12/8/17 Mark Perry on Why moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem is a mistake

by | Dec 12, 2017 | Interviews | 2 comments

Mark Perry returns to the show to discuss his latest article for the American Conservative, “Tillerson, Mattis Warned Trump Against Embassy Move.” Perry doubts that Trump understands the true effect of his decision and explains why Jerusalem is integral to the Arab world and to Palestine in particular. Scott asks if, now that the two-state solution is clearly over, peace can be found in a single state—assuming apartheid conditions are lifted. Perry believes that the silver lining is that the Jerusalem decision creates division in what has become an ever-cozier relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Scott then turns to Perry’s new book, “The Pentagon’s Wars: The Military’s Undeclared Wars Against America’s Presidents.

Mark Perry is the author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with its Enemies and The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthurHis most recent book, The Pentagon’s Wars was released in October. Follow him on Twitter @MarkPerryDC.

Discussed on the show:

  • “Arab world responds to Trump’s Jerusalem decision with protests and warnings” (Christian Science Monitor)
  • “Arabs, Europe, U.N. reject Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli capital” (Reuters)
  • “Pope Francis Has ‘Deep Worry’ Over President Trump’s Decision to Move U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem” (Time)
  • Palestinian Christians
  • “Tom Friedman on Trump’s ignorance in Jerusalem embassy decision” (MSNBC)
  • “Rice’s Turnabout on Mideast Talks” (The New York Times)
  • “Trump’s Transition Team Colluded With Israel. Why Isn’t That News?” (The Intercept)
  • “U.S. Abstains From U.N. Vote Condemning Israeli Settlements” (ForeignPolicy)
  • “An explanation of Israeli settlements” (MSNBC)
  • Philip Weiss
  • Ramzy Baroud
  • “A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity” (The New York Times)
  • Ahmed Yassin
  • 2004 Fallujah Ambush
  • “Sadr: Muslims must liberate Jerusalem not fight each other” (Middle East Monitor)
  • “Military Times survey: Troops prefer Trump to Clinton by a huge margin” (Military Times)
  • “Poll: Active Military Members Have Had Quite Enough of Nation Building, Regime Change” (Reason)
  • “Ron Paul Awash in Active Duty Military Donations” (U.S. News)
  • “America 1st: Tucker Carlson & Col. Macgregor Reveal Secrets!” (YouTube)

Today’s show is sponsored by: The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.LibertyStickers.comTheBumperSticker.com; and ExpandDesigns.com/Scott

Check out Scott’s Patreon page.

Play

Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
I think he's in process of doing that.
Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO, Secretary of State, James Mattis, Marine Corps General, Secretary of Defense.
They were up against who and how do you know?
I know because I received a phone call about the meeting and was given the details, a good data dump on the meeting.
What my source was insistent on was that this was not a full-blown heated argument.
But as he described it, an intense debate and discussion lasted for an hour.
Trump showed up, his national security team was there and talking about other things.
Mr. Trump showed up and inserted himself in the discussion, began the discussion on Jerusalem.
He was supposed to stay 15 to 20 minutes.
He ended up staying an hour.
He announced during that meeting that he was going to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
There was an immediate pushback by both Mr. Tillerson, Secretary of State Tillerson, and James Mattis, who told the President quite bluntly that this was a bad idea, would endanger American lives, undermine the peace process, and turn our Arab allies against us.
At the end of the discussion, he made the announcement that he was going ahead anyway, but that he would postpone the actual movement of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in deference to their worries.
And that was it.
That's how the decision was made.
It was not satisfactory to Mr. Tillerson or General Mattis, but under our Constitution, as you well know, the President has the final word on foreign policy, and he had the final word on this.
Isn't that funny, the art of the deal there, where it's just the simple split the difference?
So if they had said, no, Mr. President, we should declare that Tel Aviv is the capital of Palestine, then he would have said, okay, just leave it as it is, right?
That's interesting.
It's not clear to me that Mr. Trump actually knew the full effect of what he was doing.
He is disturbingly uninformed about almost every aspect of foreign policy, even though, as he says, he's the smartest guy in the room.
Well, he watches TV, right?
He doesn't read.
And TV never explains who's whom and who in Palestine.
And you know what?
So, especially since we're talking about Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, and James Mattis, the former Marine Corps General, Commander of CENTCOM, now Secretary of Defense.
Why in the world would they take this position?
What difference does it make, Mark?
It makes a huge difference.
