Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and our next guest on the show is Michael Shoyer, he's the former head analyst at the CIA's Alex Station.
He writes for Anti-War.com and for The Diplomat, that's The-Diplomat.com, his newest article which will be one of the topics of discussion today is Coming Nuclear Flashpoint.
And it's funny as I look at this picture, it's about India and Pakistan, as I look at this picture of an atom bomb going off, or maybe that's a sunrise, but it sure looks like an atom bomb going off there, it reminds me that when India and Pakistan were testing their atomic weapons in 1998, that was the same week of the final episode of Jerry Seinfeld's show, which wasn't even funny at all.
And that was all the Americans cared about, it was all they talked about on TV was the end of Seinfeld, while India and Pakistan were testing atom bombs and saying things to the camera like, you tell those Indians we're not afraid of them and their little atom bombs, and it looked like maybe one of the worst wars ever was about to break out and it's just a fun little anecdote from the recesses of my cranium here.
Welcome to the show, Mike, how are you?
Good, how are you, sir?
I'm doing great, I really appreciate you joining us here, and I want to talk about this very important and excellent article, you've written quite a few here about Pakistan and Afghanistan and the policy for The Diplomat here, very important articles that I urge people to go back and look through.
But first I want to start with your book, Imperial Hubris, of course I should have said you're also the author of Marching Toward Hell, and in Imperial Hubris you say, look, here's six reasons, and these aren't six reasons why the underbomber got on the plane last Christmas because there's been a war on terrorism going on since September 11th.
This was the six reasons that we were attacked on September 11th, and they were reasons that were about history, things that happened before September 11th that led to it.
And this is obviously still an unresolved argument, obviously you're right, anybody who's cared to look understands the point that you're making here and the importance of that point, and yet you still haven't won this argument in convincing the American people what this war is even about, Mike, and so here's your chance to tell them again.
Well you're right, and I'm slowly losing any opportunity to do that over time.
People don't want to hear the fact that we're being attacked because of what we do, what our government does in our name, rather, rather than who we are or how we live here in North America.
You know, it's the same, I wrote a piece the other day, it was the 14th anniversary, August 27th, of Osama bin Laden declaring war against us, and all of those six items that you mentioned are on qualified support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian Peninsula, our support for Arab tyrannies, our domination of what they call Muslim energy, our military presence in Muslim countries, and our support for countries that oppress Muslims, especially Russia, India, and China.
All of those were in that document 14 years ago, and I would bet to this day that neither President Clinton, Bush, nor Obama have read it.
Well, and look, it's on the PBS Lair NewsHour website, and the title, Mike, is, Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Pretty subtle, huh?
Yeah, Osama, as many things, subtle is not one of them.
I was trained by Jesuits, and if there's such a thing as an Islamic Jesuit, he was trained by them too.
He's very direct-spoken, he stays very much on message, and he's a very cogent, unfortunately for us, a very cogent thinker and strategist.
But I'm about out of ammunition here, Scott.
I've tried now for six years, actually for 14 years, counting the time I was in the government, to get somebody who's in the position of authority to listen, and really the only one, the only person in the United States government who has ever expressed any interest has been Mr.
Paul.
All of them are, all the rest of them are just on the they-hate-us-because-we-have-women-in-the-workplace mantra.
Not even Senator Graham at all?
He never asked you any questions?
Senator Graham from...
From Florida?
The old guy?
From Florida.
I testified before him...
He just seems like the kind of guy who's quirky enough that he would want to, that he'd be interested in what you have to say, you know?
Maybe not.
Well, I've talked to him in an official capacity, but I've never talked to him else other than that, and I've never really heard from him.
Well, he's gone now anyway.
Yeah.
Well, you know, look, the thing is, I feel your frustration, because this is the same argument I make to mostly deaf ears all day, every day.
I have more opportunity to say it out loud even than you do, I guess, and I guess we're making progress in a way, but it sure is slow and steady here, counting on nine years, and look, I mean, the big deal is, and I think it's, the metaphor is built right into the event.
The planes came out of the clear blue sky, and Bush and the whole narrative immediately was laid down that history began yesterday.
