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Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
All right, you guys, introducing Congressman John Duncan.
He represents Tennessee's 2nd District and was one of the few Republicans who voted with Ron Paul against Iraq War II.
A few since then, actually, that he's had a chance to vote on.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Well, thank you, Scott.
It's an honor for me to be on here with you.
I've listened to several of your programs and heard John with Tom Woods and so forth, and I really admire and respect and appreciate your work.
Well, thanks very much.
I really appreciate that.
I'll make sure to send you a book.
I'm trying to, well, let's just start with the news first.
They say you're retiring, and I'm here to talk you out of it because well, I think, and I don't practice what I preach very well at all here, you know, I'm about as libertarian as a libertarian can be, but I think what we really need more than anything else in this country right now is anti-war right-wingers and especially veterans such as yourself.
It says here you're in the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, which, good enough for me, rank a captain.
And what we need really is anti-war veterans and especially conservative and libertarian types who don't sound like, you know, reminiscent of Vietnam era hippie protesters, but 21st century anti-war on terrorism guys to, you know, as Ron Paul has done so much, has accomplished so much in doing, is destroying that narrative that you got to be Jane Fonda to oppose these wars, and that actually there's a whole thing about just being so conservative you oppose the wars, so smart that you know better than to continue with this policy.
And I think you do such a great job of communicating that message just by example, just by being there and voting the way you vote and taking the stands that you take.
I'd really hate to see you go.
Well, thank you very much.
Ron Paul's a real close friend of mine, and we worked together for years, and in fact he and I probably voted more alike than any two members of Congress all through the years.
Although, I have a pretty interesting story in that regard, in that when I first came to the Congress now, 29 years ago, I believed everything the military-industrial complex said, and I actually voted for the first Gulf War, because I went to all these briefings with Colin Powell and Schwarzkopf and all of that, and heard about these elite troops that Saddam Hussein had, and how much of a threat they were, and then I saw those same troops surrendering to CNN camera crews and empty tanks, and I thought then that the threat had been greatly exaggerated.
And then a few years later, I was speaking to a group at the Greenbrier, and I saw in the paper that an article called America's Forgotten War, and it said we were bombing, we were spending four million dollars a day bombing every fourth day to enforce a no-flat zone against a country that had no real Air Force, and then I read a front-page article in the Washington Post a couple years later, where one of our bombs had gone astray and killed six little boys who were out in the field playing soccer, and it told of the anguish of this one father whose little son had had his head blown off, and so when that second Gulf War rolled around, you know, in 2003, I was very much leaning against it, and then they called me down and into a little secure room in the White House with Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet and John McLaughlin, and that was a pretty interesting meeting itself there, too.
Well, why don't you elaborate?
Well, among other things, there had been a front-page story in the Washington Post either that day or a day or two before, where Lawrence Lindsay, who was the Harvard professor who was President Bush's main economics advisor, he said a war with Iraq would cost us 200 billion or more, and I asked about that, and Condoleezza Rice said, oh, no, it wouldn't cost that much, maybe 50 or 60 billion, and we could get some of that back from our allies, which had to be the worst estimate in the history of the world.
And then I asked him if you could get past all the traditional conservative positions of being against huge deficit spending and massive foreign aid and conservatives being the biggest critics of the UN and we were going to war to enforce UN resolutions, if you got past all those traditional conservative positions, did you have any evidence of any imminent threats?
And they didn't, and in fact, George Tenet confirmed that in his first speech at Georgetown University the day after he resigned, so it was ridiculous.
And there were all kinds of articles.
I remember Fortune magazine had an article that said that if we went to war in Iraq, we would make U.S. soldiers sitting ducks for Islamic terrorists, and there was another article in the U.S. News & World Report that said, why the rush to war?
So, you know, we were just far too eager to go to war, and it was totally unnecessary.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you bring that up because, you know, an important part of the narrative now is, well, everybody thought so, and this kind of thing, but not only is that not true, it's also not true that only left-wingers were against the war, and, you know, left-wingers were against the war because they were smart to not trust Bush and Cheney and these guys who were clearly getting away with a bonus war, exploiting the ignorance of the American people by trying to conflate Saddam Hussein and Saddam and Osama.
