04/08/10 – John Jones – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Nick Hancock, subbing in for Scott Horton, who was called out by the state to go do something, you know, because he needed permission to go do something.
And so anyway, he's all right.
He'll be back soon.
But this is John Jones.
Say hi to the people.
Hey, how's it going, people?
Yeah, so I met John in Washington, D.C. when we went there for the CPAC event into the belly of the beast.
And we left there feeling pretty good about the, you know, the movement towards a foreign policy based on an armed neutrality and a foreign policy based on non-intervention, you know, because Ron Paul won that CPAC straw poll.
And that was a big deal.
And it brought us all a lot closer together and made us feel like, you know, we were part of something bigger.
Isn't that right, John?
Absolutely.
It was pretty great.
When those straw poll results came out, they had no idea what hit them.
Everyone thought for sure it was going to be Palin or Romney.
And Ron Paul with 32 percent, the CPAC record-breaking win, up over the second place, I think, by nine points.
And Palin came in third with 7 percent.
So, I mean, that was one of the last events of CPAC.
And that left me with some wind in my sails to come back up here to UNH and keep fighting the good fight.
Well, let's talk about your activity locally, what you're doing for Young Americans for Liberty in New Hampshire.
You guys have an End the War petition.
Can you speak about that a little bit?
Yeah, the petition is part of a national program or initiative done by Young Americans for Liberty chapters all over the country.
It's calling for legislation ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They're supposed to be delivered to the offices of congressmen and senators, and we'll see where that goes.
But I think it's a great initiative, a great way to spread the word on campus, kind of get the idea in our peers' mind that you can do something about it.
Like, yes, we can.
Just by voicing your support, by putting your pen to paper and saying, I support legislation ending the war, that's a tiny bit of pressure, but that's the pressure that's needed to be put on politicians to make the right decisions.
Also, we did the petition.
And just two weeks ago, I was invited to speak on a panel discussion about the war in Afghanistan.
I'll just give you a little info about myself.
I'm a Pashto linguist.
I served in the Air Force.
Pashto is one of the major languages of Afghanistan.
So I had a pretty interesting perspective, a chance to see the war from a military perspective, from an intelligence perspective.
And really, a lot of people would kind of expect you to come out of the military and support what you're doing.
But really, I had the opposite experience.
The more I saw, the less I supported what we were doing, and the less sense it made.
I mean, especially with Karzai's most recent comments, threatening to join the Taliban.
Like, this is outrageous.
I know, what a traitor.
Like, yeah, how could he not support our great efforts there?
But anyways, we had a panel discussion.
It was really great.
I was co-hosted by Young Americans for Liberty at UNH and the UNH Peace and Justice League, and included myself, a retired 30-year Army colonel, an active-duty Air Force lieutenant colonel who runs the ROTC program here, and an Afghan-American woman, Maryam Shamsab.
And it was just a great discussion.
We each got a few minutes to kind of open up with some remarks, and then it just opened to questions from the audience.
And all the feedback we got was great.
And, you know, there was no – it was kind of designed to be balanced around, you know, kind of pro-war, anti-war perspective.
But it wasn't really a debate.
It really was a discussion.
And I think that was the strength of it, because we had a lot of ROTC kids in the room.
And ROTC is R-O-T-C, Reserve Officer Training Corps.
You know, the guys that are going to be joining the military as officers out of college.
So, you know, I threw some stuff in there talking about the Constitution, how, like, these wars aren't authorized by the Constitution, how I would really love to see them come by our table, grab a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and read it before they take that oath, so that they really know what they're, you know, swearing to uphold.
But we got great feedback from the ROTC students.
They really, you know, enjoyed having a perspective that was counter to what they, you know, think and hear every day that was reasoned.
And, you know, just like what you and Scott are doing by, you know, bringing logic and reason to the debate.
You know, it's not just an emotional thing.
It's like, all right, let's just look at all the reasons why war is bad.
