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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Tom Stridehorst.
He covered Iraq war two as a cameraman for Fox news.
And these days he writes about economics and foreign policy, including this great one at the American conservative magazine, war doesn't make sense anymore.
Welcome to show Tom.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
So you start out here saying the bloated Pentagon budget actually makes us weaker.
What do you mean by that?
Well, I started thinking about how come we've got the world's biggest military, most expensive military.
We spend more on defense than any possible combination of rivals.
And we really haven't won a war since 1945.
I mean, you could say that we won the Gulf War, but Saddam stayed in power longer than George H.W. Bush.
I guess we won in Grenada, maybe the Dominican Republic, but really we've lost a lot of wars and we spent a lot of money doing it.
And then I thought, well, the other weird thing is nobody seems to really care.
And I thought, well, I tried to figure out why we lose wars.
Is it because we've got a really big tail to tooth ratio?
We got a lot of supply guys and not a lot of combat guys.
I thought, no, that's not really it.
And I thought, well, maybe it's partly because the wars that we get involved in don't really matter to us.
I mean, I think if Mexico invaded or Canada invaded, we'd find it in ourselves to win the war.
But Iraq, who controls the province matters a lot to the people in Iraq, but it doesn't really matter that much to Americans.
So maybe that's why we keep losing wars.
And then I thought, well, you know what?
People make a lot of money off a war.
I made a lot of money off war.
I mean, I worked the war on terror kind of helped me buy my house.
You know, I worked as a cameraman for 10 years.
I didn't work.
I worked maybe six months a year and I made a nice salary.
And contractors make a lot of money working for the US government.
The American, you know, the Iraqi economy was destroyed between 2003 and 2008.
And Halliburton's stock went up five times.
So I thought, well, maybe the reason we don't win wars is because we don't really care about winning the wars.
And the reason we keep going to war is because a lot of people make a lot of money off of it.
Now, in the olden days, in the olden days with, you know, William the Conqueror and Hernan Cortez and Napoleon, people went to war basically so they could steal other people's stuff.
You went to war.
So, you know, the primitive barbarian nomads would sweep in and attack the city and steal all their stuff.
And that's why you went to war.
And war made, it was brutal and wrong and immoral and la la la la la.
But it made a certain amount of sense.
We went to war in Iraq.
We didn't go steal their oil.
Right now, Angolan companies, Chinese companies, Russian companies control more Iraqi oil fields than American companies.
So we didn't go there to steal their oil.
What did we go there to do?
And in a weird way, it strikes me what we went there to do was to stimulate our own economy with with government spending on defense.
Right, which is really bad economics, right?
Military Keynesianism.
It's, as Garrett Garette wrote back in the 1950s, in the American empire, everything goes out and nothing comes back.
As you're saying, we're not looting the gold, not looting the oil.
We're not, not that that would be right.
But again, there's no profit in it except for stealing from the American taxpayer, stealing from the American people, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, and for that matter, all the generals and their big fat salaries and their upcoming fat salaries when they sit on the board of directors of these companies once they retire.
That's where all the profit is made off of the American people driving up our national debt up to 21 trillion dollars and all of this.
But what do the American people get out of it at all?
Possibly nothing.
It's really interesting.
After World War II, in 1938, unemployment in the United States was almost 20 percent.
It was like 19 percent.
In 1944, unemployment was one percent.
And that's because defense spending, government defense spending, deficit spending does stimulate the economy.
Well, yeah.
And conscription, conscripting 16 million men into the armed forces will do wonders for your unemployment rate, too.
Well, you know, it's also, you know, a lot of people did very well during World War II for good reason.
They needed to produce tanks.
So they hired people to produce tanks.
So they produced tanks.
You know, it's and so when World War II ended, a lot of people thought, well, without that stimulus of defense spending, we're we're we're going to fall back into recession.
And there's a theory which I don't necessarily ascribe to, but it's worth considering that the Cold War was in a way was we need to keep up defense spending to keep the economy ticking over.
And it kind of sort of worked.
I mean, it did.
You know, I mean, there's a lot of things came out of of government defense spending in the 1950s, including the invention of plastics, including the Internet.
All of that stuff came out of the technology that was developed, you know, through the military industrial complex.
But you can if you want to stimulate the economy, you can do it a lot better than by building tanks.
You can build roads.
You can build schools.
You can create a better safety net for people.
You can, you know, have better health care.
You don't need to do it through defense spending.
But the thing is, defense spending is both parties will support it.
You know, the Democrats may be supported because they like the fiscal stimulus.
The Republican Party will support it because a lot of that money end up going to red states.
And also people people get riled up about defense.
They're willing to spend money on defense, on war that they're not willing to.
Conservatives are willing to spend money on war that they're not willing to spend on health care.
And I think you get a lot more bang for your buck investing in health care than you do in building a tank.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this is what Henry Haslett, the libertarian economist, talked about the problem of the scene and the unseen.
So if your factory is churning out tanks and you're collecting a paycheck, there that is right there.