See, I did it myself.
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden together, and this kind of thing, but there were plenty of people, as you say, the president's father's alter-ego, his best friend in the world.
I mean, that's what he calls him, Brent Scowcroft, the General Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor, and Bush Sr.'s best friend wrote a thing in the Wall Street Journal saying, don't attack Saddam.
That was the title of it, and that was one of his warnings, too.
Colleen Rowley, who was the the FBI lawyer for Minneapolis who could have stopped the attack if they'd let her do her job back in August of 2001, she wrote in her thing when they made her, you know, Time magazine Person of the Year and all these things for being the great whistleblower, in her letter to the Senate, she warned that this is going to make Osama look right about us, and it's going to turn a land full of a lot of Sunnis into a lawless kind of a territory in the meantime when we overthrow the government and unleash chaos there.
Who knows what might happen?
But it's almost guaranteed to benefit people like Osama bin Laden, and of course, Ron Paul said the same thing over and over again.
Well, what's really sad, Scott, is that 80% of the Republicans in the House were against Clinton's bombings in the former Yugoslavia, and I believe to this day that 80% of the Republicans in the Congress would have been against the war in Iraq if it had been, if Gore had been in the White House, but because it was George W. Bush was in there, they all felt, and they got tremendous pressure to vote for it, so they did, but I will tell you that it shocked my district that morning, the night before that vote, one of our television stations here in Knoxville had a poll showing 74% were in favor of the war, 9% against, and 17% undecided.
But when I did that vote, it shocked my district, and for about three or four years, it was clearly the most unpopular vote I ever cast.
In fact, one Sunday, I was supposed to go speak at this Baptist Church, and the minister called me on the Monday before and said his biggest contributor, his main beacon, was going to pull out of the church if I came, and he was very apologetic, and I didn't mind because he just gave me a free Sunday that I didn't think I had, but what was...
Well, you must have been reelected just weeks after your no vote, though, right?
Well, what?
No, no, because the election wasn't until 2000.
The next election went until 2004.
Oh, I thought they held the election in October of...
I mean, the authorization vote in Congress in October of 2002, and then you were up for re-election just a few weeks later, right?
Yeah, you're right.
I'm thinking, yeah, because the war was in 2003, but the vote was in 2002.
You're correct.
But so you were re-elected just a few weeks later, despite the unpopularity of that vote.
Right, but I did have...
It was two years later.
It was 2004 when I had this...
One of the mayors in my district ran against me totally on the war.
I see.
But what was, for three or four years, a very unpopular vote, it slowly became probably the most popular vote I've ever cast.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm sorry that we haven't talked this whole time because I always thought it was heroic.
Anyone in the Republican Party who voted with Ron Paul on that, they were taking a braver stand.
Well, never mind Ron.
Against that was taking a braver stand than the Democrats.
And by the way, I think more than half the Democrats in the House were good on this and voted against it.
So we should give them...
I never give them any credit for that.
In the Senate, more than half of them voted for it.
But in the House, at least the majority of the Democrats voted against it.
There were six Republicans who voted against it in the House.
Yeah.
I'm the only one left, but there were three sort of very liberal or moderate Republicans and three, and then Ron Paul and John Hostetler and I, John Hostetler from Indiana, were three, I guess, conservative or libertarian members who voted against it.
All right.
Now, so, well, I mean, we can talk about the war on terrorism in a minute, but just overall, I mean, your article here, we're running it at antiwar.com.
It also ran at the Ron Paul Institute website as well, ronpaulinstitute.org.
Yeah, and lewrockwell.com put it on today.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I meant to run it on the Libertarian Institute site.
I just hadn't got to it yet, but I will.
Well, I appreciate that very much.
It's a great piece.
It really is a very well-written thing.
It's called, There is nothing patriotic or conservative about our bloated defense budget.
And I have to say that even though I know better, because I've been reading these gold bugs all these years in the Mises tradition, I know better, and yet still my life experience thus far, 41 years, is that, yeah, booms and busts and sometimes inflation, but there ultimately seems to be no ceiling on how much money our government can print and how high the national debt can get.
I remember people being absolutely outraged that the national debt was $4 trillion when Reagan and Bush were done.