This happened for no reason.
And so, I mean, that's just the simple point.
That's an argument you ought to be able to win, that, nuh-uh, there was such a thing as an era of Bill Clinton murdering one million Iraqis from bases in Saudi Arabia that led up to that attack.
Come on.
Well, it seems to be a pretty straightforward argument, and certainly we have not found a single person, a Muslim, who has attacked us or planned to attack us, either, we've not found in his testimony, in his papers, or anything that remotely describes the motivation that you can ascribe to democracy or liberty or freedom or election.
But the media, you know, the media is owned lock, stock, and barrel for the mainstream media by the pro-Israeli lobby.
And they can never admit that American policy has anything to do with the problems in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, that certainly is a big part of it, but you know what?
And this may be redundant from previous interviews, but then again, I've talked to you numerous times going back years now, I'm sure there are a lot of people who haven't heard us discuss this before, but I want to make it known to people that, you know, again, this is for people, anybody just tuning in, it's Michael Shoyer, he was the chief of the CIA's bin laden unit, and back when he worked for the government, he kept trying to get Bill Clinton to kill this guy, and Bill Clinton would never kill Osama bin Laden.
How many chances did you give Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger and William Cohen to kill Osama, Mike?
Well, they had ten chances between May of 1998 and May of 1999, and again, Scott, no one has to believe me on that.
They can just check the 9-11 commission report.
All of them are listed, not in one spot, but they're listed in the thing.
Then Clinton had three more opportunities between 1999 and when he left office.
And then Mr. Bush had the one opportunity in December of 2001.
So there were 14 opportunities over two administrations, and nobody thought enough of the American people to kill one of their worst enemies.
Well, listen, wait, wait, wait, stop right there, because there's so many different things I could ask you about all those, the swing sets and the Saudi princes and all these things, but what's this thing about the summer of 2001?
Please elaborate on that.
I know, December 2001.
Oh, oh, oh, during Operation Anaconda there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and what do you think happened there?
Do you think that was deliberate, that Franks and Rumsfeld and Bush said, you know, it'd be really nice to have Emanuel Goldstein on the run from Big Brother from now on?
You know, I think what happened, I cut the president some slack on that one because that's not something that's going to, he doesn't move troops.
And the generals on the ground had ample forces available to go in there and clean up Osama bin Laden once and for all.
But they're PR guys, you know, most of those guys in 2001 hadn't fought anybody ever.
They were bureaucrats in uniforms and they knew that dead Americans were bad publicity.
So they subcontracted it to a couple of friends of bin Laden and not surprisingly, he got away.
Yeah.
Heck mature.
We'll send him to go get him.
Yeah.
And, uh, you know, no, we can't, we can't lose a few hundred Marines in the, in the mountains of Tora Bora, but we can lose 4,000 in Iraq and throw their lives away for nothing at all.
Continue to throw lives away fighting the Taliban that didn't do it.
We'll be back right after this with Mike Shorter, Santai War Radio, read Imperial Hubris.
That's good.
It's important.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at lrn.fm.
Santai War Radio, I'm Scott Michael Sawyer's on the line.
It's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit head analyst there and author of the books, Imperial Hubris, why the West is losing the war on terrorism and marching toward hell, and Islam after Iraq.
And if you want to see something funny, watch the interview of Mike last week on Fox news, where the hairdo girl asks, well, hairdo and lip gloss, I don't want to sell her short, asks about Somalia.
Mike Shorter says, yeah, well, this is all because of American intervention in Somalia has turned the place upside down and made everything worse.
And she just couldn't believe it.
It was hilarious, but we don't have time to talk about Somalia, unfortunately, because we've got to talk about the war now in AfPak, as the Democrats call it.
I guess they're just determined, Mike, to turn that into one big war encompassing both countries in total.
Well, I think I think they really don't know what they're doing.
Scott, the thing is completely out of control.
There's a civil war going on in Pakistan.
The number of Americans being killed in Afghanistan is accelerating with with some rapidity now.
And clearly the Taliban has has spread the insurgency across the entire country.
It's no longer concentrated in the south and in the east.
