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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 who's win?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, 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.
Okay, guys, introducing the great Mark Perry, Pentagon reporter.
You find him oftentimes at the American conservative magazine, among other places.
This one is in foreign policy.
It's from the end of June.
A couple of weeks ago, I had missed it.
Sorry.
Mattis's last stand is Iran.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you, man?
It's great to be here as always, and I'm fine.
Thanks.
I forgot to say you're the author of the Pentagon's Wars, which looks great on my shelf, but I don't know what's inside it yet, but I swear to God, I'm going to get to it at some point.
You'll get there.
I will.
I can't wait to read it.
I mean, this is what I'm very interested in.
All right, now look here, everybody else, you get it and read it and let me know what it says.
Mattis's last stand is Iran and not he wants to nuke it.
He wants to not nuke it.
Huh?
Is that, that sounds good.
And we've heard reports here and there about how, well, Donald Trump doesn't like James Mattis anymore.
Is this why?
Because he doesn't want to attack Iran?
Oh, I think it's, I think it's part of it.
You know, you understand the trans, you remember the transgender ban and, and how Trump wanted Mattis to reverse the transgender rules of the Pentagon and the military.
And Mattis said, fine.
And then I think the term is slow roll.
And then Mattis slow rolled the president.
And he's been doing that on a number of issues.
And I think that Mr. Trump doesn't say so publicly, of course, because it's James Mattis, but Mr. Trump is getting very impatient with his secretary of defense and the thinking around town here in Washington is that he will try to remove him at some point.
It's going to be hard to do because Mattis is still a very popular figure and an icon in the military.
So Mr. Trump has to be very careful.
Oh, mad dog Mattis.
He's the one standing between us and worst conflict.
I guess it could be you were on the show, maybe not last time, but time before that, or something was all about just how much James Mattis hates Iran, blames them for 500 out of the 4,500 dead Americans from Iraq war two, blames them still, and can't get over the attack on the Marines at the Beirut barracks in 1983.
And he's the guy who's trying to stave off Bolton.
Is that right?
Well, you've got it right.
Mattis is not a friend of Iran.
He's never been a friend of Iran.
He has very little sympathy for the Iranian government.
He views them as a malign influence in the Middle East as bad actors.
I think that like many Marines, he's really holds a grudge against Iran.
When asked back when he was the commander of the U.S. Central Command as a Marine four-star general to name the three biggest challenges facing the United States, he said, Iran, Iran, Iran.
But as I point out in the Foreign Policy article, disliking Iran, wanting to do something about Iran, and actually doing something are two different things.
And as Secretary of Defense, Mattis has his hands full.
It's not simply Iran, Iran, Iran now.
It's Korea, Korea, Korea, Russia, Russia, Russia.
There are all kinds of challenges that he's facing, not the least of which are some of his own internal problems, which is recruiting.
Numbers are down for the military.
So he has his hands full.
And the last thing I think that he really wants to do is to provoke Iran or to have a conflict with Iran or go to war with Iran.
What he would much rather do is repair the poor state of readiness of the U.S. military and try to keep the country on an even keel at a time when the President of the United States is accusing Germany of being an enemy and Russia of being a friend.
So he has his hands full.
And the last thing he needs is a conflict with Iran.
Hmm.
Well, now, what about, I mean, I'm sure you've heard about recent attacks by Baluchi separatists, and from different Kurdish factions as well.
I interviewed a guy who wrote a great thing for Low Blog about it.
And that raises a lot of questions, I know, from previous reporting by the likes of Seymour Hersh and yourself on those issues, Jandala, PJAK, these other groups.
But that's kind of old news.
Now it's new news again.
You think that's CIA?
We've seen some protests and this kind of thing that look like CIA put up jobs or, you know, NED or some kind of thing going on there.
Pro-monarchists and pro-MEK types.
Yeah, I certainly don't have any firm evidence that the CIA is conducting a covert war against Iran.