And as we're seeing this morning, there's rioting throughout the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia, which has been spending a lot of the last few weeks palling up to the United States, has now begun the process of shunning the U.S. I'm sure they're quite disturbed that Trump would make this announcement.
They're trying to forge an anti-Iran coalition that's going to be hard to do now, as all eyes are turned back once again to what was a fairly quiet year in the West Bank and Gaza, which is not to say that it's not under occupation.
It continues, obviously, to be under occupation.
But what was a quiet environment on the Israeli-Palestinian issue has now turned ugly once again, fulfilling the predictions of Tillerson and Mattis.
Well, please be more specific.
I mean, because what you're saying could be, for someone who doesn't understand the issue, could be just construed as saying, well, so Donald Trump said a thing and that hurts the feelings of a lot of Arabs and makes them riot.
So, you know what I mean?
Listen, Jerusalem, I think I've been to Jerusalem 40 times in the last 20 years.
Jerusalem is central to Islam and it's central to Palestinian national aspirations.
And the United States has promised and promised and promised over the years, and certainly since the Oslo Accords were signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, have promised and promised and promised that the status of Jerusalem would be decided as part of a peace process, and that the United States would not do anything unilateral to endanger the city's status.
So, a promise that we made and have kept for more than two decades now was broken.
And we didn't get anything in return, nor did the Palestinians.
It was a unilateral decision.
I mean, you know, if Donald Trump is a man who's intent on showing that he knows the art of the deal, this was just a pure giveaway.
It could have been used as leverage.
We could have insisted that Israel stop settlements, for instance, stop settlement building and exchange.
And when they did, we would announce that Jerusalem was the capital.
But he didn't do that.
The man who is the master of the art of the deal engineered a giveaway.
It's really, it's astonishing to me.
And, you know, he said that he did it to keep a campaign promise.
But everyone has promised forever, for decades.
Every major political candidate has promised that they're going to do this and never done it, because they know that the cost and the price for doing it is so high.
So it's, you know, here we are.
Israel is happy.
So by saying what you're saying is then, I mean, am I right that even just saying it, not moving the embassy there, but even just America, the superpower on, you know, that backs Israel announcing that all of Jerusalem, I guess, is the capital of Israel, that literally does preclude the possibility that East Jerusalem could ever be the capital of an independent Palestine based on the West Bank?
Well, it certainly makes that, gives that argument to the Israelis, who can now come to the table and say Jerusalem's off the table in these negotiations since it's already the capital of Israel.
And that's what all the Palestinians, to them, this is what's so obvious, that this is a huge move, even if it's just, it starts as just a rhetorical thing.
They're not moving the embassy yet or whatever.
Their recognition to them is the death knell of what's been this promised peace process that someday you'll have an independent state.
Now they know better for sure than to think that this really is going to happen.
Is that right?
I think that's right.
I think that perhaps as importantly, and our European allies opposed this move as well.
It shows that the United States is not the honest mediator of this conflict that it has claimed it would be, that we are on the side of Israel.
And I suppose that's not a secret to many people who've been following this, but now it's official.
We're on the side of Israel and we've undermined the very negotiations that we said we would back.
You know, so here we are.
And I don't think you can overemphasize this.
We did this without the support of our European allies, who told us, who told the president not to do this.
England, France, and Germany.
Well, and the Pope too.
I saw someone noted that in the New York Times coverage of this, they're like, yeah, you know, some random Arabs are upset.
No one really knows why.
Who speaks Arabic?
I don't know.
And that was their kind of thing.
And no mention at all of the Christians' point of view of this, because it's, what, a fifth of the Palestinians are Christians?
And even the Pope himself said, hey, don't do this.
And there's no mention of that in the New York Times story about the reaction to this decision?
Well, there have been a lot of media outlets who have been soft-peddling this as, well, the Arabs will get over this.
I must say my sometime friend, Thomas Friedman, who's a Saudi partisan.
I thought you were going to say raving lunatic, but anyway.
Even he was upset.
I was quite surprised to hear him on MSNBC condemning this and basically calling Mr. Trump in print and on the air a chump.
And when you've got such a wide breadth of almost unanimous condemnation, that would be enough to bring any president up short.
But apparently Mr. Trump is shrugging his shoulders and saying, well, that's the way it is.
You know, the way that Mr. Trump is going to eventually peddle this is that it shows courage of convictions, that he keeps his promises, that he does the tough stuff that no other president's able to do, and that in itself is a victory.
Yeah, that's part of his law.
He keeps all his bad promises and forgets all the good ones.
