Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Gareth Porter the Great.
He is the author of Perils of Dominance about Vietnam, and he's the author of Manufactured Crisis about Iran's civilian safeguarded nuclear program.
And, of course, about 10,000 articles about everything important in the world, all of the terror wars, and all of this stuff.
Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and Rights of the American Conservative at Truthout.
We republish everything at Antiwar.com, one way or the other.
This one is at Truthdig.
Could Trump take down the American empire?
I don't know, Gareth.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
So there's some things we all know about things Trump has at least said about his foreign policy beliefs.
His policies are another matter, but there's new insight that you have gained here, obviously, from reading the Woodward book.
As does happen, funny enough, I learned some things in there.
Notably, the most important thing, I thought, was the part about General Kellogg really wanted to get out of Afghanistan and was on the side of Bannon and Trump there on that before Trump fired Bannon and went along with the rest of them.
But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, but that was the most important note there.
But you learned a lot, and so what you're asking here is if Trump is anti-imperialist enough to actually do something about it.
He does have a particular right-wing populist point of view that doesn't believe in policing the world, does believe in kicking a lot of ass, but doesn't believe in taking responsibility for all of the rest of humanity forever in that kind of a way.
We saw this.
I'm just rambling here, but you know what?
It's important.
We saw this in 2013 when Obama said, we're going to go save the people from the evil dictator that's using gas on them.
And the American right said, we don't care enough about the Syrians to go and bomb them and protect them like is being sold to us.
Screw them.
And so we, the anti-war people, were like, OK, well, that's good enough for us, I guess.
And so that attack was avoided at the time.
That's the best we can get out of the right.
That's sort of Donald Trump's point of view, although he has attacked Assad twice over fake gas attacks.
But you can see where he comes from, that sort of populist, reluctant right point of view.
But what difference does it make when he always ends up siding with the go-ahead-and-be-pretend-macho-and-kick-ass side of every argument?
Well, of course, he doesn't always end up on that side of the argument.
That's really the point of this article and the point that I think Woodward's book Fear really documents quite convincingly.
And, you know, it's not a matter so much, in my view at least, of Trump being, quote, anti-imperialist.
That term almost inevitably invokes a kind of perspective that is associated with the left.
And certainly that is not Trump's perspective.
I would say he's coming at it from a mercantilist or neo-mercantilist point of view, which does mean that he is not interested in protecting the rest of the world.
That's true.
But going beyond that, he's more interested or more concerned with protecting the flow of money out of the United States to other countries than he is in.
I mean, he's interested in not having that outflow to other countries and, if possible, having the inflow to replace the outflow.
So, I mean, that to me is the real sort of ideological underpinnings of his opposition to the wars and troops, stationing of troops that he has clearly opposed within the administration, which have caused so much worry on the part of the people who are responsible for the empire.
Well, you know, I mean, so the thing of it is this.
I mean, I don't know if he even understands it the way you and I would about, you know, all these international institutions basically as a fig leaf for American power and the way all this stuff supposedly works.
I mean, if you look at his criticisms of NATO, he said, you know what?
They're obsolete.
They ought to focus on fighting terrorism more.
In other words, come with us to Iran or whatever kind of crap.
But he never said, I want to withdraw from NATO.
He never said the thing is useless.
He always just said, you guys ought to spend more on weapons.
And by the way, we have some for sale and this kind of deal.
So it always just seemed to me like it's really hardball.
I've never heard him actually question the permanence of the NATO alliance in any significant way at all.
Have you?
Well, no, I haven't.
I think you're absolutely right.
From my point of view, that is precisely what I was trying to get at in saying that he's not anti-imperialist, but rather neo-mercantilist.
You're right.
He's not so much concerned with the existence of NATO as he is with the money flows that are associated with it.
And with, again, making sure that the United States is not committed through NATO to any engagements that really are unnecessary.
So there's a big difference between his point of view and anti-imperialism.
