
It was...
I think it was published, I want to say, by the National Geographic during the Iraq conflict back in 06, 07, and it was a Marine base out in the sandbox, and on a whiteboard a Marine had written, the United States is not at war.
The Marines are at war.
The United States is at the mall.
And I think that really does talk about how this constant state of war, the question of when is enough enough, how it changes how we perceive it, and I think it doesn't change it in a positive way.
It makes us accept it as the new normal, and I think that what we're seeing with the debate over Syria is the public rising up and saying, no, no, no, this isn't normal for us.
We don't just get to decide and go unilaterally.
We want this to be done constitutionally.
We want this to be done correctly, and we want to have our voices heard in the discussion.
Right.
Well, now, so how many friends have you had who fought in the Afghan and Iraq wars, for example?
A dozen.
I grew up near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and so there were a lot of my friends who out of high school enlisted and have done several tours, and even my RA in college is still in Afghanistan after he graduated from ROTC and deployed, so a lot, and I think the commitment to service is still very strong, and people are still enlisting, and they want to serve, and they want to serve their country proudly, and they do, but the question is what do we as a country commit them to go do in the name of the United States, and I think that that's the debate that needs to be had, and that's a debate in which younger people may have a different perspective than the older generation currently making the decision.
Right.
Yeah, and you know, this has been a big thing of mine for a long time is that, you know, most soldiers, and I've known plenty of guys who've been in the military, and their attitude is that, you know, deciding the mission, not my job, nothing, you know, politics, this, that, the other thing, Republicans said this, Democrats said this, and bomb this or invade that, not my job.
My job is just doing what I'm told and killing who they tell me to kill, and it's not just that they're psychopaths and like killing people or whatever, it's that they believe, they've been raised, especially by the government schools, but also by their own parents to really believe that the government is the country, and that if the government is asking them to kill somebody, that's serving their country, that's protecting and must be protecting the people of the country, or else why would the government ask them to do it?
And so it just sort of goes without saying, even though it's wrong, it just sort of goes without saying that whatever mission we're on is the right one, because the adults of America have talked this over and decided through their democracy that this is so important it needs doing.
And so, you know, why should I even need to pay close attention to, you know, whether Saddam was friends with Al-Qaeda or not or whatever?
I'm 19, you guys decide that, and then I'll go shoot at whoever you guys decide needs shooting at.
And what's happening is the adults of America, with our, you know, pseudo-democracy, whatever we have left of one, have betrayed them, have let them down, and have basically decided whoever the Republicans and the Democrats send you to kill is fine with us, at least we're not going to do anything to stop them.
And so it's kind of funny to see these guys putting up pictures of signs saying, I did not join up the service to go fight for Al-Qaeda in Syria.
No, they just joined up the service to fight for Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan, I guess.
You know what I mean?
They did sign up to fight for Al-Qaeda in Syria.
That's exactly what they signed up for.
But they weren't paying attention.
They deferred their decision-making to the rest of us, and then the rest of us have let them down.
Yeah, and I think that that point is the important one to draw, that, you know, I don't place any onus on those who sign up to serve the country and the military in that sense.
It's a decision they make, and they live up to it, and I think that all of them do serve proudly in what they do, and where they disagree with it, you know, they can air their, I think the anonymous picture has been a very interesting development in that sense, and what social media has allowed the armed forces, members of the armed forces to express.
But I think the second point you make, the point that it's on the public, right, it's on the democratic process to determine how to utilize them, where to send them, and what to ask of them.
And I think that for too long, we haven't really taken that responsibility seriously.
And I mean, you can go back and argue that ever since the War Powers Resolution, we've kind of sidestepped that, right?
Congress delegated authority that arguably it can't delegate, and so we no longer have the level of rigor and robust debate that's necessary to make decisions where we're committing people's lives, where we're sending our young men and women to point and shoot, to fight and die, without even talking about why, and not even talking about it seriously.
And I'm encouraged to see that that seems to be changing with Syria, I'm encouraged that the President decided, and it seems like from all the reporting, fairly last minute, thankfully, but he still decided to do it, to take the question to Congress.
And whether it's the point Senator Paul, Rand Paul made yesterday at the Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Syria, was, well, this can't just be fear, you know, our vote has to be binding.
If we say no, can the administration commit to honoring that decision?
And I think that that's really the big question, because it's unclear where it's going to go in Congress.
And I think what the administration does with Congress's decision will be very telling for the future of determining how often we send our troops abroad.
Right.
