Hey guys, I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party in Rhode Island on October the 27th and then November the 3rd with Ron Paul and Lou Rockwell and a bunch of others down there in Lake Jackson.
Jeff Deist and all them, Mises Institute, are having me out to give a talk about media stuff.
And that's November the 3rd down there in Lake Jackson.
If you like Ron Paul events and you're nearby, I'll see you there.
Sorry I'm late!
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR!
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had!
You've been took!
You've been hoodwinked!
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
My name is Johnny Burtka, and on behalf of the Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy, I'd like to welcome you to tonight's lecture entitled, The Negative Impact of the Unnecessary War on Terrorism.
This evening's presentation provides us the sobering opportunity to learn about how America's 17-year and counting war on terror undermines our strategic interests in the Middle East and threatens the safety and happiness of the American people.
Before we get started, I'd like to say a brief word about our host today.
The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy brings together people from across the political spectrum on a monthly basis to discuss the most important issues relating to national security with the aim of restoring the authority of the Constitution in order to create a more peaceful and secure world.
In their own words, the Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy believes that the United States must pursue a realistic and restrained foreign policy.
Foundational to responsible and thoughtful foreign policy is the need for congressional consent for all acts of war.
Too often, Congress has taken a back seat in directing military actions, acquiescing to the President.
The Constitution spells out in Article I that the authority to authorize war comes exclusively from Congress.
And we gather here today in the shadow of Capitol Hill to assess the negative impact of America's war on terror, which has cost U.S. taxpayers over $2 trillion, $600 billion more than World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.
Taken the lives of 4,400 troops and injured 32,000 more and destabilized an entire region by creating U.S.-made fail states in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, which provide terrorists more space and cover to train than Afghanistan ever offered to begin with.
But perhaps, as our foreign policy elite often argue, the human, economic, and national security costs have been worth it.
As the saying goes, we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here.
If that were true, what about the numerous incidents of, quote, backdraft terrorism, including the Boston bombing and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting that were in part motivated, according to the terrorists themselves, as a reaction to America's Afghan war?
And how about the global migrant crisis facing Europe as tens of thousands of refugees flee war-torn Middle Eastern countries for the shores of Greece, Spain, and Italy?
Surely these outcomes must be indicative that something has gone terribly awry.
And yet, in the face of 17 years of evidence to the contrary, the only response from our politicians, pundits, and generals is more money, more troops, and more war.
Tonight's speaker, perhaps better than anyone else, has demonstrated why this formula will only lead to more problems.
Scott Horton is the author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, which former congressman Ron Paul called an important contribution to this vital effort of understanding the folly of Washington's warmongers.
Harvard's Stephen Walt praised it, saying, even readers who do not share Horton's libertarian worldview are likely to find themselves nodding in agreement.
The war in Afghanistan has indeed become a fool's errand.
And investigative journalist Gareth Porter dares anyone to read it who wants, quote, the full truth about this sword exercise in American imperial power.
Scott is the managing director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.com.
He has conducted more than 4,800 interviews since 2003.
His articles have appeared at Antiwar.com, the American Conservative, History News Network, the Future of Freedom, and the Christian Science Monitor.
He is a fan, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper's.
Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, investigative reporter Larissa Horton.
Please join me in welcoming Scott to the podium.
All right.
Thank you all very much for having me here tonight.
I really appreciate it.
So the first thing is, I'm going to say a bunch of antiwar stuff.
And so I want to disclaim just a little bit that plenty of combat veterans from the 21st century terror wars agree with me.
Former CIA officers, military officers, including a full bird colonel here who endorsed my book, Colonel McGregor.
Plenty of lieutenant colonels and captains and majors and specialists too who fought in Afghanistan and in Iraq tell me that they appreciate the book and that it's a good thing.
And I say that not just to disclaim, but also to, in a way, pick a little bit of a fight.
The hawks always hide behind the enlisted men with all of their arguments for any intervention.
And to oppose their plan for remaking whatever country is to backstab the soldiers, is to sell them out.
To support the troops is to support their policy, they say.
And that's frankly just wrong.
And especially in the United States of America where it's supposed to be a limited constitutional republic with full civilian, not just the president, but the people as the sovereign power in the country have civilian supremacy over the military.
And military men, mostly young men, when they join, they have no means to do or die.
And they trust, as they're taught in their public school system and in everything else, that in the democracy the adults, the civilian population of the country will discuss and debate and argue and figure out what to do and will vote and will choose the best leaders and those best leaders will only send them on missions that endanger their lives when it's absolutely necessary as they put it, to fight for our freedom, to fight to protect us, to protect their mom and dad and little sister back home.