But I certainly wouldn't doubt it.
And we do know that there is a new office inside the CIA that's focused solely on Iran.
And part of their mandate is to look at ways to destabilize the government of Iran.
It's interesting, you mentioned this Low Blog piece, a terrific piece.
Yeah, talk to the guy, James Storrson.
Really frustrating.
And this has been part of the menu of options that the United States, and most importantly, Israel has had for quite some time, to use separatist groups like the Baluchis to undermine Iran.
And that this would be happening now is certainly not out of the question, I think almost certainly is.
So, you know, the depth and the breadth of this covert program are not yet known.
But it certainly wouldn't be a surprise to me to learn that the CIA at the best of the Trump administration is involved in a program that's pretty expensive, extensive and expensive.
And, and that a lot of the problems that we're seeing in Iran now, while homegrown, at least some of them are probably the result of a covert US program.
No, no, there's no question in my mind that that's a real possibility.
Well, now, I seem to have noticed an increased presence of pro-monarchist, pro-Pahlavi types, as opposed to MEK.
And I guess MEK is trying to keep their profile up too.
But oh, yeah, they're a communist terrorist cult.
And they don't, you know, they don't allow their, uh, I mean, they really are like Bowen Tee and the Heaven's Gate, just crazy comet chasers here, man.
And so it, you know, they pay well.
So if you're Ed Rendell, or Rudy Giuliani, then fine.
But, I mean, I don't know, do you know, or do you think that people like John Bolton, do they really think that they could put Rajavi in there, Myron Rajavi, the leader of MEK?
Or, do you think that maybe they're kind of tilting away from these crazies to the less, question mark, embarrassing monarchists, like back in the good old days?
I suppose it's possible.
But either way, whether it's the MEK or monarchists, this is a, this is a faint dream.
You say comet chasers.
That's, that's a good way to put it.
You, you and I remember quite clearly how in, how, how the U.S. government fell in love with Iraqi dissidents, Iraqis who opposed Saddam Hussein, and opposed him for good reason, but who exaggerated their own power, prowess, and, and assets.
Ahmad Jalabi being the most notorious.
And once we rode into Baghdad and turned to Ahmad Jalabi, we learned that he was a fraud, basically.
Too late, we learned it.
But he was a good excuse for us doing what we wanted to do.
But he had absolutely no support among the Iraqi people.
And he was really resented by rational thinkers inside the U.S. government.
And my suspicion is that the MEK and the Pahlavi monarchists who believe that they can somehow ride back into Tehran with flags flapping to the acclamation of the Iranian people, these are Jalabi-like figures.
They have no support inside of Iran.
They're not going anywhere.
I think the real game here is to exaggerate their own power in the hopes of getting U.S. support in, in engineering what was engineered in Iraq, which is, you know, a phony war for phony purposes that cost American lives, destroyed the U.S. Treasury, and not the least of which killed a million Iraqis.
But that, I think, is their hope.
Are they, is it possible they could succeed?
Well, no one bet on Jalabi, and he got what he wanted.
So I don't think it's out of the question.
But it's really going to be a Hail Mary pass for these guys to convince anyone in this town to support an invasion of Iran.
It's certainly not going to convince anyone at the Pentagon.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad for that.
I mean, it seems like our hope really is that John Bolton is such a cynical SOB that he doesn't really believe this.
He knows better than the lie he's telling, and so wouldn't make too big of a bet on it, you know, I hope.
But they don't have anybody else, right?
I mean, that's the whole thing.
Baluki, Jandala types, or P-Jack, or Aziri, separatists, or whatever, they can try to bankroll them, give them some guns, or this or that.
But, you know, I think it was ...
I'm losing track of which article it was that I read.
It may have even been yours.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I forget.
It was either yours or maybe something Bandau wrote about even if we had a massive air war and called out all the stealth bombers and the B-52s and bombed the hell out of them.