Well, you know, one thing about like the difference between the Iraq situation and this one, in both cases, it's sort of their slow motion line us into war based on weapons of mass destruction sort of thing.
But back then, that all this political capital from 9-11 happening on their watch was somehow made them the most credible set of politicians in American history or something, I don't know, made them extra trustworthy, and the American people were extra bloodthirsty.
And so they didn't really care who got bombed.
And everybody knows Saddam Hussein's a Hitler.
And so go bomb him.
He's so damn insane and whatever.
And so the American people, by the tens of millions, at least, were perfectly willing to go along with a bunch of lies because they wanted to see some more explosions.
They wanted some more revenge.
And they trusted George Bush to go ahead and lead them into whatever.
But all of that, you know, war fever from, you know, 11 years ago or whatever now is has dissipated.
And Obama does not have the benefit.
The war party does not have the benefit of any of that narrative.
And so, you know, people, anybody really like these guys passing around their pictures on Facebook or whatever, these soldiers pass around their pictures on Facebook.
All it takes is two minutes and a Google to figure out that the rebels in Syria are the Sunni based insurgency left over from our war in Iraq.
Only now they've moved up to Syria, basically.
So, you know, they haven't switched sides.
We're switching sides.
But, you know, if I was a young soldier, you know, I could see how, anyway, a lot of young soldiers would be able to spend a minute on Google and see right through this and and seriously object and not just them, but their family members, their neighbors.
Anybody ought to really be able to look right at this and say, you know, this isn't even really indirectly aiding al Qaeda like invading Iraq was.
This is directly aiding al Qaeda here.
There's something incredibly objectionable about this proposed mission.
And everybody can see it.
And we still got another week before the vote.
Right.
So the and as of today, you know, after the hearing, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee came up with new language for a joint resolution, which was published on their public web, public facing website last night.
There's been comments on it.
It's far more narrow than what the White House had proposed and sent over.
But now you're getting pushback from the other side.
Senator McCain just, I think, about a half hour ago came out and said he opposes the new resolution on the grounds that it's too narrow, that it doesn't go far enough, that it binds the hands of the administration and the military to not be able to carry out a full military mission.
And I think, honestly, the real telling moment from yesterday's hearing was Secretary Kerry's comments about potential boots on the ground, because when he was improvising, he let the proverbial cat out of the bag.
He admitted that which anyone who pays attention to military conflict understands is that if everything falls apart, there's absolutely a potential for American boots on the ground because chemical weapons can't fall into the hands of, you know, rogue agents.
And the only way to secure them is to do it personally.
And you know, the Secretary Kerry walked that back and the folks on the other side of the bench helped him walk that back and say that we're going to craft a narrow resolution that's going to keep it very limited in what we can do.
And that moment of kind of accidental truth is exactly why we need to be having this public debate, that this idea of transparency and an engaged public needs to understand that that's what can happen.
And so we'll see what happens with it.
I would hope that there's a lot of commentary on it.
There's been some great commentary in the press, but haven't seen too much up swell from the public beyond the general opposition that exists, and that has actually become less opposed to it with the new polls coming out yesterday.
It used to be as low as single digit support for any kind of military intervention, and now it's up to between 20 and 30 percent, depending on which poll you look at.
It's still far too low and far lower than it was a year ago, but it's already double to triple more support than it was, you know, a week ago.
So we'll see where this goes.
Yeah, I think now the word's getting out that Obama wants to do this.
So people are, you know, working out their cognitive dissonance by going ahead and changing their mind and being for it now, since he's their number one hero in the world and whatever.
Well, it's going to I think what will be interesting to see is what happens in the House more than anything.
I think that the Senate can be, you know, navigated by the administration and by leadership.
I think that what happens in the House will be far more interesting.
You know, theoretically, the voice of the people, but the leadership on both sides came out yesterday and said, OK, we're going with this.
You know, we support it.
Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Eric Cantor all came out and said, let's do this.
And so the question now will be, well, because the so-called fringe elements on either side, be it, you know, Alan Grayson on the left or Justin Amash on the right are trying to secure more votes against it.
And the question is, where is that line going to end up?
And then if they fail to pass it, if they reject the joint resolution for the use of military force, what does the administration do?
Does the administration say, well, we got the Senate and that's good enough?
Does it say, well, let's have them vote again?
Does it say, OK, we'll honor and respect that like the British did?
You know, that's going to be the real question to kind of set the tone for how this will work.
I don't think the president wants them to vote it down.
But why risk going to Congress if you didn't realize that was a possibility?
