Hey y'all, so here's the thing, I'm giving a speech to the Tarrant County Libertarian Party on April the 28th, that's Saturday, April the 28th, from 2 to 4, Central Time, up there in Fort Worth, so if you're anywhere near the 200 square miles of concrete known as Dallas-Fort Worth, head on out there, and I'll see you, it'll be cool.
I'll sell you a book.
Oh, you can find out all about it at eventbrite.com.
Oh, and I guess I'll write up a blog entry too at the Libertarian Institute and at scotthorton.org.
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, and he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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, introducing Army Major Danny Shurson, and he's one of the most outspoken anti-war activists in America these days, and he's an active duty Army Major.
Really.
He's getting out soon, though.
He's writing for antiwar.com.
Here he is, American Empathy Gap, Massacres in Gaza, and U.S. Silence.
Before that, U.S. should do the opposite of what Saudis want, and Circle of Absurdity, Killing the Islamists We Create, and on and on.
He writes like 10 articles a week or something.
It's insane.
We can't keep up with them all.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Danny?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
I have been busy.
Well, I have to tell you, you are a great asset to what we're trying to do around here, so I really appreciate it.
So let's just start with the latest first here and the attention that you're paying to the situation in the Gaza Strip.
So if I'm your captain and I say to you, Major, what the hell is going on in the Gaza Strip, you would say to me what?
I would say, well, first of all, I'm impressed that you're even asking that question, because most Americans largely ignore Palestine at this point, and specifically Gaza.
The best way I could explain it is that essentially since 1967, although it's gotten worse in the last few years, Gaza, which is the most heavily population-density strip of earth on this planet, has been besieged in an open-air prison.
There's really no way in or out.
There's no free travel for the Palestinians into Israel or into the West Bank, which is the other larger Palestinian entity.
The Gazans are denied basic civil liberties that are common to all Israelis, and they live in a sort of socio-political limbo.
And now, after three or four different punitive military sort of conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza since 2009, a lot of the Palestinians have just had enough.
And so they're going to the border fence, and thousands of them, especially young people, are protesting the conditions in Gaza and asking for the right to return the homes they were, or their parents and grandparents, were kicked out of during the 1948 founding of Israel.
The bottom line is these protests have been largely peaceful, and Israeli soldiers and snipers have killed dozens of Palestinians.
Not a single Israeli soldier has been killed or seriously wounded, to my knowledge, up to this point.
So it's a lopsided endeavor.
If it happened somewhere else, if the roles were reversed and Israeli protesters were shot down by Palestinian gunmen, I promise you it would be on every station in the American media.
Man.
Okay, Major, but it must be all their fault.
Well, that's right.
So that's what, it's really interesting.
When you write about the Palestinians with any empathy, right, it's amazing what you're opening yourself up to.
Sections on websites, emails that you get, they really border on hate mail.
Because what you get told is you're obviously an anti-Semite, and you obviously don't understand, you the author, that Palestinians are all terrorists, right?
This is the kind of reaction you get.
I've called the Israel-Palestine crisis the third rail of American politics.
If you're smart and you don't want to alienate anybody, do not write about Palestine, right?
I just couldn't let this one go.
I couldn't let this one go.
Here's what I'll say about the Palestinians are all terrorists argument.
Either they're the most boneheaded, incompetent terrorists of all time, or most of those protesters were completely peaceful.
What do I mean by that?
They couldn't even manage to break through the border wall, okay?
No one got through the fence, no Palestinians got into the Israeli side, and no Israeli soldiers were hurt, killed by gunfire, suicide bombings.
So they're either the worst terrorists ever, or the guys that are out there, the guys and gals protesting, are in fact largely peaceful.
But it doesn't change the rapid reaction to any empathy for the Palestinians.
Clearly, I must be anti-Israeli, an anti-Semite, and a lover of terrorists.
And that's kind of the response you get.
Yeah.
It's funny, you know, I wonder if the people on that side of it ever wonder, is it really right that every person who thinks that the Palestinians might have a point at all simply wakes up in the morning with an irrational hatred of Jews?
Because that really doesn't sound right, does it?
You know what I mean?
Right.
Well, I mean, that kind of logic would never be applied to another issue.
No one ever says that I'm anti-Persian if I critique the Iranian regime.
