Peter Van Buren, a writer and retired US Foreign Service Officer, discusses his fictional account of an alternate WWII where the US invades Japan, in an exploration of how war creates moral injuries that never heal. He also discusses President Trump’s increasing use of drone strikes, why taking out ISIS won’t end Iraq’s problems, and the partisan stupidity that dominates American politics.
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Great Peter Van Buren used to be a State Department weenie, but now he's a hero of the anti-war movement, writing great articles all the time at his great blog, We Meant Well, which is also the title of his first book about his time in Iraq.
He also wrote The Ghosts of Tom Joad, and he's got a brand new book coming out to Hooper's War, a novel of World War Two, Japan.
Ain't that interesting?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be here.
I got to inject before we even get started that the title of my book, We Meant Well, is fully sarcastic and ironic.
A week does not go by when I don't get this blast from someone saying, we didn't mean well, that was a terrible war.
And it's like, dude, that is what the whole book is about.
It's called sarcasm, irony.
All you got to do is read the back cover and you got that.
So I just want to throw that out there because it is as anti-war book as I was capable of writing.
Absolutely.
Yeah, good deal.
And it's too bad that you have to say that.
But yeah, you know, maybe on the paperback, you put a slash Sark, you know, end code thing at the end.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've got to clarify this.
So yeah, when the film version comes out, we'll work on that.
Bracket slash Sark.
Yeah.
Yes.
For those of you who are too stupid to read the subtitle, please note.
There you go.
All right.
Well, now don't get me started asking you about what you know about Iraq yet.
Anyway, Hooper's War.
Who's Hooper and what war are we talking about here?
Well, it's another one of those titles that has several meanings.
And the theme of the book is an anti-war story that focuses on the concept of moral injury, the damage that war does to the soul, the core, the heart of people who fight it and civilians who experience war in their own ways.
And Hooper, Nate Hooper, is a World War Two American soldier who gets caught up in the Japan during World War Two and is pressed into a series of moral decisions that some are his own mucking up.
Others are sort of forced on him and finds his himself destroyed as a human being.
And then in the present day, seeks to reclaim himself.
And it's a setting in World War Two Japan for a couple of reasons.
One is that I have found in speaking with people that the more removed from current events that I can get, the more I can talk about current events.
If you talk about torture in the context of America's post 9-11 wars, everybody's got some kind of complex and often misguided opinion of these things.
But if you talk about torture in the context of fictional events 70 years ago, I find that people are a little more interested in approaching it with an open mind.
And so ironically, by not talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, I find myself with more freedom to do so.
The other reason for the setting is the book actually began in a very different way.
I stumbled into an opportunity to speak with a number of very elderly Japanese survivors of World War Two.
Civilians, not soldiers, people who were children and experienced the war.
And I was able to get to know them, to interview them, and to learn that they experienced these concepts of moral injury based on things they saw, based on what happened to people around them, based of course on their sense of guilt for not being able, even as children, to save their parents or to help others.
And I realized that this was extraordinary information.
No one in English has touched on this type of thing, basically the Japanese home front during World War Two in any kind of human way.
It's always presented that these were robots ready to fight the Americans with bamboo sticks, or they were just simply targets for our drones of the day, B-29s and of course the atomic bombs.
And it evolved into this setting of World War Two to give me more flexibility and this fictional format that would allow me to blend this mountain of information that I found in ways that would tell not only what I hope is a good story, but do it with a conscience.
Cool, man.
I can't wait to read this.
May 15th.
It's on Amazon for pre-order.
And please, folks, if they can take a look at it.
Cool, man.
All right.
Again, y'all, that's Hooper's War, a novel of World War Two, Japan by Peter Van Buren.
Hey, let's talk about some of the articles you wrote.
Sure.
Do I want to start with Russia BS or do I want to ask you about the drone war?
So many drone wars.
Well, let's let's do them both at once.
Hey, go ahead.
Because they're more related in a way than maybe we think.
Just kind of a quick scene setter here.
Donald Trump has changed some of the rules of how the drone wars work under Obama.
The United States evolved what was called the playbook, which is a set of rules, if you will, that decide who we're going to smite from the air and how we're going to make those those decisions.
And one of the things that the playbook specifies is that when the president declares an area, a kind of an active war zones, which includes Iraq, Afghanistan, and it's not been stated out loud, but but Syria, then the decisions on who to blow up largely devolve down to the military commanders.
The White House is not directly involved in those decisions.
When you are talking about blowing up a human being in an area outside of those designated war zones, then the decisions are supposedly made at a higher level, potentially up to and including the White House itself.
There's been newspaper articles insisting that Donald Trump, quote, has passed the commander in chief's authority down to the CIA and military commanders and that this represents a widening of the war and things along those lines.
What has really happened, and it's still not a good thing, but what has really happened is he simply has expanded the Obama rules to include parts of Yemen and parts of Somalia as active zones, if you will.
And the CIA and the military are welcome to kill people there without having to talk to Trump first.
And that's exactly and only what has changed.