And so now it's $20 trillion, and apparently the sky's the limit, and yet you're writing an article here saying that, no, there's such a thing as being able to afford a world empire or not.
Is that so?
Well, that's the way I look at it, and what I wrote about, I guess what got me really started was, I was hearing the President and many others say how the Defense Department had been cut drastically and was depleted and eviscerated and all those words like that, when I knew that that was totally false.
And in fact, as I say in this article, one of the Capitol Hill papers described the bill as a $700 billion compromise bill.
The $700 billion is not the whole story, because the military construction bill, for instance, is a separate bill, and then they get the extra money through all sorts of emergency and supplemental appropriations, and also in the omnibus bill that we do at the end, they got extra money in the flood bills that we did for Texas and Puerto Rico, and on and on and on.
And so I said in this article that the Defense Department, it seems to me, that it's just like any gigantic bureaucracy, when it comes to money, they want more, more, more, more.
All right, hang on just one second again.
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You know, I'm sure you saw the headlines here.
We were joking about it on Twitter about how they claim at least they're using F-22s in Afghanistan to attack a heroin refinery, you know, meaning a house where they were supposedly processing opioids for the black market.
And the F-22, meanwhile, is supposedly meant for taking on MiGs, right?
It's an air-to-air.
It's not even supposed to be a ground attack plane in the first place.
It's just that the F-35, they can't use that on anything yet.
And I don't know if they threw too many F-18s in the sea or what, but it seems like a mismatch, you know, a howitzer and a mosquito and this kind of thing, right?
Right.
That's right.
It's amazing to think about.
Well, and then, too, I pointed out something that almost nobody thinks about.
We spend, in 2016, we spent $177 billion on new equipment.
We spend similar amounts every year or have for the last several years.
And most of that equipment, it doesn't wear out after just one year or it's only used one time.
I mean, you buy any tank that we bought in 2016 or a ship that we bought, those are still around and still should be very useful because we're not up against a big army someplace.
And then another point in my article was that I said we had way too many officers.
And, you know, as you pointed out, I was in the Army and I started out as an enlisted man and went up to, became as high as captain.
And, you know, I feel like I believe national defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the national government, but you can go ridiculously overboard on everything.
And I don't think we should be trying, I don't think we should be trying to run the whole world or provide the defense for all these other countries.
Well, you know, I guess when it comes down to it, I mean, it really does go to not just the post-Cold War order, but even the post-World War II order, right?
Where America says, first and foremost, that the UN Charter is the law.
And that means that UN resolutions will be enforced by someone.
And so that's us.
And so that's it.
Like that's our, and it's, it's actually kind of ingenious in a way, right?
That it's this international charter is the charter for the U.S. Army to be the enforcement branch, the world police, as they call it.
And so that's right.
I wonder, do you reject that?
Is it time to leave NATO and the United Nations and go back to, or not necessarily back, but go forward to an entirely different sort of order there?
Yes.
Well, let me tell you something.
I don't believe in world government, never have.
I believe the government closest to the people is the best.
And, and I agreed, I agreed with the foreign policy that candidate Trump advocated in his campaign.
He, in fact, that's one of the main reason that, you know, I really wasn't going to endorse anybody, but then it got down to where there was just three left.
And one was Ted Cruz and one was John Kasich and Donald Trump.
And I thought of those three at first, I knew that John Kasich didn't much have a chance.
And so I thought that Trump, President Trump, of course, to me anyway, was, was a lot less hawkish than Ted Cruz.
And so I went ahead and endorsed Trump.
And of course, I, since then have written an article that I wrote an article for the American conservative magazine about my disappointment on President Trump's actions in regard to Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, and he's escalating in the Baltics, which was the number that was the only single best thing about, and that was the real thing that gave him the advantage over Hillary on foreign policy.
Cause he said a lot of horrible things about foreign policy too, but he wanted to back off of Russia.
And even now he just tweeted last week, Hey, we ought to get along with Russia, forget the haters and the losers.
And yet he's escalating troop numbers and equipment in the Baltics and getting ready to send weapons to the Ukrainian junta there, you know?
Well, I know.
And, and, and then of course it's, it's all over the, it's all over the world, the same, same way and all over the country.