That's what they are told they're volunteering for, not to implement the grand strategy of some egghead at a think tank who's never been in a fight in his life and who has a great plan for offensive war against people who've never attacked us.
And so it's just wrong that we're not supposed to discuss this and in fact, as we'll see, it's really wrong that supporting the war is supporting the troops at all.
The foreign policy is a betrayal of American soldiers and marines.
So, now, the war on terrorism itself the hard truth, I guess, for people to swallow but the most important one is that America started it.
This is not a case of foreign civilization that is intent on coming and destroying all that is good, true and beautiful in western civilization because they have nothing better to do.
In reality, America picked this fight and I'll go through this real quick because we're kind of short on time and I don't want to dwell too much on the facts and I think you guys probably know a lot of this history although maybe not as told with this narrative.
But Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan they backed the Afghan Mujahideen and they backed a lot of Arab fighters who went in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet Union and they did that in order to, in their words, give the Soviets their own Vietnam a no-win, destructive quagmire that would break the bank destabilize their country.
They also both backed Saddam Hussein in his attack and 8-year war against Iran in an attempt to contain the results of the Iranian revolution of 1979 when led by Shiite religious leadership they overthrew the American sock puppet dictator the Shah Reza Pahlavi and so America supported Saddam Hussein in that war.
Everybody knows that, we're on the same page so far.
Then we get to the 1990s and Saddam Hussein has a dispute with Kuwait over war debts and he invades.
There was more to it than that but to sum it up.
America launches what's known as Operation Desert Storm the Iraq War 1 basically to drive Saddam back out again and of course right around this time the Soviet Union is falling apart, the Cold War is ending and the Soviets are withdrawing from Afghanistan.
Something that many people know but maybe not everyone remembers is that in the aftermath of the first Iraq War there was a Shiite uprising in the south of the country and also the Kurds in the north as well and George Bush personally encouraged this in a message on Voice of America and had the Air Force drop leaflets encouraging these army divisions to rise up and to overthrow Saddam Hussein, now is your chance.
But then they balked and they changed their mind and they called it off like the Bay of Pigs they put them out there and then they left them and the reason why they did is because they realized that Iranians and Iraqis who had taken Iran's side and fled to Iran in the Iran-Iraq War well they were coming across the border and they were taking the leadership over the Shiite uprising and James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and George Bush Sr.said oh no, we're reversing Ronald Reagan's policy of backing Saddam to contain Iran we're now importing the Iranian revolution into Iraq we didn't mean to do that, so they call it off and Saddam was allowed to keep enough tanks and attack helicopters that he massacred as many as 100,000 people in putting down that insurrection this is in the aftermath of the first Iraq War and then this became the reason the excuse for the Americans to stay in Saudi Arabia to keep the base, they already had some but they had expanded massively in order to launch Iraq War I and they decided they needed to keep those bases now to wage the no-fly zone air patrols over Iraq in the name of protecting those they just betrayed in the name of protecting the Shiites and of course to enforce the United Nations blockade and sanctions regime against Iraq and this then, under George Bush Sr.and Bill Clinton, this is the policy that turned the freedom fighters, the Mujahideen heroes that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had supported in Afghanistan into the enemies of the American people and in fact, Abdul Azam who has been Laden's mentor and the kind of founder of proto-Al Qaeda had told Eric Margulies back in 1986 that as soon as we're done with the Soviets we're coming for you next because he called America imperialist and Eric Margulies, he's a famous reporter a friend of mine, war reporter he said he had never heard anyone except an anti-American pro-Soviet communist call America an empire and he just laughed and said what are you talking about we are here helping you to fight the Soviets and he said yeah but you're an empire too because look at what you're doing with your building up the Carter Doctrine in the Persian Gulf, building your bases and dominating our part of the world, supporting governments that we don't approve of and so this is going to change and that was early warning right there so in the 1990s, Al Qaeda started attacking and there were quite a few attacks the assassination of Rabbi Khane in New York City in 1990 the first World Trade Center bombing there were attacks overseas including the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia which for political reasons was blamed on Iran in fact it was Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who had done it they killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there for the air patrols over Iraq and the no fly zone bombings over Iraq and the American people were deprived of the truth of what was going on there when they muddled the issue by blaming it on the Iranians and all this time during the 1990s Al Qaeda's strategy was to provoke an overreaction and people cite Beirut and Somalia in fact Bin Laden cited Beirut and Somalia and said it's easy to make the Americans turn and run but he also said that he was trying to bait America into a full scale war in Somalia in 1993 that he wanted to wage a war of attrition against us there he wanted to replicate the war that America had helped him wage