The killing has been going on continuously for 15 years.
The killing of people in civilian areas with all those unfortunate civilian collateral deaths has been going on.
The absolute only change is that a different person is making some of the decisions under Trump than under Obama.
But this has been conflated into something that represents a radical change and all that.
And this is actually in a funny way where we can talk about the Russians, because America has evolved into a situation in the last couple of months where anything and everything that happens in the White House now is A, wrong, and B, oftentimes motivated by something we don't fully understand or something that's new and different.
And that's the whole idea with the Russians.
Trump won only because the Russians intervened to destroy democracy.
And it's a nefarious thing that's going on behind the scenes that we won't fully understand.
And very much like the drone wars, everything that flows out of this is not only bad, but has to be spoken of in near apocalyptic terms.
It's a stretch in some ways to connect the two, but in other ways, maybe less of a stretch than might appear at first glance.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you about on the terror war stuff here for a second.
There's certainly what you say is so true.
And you can see that really there's a whole liberal and that includes basically every hairdo and lip gloss on TV a kind of narrative that they're wedded to that anything that's going on now, any civilian casualties that are going to be blamed on the U.S. now or anything, that's all Trump's fault because he changed the rules and everything was fine back when it was our hero Obama and all that.
On the other hand, it is still true, though, right, that he's basically telling Mattis, you know, Rumsfeld style gloves off, go ahead, do what you want.
And that isn't that kind of guaranteed?
I mean, that does mean escalation, right?
What was wrong with Obama was he was such a wimp about it.
What we really need is to stop second guessing our targets and just go ahead and smash them already.
I think what you're saying is accurate, but the way it's being spun by the left is is such revisionist history and so quickly that it's it's misleading.
So the theory here is that the, you know, thousands and thousands of civilians, innocent people who were murdered during the Obama eight years.
And it's an extraordinary number.
I mean, the Council on Foreign Relations says that almost 4000 civilians are known to have been killed outside of Iraq and Afghanistan during the Obama years.
And I think we can all kind of agree that that 4000 is probably in the low ball category and it automatically is not including Afghan and Iraq deaths.
The official U.S. government death count is only three hundred and twenty four.
So the idea is, is that if you change that from 4000 civilians to let's double it, 8000 civilians, obviously on individual terms and human terms, that's a horrible thing seeing those people die.
But if you start to think in geopolitical terms, the war on terror itself, it's not as big of change.
And by ignoring what Obama did or actually praising it, we are asking the wrong questions.
It's not a question of whether Mattis should be making the civilian kill decision or Trump or Joe Smith in the Pentagon.
The question is, should we be flying drone wars at all?
And should we be killing people in this manner at all?
Should there be one death, never mind whether, hey, 4000 is cool, but hey, if you get close to 5000, dude, bummer.
Right.
We're asking the wrong question and we're allowing our bizarre everything Trump does is wrong.
Everything Obama did was right.
Thesis to block us from seeing what should be the question that we should all be asking.
Yeah, well, and it's especially sad because he was never anything but Hillary in blackface anyway from the day he was introduced in 2004 or the day he started running in 2007.
I mean, come on.
This guy's always been nothing but another one of them.
A little bit less worse than Bush in that he didn't send in the whole damn infantry division and Marine Corps into Iraq style thing.
But then again, he took Al-Qaeda's side in Libya and Syria.
That's at least as bad as what Bush did.
And the fact that anybody's got to still be married to somehow defending Obama's legacy.
He was a president.
Your enemy was so difficult.
I'm sorry.
You know, I take my hat off to the guy, though, because while, you know, Hillary could never even come close to selling it, you know, and coming across as the savior of anything.
And, you know, the person who does sometimes makes mistakes, but makes them for the right reasons.
You know, Obama was brilliant at that.
Here's a guy who started a new war in Libya.
Here's a guy who started a new war in Syria, a new war in Yemen support supports the near genocide that the Saudis are playing out in Yemen.
A guy who surged in Afghanistan and reinserted us into the Iraq war, all those things.
And yet he comes across as a peacemaker, as the guy who was not a danger to civilization as we know it.
And that was purely due to his rhetorical skills.
Like I said, I got to take my hat off to the guy.
He could talk pretty and that will leave him with a historical legacy for at least for the near term that is as removed from reality as it possibly could.
But man, evil genius is still genius.
Yep.
I remember right after when I was a kid, when it when the George H.W. Bush years first started, and all the Ronald Reagan revisionism was got kicked straight into gear that never mind selling missiles to the Ayatollah or any of that, never mind the death squads in El Salvador, never mind, you know, all the stock market, the first recession and the second one, never mind all of this stuff, you know, they just, and he had a low approval rate.
I remember, I don't know what the number was, but he had a low, low approval rating on the way out.
But man, they just went straight to work on that narrative.
And of course, it won out.
I mean, he's basically hailed as a founding father, like FDR Lincoln now, you know.
Yeah.
And, you know, I wonder if that's how Obama will be in 25 years where every Democrat is like, I'm an Obama Democrat and that kind of thing.