But the unseen, you have to use your imagination to figure out where that wealth could have gone instead.
After all, a tank is only good for destroying wealth and property.
And then you throw it in the ocean and let it turn it into a fish tank or something.
It's good for nothing in terms of producing more wealth for anyone else.
But you have to stop and go, well, so what if we made a factory that made factories?
What if we made a factory that made other machine tools that were useful for creating other goods and services to distribute to people?
That would all be a plus.
But right in front of me is, look at Fort Worth, churning out the F-35, where the thing's nothing but a piece of junk.
But you talk about how stimulative it is to the economy of Fort Worth.
Hey, there's no denying that if we close down the Lockheed plants in Fort Worth, the people of Fort Worth overall would be worse off, at least for a short time.
Right.
They even say when we're closing military bases.
But what about the diner across the street?
We'll go out of business and this kind of thing without recognizing how much money is being wasted in the name just to keep in this diner going.
Right.
I mean, you know, there's a lot to be, you know, the Reagan boom was in large part military Keynesianism.
He cut taxes, which put more money in people's pockets, and he increased government spending by, you know, building Star Wars stuff against the Russians.
And and it did work.
I mean, it is it is stimulative.
It's just there's a better way of doing that stimulus.
And also, also, I think it kind of, you know, I don't I don't mean to badmouth the military.
I have a great, great affection for the American military, great affection for the people, especially the combat soldiers.
They're great guys.
They're they're brave.
They have a huge sense of comradeship for each other.
You know, they're they are, you know, amongst the best people in America.
But when the goal isn't to win the war, it's just to spend the money.
You don't win the war.
You don't win the war.
I mean, that's the question that I came I started this all off with in my own mind was, why can't we win wars?
And if you're going to send if you're going to send your children into battle, and if you're going to slaughter the children of other people, that better be a damn good reason to do it.
You shouldn't be doing it just because you it's easier politically to vote for the F-35 a bomber than it is to build hospitals, you know.
So it's I think that we, you know, you know, in the olden days, you know, people there was conscription and people, everybody knew what the military was.
Now, you know, there's like guys who've done five tours in Afghanistan.
And there's other people who've never, never even thought about Afghanistan, you know, maybe they own stock in Halliburton, they profited that way.
So we've got this really kind of bifurcated society where some people are living the dangers, and other people are not.
And I think we need to recognize what the point of war is.
And really, the only real point of war is either to steal other people's stuff, or stop them from stealing your stuff.
Otherwise, what's the point?
You know, that's how people went to war originally was to take other take, you know, more more militant tribes went and attacked more Pacific, and more developed tribes and took their stuff that I can kind of, you know, maybe it's wrong, maybe it's immoral, but it makes a kind of sense.
It doesn't make sense that you go to war, so that, you know, Dick Cheney's company becomes more valuable, because they're ripping off the government by charging, you know, all this money for for the lobster dinner you get on a Friday at the defect in Baghdad.
Yeah.
And now, so you hit such an important point there, too, which is, you know, about these young men who are doing the killing and the dying in these wars, that, I mean, they are, for the most part, very young 1718 years old.
And their idea, we're all taught this, at least in school, you know, basically is that, hey, America is a democracy.
And so that means that the adults have already carefully examined the question, and they decided that this is important, it's necessary to do, otherwise, we wouldn't be sending them.
That's baked right into the thing.
And so the idea is, hey, if you send me hither or yon or whatever, my job as a soldier is to do or die, your job is to make sure that I'm only being sent on a mission that's really worthwhile.
If I'm going to kill somebody, or if I'm going to lose my legs or lose my best friend over there, it better be for a damn good reason.
And then, of course, at the same time, the mass media and the government says that, no, you can't question the policy at all, or else you're stabbing this young man in the back, you're spitting on him, like the guys who came home from Vietnam, and that to support the troops means, shut up and let Dick Cheney decide, because he does know best, and you don't have a say in it.
And if you want to debate the question, and you want to say that these young men's lives are being thrown away for nothing, then you're the bad guy, you're the one who's betraying them, not those who are sending them off to fight in wars that are good for nothing.
I mean, the thing I find really disgraceful is that all the people who supported the Iraq war, I mean, in a just world, they'd have all gone to a monastery and shut up for the next 20 years, and say, I'm sorry, I was wrong.
But they're not, they're still on the boards of companies, they're still flying first class to conferences, they're still writing editorials, and it's suggesting we invade Iran now.
I mean, these people were 100% wrong, they've destroyed the Middle East, they've destroyed Iraq, they've destroyed Syria, they've caused the rise of ISIS, they've ruined the reputation of our country all over the world, and they haven't paid any price.
And that's just disgraceful.
Yeah, well, so now tell us about Iraq war two, because I think maybe we're begging the question here in the correct use of that term, assuming our own conclusion.
Who says the terror wars are unnecessary?
Maybe we do need to invade Iraq, maybe we need to invade them three more times to keep us safe.
You know, more Americans are killed by toddlers with guns that are killed by Muslim terrorists.