Everything else is just politics.
Everything else is just business.
But this really is the third rail in U.S. foreign policy.
I think more and more it's just a silly red herring that hardly anyone believes in.
Like, well, you call someone an anti-Semite, but all that means is, okay, I'm listening, what's your evidence for that?
Right.
But it doesn't mean that you've convinced me just by labeling somebody that way.
Not by a long shot, you know.
Yeah.
It's a tough thing.
I couldn't stay silent on this one.
I generally write about other issues.
I would admit that my expertise in Israel-Palestine is, you know, limited to several books, whereas I have personal experience in other parts of the Middle East.
So sometimes I stay silent just because I don't want to act like an expert.
But I was appalled by the just complete lack of coverage in U.S. media.
I was reading an article, and I mentioned this in my piece, I was reading an article by Paul Pilar, who writes for The National Interest, it's a really good piece on Gaza.
And I said to my wife, I said, let's do an experiment.
And I started flipping through every American news channel.
And I mean, left each one on for five or 10 minutes.
And this is after 17 Palestinians have been killed that day.
And radio silence.
I mean, it's Stormy Daniels, it's Trump, it's Syria.
I'm not saying those aren't important issues.
They are.
But I wonder if we're distracting ourselves from really what is hard to consider anything but a war crime.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, to be perfectly selfish about this, this is why Mohammed Atta flew the plane into the North Tower or the South, whichever tower there.
This was his thing.
It wasn't the American bases in Saudi Arabia being used to bomb Iraq.
That was or may have been a part of it, along with the rest of them.
Bin Laden and Ramzi Youssef and all of these guys had all cited that.
But for Mohammed Atta specifically, it was Israel in Lebanon killing people.
And he said, you know what, I want to join up with Osama and crash a plane into an American skyscraper.
Wouldn't that be a riot?
And so we paid dearly for our support, not just for Israel's existence, but for Israel's merciless totalitarianism and persecution of these people.
It really is completely true that we we make our soldiers less safe and we make our civilian populace less safe through our unabashed, unqualified support for Israel.
In Baghdad, I would sit in thousands of houses and drink chai tea until I was just really hyped up on a sugar rush.
And I would just listen to these people explain their gripes with American policy.
And these people had never been to Palestine.
Most of them had never left their neighborhood in Baghdad.
And yet they would talk about Israel, Palestine and America's support for Israel with a fair amount of sophistication.
And that was one of their gripes.
Three years later, I find myself or I'm sorry, four years later, I find myself in Afghanistan where there is no power grid out in the rural part of Kandahar province.
I mean, it is black.
These guys can't read or write.
And they still knew about Israel, Palestine.
They still had that gripe.
And I heard the same things.
And they said, well, they're one of the reasons we don't respect you is because of what's happening to the Palestinians, what's happening in Jerusalem, what's happening in Gaza.
It's so obtuse of American foreign policy elites not to recognize that and to take some sort of action to ameliorate the situation.
Well, you know, it's in Walt and Mearsheimer, their famous essay, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.
They talk all about how Colin Powell said to George W. Bush, listen, you've got to get a 90-something percent approval rating after the greatest failure of any, to put it mildly, of any president who's ever lived.
As everyone is rallied around you, you have the political capital to spend.
Now is the time to get the Israelis out of the West Bank and get a Palestinian state through.
And it was the Israel Lobby and with the help of people like Tom DeLay and the Christian right who came to George W. Bush and said, if you want to be a one-term president like your father, we dare you.
And he backed down.
And so, but at that time, Colin Powell was talking like what you and I just said.
Absolutely.
You know, what's really interesting is what you mentioned about the Christian right.
You know, it would be one thing if the Israel Lobby was only wealthy, you know, politically active Jewish families in the United States.
And it's not, it's not just that, not by a long shot.
The greatest supporters of Israel tend to be people on the evangelical Christian right.
These are folks who believe, seriously believe that the world is ending.
The apocalypse is coming in our own lifetime.
And in order for that to happen, the Jews have to return to the Holy Land.
Now, of course, they need this to happen so that they can live out this just sort of millenarian fantasy.
But the Jews, they believe are going to hell when this all happens.
And so they're just these really, really odd bedfellows, the Christian evangelical right and the Israel Lobby.