But at the same time, it's very possible that he could achieve some of the results that anti-imperialists really would like to see.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so the thing he's been best on so far is Korea, right?
Over George W. Bush and Barack Obama's dead body, Trump has said, hey, South Korean doves, go ahead.
Take the lead.
Get this done.
Let's make sure to thank me for it.
And so and it's been great so far.
There's all this progress.
I can hardly keep track of all the great little sub agreements that the North and South Korean governments have made with each other, including some real significant ones very recently about demilitarizing the DMZ, for God's sake, if you could ever imagine that.
And so talk about that part of the Woodward book, too, about how this really this really struck me about the Woodward book was that.
And I think all of us can imagine Trump being very mad and yelling and screaming at people and being considered by his subordinates as a little bit unhinged or something like that.
But all the times in the book that they call him unhinged, all the times that they consider what he's doing to be crazy, insane, out of control, blah, blah, blah, all those kind of characterizations.
It's always when he's calmly announcing he really wants to get the troops out of Korea.
And they just simply disagree about the policy.
It's never like, you know, the scenes of Bill Clinton throwing his purple fits where he stomps his feet and, you know, gets all angry or whatever.
It's not like that.
And then Trump said, I want to get the troops out of Korea.
And we all agreed he's a madman.
You know, I think that's true that that he's very all the indications are from the Woodward book and from all the other sources that have been published.
And it's not just Woodward, but other press accounts that make the same point or show the same reality, which is that Trump has repeatedly expressed, you know, I would say puzzlement, just being disturbed and even irritated, if not angry, with his aides over the fact that we still have all these commitments left over from, you know, past days.
Many decades in the past, in some cases, and in other cases, very new commitments that were made in the previous administration or two.
And that he has been calm, but very determined.
And that that is what is really upsetting them.
It's not his demeanor.
It's the substance of his position.
And you're right.
South Korea is the one issue which I think he has been creating the greatest waves, the greatest disturbances within the permanent war complex, if you will, then more than any other.
And I think here this is the perfect illustration of his his neo-mercantilism, if you will, at work, because he makes it clear from the beginning in the accounts that that Woodward provides in his book that what disturbs him here is that the South Koreans are getting a free pass.
They're getting U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.
It's not free, but they're getting a huge discount, a huge sort of subsidy from the U.S. military for the stationing of U.S. troops.
And specifically, we learn from the book.
I hadn't seen this anywhere else, although I'm sure it must have been published elsewhere, that the total cost per year of the stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea is two billion dollars.
So the cost is two billion dollars a year, of which the United States is paying one point two billion.
And the South Koreans are paying eight hundred million.
Well, you know, to Trump, that's that's chump.
That's that's a chump deal for the United States.
And he doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
And he's saying, let's pull him out.
Now, there may be there may be other elements to his thinking here besides the fact that the South Koreans are getting a good deal.
And, you know, presumably as time goes by, he realizes more and more that those troops are just not needed.
And so that is certainly underlying his position, I would say, to one degree or another and to a greater degree as time goes by.
But it really begins with the argument that he immediately comes out with is one about how much it's costing the United States.
And they're the ones who should be paying for it.
But I do think, in fact, that Trump is moving toward a position with the help, I must say, of President Moon of South Korea, of being able to say, regardless of what the South Koreans are willing to pay, the United States doesn't need to be there.
And there's no point in our having a troop station in South Korea.
Yeah.
All right.
So, you know, maybe I should have kind of started with this or maybe I should just forget it.
But it's kind of interesting to me that there's this guy, Walter Russell Mead, who, you know, he's like this professor of international relations type.
I think he's probably pretty bad on most stuff.
So he has this kind of theory of international relations where he says it's the Hamiltonians, the Wilsonians, the Jeffersonians and the Jacksonians.
Well, I said them out of chronological order there.
Jeffersonians and Jacksonians and Hamiltonians and Wilsonians there.
And so I guess Ron Paul would have been the Jeffersonian and, you know, like in the inaugural address and all that.