And of course, we don't have enough troops there to fix any of those problems.
And so that war is lost.
It's just a matter of how we get out of there.
I don't know the answer to that yet.
But we have Petraeus angling for the Republican nomination for president the next time out.
So between him angling for that, Obama trying to save face, the net cost of that will be more dead American men and women.
Well, you know, this whole thing, it's funny you talk about there's not enough enough troops to do anything about it.
That is to absolutely, you know, ruthlessly go in there and defeat the insurgency and win.
But there's plenty enough eight new brigades.
This is enough to inflame the entire population against the occupation and recruit more and more and more people into the resistance just to, you know, it's like a what they call a self-licking ice cream cone.
Right.
Yeah.
It's got the mission.
Really, there's they have no contact with reality.
The problem for the United States and Afghanistan from the first day was going to be our occupation.
The longer we were there, the more problems we would have about until about two thousand late 2006.
We were fighting primarily Islamists, people who wanted to restore the Islamic Emirate that the Taliban had created since 2006.
They have been joined by people who are simply nationalists, people who really don't have much interest in an Islamic state, although they're Muslims.
But what they don't want is foreigners in their country.
And so if you're going to stay there, you're going to be the cause of the war.
If you're going to increase the the number of troops you have there to an extent insufficient to win, but sufficient to mobilize the entire population, you're going to have a terrible ending.
And that's what we're seeing now.
Well, and what we've seen this whole time, those of us looking really closely, which of course includes you, is the invitation, the insistence on the part of the United States that India participate as much as possible in the occupation of Afghanistan.
Now, what could be problematic about that, Mike Schwerer?
Well, that's another you know, I think, Scott, that's really another evidence of the woefully ignorant, the woefully ill educated people who we elect to become president and senators and congressmen.
The Indians, of course, are the mortal enemies, and vice versa of Pakistan.
And the Pakistanis always have valued Afghanistan as what they call strategic depth, a place they could drop back to if India invaded them and try to regroup their forces to continue the fight.
So what do we do?
We know that we don't have any operation that's plausible in Afghanistan without the help of the Pakistanis.
But we go to India and urge them to send aid, road builders, engineers, health professionals, military policemen to Afghanistan.
So now we're fighting a losing war.
We have a civil war in the country that's most important to us, Pakistan.
And the Pakistani generals now see that they have not only a massively overwhelming Indian military on their eastern border, but they have an Indian presence on their western border in Pakistan that denies them what they call strategic depth.
And what they believe is also an Indian presence that's supporting the Pakistani Taliban and insurgents in the southern province of Balochistan.
So we really have created a situation that is self-defeating from our perspective.
And it's not one piece of information did you need from anything classified to be able to know that this was coming.
Well I know that you're right because that's what Eric Margulies says.
And I know that Eric Margulies knows Pakistani generals like many of them and has for years and years.
Exactly right.
So yeah where now in your in your work at CIA you must have worked with Pakistani intelligence on some occasions huh?
Or a lot?
Constantly yes.
Okay so and that's so when you're talking about this you know that from them not just because you read something somewhere.
Yeah well yes that's the truth.
The Indians are their mortal enemies and what happens in the United States is that the federal bureaucracy is so pro-Indian that the Indians get a free ride.
You know they have a caste system in their country that leaves some people still in the status of slavery.
But any American politician really all he ever talks about is this is the world's biggest democracy.
So the packs really are up against it.
Are they are they duplicitous?
Absolutely.
Are they willing to take the money we give them for one thing and use it for another?
Absolutely.
What other ally do we have that has tried to help us to the point where they've caused the civil war in their own country?
Yeah well you know I was just chatting with a stranger on Facebook the other day who turns out was living in Karachi and said that he's just counting the days to a military coup.
That the civilian government has done the floods there Katrina times fifty times a hundred times a thousand going on there.
That's just the death knell of the civilian government there.
And he said that he didn't think that there was there would be a problem anytime soon with you know fights within the military and the country breaking up like that.
They will still maintain their monopoly on power but no more elections no more parliament at least for a while and he said it this is this will be within weeks.
Well I think I think the military is the one institution in in Pakistan that works.