You know, we already hear that.
I mean, but even worse, you're starting to see the revisionism play out on George W. Bush.
I mean, the the son of a has a book out of infantile paintings of soldiers from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
And, you know, he's been rehabilitated.
He's he's showing up at events.
He's starting to make public statements.
He's being quoted, criticizing Trump, supposedly, and of course, anonymous sources.
But he's already being clawed back into the center light.
It's just I wake up some mornings and feel I'm in the topsy turvy world.
I it's like I either have to stop drinking or drink a lot more because things simply make no sense anymore.
And the media that I always criticized, but but always held hope for, I guess, has collapsed around me.
I don't know what to read anymore.
This is not a smooch on the backside, but I find myself reading your sites and more of the other libertarian stuff simply because I can't read the left anymore, as I used to do, because it's all apocalyptic stories about what Trump may do.
And certainly on the right, they've completely given up on reality and simply promote means that that in many cases are so hateful that I just can't.
Even if the underlying thoughts are semi in line with mine, the anger and the hate there is just beyond what I'm really capable of of doing.
So I spend a lot more time watching, you know, cartoons.
You know, SpongeBob is really, really funny.
Yeah, I'd be willing to bet that it is.
I mean, I know what it looks like.
Yeah.
Check it out.
Check it out.
Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audiobook.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes, or just click in the right margin of my website at scotthorton.org.
Yeah, no, this is how libertarians end up winning people over a few at a time, is when the left and the right change positions in power and everyone in the world turns into the world's greatest hypocrites.
Us libertarians are still perfect on everything always.
We're against everything always.
You don't ever catch us slipping, right guys?
And so I've had a lot of leftists say to me, you know what, man, if this is who leftists are, then I guess I am a goddamn libertarian because at least I know that you're going to always be against killing Afghans, whether it's under a Bush or an Obama.
And with these guys, I'm like rolling dice.
I don't even know what, when I start reading an article at this or that left-wing site, I don't, I'm taking a risk at how it's going to be by the end and whether this may be a big rationalization for what Obama's doing over there, you know?
People get really jaded about stuff like that.
It's very interesting because as some of your long-term listeners know, I've focused a lot on Iraq.
My first book was about Iraq and I still try to write about Iraq and certainly keep up with the news.
And just watching how perceptions of Iraq, you know, it was Bush's war that Obama was trying to fix and now it's Obama's war, but it was forced on him.
It's good.
It's bad.
We did the right thing.
We did it in the wrong way.
David Petraeus is still talking in public about these things and I no longer have any sense of what really happened there.
I mean, I'm exaggerating.
I hopefully have at least as good a sense of it as anyone else, but what I thought were sort of hard truths have fallen apart as far as the media narrative is concerned and I can't see that improving as every problem is going to be twisted into being Trump's fault.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, here's the thing too, man, is there's so few people, well, first of all, during Iraq War II, they never explained who was who at all, other than it's America and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists who are trying to stop their democracy or some kind of nonsense.
They never explain, you know, who any of the relevant parties were, what their motivations were, what they're fighting over at all, what they had and lost or what they had and gained or any kind of thing.
And so now, you know, they're really in no better position to try to examine and yet we're in the middle of major changes here, right?
This isn't just a war against the Islamic State.
This is a war to expand the borders of Iraqi Shia-stan even further to the west now, which is just, if ISIS is Prince Bandar's backlash from when George W. Bush handed Baghdad to Iran and their friends on a silver platter, then what the hell is the next backlash going to be after this?
And especially when now there are, I don't know, 20,000 something more Bin Ladenites in the world than there were when Obama took their side in 2011.
Yep.
No, I mean, I'm starting to think of Iraq, the current Iraq war.
You call it two, but I call it Iraq war three because we had the 1991 war in there too.
But regardless, I mean, the idea is, is it's Groundhog Day where we've got a rising Shia or Sunni force that's being squashed with extraordinary amounts of firepower.
I mean, how many bombs per ISIS, dead ISIS guy?
I mean, it's incredible math and fine.
I mean, at some point physics is going to win out and we're going to blow up enough ISIS people that ISIS becomes a very ineffective organization inside Iraq at least, because that's in a way partially what happened with Al Qaeda.
But that doesn't mean the issues are going away.
It's just going to be as Al Qaeda can be considered to have morphed into ISIS in Iraq.
There's going to be a one after that because the fundamental issues of resolving the Sunni Shia conflict, the fundamental issue of why Iran still is a major presence in Iraq and what they're going to be doing, those issues are not going away.
They may actually get worse for the fact that they're dragging into a second decade.
And we're going to keep doing Groundhog Day all over.
We may have a Syrian addition as well because it looks like we're going to basically walk away from that war in some ways.
I mean, Trump's people have said out loud now that they're not pursuing regime change, but they're not giving up northern and eastern Syria either.
And so basically you're going to have a divided country there and that division is going to have to be maintained with American firepower at some level.
