12/18/13 – Rob Prince – The Scott Horton Show

Why does the U.S. 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.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is the show.scotthorton.org is the website.
You can find all my interview archives there.
More than 3,000.
I'm now going back to 2003.scotthorton.org We're live three to five here weekdays at Liberty Express Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Rob Prince from Foreign Policy in Focus.
And also from Colorado Progressive Jewish News.
That's robertjprince.wordpress.com Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing real good, Scott.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us.
It's been too long since we've spoken.
You're actually on my whiteboard in no longer erasable ink.
It's been on there so long as one of the few people I can call on Africa issues.
And I refer to your work all the time.
In fact, in regards to the article that you published when the WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning's liberated WikiLeaks documents revealed the extent to which the Americans had compelled the Ethiopian dictatorship of Melissinawe to invade Somalia Christmas 2006.
A very important part of the story.
We knew it was a joint operation along with the CIA and special operations guys and everything.
But your article really focused on how the Americans made Ethiopia do it rather than ask very nicely.
This one is a French remilitarization of Africa under the well-worn pretext of humanitarian intervention.
It's in the making here at Foreign Policy in Focus fpif.org.
And so I guess, first of all, can you take us back a little bit to the last couple of years?
Because as this article begins, you say it's been what, nine months or almost a year since the French reinvaded Mali.
What led to that?
Well, I guess it depends on whether you take the word of the French president Francois Hollande or not.
Hollande insists that France's military intervention, that France had nothing to gain from it economically or politically.
And it was done only for humanitarian reasons, which is touching.
And went over very well in France.
Having said that, there's reason to believe that that was just a, how can I put it politely, a bunch of hooey for a number of reasons.
First of all, Mali is a place today where it's not so much that France has major investments there, but it's exploring in the northwest corner of Mali for oil and gas.
And then next to Mali, just east of Mali in Niger, France has among its most important uranium mines in the world.
They're within less than 100 miles of the Malian border.
And that whole region of the northern Sahara, or excuse me, central Sahara, is a mineral-rich region whose wealth is being intensively explored.
So what happens in Mali has great strategic importance to the French, particularly within the current context of the, as Michael T. Clair refers to it, the race for what's left, i.e. mineral wealth, oil and gas.
And France is concerned that it have its place in that race, particularly at a time of growing competition from the Chinese, United States, India, among others.
So stabilizing Mali is quite important for strategic reasons to the French, President Hollande's comment aside.
Well, and then they have a history going back there, how many centuries?
Well, yeah.
You know, France's role in Africa in a kind of serious way starts with the Algerian invasion of 1830 and its conquest of much of West Africa in the 1880s and the 1890s.
And colonizing that region was very important.
At the time, France had a number of goals, and among them was this kind of global competition with Great Britain.
And in any case, France was forced in the late 1950s and early 1960s to give up its colonies.
And what it—and de Gaulle, who's kind of a very clever man, he's actually worth studying—he was willing to give formal independence to France's former African colonies, but he charged his main Africa aide, a fellow named Foucault, F-O-C-C-A-R-T.
And the idea was that Foucault would engineer some kind of a system in which the former colonies would be formally or politically independent but would remain economically dependent on France.
And that was a very, very successful effort, commonly referred to as neocolonialism.
And French neocolonialism in West Africa has been one of the main keys to continued French economic success to the degree that they've been successful, so it's worked.
In the case of Mali, the history has been a little bit less clear than in some other places.
There were moments in the history of Mali where there was strong nationalist leadership that resisted French economic and political intervention.
But eventually, due to a whole number of factors, France was able to regain its stranglehold on the country, and that's been true for some time now.
And then, I guess before we get to the recent conflict, can you talk about—is it just a French-drawn border?
Is that why the small—I mean, if you just look at it, you can tell that the border was drawn by someone with some kind of selfish interest, including people who didn't necessarily fit together in one state.
Well, the drawing of the border—the controversy over the drawing of the borders really takes place in the context of the Algerian revolution of the late 1950s.
And at that time, France was trying to set up what it referred to, something like a Sahara economic zone, in order to kind of retain control of the resources of that region.
So there was a lot of contention over where the borders would be drawn.