That's something that the ROTC students don't normally get exposed to.
What about your experience in Iraq?
Can you speak a little bit about what it was like?
It must be a complete 180-degree shift being a peace activist to being in uniform overseas, where you never belonged in the first place.
I mean, it's something the rest of us can only begin to understand through headlines in the news.
But luckily, last hour, Adam Kokesh, in a late notice, was able to come in and share some of his experiences.
I'd like to dig into you a little bit here, if you don't mind.
Like, what was it like, you know?
Well, I served exclusively with the war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom.
When I joined, you know, it made sense.
It was the right thing to do for my country.
I was 18 years old, out of high school, didn't really have much going on, wasn't in college.
And so I joined up, and I became a linguist.
I went to school for a year to study the language and culture of the Afghan people.
And, you know, after my language schooling, I kind of had some questions about the way we were doing things, but I was still mostly on the same page.
You know, like, I worked so hard to get through my year and a half of training, and now I'm ready to go over there.
Well, I went over to the desert, and after my first deployment, I really had some questions.
You know, just, I mean, I worked with a top-secret clearance, so most of what I did specifically is classified.
But really, you know, just the way we were going about things, I had some really interesting experiences with some of the leadership that clearly just had no idea what was going on.
And they might be, you know, have gotten an engineering degree, which is very popular in the Air Force.
You know, they're going to be a pilot.
They like to see the engineering degrees.
But they don't really know anything about the Afghan culture, about the Afghan people.
And that was what I was trained to know about.
So to be in that, to have that perspective, and then just see so many culturally ignorant people making these decisions that they really believe are in the best interest of the Afghan people, despite their ignorance, that really shook me, like really made me think about it.
And then, you know, I came back, and I saw Congressman Ron Paul talking in the debates.
And it was funny, because the first time I saw him, I was like, oh, this guy's crazy.
Like, how can you be a Republican and be against the war?
Us Republicans love this war.
This is great.
But then I heard what he talked about with blowback, the idea that what we do actually has some negative consequences down the road.
And that just really kind of brought the walls in my reality tumbling down, because all I could see that we were doing over there was more of the same thing that pissed people off in the first place.
So it was really a humbling experience to, you know, really have my reality destroyed.
And it really was destroyed in every sense of the word, because, you know, like I said, I joined the military with this idea of what I was doing was right.
What I was doing was the best thing I could do for my country.
But when I did it, I would see in the news, you know, one, the misinterpretation of what actually happened.
I described at the panel I was on a couple weeks ago that when the American people are trying to form an opinion about what's going on overseas, it's really like looking through a keyhole at what's going on.
When I would fly a mission, I would come back and read about the results of that mission on foxnews.com.
But their story would be totally, you know, messed up.
It would be inaccurate.
But this is the information, the factual news that everyone's forming their opinions off of.
And to see that from a perspective where I'm working with top-secret intel reports, which are often flawed themselves, the news reports are hideous.
To actually be there and participate in what's going on and see that the American people are being fed this garbage about what's actually happening, after that, that was it.
You know, I was coming back.
I wanted to fight for liberty.
I'd been tricked into thinking what I was doing was right.
And so I'm all in right now.
You know, Young Americans for Liberty is just, you know, that's the most important thing for me right now.
I'm in school.
I'm going to school at the University of New Hampshire.
But that's really secondary to Young Americans for Liberty for me because that's the real fight.
That's what's important.
And, yeah, that's kind of my little experience in a nutshell, going Air Force to a peace activist.
So what were people being told were the Afghani interests?
Like were you getting different conflicting messages when you were serving?
Well, I think an important thing to point out for those that haven't served in the military is that when you're in, you know, you don't really think about it.
It's not really you go to basic training and you're taught to take orders, and that's really what you're trained to do.
You do what you're told.
And when you're in, like when I was in the Air Force, even after I started to really doubt the effectiveness of what we were doing, I still did it.