But then so that makes Trump kind of the funhouse mirror, you know, horror movie version.
The Jacksonians who are perfectly willing to hawk it up and whoop it up and fight.
And we're going to obliterate ISIS.
We're going to bring back torture and, you know, all of this kind of thing.
Escalate the air war over Afghanistan, for example, troops, too, but especially the air war.
And so here's a guy who is saying things like, well, you know, what do we even do in Afghanistan?
The whole thing is ridiculous and stupid and we shouldn't do it.
And then, by the way, who even needs a strategy?
Just kill people.
Just isn't that your job?
Go over there and kill them until they're all dead or something.
What's taking so long?
And so he just as soon bombed them all to death as bring them home, because what's the use?
And it's a matter of if you ask him before or after lunch, because there's no real principle involved.
He's just a crotchety old man.
Well, he's a crotchety old man, but it's the military that is telling him that he needs to remove all those restraints that Obama placed on the military.
And he's going along with it.
Now, of course, he deserves to be criticized for having agreed to that.
But let's be clear that this this move to basically remove restraints on bombing and drone strikes in Afghanistan is something that the military is pushing on him.
Whereas, you know, in fact, from his point of view, it would be better if we got out of there completely.
So I'm not absolving him by any means.
That's far from it.
But but I think we need to be clear that the primary responsibility here for not not legally the primary responsibility for pushing that line comes from the war, the war complex itself.
Yeah, well, and, you know, really, he really is just like Barack Obama on this, where he knows better, but then he goes along anyway.
And, you know, basically, it's arm wrestling match and they win every time he gives into them when he could just as easily tell them to go to hell.
He's supposed to be the boss.
The buck stops here and all of that thing, you know.
And and in fact, you know, when they say this, what really bothers me about this is all this reporting about these people and the way that they weigh these decisions.
They all just sound so stupid.
I mean, I believe it.
I have no real reason to.
It's just a Woodward book shrug.
But supposedly Mattis says that, well, we're trying to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square.
That's why we have to do this when everybody knows that the Times Square attack was provoked by the CIA's drone war in Pakistan.
The guy was a perfectly happy, perfectly adjusted American citizen, in fact, had a wife and a house and an advanced degree in a professional career.
And he went home to Pakistan to visit relatives and he saw dead people from an American drone strike and volunteered to the Pakistani Taliban, which had never attacked America.
The Tariki Taliban had no beef with us until this.
And they recruited him to try to blow up Times Square.
And these idiots want to say that the war is preventing that kind of thing.
And that's the best example that they have.
Right.
And that's that is just so reprehensible.
You know, we can hardly find the words for it.
I agree.
Just just to put an exclamation point on that story, however, just let me put that particular quote in context in the context of the sequence of events in the Trump administration.
This was what occurred in the summer of 2017.
And this is really a critical story in this whole series of episodes, because this was the occasion in which Trump was complaining bitterly about the Pentagon's asking for more, more ability to make war in North Africa because they were saying, you know, the situation in North Africa is getting out of control.
This is ISIS affiliates in North Africa that we're trying to track down.
And so we need more freedom of operations.
We need more people.
We need more bombs and so on and so forth.
And what what Trump said was he didn't see why this was necessary.
And he said he complained that you're trying to get me to station troops to keep troops and put troops in everywhere in the world.
And that's where Mattis came out.
And he said, I don't understand why we have to do this.
And that's when Mattis came out and said, well, Mr. President, we're doing this so a bomb doesn't go off in Times Square.
And this is a key point that I think everybody needs to understand.
That Trump's response to him was that you can make the same argument for any country in the entire face of the globe.
So this is just to point out that Trump didn't buy Mattis's argument at all.
And in fact, that it was that episode that caused Mattis to suggest that they take Trump off to the tank in the Pentagon in the hope that maybe taking him away from the White House and subjecting them to this atmosphere would have a stronger effect of their arguments.
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Well, so a couple of things there.