So we're just going to have that one go on for basically my grandchildren's lifetime as we will in Iraq and as we will in Afghanistan.
Yeah, I guess, you know, we're still waiting on Mattis for some reason to turn in the final report there, but they've made it really clear, I guess, the commanding general in Afghanistan that he wants 5,000 more troops.
So I guess we can expect 15,000 more to go.
Yes, and even those numbers are very flexible.
You know, there was another crisis reported across the media that Trump has announced that he's not going to be issuing troop figures for Iraq and Syria, which is bad.
But we do need to remember that during the Obama administration, they were classifying troops into two categories, quote, deployed and, quote, temporary.
And they only were issuing figures on the deployed.
And that really was nothing more than military paperwork.
For example, most of the Marines serving in Iraq are officially deployed to ships.
That's what Marines do.
They're officially deployed to ships that are in the Gulf, but in fact, they're on the ground all the time in Iraq.
But they don't figure into the headcount of how many American troops are, quote, unquote, in Iraq.
So we've been playing games with these numbers long before Trump has said, well, we're just not going to issue any numbers anymore.
The numbers we were issued were false.
So the difference between getting false numbers and no numbers, I would argue, is not particularly important.
Yeah.
Well, now, so I don't know, man, let me get bogged down in Syria here for a second.
Why not?
We all are.
Yeah.
So I was trying to count the other day and I got to up around 12, 13, 14 different armies fighting in this war with the different factions of Kurds and the Iraqi army and the Shiite and Sunni militias.
The I say the two kinds of Kurds, the Syrians, Arab army, Hezbollah, Russia, the CIA and JSOC and all these different factions on all these different sides fighting in this thing.
The Turks, of course, the Israelis, Saudi money going to Ahrar al-Sham and who knows who else CIA versus JSOC at some times, depending when when the Syrian defense democratic forces so-called come into battle with CIA's al-Qaeda guys.
But so.
As you were saying, they're indicating they're sort of calling off the plan for regime change against Damascus, which is really a continuation of Obama's policy anyway.
Exactly.
Sort of.
Yes.
Kind of half assed try that.
Well, maybe if it works, OK, but we're not going to really do everything it takes to guarantee a regime change there.
And yet the battle for Raqqa is still on.
And right now we're they have they're putting infantry, not just special forces, but Marine Corps infantry, artillery guys and whatever other ground forces there to reinforce the special forces and the Syrian YPG, otherwise known as the Syrian Defense Forces.
They're in their battle, upcoming battle for Raqqa in eastern Syria.
And you have all kinds of horrible conflicts of interest there between the Turks especially and those Syrian Kurds.
And you have the Syrian Arab Army, which has, I don't know, you characterize it X relationship with the Syrian Kurds themselves and a whole tumultuous future for what's going to happen with their degree of autonomy or sovereignty in some future Syria.
And then plus you got Erdogan, the emperor of Turkey now, I guess, is at least, I don't know, too big for his britches, but they're about to rip anyway, you know, at the limit there.
And I just wonder about, I don't know, how, first of all, like, what's your assessment of just how stupid it is to have our troops there at Deir ez-Zor and right in the middle of this kind of flashpoint, and the possibility, however you rank it, of the thing getting out of hand here, when after all, we're fighting for and against the Russians at the same time still.
I mean, you've done an excellent job of summarizing it and that on your list of combatants, you know, there needs to be an asterisk at the end because I'm sure there are combatants involved in this who we don't know of yet that are fighting, you know, right now.
We just haven't heard of them.
We'll also, the asterisk should also note that I'm sure a lot of these groups will splinter at some points and that what you, we think of as two Kurdish groups may morph into three or four or seven or ten or the same thing for anyone else that's on the ground there.
So this is a scenario that has no bottom in terms of how bad it can get.
The problem is, as you said, conflicts of interest.
Each of these groups has a different goal and they're pursuing different goals right now, and what I think a lot of the United States' purpose is, is to kind of try to referee all this if possible, and if possible, really possible, try to redirect some of the fighting towards, some of the fighters towards American goals, whatever those might happen to be.
I will put a big asterisk next to that as well.
But I wonder how much of those efforts of American military on the ground are really designed to keep the Turks and the Kurds from killing each other too much so that that doesn't become the focus of this war and all the way down with all these other disparate groups.
I mean, think about, for example, the pressure the Americans must be applying to the Israelis not to get deeper into this.
You can imagine the IDF just itching to start engaging heavily in Syria, and they're certainly engaged, but I mean, really going in and taking care of some old business there.
You can imagine the United States saying, please don't do this right now.
When the time comes, you'll be able to kill as many Syrians as you want, but not right now.
And the same thing with the deals that we know are worked out, certainly on the ground level, between the Russians and us and the Iranians.
We, the Russians, and probably the Iranians are really the only, you might throw the Turks, I mean, fully organized forces that have actual chains of command, and you can actually talk to someone at a high level and expect things to happen at a low level under his orders.
