Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, on the line I got Peter Van Buren.
He used to work at the State Department.
He was in Iraq War II and he was I think at the same base there where Bradley Manning was, right around Lincoln time.
Anyway, he wrote a book about his experience there.
It's called We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
And he also wrote one that I forgot the title of about the class war.
Ghosts of Tom Jode.
Ghosts of Tom Jode.
I knew it was Tom Jode something, I just didn't know what.
Ghosts of Tom Jode.
And then the latest though is called Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan.
And then of course, secretly really though, America's current terror war.
Fictionalized.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you, sir?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you.
And since we're congratulating one another, I need to say some good words about your book, Fool's Errand, about the Afghan war.
Go ahead, tell them all about it.
Which I had the pleasure of reading in pre-publication format and is just a terrific history with a point of view of what's been going on in Afghanistan.
And quite importantly, the book starts well before the arrival of the first brave American troops and tries to give some real background on it.
The book is doing well and I'm very glad to see that it's doing well because this is essential information in a time in our history when too many Americans are imagining that absolutely nothing occurred prior to November, 2016.
And this Afghan war just popped out.
I'm actually have submitted a recommendation to the attorney general's office that Michael Flynn be found guilty and required to do community service as punishment.
And that Flynn's community service will be to create the audio book version of Fool's Errand.
He'll be reading it out loud, so stay tuned for that.
I do quote him a couple of times.
No, actually the audio book is almost done.
It's recorded.
I've been through it once and I'm halfway through going through it the second time to get it just perfect for everybody, but it should be out.
I keep saying this two weeks, like it's some kind of cliche now, but another couple of weeks and it'll be ready.
Fair enough.
Well, we'll find something else for General Flynn to do that.
I have an idea.
He could get over there with a damp washcloth and start cleaning up the depleted uranium dust he left all over Afghanistan.
How about that?
Excellent.
Excellent idea.
And maybe pay direct reparations to the families of those he killed in his J-suck night raids over there.
Fair enough.
Good.
Hey, man.
Well, I got so many things on my mind to talk with you about.
I mean, you've written these great articles.
I want everybody to read them and I want to talk about them.
Yeah, let's go ahead and talk about this.
We can talk about other things later.
Rex Tillerson is a dead man walking.
Did you ever think that we would have an Exxon CEO, Secretary of State with so little power?
You know, I have so many conflicting thoughts about Rex Tillerson and the Department of State.
And while I have written in the American Conservative, where I'm pleased to say I'm now listed as a contributing editor, I never imagined myself as a conservative.
And I have friends who have known me for years who constantly giggle and laugh how the same positions that I've been espousing for years have now suddenly become conservative.
But nonetheless...
Well, I've seen on Twitter where some of these leftists are turning your right wing, man.
You got to be careful.
They'll do that to you if you don't watch out.
It's absolutely an endless source of amusement and some frustration.
But I have mixed feelings about Rex Tillerson and the State Department.
And the theme that I think I tried to lay out in these articles at the American Conservative is that the problems with the State Department are not problems created by Rex Tillerson or Donald Trump.
They are problems that the core problems have existed since probably, if we needed to put a date on it, we'll say September 11, 2001, have existed since 9-11, were certainly made worse under the Bush and Obama administrations, and that while Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump clearly have no love for the State Department and are doing nothing particularly good for the State Department, getting rid of Rex Tillerson is not going to fix anything.
And getting rid of Donald Trump is not going to fix the State Department.
And the more that we focus on Donald Trump is dismantling the State Department or Rex Tillerson is, you know, Satan at foggy bottom, the more we pretend that there are not core problems with diplomacy, with military primacy in our foreign affairs, things we can get into in a moment, the more we focus on this is all Trump, the more that we put off any reckoning with the problems of diplomacy, and from that extended into problems of the American empire and its failings around the world.
Yeah, I mean, it's a couple of different questions here, depending on, you know, which premises you, you know, run with.
So, I mean, I would argue that who needs a State Department, if we don't have a world empire, what's to negotiate?
You know what I mean?
We could hold, we could host peace conferences for other powers that have problems, but, you know, a big North American Switzerland doesn't need a State Department, really.
On the other hand, though, if we're talking about the contrast between who's calling the shots, the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, when it comes to America's global policy, that's a real problem.