But you know, Israel's been isolated on this issue for years and years and years and years, and now we've joined them.
We're isolated on this issue too.
We've lost, I think, this is only the latest in a series of moves we've made, but we've lost the support of Europe.
They're turning away from us.
They're going to handle their own problems without us, and I think that's true in Asia too.
We're alone in the world.
For those people who believe that America should be an isolationist nation, here we are, isolated from our friends, isolated from the Arab world.
With one big entangling alliance that rules them all.
And one entangling alliance that rules them all.
Yeah, it's not quite isolationism in a situation like this, but I see where you mean.
That's what Ron Paul always said.
He's the isolationist.
I'm just anti-war.
I want to get along with everyone.
You're the one who puts sanctions on everybody.
You're the one who's picking fights and isolating the American people from people in other countries all the time.
Smearing me, which is, I think, a good way to put it.
Well, he's right.
He's right.
And look, Donald Trump has said, Oh yeah, no, we want to do a deal over there, but both sides must be happy.
But both sides won't be happy as long as the Israelis aren't happy, and the Israelis won't be happy until they just have all the West Bank and the Palestinians lay down dead.
So he's really just saying, No, there's not going to be any deal, and why would I pretend?
Why would I do like Barack Obama and George Bush and Bill Clinton and George Bush and Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and pretend like they're ever going to give independence to the Palestinians on the West Bank, when, meh, no they're not.
And everybody knows it.
I think it's...
Is it really worse than the previous list of liars before him?
Remember Rice at Annapolis?
Oh yeah, we're going to maybe talk about talking about talking about never doing anything.
The most important, oddly, the most important statement made on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last 30 years, in my opinion, was uttered by George Bush, 43, during his presidency, and when I heard it, my mouth dropped.
But it was absolutely correct.
And he, you know, we maintained our friendship with Israel, obviously, at great cost, under his administration.
But he was right.
He said, This conflict isn't over until the Palestinians say it's over.
And I thought, that's exactly right.
We should be satisfied with the Palestinians.
They're the ones under occupation.
And it was a stunning, I think, recognition of what the problem is.
That, you know, the Palestinians, and a recognition of how tough the Palestinians can be, they're going to hang in there.
They're not going to give up.
This isn't going to stop them.
And I think it's, if anything, they'll dig in their heels and refuse to come to the table until this is reversed.
So now we've actually added to our problems with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This has done nothing to soften or dampen or downplay that conflict.
It's worsened it.
$20 right now, you get to the front of the list to get the audiobook of Fool's Errand.
I'm going back over it a second time.
It's taking me forever, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to make sure it's good for you there.
But $20 and you go to the front of the list.
Anybody who donates $50 or more at scotthorton.org/donate, you get a signed copy of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Anybody who donates $100 or more, you get a QR code, commodity disc, a silver coin with a QR code on it.
It tells you the instant spot price.
And anyone who donates $200 or more, you get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks.
And by the way, you can do monthly donations, subscription donations there, $5, $10, $20, $50, a million dollars, whatever you want there by way of PayPal.
And thank you very much to everybody who does that.
Those monthly donations really help.
And of course you can also donate per interview at patreon.com/scotthortonshow.
And anyone who signs up now to give a dollar or more per interview at patreon.com, you get two free audiobooks from Listen and Think.
So all that is at scotthorton.org/donate.
Also on the front page of scotthorton.org, there's a link to amazon.com.
Do all your Christmas shopping through there, and I get a kickback from their end of the sale, not yours.
So that's pretty good.
And then hey, leave me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher.
Give me some good reviews and tell them why.
And of course share them on Facebook and Twitter and that kind of thing if you can.
Thanks.
All right now, so I saw some Palestinian leftists saying, good, you know what?
The two-state solution was always a hoax.
It's about time we call the hoax off and everybody recognize that the West Bank already has been annexed and we're going to have one state.
And under that paradigm, you cannot keep up the apartheid any longer.
You're going to have to give the Palestinians representation and their rights as individual citizens of the Israeli state that rules them.
And so, good.
What do you say to that?
It appears that we're moving in that direction and I've heard those voices say that.
But we're a long ways away from a one-state solution.
We are a long ways away.
We're at least a generation away from it.
So the Palestinians can say that and pound the table and say, we want our rights in a single state.
That's not going to happen.
What's going to happen is that the Israelis are going to continue to occupy the West Bank and build settlements and try to push the Palestinians out.
This is a long conflict.
It has proven to be irredeemable to any kind of negotiation.