And in fact, a lot of the debate—Algeria is just north of Mali, and a lot of the debate over the independence of Algeria had to do with the Sahara, with France wanting to cut the Sahara off from Algeria so it could control it.
At that point, it already had oil, and the Algerians insisting that the border move further and further south to include the oil discoveries.
The oil was discovered there in 1956.
The Algerian revolution began in 1954, and there's a number of indications that that revolution, that war, was so cruel and mean, in part because France really refused—it did not want to give up those energy resources.
But it was forced to—eventually it had to move the border further south.
So that was the big argument.
The loser in that, I suppose, was Mali at the time.
And then what France tried to do was, having lost the political control of that region, it tried to maintain economic control of the Algerian oil industry and the mineral industries in places like Niger and Mali.
So yeah, it's a whole story.
But the fundamental tale here, or the fundamental theme here, is France doing whatever it could in whatever way to retain control of the wealth of the region.
All right.
And now, so part of that too, though, is the combining of the Tuareg population to the north, which, you know, I'm not the expert on this, but I'm under the impression that the northern part of Mali, their northeastern part, is roughly the size of Texas, which I guess would make the lower part is sort of the size of the rest of the south, something like that.
And anyway, so—of the American south, I meant to say.
But so it's—the northerners, as you write about in your article here, the Tuaregs, they've been battling for quite some time for at least autonomy, if not outright independence from the south, correct?
Okay, yes.
And again, you know, in this area, everything gets a little complex.
But they're referred to as the Tuaregs, mostly in French literature.
They call themselves Azawad, A-Z-A-W-A-D, the Azawad people.
And their living area extends across a number of countries, northern Mali, southern Algeria, a little bit into—a little bit west is Martini, a little bit east is Niger, and even into Chad.
They're an extension of the Berber people, who are kind of the people who lived in that region before the Arabs came.
So they've been there for a very, very long time.
And like the, let's say, the Kurds or the Palestinians in the Middle East, modern borders basically screwed them.
And they have no territory of their own.
There have been—they're neat people.
I mean, these are really the desert dwellers, and I've met a few of them years ago, and I really found them fascinating.
But having said that, there's been a long-term tension between these people in the north and the black African population in the southern parts of Mali, closer to the Niger River basin.
And these tensions have been—there is real discrimination against them, cultural discrimination, economic, social discrimination.
There's no question about that, i.e. they have a real case for their grievances.
And that's just a legacy of the French then, is that right?
That they just put the south in charge of the north?
Well, if you look at what the French have done throughout French Africa, they take a look at a country that's a colony, and they favor one group over another.
So in some countries they favor the Muslim—Cameroon, for example, they favor the Muslim north over the Christian south.
And in the case of Mali, basically what they did was they kind of pitted the north and the south against one another.
And in the following way, the French have always had some ties with the Tuareg, with the Azawad.
And they have encouraged, either openly or less so, Azawad, Tuareg autonomy, things like that.
And ultimately what that's about is, you know, the French hope that they could use the Tuareg as a vehicle, some kind of Tuareg separatism, to control the economic resources of the region.
And this even comes out in the recent fighting.
For example, there's this Tuareg rebellion, right?
Add to it the Islamists.
We can talk about that later.
And then the French come in militarily and counter that whole movement.
But the ones they go after are the Islamists.
They really have made their peace with the Tuareg rebels.
And in fact, the Tuareg rebels come out of this deal with as much autonomy as they've ever had.
And so, like in Bamako, in the capital of Mali, they talk conspiracy that there's French Tuareg cooperation.
I'm not sure how far it goes, but the history is unquestionable, that they played those games.
And the other thing that's really clear is France's desire to gain control of that region of northern Mali, a region which they haven't found the resources yet, but there's intensive studies that are going on in the northwest corner of that country.
And the real competition there is between who's going to control those resources, the French or the Algerians.
So, yes, they're being used.
The Tuareg appear, on the one hand, they have the legitimate grievances, and on the other hand, that's being manipulated.
It's an absolute classic African neocolonial situation of dividing conquer and leading to the kinds of tragic results throughout the continent that we have seen.
All right.