against and helped the Afghans wage against the Soviet Union in Somalia as early as 1993 and then after he was exiled from Sudan and moved to Afghanistan in 1996 the game was to try to get America to overreact so in my book I quote an interview from 2010 Osama Bin Laden was still alive at this point it's an interview in Rolling Stone magazine with one of Osama Bin Laden's sons not one of his terrorist sons but one that gives interviews to Rolling Stone magazine he said my father's dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan he would do the same thing he did to the Russians I was surprised the Americans took the bait I so much respected the mentality of President Clinton he was the one who was smart when my father attacked his places he sent a few cruise missiles to my father's training camp he didn't get my father but after all the war in Afghanistan they still don't have my father they have spent hundreds of billions better for the Americans to keep the money for their economy in Clinton's time America was very very smart not like the bull that runs after the red scarf in Afghanistan when Bush was elected my father was so happy this is the kind of president he needs one who will attack and spend money and break the country I'm sure my father wanted Senator McCain more than Obama in the 2008 election McCain has the same mentality as Bush so instead of cowering and saying we have really tough macho Republicans who are willing to unleash American power unlike Bill Clinton we better be careful instead Osama Bin Laden saw the perfect mark George Bush and Dick Cheney two guys and their team people that if he would provide them the pretext that they would exploit it that they would take full advantage he was deceived and fooled by Bin Laden so much as he cynically exploited the opportunity that Bin Laden gave him just as Bin Laden was betting that he would and what he wanted more than anything else was to get the Americans to invade Afghanistan to replicate the same fight that they had against the Soviets with our help a generation before and in fact Alan Cullison a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wrote in this letter that Bin Laden wrote to Mullah Omar shortly after the war began in 2001 after September 11th when they were being bombed severely and their government was being overthrown and Bin Laden wrote in this letter to Mullah Omar listen I know things look bad now but believe me in 10 years the Americans just like the Soviets before them will be bled dry and will be forced to leave in humiliation if they leave now they'll be humiliated if they leave then they'll be broken so please don't be mad I got you into this mess Mullah Omar it's for the greater good I should have held up my book I was quoting from alright so George Bush did exploit it he exploited it beyond any reason and I talk about in the book how they could have negotiated over Bin Laden gotten him from the Taliban without a war at all and even if you don't believe that they certainly didn't need to take over the whole country and create a new government and make enemies of all of its enemies or anything like that and that was the gigantic step that they took to declare that they were going to create a new democracy and a whole new way of life for the people of Afghanistan but then most famously Bush started Iraq War 2 absolutely unnecessarily even now it's unanimous everyone calls it completely uncontroversial a war of choice in other words an aggressive war something that absolutely did not have to happen at all and so we fought it for five years but what's the point what's to learn really from what happened in Iraq War 2 well what the Bush guys thought was that they were going to gain dominance they were going to help the Shiite majority of Iraq gain dominance and then they would have dominance over the Iraqi Shiite majority so when they launched that war they really picked up right where George Bush Senior had left off installing the Iranian backed militias and their political factions in power in the country and once they started there was no way to turn it off the Ayatollah Sistani said we're not going to have handpicked leaders we're not going to have one man one vote unless you want to start the war all over again and at that point other than just leave the only option for the Bush administration was to help the Shiite super majority win that civil war and most importantly complete almost entirely the sectarian cleansing of Baghdad of almost all of the Sunnis creating a new Iraqi Shiistan breaking the country creating this new Shiistan from Baghdad down to Kuwait and over to Iran and then their bet of course didn't play out didn't pan out it was the Iranians who the new Iraqi regime were far more friendly with and far more dependent on and so once America was done winning the war for them they said thanks now you can get the hell out we don't need you we don't want you they hadn't accomplished what they wanted they had accomplished exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do backing the Shiite side in the civil war they ended up empowering Iran well now in reaction to losing that civil war and the process of losing that civil war on the Sunni side they were then pushed into a brutal insurgency and you know hundreds certainly hundreds of thousands of people as many as a million people died in the civil war there and on the Sunni side al-Qaeda in Iraq which had never existed before the war only in Colin Powell's imagination and UN speech did it exist but after the war in fact a year and a half into the war in the fall of 2014 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared that he was loyal to Osama Bin Laden and his goals and named his group al-Qaeda in Iraq and so western Iraq George W. Bush had handed to Iran's friends and I'm sorry eastern Iraq and western Iraq he had handed to Osama Bin Laden's friends now the miracle here was the so-called awakening and David Petraeus and the US Army get the credit for it but that's not really what happened really what happened was it was the American