And while the United States has supported a two-state solution for the record, the Jerusalem move shows just how bankrupt our policy has been.
We have simply been unable to move the Israelis into negotiations and make no mistake, the obstacle here is Israel, not the Palestinians.
Well, I mean, and the obstacle too is the American people don't understand this issue any better than Donald Trump.
So, as far as the American people know, the Palestinians are the country next door that's relentlessly attacking the poor Israelis with terrorists and trying to extort land out of them as though it's Israeli land and the Palestinians are the aggressors.
And they just lie.
They just turn everything upside down.
You know, at the time there's all this, the news now is the real collusion was with Israel getting the incoming but not yet sworn in Trump administration to try to intervene to get the Russians to veto or to abstain at least from the UN resolution about the occupation last December.
And I like pointing out that that UN resolution and Obama's abstention and refusal to veto it last December was the one occasion where TV news explained it and they only explained it because it was MSNBC defending the president's position, Obama's position.
Here's the West Bank and here's where only Jews are allowed to go and here's where the oppression is and here's where the IDF tortures little kids and I don't know if they got into that but they certainly explained the apartheid system there once.
And just by the fact that they did it that one time it really went to show the silence and the echo and the darkness and the rest of the context about this issue.
I mean if you really want to know about it there's no problem or if you know Palestinians and read Palestinians like Ramzi Baroud or whoever else you know there's a whole list of them then you understand the issue but if you're just regular Joe Sixpack like all of my neighbors and my family and everyone else and yours nobody understands this stuff and so everybody thinks well jeez the Israelis they're like sort of white and they speak English that I never disagree with but there is the rare occasion so I will amend your previous comment Please do.
I think that slowly but surely and maybe even almost imperceptibly the American public is starting to turn on this issue.
You can see it in the Democratic Party especially remember the platform fight on the Israeli-Palestinian issue at the Democratic Party convention that was down dirty and ugly and undermined by Hillary Clinton as we all know and who was really pro-Israeli and I watched it and a lot of people watched it closely and a lot of Democrats a lot of the Democrat elites those who run the Democratic Party the leadership of the Democratic Party remember it well and thought that many of the points made by Jim Zogby were well taken and well put and now that you know Trump has basically married the Jewish-American community and its funding maybe finally the Democratic Party will begin to understand that they don't need Jewish votes to win and they don't and they don't need Jewish-American fundraisers to help them and maybe they can come out more honestly about this issue you know it is a it is a distant hope perhaps but I see this issue turning and turning and turning slowly slowly slowly and there are even though people stand up in the Senate and the House of Representatives and defend Israel in private they're sick of this conflict and they're sick of having to kowtow to the Israelis and it's starting to show I was on a friend's show yesterday and he was asking me well so you know you really think when it comes to the good guys and the bad guys that it's the Israelis who are the bad guys and I'm going well you look you know I'm not saying the Palestinians meaning especially their political leadership are good guys that's not the question good and bad the question is who's the aggressor and who's the victim right who's initiating violence who's committing land theft who's killing people who's arresting people under this worse than martial law this foreign occupation military rule over these people who's doing that it's the Israelis doing that to the Palestinians full stop so that doesn't you don't have to impugn a bunch of you know Disney fantasy onto the perfect you know innocence and brilliance and whatever of the Palestinians they have plenty of problems but that isn't the question right whether they're good guys or bad guys the question is whether they're the helpless civilians who are being victimized that's right yeah yeah so I think people you know when it's phrased that way then it's like an overreach that like oh how can you say that the all the you know Hamas you're taking the side of Hamas as though it was Hamas that knocked our towers down not the al-Nusra front you know that's right no it's there's still deep um stereotypes about the work here I mean if you and I traveled to Alabama today and asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I don't know that we'd find but a handful of people who understood it you're certainly right about that and I and I doubt that we'd find a handful who'd say you know the Palestinians have been wronged so we do we have a long ways to go uh but it's interesting to watch what Mr. Trump did yesterday on Jerusalem uh because no one you know people who would normally not want to be seen as criticizing Israel think that this is idiocy and uh and have said so so that you know that's a that's we marked that in the plus column and there are very few pluses in the plus column so that's an example of something Israel did that reflected bad on us and well Operation Grapes of Wrath led directly to the 9-11 attacks there's one and then of course the I cited the assassination of Sheikh Yassin in the Gaza Strip in 2004 which is what led to the riot in Fallujah and the lynching of the Blackwater and things like that there's a couple you know but so I wonder you know I saw this thing yesterday I don't know if you saw this but Muqtada al-Sadr who recently has been piling around with the Saudis anyway the Shiite militia leader in Iraq of course he has said hey we're going to do this we're going to do this we're going to do this we're going to do this we're going to do this we're going to do this
But maybe we could maybe we could we could start a republic coming on Trump is Lee Lee iron man is the iron man it is the iron man it S L war, and the isolation of the United States from its allies.