So 2011, the Egyptian people, left and right, so to speak, came together, overthrew the American-backed sock puppet dictatorship.
So then Hillary Clinton decided she needed a publicity stunt.
And Michael Hastings verifies this, my suspicion in his great work in Rolling Stone, that she needed a publicity stunt because it was too obvious that Uncle Sam was behind every tortured dictator in the region.
And so they decided they would betray their new, again, friend, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
They would stab him in the back, throw him to the wolves kind of thing so they could pretend that America's on the side of the little guy like that one time when we liberated France from the Nazis back in the black and white footage that everybody's seen.
And so that would at least, if it wouldn't prove the case that Uncle Sam's the good guy, it would at least confuse the issue a little bit when it was becoming way too obvious who's wearing the black hat in this situation.
So they betrayed Gaddafi, and then his Tuareg goons went back, his hired guns, his mercs, went back to where they're from and brought their guns with them once they lost.
They sure did.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
And then what happened?
Oh, you got it.
That's certainly a part of it.
So you have, there are a lot of Malayans.
I mean, Mali, the big problem in Mali is a kind of seething poverty, the likes of which is true in only very, very few countries in the world.
That has to be put forward.
Mali is right down there among the five poorest countries in the world, despite important gold reserves, in spite, in the northern part of the country, in the southern part of the country, there's some agriculture.
This is a terribly, terribly, terribly poor country.
So they got a lot of folk that leave and look for work elsewhere.
In this case, where was the work for a number of decades?
It was in the Libyan army.
And yes, you have mostly Tuaregs, but some others, Malayan Tuaregs, who form an important part of Qadhafi's military.
So the whole thing collapses in Libya.
And I want to come back to France and Libya and make a couple comments about that.
And as a result, you have this explosion of unattached people with military training leaving the country, going everywhere, going to Tunisia, going to Chad, Mali.
And the Japanese have a term for their samurai who no longer have a master, and they're called Ronin, R-O-N-I-N.
And so these are the Libyan Ronin who wind up in northern Mali, armed to the teeth, and also with a lot of military experience.
Now, what happens at this point is, from where I'm sitting, it's most unfortunate.
So the Azawad, the Tuareg people, they have their own political movement and military movement.
It's referred to in English as the MNLA.
And again, this is the movement that really has legitimate grievances.
And this is the movement that started the armed struggle.
And so these elements come from Libya, and these elements are heavily influenced by a number of Islamist groups.
Now, who is pulling the strings on these groups isn't clear exactly, but we know the countries that are involved.
And they're the same countries that are funding and arming radical Islamists everywhere.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia.
To a certain extent, Algeria, the Algerian security apparatus.
And so these elements come into northern Mali.
Well, the Tuaregs see this as an opportunity to form an alliance with these groups.
The alliance is formed, and that gives the military rebellion in the north tremendous force, and it begins to explode.
But along the way, something else happens, and that is that the rebellion is hijacked by the Islamists, by the kind of Salafist elements, and the Tuareg rebellion itself, which is really essentially secular.
Its goals are socioeconomic goals.
They're not the implementation of Sharia law.
So the whole thing gets transformed.
You have a similar situation in Syria, where you had a legitimate Syrian opposition.
It's hijacked by these similar elements.
So that's what happens in Mali.
And that provides the pretext, ultimately, for the French-led intervention.
So I know it gets a little bit esoteric here, but that's fundamentally what happened.
Now, I want you to think of one thing here.
Let's go back to Libya in 2011.
What was the pretext?
Do you remember the pretext for the NATO decision to move into Libya?
Yeah, yeah.
It was Benghazi.
According to Susan Rice, Gaddafi had handed out Viagra to his armies of rapists, and then they were going to go, and they were going to murder every man, woman, and child in Benghazi.
That's right, i.e., Benghazi was going to be slaughtered.
Later, we found out, well, I mean, I'm sure that if he went into Benghazi, he wouldn't have been, you know, a nice guy.
But the notion that the whole city was going to be massacred, this was the pretext.
This provided the pretext.
The world said, oh, my God, this is a terrible thing.
We have to stop that humanitarian intervention.
Bam.
In Mali, the situation is not that much different.