I mean, first of all, there was another thing right along these lines where, when they went to Camp David, and they cornered him on Afghanistan, where, and I criticized him for this.
I explained at the time, you see exactly what they're doing here, is they're saying, they're using the example of Obama's withdrawal from Iraq to say, anything that happens bad in a country after you withdraw troops from it will be your fault for withdrawing troops from it.
Whereas, anything bad that happens while troops are still there, well, geez, that's just despite their best efforts.
And meanwhile, Trump himself, unbelievably, right, unbelievably, and magically, in the annals of all of American politics, got it so right when he said, Obama created ISIS by backing the jihadists in Libya, and especially by backing the jihadists in Syria, for years before the rise of the Islamic State there.
And then, also, he pulled the troops out of Iraq, so when the Islamic State rolled into Iraq, there was no one there to stop him.
And Trump had said that in the campaign at least once or twice, but then he dropped the part about Libya and Syria.
And he truncated, under instruction from whoever, the whole rant to, well, he pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So once that myth was bought, then, apparently, according to Woodward, that Mattis, and you cite this in your article too, that Mattis used this against him right here.
That if you pull troops out of Afghanistan, and ISIS goes on to fight one more day, I'm going to blame it on you and say that I told you so.
Now that there's this group of basically a bunch of Pakistanis calling themselves the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, what?
And yeah, good enough to count for – I'm sorry, go ahead.
This is a critical point that I want to just expand on a bit because this argument that you're citing, which is absolutely correct, that this was the point that got to Trump sufficiently to get him to give in at this Camp David conference.
And that he cited in his speech announcing the escalation.
He cited exactly this argument.
That's right.
And it was that same argument in different circumstances that was used by the military and its allies against Obama.
When Obama was opposing the escalation of U.S. troop engagement in Afghanistan in 2009, it was the same argument that was used with LBJ to get him to give in and let the military have its way in Vietnam.
And I talk about this in my book on Vietnam, about how LBJ was still holding out in early 2005 when McNamara and Bundy wrote a letter to him which intimated that they could no longer support his policy because he was de facto allowing the communists to win.
And that once – when it happened, if and when the communists took power, they would not be able to defend him.
In other words, they would go to Congress and the media and blame LBJ.
So this is the same tactic that has been used over and over again in the annals of U.S. wars by the military and their national security elite friends to force a president against his will to go along with their plans for either going into war or escalating the war.
All right.
Now, another part of these guys being right-wingers and not Ron Paulian types at all is that the best you can ever get out of them is let's pull out of one war so we can escalate in another.
So, for example, Stephen Bannon was relatively good on Afghanistan, wanted to get out of there one way or the other, was – never mind the whole Blackwater garbage for a moment just for time's sake here or to stay on point – but he certainly wanted to end the war there one way or the other.
But was – and I think was less worse on Syria as well, right?
But then was worse on Iran.
And then he had Mattis, who is the mad dog Mattis who hates Iran so much, was also less – was less worse on Iran but was worse on Syria.
Have to stay and double down with the Kurds there to prevent Iranian influence there.
And just like when Obama was dealing with Iran on the nuclear deal but then backing Saudi against them in Syria and in Yemen, we have this ridiculous schizophrenic policy where none of these guys have a consistent position on Iranian influence there other than they're really upset about it.
But what to do about it is always – they're always kind of at odds against each other on it.
And they don't even really seem to have defined these questions very carefully in the first place, actually.
Not South Korea, excuse me.
We should get out of Syria so that we can be prepared – Afghanistan primarily – so that we can be prepared for war with China.
I mean he was pointing China as the main enemy.
So I think the point here is that all of these characters who want to be credible or I don't know exactly what their game is always have to have a primary enemy or a primary conflict that they can say we're really in it all the way.
Right.
Yeah, I mean that's my worst nightmare, right?
Is that somebody finally listens to me and they get out of the Middle East and it only leads directly to war with the Russians and the Chinese over some stupid atoll or some troop movement right on NATO's doorstep, i.e. within Russian borders or something.