And that makes the Russians an extraordinarily important power to us because we can do what we do, which is negotiate and have meetings and let generals talk to each other and issue orders.
You can't really do that well with Hezbollah or a splinter group of Al-Qaeda or what have you.
But the potential for that whole system to break down is significant.
The potential for one party or another to up the ante in terms of weapons, we throw the term weapon of mass destruction around pretty casually these days, but it would not be hard to imagine a big weapon, a massive weapon that may not qualify, you know, it wouldn't be a nuke or something, but more chemical weapons, more poisons, a dirty bomb scenario where, you know, you don't need a whole lot of skill to make that work.
You put that all together and the potential for the shit really to hit the fan goes up.
The Kurds, for example, deciding that they can make more mileage fighting Turkey as a paramilitary force inside of Turkey, boy, you know, where that one spins out would be hard to really pin down.
Or imagine a scenario where Assad takes a very different position, whatever that might be, allying with a new group.
The Mideast is one of those, you know, strange bedfellows kind of places politically.
So, you know, Assad deciding he's going to throw in with X, Y or Z group or some kind of coup which changes the complexion of the Syrian leadership, but still keeps the Syrian leadership, just not Assad.
Man, you could just fill up pages and pages with scenarios and I can't think of a good one in there.
I mean, if Syria broke off and floated into the Mediterranean, maybe that would be about the best scenario I could actually envision.
So global warming is going to be basically the way we save this situation.
Just wash the whole thing away.
Just wash the whole thing away and we'll start over with something else.
You know, it seems like the first order of business would be to call off the CIA, man.
You know, the thing is this.
I'm 100 percent, you know, me and I wore Scott, man.
I ain't got no tolerance whatsoever for bombing the Islamic State.
But to have the CIA still back in Al-Qaeda and yeah, yeah, yeah, mythical moderates, they're nothing but the gun runners for Al-Qaeda.
The CIA has known.
I played the quote a million times of Hillary herself in February of 2012 saying, well, geez, if we're supporting the rebels, we're supporting Al-Qaeda, right?
I mean, hell, we don't want to do that.
And that's right.
And that's what they're still doing.
Because as best I can tell, it seemed like we had these reports last fall where Obama told JSOC, go ahead and start killing Al-Qaeda guys, if you want.
The Al-Nusra Front, whatever they call themselves this week.
And they said, okay, and started killing them, at least some.
But then we never really heard about, well, yeah, but what about the CIA program to help these guys, right?
Well, but then there was this thing in the Reuters.
And I believe Landay was one of them, but there was a bunch of authors on it.
But anyway, Landay is a pretty decent journalist.
And so they're reporting in Reuters that, well, the program to arm the moderates has been temporarily suspended because the Al-Qaeda guys came and stole all their stuff.
And geez, with security that bad, you know, we're supposed to just give it to them one piece at a time or something.
They're not supposed to just steal it all.
So because of that embarrassment, we're temporarily curtailing the thing.
But they took great pains to explain.
This has nothing to do with any change in policy.
And it certainly, a lot, they elaborated, has nothing to do with Donald Trump being the new president.
Nothing has changed.
This is in terms of strategy.
Just tactically speaking, we've stopped giving them anti-tank missiles for a few weeks.
But that's all I know about.
If there's other sources, I really am behind on reading Moon of Alabama and stuff.
There may be more sources that I don't know of about what the CIA is doing.
But I mean, all indications basically are that the Hillary program is still on.
Yeah.
And this is what happens.
I mean, new stuff is simply layered on top of old stuff.
Some of it is just bureaucratic, you know, digging in there.
So there's a cell at the CIA who does this and there's people assigned to it.
And they've gotten deep into their work and they've made all the contacts and there's budgets allotted.
And, you know, it's just kind of a bureaucratic snowballing kind of thing going on.
The other, of course, is that, as you pointed out earlier with the CIA rebels fighting the JSOC-backed rebels, these different parts, we say the U.S. government, but in fact, as we all know, the U.S. government is really a bunch of little duchies and fiefdoms that don't always agree with one another about what to do or what the goals are and are also competing with one another for budgets and attention and, you know, pats on the head from daddy and that kind of thing.
So the fact that this, what you've described is happening and we can be certain that if that isn't necessarily happening anymore, we just don't know there's something else like it going on.
I mean, this is part and parcel.
There's a technical term for it.
It's called Vietnam.
And you can look that up and see how that reads out.
But I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing that has been part of America's wars forever, is trying to play every side, fighting ourselves as much as we fight the quote unquote enemy, not knowing what each side is doing.
Just to go backwards, there's a famous story from the Vietnam era where my beloved State Department was complaining that the Pentagon was not keeping them in the loop on what the military was doing in Vietnam.
And so the Pentagon guys figured, OK, we know how to deal with this.
And they set up a dozen teletype machines, which are it's an old fashioned way of sending telegrams.
That's how people communicated back in the day.
I mean, whatever.
Think of it as slower email.