There was a seizure of a town in Mali.
It's called Moti, M-O-H-T-I.
And what we heard about Moti is if you seize Moti, that Bamako, the capital of Mali, is next, i.e., they're on the verge of seizing the capital of Mali.
Right.
Well, because I'm actually looking at the map here.
Moti is south of the line, right?
So it seemed like when the Tuaregs had said, you know, we're seceding from the union, we're declaring independence up here in the north.
Hillary was trying to get Algeria to intervene.
She's trying to get France to intervene.
Everybody was waiting.
But then they blew it when they teamed up with the Al-Qaeda guys.
They went across the line.
And like you're saying, they went across the line.
Now, if you look at that line, that line is 600 or 700 miles from Bamako, i.e., they're not knocking on the door of Bamako.
Bamako is still very, very far away.
Secondly, there is something at Moti that no one talks about, and that is there's a French military base right next to it.
So France was nervous about that.
And then finally, you know, what are we talking about from what we can tell about the strength of the rebels?
We're talking about a group that at its largest is 5,000 fighters, probably less.
And they're going to take a city.
Bamako is 1.5 million.
And yes, there's a lot of problems with the Malayan military.
But once again, we have what, looking at it, granted, you know, from the Rocky Mountains, it's far away here.
But what does it look like?
It looks like the threat to Bamako is exaggerated.
And once again, we're hearing that Bamako is now the new Benghazi.
Oh, if we don't save Bamako.
So it's all done in a certain way.
The threat is amplified, exaggerated.
The world says, oh, this is terrible.
Meanwhile, while the rebels, the Islamic rebels, were moving into places like Timbuktu and Bengal, really the world was doing nothing.
And at that time, in fact, the military government, which had seized power in a coup, but had popular backing, sanctions were being put on them.
So they could not counter this move from the north in any kind of an effective manner.
So they needed the foreign help, then, conveniently.
That's right, yes.
And so, in any case, the coup was important.
It was important, too, that the excuse for the coup leaders was that the, I mean, he was a former military guy, but he stood for election a couple of times, somewhat, some kind of election a couple of times, that they overthrew him because he wasn't doing enough about what was happening in the north.
That was their excuse, right?
Well, yes, that was the excuse.
But at the same time, sanctions had been put up against him.
He was under tremendous pressure to turn his government over, and he did.
You know, he turned his government over to a civilian leader who happens to have come from Paris with close ties to NATO.
I have his name somewhere, but I can't remember it.
But in any case, this particular guy, he's the one who wrote the letter to the United Nations Security Council saying, please come and help us.
And from that point on, you know, things moved very quickly.
We're in the middle of talking with Rob Prince from the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies, which I should have led with, right?
Also, he writes for Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org, and we're talking about this piece in Mali.
Conflict continues a year after the French-led invasion.
So it's part blowback, part exploiting blowback as the excuse for some more intervention and some more blowback.
And all the bad guys, they were going to march on the capital city, so they say.
And so when was it again?
How many months ago was it?
Almost a year ago, right?
That the French went ahead and occupied the south.
Of this year, they went in.
So almost the anniversary there.
And then, as you said, it was only 5,000 guys.
Maybe they had some Saudi money and some pickup trucks, that kind of thing, some equipment that they may have seized along the way.
But then, and of course, they've got an area the size of Texas to run and hide in, I suppose.
But then it's all sand dunes, right?
So how could the war still be going on now?
What's going on now?
Well, you know, it's another case of a kind of spectacular military operations that don't deal with any of the real issues in the country.
So you knew, unless the socioeconomic crisis is addressed, that sooner or later, that the social crisis would re-erupt.
And rather than waiting for several years now, the crisis re-erupted once again.
It re-erupted in the north.
And that's where it started in the first place.
And so now, is the government based in the south invading the north, fighting the Tuars again?
Bamako is in the far south of the country, the capital.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm saying, are they attacking the north now?
Well, the tension, the current tension is between the central government in the south that's trying to exert its will over the north, and the north that wants more autonomy, if not separatism.
And so that issue, which has plagued this country since independence in 1960, it just re-emerged full force.
And now, according to the government in the south, I guess they have the ultimate talking point now, right?