I still flew missions, one, because I would go to prison if I tried to say I'm not going to go, and, two, because I realized that, you know, by doing my job well, I could keep the wrong people from having bombs dropped on them or keep, you know, American boys from being blown up.
So that was really the motivating force for me to continue doing what I was doing, even when I, you know, realized that occupying Afghanistan isn't the answer.
So that being the case, I think that's very common in the military.
It's a job.
When you're in, you're trained in a specialization, you know, you have a skill, and you do that job.
So as far as, like, what we're being told, it's really not part of it.
We kind of have this impression, I guess, you know, given, like, the popular news media's portrayal of how things are going, that what we're doing is right.
But that's not really part of being in the military, like discussing amongst ourselves how what we're doing is right.
It's just it's kind of accepted.
You all took the oath to follow the orders.
So that's kind of a roundabout answer to your question.
But, yeah, discussion of what's, you know, how right what we're doing is really nonexistent, or at least my experience was that we weren't actively doing that.
What is the relationship with your YAL chapter with the rest of the campus?
I've seen when I go to YALiberty.org, a lot of times there's the sense of outcast sense.
And that's, you know, that's just my interpretation.
When people are out there protesting and demonstrating, it serves a good purpose, you know, for sending the right message and all that.
But sometimes what I see on there, it seems like they might be just separating themselves too much from the rest of the campus.
Are you guys pretty open to everyone?
Are you finding new members?
And are you growing?
Or is it, you know, have you felt like you've reached your peak anywhere?
Or what's the evolution of the group there on your campus?
Well, what we really try to do is build every bridge we can.
Because, you know, the war issue, as long as we're on anti-war radio, I'll address that specifically.
Like I said, that panel was a co-sponsored event by Young Americans for Liberty and Peace and Justice League.
The Peace and Justice League, they're pretty much the anti-war group on campus.
I'm trying to think how best to characterize our relationship.
Because obviously, I think, as Scott has pointed out numerous times, in the left anti-war movement, it kind of went quiet after Obama was elected.
Kind of.
I mean, it went quiet after Obama was elected.
And that was really kind of the case last semester.
But I found that, you know, just by having some conversations with the folks in the Peace and Justice League, who generally came across to me as being members of the leftist school of thought, after having conversations with them and just kind of talking about how, all right, you know, the wars are still going on.
You know, it's still our job to try and stop them.
They sprung right into action.
And, you know, they've cooperated with us on a lot of things.
And I have personal relationships with several of the members.
Other things we've done with other groups, we've reached out to the college Republicans and college Democrats here to have a debate.
Just all topics, no holds barred.
We offered for it to be moderated by someone from the school paper.
And no response.
They're just not interested.
Republicans and Democrats on campus, I am still perfectly willing to try to have some sort of event with them.
But I've gone to college Republicans' meetings, and I'm just not welcome.
So, yeah, we are outcasts in many ways.
Because, you know, like I was saying earlier, when you and Scott, you talk about the logic, the reasons of why anti-war is not bad.
There is the emotional side.
But I feel like a lot of people who are anti-war, a lot of them are anti-war for the emotional reasons, but haven't done the necessary research so that they have logic on their side as well.
So when you do that logical analysis of why you're anti-war, well, then that's when it leads to libertarianism.
Because you realize that having a big state leads to war.
And so that's kind of where I think a lot of the friction comes between Young Americans for Liberty groups and other groups, is because we've largely looked into the logic as Young Americans for Liberty and realized that the state is why we have these wars.
Groups of people aren't going out there and declaring war.
It's the states.
So there's that resistance in the mainstream to accept that government may not be the best thing for freedom and peace.
So I think that's where the friction really comes from.
We've accepted the fact that, all right, we need to recognize that the state is perpetuating these wars, and we need to be able to point that out.
But other groups aren't at that point where they've accepted that yet.
And it threatens them when we bring it up.
Well, you were saying that the college Republicans and the college Democrats are just not interested or whatever.