But but it prints out on paper and they set up a dozen of these things in the American Embassy and they put everything into the hands of the State Department, every supply request, every note saying trucks need to be parked tail to nose instead of nose to tail anymore.
Literally millions of pieces of paper flowing 24-7 and the State Department was forced to say, no, no, stop, stop, stop, stop.
So these things are not particularly new.
I think the difference, if you will, between some of our earlier wars where we were doing this, the 80s Afghan wars, Vietnam, whatever, is how quickly things can globalize now.
When we were funding the Taliban when we were funding the Taliban during the 80s in Afghanistan, the Taliban was at best a minor regional force and they didn't have the means or the communications or any of the tools of globalization to be a problem outside of their their area, Afghanistan.
And certainly the Vietnamese never had global intentions.
But when we're talking about these organizations today that we are handing anti-tank missiles to or losing control of weapons stores to, they do have the ability to expand either regionally or globally via terror acts.
And that raises the stakes considerably, though we seem to still be playing by the old rules while they're playing by a whole new set of rules.
Right.
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So that's something to worry about.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
All right, now, so geez, I could ask you all different things about Syria and Afghanistan, all kinds of stuff now, but I got to change the subject back to Russia.
So you're a former State Department guy, which in a way implies that you're a big dummy, but it also implies that you're no dummy.
It's Mr. Dummy to you, okay.
No, it's no dummy at all, right?
You're a guy, you're a worldly guy, man.
You worked for the U.S. Imperial State Department for two decades or something, right?
That's right, 24 years.
I was an imperialist.
So there you go.
And you know what?
I think also that that means you're some kind of patriot, right?
And that you would never put the fortunes of some other nation state ahead of the fortunes of your own or the people who live in this country.
Is that not correct?
Absolutely, because I was a patriot.
I was misguided in what patriotism was.
But at the end of the day, loving country is what patriotism is.
And I did and do subscribe to that.
I just came, of course, to realize that the country I loved was not the country I was serving.
And the methods of expressing patriotism were not supporting imperialism.
They were supporting freedom.
But nonetheless, the word, I feel, stuck to me then and sticks to me now.
But I see where you're going, but take us there.
Yeah.
Well, so the point being, how come you're not on board this bandwagon about the whole Russia thing?
Because everybody knows Putin, evil, expansionist, must be contained behind every horrifying thing here and there and everywhere.
The entire rise of the right in Europe is because of Putin.
The entire rise of Donald Trump in America is because of Putin.
My computer takes too damn long to boot up in the morning because of Putin.
And and everybody knows all of that.
And yet you keep saying, hold your horses and stuff like this in your article.
So how dare you?
And I insist you explain yourself.
Well, I'm actually not.
I guess it's time to come clean.
I'm actually a Russian bot myself.
Oh, man, I knew it.
Yep.
I am the sophisticated victim of extraordinarily clever Russian mind control.
And it is the simplest explanation.
And you go, it's Occam's razor right there.
And my lavish lifestyle is funded by the Russians.
Hang on a sec.
Svetlana.
No, no, no, no.
You know, no, no.
The the jasmine smelling massage cream, please.
No.
OK, sorry.
I just needed to take care of that while we were talking.
Um, look, this Putin thing is the most ridiculous.
Set of claims that I have ever heard in American history, and that includes whatever I happen to study that before I was old enough to experience it myself.
If you take this at face value, basically, here's what a vast number of Americans believe.
We had an election that would certainly have turned out radically differently, except for the intervention, the very clever intervention of a foreign power that leaked a bunch of DNC emails.
This call and along with what people consider fake news, this caused this vast number of dumb ass Americans to abandon the way they were going to vote and shift to a whole new candidate, Donald Trump, and push him into office.
At the same time, these very clever Ruskies infiltrated the very fabric of the United States, spending years buying off Trump associates and people who weren't Trump associates then, but eventually became Trump associates, playing the so-called long game, knowing in the future that Donald Trump would be a viable presidential candidate.
Now, the cool thing is they didn't do any of that with any other candidates.
The other candidates who could have been bought off probably a lot cheaper than Donald Trump were not bought off in any way.
The Russians, who no doubt had all of Hillary's emails from her secretary of state time, didn't use any of that material to try to blackmail her in any way.
The Russians, who no doubt have been amassing stuff on Bernie Sanders since he took his honeymoon in Moscow years ago, didn't bother to use any of their superpowers for or against him or any of the other Republican candidates.
No, they simply decided that they were going to grab some emails out of the DNC server, including John Podesta's risotto recipe, feed these to media and WikiLeaks, who's also on their side, and then Americans would simply say, oh my God, we've got to vote for Donald Trump.
I mean, that's what a vast majority of Americans believe.
It's staggering.
It's absolutely staggering how stupid we are, either because we are really stupid or because the entire Democratic side of our system, you know, capital D, Hillary Democratic system, believes that the other half of America is stupid enough to be swayed by Facebook posts.
So that's the vision of America that the whole Russian caper presents.
Well, I mean, I think all the assumptions and premises about how stupid everybody is is probably right.