That anyone who resists them is not a nationalist Tuareg rebel, but is an Islamist suicide bomber al-Qaedaite, right?
Well, yes.
That's the card they're trying to play.
And of course, it plays well outside of Mali.
But within Mali, it doesn't really resonate that much.
And addressing this issue of the north and the fate of the Tuareg in particular, this is really going to be a central issue.
It's been addressed before.
And the agreement, there was an agreement in 1992.
There were actually several others.
In words, it's a good agreement.
It's just never been implemented.
You know, it promised autonomy.
It promised money for infrastructure development, et cetera.
But it just never happened.
So we got the same promises this time at the end of the major part of the French military operations.
But once again, no meat to it.
And how many people live in the northern part of Mali?
That's a good question.
I think we're talking about, I know it's less than a million people.
I think it's somewhere around 500,000.
The country has 12 million people in all.
I see different figures from 10.5 to 12 million.
We're the heaviest concentration in the south of the country, which is a little bit outside of the zone of the Sahara.
And now, what can you tell us about the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA running around there?
Because they got to still be there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I've been researching the American role there.
And once again, there's a comparison with Libya in that the French do more of the actual fighting on the ground, but the U.S. is involved, quite involved logistically and politically in what's going on.
And the United States has been involved militarily in the Sahara for a decade.
They have these different initiatives.
So the first one was referred to as the Pan-Sahara Initiative, PSI.
And then in 2005, it was replaced by what's called the Trans-Sahara Counterintelligence Partnership.
And this has involved training of a number of African militaries, including Mali, and some activity on the part of special forces, joint special operation type operations.
I've been able to actually uncover two incidents where special forces were involved.
One is in nearby Algeria, where apparently, for several years, there was an important base at a town in the southern Algerian Sahara called Tamanrasset.
And there's plenty of evidence of that.
And the guy who writes about that in some detail is the British anthropologist Jeremy Keenum.
And then in 2009, I just found a reference to special forces operations in northern Mali against the Tuareg, where the Malian government was given, as they call it, logistical support.
Of course, you don't really know what that means at this point.
Well, I think even the Americans, weren't the Americans due for a big training exercise with the military of the south right before the coup that they had to call off, or at least officially?
Yes.
Well, there's an annual operation, which is called Operation Flitlock.
And these are very big, very big operations.
And there were two of them in 2007 and 2008 that took place in Mali.
And it was supposed to take place again this year, but they had to call it off.
So U.S. military training special forces has been there.
In fact, if you look at it, one of the failures of U.S. military policy in Africa has been it's for the last 10 years, it's the United States that trained the Malian military.
And then when the Malian military has to deal with this crisis, it pretty much collapses.
So that's not a real...
Right, all they're good for is overthrowing the government.
Yeah.
And then, you know, like you mentioned the Scahill film, which, by the way, is excellent.
And one of the things that becomes very clear about the Scahill film is that these special forces are everywhere.
You know, they're in Mali and everywhere else.
And it's very hard to document their activities.
And in many cases, it's not so much that they have actual bases, but they move around.
You know, it's kind of mobile bases and Toyota trucks or whatever.
So at this point, we don't really know the scope of U.S. military intervention in Mali.
But it's quite clear on some level that what we're seeing in Mali and elsewhere in Africa is kind of a division of labor between France and the United States, with the first model being Libya and the second model being Mali.
And now watch the third one coming into being in the Central African Republic.
So there's some competition between them and some, at the same time, cooperation.
France has worked very diligently to try to replace Britain as America's military junior partner.
And in Africa, it appears that it's been for some time now they've cut a deal.
And that's what we're seeing in Mali.
So the exact framework of it is unclear.
But the broader outlines of it...
Didn't they build a drone base being put in Niger?
Yes, that's correct.
Yes.
Yes.
From what we know, there's a drone.
Yes.
There's a drone base in Niger.
There's also the reinforcement of the French military presence in Niger.
The only need to is rumor that, hey, you know, I heard that somewhere a member of Boko Haram shook hands with one of these Tuaregs that once knew a Libyan jihadist who'd been to Iraq or whatever.