Yeah, of course.
I mean that's the great nightmare that we all have.
And at this point, I mean look, I'm quite convinced that basically the armed services and the civilian Pentagon have no interest in a war with either Russia or China.
But they have obviously the interest in justifying not only the weapon systems but the military strategy that takes them right up to the edge of China, the borders of China and Russia.
And that is where the danger lies.
Because as Mort Halperin once wrote, prophetically I think, if you give the military a weapon system, they will ultimately want to use it.
They will ultimately find a situation where they have to make an argument that the weapon system is needed.
In other words, there's a whole train of consequences to giving them the military wherewithal to fight a war.
And I think both this present situation in regard to China policy and the situation in regard to Russia policy are primary examples of this.
And that is what I am going to focus on more and more in the coming months and years.
Good.
Listen, here's another thing I'd forgotten about, Gareth, on the previous point, but it's here in my notes.
Page 196.
Bannon makes a deal with Mattis.
If you support containing China more, I guess, then I'll shut up about Afghanistan.
Because after all, the reason we're in Afghanistan is to block the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative as if they're rolling through Afghanistan any decade soon.
But since that's the pretext, it's about China anyway.
Bad news for you posh toons.
You thought this was about you, but yeah.
Look, the Chinese are already engaged in Afghanistan.
They're buying the rights to minerals there.
I mean, that's what they do.
They buy the rights to raw materials, to minerals.
They don't put troops in.
That's all.
That's the difference.
And that should not be a matter of any concern for the United States.
Even mercantilists don't care about Chinese getting access to raw materials.
That is none of their business.
They don't care.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing about politicians, though, is the economics of politics are all that matter to them.
So we saw this with Petraeus invoking all the mineral wealth down in the Helmand province as the reason that we have to win this war and stay somehow.
There's a trillion dollars worth of mineral wealth under land that we could never develop with $50 billion, with $100 billion in 50 years.
Could never develop those resources in the Helmand province because those guys will shoot you.
And you'd have to build railroads and highways and et cetera, et cetera.
All of this.
Not there.
You just can't.
It was obviously a sham.
But what does he know about it?
Right.
Only enough to use it as a talking point in The New York Times.
That's all.
And then to try to.
They came up with that back in 2010.
Then they tried to tempt Trump with that as well.
That's right.
Of course.
And you know, the thing is that they could, if they want, they could tell the Taliban, we'll help you develop your mineral resources.
Let's just get a peace agreement here.
We'll help you with the mineral resources and you can be rich and take credit for it and have all the legitimacy in the world for an Islamist or Islamic government.
It would work.
I'm quite sure.
And by the way, about that tank meeting back to that point.
I think I remember the AP version of that when it happened was that it worked real well.
And he said, OK, you guys convinced me.
Apparently there's a discrepancy about that.
No, that's not what happened in the tank.
What happened in the tank was that after they tried to ply Trump with this idea of of how wonderful the liberal international order was that had been built over the decades by the Republicans and the Democrats.
And Trump said, well, he didn't say anything.
He just shook his head knowingly.
Obviously, he didn't buy that for a moment.
And then Trump changed the subject to South Korea and brought up the whole business of the need for the United States to get out of South Korea and how it was costing the United States too much and the South Koreans ought to be paying for it.
And it was at that point that Reince Priebus, then the chief of staff for Trump, called the whole thing off, recognizing that it was a total flop.
They had totally failed to turn Trump, even the slightest, in the direction they wanted him.
Yeah.
Well, except that every bit of all of the wars keep grinding on.
So they didn't feel that bad.
And it's not like he sailed the Navy home or anything yet.
So I get it that he's failed to say, wow, you guys are really smart.
I guess I agree with you.
Right.
That hasn't happened.
But he's gone along with them anyway on everything, I guess.
But I'm glad also, I actually quoted this whole thing, wrote it down in my notes.