army had pushed the Iraqi Sunni population into working with these guys in the first place but they made themselves very unwelcome rather quickly and the Iraqi Sunnis started turning on them and killing them as early as 2006 and so this was just the greatest stroke of luck I mean George Bush gives all of western Iraq to al-Qaeda guys and then the locals just basically virtually almost entirely eliminate them for us and that was amazing and it was convenient for Bush because and this is the second point that I think is the most important thing to learn to understand about Iraq war 2 was what Seymour Hersh the investigative reporter called the redirection and that was in 2006 when Zalmay Khalilzad and others in the administration finally got it through to Bush that we really have just fought a war for Iran's friends and we are going to lose out at the end here and boy are the Saudis angry at us and we've got to do something and so they started the redirection to try to make up for their massive pro-Iranian blunder that they would go back to the Saudis and their allies and work harder on the goals of the Sunni alliance in the region but there's a problem and that is that Saudi doesn't really have an army just al-Qaeda and Saudi had backed the Sunni based insurgency against the Americans in Iraq war 2 and then just like al-Qaeda were the left over mercs who had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and then went on to cause all this trouble well the generation of jihadis that fought in Iraq war 2 well they started coming home and one of the places they came home to was Libya where Saudi Arabia and America and NATO then immediately took their side George Bush had given them western Iraq accidentally Obama deliberately took the side of the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq starting in 2011 in that war against Muammar Gaddafi and then even the New York Times has it Hillary Clinton thinking she's clever called it her bank shot we'll take all the jihadists and the guns from Libya and we'll send them on to the next one in Syria and by choosing and for the very reason again for the same policy of the redirection that George Bush had started beginning to back al-Qaeda type fighters Bush had started in Lebanon in Syria and in Iran and then Obama was continuing this policy and so even as he explained it perfectly in a conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic that the whole reason to do this to try to get a regime change against Assad to back the Sunni insurgency the al-Qaeda led Sunni insurgency against Assad was to hurt Iran it wasn't to protect the people of Syria or something like that it was because George Bush had given Iran's best friends Baghdad and there was nothing that we could do to reverse that but maybe we can get a consolation prize by taking out Iran's last Arab allied state or second to last now in Bashar al-Assad and that was the reason that they did it and that was the reason that what they did essentially amounts to treason because where George Bush had accidentally done the greatest thing for Osama bin Laden that anyone could have ever imagined Obama doubled it and he did it deliberately and he knew and we all knew from 2011 on that the Saudis are sending jihadists to Syria to fight that's what's left of al-Qaeda in Iraq the Islamic state of Iraq it was calling itself already then was going to Syria and was taking charge of the revolution against Assad in Syria and they knew it all along and they did it anyway so here the American people only have one enemy force on the planet and that is al-Qaeda and yet our government prefers our enemies al-Qaeda to their enemies Iran and the axis of Shiite power in the Middle East that's never done anything to us but stands in the way of their goals of hegemony military dominance over that region so how can we continue to have these people as our security force when this is the level of bait and switch that they would stoop to when the American people give them the writ to protect us from those who would do the September 11th attack and they turn right around within just a few years they're backing those very same men sworn blood oath loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri the butcher of New York City and they're the men that our government prefers because Assad and Iran back Hezbollah which did not knock our towers down but is a hassle for Israeli and American policy in the region and if you listen to them now they say well the Islamic state is defeated, oh I left, this resulted in the rise of the Islamic state then and Iraq war 3 when support for the jihadist meant that one of these groups that broke off from al-Qaeda they took complete control of eastern Syria and western Iraq for three full years from 2014 through 17 the war only ended one year ago Iraq war 3 but they seized Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul and all the cities of western Iraq as well as in eastern Syria so now that that war is finally wrapping up and with the help of the United States in Iraq war 3 which again in Iraq was fought for guess who again the same Shiite militias that they wish they hadn't fought for in Iraq war 2 were the ones who rousted the Islamic state out of the Sunni regions for us and then they say now that we have to stay in Syria because Iran is there more than ever before but Iran is only there because they came to help save Syria from the al-Qaeda terrorists that the CIA was supporting and so now they're there more than ever before and our government's priorities are still completely backwards compared to what the American people would expect would be the prioritization of keeping Bin Ladenite terrorists and insurgent movements at an absolute minimum in all cases in 2011 the great Jeff Huber who died way too young he was a former I think Navy captain and he wrote an article called Osama Bin Laden dead and loving it and it was about how he got everything he wanted so it was on his way to getting everything he wanted we overthrew the secular Baathist dictatorship in Iraq for him created