You know, I mean, let's, let's get genuine here.
You know, I'm not saying, I was in New York during 9-11.
And it was really shocking.
And 3000 innocent people were killed.
And that was a horrible, horrible thing for them and for their families, and for the people who love them.
But when Pearl Harbor happened, the United States actually became weaker, because it lost its ability to project a certain amount of power in the Pacific.
It lost, you know, destroyers, it lost ships, it lost soldiers, it lost something of its fighting ability.
We did not actually become weaker after 9-11.
It was a symbolic act, which we dragged, and our weakness after 9-11 is utterly self-inflicted.
You know, the United States, in 2001, people called us a hyper power.
You know, nobody calls us that anymore.
You know, America has proven itself to be a paper tiger because of these failed wars.
You know, we, I was in Afghanistan right after 9-11.
I went there right after 9-11, up to the north, and the Taliban still, still controlled most of Afghanistan.
I loved it.
Afghanistan is just a beautiful country.
And the people are amazing.
And it's just, I loved it.
I had the best time.
And if you told me, I remember, I was talking to one of our translators after Kabul fell, and he said, you know, you guys betrayed us after, after we defeated the Soviets, we destroyed communism, and then you forgot all about us.
I thought, man, we're not going to do that this time.
Because it seemed to me it would be so easy.
Afghanistan is such a poor country, it'd be so easy to fix it.
All you got to do is hire Afghans to build roads, dig ditches, dig wells, improve the irrigation system.
You do, you pour the money in to hire Afghan labor, you put money into that, into that country, and, and you will, you can easily make it better.
Just improving the roads, building a school, building a well.
You do that with Afghan labor.
That's not what we did.
We hired high cost American, you know, consultants, and then we had to put security in to protect them.
And all this money, we poured all this money into Afghanistan, and very, very, very, very little of it went to the Afghan people.
We, it is, if you had told me back then how badly we would screw that up, I would say that's impossible.
And we did, because we weren't focused on Afghanistan.
We were focused on looking good in the, inside the beltway to the, you know, to the, to the, the newspapers and the people in the beltway.
And we were focused on creating jobs for ourselves.
You know, I think a lot about the East Asia Company, which was a British corporation founded, I think, in 1600, when, when, to go trade with the Mughal Empire.
At the time, the Mughal Empire was the richest, most powerful empire in the entire world.
It had 20% of global GDP, was from India.
England was like, I don't know, three or four or something like, probably even less than that.
And within 200 years, the East Asia Company owned India.
They owned India.
They cut deals with the Mughals to collect taxes.
They fought, you know, they fought very, they had allies with different rajas.
They took over different areas and they owned the country.
And I thought, how did they do it?
They didn't have that many soldiers.
They had fewer soldiers than we have in Afghanistan.
And how did they manage to conquer an empire?
And they did it because they weren't really concerned with anything other than stealing the money from the Indians.
Now, I'm not saying they did a good thing.
They did a terrible thing.
They destroyed, you know, they, they, they de-industrialized India.
They, they, they did a lot of criminal activities in India, but they made themselves rich and they succeeded in their goal because their goal was take money out of these people.
You can't do that anymore.
You can't in our modern world with, with, with, with telecommunications and the news media, you can't go stealing.
The West no longer is able to steal from the East in that way.
And yet we keep going to war and we say, oh, we want to bring democracy to Afghanistan.
Well, you don't even understand Afghanistan.
How are you going to bring democracy to it?
There's a brilliant book I read.
I can't remember its name.
It's written by a bunch of military guys talking about Afghanistan and the people, the wisest people on these, on these topics is never the state department guys.
It is the military guys.
And they talked about how, you know, we went into Afghanistan and we wanted to bring the rule of law.
I mean, the number of times I heard the state department guys banging on about the rule of law.
And it was like, dude, you don't understand.
Afghans, rural Afghans don't trust their government for very, very, very good reason.
They have their own system of law.
You know, they have their own way of resolving issues.
It's not our way of resolving issues, but it works for them.
And here we are saying, oh no, you must obey the central government, which all their experience has told them is corrupt and is going to rip them off.
And the military guys understood this.
The state department guys didn't, the state department guys didn't.
And the White House guys didn't because all they cared about is, oh no, we're, you know, we're doing the rule of law.
We're, we're helping women.
It's bullshit.
You know, if you don't understand where you're going, don't go there.
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Well, you know, even Petraeus admitted, and there's a brand new study about this as well.
That just came out last month about how, and in Petraeus his own words that the local posh tune systems of dispute resolution under the Taliban and under their tribal systems is in fact superior to the courts foisted on them by the central government.
That's Petraeus his own words.
There's every reason to understand why they prefer their own way of doing things to the kind of thing that we're trying to force onto them.
Right.
Simple as that.
By the way, I wrote a book about Afghanistan.
You might like it.
I'll send you one.
Okay.
No, I love, I guess I'm not that fond of Iraq, but Afghanistan I have huge affection for.