Right.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
Part of me, well, maybe I just really want to believe that Obama is giving himself an out here that for reasons he personally has explained for more than a year now, there are elements among the rebels that we don't want to mess with.
I mean, just now when you talked about the boots on the ground thing, the implication there was if the regime falls and the jihadists that we've been backing this whole time and will be the direct beneficiaries of any missile strikes, if they get anywhere near the chemical weapons, that's when we're going to have to invade to keep them from the chemical weapons, the people that we're fighting for right now.
Right.
You know, real good thinking there.
And it seems like, you know, Obama's horrible, but he's not as stupid as George W. Bush.
He can't really want for his legacy.
He's got three years on the clock, right?
He's got enough time to make a horrible mess, but not enough time to even try to really clean it up.
Does he want to go down in history as the president who not indirectly like George W. Bush, but directly fought for a war for Ayman al-Zawahiri's prisoner beheaders and suicide bombers?
I mean, that could be really I mean, I'm talking his own selfish purposes here.
No matter what Israel wants, that could be really bad for Barack Obama's personal legacy in the world.
He's got to know better than to do it.
And I'm kind of hoping that what it really comes down to is him telling Pelosi, oh, yeah, push real hard because I really want some votes a lot, please kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
Because if he really tells her, I got to get these votes, get me these votes, then she can probably do it.
But if he tells her, hey, go ahead and accidentally on purpose fail to round them up, then she could do that, too, you know?
No, absolutely.
And I think I honestly don't think that the risk comes from whether or not she can secure sufficient votes.
I think it comes from the majority party.
I think it's whether the Republicans can secure enough votes that with Pelosi's block would be sufficient to pass it.
But I don't agree with you that, you know, it could be a potential out.
Again, whatever the reasoning, I'm glad it happened.
Right.
One of the one of the big hang ups I had about this entire process is, look, I'm not a big fan of the War Powers Resolution.
I don't believe the executive should have the ability to engage in military action without the approval of Congress.
But now they're seeking it.
And so that's a step in the right direction.
Yeah.
Although, you know, legally, it's a step in the right direction.
Politically, it could backfire and just, you know, help spread the responsibility for the same bad decision and just let it go through in slow motion here.
Although it's kind of funny that they're saying, oh, yeah, we definitely got Obama.
But you don't need to hurry back to D.C. from your summer vacation in order to vote on it, Congress.
We can get around to it next week and be fine.
Really?
How can it be so bad of an emergency that we've got to explode people to death, but it's not so bad of emergency that we need to hurry to do it?
And I think to many members of Congress credit, they did come back early because the session technically doesn't start until next Monday.
So the hearing yesterday and the House hearing today and the classified briefing that's going on today is all kind of ahead of schedule.
But the way the schedule is shaping up right now, the markup of the Senate resolution would happen today or tomorrow and could potentially be voted on by the committee as early as tonight or tomorrow morning.
And then it could make the floor of the Senate later that same day, depending on how quickly they want to move it and whether there's going to be any obstruction to moving the bill to a vote.
I guess I wasn't aware that that much of the Senate had come back to D.C. without being called back.
Well, so if the they may call them back and schedule the vote for the next day, I mean, that's a decision that can be made the day of.
There aren't there are not enough to do a vote right now.
But if the after the markup of the committee's resolution, if they feel that this can move, they'll put out the call.
Right.
Well, I sure hope they don't.
I would rather see it.
I thought the original leak said that they're not going to vote until the 9th, which I thought that makes for a great talking point as far as, you know, back in al Qaeda in Syria on the almost anniversary of the September 11th attack.
Right.
Yeah, the timing doesn't work in their favor in terms of messaging, but September 9th would probably be the date that the House would vote on it at the earliest, since that's the formal time they're coming back into session.
And it's a lot harder to bring all 435 of them back in time for a big vote like this, not to mention that they may want to have more hearings.
And again, the procedure of the process, the procedure of moving through can be stalled tremendously.
You know, everything from opposing the vote to adding amendments to going to discussions to scheduling hearings, it's really going to...
I think the timing of how this moves through Congress will be very telling about, A, where Congress stands on it, but B, how hard the administration is pushing it.
Because the faster it moves, the more pressure the White House is most likely exerting on leadership, because all leadership except for Senator McConnell came out and said, we support this.
Senator McConnell hasn't issued his own decision yet, probably because he's waiting to see which way the wind blows for his own reelection purpose.
But if it starts moving quickly, and if we see both occurring this week and scheduled for early next week, then, you know, I think the read to take from that is White House pressure is being applied to hurry this along, and it's going to be dependent on kind of the opposition element, both to the steering intervention, both in the Senate and the House, to show, well, how hard of a fight are they going to make it for the White House?