And Lord knows the Air Force and the Navy can drop a lot of bombs.
But that wouldn't change the regime.
That wouldn't necessarily, I mean, unless you got a lot of lucky hits, which I don't think we believe in, in your decapitation strikes, you're going to have some surviving molas, and they're going to have the loyalty of whatever lives of the police and the military forces there.
They're not going to overthrow their government because we bomb it.
That's crazy.
No, just the opposite will happen.
If we intervene militarily against Iran in an attempt to change the regime, the Iranian people will dig in their heels and support the regime.
They're as patriotic for their country as we are for ours, and they don't want to be meddled with.
And it's likely that any effort on our part to kind of help the resistance movement in Iran would backfire, would be counterproductive, and that we would transform potential friends into real enemies.
And it is true, no matter how many bombs we drop, we dropped a whole load of bombs on Vietnam, and we simply ended up strengthening the opposition to our puppet regime.
If we do this in Iran, it would be a terrible mistake.
And I mean, there are thinkers in Washington who know this quite well.
I don't know whether John Bolton is delusional or not.
I think that he believes absolutely what he writes, that he is all for regime change in Iran.
And I think that Mr. Bolton believes in the power of the American military to transform geopolitics.
I think he's wrong.
And I think it would be a terrible mistake to buy that assumption, that somehow the use of our military can be a substitute for careful, deliberate, well-thought-through diplomacy.
Yeah.
Well, it turned out, though, that, you know, Chalabi, his family had bankrolled the keeping of one of these important mosques in Najaf, and so he had some credibility as a Shiite leader.
I mean, not compared to Skiri or Dawa or Sadr, but he was, you know, something, somewhere in there, somewhere.
But with the MEK, or with the Pahlavis, I mean, and then I guess maybe I'm begging the question here, but isn't it correct that there really is no one else?
Aziri, you know, discontents, or, you know, baluki, jandala types.
There is no one else other than the monarchists or the MEK or these crazies that they even have in mind to put in power in Tehran.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I, you know, you say you beg the question.
Well, I think it's a good question.
There are protests against the government in Iran, and some of them are astonishingly deep and broad and have a broad base.
There is real discontent, economic discontent in Iran, seeded by our economic embargo of the country.
That's true.
But if we're really concerned that, if we really are concerned about the government, then the best course that we could follow would be to leave it alone and let the Iranian people deal with it.
It seems to me that their best position to do so, they'd have much better chance of success than we would.
You know, the guys in, the guys, the mullahs in Tehran are in office and in power and do lead the government.
But there was a revolution there, a very popular revolution, overthrew our ally, who we put in place through a coup.
Here's an idea.
Let's stand back from Iran in places like Iran and allow the people of Iran to decide what kind of government they want, and then we'll deal with it.
That has a much better chance of success than anything we've done since 1979, when the Iranian revolution actually took place.
That has a real chance of success.
And yet we seem to be of the mind that somehow, you know, if we shape our policy and intervene, that somehow we'll get better results.
We won't.
I think it's been shown that we don't get better results.
Now, I one time interviewed a State Department guy named Wayne White, who talked about, oh yeah, back then when Saddam invaded Iran, it was going to be easy.
You know, I don't know if they named it Operation Decisive Storm, like the Saudis in Yemen for the last three and a half years.
But, you know, basically that was the deal was, oh, the Iranians, they hate these mullahs.
Man, dictatorships are brittle.
We're going to, Saddam's going to go in here and take care of business real quick.
And it didn't work out like that at all.
And why would it?
And in fact, you look at how much discontent there's been under Bush, Obama, and Trump, and how much people protest and all that kind of thing.
Does anybody really question whether the U.S. state is about to fall or not?
Just because even if the Republican and Democratic parties were completely smashed and replaced by the socialists and the libertarians or somebody else, that wouldn't mean the end of the 50 states and all the judges and all the cops.
They're not going anywhere.
You know what I mean?