Um, so I don't know, I think that I think that in a way, you know, the, the way it works, there's, there's, there's defense contracts in almost every congressional house district.
So there's a real reason for people to, for congressmen to vote for increased defense appropriations.
It's a safe vote.
No one's going to say, Oh, you're helping, you know, poor people or you're helping, you know, the undeserving.
You do put money into your district.
It is stimulative.
It does.
It does work as a, as economic stimulus.
It's just, we can do so much better.
And you, you know, let's build hospitals, build, build roads, build public transportation, improve, you know, hire twice as many teachers, you know?
Um, I'm not saying we shouldn't have fiscal stimulus.
I think we should have fiscal stimulus.
When you have unemployment and low wages, you've got slack that you can, you can afford government deficits to stimulate the economy and create jobs.
It's just this notion that the easiest way to create jobs is through the, through militarization, I think is wrong.
I disagree with you about the first part, but I won't argue the point because you're certainly right about the militarization is just might as well.
In fact, this is straight out of George Orwell, right?
Is that the reason that we have the war is so we can take all the excess wealth of the people and we can blast it off into space or sink it into the ocean where they can't get to it, where they might be able to improve their lives and start to question their role in world.
I mean, I don't think that Dick Cheney went to war in Iraq because he thought it would, it would improve Halliburton stock price.
I don't think that I, I can't be that cynical, but it certainly didn't dissuade him.
You know, he certainly didn't pay any cost for it.
I sure think that really was a big part because he was a really lousy CEO.
I think he bought Ingersoll Rand about two weeks before they were found liable for $10 zillion worth of asbestos claims and all this.
He'd run it into the ground.
And then his payback to them was, don't worry, I'm going to put you on the army dole and you're going to get paid to build a bunch of bases when Halliburton's real job is building pipelines or oil services company.
They do real construction in the market until they get a government contract and they're happy to do that.
And, you know, Juan Cole, uh, called it the purloin letter.
It's just sitting right out there in front of us for all to see.
He owed them big time because he was a lousy businessman.
Why would they have hired him?
He was a politician.
What did he know about running a business?
Nothing.
We got him that contract.
Yep.
And once he's vice president, he can socialize all their costs onto us and privatize all their profits.
And also, you know, if we had hired, you know, in 2003, the Iraqi people were expecting things to get better.
You know, they were wary.
They weren't.
They're not stupid.
But they thought, you know, they've had they had sanctions for like 17 years, which just devastated the Iraqi middle class.
And they thought, well, you know what?
This is Saddam was a was a murderous thug.
And I thought maybe it's going to get better.
And if we are big, you know, we the number of mistakes we made in Iraq are just incalculable.
But if we had had not built the green zone and just had created security in the whole country, recognize our responsibility to create security in the whole country because we just invaded the damn country.
If we hadn't disbanded, you know, the army and the Ba'ath party and let the people who knew how to run the country continue to run the country.
And more important, if we had put money into the pockets of ordinary Iraqis, they'd have had a reason to support us.
So instead of hiring American truck drivers to drive, you know, all those supplies up from Kuwait, if we'd hired Iraqi truck drivers, it would have cost us less money and it would have bought us their loyalty.
But we didn't think about that.
And we didn't think about that because we weren't really focused on the facts on the ground.
You know, the East Asia Company conquered the Mughal Empire because that's all they thought about.
We, you know, and the soldiers thought about the facts on the ground.
The soldiers always could tell you, oh, that shakes a good one, that shakes a bad one.
They knew what was going on on the ground.
But the State Department and the government structure, they really, they saw Iraq as a playground for their theories and for their, increase their power inside Washington.
And you don't go to war for that.
You shouldn't go to war unless you want to win the damn war.
Yeah.
And we don't want to win the war because the contract, you know, the contract stays.
Right.
Well, and, you know, there's the quote from Bush saying Sunni this, Shia that.
I thought they were all Muslims refusing to even take on board that, look, you're toppling a minority dictatorship in favor of the super majority here.
And so once they, once Ayatollah Sistani said, I want one man, one vote, the civil war was on.
And I mean, again, I guess that's great for contracts.
It sure is bad for 4,500 dead Americans and a million dead Iraqis.
Well, I think it's also, it's really important.
So many Iraqis told me, you know, I used to not know if my friend was Shia or Sunni.
And there'd be many people who like, you know, I'm Sunni, but my cousin is Shia.
And there wasn't, there was, you know, there was a huge Christian population also in Iraq.
And that works until the central government power disappears.
And when you don't have, you know, if tomorrow in Austin, Texas, or in Los Angeles, the cops stop going to work, the first week would be all right.
The second week, there'd be break-ins.
The third week, people would start like putting checkpoints on their streets to make sure their area didn't get broken into.
And by the fourth week, you know, Los Feliz would be attacking Silver Lake to steal their stuff.
You know, that's what happens when you don't have authority to keep people, you know, to give people the confidence that they're safe.
So, you know, this notion that, oh, the Sunnis and the Shias have always hated each other.