Or are they just going to, you know, note their opposition and say, go for it, we lost this fight?
Yeah, well, I saw there are some reports that Rand Paul is considering a filibuster.
And, of course, he'd have to have, what, 40 people willing to at least let him try or something like that in the Senate, or else they could shut him up, right?
It takes 60 or 61 votes to halt a filibuster.
60, right?
Right.
So the way it would work, so there are two issues with it.
So the basics on the filibuster is that a filibuster can still eat up time.
So it can still delay, because once you have this, in order to determine whether you have the 60 votes, the process for doing that takes up about three days of Senate time.
And then you will have the actual vote.
And then if 60 senators vote, that doesn't end debate.
That sets a time limit, and that time limit is a few more days.
So the delay can keep going.
What usually happens is that once it's clear that the 60 votes exist, the person opposing it stops opposing it, because it's clear that they're going to lose eventually.
But if the goal is to delay, then they can continue doing so.
The other challenge for a potential Paul filibuster is that, depending on the way the resolution is written and presented, and kind of the mechanisms within the Senate that are utilized, it may not be eligible for a filibuster.
It may not be eligible to have that kind of a delay tactic put into it.
It may just be pushed through.
And again, if it's written that way, that will also be telling on priority.
Right.
Yeah, and the thing is, it's not just the delay.
It's that C-SPAN camera, you know?
If you look at Paul's filibuster on the drone issue, he really brought that to public attention that it was even an issue that they needed to be concerned about, which to me betrays a real lack of imagination on their part that the drones they use against the world might ever come home.
Who do they think their cops are but a bunch of veterans, you know?
But anyway, he really made a national issue out of himself and drones.
I think himself was probably his real point.
But anyway, he made domestic drone use a real issue.
And I think that he could do a hell of a lot to enlighten the American people about who's who in Syria and why he thinks this is such a bad idea when, face it, most people don't know the first thing about it.
Most of the anti-war sentiment I'm hearing from just regular people is that kind of contrary to what they're being sold that this is a humanitarian mission.
Their answer is, I don't care enough about the Syrians to have a war to go save them.
So let them burn.
Let them choke, which is not the nicest peace sentiment ever.
But I guess, you know, we'll have to settle for it.
Right.
I mean, it's a tough line to draw in that sense, too, because what stopped us from the first 100,000 that were, you know, killed, tortured, beaten, and raped with conventional weapons, right?
So the moral argument here is tough, because we've never been consistent on, you know, universal red lines.
We step in in certain places, but in other places, we don't.
And that determination varies by administration, by public opinion.
But to your point on Senator Paul's filibuster, I think that's absolutely right.
I wrote an article about his filibuster on drones.
And while I agree, you know, it was a smart political move to get himself a little attention, I think it was a perfect example of what a filibuster is supposed to be.
There's a lot of discussion about filibuster reform and obstruction in the Senate.
And I do believe the filibuster needs to be reformed.
It needs to be kept around, but reformed.
But the reform should force every senator that wants the filibuster to do what Senator Paul did, which is to stand up there and teach the American people about a topic.
The purpose, the very first filibuster ever carried out was actually in the First World War in opposition to deploying forces to World War I.
And President Wilson had attempted to arm merchant ships or send submarines, something like that.
There was some armament that he wanted to deploy into the World War I theater.
And there were a group of four senators that kept talking so long that the timeline on it ran out and the effort failed.
And that was when the ability to end the filibuster was first introduced, because there was no way to end it.
They succeeded.
They kept talking until time ran out.
And so that original emphasis to tell the American people, here's what this is about.
Here's what's going on.
It's a tool for the minority to educate the public and to try and win them over to their point of view, because in the end, if they lose, so it goes.
But they are given the opportunity to explain why they oppose it the way they do.
And I think that that could be a very, very useful thing for the American public.
Right.
And now the American public, we're no AIPAC or anything, but it seems like if the phones are just ringing off the hook and the emails just keep coming and coming and coming and the tweets just keep tweeting and tweeting and tweeting, that that's got to have some effect in the House and the Senate, don't you think?
I mean, I do, but it's a question of whose pressure applies more effectively, right?
Is it the bosses or is it the people?
All right.
Hey, that's Mark Kogan at PolicyMike.com.
Thanks, Mark.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
All right.
The piece is millennials have been a war their entire adult lives.
Why does the US support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here.
Sick of it yet.
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
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