And it's amazing.
You're right.
The power they had over the Bush administration, the wasted political capital that he had.
It's mind blowing.
And I think most Americans are sort of unaware of it.
They're busy just, you know, trying to get by or whatever.
Right.
You know, I talked with Ramsey Baroud yesterday, and as he's going around talking about his book, people are saying to him, what's Palestine?
You mean Pakistan?
They just don't even know anything about it.
Anything about it.
If they know anything, it's that the terrorist Arabs are trying to extort land from Israel by inflicting terrorism against them unless they give up some land.
And it's just completely upside down and backwards.
In fact, I talked to Grant Smith yesterday, too, and he reminded me about a poll, a set of polls that he did back a year ago that was based on a question that I had had about just how much people know about this in the first place, where everywhere else in Europe and Canada and what have you, where they did the poll, everybody knows that the Israelis are occupying the Palestinians, more or less, except in the USA, where everybody has it completely backwards.
Either they don't know anything about it, or they already think that Palestine is the country next door that's constantly attacking Israel, or they think that it's the Palestinians who are occupying and persecuting the poor Israelis, because that's what they're always told, poor little Israel, surrounded by these horrible, evil enemies, when that entire narrative is true, but it's true about what Israel's doing to the Palestinians, not what the Arabs are doing to the Israelis at all.
Absolutely.
I mean, the Palestinians are in this crazy limbo that we would never allow for any other people.
They are the ones that are truly trapped between rocks and hard places.
I mean, Israel has made peace with the Egyptians.
Israel is even relatively peaceful with Saudi Arabia.
Certainly with Jordan.
And they are not at risk of being thrown into the sea.
Let's be real.
Let us be real for a second.
Israel has one of the most powerful technologically advanced militaries in the world.
It is largely at peace with its Arab neighbors, and it has been able to keep terrorism to a very minimal level through its massive security state.
And so this whole narrative that, like, poor little Israel, David versus Goliath, and that if we don't stand with them, they're going to be thrown into the sea is absolutely ludicrous.
So let me just say real quick what I'm what I'm talking about and explain how moderate I really am on this issue.
I think Israel has a right to exist now.
I think the founding of Israel and the politics surrounding it were all flawed and problematic, but we can't remake the past.
We're not going to take millions of Israelis and send them back to Eastern Europe or send them back to Russia or wherever they came from, which largely those are two of the places.
But what we need is some sort of settlement that has a degree of efficacy and fairness and justice for both sides.
So I'm not calling for the extermination of Israelis, not even calling for the Israeli state to shrink.
I'm just asking that it stay within its 1967 borders, borders which, according to UN resolutions like UN 220, they are in violation of because they are occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank and imprisoning Palestinians in Gaza.
Let me just say one last thing.
I say it in the article, but I think it's very important.
Israel would like to be three things in its own narrative.
It would like to be Jewish, OK, like a like a self-consciously Jewish state.
It would like to be democratic.
It likes to say we're the only democracy in the Middle East, although that's not true.
And they're like they want to be expansive.
They want to control all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
What I say in the article is Israel can only be any two of those.
It cannot be all three.
And the reason for this is if they're expansive and they control all the territory the Palestinians are in and don't give civil rights to those Palestinians, don't give them the same citizenship as Israelis, then they are not democratic.
And if, you know, if they agree to drop some of the territory, then that would be a possibility of peace in the sense that they could give the Palestinians a state and they could still be Jewish and democratic.
But so long as they leave the Palestinians in limbo, Israel is not really a democracy.
What Israel is is an apartheid state.
Yeah, it really is.
It's fully 50 percent of the population.
I mean, if you include the 20 percent of the citizens of Israel who are, you know, as they're known as the Arab Israelis or the Palestinian citizens of Israel or whichever kind of name, if you include them with all the occupied in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, then that's half the population who are almost all of them are completely disenfranchised.
The ones who are the citizens of Israel have some representation, but they certainly live as second or third class citizens compared to Jews there.
So it's yeah, one more thing that there would be some kind of end in sight to something that is so on its face, untenable.
But I guess maybe it's tenable.
So long as the Americans are complicit and enabling, I mean, think of Israel as like an addicted family member.
You know, they're addicted to settling this Palestinian land.