Yeah, a little bit, but they started hating each other a lot more when there was no, you had to depend on your set for protection, you know.
It turned really Hobbesian there.
It turned, you know, if you think somebody is going to steal your stuff, you know, and kill your children, well, the next step is you steal their stuff, and you kill their children.
And then it just, it goes crazy.
Yeah.
There's something that I've always, you know, there's a quote in The Great Gatsby, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan, you know, they do these things, and all these different people die.
And Fitzgerald says, you know, and then they just went away to wherever rich people go to forget the problems they've created.
And I think, sometimes I think the American foreign policy is a lot like Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
We screw things up for the rest of the world.
And then we bugger off.
And we don't even think about the cost.
Yeah.
And then we blame all the refugees, we call them migrants.
And then never mind, they're all coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria.
I wonder what those countries have in common.
Well, also, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of, you know, I met, I met people who were, you know, interpreters for the US Army, you know, which is a job that could get you killed, right?
In Iraq, and they trying to, they were promised you can, well, we'll get you into America.
And then, and then the promise was reneged on, you know, so why?
Why just America?
You know, I mean, our reputation has gone in the toilet because of these wars.
You know, Hey, tell me this, man.
I'm interested about your time working for Fox News as a cameraman over there.
And, you know, what that was like, I mean, they were absolutely the worst of the worst, although MSNBC and CNN did their best to keep up.
But, you know, the war propaganda from Fox News in that era is probably as bad as anything that came out under Goebbels.
And I just wondered what that experience was like being on the other side of the camera, as these embedded reporters are just reporting about what a wonderful success the war is at stopping all the terrorists who would dare to oppose us and all that kind of thing.
Well, I'll tell you, it's really funny because the, before the war I was in right before the invasion, I was in, I was with one of the, with NBC and we were very, you know, I remember sitting at a table in Kuwait right before the invasion.
I said to a bunch of, bunch of us, I said, who here thinks Saddam Hussein's got weapons of mass destruction?
There were 12 people at the table.
Only one who happened to be the most highly paid of all of us thought he did.
Everybody else didn't think so.
But if you read the stuff we put out, you would never know that.
And we felt very much, the media very much felt, we felt like the war is going to happen.
If we don't support it, we're going to, they're going to call us traitors.
And so let's just hold back our genuine beliefs and let this thing happen because it's going to happen anyway.
And I feel very responsible for that.
And then during the war, I was with Fox and the thing, the Baghdad Bureau of Fox, I have no qualms at all about any stories we did.
We were, we were always solid.
We were always truthful.
And I think the reason, and I watched the guys from ABC and they were much more timid about going, you know, you know, I remember there was a, there was a parade, there was a parade of the, of the new Iraqi army and the ABC, the ABC reporter was flying.
You know, this is the, you know, this is the army that America hopes will take over the fight.
I'm like very pro the army.
And our guy said, well, it's not the mother of all parades.
And we had a shot of these guys bumping into each other, looking like idiots.
And we, because no one could say to Fox, oh, you're on the side of the terrorists.
We in the Baghdad Bureau were very free to be good journalists.
So we did.
That's in other words, your right flank was covered.
So you could tell the truth.
Our right flank was covered.
So we told the truth and we always did.
And, you know, I don't think any, you know, I, I mean, this, some of us were, well, nobody was pro war.
Nobody was pro war.
Some thought it was less of a horrible idea than others, but nobody thought it was a good idea.
You know?
Yeah.
It's really, I guess when I think back on that era, it's not so much the reports from the field is Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and, you know, the, the pro Republican jihadists in New York city.
They were the ones who really, it was that narrative that dominated far more than any reporting you guys were actually doing on the ground there.
Well, one time Bill O'Reilly came to Baghdad and I spent a week with, with him on, we flew into Baghdad airport and he went to Liberty base, which was the base right by the airport, big, huge American base.
And then, and this wasn't even, this wasn't even 2006 when things were hairy.
This was like 2008 when things were getting better.
You know, we would drive up and down the road, you know, with security people, we would drive up and down the roads to go places.
He would not drive down the road.
He only would go by helicopter.
He was deeply chicken.
And we all, you know, we all laughed at him, but you know, what are you gonna do?
Yeah.
He wouldn't go down the roads and everybody else went down when he wasn't even that dangerous.
He insisted, I want to fly an helicopter.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's not surprising at all.
But so I'm just curious, like what kind of anecdotes you have in that memory of yours from you were there from really, it sounds like the whole war from Oh three through Oh eight, at least here.
Um, tell me some stories, Tom.
I remember we were at this base, I think it was in, I think it was in the Allah.
And one of the one of the security detail of the colonel was hit by an IED and died.
And we've been there for a while.
And they trusted us.
So they invited us to his, his memorial service.
And we didn't film it because we didn't think that was appropriate.
But they invited us there.
We're honored to be there.
And, you know, his, his name was he was 19 years old, he wanted to become a he was a medic, he wanted to become a doctor, his nickname was Doc.