That's something that you get into in this one, and you have your previous article, Don't Blame Donald Trump for Eclipsing the State Department here, that it's not like Trump is abolishing the empire, he's just abolishing even the pretense, the last of the pretense, maybe, of the diplomats and the civilians deciding, the military men being the tools of the civilians who use their democracy to do their deciding.
Instead, they are the deciders.
Absolutely, and during the Obama regime, when I was writing exactly the same things, the way I characterized it then was that the State Department is devolving into America's concierge overseas, that diplomacy is no longer a tool in the foreign policy toolbox, that there's not really a lot of interest in diplomacy and negotiations.
When something does need to be sorted out, either the military does it themselves or the NSC assumes control of that, and that the State Department really is there to keep the embassies open for all the things that are conveniently run out of embassies, to do the ceremonial things, to accept delegations and what have you.
The State Department basically is becoming the landlord of America's property abroad, and like I said, providing concierge services to the military and others.
It's not even particularly an outlying opinion at this point.
Nicholas Burns and one of his other stooges writing in the New York Times this weekend, firing up the flag in defense of the State Department, actually listed as some of State's accomplishments, basically carrying water for the military.
He was very proud of himself that State has negotiated some basing agreements overseas and overflight agreements and what have you.
And approved a lot of drone strikes too.
Rubber stamp those drone strikes.
And the idea that State is really just a place that handles some notary services for the military is now actually being pushed out by State Department supporters in the New York Times as a charm point.
So what began as an outlying opinion is now being recycled as one of the strongest reasons to keep a State Department open.
And that, again, did not start under Trump.
We just have to change the language now to fit with the mediascape because we're no longer allowed to say anything negative about any of Trump's predecessors.
Each of them to a man has been relegated to deity-like status, including George W. Bush.
It really is amazing to behold.
Well, David Frum says he's great.
I mean, I know I'm a really old 41 and everything, but yeah, that wasn't really that long ago.
I'm not over it yet, frankly.
I'm not over Waco.
I'm supposed to be over Iraq War II already?
No, man.
Well, I work with people who are a little younger than you who regale me with tales of how John McCain is one of the saviors of democracy and a hero of the resistance.
And Robert Mueller is the only person that stands between us and then the abyss where democracy will die in the darkness.
So I'm fully through the looking glass on revisionist history here.
That's the only thing I like about Trump is that he stomped George Bush's brother into the ground.
Well, and the lady, you know, the female version of Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, too.
Well, when we finally get back to reforming the Millard Fillmore administration and comparing how Trump has has destroyed his legacy, Miller's legacy, then I think our work here will be completed.
Hey, guys, check it out.
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Oh, yeah.
And you know what?
I give speeches, too.
Once you hire me to give a speech to your group, we'll talk about the book.
I'll sell some.
It'll be great.
So you talk about in here the the continental power of the combatant commands, the military versus the state by state basis of the ambassadors and that that basically opens and shuts the case right there.
In fact, I was reminded of a I'm pretty sure this is from Sorrows of Empire, where Chalmers Johnson highlights when the State Department was trying to punish Islam Karimov in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.
I forget.
Anyway, one of the other of those is torturing people to death, boiling them in oil and all this.
And the State Department says, hey, you know, you're going a little overboard.
You can torture for the CIA, but don't torture your own internal dissidents.
Not too bad.
Or we're going to take this money away from you.
And then the general came to town and the general basically said, oh, don't listen to them.
You know, Donald Rumsfeld has given me this slush fund.
I can pay you whatever I want.
You can torture whoever you want and I'll make up whatever State Department takes away.
It's kind of the loot.
The thing that we're referring to here is the idea that ambassadors, the president's represent representatives overseas who work for the State Department, are sent out on a country by country basis.
The ambassador for Botswana represents American interests in Botswana and only in Botswana.
And his or her budget and staff and influence and reach are consummate with whatever the U.S. opinion of Botswana is at any particular point in time.
The military, however, and one of the reasons that they are so powerful in terms of foreign policy, the military looks in much bigger pieces of real estate, the so-called combatant commands, where you've got, for example, a single general that is in charge of Africa.
AFRICOM would be his command.
And that general has the ability to cause things to happen in multiple nations or across nations.
And his budget, his staffing, his reach, and his influence back in Washington are consummate with that continent-wide, arguably almost hemispheric-wide ability.