all that mess all that destabilization and we were already beginning to move on to Libya and Syria and Jeff Huber said eat your heart out Charlemagne nobody no general ever moved this many men with this little effort as this man is hiding in the attic from his own wife even and yet has America at its beck and call accomplishing all of his goals okay so I already did flip the page back at the dawn of the Cold War William F. Buckley the founder of the National Review Magazine and you could say the founder really of the post-war conservative movement in America wrote an essay for Common Wheel Magazine where he said listen we must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores because of the danger of the Soviet Union the emergency requires it even with Truman at the reins of it all and so that was the deal back then it was not a controversial point of view to think of the national security state as an alien system that was from outside of the American Republic and that the military and the intelligence services were to have such sway over the future but that that's the way it absolutely has to be to protect us from the global communist conspiracy that was the line but that line expired more than 25 years ago the Soviet Union ceased to exist and yet somehow the permanent emergency didn't and the totalitarian bureaucracy has only gotten that much worse and just in the 21st century we've had all different patriot acts who can name all the different new laws that they've passed to surveil us in every way and that's not just Snowden you know as he revealed the NSA but the CIA too doing domestic spying on virtually all American citizens without limit we have a 20 trillion dollar national debt that everyone's what just whistling past a graveyard pretending it's not a problem someone else will take care of it another day they say they cut taxes but they're still way too high to me and you know income taxation itself perhaps if we hadn't had a terror war this time we could have had a real conversation about ending income taxation in America now the thought is a million miles away the idea sounds crazy could never happen as long as we have a world empire and they even call it unashamedly unironically military Keynesianism an economic policy where we stimulate demand by purchasing military equipment and one of the greatest believers in this in our society right now and preachers of it unfortunately is our president Donald Trump who seems to think a measly few billion dollars here or there for a few planes if things were to change would cause such disruption as to be intolerable which really is not right in a 20 trillion dollar economy as they measure it and and of course with that is all the corruption you know I only started coming to DC in 2014 to do some of these conferences and things I really was surprised to see BAE systems and General Dynamics and Lockheed and Raytheon written in lights on these giant office towers and these giant campuses where I thought really like you're not embarrassed at all this is a matter of the greatest of pride to be the biggest boldest you know most boastful defense contractor where I thought they would have hidden those campuses back on the far side of the prison from here where you can't see it you can't see just how much you know kind of gloating goes with the profiteering from our military system and then of course the worst part and one that is very important to libertarians especially but you don't have to be a libertarian to know about this and understand it and care about it although it's the libertarians who've got this right that it's the government intervention in backing the inflationary money supply in America artificial bank credit expansion and artificially low interest rates that cause the booms and the busts and those policies are necessary to make the war seem free Bush couldn't have sold you $6 trillion worth of war bonds and he couldn't have raised our taxes in fact they sent us dividend checks in the mail remember that every taxpayer gets a $300 check in the mail as though it was a dividend for all the profit that we were all making off of invading Iraq when in fact we were blowing $6 trillion into the stratosphere and then when we have those booms and the busts it's the free economy that takes the rap for the consequences of all of the government intervention which leads people to then want to end a free economy more and more and socialize and put government in charge of more and more of the economy all the time and we have betrayed vets and I guess that's kind of bold to say but then no I know I just talked with Major Danny Sherson current active duty major was talking about how the Saudis were bankrolling the insurgents that killed his guys out on patrol in Iraq war two and he's unhappy about it his guys are dead and he feels betrayed very by the men who sent them on that mission and and somewhat against the American people who tolerated it as well and you have people who are severely maimed who will be living the rest of their lives in military hospitals on life support who will be dependent on care for all this and not for an honorable and necessary sacrifice but for completely unwise and unnecessary sacrifice and very importantly and especially denizens of Washington D.C. really know a lot about this and this is the growth of executive power in relation not just the growth of government overall but in comparison to the other branches of government has created a system in the 21st century especially where the executive branch the presidency and the departments sometimes separate even from the presidency are virtually lawless where they make a mockery even of the idea of law and here are a few examples of that in 2002 Ron Paul the anti-war Republican was on the house foreign affairs committee foreign relations I guess and he was against Iraq war two but he filed a declaration of war and forced the rest of the foreign affairs committee to vote on it up or down and Henry Hyde the chairman of the committee the Republican chairman of the committee chastised