Is that because you're using the wrong approach?
I mean, certainly they fall short on being relevant towards anything that would maximize individual liberty.
But are you going in there just talking about being anti-war?
Or what are the other terms that you might find useful or have tried?
Or is there other terminology that you've used besides anti-war that's worked for you?
Yeah.
I mean, as far as fiscal conservatism, I mean, that's something that I really think that the college Republicans would be all about.
But we have some sort of untouchable status because of our anti-war stance.
What I mean is, John, is instead of using the term anti-war, is there another term like non-intervention or arms neutrality or something else?
I don't know.
I think just like from an individualist perspective, everyone has a different sensibility of what one word means over another.
So have you tried addressing the foreign policy issue with other terminology besides anti-war?
Well, I guess so.
I mean, there's always more we could do.
And I know that's an area where we could work on more is involving ourselves more with the college Republicans and Democrats.
I see exactly what you mean.
We could really probably tailor it to them more effectively.
But the forum in which we can do so is kind of limited.
One, because they don't want us.
I go to the meetings, and there's like a hand-raising system where it's very structured.
There's not really a – and I went in.
I asked at a meeting once.
This was shortly before CPAC.
I asked, so why do you guys have these meetings?
Like, why are you college Republicans?
What philosophic points of view do you hold that make you who you are?
And I was met with just like great frustration.
I was called an a-hole.
So they answered your question for you.
I guess in a way they did.
But, you know, I know they're smart kids, but I guess we really need to find that way to have the forum.
I guess I thought that we could have a debate and kind of have a reasoned discussion like we did with the war panel.
We had both sides represented there, and it was a great, productive discussion.
But I guess, you know, I accept some of the blame that perhaps I haven't done enough in tailoring my arguments.
But at the same time, I mean, how effective can you be when someone's sticking fingers in their ears and going la-la-la-la-la?
That's kind of the resistance I've met, at least when I say, you know, college Republicans.
But I want to say as far as like our group alone on the campus, whatever we do, we're perceived positively on the whole.
Like people like what we have to say.
Students, you know, when we have a table, you know, they don't, you know, thumb their noses at us or anything.
So students are receptive to the message.
And so really this is our first year on campus, and I think we've done a pretty good job of putting on educational events and getting good literature in kids' hands.
Yeah, but I guess if the topic is coordinating with other groups, yeah, we've done that on several events, especially the Peace and Justice League.
But yeah, there is sort of an outcast feeling, you know, about being a YAL chapter, because what we are talking about is completely out of the mainstream.
So it's kind of like, you know, when you're bringing that kind of information to someone, they've never heard it before.
So if it threatens their reality, they're going to resist it.
But overall, I think this is something that's just going to get stronger as we go forward.
Well, John, I want to thank you very much for being on anti-war radio here.
Do you ever write for YALiberty.org?
I have plenty of ideas of things I'd love to write about, but I just haven't been writing, to be honest.
Yeah, you should, man, because we had some cool talks over there in D.C., and I hope that you're able to come out here, or maybe I'll get out there.
It's a great website for people to go check out, YALiberty.org, Young Americans for Liberty in New Hampshire.
And are you the founder of that group?
Yeah, co-founder.
Another veteran, Alex Peterson, he helped me get the group started.
We kind of have a non-hierarchical design for the group, so there's not really like a president.
I'd say that myself and a couple other members are more motivated than others to initiate ideas and events.
But yeah, kind of a co-founder, and I can't take credit for everything because everyone's worked so hard at our group.
I'll just throw out there that tonight I'll be getting up the panel discussion that we had two weeks ago online.
So if you look for the YouTube channel YALUNH, you should be able to find the video tonight, hopefully by 10 o'clock or so.
All right, well, make sure it gets on the Young Americans for Liberty blog there.
All right, will do.
Okay, yeah, that's Jon Jones, everyone, and this is Anti-War Radio.
My name's Nick Hancoff, substituting in for Scott Horton.