And so the idea is, if you're the president or the guy who's running Botswana and you need to get Washington's attention on some issue, do you go to the ambassador, who at best can send a message back to some assistant secretary in Washington for African affairs, who will then immediately send a memo to nowhere, or do you get the combatant commander on the phone and explain to him that if he can throw a little money your way in Botswana, you will look the other way when the border stays open to allow X, Y, and Z to happen or what have you.
You go for the person who has the largest influence, and in this case, that would be a combatant commander, not the ambassador to Lithuania, but the combatant commander who has authority over all of Europe and can speak to the Pentagon.
This is mirrored, of course, when you just zoom out a little bit and say, well, who does the president listen to?
And whether it's President Trump or President Obama or President Bush, it's pretty obvious to anyone with access to the newspaper that the Pentagon wields enormous influence in Washington.
It extends down to money.
When I worked for the State Department 24 years overseas, we were always the poor cousins in the embassy.
All the other agencies, and particularly anyone associated with the Pentagon or with the intelligence agencies, always had more money and always had a freer hand in spending that money when it came time from everything as significant as you pointed out to the funding of a government that was torturing people, down to the silly things like end-of-the-year holiday gifts.
I mean, here's a box of chocolates from the State Department and a case of 12-year-old whiskey from your friends at CIA.
Have a nice year.
Who do you look to when you need something done?
Who do you turn to?
And so these ways of exerting dominance, if you will, on foreign policy are very clearly delineated in the post-911 era, and they fall very heavily on the side of the military and the combatant commands, while the State Department sits off to the side fretting about whether there's enough money to keep the lights on at the embassy.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, I want to talk about Tillerson.
I know I understand what you're saying about how, well, it's, you know, we don't want to miss the forest for the trees and all that, but the trees are important here too.
And if Tillerson goes and the New York Times is right, which I don't really know, man, I actually saw a thing by Marcy Wheeler saying that Pompeo has too many problems to be confirmed right now, and it would be a mistake politically for them to move him.
Although, you know, maybe they could put Cotton in.
They're talking about, I'm sorry, I'm skipping the point.
The New York Times claims they're going to push Tillerson out.
They're going to put Pompeo, who's now the director of the CIA at the State Department, and bring in Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Bill Kristol's house, and make him the director of Central Intelligence, which would mean that we'd be at war with Iran within a year or something, right?
I mean, seriously, wouldn't it?
Maybe.
First, I want to, I do want to let the listeners know of a book.
My memory failed me in that last exchange.
It's called State versus Defense, The Battle to Define America's Empire by Stephen Glane.
The book is a couple of years old.
It was written in the early Obama administration, but while its examples are about 10 years out of date right now, the basic points are still there.
And if you thought what we just said a moment ago was of interest, you'll enjoy this book.
Second, I don't think that Tillerson's presence or absence has anything to do with whether or not we go to war with Iran.
Everybody else in Washington seems to be thrilled about war with Iran.
Whether Tillerson is at the table saying maybe not, or whether he's outside the White House looking through the fence, I don't think that's a big part of the calculus with Iran.
So, I'm not so sure about that.
I do want to actually argue with myself for a moment, because I'm preparing a new piece where I'm sort of walking back the question of whether or not Tillerson is as doomed in the short term as I initially said.
And Marcy Wheeler's piece was somewhat influential, because look what happens if Tillerson leaves.
And things happen as the New York Times has predicted.
Basically, Pompeo comes over from CIA, and Tom Cotton goes to CIA.
If Tillerson leaves, the first thing that happens, of course, is that Trump has to go through another round of everyone's calling him an idiot and reprinting all those tweets where he said he's going to hire only the best people.
That's not the big issue.
The big issue is that you've got two confirmation hearings that are going to be ugly, contentious, and the Democrats are going to attempt to beat the crap out of Pompeo, and especially Cotton.
Pompeo is going to be called up as the Secretary of State designate, and the Democrats are going to question him about everything that Trump has done in terms of foreign policy for the last year, everything that's gone on in CIA.
They're going to bring up Russiagate and everything else, and Pompeo is really going to be on the spot for that.
When they're done with him, then they get a second chance to revisit basically all of those same questions plus the torture allegations that Tom Cotton has been in favor of.
And I think that's a pretty heavy political price to pay because that'll all happen in 2018, of course, because if Tillerson does leave, I don't think it'll be much before the end of the year.