They're addicted to maintaining these walls and maintaining control over the Palestinian land.
And they can only be an addict if they're enabled by others.
And in this case, they're being enabled by the United States.
Number one recipient of U.S. military aid is Israel.
I mean, they have the military hardware that really is essentially as good as the United States.
And we let it happen.
We block U.N. Security Council resolutions that would chastise Israel.
We constantly veto any criticism.
So we provide them top cover and the military wherewithal.
And so it will go on forever.
That's the thing.
I mean, this stasis that we're in now, it's perpetual.
And there's no end in sight because there's no constituency in either of the two major political parties that gives two shits about the Palestinians.
Yep.
Afraid so.
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All right, let's talk about other things.
The U.S. should do the opposite of what the Saudis want.
Well, so starting with Stan with Israel, so you convinced me so far.
What other policies do you have in mind that America has in the Middle East that are influenced by the Saudi regime there, Danny?
Yeah, well, you know, it's like a chicken or egg situation, you know.
Do we get pulled into these situations that are against our interests by the Saudis or do we want to do them already and they just happen to align with the Saudis?
It's hard to know, but I'm generally going to come down on the side of the Saudis pull us into this region in situations that are almost always against our interests.
So let's just take a quick survey of the Middle East.
Name a country, name a problem, and whatever the Saudi position is, the Americans take that same position and it hurts us.
It either drains our blood, our treasure, or both.
So we'll say Yemen.
Saudis are terror bombing the people of Yemen.
They've unleashed a cholera epidemic, which is the worst in recorded human history.
There is a famine, 22 million people are reliant on some sort of food aid to survive.
And the only thing the United States gains out of this is the rancor of the people on the Arab street.
OK, so not only are we complicit in a war crime, but we're actually making ourselves less popular in the Middle East.
We're making ourselves more at risk.
And oh, by the way, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, is actually being strengthened by this war.
So let's turn ourselves to Syria.
What would the Saudis like?
The Saudis would like Bashar al-Assad's regime to be overturned, and they would like the Sunni extremists, which is what most of the rebels are at this point, to take over power.
So in the name of that, they've sent money and guns to the Al-Nusra Front, which is an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
It's the Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, although they've renamed themselves, rebranded.
And again, here are the Saudis with their Wahhabi extremist ideology, supporting Islamists, getting us to support the same and trying to get us to overturn the Assad regime, which would not only not be in the United States' interest, but would make us less safe, create more chaos and increase the likelihood of war with Russia.
I mean, those are just two examples.
Quite frankly, if this was a radio call-in show, I would challenge any listener to just like name a country or a problem in the Middle East.
I'll tell you what the Saudi position is, and I'll tell you why it's not good for America.
And so what we need to do, and I could do that for almost any country in the world.
It's incredible how they pull us into these absolute quagmires.
So here's my thing.
I don't give a dang who's a Wahhabi or a Salafi or a Hanafi or this, that, or the other damn thing.
What matters is politics, right?
Some of these 9-11 hijackers were doing coke at the strip clubs and whatever.
It ain't religion that's really the matter.
Now, if I was a Syrian, I surely would not want to live under the religious rule of the Nusra Front or the Islamic State.
But the thing of it is, when you say that, well, you know, it's the al-Qaeda franchise there, I mean, that sounds kind of pretty bad.
But what that means, really, is that they've sworn their oath of loyalty, their bayat, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
So that's all I care about.
I don't care what your religious beliefs are.
If you took an oath to join up under his authority to fight against whoever, you know, I'm not saying I would justify American war against any group declaring loyalty to Zawahiri anywhere, but it's certainly treason to support them.
Absolutely.
And, of course, when President Obama finally decided, okay, I'm going to send some arms to the Syrian rebels, most of the guns and most of the money ended up in the hands of the Islamist extremists, not because we directly fueled it to the Nusra, but because Nusra just took our weak-ass rebel groups and said, yeah, thanks, we'd like your guns, turn them over or we'll kill you.
Join us.
Hey, you know what?
Here's a good one that someone ought to investigate.
You know, there's a great Public Radio International story that's just a State Department press release about how they bottled these trucks and gave them to the mythical moderates there.
And you might remember, everybody, and including you, Danny, the scandal where there was this plumber in Corpus Christi who sold his old work truck, and then it ended up in pictures under the control of ISIS or on Nusra there in Syria.