And same thing in Iran, you know?
I don't mean to bolster them, but they don't need to be bolstered.
That's the point.
Well, one of the hallmarks of the post-World War II, kind of 70 years that we've had now, post-World War II, one of the hallmarks of that era is that the guys with the tanks and airplanes don't often win.
The Soviet Union, for all of its military prowess and the billions of dollars it spent and the lives it expended, did not win in Afghanistan.
The United States, for all the lives it expended and the billions of dollars, did not win in Vietnam.
Iran and Iraq pummeled each other to exhaustion in an incredibly bloody war in the late 70s and 80s, and we took sides on that, and neither of them won.
Both were losers.
And you would think that after all of these examples, that people would, governments would learn from their mistakes instead of, you know, projecting their power into places that will reject it.
It seems to me that, you know, if there's one lesson that we can learn in the post-World War II era is to keep our military nose out of other people's business.
Alright, hang on just one second.
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What's funny is, the one big example that Bush Sr.'s Iraq War won, which was supposedly Operation Yellow Ribbon, in and out, 100-hour ground war, and what a tremendous victory, and 80 guys died on our side and 50,000 on theirs, and yet, George Bush Sr. said, this will not be another Vietnam.
We're going to go in there, do our thing, and go, and yet, no, it wasn't another Vietnam.
The first thing they did after they won the war was they did a big Bay of Pigs, where they encouraged the Shiite and Kurdish uprising and then stabbed them in the back and let Saddam massacre them, and then that became the reason or the excuse to stay in Saudi, to wage the no-fly zones and the blockade, to protect the Shia and the Kurds they'd just encouraged and betrayed.
And here we are now at Iraq War three and a half.
Talked with Patrick Coburn the other day, reporting from Baghdad, still going on, the war against what's left of al-Qaeda in Iraq, basically, ISIS in Sunnistan there.
It's still going on after Iraq War three, this same, will not be another Vietnam, quick, easy, successful, wonderful victory that Bush Sr. waged back in 1991.
Yeah, it's astonishing to me that we're still kind of slogging through this.
It's a real stain, I think, on our history that, you know, Mr. Bush Sr. encouraged an uprising against Saddam Hussein and then refused to support it when it happened.
It was really a terrible tragedy.
Many innocent people killed as we stood aside.
And it's, there are some military officers, aging military officers now, kind of remember that and shake their heads and wish it had been otherwise.
Well, but then you look at what happened when Jr. picked up where his father left off.
We're going to take the side of that Shiite uprising, we're going to put them in power.
And that was the civil war that led to the million people killed that you were referring to earlier.
Pretty good case for just staying the hell out.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You would think that we would learn and we haven't.
But I think that, you know, a guy like James Mattis at the Pentagon understands full well what's involved in these kinds of operations and how the results can be somewhat different than you anticipate.
He was a good soldier and he served his country well and no one's denying that now as a civilian.
I hope that he is bringing the lessons that he's learned as a soldier to his office.
I think that he is.
I think that if you were to sit in the White House with him and mentioned that perhaps it was time to intervene militarily against Iran, he'd be the one guy at the table who would oppose it.
Not the only one, by the way, but he would certainly oppose it.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's got to know better than that, right?
Yeah.
And hey, let me ask you about this, about Mattis.
I have no idea whether you've ever written about this or anything, so I don't mean to put you on the spot, but it says in the New York Times that he had 4,000 Marines ready to march on Tora Bora and whoop Osama and that the general was turned down and he was not allowed to do that.
And I know what he's most famous for in the Afghan war really is abandoning some guys out in the field, some army guys who needed some help and he left them out there to die and they're pissed off about that, but that's a separate issue.
But I wonder if you know the story about him being a general on the ground in Afghanistan in December 2001, wanting to go and help the Delta Force and the CIA paramilitaries where they had Osama cornered and was not allowed to go help.
Yeah, I think the story is accurate.