He forced President Musharraf out and in his place now they have Mrs. Bhutto's husband Zardari who is the biggest thief probably in Pakistan's history.
And while his country was being submerged he was off visiting Europe.
So I don't know any more than the gentleman you were speaking with on the on the Facebook Scott.
But I think Pakistan in order to stabilize the country the military will have to take over.
And that's the position that we have put them in forcing them really to fight this civil war against their own people that and for what reason because it's supposedly we're after Ayman al-Zawahiri or something.
Well what it's even more than that.
Not only were they fighting this civil war but we forced them to have democracy.
When whenever in history shows again it's another one of those things where you don't need secret data.
The politicians elected in Pakistan always run the country into the ground and the military has to take over.
That's what's happened now with the help of the floods in addition.
But but what we were looking for from the Pakistanis was to do our bleeding for us.
We wanted them to get their soldiers killed and their Marines killed trying to eliminate al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
And so we could sit in our our catonements and our generals could sit in Tampa and let somebody else do our bleeding.
And that very seldom ever works.
And now we have the we have to pay the piper now.
So there's a thing in the Post today that well no no no wait I can't go to I want to ask you about Yemen and Somalia in a minute but on the Pakistan thing just to kind of go back over and wrap up this thing.
Pakistan has India on one side and Afghanistan on the other.
In the event that their military strategy is in the event of a war particularly an atomic war with India they would need to be able to retreat across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan in an attempt to not be completely obliterated off of the face of the earth.
It's more designed at conventional invasion.
If you look at Pakistan Pakistan is a pretty thin country and the Indians could get across it very quickly.
So they value Afghanistan as a place to fall back to the escape route.
Right.
So then we're bringing in the Indians to at least I mean it sounds like and you say in your article it's mostly civil road construction this kind of thing but it's enough to make the Pakistanis at least feel very surrounded by the Indians and then as Margulies has explained on this show over and over for years this is why the Pakistanis as you say must be duplicitous and support as they're as they're obeying our orders and fighting the Pakistani Taliban.
They're helping finance and and support the Afghan Taliban to make sure that the Karzai government in alliance with India can never form a real monopoly state there.
And we're on this perpetual motion machine of death then of course as you said you got Obama and and Petraeus and their politics their selfish individual interests keeping us there as well.
And here's the thing as you said these states are sworn enemies and they got atomic weapons and they share a border.
And you know I don't know man this is we're really playing with fire here Mike.
This is not playing around this is not fooling around.
This is the history of the world being written right now.
Yeah.
We've put the Pakistanis in the strategic vice really with the Indians on both sides of them.
And I think that'll be one of the issues that's addressed when the military takes over in Pakistan that once we get General Kayani in there as the head of the government he'll speak very frankly to to the United States and really tell them that the game is up.
So that's who's next.
I would assume so.
He's the chief of the army staff now.
He seems like a very savvy character and I don't know.
You know I don't know Scott.
That would just be my guess.
Yeah.
Well you know I don't like you know predicting the worst and in the near term or whatever because if I do I'm never right anyway.
So I try not to do that too much.
But I think it's worth bringing up this point that there was an HBO movie that came out in the I guess must have been the late 90s when this was relevant in the news.
It was sort of a made for TV straight to DVD type thing and it was called the Second American Civil War and it began with a nuclear war between India and Pakistan and the American president who I think was Dan Aykroyd or something lets all of the Pakistani refugees come to the United States and just says well they'll all go to Idaho and the governor of Idaho has his own political selfish ridiculous things going on and says no way calls out the National Guard to seal the border and then all the states start seceding and all those soldiers start killing each other and it's a giant catastrophe and it's basically it has underlying the whole thing the kind of idiocy that you describe in this policy where these people are so narrow in their vision that they this is the kind of blundering catastrophe that they could do.
You know it's like it's a silly worst case scenario in that circumstance.
But I thought it was worth bringing up as Martin Short as the Karl Rove you know George Stephanopoulos type TV advisor to the president and maybe convinces him to make these terrible decisions in the name of how it'll look you know like Rahm Emanuel would.