But it had his phone number on it and the name of his company.
So people were calling him and threatening him and accusing him of treason and threatening his family and all this stuff.
But no one was really asking the question, how did his truck get to Syria?
And the answer, of course, is that Hillary Clinton had sent it to Syria.
And that was where they got it.
And I just wondered if anyone had ever definitively connected the dots between those trucks, and I mean really specifically all those Toyota Helixes, and the ones that we've seen from the pictures of the parade as the Islamic State invaded Mosul in June of 2014 and basically sacked all of Western Iraq.
And were those, in fact, the very same trucks?
I suspect they were.
Yeah, at least some of them.
And I like how you mentioned Hillary Clinton, because I just don't care about Republicans or Democrats anymore at this point, because if Hillary Clinton was president, I think we'd be doing more bombing of Bashar al-Assad.
I think we'd be doing more intervention and regime changes in the Middle East, because there's no one more hawkish than Hillary Clinton.
Now, I'm not saying that I'm a fan of President Trump, I can't say that I am.
But what I will say is I think we have a better chance of getting out of a place like Syria under Trump if he follows his instincts than we would have under a standard neoliberal like Clinton or a standard neoconservative like, well, some of the people that Trump has now appointed, meaning Pompeo and Bolton.
So these people scare me.
Our best bet would be if we just locked Trump in a room and said, hey, you're not allowed to talk to anybody else.
Should America be in Syria?
Because I think his instinct would be, no, that's a waste of money.
It's not in our interest, you know, because he has that kind of simple thinking.
But sometimes that sort of simplistic view is correct.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen here, man.
I know you've fought in these wars.
You know this stuff firsthand, the way that this all played out.
It seems to me pretty clear that ever since Bush Jr. reversed the Ronald Reagan strategy of supporting Saddam to contain the Shiite revolution in Iran and imported it into Iraq, that they've been playing screw up, catch up and trying to figure out what else to do.
And Bush wouldn't let them, you know, outright attack Iran.
And so they decided, you know, in Obama years, I guess, they started during Bush in the redirection, but especially in Obama years in 2011.
As Obama himself really put it to Jeffrey Goldberg, that this is sort of a consolation prize after giving all of Eastern Iraq to Iran's friends, that, well, we can at least take out their friend in Syria as a consolation prize kind of thing to try to weaken Iran a little bit after we've accidentally just empowered them so much.
But then now so much history has passed.
Support for these jihadis blew back into the form of the Islamic State, which was a few bridges too far.
So they had to launch Iraq War III in order to destroy the Islamic State that they had created.
Of course.
Oh, I wanted to mention this famous quote from the Financial Times.
Prince Saud al-Faisal said to John Kerry, as though John Kerry wasn't in on this all along himself, Hillary's successor as Obama's Secretary of State.
He said, Daesh, that's ISIS, Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa.
So America put Iran's friends in the Dawa party, the Shiite faction in power in Baghdad.
And so this is their response to that.
And of course, that's been America's policy too.
But then, so my point is that after Iraq War III, now ISIS is smashed.
Assad and Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army and the Iranian Quds Force and their friends.
And of course, the Russians are ascending again in Syria.
Obama, Trump, pardon me, has called off that CIA support for al-Nusra last year, apparently.
Best I can tell, everyone else seems to think that that Washington Post reporting is correct on that.
But now you, sir, are arguing that now is the time to leave after George Bush and Barack Obama have done so much to help Iran and have helped enhance their position in Syria and in Iraq.
And, you know, as you mentioned before, it's part of the narrative in Yemen that this is why we have to fight in Yemen is to limit Iranian influence there.
Just as the Americans have ruined everything, you're trying to tell them to stop fixing it when they would just as soon keep failing upward and would say that, you know, what are you, the agent of the Ayatollah?
We can't leave Khamenei in the catbird seat like this.
Well, you know, it's a really good point because that's the way people make an argument for continued occupations and interventions in the Middle East.
You know, I have sort of like a Hippocratic Oath view of all this, like first do no harm.
And I cannot think of an American operation in the Middle East since 2001 that has not done more harm than good.
I just frankly don't trust us.
I don't trust myself.
I don't trust the American government to try to fix these problems.