I mean, just last week or week before they announced that we were going to send 1,000 Tennessee National Guard troops to Poland.
And, you know, I mean, I've, I've sure got nothing against the Tennessee National Guard.
I'm all for the Tennessee National Guard, but I don't think they should be put into Poland on the border of Russia.
I mean, the way I look at it, what if Russia was to put a thousand troops on our Mexican border or our Canadian border someplace?
What would we think about that?
Yeah.
Well, people don't like that shoe on the other foot stuff.
Yeah, I know.
Not these days anyway, because it doesn't really look very good.
Well, and then also on Iran, I was one of three that, that voted against increasing the sanctions on Iran because the NPR called me up and asked me why.
And I said, well, Iran, by all of our intelligence agencies and the people who are supposed to know what is going on, they say Iran is doing everything that we've asked or that, or everything that was demanded through the agreement.
And so I said, you know, I just didn't think we should slap them when they're doing, slap them in the face when they're doing everything that we supposedly wanted them to do.
That's good.
Yeah.
And you know, this is another one like Iraq war two, where you have to have some backbone and a willingness to actually learn what the truth is, because there sure is a lot of sloganeering on the issue of that nuclear program and that nuclear deal.
And to get to the truth of it, you have to actually be willing to be honest and not just have some, you know, whatever partisan bias confirmed and that kind of thing.
But then when you look at it, boy, they sure do have a tiny proportion of the nuclear program they used to have and more inspected than ever.
And can't really argue with that very much.
If you talk about the details, it's better to just say it's a bad deal really loud and hope that washes away any other argument, I guess.
But, you know, one quote that you might be interested in that, you know, I mentioned that article about Scott Burd's biography of Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, and how that he said we had, you know, we had 30 officers, 30 enlisted for each officer during World War One.
But it also says in that same biography, that Winston Churchill in 1936, told a New York newspaper editor, America should have minded its own business and stayed out of the world war.
He's talking about World War One.
And Churchill said, if you hadn't entered the war, the allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917.
Had we made peace, then there would no collapse in Russia followed by communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by fascism, and Germany would not have enthroned that Nazism.
And that's a fascinating quote coming from Winston Churchill.
And especially the way that Churchill is venerated by the neocons and by Bill Kristol in the Weekly Standard crowd.
And of course, they and everyone else seems to always invoke Adolf Hitler.
Well, what are you going to do?
What about Adolf Hitler?
What about World War Two?
You had to jump into that.
Germany hadn't attacked us, but still, and we should have attacked earlier.
Everybody knows that we're all raised with that.
And yet, this is the perfect answer to that.
There would have never even been Adolf Hitler, the Führer at all, if it hadn't have been for Woodrow Wilson in World War One.
Yes.
And the peace agreement that basically destroyed Germany economically, that's what gave Adolf Hitler a platform.
And even though in more recent years, our foreign policies in the Middle East have made us a lot more enemies than friends, I think.
Well, it looks that way.
Wait, so, well, let me get to the terror war in just a second.
But I want to ask you about nuclear weapons.
I'm just curious.
I don't know if you've ever written about this or anything, but of course, this program, this entire policy started with Barack Obama.
I think mostly it was a compromise with the Senate over the Start Two Treaty that, okay, we'll sign this treaty, but at the same time, we're limiting our nukes.
We're going to expand them and revamp the entire industry for making them and all of these things.
$1.2 trillion.
You see how they've already added the .2?
It'll be $3 trillion by the time we're done, right?
Trillion dollar program.
Now, $1.2 trillion program.
It's just .2, 200 more billion.
Anyway, to expand and basically revamp our entire H-bomb industry.
And I wonder about how this works on Capitol Hill, because I'm sure there's just a bunch of like, hey, I'm some idiot congressman and everybody knows we got to be tough and vote for more nukes all the time and just not question it.
And yet it seems like there's probably also like lobbyists for Honeywell up there making sure.
And so I wonder if you have any, you know, and can teach us a little bit about how that works.
Because I have to say, you know what?
Sorry to continue on on this, but honestly, as much as I already knew everything about how every lobby works in DC and how they use their power and influence and steak dinners and bribes and campaign money and all the things that they do to win power and influence, I somehow had carved out this exception for the H-bomb industry and just thought that that's something that's so nationalized with the national laboratories and with the military monopoly that that's somehow the economics of all of that rent seeking don't count for the H-bomb industry.