What has come home to me is that any parent who pays for their children to go to Yale or Harvard to be educated is just throwing his money away Scott.
Making them broke too.
Really broke.
And if you had that much money in the first place broke is a hard place to land you know.
Well all right so now let's talk about the Washington Post this morning says well you know the generals and the CIA or I don't know the CIA the generals and Obama's team I guess the White House team differs.
Maybe that means John Brennan and those guys I forget I don't have it in front of me here but they disagree with Obama's assessment of the importance of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and here's how they disagree.
They're much more focused on Al Qaeda in Yemen and just like in the West Point speech that Barack Obama gave last November Somalia Yemen you're next as though America had been killing people in those countries pretty much this whole time and now I don't know do you think we're on the path of a real escalation perhaps even ground forces into these countries or are we going to stick with robot assassins or what?
Well the problem is Scott that the drone and special forces and CIA those aren't war winners.
Those can hold the hold the tread water for you for a while but ultimately if you have to fight you have to use your conventional forces.
Well do we have to fight in Somalia and Yemen?
I don't think so.
Although it's just hard to know from for me anymore what they're thinking of.
I think a lot of this stuff is made up.
Yemen is sexier at the moment than Afghanistan because we're losing in Afghanistan so Yemen gets pushed to the front pages.
The ability of policymakers to kind of dissect and separate the various branches of Al Qaeda as if they weren't related to each other is really astounding.
You know Al Qaeda in Yemen, Al Qaeda in Somalia, Al Qaeda in Iraq are all tied back to Osama bin Laden in the main headquarters.
They call them affiliates but they're really wings.
I'm publishing a new book in February a biography of Osama bin Laden and it shows how directly Al Qaeda in Iraq is related in a command and control manner with Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
So all of these problems go back to Al Qaeda core.
The core group that's Osama and those people around him.
And if you want to take care of the problem you've got to go after them.
Somalia and Yemen are really sideshows.
Well and you know it's just like when we talked about the Afghanistan war ten minutes ago and how you know not putting in enough forces, leaving morality aside, but just strategically speaking as George Bush would say, not putting in enough soldiers to just outright win but putting in enough soldiers to make everything worse for everybody and encourage a brand new resistance and all that.
That's what's happening in Somalia like you said to the Fox News girl the other day.
Well America went in there and intervened in something that had nothing to do with this and turned the place upside down and now you have people going across the gates of the Red Sea there back and forth between Somalia and Yemen and teaching each other how to make bombs and even have American citizens, Somali-Americans as I guess you're supposed to call them with a hyphen there and everything, leaving Minneapolis, the Minneapolis area and going to Somalia to join the al-Shabaab holy war.
That America started there.
It shows you how things can go.
You know in 2005 in Somalia, an Islamic group called the Islamic Courts had taken over finally.
The civil war was calming down.
The Islamic Courts were spreading control over the country really for the first time in 25 years and we decided that they were Muslims, they were Islamic so we couldn't put up with that so we bombed them.
And then we encouraged Ethiopia to invade the country and to knock them out completely.
Now I'm not sure that anybody in the White House was smart enough to know that Ethiopia is a Christian country.
And so when the Ethiopians came in, not only did they come in to unseat a Muslim government, but they came in as a Christian power to unseat an Islamic government.
And so the whole notion of crusades and defensive jihad comes up again.
And of course they get beaten.
They withdraw in January of 2009 and we still aren't happy to let it settle down.
We back a United Nations government that again is viewed as an outsider force supported by the Christian West.
And so now we have an insurgency that didn't exist before 2005, which controls about two thirds of the country, is undermining the stability of Kenya and Ethiopia, and a couple weeks ago conducted that attack in the middle of Uganda, which has sent peacekeepers to Somalia.
So it's a nightmare.
But it's a nightmare of our own making because we don't understand.
Well, and you know, it's the same thing with history beginning all over again every single day because as Jason Ditz did such a great job of pointing out at antiwar.com, you literally had Ugandan troops shelling Mogadishu and hitting a soccer field and killing a bunch of kids playing soccer in Mogadishu, like three, four weeks before that attack in Uganda.