And from my own research on this, it's actually a fairly complicated story, but you know, it's one of those moments, almost a movie moment in American history, where, you know, the commanding general is denied permission to conduct an operation that could lead to victory and success and is told no.
Usually these kinds, you know, and the look of astonishment on his face must have been absolutely priceless.
It's, you know, it's another moment, it's another one of those moments in American history where if only you go back and undo it, you know, things would have been quite different.
The American people would have been satisfied that the war was won.
As Mattis was given his orders to not go ahead, people in Washington were plotting the invasion of Iraq.
I mean, within days of 9-11, within days of 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld was talking about getting ready for the invasion of Iraq and taking the eye off the ball in Afghanistan.
Just it's really astonishing that that happened.
Yeah.
And there were Green Berets and Army Rangers in the country available as well.
The Rangers already had 5,000 guys or something, maybe more, I forget now, at the Bagram Air Base right there adjacent to Nangarhar Province, you know, what, 50 miles away or something.
Yeah, think of how history might have been different if we had hunted down Osama bin Laden in 2001, and not invaded Iraq and brought our troops home.
And, and how this, how it would have united the country and united the world behind us.
And it didn't happen.
We, we screwed it up terribly.
All right.
So now, to get back to the war with Iran thing, I'm sorry, because I'm scanning through and I realized that, yes, of course, it was your article that I was thinking of, I want to make sure that this In Foreign Policy, Mattis' Last Stand is Iran, where you talk to all the experts and all their war games and all their theories about what war with Iran would entail.
So, and you also talk about, and I like this is how you introduce the subject in the article, is Mattis went to a briefing where the Navy said, here's what we're going to do.
And he said, I don't buy it.
So yeah, tell us a little bit about that.
And then overall, you talk to all these RAND guys, you have this RAND Corporation report and all this other stuff about just what it would really take if the commander in chief went ahead and ordered it, what a war with Iran would look like here.
Well, I, you know, it's interesting because I wasn't going to write the article.
I was just going to, I was doing research on what a war with Iran would look like.
And it's astonishing to me, amazing to me that there was so little detail, people had so little detail about the war.
Most people speculated about whether it'd be successful, but, you know, why we would launch it, what the politics are, but there were very few actual numbers.
I wanted to find out how many air wings is it going to take?
How many aircraft carriers do we need to deploy?
How many divisions of army soldiers, if any?
How many marine troopers?
How long would it last?
You know, the kind of exact detail that you do get in a war plan.
Of course, I couldn't get the actual war plans for the most highly guarded secrets of the American government.
But there are very strong, good, deep, detailed articles out there and papers, including one from the Rand Corporation, of what it would likely entail.
And the numbers are grim.
You know, we would have to deploy half of our air wings.
There are 56.
We'd have to deploy 22 or 23 in an attack.
Four aircraft carriers.
There would have to be some army people on the ground, even during just a strictly bombing campaign for search and rescue.
It would be a huge undertaking.
It's not like you can do this tomorrow morning.
It would be a huge undertaking and would cost billions and billions of dollars.
The campaign that is likely to result would last 90 days.
And at the end of it, it wouldn't succeed.
There would not be regime change.
We could destroy the Iranian military, but it's not as if the Iranians themselves are going to put up their hands and say, we surrender.
They're not going to do that.
The war will continue beyond our intervention of 90 days and likely last for years and cost a lot of American lives.
The second issue is that it's not clear at all, considering our current military assets and their status, their readiness levels, that we can actually do this.
We are 2,000 pilots short in the Air Force.
We are tens of thousands of soldiers short in the Army.
We understand the problems with the Navy.
There are ships running into each other.
There's been a degradation, I think, in the upper command levels of the Navy.
And not only that, but back in the 1990s, when the Air Force was actually considering doing this, they decided against it, because it was not clear it would succeed.