And, you know, his comrades, you know, talked about him and what a great guy he was, you know, my, you know, and they do this thing in the military, they at the end of the ceremony, the sergeant, the sergeant of the platoon calls roll home and he, he, you know, says the name of each soldier and they go, you know, and, and then he called the name of the doc of the dead guy.
And there's the silence.
And, and then he calls it again, using the guy's entire, you know, middle first name, middle formal first name, middle name, and there's silence.
And just everybody's, everybody's hair on their arms just stood up.
And I just thought, you know, it's 19 year old kid, you know, with his whole life ahead of him.
You know, what, why?
Why?
Why?
Why go to war, just so the President can look butch?
You know, yeah.
Right.
And, and such a good point there too, because of what a faux tough guy George W.
Bush was.
Here's a guy's never been in a fight in his life.
And I'll never forget this one scene where he's, he's outside walking between, you know, one part of the White House and the other through the Rose Garden or whatever.
And he's wearing a black overcoat and a cowboy hat and it's snowing.
And some reporter is asking him, well, why are we doing this?
And he does his best tough guy, John Wayne impersonation about why it's so important to do this and all that.
And yet it was just so transparent.
This is George Bush's son, right?
This is the most pampered little, you know, he's Prescott's grandson.
It's the only reason he's even there at all.
And, you know, I think I forgot who had said that.
Well, why don't we just let George Bush and Saddam Hussein fight this out?
In fact, I think the Saddam Hussein himself challenged George Bush to a fight, said, let's settle it that way.
And of course, Saddam would have beat George Bush's ass into the ground, which would have been hilarious to see, in fact.
And, you know, I like this anecdote, too.
I'm not sure if you saw this, but in Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, they interviewed one of bin Laden's sons.
And he talked about how thrilled bin Laden was when he saw that George W. Bush won the recount over Gore in Florida and was going to be the president because he could see that this was the perfect mark.
He wasn't afraid.
Oh, no.
The big, tough Republicans are coming.
He said, this is excellent.
This is perfect.
Here's a guy.
I'm going to give him an excuse and I'm going to watch him exploit it.
And he's going to run America right into the ground, just like the Russians did.
Well, you know, what did Bush do on 9-11?
He ran and hid in a bunker.
He flew around the country, scared like a little girl.
Absolutely.
A mile beneath Nebraska.
I think, you know, you can say a lot of bad things about W's dad, but he was a fighter pilot.
You know, he did, you know, get shot down in the Pacific.
And he and I think that the real difference is, you know, back in the old days, the elite, because of the draft or because of a sense of obligation, you know, Harvard boys went to war, you know, and so they made friends with ordinary working class Americans.
They understood the dangers.
They understood, you know, what it meant.
And now the elite, the elite sense of war is, is based on, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, you know?
So of course they want to go to war, you know?
Of course they want to go to war.
It's like, it's, it's the good guy never dies, right?
It's only the sidekicks that die.
Right.
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So tell us about the Iraqis.
You know, we hear so much about all the PTSD on the part of the Americans, you know, side effects of depleted uranium, dust in their lungs and all these things.
And yet we got a precipitated a civil war over there that killed upwards of a million people is still raging on.
We're at Iraq war three and a half now.
The Islamic state is gone, but the insurgency remains.
And, and so, I mean, tell us about the Iraqis and, and how they suffered here or, or, or how they, you know, got along, whatever you think is important for us to hear.
Well, I think it's really important to remember that in the 1970s, Iraq was a, was a pretty prosperous country.
And then they went to war in 1980 against Iran.
Now, I don't know if it's true or not, but a lot of Iraqis will tell you the reason they went to war with Iran, because that was right after the, the embassy thing and the fall of the Shah is because they were told to by the Americans.
I mean, there's a, there's a famous quote, that the coup that brought, the coup that brought the Ba'ath party to power was, was a locomotive driven by the CIA.
And the CIA at the time was very much on the side of the Ba'ath party because their, their opposition was the Iraqi Communist Party.
So the Americans, so they went to war with, with Iran.
They thought it was going to be an easy victory.
It wasn't, because Iran was a much bigger country than they were.
I don't know how many millions of people died.
The war ended.
The Iraqis felt that they had been, you know, fund, they had been funded by the Kuwaitis and other countries like that to defend them against the Persian threat.
And then at the war was over, the Kuwaitis said, no, we, you know, all that money we lent you, we want it back.
And Saddam said, well, we just fought the war for you guys and for the Americans.
And they went, no, we want our money back.
Meanwhile, also the Kuwaitis at the time were doing these horizontal, these wells that, they're big oil fields on the Kuwaiti Iraqi border.
And they would drill these kind of non-vertical pipelines to suck out the oil from Iraq.
So Iraq had genuine reasons to be mad at the, the Kuwaitis.
So Saddam Hussein went to the American ambassador, April Gillespie, and said, you know, we've got a real problem with the Kuwaitis.
They don't, they won't pay us back.
They want the money back.
They're stealing our oil.
We think the border is in the wrong place.