I think in the end we find a way to make it worse.
And so, first of all, I think Iran is a paper tiger and that is a controversial statement.
I'm not saying that they haven't been empowered.
They've been massively empowered by our follies in the Middle East.
But they still spend a smaller percentage of their GDP than Saudi Arabia on military hardware.
They work through proxies largely because it's the simplest way for them to exert influence.
They can't beat Saudi Arabia in an outright tank battle or air force air superiority battle.
If the Saudis and the other Sunni states really believe that Iran is such a threat, then they need to balance them.
Because quite frankly, the United States, the longer it stays in Syria, the more it looks like an occupier.
And I'm not convinced that we have either the military will or the amount of just sort of time, space and attention to really go against Iranian interests in that region.
So yeah, I am saying let's pull out.
The thing is, there's nothing that Saudi Arabia would like more than a war between the United States and Iran.
They would love us to fight their battle for them.
So would the Israelis, getting back to our earlier conversation.
They want us to fight Iran because that's their enemy.
Saudi Arabia's enemy is Iran.
Israel's enemy is Iran in their minds.
And so they want to get Uncle Sam to do the fighting for them.
The reality is Iran would not be an easy country to occupy.
It would make Iraq look like the cakewalk we were told it was going to be.
These are fiercely nationalistic people covered by mountainous and plateau terrain.
They are more populous than Iraq.
They have more difficult topography than Iraq.
I mean, the whole idea that regime change would even be plausible in Persia is mind-blowing.
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Well, so tell me about that.
When you guys were in the army, and wait, now, pardon me, which years were you in Iraq War II again?
Yeah, I was in 06 to 07 for 15 months.
Okay, so there's a good bit of time there where Iran took center stage in the demonization that everything going wrong in Iraq was Iran's fault, even though it was America who was doing all of this for them, and putting all their friends in power there.
But so, tell me about the discussion at the time about, I mean, I guess it sounded, it must have sounded even to the commanders, a lot like what you just said about how, no, we ain't invading Persia, not with our entire army and Marine Corps, are we going to try to conquer Persia?
Yeah, well, you know, there was the British source, I can't remember who it was, a top British official said something like, everybody wants to go to, this is in 2002, everybody wants to go to Baghdad now, but real men want to go to Tehran.
You know, there was this triumphalism that it was going to be so easy to take Iraq and pacify Iraq that we could then attack either Syria or Iran or someone else in the axis of evil like North Korea afterwards.
But obviously, the quagmire in Iraq taught us that there's no way that with our military completely overstretched across the Middle East that we have the resources or the ability to, you know, do another regime change in Iran.
I'll say this, you know, people have called me like an Iran apologist, they've called me a Russophile, an anti-Semite, I mean, there's all these pejoratives when you take the stands that I do.
But Iranian...
Which, isn't it funny that being a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan is no immunity whatsoever from that kind of thing?
No, no, no, no, no, I mean, I'm a traitor, I mean, you know what I mean?
That's where it is.
Being outspoken, dissenting, being a citizen as well as a soldier makes you essentially a traitor of the republic because we have such a narrow view of patriotism at this point and of nationalism, and I just think it's really dangerous.
But let me say this, January 25th...
You think you know better than George W. Bush?
Couldn't be.
Right, yeah, I can't know better than a C student who got into Yale because of his family.
You know, I can't point to a direct connection, but what I know is that there were Iranian Republican guardsmen in East Baghdad that were at least working with the Shia militias and maybe sharing some technology with them.
I mean, a lot of the Mahdi army guys at the time that were attacking me in East Baghdad were pro-Iranian, although not all of them were.
And they killed my soldiers, you know?
Explosive form projectiles that may have been made in Iraq.
So that was your part of the surge then, was it against the Shia?
I fought the Shia mostly, yeah.
The first three months of my time I fought Tawheed al-Jihad, which eventually became Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And then when I moved into East Baghdad, I was in South Baghdad first.
When I moved into East Baghdad, it was all Shia.
And I couldn't understand, like, why are they killing us?
We just handed them this country.
You know what I mean?
60% of the population is Shia.
By virtue of our regime change, we were going to put the Shia in a preeminent position.
And I'm thinking, why are these militias attacking me?
Why are they saying I'm an occupier?
I handed them this country on a silver platter.