So the hearings will be in 2018.
That means that Trump is going to tee this all up for the Democrats by election year with those hearings, and I don't know that that political price is worth paying just to replace Rex Tillerson.
We'll have to see.
So I am walking back my predictions.
I don't think Tillerson is going to be there at the end of the Trump administration, whenever that is, but I am going to give him probably a little more life support in my next article than I did when I originally labeled him a dead man walking.
Yeah, you know, there's something suspicious, wasn't there, about that New York Times article saying this is going to happen about a week from now, rather than like, we have this scoop, but it's going to be announced in a couple of hours, which is usually how this thing would be, right?
They tell the newspaper right before they do it, not in a week we're going to do it.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of questions, and we can veer off on a tangent talking about more about the media itself here.
I mean, the media, the original New York Times story saying that Tillerson was out in the very near term was based, of course, on the usual anonymous sources.
And we have no idea whether the New York Times was talking to an intern or John Kelly or whatever.
So we have no way to judge all these things.
But there becomes sort of this self-licking ice cream cone thing.
The Times publishes the story based on perhaps very little.
Every other media outlet then picks it up and basically amplifies a lot of nothing into an extremely loud noise that forces the White House to deny it.
Those denials are then filtered through the current media speak to prove that it must be right, because if the White House says Tillerson is not leaving, of course they lie about everything, and therefore he must be leaving.
And you almost are looking at a process that's designed to use the media as a weapon to try to force Tillerson out, to create an impression that he is such a lame duck that leaving him in there accomplishes nothing.
In fact, there was an article in Politico today quoting anonymous diplomats, both on the US and foreign diplomats, as saying no one is going to take Tillerson seriously on his current overseas trip, of course, because they realize he has no authority in Washington.
So there's a self-fulfilling prophecy to these things that's a little scary, that has that kind of coup-like taste in your mouth to it.
Well, and you know, the thing is, too, is, you know, it could be Operation Mockingbird-type manipulation, but at the same time, too, I think you really do have—and look, I mean, I think the guy should be drawn and quartered for all kinds of war crimes and all kinds of horrible things, I don't care—but you have literally a Trump derangement syndrome where everybody who hates him the most, I guess, hates him for all the wrong reasons and hate him for wanting to get along with the Russians, for Christ's sake.
I hate him for, you know, all these kind of bogus accusations.
I have a feeling if you and I were roommates, Scott, we'd both end up as alcoholics in about a week because, you know, I look at, you know, articles and tweets and commentary that basically says it's bad that, you know, Trump pushed the Russians back from having sanctions against the United States.
It's terrible that Trump tried to reach out and establish better relations with one of America's— Right, because none of the things are taken on their own merits.
Everything is taken as, it's a thing that Trump did, let's be hysterical about it.
So I could see them, like, accidentally pushing us into war with Iran if it seems like Trump has taken too long to start one and that's an angle that they can attack him from, then they'll attack him.
Or, look, weakness.
There's a problem in the personal relationship between the president and his secretary of state.
Let's go on and on and on about that, where now this is the kind of thing that's going to create an opening for Tom Cotton, for Christ's sake.
But they're not thinking down the road.
It's like they're not thinking about, wow, do we really want to make sure to put a freeze on any positive relations with the Russians right now?
Like, is that the future of humanity?
Is America and Russia nose-to-nose again?
We're gonna do a whole other Cold War with the power to destroy at least all of the northern civilizations of the planet Earth?
Which may not be the worst idea overall, just throwing that in there.
You know, I'm waiting for Trump to announce that oxygen is good, followed by Rachel Maddow ordering the resistance to begin breathing carbon dioxide.
I mean, it's almost at that point.
I can hear the screams in the audience already, but I think Rex Tillerson, far from being the worst secretary of state in history, is really going to end up being one of the most pointless secretaries of state in history.
Yeah, he's like Chuck Hagel at the fence under Obama, right?
He's just standing there for a minute and then he'll be gone.
Exactly.
Because all the things that have been, all the horrors that keep being attributed to Tillerson are either using him as a stand-in for things that they really don't like about Trump, or are largely non-issues about decimating the State Department and dismantling diplomacy and all that.
I mean, they're things that once you poke a tiny hole in them, there's nothing really there.
I think he is going to disappear, and he's going to be one of those kind of jeopardy questions at some point in the future.