You know, it's just the whole, the Russia didn't do it part.
That's the big flaw in the theory here.
But, you know, look in 2002 and three, all the people who supported the war, virtually all the people who supported the war among the regular people.
I don't mean the liars in DC with power and all that, but I mean, the regular schmucks out here in the world, the people who supported the war, they thought Saddam was in on 9 11.
That was why they were supporting it.
And that was why they hated the guts of every American who didn't support it.
Because they were saying, what do you mean?
You don't want to hit back at the people who attacked us.
But the other half of the people were saying, no, stupid.
Osama beard 2000 miles east, idiot.
Not Saddam with the clean shaven chin and the beret and the olive green, who's obviously an atheist and only worships himself.
Dumbass.
And we're against the war, right?
So same thing here.
You just, it's the other half of the population convinced that as you say, well, in this case, the democratic party and the Hillary Clinton supporters have this partisan motive to believe this nonsense and everybody else doesn't.
And so everybody else is like, what are you talking about?
What do you have?
You got just like the case against Saddam that you have 10 claims, none of which are true.
So 10 times zero still zero.
It's exactly the same thing as 2002.
As far as I can tell, it's just that the parties are switched.
Well, one of the wacky coincidences between what you've just described and the Russian caper is that, gosh, golly, both of them were promoted by the intelligence community.
CIA in particular, both of them involved the leaking of grotesquely false information that was trumpeted by the media and used to convince Americans of these things and using the credibility of media like the New York Times, the Washington Post to pull in Americans who otherwise would expect to see this kind of thing in the National Enquirer or on websites that haven't been updated since geocities.
And instead, the credibility of the information was validated by high level media and by government officials who you kind of expect.
And that's basically what happened in 2002.
And that's a very large part of what's unfurling in front of our eyes right now with the Russian caper.
There is not a rumor that the New York Times won't headline about this.
There's not a story that the Washington Post won't buy wholesale as fed to them by a, quote unquote, anonymous leaker.
And the liberals, the progressives, the Hillary team can't get enough of it.
They can't believe it fast enough.
And if you read their stuff, assume that what comes out of their side on Twitter and Facebook and whatever is representative in any way, they don't believe we're even learning enough of it, that there's not just a made up dossier that says Trump was into golden showers.
There must be YouTube videos of this out there and there must be multiple incidents and what have you.
They want more.
They're not ready to just go with Saddam helped bin Laden.
They're ready to go with Saddam did 9-11 and Oklahoma City and, you know, was responsible for bad vaccinations and chemtrails and is the one who raised prices on cable TV.
You know, they don't get enough of it.
We want more conspiracy theory.
Well, you know, I'm pretty sure Litvinenko, the polonium guy, said that Putin trained Ayman al-Zawahiri, dude.
Don't do that.
So there's Putin did 9-11.
What are you liberals waiting for?
Seriously?
Yeah.
Well, you know, 9-11 is sort of passe.
I mean, if you think about it, I mean, it's 15 years ago.
I mean, seriously, think about how many voters, how many people who are involved in this election, how many how many reporters were kids when 9-11 happened?
If you figure that there's a bunch of people.
Man, you're making me feel old.
Well, dude, you've got you in my hairline.
You've been acquired in education.
We're going when the when the when the when we start rounding up the the people we need to round up for the camps, you know, you're going to be an overseer.
We've got a special you know, you've got extra rations.
Don't worry.
But the thing is, if you take a reporter who is out of school and gets his or her first job and moves on to a second level job and is what, 25, 26 years old, they were a kid when 9-11 happened there.
They have no personal experience or knowledge of a pre 9-11 world.
And what happened on 9-11 in the early days of the War of Terror is something that is an event of history that they've learned about, assuming they've learned about it from books.
Yeah.
Like Vietnam is to me.
I was born in 76.
You know, I gave a lecture on Iraq at a major university and I mentioned Vietnam.
It wasn't a critical part of my discourse, but I just kind of mentioned it.
And the professor kind of cleared his throat and said, we haven't covered Vietnam yet.
So you probably want to get into that a little more or just drop it.
And we'll talk about it later.
Right.
And which is sort of, in other words, he's also saying, too, is that even through movies and TV and just popular culture, they really don't even know what decade it happened in or where it is or what it means at all.
No.
And my own children, I love them.
They go to they attended, you know, quote unquote, good schools.
They're intelligent, all these wonderful things.
I mean, I still sometimes am unhappy to see the gaps in their knowledge.
And they lived with me for all these years.
So it's a very difficult thing when the audience and the people who are creating a lot of this content simply are relying on Google to educate them, even if they're trying to get some measure of of education.
It's it's not a thing that particularly bodes well for the future.
All these folks, oh, I'm going to debunk that and click, click, click.
And here's something from a website that is factually completely on hallucinogenics.
But it proves you're wrong.
I'm having my concerns.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, of course, there's the irony of the one thing that was maybe going to possibly be decent about this schmuck Trump being in power instead of her is he's kind of a little bit maybe going to possibly talk better on Russia.