That is the substantive outcome of what Mr. Trump did yesterday.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
Hey guys, did you notice the new and improved show notes?
Damon Hathaway has been doing a great job with the show notes there on the pages at libertarianinstitute.org and at scotthorton.org.
So check out the links for all the information we talk about in these interviews.
You guys have been asking for that for a long time.
Well, we got it now.
Good show notes at scotthorton.org, et cetera.
All right.
This show is sponsored by The War State.
Mike Swanson wrote it.
It's a great book about the early history of the military industrial complex after World War II.
And he also gives great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
And when you get that advice, you want to go buy your medals from Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's rrbi.co, rrbi.co, libertystickers.com for anti-government propaganda.
And we got a brand new and improved site and brand new and improved sticker art coming up soon for you there at libertystickers.com.
And of course, you'll probably also want to sign up for Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom by way of the link on my page.
And I'll tell you what, did you notice how great the website is at foolserend.us, the website for my book?
Well, it is great.
And you know who did that?
It was Harley Abbott at expanddesigns.com/scott.
And if you go to expanddesigns.com/scott, you're going to save $500 on your brand new website.
All right, now let me talk to you about your book here for a minute, and I'm sorry I haven't read it yet.
I have the PDF saved right on my desktop.
And as soon as my audio book is done like yours is done here, then I will get it out.
Everybody, that's right.
You could buy Mark Perry's audio book and his hardcover and his Kindle.
You get it on audio CD.
It's all here right on amazon.com.
The Pentagon's Wars.
And I love this subtitle.
This sounds so good.
300 pages of this, man, I can't wait.
The military's undeclared war against America's presidents.
Give us some examples of what you're talking about here, Mark.
The surge.
We all remember the surge in Iraq where President Bush wanted to send an additional several brigades under the leadership of David Petraeus.
And the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior military at the Pentagon, were quite worried that this was an actual expansion of the war.
And Mr. Bush was required and under pressure to go explain what he wanted to them.
And it was a, I detail it in the book, it was quite a rough session.
At one point, the Army Chief of Staff argued that this would break the military and that it would mean serial deployments of American soldiers who had been there in deployments again and again and again.
And Bush, you know, he dug in his heels and said, well, I've made the decision and I'm the president.
And the Army Chief of Staff, General Schoomaker at the time, turned to him and said, as if in disappointment, yes, sir, you are the president.
And it, you know, it was close.
It was very close to insubordination.
It was hard fought.
Bush made that decision and the Joint Chiefs continued to fight and fight and fight and fight.
And we find that, I think, in every single administration since the end of the Cold War, that the senior military is actually quite negative and skeptical about the continued military deployments overseas.
We saw this most recently in the instance of Niger, where the Army Chief of Staff argued to the U.S. Congress that these continued deployments will, in fact, break the Army.
The congressional response to this was, well, you need more money.
That's not what they need.
They don't need more money.
What they need are fewer responsibilities overseas and a pullback to rebuild a military that has been overstretched by being in 87 countries and fighting any number of enemies.
That's the problem.
So well then, OK, so another example from the Bush era, I don't know if this is in your book, was Admiral Fallon saying, yeah, we'll attack Iran over my dead body when he was the leader of CENTCOM in 2007.
Is that in there?
You bet it's in there.
Of course, yes.
So I'm interested in the theme of your book.
In other words, you're saying that it's these eggheads and the civilians who are abusing their standing army, and their standing army would rather stay home in a lot of these examples.
Well, you know, that's true.
But I think that, you know...
The Afghan surge is certainly another story, where that was, look, Obama, you better do this or we're going to basically call you the Taliban, get it?
And he was like, OK, guys, whatever you say.
I think that we have to remember that Mr. Trump got 80 percent of the military vote.
But 70 percent of that vote was cast by soldiers and military families who were against, very specifically according to polling done at the time, were very specifically against nation-building.
You know, the Army and the Marines in particular will not happily, but they'll, you know, they'll agree to a deployment, no question.
But what they won't agree to is an endless deployment, one in which there's no victory in sight and no end to the combat.