That's when I started to realize we have completely empowered Iran.
We have completely empowered these old militias, many of whom, including many of Iraq's leaders, spent the Iran-Iraq war in Iran, because they were traitors to the Iraqi people.
And then we're surprised that a lot of the Iraqi people don't want the Shia Dawah party and Baader party guys running their country.
I mean, these people are seen as traitors to Iraqis, especially Sunnis.
I mean, the web is so tangled at this point that that's why I call for a clean break.
Because it's like, in these Byzantine situations, there's always a good reason to stay.
You can always come up with a reason to stay.
Well, we can't leave because of X.
We can't leave because of the safe haven myth.
We can't leave because we're going to give the country to Iran.
You know, it's 17 years later, and I no longer trust the United States to make those kind of calls in the Middle East.
I no longer trust us to be an honest broker.
I think it's time to cut sling load largely and step away.
Because we've made everything worse, every time.
Gardner.
I mean, you think about it, seriously.
Where the American people are like, damn right, George Bush, you have the writ to hunt down this bin Laden fella and lynch him for us.
Go get him.
Dead or alive and all that, yeah.
But everybody, well, not everybody, but the naive, just regular people who knew anything about Al-Qaeda at all would have, I guess, expected, if they didn't know about George Bush and his men, would have expected for the war to be over by Christmas.
You know, I interviewed Cynthia Storer, a CIA counterterrorism analyst from that era in the government, and she told me, yeah, the CIA's official estimate of Al-Qaeda's strength in Afghanistan on September 12, 2001, was 400 men.
You know, when they cornered them at Tora Bora, it may have been 1,500 with all their fellow travelers hanging around them or whatever.
We gave Bush a writ to kill 400 men, and now we've got 40,000 of the bin Ladenites that he had the writ to go after, and we've overthrown governments in Iraq, in Yemen, in Libya, and half of one in Syria that ended up leading to the rise, literally, of the Islamo-fascist caliphate that was always bin Laden's fever dream and George Bush's most ridiculous propaganda, as though there could ever be such a thing until he and Obama created it.
It's just crazy to think that, oh yeah, and by the way, all that time also empowering Iran, Al-Qaeda's enemy, all along and all across this same landscape, as well.
So yeah, the idea that the burden is on us to justify quitting now, when everything is so wrong, it seems like somebody ought to be able to explain what, to paraphrase the Kagan's, what's the desired path to the end state here?
They don't know, and we don't know.
There couldn't be one.
It's so wild.
I'm glad that you brought all that up, because I think that ...
So I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy, but there are a lot of people who see everything that happened on 9-11 and after in a very conspiratorial lens.
And I'm sympathetic to it, not because I believe they're right, but we have managed to shoot ourselves in the foot time and again and go against our own interests and empower our enemies to such an extent through these perpetual wars that it almost makes you believe ...
You could see why the conspiracy theorists would think that it had to be a plan all along.
We're so incompetent that it's either ...
It's almost genius.
If the goal was forever war, our stance and our policy since 9-11 has been perfect.
And I think that really explains why I believe that.
It's a direct connection.
I mean, the point is that al-Qaeda is America's strategic ally, just as bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, who ...
I think he would have let us know if bin Laden really worked for the CIA, considering Scheuer's point of view on all this, but he said that America is bin Laden's indispensable ally.
And the reverse, of course, is also true.
This is the deal.
These are the ...
They're the vanguard fighters of the side that we're on, the Saudi axis, the Sunni axis.
And the enemies are led by Iran, the Shia.
They're independent from the empire, refuse to do what they're told.
So al-Qaeda may have butchered a bunch of American citizens, and hell, even a bunch of officers at the Pentagon.
But at the end of the day, hey, they hate, not the American people, but the empire hates Iran more.
So ...
Yeah.
That's what's interesting.
The average American is under almost no threat from Iran.
There were no Iranians on those planes.
Iran has not attacked a domestic target in recent memory.
But you're right.
The empire, the Kagans, the John Boltons, the Paul Wolfowitzes, the ideologues, the true believers, because those are the dangerous ones, the true believers in the American neocon and neoliberal empire, those guys hate Iran more than they hate bin Laden.
And they've convinced the American people that Iran really is the equivalent of al-Qaeda, when it could be no further from the truth.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
And again, that's not that I like Iran.