And April Gillespie, the American ambassador said, the United States takes no position on inter-Arab border disputes, which Saddam Hussein took as, we don't care if you invade Kuwait.
And so they invaded Kuwait and then all hell broke loose.
And then we, I think probably did the right thing in, in forcing, you know, reconquering Kuwait.
But then instead of going to Baghdad and liberating Baghdad, which probably would have worked out at the time, because we had a real huge coalition.
There was antipathy towards Saddam.
We didn't do that.
And instead we encouraged the Shia to revolt.
They revolted.
And then we stopped.
We stopped.
And we let Saddam's helicopter gunships back in the air.
They killed, I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands of Shia in the South.
And he reestablished his dictatorship.
And then, in vengeance for that, we established sanctions.
Now the sanctions didn't really affect Saddam, because they never affect the guys at the top.
There's always ways around it.
But they certainly affected the ordinary Iraqi.
And the Iraqi middle class, which had been prosperous and strong and educated and, you know, advanced and secular, was destroyed by sanctions.
And people, you know, people were bankrupted.
The economy was destroyed.
People had to sell all their stuff.
We really, we really did Iraq a disservice during that entire period.
From 1980 to 2003, we did them a disservice.
And then we invaded and then precipitated, didn't protect them, disbanded the army, let armed men go back to their villages with no ways of making a job, increased sectarian hatred, and destroyed the country.
And so how did the Iraqis feel?
Well, you know what, they're a lot more generous and kind hearted than I would be if I were in their situation.
Yeah, I bet.
It seemed like, yeah, even after the invasion in Iraq War Two, like you're saying at the beginning, you know, I remember even Aaron Glantz was reporting from Tikrit and Fallujah and Ramadi in these predominantly Sunni areas, where they were saying, thanks for getting rid of Saddam for us.
So never even mind down in Basra, where, you know, in the predominantly Shiite areas, but even in Saddam's hometown, they were saying, thank God he got rid of this guy.
But and then they started looking sideways.
Now what's your plan?
What are you going to do?
And everything went to hell after that.
Establishing the green zone, I think was a huge mistake, because we went, okay, we're going to put an area so where we're safe, you know, we're safe.
So whatever happens outside our ballywick doesn't matter.
You know, in Vietnam, you know, American soldiers walk down the street.
I mean, my dad was a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, I lived in Saigon in 1972.
And you know, there was no security fears, there was no, everybody hung out, people, soldiers would have apartments in town, you know, with their girlfriend, you know, there was intermixing between the Americans and the Vietnamese.
And in Iraq, we were, you know, there are people, there are soldiers who went to Iraq, who never left the base, who never left the base.
How can you have a war like that, you know, if you're going to have a, and that's one thing, I'm not a huge fan of Petraeus.
But one thing that he did do that was right, during the surge, was he took the soldiers out of their big bases, and he put them in forward bases in the neighborhood, so that they could provide security for that neighborhood.
Because what we were doing before, we do a raid, right, we'd come in there with, you know, helicopters and armored vehicles, and la la la la la, and everything, you know, and people would run away, or we'd shoot at them or whatever.
But everybody knew that night, we would leave again, you know, and then the bad, our enemies would be back there.
So who, you know, you go to war, so that you can scare people into obeying you.
But if you're not going to hang out, if you're not going to be there, then they're still going to be more scared of the insurgents than they are of you.
You know, I always wondered what would happen.
I mean, of course, I opposed the war in the first place all along.
But I wonder what would happen if they got rid of Saddam, and then just got the hell out of there?
Or even, for that matter, same kind of argument?
What if they'd listened to Rumsfeld in 2006, and left then instead of doing the surge?
Because the point of the surge, supposedly, was to create peace and stability in Baghdad, so there could be a political reconciliation.
But in fact, what they were doing was helping the Shiite militias finish cleansing the city of Sunni Arabs, and depriving them of their last incentive to cooperate.
And once the surge was over, Maliki and, you know, Petraeus promised, oh, don't worry, we're going to get you all these patronage jobs in the police and the army and the rest of this.
And Maliki said, screw you, we got the capital city, you guys can go bake in the sun, and set in the stage for the rise of Islamic State, once Obama started backing them in Syria.
I mean, I think, you know, in retrospect, I think the big mistake was not to take Baghdad in 91, or whenever that was during the first Gulf War.
I think if we'd done that then, it would have been- But wouldn't Sistani have said the same thing?
That, hey, Shia, if you believe in God, it's time to take the capital city for us now.
Sistani's not a bad guy.
I don't view Sistani as a force for evil.
I don't even view Muqtada al-Assad as a force for evil.
I think, you know, I think there were a lot of gangsters on all of those sides.
I think there was a lot of corruption- Well, evil aside, though, I mean, once Sistani called George Bush out and said, listen, you said democracy, we want one man, one vote.
We don't want this handpicked caucus system.
We want one man, one vote.
It was on after that, right?
They wrote the constitution, they won the purple fingered election, and then the Bata Brigade went to war to kick all the Sunnis out of the capital city with Rumsfeld's help.