Now the insurgency spreading outside the border, then what do they do?
They attack all the people watching the soccer game and everybody says, God, these people hate soccer.
What is the matter with them?
Well, it's just astounding, Scott.
I don't know.
It's like a nightmare you see unfolding.
But I dream about it.
I admit it.
I do.
It's it is a nightmare.
That's exactly what it is.
It's a discussion perhaps for another time, but I think it has to come back to the absolute bankruptcy of the American educational system.
Yeah, that's what I was just saying earlier in the show.
Everybody's so stupid because they don't know anything really to ground their feet in so that when new information comes, they can bounce it off and see whether it makes sense or not.
They're like floating in space.
Yeah.
And it's because exactly because of the public schools in this country.
I think that's right.
I remember after we invaded Iraq, just before I resigned, the Bush administration was looking around for help to occupy Baghdad.
So they settled on two countries, India, with a reputation of ruthlessly killing innocent Muslims in Kashmir, and the Mongols, the Mongolians, who, of course, in Islamic history, are the Hitler of Islamic history in terms of the number of Muslims they killed.
Fortunately, the Indians and the Mongolians said, thanks, but no thanks.
But we were so stupid, so ignorant of history, that we did ask those people to send military forces to Baghdad.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's absolutely amazing.
It is amazing.
Well, and look, here's amazing, too.
They say, literally in one breath, the war's over, we're leaving 50,000 infantry men and uncounted tens of thousands of mercenaries in the country, along with air power and bases, and we insist on renegotiating the exit agreement, and we're staying past 2011, read it in McClatchy newspapers by Warren Strobel, and the war's over, all at the same time.
It's all one big paragraph.
And also, I don't know if you, I'm sure you did catch it, but also it was clear that cultural imperialism and intervention was coming.
When the president talked about these thousands of American diplomats and health workers and everyone else who was going to be deployed to Iraq, to teach them how to be other than Muslims, I guess we want to have them look like Lady Gaga and be enthusiastic about abortion and all of those kind of things.
But here, there was Obama the imperialist at his most dreadful, really.
Well, you know, that brings up, I mean, who we turn the country over to, and that is Sistani and Sader, and no, women's rights is not taking an advancement, and cultural imperialism isn't going to accomplish a darn thing.
We just undid every bit of what I guess you could call modern Western progress in that society, which was the most like the West of all the Arab states, other than Jordan, maybe, I guess, which I've never been to either of them, but as far as women being able to teach college in blue jeans, that doesn't happen all over the Middle East, but that's how it used to be in Baghdad before that war.
Yeah, you know, I'm one that thinks that I don't want to send anybody across the ocean to teach anybody anything, how to be like us.
I think it's self-defeating, I don't think it's worthwhile, and I think it causes worry.
But I'll tell you the worst thing about the Iraq war, is as long as Saddam was in power, he was the cork in the neck of the bottle.
Those people who were fighting us in South Asia were staying in South Asia.
They couldn't get to the Levant, to Syria, to Jordan, to Gaza, to Lebanon.
They couldn't get to Turkey.
Now they're all there.
We created a highway right across Iraq into the mainstream of the Middle East.
And I think history will show that Saddam was the best kind of ally.
He was murderous, but we didn't need to pay him because he was going to do it anyway.
Right, well, and he was a more or less secular fascist of the Sunni tribes there.
So if there was to be, you know, Al-Qaeda radicalism type influence anywhere, it would have been in Anbar province or in Tikrit or wherever, where he had the most influence and the most incentive to not let that last one day.
That's why Zarqawi was hiding out in American Kurdistan in the run-up to the war, Mike.
And that's why George Bush told the military no ten times when they were, maybe it was seven, Jim McLeisheski did the thing for NBC and there was a bunch more too, where they wanted to go into Kurdistan where they had free reign and kill Zarqawi before the war.
And Bush wouldn't let him because they needed Colin Powell to be able to say that Zarqawi had a fake leg that Saddam gave him and was the link between Osama and Saddam for their war propaganda.
Well, I worked, I just happened to know it because I worked on it for about two years.
We knew basically for a year, almost every day, where Zarqawi was in Northern Iraq, what camp he was in, what building he lived in.