I'm glad you quote it, too, in your article here, where Tillerson argued to him that this is what's kept the peace for 70 years, which I guess you could say, I mean, he meant this is why we didn't have a major power war in Europe or with the Chinese or Russians or something like that.
But boy, there are a hell of a lot of dead Koreans and Vietnamese and Iraqis and Afghans and Syrians and Libyans and Malians and God knows who.
Hey, Latin Americans in the Reagan years and God knows who.
Indonesians who suffered under the American empire in the post Cold War years.
But none of those people even make the slightest mention, even as a footnote to him.
Well said, Scott.
And I this is this is one of the tropes of the of the war machine that most enrages me.
And I intend to write something about it soon.
I mean, this is it's so completely beyond the pale for these people to talk about the liberal international order that they built and which has kept the peace for 70 years.
We've got to squash that one.
That's for sure.
Yeah, well, I mean, Exxon is Standard Oil, New Jersey.
And those were the guys who built this so called liberal order in the first place.
So makes sense that that would be his position after all.
From their point of view, it has been a marvel of peace and prosperity.
You're right.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of people don't know this.
And I forget all my footnotes now.
But yeah, after World War Two, I mean, the State Department wasn't much.
They didn't have ambassadors every country in the world and all this kind of stuff.
But Standard Oil did.
And so the State Department built their entire operation in Standard Oil offices for starters all over the world.
Standard Oil people basically built the State Department.
Of course, the Rockefellers financed the Council on Foreign Relations whole time.
And it was all their men who staffed all the new positions and all of that kind of thing.
And the whole thing was a project in the first place.
You don't think it's an accident that Rex Tillerson was the one who quoted the wonderful phrase that the liberal international order and talked about how it kept the peace for 70 years?
Yeah, well, I think there's a correlation to that causation.
That's all I think, you know.
All right.
So now, so Israel, Adelson, Iran, and Trump say things.
Yeah.
You know, this is the explanation that I have to provide every time I say anything that suggests that Trump could play a useful role in bringing down at least some significant parts of the permanent war state, the empire, the military empire, if you will, because people always say, well, what about Iran and Tillerson?
And Adelson and the infeudation, if you will, of the President Trump and his White House to Israel?
And they're absolutely right, of course.
I've been saying that for many months.
And that is certainly at odds with any useful role that Trump can play in terms of U.S. foreign policy.
But on the other hand, I don't think it's the case that even with bringing in John Bolton as national security adviser, which was clearly done because that's what Adelson wanted.
I don't think Trump made that decision on his own.
I think it was forced on him by Adelson without any question.
And I think that, you know, Bolton wants to have a war with Iran.
He never has not wanted to have a war with Iran.
But I'm not convinced that Trump is going to follow Bolton in regard to a war.
I just don't think that's going to happen.
I think that it doesn't require even the degree of confusion that we see in Trump's mind about a lot of things.
It doesn't require much more than that to see that there's no possibility of an attack on Iran that wouldn't result in some horrible consequences in the Middle East, including a probable war in Israel itself.
Both from certainly from Iran, because they have the capability to retaliate now, which they didn't have 10 or 15 years ago when the neocons were trying to get the United States into a war with Iran.
But, you know, Hezbollah could also rain missiles and rockets on Israeli territory.
They may not reach all of Israel, but they could reach some significant parts of Israel and cause havoc in populated areas.
So, I mean, you know, it just it just doesn't follow that despite or because of of the infudation, as I call it, of Trump and his administration to the neo to the Adelson faction of the Zionists, that that the United States is going to get into a war with Iran.
I don't think that that's likely at all.
Yeah, well, I feel the same way about it as you in terms of kind of, you know, my my sort of overall impression is they would need a new and improved pretext for war and they just don't have one.
And it would have to be credible enough to satisfy somebody other than themselves, you know, and they just don't have it.
I mean, the Iranians just aren't making nukes.
Netanyahu's little stunt at the UN again, you know, amounts to a ridiculous hoax.