That's like the one thing.
And this is the thing that we're all supposed to hate the most about him.
Not and out of all the other things.
I mean, every other single thing that you could name he's bad on.
I couldn't even think of.
I really can think of no other thing.
I mean, backing off Damascus, maybe as we talked about before.
Right.
But otherwise, this is a perfect storm of total disastrous proportions, foreign and domestic and in every kind of way.
And at least maybe he's going to be a little softer on Russia, which is not even true.
He keeps sending troops to Eastern Europe for these exercises and all these things.
Doesn't look like any of those policies has changed.
He just made McMaster the national security adviser, for Christ's sake.
And so, yeah.
And then but this is the only thing that anybody can think of, for the most part, anyway, to attack him.
And as quite a few people have pointed out, they're really putting him in the position of having to prove that he's not the Manchurian candidate by doing something tough against Russia.
And it seems like to me, the obvious thing to do is just invite Putin to D.C. and say, ha ha.
How do you like that, haters?
And just that's Donald Trump's way anyway, right?
Invite him to D.C., cut a new deal, make friends and make the liberals come right out against peace and nuclear arms reduction or whatever their problem is, expose them for the frauds they are and just do the right thing anyway.
That seems to me, politically speaking, the only way to win here.
But it seems like the more obvious thing is, I don't know, maybe we'll sink one of their ships in the Black Sea and see how they like that, which seems to be like the way that Donald Trump is likely to think if it really comes down to proving he's not some traitor.
Like if they really are talking about they're going to impeach him over this stuff.
I don't know.
He's Donald Trump we're talking about here, man.
He already threatened to shoot down jets over the Baltic Sea, although luckily he wasn't in power yet when he said that.
But still.
I'm hoping, here's the good I'm hoping that will come out of the current Trump years, and that is that he will quietly decide that this is just too much bullshit.
It's not worth his trouble.
And just kind of quiet.
I mean, he's not going to quit.
He loves the White House.
I mean, who wouldn't like to have Air Force One to fly you around everywhere?
So he's not going to quit.
But I mean, he's just going to say, you know, the hell with all this.
If this Muslim ban thing is just going to be this much of a pain in the ass all the time, I'm just I'm not going to pay attention to it.
And just kind of leave Pence there, because Pence's interest, you know, as the effective president, is going to be to mess around the edges of stuff that appeal to his hyper conservative base.
And Paul Ryan will play around with some wonky tax stuff.
And, you know, there'll be kind of little puddles of people doing little things that are important to them in their reelections.
But, you know, the kind of global stuff, I think, will just sit on a back burner during eventually here with the Trump administration.
And to the extent that no event sort of forces some kind of big decision, there won't be.
And I think those big decision events are far less often than America likes to pretend.
You know, China and Russia, despite what we think of them, are rational actors.
North Korea, everyone else, too.
These are all rational actors who pursue their own interests, but are very, very aware that they pursue them in the context of a global bully who has more military power than they'll ever have.
By the way, that's us.
And who can and in the past has acted erratically well before Trump and is willing to start a war pretty much anywhere if the opportunity arises.
But so they're going to lay back.
They'll do what they do.
But, you know, the same way that Russia did whatever it did with the Crimea and Ukraine and Obama kind of went, meh.
I think you'll see a lot more of that out of Trump as he gets bored and tired and frustrated with this process.
So I'm not optimistic, but I'm not apocalyptic about any of this stuff.
Yeah, I got to say, when it comes to Eastern European issues, at least he ain't Hillary Clinton, man.
And she's got the worst attitude about this.
Oh, no, we'd be think about what would be happening in Syria right now in Eastern Europe.
She would have been the absolute opposite in terms of being far too activist in intervening here and fighting there and shaking swords over there.
I mean, she would have been everywhere all the time and would have been mucking around because that's what she did.
She would have wanted to.
That's what Libya was supposed to be, right?
This was supposed to be her signature event that she was going to run on going into the White House.
And she would have been searching the globe for something like that where she could prove herself to be the big, toughest person on the block and the wielder of America's might.
And that would have ended just as well as Libya did.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hey, I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I like interviewing you about stuff.
Oh, I love this stuff.
When are we going to do the interview?
I mean, whenever we have these conversations, I feel more like we're hanging out and hoping people are listening than conducting an interview, per se.
So any time, any time.
Good deal, man.
Very happy to have you on, Peter.
Carry on.
Take care, please.
All right, so that's Peter Van Buren.
He used to work in the State Department, 24 years, he says, and then he wrote the book We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
He writes regularly at Antiwar.com and at his blog, WeMeantWell.com.
And then, as he said, brand new book coming out next month, Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan.
So check that out.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out all the archives at ScottHorton.org slash interviews.
Q&A show at ScottHorton.org slash show.
And check out all the archives at the Libertarian Institute.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Send me your Q&A stuff.
Scott at ScottHorton.org or tweet me at Scott Horton Show.
I'm about to record one of those right now, I think.
Thanks.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
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