You know, true or false, was Rex Tillerson actually secretary of state?
And people are kind of, hey, did you know?
It's like when you kind of try to remember if a particular old celebrity is still alive or not, you know?
Well, you know, it's mildly ironic, right, since the State Department was literally built on the corporate structure of Standard Oil of New Jersey.
I mean, that's where the U.S. State Department comes from in the post-war era, and he was the CEO of the son of a bitch, and he's persona non grata, but times have really changed.
The State Department's core problems are basically one, core problem, if you will, is basically one of relevancy.
First of all, it is, whether it came from Standard Oil or not, its structure no longer reflects the realities of a global system.
As we talked about earlier, the state's insistence that every country stands alone without looking broader and more regionally is foolish.
States' siloing of political military affairs over here, economic affairs over here, trade affairs over there, I mean, these kind of things are no longer valid as well.
They all overlap, and you find the State Department arguing with itself.
You know, the human rights people are arguing one way, and the political people are arguing another way, because they're told their job is to think in that silo.
Those things are all out of date.
The idea that the U.S. uses politically appointed ambassadors, we are the only industrialized nation in the world that does that, where we get appointed ambassadors who are the president's friends.
And yes, children, that's not something new under President Trump.
It's been in there since George Washington's day.
That's ridiculous.
That disappeared in the 19th century with plumed hats.
The other problem, of course, is that the very nature of diplomacy is not fitting well with how America's government seems to work anymore.
Our politicians and our media and our people demand immediate answers, quick, decisive things.
Diplomacy is slow.
It's gray.
It involves trade-offs.
It involves occasionally giving up something to get something.
That is, if we take it at its most positive look, what was going on in the interim with Michael Flynn between Trump's election and Trump actually taking office, where they were reaching out to the Russians and saying, what do we have to do to avoid a tit-for-tat on sanctions, to set the groundwork where we can sit down and start to talk about the bigger issues?
In other words, if we're going to talk, if we're going to spend all our time arguing over how many diplomats we're each allowed to have in each other's capital, we're not going to be able to move on to larger issues like Syria, like the Ukraine, like nuclear weapons, like fill in the blank.
That's diplomacy.
And if every time you extend that diplomatic outreach, it's labeled as a weakness, or in the case of Trump, abstractual treason.
Diplomacy becomes irrelevant.
The same thing with the Iranian sanctions.
What bothers the hell out of so many people is that it appears that Iran got something out of this.
Well, guess what?
Why would they otherwise give up something if they don't get something?
That's sort of how things always have worked.
And a skillful bit of diplomacy will get more than we give.
But to simply expect, fast forward to North Korea, that Kim Jong-un one day will suddenly realize that the Washington Post editorial page has been right all along and he shouldn't have nuclear weapons is foolish, is absolutely foolish.
Well, and you know, you want to bring up Korea for a second here, man.
The quote was, we will never negotiate nuclear weapons as long as the Americans keep threatening us.
Like, wow, that is a huge invitation to negotiation over nuclear weapons.
They're willing to put their, their already created nuclear weapons on the table for negotiation.
Did you hear that, Peter?
Yeah.
But instead the, the news reports, they will never negotiate.
Like, oh my God, man, this has got to be worse than the propaganda in the Soviet Union.
It's got to be like, how could anybody be so blatant in their dishonesty?
You know, where, where, geez, it's like our backs to the wall.
McMaster's saying, yeah, we're running out of options here.
We don't know what we're going to do.
We might have to start a war against North Korea when they just said they'll talk.
The value of nuclear weapons to North Korea is in not using them.
If North Korea detonates a single nuclear weapon anywhere in anger, then they're finished.
They will be destroyed.
The United States would, would never allow that opportunity to pass and would, would absolutely nuke North Korea to cinders.
That's it.
They can't use their nuclear weapons.
Their value is in twofold.
One is as a deterrent, the same thing that, that kept the cold war from going hot.
As long as North Korea has nuclear weapons, the United States can't use nuclear weapons against North Korea.
And then the other value is in being able to negotiate some of them away in return for things the North actually wants, which would be diplomatic recognition, increased trade, increased access to, to the world system.
That's what they have nuclear weapons for.
The deterrent part will likely never go away.