Every look at Daniel Harrison's little blog post on that where the translation is literally nowhere land is where he said this thing was this secret nuclear this and that all they're doing in Iraq and their intervention in Iraq is backing the same guys as America, just as it's been since 2003.
So I got no excuse to complain.
They're still backing the Hazaras, our friends in Afghanistan.
No problem there.
And so, you know, they're going to have to come up with something to accuse them of that, you know, the British prime minister can haul out as an excuse before the House of Commons or something.
But they have nothing.
Yeah.
And, you know, even though in the past I have suggested that John Bolton would try to come up with that kind of Cheney ask excuse for an attack on Iran, which he did, you know, try to attempt in 2007.
We know that that, you know, Cheney did propose that we take advantage of some kind of attack in Iraq that could be blamed, that would would cause multiple casualties in U.S. troops and could be blamed on Iran.
And that would be the basis for a U.S. attack on an IRGC base inside the the Iranian borders.
And I thought, you know, it was likely that Bolton would try to come up with something similar.
But I'm quite convinced that if Bolton did try to do that, and that's still a possibility, that the military, the Pentagon and the armed services would unite behind a warning to Trump, you're being tricked.
Don't fall for it.
If you do, we'll expose it.
We'll expose it anyway.
I think that there are ways that we now can see that Bolton is hemmed in in his ability to try to do what what Cheney failed to do in 2007 because the Pentagon came down hard on him.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, one more thing here real quick.
And I'm sorry, I got to go because I'm late for my other interview.
I screwed up everything today.
So I'm just going to roll with it.
Did you already know or were you impressed by the fact the way it's portrayed by Woodward here that Donald Trump's lawyer, Dowd, said to him, hey, did you do this?
The Russia BS.
And that Trump said, no.
And he said, OK, so you don't care if I turn over everything you've got over to the prosecutors here.
And Trump said, go ahead.
And that Dowd gave them every freaking scrap of paper from the entire campaign and everything that they could think of to give them and develop this personal relationship with Mueller's right hand man.
Listen, pal, every day, you know that you have confidence that I am being totally open and honest and working with you.
Right.
Right.
Every day reaffirmed all the time.
Here's everything we have told, instructed all the witnesses to absolutely spill your guts about everything, you know, please.
And et cetera, like that, because I never heard that before, honestly.
And I've read some kind of right wing pro Trump stuff about this where but I had never heard the narrative that Trump really had told his lawyer, turn over every freaking thing because I don't give a damn because you got nothing.
And that, you know, in other words, he was really backing up his claim of a witch hunter where or that at least he certainly believed that he had nothing to hide from them about it.
Yeah, I think that's I think that's correct.
That is probably what happened.
I believe that is what happened.
And, you know, I mean, I don't believe that Trump was, you know, colluding, you know, certainly consciously colluding with the Russians in any way.
That's that's never as far as I'm concerned.
That's never been the issue.
So I think it's I think it's credible, credible story.
Yeah, well, and you know, I hate being the guy's lawyer and everything.
But what hysteria?
You know, there's so many examples of things that are supposed to amount to something that end up amounting to nothing.
And just like with Iraq, if you take all the accusations and combine them together, makes a great story.
If you take each one of them one at a time, virtually none of them stand up or at least mean what they're said to mean.
Exactly.
And watch watch for my next piece at Consortium News very soon on the whole myth about the Russians using social media to swing the vote in favor of Trump, or to even be close to being able to do so as Shane and Mazetti in New York Times claimed on September 20th.
And there are there very long article.
Yeah, ridiculous thing.
Okay, yeah, can't wait for your we've all seen and talked with Joe Lori about his takedown of that piece, but can't wait for your follow up there at Consortium News.
Alright, this one is called could Trump take down the American Empire by I added the man at truth dig.
Thanks again, man.
Thanks a lot.
Talk to you soon.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute.org at Scott Horton.org antiwar.com and reddit.com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book fool's errand timed and the war in Afghanistan at fool's errand.us