And that's what we've been in since 9-11.
There is a growing, strong sentiment in the military that we need to start regrouping, pulling back, pulling out, that we can't do everything all the time with our military and that it's not the only tool in the toolbox of American influence and that we have to start doing better on diplomacy.
Well, but wasn't it just Mattis and McMaster who forced Trump to back down from withdrawing from Afghanistan, which is the one war he was really against, and make him double down instead?
After six months of pulling his teeth and making him do it?
That's right.
But, you know, I think that the, I think that my point still holds.
You know, senior military, the four stars and the three stars will, you know, once we're engaged, they want to win.
But if you go into the enlisted ranks, talk to the sergeants, privates and corporals, those who actually fight the wars, they just think that this is crazy.
Well, we saw as far back as 2008 that it was Ron Paul who got most donations from enlisted men and officers currently serving and veterans.
And in 2012, I don't know if this is true in 08, but certainly in 2012, he raised more from the military, from officers and enlisted men than all the other candidates in both parties combined.
And of course, that was because he was an anti-war Republican, right?
If he'd been some wimpy Democrat, they wouldn't have been able to support that.
But he was a Republican congressman from Texas saying, this is stupid, we don't need to do this anymore.
But being plenty patriotic all along while he said so.
And they were like, yeah, that's what we want to hear right there.
That's right.
That's a good point.
So I think the military is increasingly turning away, I just don't think there's any doubt about it, I think the military is increasingly turning away from these constant deployments and arguing that if we're going to win the war on terrorism, and it might not be winnable, that we have to pick and choose much better than we have.
But we can't continue to spend $700 billion on the military at the same time claiming that it's suffering.
I've always argued that the one way to insist on discipline and the one way to ensure that our military is prepared is to actually cut their budget to impose fiscal discipline on the US military, which is spending wildly and on things they don't need and America doesn't need.
Yeah.
All right.
So one last thing here.
And this goes back to something you were saying a minute ago.
It was Colonel Douglas MacGregor, who is, you know, you actually first introduced his character to me and your story about him versus McMaster on their plans for war with Russia and Eastern Europe if it goes down, and all of that back a couple of years ago.
But so I saw him on the Tucker Carlson show, I guess he's known as the commander of the big tank battle in Iraq War One against Saddam's forces where they decimated in there.
So he told Tucker Carlson, he said, and it wasn't hyperbolic, he didn't raise his voice or lower it or anything.
He just said, listen, it's a broken force.
That's what you just said, Mark.
It's a broken force.
The men don't believe in this mission anymore.
They don't want to do it anymore.
He was specifically referring to Afghanistan.
And he said, you cannot field an army like that.
Get it?
You know, basically.
So I just wonder, you know, how exactly I mean, parse that more and better, because we are talking about a trillion dollar armed force here, Mark.
And so what is it that they can't do exactly when it comes to facing down some Taliban militiamen over there?
They can't.
They can't fight.
And listen, this is you know, this is our military is fighting an insurgency.
And there hasn't been one instance where a major power has ever defeated an insurgency.
You know, the British say, well, in Malaysia, it was quite different.
They were fighting an ethnic insurgency.
But if you look at the record from the end of World War Two to now, the United States has not won an insurgent campaign.
Just it hasn't been done.
And there's a reason for that.
And the reason is that our adversaries are from there.
And so it's much better if we can enlist people to fight our adversaries who are also from there.
And if that can't be done, and if it fails, we shouldn't be involved in fighting endless wars.
So I talked to Doug McGregor about this after his appearance on Carlson.
If we if we continue to fight these endless wars without winning, we will break our military.
And at some point, the enlisted ground pounders will say, well, you know, what are we doing?
I've been away from my family for nine years overseas, and we're not winning.
It can't continue.
And I think we've, you know, I think we've reached that point.
And that's what McGregor means when he says the military is broken.
You know, we we continue to expend an incredible amount of effort.
And and at some point, the army gets exhausted.
And that's what's happening.
Yeah.
Well, again, with the silver linings.
All right.
Thanks very much, Mark.
I sure appreciate your time on the show again, as always.
It's always a pleasure.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
That's a great Mark Perry.
American Conservative Magazine.
This one is called Tillerson Mattis warned Trump against embassy move.
And you'll know me.
I'm at Scott Wharton.org antiwar.com.
The Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org.
And by my book, Fool's Errand.
Timed and the war in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S. and follow me on Twitter at Scott Wharton Show.
Thanks.

Listen to The Scott Horton Show