It's very, very hard, especially since the North Koreans have access to the Wikipedia page that explains what happened to Libya and Iraq when they got rid of their nuclear weapons.
They're never going to be able to get rid of their nuclear arsenal completely.
It is what allows them to continue to be North Korea is having that deterrent.
But it would be possible to negotiate away, for example, some of the delivery systems, the type of missiles that extend that deterrent threat outside of the peninsula.
You can drive a nuclear weapon into Seoul in about an hour, but you can negotiate based on the type of missiles that North Korea develops and tests so that the nuclear threat shrinks from possibly the entire world as it exists now to, for example, East Asia to simply the Korean peninsula.
That would represent an enormous stride forward in terms of world peace.
The argument that was always used during the Cold War, which apparently we don't remember, is that the more that we brought the Soviet Union into the world system, the more that they were going to weaken their central government.
The argument at that time was that countries that have McDonald's don't make war on each other.
The more that capitalism found a home in Russia, the Soviet Union at that time, the more that they were going to lose their power as a global threat.
We seem to have taken exactly the opposite track with North Korea and that instead of negotiating limited entries into the global system that could be used as a way to gain leverage, instead of trying to negotiate the arsenal down, we've simply taken this, we're going to stand over here and hold our breath until the North Koreans voluntarily give up the only thing that keeps them alive as a country, their nuclear weapons.
If they don't do that, we might just blow them up.
What the hell?
By the way, all those arguments apply to Iran as well.
All right, hold on just one second again here.
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All right, well, so let's change the subject to that.
So I have an idea that just as well with Korea that a war with Iran would be an absolute catastrophe.
I mean, it's not like they have a Navy or an Air Force or an army that they could feel anywhere to really threaten our allies or anything like that.
But at the same time, man, they really could hit a lot of American assets in the region, Kuwait and Iraq and Afghanistan and then all across the Gulf there in Qatar and Bahrain and in Saudi and UAE.
And so and they got missiles that can reach our Navy, assuming our Navy would be dumb enough to be close enough at the time, you know, within standoff range or whatever the hell they call it.
You're leaving out our 51st state in Israel.
Well, I don't know what Iran could do to Israel.
Could they hit Israel with their missiles now?
Oh, they could reach that far and then Israel would counter fire.
But I mean, the idea would be that Iran, by attacking Israel, could in fact set off a nuclear exchange in the Middle East.
So your point is absolutely valid that the risk of war with Iran is on the same level as risk of war with North Korea.
And yet we talk openly about that.
And it's absolute madness.
This administration acts like, geez, I don't know what we're going to do.
It seems almost like we have no choice.
And they just constantly accuse Iran of accepting the power America keeps handing to them on a silver platter.
I don't know.
That's the worst accusation that I heard Pompeo making the other day was like, just look at how much influence they have in Iraq now.
And it's like, come on, man.
I don't know.
Well, Foreign Policy Magazine just proclaimed the president of the prime minister of Iraq, Abadi, one of the great global thinkers of the year in response to, quote, saving Iraq from ISIS.
So there you go.
It's settled.
The thing is, Iran is the other power in the Middle East.
The United States-Saudi-Israeli bloc represents one power bloc in the Middle East, and the Iranians represent the other.
If the United States refuses to accept that reality and negotiate and follow a course that recognizes that, then we're going to just put ourselves into an endless loop of Cold War in the Middle East as we did in the rest of the world.
That seems to be what we're evolving into.
The Russians have never been friends with the Iranians, but we keep pushing the two of them together through shared mutual interests in Syria and perhaps someday in Iraq, maybe Kurdistan.
But the idea would be that America just manufactures these enemies and just refuses to accept that diplomacy exists as an option outside of threats of war.
And until and unless we abandon that mindset, then we will face the constant threat of war, and we will live in fear.
For being the world's most powerful country, we are the most scared country that I've ever encountered in my own studies of history.
Yeah, Garrett Gurette called it the complex of vaunting and fear.
We're number one!
We're number one!
Oh no, all the barbarian hordes are coming to get us!
Whatever are we gonna do?
All in the same breath.
Hey, do you gotta go or can I ask you more things?
I got a few more minutes, so hit me up with another good question, please.
Well, did you see the news this morning that the Houthis, rather than being betrayed by Saleh, killed him?
I have not followed that as closely as I should.
But if you're asking me, am I shocked to find out that what we've been understanding about Yemen is incomplete?