And yet I really am wrong about like that was just some fantasy of mine.
And the truth is, it's just like selling boots to the army.
Right.
Same thing.
Right.
Well, the way it works is just like it's worked on the F-35.
They are the most expensive plane in the history of the world.
They parcel it out and they put some little segment of all of these programs in this state and that state.
And pretty soon they find ways to have something in almost every state.
And then if you don't vote for it, they say you're voting against jobs or money coming into your own district and so forth.
That's a lot of it.
But it's really it's really sad the way it works.
But I will say while I'm on here that you've got to while I'm going to be leaving after another year, you've got some good people.
In fact, you've had some of my friends like Walter Jones and Thomas Massey and Justin Amash and there's some others.
And even though even though we're a very small number in the Congress, I can tell you that out in the public, it's becoming non-interventionist policies are appealing to a much larger portion.
In fact, I think a majority of the people now.
Yeah, no, I think I really agree with that.
All the polls say that people are tired of the wars.
It's not a priority, though, unfortunately.
But, you know, and this goes back to the beginning about me asking you and I only am half serious.
Obviously, you have your life and your priorities and things like that.
But about asking you to stay there is just about, as I was saying, the example set that you don't have to be any kind of liberal or socialist or progressive or Hollywood person or Nancy Pelosi, not like she's anti-war.
You don't have to be any of those things.
You can if you like your identity as a conservative Christian Republican, you can keep it.
That's fine.
Just be anti-war now because it's just crazy to continue on like this.
And when when it's put that way, you know, this was the example that Ron Paul said was, hey, look at me.
I'm the most square guy in North America.
Right.
Like still married to his high school sweetheart since they were 16.
And, you know, a Protestant of German stock, Republican from Texas, congressman, Air Force veteran.
Right.
So then when he says and I'm very anti-war, in fact, I'm more anti-war than any left winger you ever met, then it kind of blows people's mind for a second.
But then they realize it's not a contradiction.
He's the one being consistent.
He's the one who knows what he's talking about.
He's the one who's on the right page.
And then they go, hey, cool.
Right.
So now they don't have to feel like, oh, they have to identify with Michael Moore.
They can identify with Ron Paul.
They can identify with John Duncan and go, well, here's a guy who's a captain in the Army Reserve.
Here's a guy who's Republican Congress, however many terms in the Republican Party in Congress.
And he's saying enough.
And so maybe it's all right to say enough, because that's what this is all about, really.
Right.
Is whose side are you on?
And social psychology and all that.
You got to support the troops.
But if the troops say supporting me means bringing me home, then now what are they going to do?
They're going to have to go with that.
Right.
Supporting the troops is the highest priority.
You understand what I mean?
Oh, I understand.
And let me tell you, I wrote an article, I think it was in early 2015 for the American Conservative Magazine about how the Republican Party used to be and still should be the Peace Party.
And so I think you might be interested in looking back at that article.
You know what?
I want to suggest, too, you should write some things for the Washington Times, because, you know, they've run some good things by Carl Douglas McGregor.
Yes, I've had several columns over the years in the Washington Times also.
And even though I'm retiring, I hope I can still write some articles and speak out in every way that I can.
But I've got nine little grandchildren.
I'm very fortunate they're all here in Knoxville.
And I have four growing children, but I missed a lot of things when they were growing up.
But the best decision I ever made was I told my wife when I first went to Washington that I wanted our kids to be raised in Tennessee.
And so now they're all here and I need to spend a little time with them.
Right.
I dig it.
Well, happy Thanksgiving.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate you coming on the show.
Well, it's been a great honor for me.
And I tell you, I hope you keep up the good work for a long, long time.
Well, I appreciate that a lot.
I'll get with your assistant there and send you a book.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thanks again.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that's Congressman John Duncan from Tennessee, the second district there in Tennessee.
I'm Scott Horton, and you guys know the deal. scotthorton.org for the shows, libertarianinstitute.org for the Institute, foolserend.us for the book, Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And read the viewpoints at antiwar.com.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