Now all of a sudden you spread the war down to, you know, you internationalize a local problem really quickly.
Well, that's well put, because that's what we're seeing here.
We're seeing the internationalization of what is a local or the most regional problem that should be addressed by the players in the region.
But because of the race for resources, it's become internationalized to a very, very great degree.
So in Mali, it's really the French that are, if you like, the more aggressive component with American backing.
And then in Somalia, if you like, it's the other way around.
America takes the lead.
So yes, we see this.
And all this has been going on really for a decade.
Somalia is just the latest area of tension and confrontation to a degree that's, of course, very cruel and unnecessary.
And now, for some reason, I'm completely spacing out on who it was that I read and interviewed about Somalia recently, who talked all about how when the Kenyans kicked the al-Shabaab militia out of Kismayo, that that really solidified their turn toward being an international movement more allied with Zawahiri's goals than focusing on their local things, if only because they need the revenue.
They need Saudi donors.
And so since they don't have the port to sell their charcoal anymore.
And so that just took the problem that, as we've covered before, they had created in Somalia in the first place with al-Shabaab and turned them toward the internationalization.
That was only a couple of months ago.
My apologies to whoever's name I'm not thinking of.
No, well, we're looking at Somalia and Mali as really two failures in any kind of what we might call conflict resolution.
And indeed, these conflicts are going to fester for a long time, and they provide the pretext long term for further U.S., French, whatever, militarization of the region, whether it's East Africa or West Africa.
And, you know, I just I don't see I unfortunately I don't see an end to an end to this instability for some time.
It's a real shame.
Scott, I'm going to have to leave you.
OK, well, thanks very much for your time.
And I appreciate your call and hope it wasn't too confusing.
It gets into some pretty esoteric stuff, but.
Oh, no, it's a lot of fun.
I appreciate.
All right.
You take care.
We'll do it again sometime.
Bye.
Bye.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
The jobless rate in America keeps climbing.
Food stamps and other social welfare spending continue to increase at an alarming rate.
And the only thing that's kept this whole so-called recovery going at all is the Federal Reserve's inflationary printing press.
Seems like 2008 might have just been a rehearsal for the financial crisis still to come.
So now let me talk to you about this great video by Dr.
Martin Weiss from moneyandmarkets.com.
The video spells out how this disaster will affect you and create enormous financial opportunities if you know how to recognize a true diamond in the rough.
Weiss shows when stocks have crashed and even gives the names of the biggest banks that are most likely to fail.
Before you invest one dollar, take the time to watch this new video.
Go to crisis16.com.
That's crisis16.com.
Learn from the experts how to evaluate these opportunities and start making better informed decisions that will lead to a better return on your investments.
That's Dr. Martin Weiss at crisis16.com.by the state of Utah.
Fact.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
Our message to Utah?
Turn.
It.
Off.
No water equals no NSA data center.
Visit offnow.org.
Hey, Al Scott here.
Ever wanted to help support the show and own silver at the same time?
Well, a friend of mine, libertarian activist Arlo Pignotti, has invented the alternative currency with the most promise of them all.
QR silver commodity disks.
The first ever QR code one ounce silver pieces.
Just scan the back of one with your phone and get the instant spot price.
They're perfect for saving or spending at the market.
And anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate gets one.
That's scotthorton.org slash donate.
And if you'd like to learn and order more, send them a message at commodity disks.com or check them out on Facebook at slash commodity disks.
And thanks.
Hey, Al Scott here for myheroesthink.com.
They sell beautiful seven inch busts of libertarian heroes, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, and Harry Brown.
I've got the Harry Brown one on the bookshelf now.
Makes me smile every time it catches my eye.
These finely crafted statues from myheroesthink.com make excellent decorations for your desktop at work, bookends for your shelves, or gifts for that special individualist in your life.
They're also all available in colors now too.
Of course, gold, silver, bronze.
Coming soon.
Hayek, Hazlitt, Carlin.
Use promo code Scott Horton and save $5.
At myheroesthink.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire and the permanent military economy, and all from a free market libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome.
And Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers state that people agree on one thing.
It's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society.
Empire.
The permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at Amazon.com.
Or just click on the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org.