Gosh, I am shocked.
Yeah.
Well, so it turns out he'd been trying to cut a deal with the Saudis and betray the Houthis and go back to being the dictator again with Saudi and American support, which is what I was joking on the show.
Hey, why don't we just put Saleh back in power there?
He seems acceptable to the Houthis now and to the Saudis in the past, so why not, you know?
But yeah, I guess here's why not.
He tried that and the Houthis killed him.
And Gaddafi-style, I mean, that was the pictures of him, you know, dead on a blanket in the back of a pickup truck.
You know, I don't know exactly how they lynched him, but I just saw the post-lynch video there on Twitter.
They don't kid around out that way.
You know, Yemen is a perfect example of what we're talking about.
The United States entered into that conflict under the Obama administration, may lightning not strike me, you know, with the idea that a struggle in Yemen was going to be part of pushing back Iranian power in the Gulf, that the United States was going to tie down Iranian forces, was going to dilute Iranian influence, was maybe even going to push the Iranians off the Saudi peninsula with a little luck.
And so we go in, we are actively fighting there at some point in time.
We're certainly helping the Saudis fight there.
Whether or not there's special forces on the ground is kind of irrelevant.
They might be there this week, they might not be there next week.
We're involved in this war.
But the whole point has been lost.
And sorry for the Yemeni people who are now dying of cholera in the 21st century because of us.
The whole point has been lost.
What are we actually trying to accomplish in Yemen?
What are we accomplishing by supporting the Saudis there?
It reminds me an awful lot of trying to disassemble what the point in Syria is anymore, or the point in Iraq is anymore.
These things were all started with one particular premise based on this idea that we've got to push back on Iran in every possible way.
And they just kind of devolve into something else.
No one ever wants to stop them, because that's a sign of weakness, of course.
And so these wars just kind of bubble along.
The U.S. has the ability to pull our people in and out to keep our casualties at whatever seems to be an acceptable level.
Too damn bad for the folks who can't pull out, in this case, the people of Yemen, the people of Iraq, the people of Syria, because they just die.
Yeah, they do.
And keep dying.
All right, man.
And yeah, it's diphtheria now, too.
Don't forget the diphtheria.
This is the problem with wars is this whole concept of limited war, surgical war, special forces war, whatever we like to imagine that we are doing.
It only works for the side that has the flexibility to scale up and down, in this case, the United States.
We can have a limited war.
We can use bombs that are more precise than other bombs or what have you.
But for the people on the ground, they don't have that flexibility to see this as limited.
When you blow up the only medical facility in a particular area, that is not a limited strike.
That is a devastating strike as far as the people in that area are concerned.
And when you think, well, we're just using special forces, that only works when you're looking at it from Washington.
When you're looking at it from the families that just got wiped out by accident in a night raid, then it's actually a total war.
And we fool ourselves.
We like to fool ourselves.
We want to believe we're still the good guys.
But that gets harder and harder to maintain.
And in an era when we're not even believing our own bullshit at home anymore, it must be impossible overseas to try to maintain that.
For all the bad news I throw at the State Department, I pity my former colleagues at State sitting around tables around the world trying to explain or justify the actions of the last 20 years or so and keep a straight face and a sane mind while they do it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the thing, right?
It's the ratio between how bad it is and how little anybody knows or cares about it and that kind of thing where it almost makes it unreal.
Where if you really want to get across it like, hey, I don't care what the U.N. says.
The numbers must be in the tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of dead now, and maybe more than that.
When we talk about a few years from now, when, you know, they do the excess death rate count.
I mean, this is for two and a half years now we've waged to blockade, not for two, three weeks, for two and a half years.
We've blockaded this country that due to previous IMF World Bank gangsterism had been forced off of their, you know, traditional crops and into growing things that they can sell on the global market for money instead and import their food, which is great until America puts you under a blockade, in which case you're doomed.
And, you know, this is the kind of thing that'll get America attacked.
And then you know it's going to happen as soon as some Yemeni or someone fighting in the name of the Yemenis attacks the United States.
They're going to say, well, what did we ever do to them?
Nothing.
And so, of course, this is just proof that their horrible, evil, blasphemous, sinful religion makes them hate innocence and goodness.
And like you said, you know, history began a year ago.
Well, whatever, began half an hour ago, Peter.