So when you've got John Bolton, you know, banging the table about regime change in Tehran, and even if he were to convince the president, the president were to go to the Pentagon and Jim Mattis and say, we've got to do this, it seems to me possible that the secretary of defense would say, Mr. President, I understand that.
I appreciate your order.
And yes, sir, we'll do it.
But, sir, we might not be able to.
Because we simply don't have the readiness capabilities and the weapons necessary and at the levels of readiness that we need them to be necessary to do it and to win.
I was, and that really, that really shocked me.
It showed that over the course of the war on terrorism for the last 17 years, there's been a real degradation in U.S. military capabilities.
So it's now an open question whether we could forget about winning a war against Iran, whether we could actually carry one out.
And that's a, it's a pretty grim finding, I think.
Well, like we already talked about, air war wouldn't lead to a regime change anyway.
You know, I guess there's some Hollywood version where the Delta Force hunts down the mullahs and executes them all or some kind of thing, but, you know, that wouldn't happen either.
So by definition, the war would have to have a limited set of goals.
Like, well, we're going to degrade their military and their nuclear program by X percent and guarantee all this retaliation, which we hadn't talked about yet, but what all they could do about it in response, almost necessarily recognizing that they couldn't get anything like an actual, quote, victory, where then Myram Rajavi leads Iran into the brave new future or something.
Nobody knows that, right?
No, that's not going to happen.
But I mean, and they know that, right?
They would have to accept that, okay, well, what we're going to do is we're going to bomb the hell out of them and then we don't really have a good ending.
That's right.
You know, if you talk to senior military officers about this, they'll say, well, here's what we can do.
And they tick off a list.
We can destroy their nuclear capabilities, such as they are, and they're not much now.
We can destroy their surface-to-air missiles.
We can target their barracks and their assets and facilities.
We can bring down government buildings.
And then we can dot, dot, dot.
And they shrug and say, and then what?
You know, we can't change the regime.
There's no guarantee that we can change the regime.
It's not a good idea, necessarily, if we do anyway.
And what is it exactly that we accomplish?
What is it that this, that a war with Iran will accomplish?
Well, you know, you have to conclude if you talk to sober-minded people that it's more of a feel-good exercise than a reality.
Well, I'm sure exactly what Ayman al-Zawahiri wants us to do.
So, got that going for us, at least.
I don't know.
All right.
Man, I was going to ask you.
Oh, yeah.
And then, so real quick, if you could, what about what Iran could do in response to this, symmetrically, asymmetrically, et cetera?
Well, they could do what they've done to us before.
In October 1983, they brought down the Marine barracks, our Marine barracks, 241 dead in Beirut.
And, you know, we, our tendency is to call these war-like acts terrorism acts, because we don't like them.
And that's what they could do.
They could target our assets in Europe.
They could target our assets on the ground in Iraq and Syria, where we are.
They could make life difficult for us in Afghanistan.
It's possible that if we were to launch an attack on Iran, they could close the Straits of Hormuz, which would spike oil prices.
We could probably reopen the Straits.
They might be able to take down a destroyer or two in the Persian Gulf.
Maybe not.
But, you know, they're, the word here is asymmetric.
Their response to our symmetric kinetic warfare, our cloud of aircraft and boats and soldiers, our kinetic response would trigger their asymmetric response.
We don't know where they would strike.
We only know that they would.
And they've got the whole globe as their target.
And Americans everywhere would be in danger.
And it's likely that this would go on, this could go on for years and years and years.
You see, if, I mean, the more you study this, the more you realize that this is just, you know, this is the kind of moment that you wish the military had more of, where the president sits at a table in the White House and goes around the room and everyone says, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir.
And you get to Jim Mattis, where you get to the Air Force chief of staff, the Army chief of staff, and they say, yes, sir.
But, you know, Mr. President, let's not do this.