And that information went to the White House every day until they finally said, we don't care.
But it wouldn't even take, it would take no clues on the ground.
When did they say that?
Approximately what month?
What year?
Well, they finally said, we're sick of hearing this, so probably December, December of two, January of three, um, the, the, the, what they kept telling the Powell speech, well, what they kept telling the intelligence community was there were, they, they were still trying to wine and dine the French and the Germans into going to Iraq with them.
And they were afraid if we killed Zarqawi, uh, with an airstrike, they would think we were cowboys and they wouldn't go.
And now, Scott, we're in that, we're in the insane position of Zarqawi in the short time he was active, probably is responsible for killing more American service personnel than Saddam's army was in two wars.
And you know, he didn't even declare himself Al Qaeda in Iraq until the end of like the last day of December, 2004.
Yeah.
Man.
All right.
Well, so, okay, we got to wrap this up, but let me try to ask you something smart here to do it.
I'm the president, you're my national security advisor.
I'm sorry, dude, your opinions matter a lot, but still you work for me and here are your two choices for our policy, right?
Uh, or no, here's your, here's your orders.
We're calling off the whole thing.
We're ending the occupations and the support for every dictator.
We are disengaging completely from the Middle East and the entire war on terror.
And if there's going to be a war on terror at all, I'm going to let you run it.
But the best you got is Interpol and maybe the CIA a little bit, but you don't get to have a war on terror because I think that any war on terror, and I know you don't agree with this, we've talked about it before, but I think that any war on terror is just more on that six on that list of six reasons that's going to make this thing a permanent clash of civilizations like the neocons want, and I will not tolerate it.
So can we just do that?
Can we minimize this thing down to serious and effective and meaningful police work?
Find someone, some bounty hunter somewhere to cut Zawahiri's throat and end this stupid war forever or what?
No, I would resign immediately and go public with that.
I think we've tried that, Scott.
I think Clinton tried it for seven or eight years.
He was very assiduous in using Interpol and police forces, and none of it worked.
The only thing that's going to work is a direct debate and alteration in our foreign policy.
Well, I gave you that, though.
I gave you the complete withdrawal and the end of the list of the six reasons from before and even the few that George Bush and Obama have added on top of those.
Those reasons are all gone now, so we've uninflamed the Muslim world as much as we can at this point in my fantasy here.
Well, I'm afraid I don't see how that could happen.
If that could happen, then you might be able to get away with police efforts, some CIA efforts, and some special forces efforts.
I would say yes, but my God, you know, Scott, until we do anything about oil, none of this can stop.
If you want to really focus on the key to this whole problem with terrorism, it's energy.
Until we do something about that, we're going to keep exactly the same position we are, no matter who's president.
Well, you know, what really frustrates me about that, and maybe I'm wrong about this, my estimation of it, Lord knows I'm no CIA analyst from way back, but it seems to me like what that's really about is our state's control of those resources to keep Russia and China from being a near-peer competitor.
It's not about our ability to buy gasoline at the pump, because it's going to be for sale even if the Chinese are the dominant force in the region.
Well, I would say if the Russians don't need it, they have enough of their own.
Right, but it's all strategery.
It's not just about Houston making dollars, which of course is part of it, but it's about our state checking the power of these other states in this global game of empire that I don't want to play.
I don't care who controls the Caucasus at all.
I don't care at all.
Well, I think that's, and neither do I, but I think the reality is that...
I mean, I still want oil from there, but I think I can get it anyway.
That's my point.
Oh, I think you can get it anyway.
I agree with that.
You can get some oil from the Middle East without supporting the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Emiratis, but the Congress is owned, Scott.
You know, we have to start doing something for ourselves here.
We've got to do offshore drilling.
We've got to do nuclear energy.
We've got to do all of it.
And the sooner the better, because I don't want to keep paying for oil with the life of Marines.
Yeah, well said, and a good place to leave it.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Mike.
I appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Take care of yourself.
All right, everybody.
That's Michael Shoyer.
He is the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell.
You can find him at antiwar.com and at thediplomat.com.