Well, you know, I think, I don't think that, I think, I think that, you know, this notion that, you know, all right, if you are allegedly a democracy and you're invading your country to bring in democracy, then you kind of have to have one man, one vote.
However, you don't necessarily, it's not inevitable that that one man, one vote will break down purely on sectarian lines.
I think one of the real tragedies of the Middle East is that, you know, the people that you and I would hang out with, you know, the people that you and I would hang out with in Afghanistan, right?
The non-fundamentalist, the secular, the westernized, the educated, were mostly for the communists.
You know, when you talk to them, they're like, well, yeah, I was with the communists in, you know, whatever, in 81 or whatever.
We ended up supporting the most reactionary elements in all of those countries.
And I think, I don't, I think that if we had been, I don't, you know, I mean, I think that the notion, you know, Muqtada al-Assad is no fan of Iran.
He's not a fan of Iran.
He's an Iraqi nationalist.
And Shia in Iraq, in my experience, are not, they, they feel very Iraqi.
You know, they don't, some of them feel very Shia, but a lot of them feel very Iraqi.
And you can build on that non-sectarian thing.
And of course, they accused Sadr of being the most Iranian backed one, right?
While they were supporting Iran's friends in Skiri and Dawa and the Bata Brigade at Sadr's expense.
Iraqi was, you know, was totally a pawn of Iran, you know.
But Muqtada al-Assad had genuine support of the Iraqi Shia low middle class.
So, I mean, I, you know, I think, I think that if we had gone in, you know, I think that one huge mistake, you know, what's his name, that General Shikashvili, I think his name is, he said, well, if you're going to do this, you need this many men.
And Rumsfeld said, no, that's too many men.
I think if we'd gone in with enough men to be able to provide security, I think that would have made a difference.
I think if we hadn't, if we hadn't been obsessed with American force protection, that is to say, Americans were told, American soldiers were told, 19-year-old American boys were told, if you feel for any reason that your life or the life of your comrades is in danger, you can fire.
So a car would come up to a checkpoint a little bit faster than this guy felt comfortable with.
He was told, protecting your own life is the most important thing, which is not, by the way, how a warrior should feel.
And so he opens fire, kills the whole family.
And now, now we got another enemy, right?
If we hadn't been so chicken shit, we might have not screwed up so badly, you know?
Yeah.
Well, and of course, at that point, you know, the war against the Iraqi army was over.
That lasted two weeks.
At this point, you're just fighting civilian resistance.
And they were also told, and just as we were told, and especially by Fox News, that anyone who resists us is a terrorist.
These aren't Iraqi patriots defending their neighborhood from foreign invaders.
These are all somehow acolytes of Osama bin Laden, and this kind of thing.
And so that was what 19 year old soldiers were told, too.
Anybody shooting at you is doing so because they are the terrorist enemies of the Iraqi people.
They're the ones that you're here to protect the Iraqi people from, but they were the Iraqi people.
Well, also, you know, a lot of, you know, you disband the army, and you send people home with their guns, you know, and, you know, at the beginning, the American military did learn a lot.
You know, I'm not dissing the American military.
But at the beginning, they would go into a home, right?
They'd be given bad intelligence because people would be, you know, so, you know, somehow, I was so-and-so money, so I'll tell the Americans he's a bad, and then they'll go into his house.
They go into his house, they search his house, they come into his house at night, they look at his wife uncovered, and then they find an AK-47.
Well, you know what?
An AK-47, I mean, I guess you live in Texas.
People have guns in Texas.
People have, in Iraq, people have guns.
People have AK-47s.
It's not, it doesn't mean you're a terrorist.
It just means you're, you know, nobody, you're not going to let anybody steal your ox, you know?
And so they'd find the gun, and then they'd haul the guy away, and now you've made an enemy.
And, you know, an intelligence officer told me, I might get the number wrong, but something like 95% of all the people we arrested in Iraq were not guilty of anything.
Right.
Yeah, they admitted that outright.
The U.S. Army officially said that, not just to you, but that was on the record at one point, that, yeah, all we're doing was just sweeps of fighting-age males, basically.
We don't understand, you know, I was, I was, I was outside Basra, and I was talking to this interpreter who was Egyptian, and so we're out there chit-chatting away, and I said to him, well, you're Egyptian, and that's a really different, that's a really different kind of Arabic.
They speak a really different, the Basrawi speak a very different Arabic than the Cairo Arabic, and he said, oh, God, I have no idea what they're saying.
You know, and he would tell me that because I, I wasn't his boss, but he, we didn't speak the language, our interpreters didn't even speak the language.
So my, my one rule for going to war is, if you can't be asked to learn the language, don't invade.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, Tom, it's really been great talking with you, and I sure hope that you'll keep writing for TAC.
Thank you, it's a pleasure talking to you.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that is Tom Streithorst, he wrote this very important piece, I really hope you'll go look at it, it's at tactheamericanconservative.com, War Doesn't Make Sense Anymore.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, twitter.com, slash scotthortonshow, appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