Let's, you know, let's, you know, let's rethink this a little bit and really assess the cost, because the cost would be, you know, you're not going to have thousands of Americans dead or tens of thousands, but you're going to have dribs and drabs and nickels and dimes of Americans dead five years, 10 years over a period of 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
And it's just simply not worth it.
Yeah.
And that's what happened 11 years ago, right, when they were thinking about hitting Iran over the excuse of their intervention in Iraq.
And Admiral Fallon, the commander of CENTCOM said, over my dead body, man, we're just not going to do this.
Yeah.
And he was, he was right to say so.
And he understood, and this is a Navy officer, he understood full well, the cost that we would pay and that it wasn't worth paying.
Yeah.
Let me ask you one more thing real quick.
So Pompeo went to Afghanistan, and he says, yeah, we're here because we want to negotiate and we want to work with the Afghan government on negotiating.
And it's going nowhere.
And you and I both already know that the Taliban don't want to talk to the Americans until the Americans agree to go in the first place, which is not going to happen.
So but that's not the point.
So, but that's not the point.
The question is, though, does that symbolize, do you think an attempted change from the McMaster plan, which, as he stated, it was just fight for four years and then think about negotiating after that?
I think that there's a lot of anxiety in the US government over Afghanistan to the point where we're looking for an accelerated way out.
And I think that Pompeo is one of these guys who looks at Afghanistan and says, you know, we've done as good as we can.
Let's let's try to hurry along a process of a political resolution, because, you know, if if there's if the only way out of Afghanistan is a political resolution in four years, why can't there be a way out of Afghanistan with a political resolution in four days?
And I and I think that, you know, Mr. Pompeo is certainly much more conservative, to say the least, than I am.
But he's you know, he's an adult.
He's an adult in the room.
And he understands the calculus in the Middle East.
And I and I think he and others in the administration, perhaps the president himself, think that it's time to draw to an end.
I mean, how long have we been there?
17 years?
You know, what it is, too, is it's good politics to say, look, this is all Bush and Obama's fault.
This isn't, you know, in Fire and Fury, Dina Powell, the deputy national security advisor says, hey, let's face it, if he pulls the troops out, then that's a defeat.
And Trump can't lose a war.
But the whole thing is that's totally wrong, right?
It would be, look, it would only be Trump the outsider, recognizing that Bush and Obama lost this war, and the costs to try to tie up the loose ends just aren't worth it.
So let's just quit now, because it's the smart thing to do.
And it wouldn't be on him at all, even after a year of this, of going along with McMaster.
Still, he's Trump.
He could do that.
He could flip flop right now.
And it would be good politics to do it.
Not bad.
That's exactly right.
And he doesn't have to blame Bush and Obama.
What he has to do is say, we came to Afghanistan to provide a stable government capable of defending itself.
And I woke up this morning, and I realized that we'd done that.
And so now it's up to them.
We won.
And so we're coming home.
Yeah.
Well, the media would call him a coward and a surrenderer to the Taliban.
So that's why I'm saying blame Obama and them, because why not?
It really is their fault.
They really did build a government that can't stand on its own.
So how, you know, it would be truthful.
Mr. Trump can certainly say that after withdrawing U.S. troops and the Taliban ends up in downtown Kabul, that's it's possible to do.
But I do think that they're searching now very actively for a way out.
And you know, Mr. Trump said that he wants to end these wars.
Well, here's a perfect opportunity.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, we got this summit with Russia coming up.
So how about that?
How about make a deal with them?
As George O'Neill put it in the American Conservative magazine, we could make a deal on Afghanistan, on Syria.
What do you got?
That's right.
All right.
Hey, listen, I love talking with you, Mark.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
As always.
I love this.
So keep me in mind.
I'm willing and able anytime.
And I appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks very much again.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
All right, you guys, that's Mark Perry.
He wrote The Pentagon's Wars.
And his foreignpolicy.com article here is called Mattis' Last Stand is Iran. foreignpolicy.com.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org.
And buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook, as well.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
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Thanks, guys!