And so we could it's going to be like this, man.
That's the lesson of 9-11.
I mean, the American version of those events is that we were just sitting here, you know, watching TV on September 11th when this whole history of Islamic terror suddenly sparked off.
And as long as we continue to believe these things where a historical event, capital letters, is preceded by nothing, that history begins again on a particular date, we will continue to find ourselves in this cycle that never ends war, that never ends overseas deployment, that continually re-justifies itself.
It's almost as if somebody wanted all that to happen.
Gosh.
Yeah, man, especially because all the partisanship when, you know, the Obama years were at least, I mean, really more violent than the Bill Clinton years.
Not quite as bad as the full scale invasion of Iraq that Bush Jr. did, but pretty damn much right with the surge in Afghanistan and spreading the rest of the drone wars and the proxy wars and the regime change with NATO and Libya and all that.
And yet, in the minds of the American people, I guess, it's sort of like the 1990s.
Like, yeah, we're still bombing and blockading Iraq and whatever.
But overall, more or less, it's peacetime.
And I keep seeing these memes on Twitter about how there was never a single scandal in the Obama year, because him having eight, nine wars doesn't count as a scandal, right?
The Libya war spreading on down to Mali and innocent people being butchered.
Whatever, dude.
Like, that's just how things go.
And it's a long way from here.
And I guess the Obama year, am I right?
Is that what your neighbors think?
That the Obama years were basically peacetime?
And that any blowback, anything going on now, would just be Trump's fault and anything that happens would be blowback either from Bush or Trump years.
But everybody knows that everything was great during Obama.
Oh, absolutely.
This was one of the things that came out of the 2016 campaign was kind of the real time rewriting of the Obama years.
And I don't mean to revive all this, but I mean, in Clinton's presentation of her tenure as Secretary of State, the leaving out of the events in Libya, for example, it simply doesn't exist in her retelling of her four years as Secretary of State, even though that's why she did it in the first place.
So she could run on it in 2016 and say, look at what a great warrior I am.
And then by the time 2016 rolled around, it was like, oh, yeah.
So the revisionism preceded Trump.
And I think the revisionism would have followed Hillary Clinton into the White House if she had been elected.
But now that Trump is in place and now that every spark of criticism of the Obama administration is immediately relabeled as pro-Trump.
And this is something that I've found on a personal level that that's made my own work extremely difficult, is trying to write as objectively as I can about the events between 2008 and 2016.
Trying to write about those events objectively is near impossible because if one does not, if one does speak objectively about, for example, the U.S. destruction of Libya, one is immediately labeled as pro-Trump, pro-Russian, pro-Nazi, things like that.
And I think we would have had a blast of it under President Hillary Clinton.
But now it's just reached new heights of madness where we...
That don't bother me, man.
I'm pro-David Koresh and I'm pro-Saddam Hussein and I'm pro-Muammar Gaddafi and I'm pro-Mullah Omar and pro-Bashar Assad and pro-anyone that I say my government shouldn't murder.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess I'm the big champion of Manuel Noriega, too, because because look at all the interests I have in propping up Manuel Noriega, right?
Well, that's the only reason I would oppose slaughtering a bunch of Panamanians.
Well, you've heard it there, ladies and gentlemen.
Scott Horton finally has confessed.
That's right.
I gotta explain to you the Seven Seals now.
His worldwide support of dictators, and I will point out that all of the dictators you support are men, so you've also got that against you.
Yes, I'm horribly sexist.
You have no idea.
And all of my anti-war activities.
I'm going to retreat to a corner and cry myself into a coma until our next interview, Scott, but congratulations again on your book and your success there.
I've got a couple of pieces on the State Department in preparation and assuming I can get those published anywhere outside of Pravda, I look forward to getting a chance to come back and talk with you again about those as the story develops.
Awesome.
I look forward to that, too.
Very good.
Take care, my friend.
You, too, man.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that's Peter Van Buren.
He's at the American Conservative, a contributing editor now, believe it or not, at the American Conservative magazine, Hooper's War.
That's his book.
Go and buy it.
It's about PTSD and moral injury and the aftermath of violent conflict there.
He knows a little bit about that, I think.
Check that out, Hooper's War.
It's on Amazon.com.
And then, hey, you know me, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, foolserend.us for my book.
Buy my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Everybody likes it so far.
And follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