I don't dig the Islamic Republic or the notion of rule by imam.
I'm not into it.
But I'm just speaking the truth from a basic realist perspective, which we have to get back to.
Yeah.
And it's just the same thing about Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega or Vladimir Putin or anything else, that to tell the truth about them compared to the American propaganda campaigns of demonization is not to defend the man like you're in love with him or something.
It's just to defend the truth against a bunch of lies.
The fact that anybody even has to disclaim that.
I mean, give us a break.
You know, Ron Paul always said about, you know, back when he was in Congress about Iraq before that war, that, look, they have no Navy.
They have no Air Force.
What Air Force they had?
We bombed or fled to Iran back in Iraq War One.
We have had total air dominance over their country.
For more than a decade straight, they haven't shot down a single one of our planes.
And yet at the same time, they're the most dire threat in the world.
That's no endorsement of Baathism as administered by the Hussein regime whatsoever.
It's simply a statement of the true fact.
They're trying to make you think that you should be afraid of this when the reality is there's certainly nothing to be afraid of.
And of course, as Ron has said, and everybody else, too, honest about this, the same goes for Ron.
They got what?
One battleship and a bunch of fiberglass speedboats like you might find on the lake on the weekend or their Navy.
I mean, yeah, they got mounted machine guns on them, but still, you know, they're only dead.
And those those little ships.
Right.
Those little speedboats are only dangerous if we decide to be in the Persian Gulf.
Right.
They're only dangerous.
Seaboard.
Yeah.
They're not going into New York Harbor.
We're only under threat because we're there.
Right.
We create our where we put a big red, white and blue American target all over the Middle East.
And then and then we're appalled when we get attacked.
Right.
We're appalled when someone hits that target that we've put there.
It's mind blowing.
I mean, I will tell you more and more.
I know I sound kind of fired up today because more and more the absurdity of it all is damaging my like mental health.
You know, it's just crazy when you start thinking about it.
It's beyond crazy.
And now it's absurd.
You know, it's like Marx, you know, history repeating itself right first as a tragedy and then as folly.
Like we are definitely in the farcical stage at this point, except the problem is there's real human beings dying, both in the Middle East and to some lighter extent among Americans.
Yeah.
Or American soldiers.
It's crazy.
Well, listen, man, I mean, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you keeping your priority straight on this.
I can't understand.
I mean, I know it's difficult subject matter.
That's understandable.
But still, it seems like I can't figure out why this isn't our entire society's highest priority.
The way it is, it's yours and mine.
And I know that most people actually agree with us, the general thrust of like, hey, a lot less, a lot sooner, again, to quote Ron Paul.
But you know what it takes to get people really animated about it, past partisanship and willing to really insist that, hey, we want to live in a post-Empire America right now.
We don't want to fall.
We want to just call it off.
This is completely crazy.
And anyway, I appreciate you doing all the work that you're doing to get people thinking along these lines and in these terms and from the very experienced point of view that you have on this stuff.
Well, I'm going to keep it up.
You can count on that.
And I'll be back whenever you want to have me.
And you know, I'll just say one last thing.
To be honest, I mean, I try to take my platform as a vet of both of these wars just to try to get a tiny bit of credibility.
So maybe a new voice will listen.
Not because I believe you have to be a veteran to be right about these things.
Most veterans are wrong about most of these issues.
But I try to use this platform because it's all I have.
It's the only way I can maybe get someone to listen who doesn't already agree with me.
And that's becoming more and more difficult.
So I'll keep it up and we'll talk soon.
All right.
Thanks again, Danny.
All right, brother.
Bye.
All right, you guys.
That's Major Danny Sherson.
He's a regular writer at Antiwar.com.
Combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and currently serving Army Major.
Hey, I want to add on a special thanks to the heroic Ron Paul, the greatest American hero ever, in my estimation, for interviewing me on his show, The Liberty Report with the great Dan McAdams as well.
It's really great.
They interviewed me on Monday and it ran on today, Wednesday.
I don't know what day you guys are hearing this, but it ran on Wednesday.
You can find it on YouTube.com and I'll blog it and all that.
We talked about Syria and Afghanistan and other things.
Libertarianism.
So, thanks, Ron.
You're great.