Dr. Paul and said that part of the constitution is an anachronism we don't do it that way anymore now we didn't amend it and repeal that part we just don't like it and so what we do now is we pass authorizations we pass the buck we pass the responsibility to the president so that when his war goes bad we can say well I just voted for the authorization for him to decide I didn't think he'd use it which is you know the Hillary Clinton line and many others they do hide behind that but the law is the law and the constitution isn't vague on this question whatsoever about who has that war power and how it's to be implemented another major example is a clip that is somewhat famous from the Bush years when they were bogged down in scandals of torture and I think this was specifically about spying a reporter cornered Jay Rockefeller the senator from West Virginia who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time and he said well as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee isn't there anything that you can do to find out more about what's going on with the wiretapping and the stellar wind program and all this and I guess it was 05-06 and Jay Rockefeller the senator got really upset at the guy and you can tell he wasn't really upset at the reporter he was upset at the situation and he goes what do you think do you think that just because I'm the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that they give me anything at all let me tell you something that's not how it works quit being foolish the way it works is I beg and they give me what they want to give me and I can't do a thing about it that's the chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight authority over the CIA and the NSA pleading absolute helplessness and that's John D. Rockefeller the fourth it's not Rand Paul protesting it's a guy who ought to have been able to get his way on something and could not and then this one is really outrageous absolutely outrageous during the Senate torture investigation the CIA accidentally turned over one of their own internal torture reports to the US Senate investigators and then what did John Brennan do he called the cops on them he tried to get the FBI to indict and prosecute Diane Feinstein staff who had ultimate clearance to see all of this and accuse them of stealing this document that in fact they had accidentally turned over and the reaction at the time was somewhat muted in a way but there were also people who noted that this is really a turning point this should be marked down in American history as a signpost on the road to total lawless empire the CIA is not a co-equal branch of government with the United States Senate or are they all Brennan should have to say to Diane Feinstein is yes ma'am you're the chair of the committee you say it goes that's it and yet things are have become the power in reality the CIA is that much more powerful than the United States Senate isn't it so why should they take a real investigation from her if they feel like they don't have to and this is a major change a revolution within the form of what used to be our system of government to something else and then the biggest example is from our time right now I don't think there's any secret whatsoever in fact it's widely celebrated that our government the executive departments of our government are an open revolt against the president of the United States for good and for ill and for ill here's three examples that we all know for a fact Donald Trump wants out of Afghanistan he wants out of Syria and he wants out of Somalia and in all three cases he's told by the departments of the government you can't you have no choice this is the deal and in the new Woodward book it's very blatant we already knew it but James Mattis the Secretary of Defense outright told Trump you pull out Afghanistan anything bad that happens in Afghanistan after that I'm going to blame it on you and say I warned you we so we have to stay no matter what and we know that Trump knows better why are we in Somalia I don't care who kills who in Somalia why is it got to be our guys that are over there in that they didn't even explain it they said we're trying to prevent someone from blowing up Times Square Mr. President it's at the Times Square attack was committed by an American a Pakistani American who went home to Pakistan and saw the results of one of Obama's drone strikes on a family over there and then allowed himself to be recruited by the Pakistani Taliban that had never attacked us before that was what caused the attempted thankfully failed attack on Times Square in 2010 and so and in fact just in the last couple of weeks Donald Trump has said that George Bush's decision to invade the Middle East as he put it not just Iraq but to knock over the whole region the way he did Donald Trump our Republican president of the United States of America said that was the worst decision American president has ever made now I actually I would dispute that but good enough for me and so according to Donald Trump the current Republican president of the United States none of this had to happen the 21st century did not have to be this way and now he feels he stuck with it now the conventional wisdom and I'm sure you guys have thought a lot about this is that presidents need wars as R.W. Apple put it in the New York Times back when Bush senior launched the beginning of this Iraq war all those years ago that presidents have to let blood to join the club as a true leader of this country and it works George Bush was reelected in part because of the crisis of the Iraq war that he himself had engineered and gotten us into and this does work and and worse it's conventional wisdom and I hear people a lot very worried people who know a lot of things very worried that Donald Trump could start a war with Iran just to get reelected just to make sure that you can't change horses in midstream you gotta stay with your current leaders the same as worked for Bush in 2004 but I say forget all that that's wrong that as conventional wisdom usually is that it's wrong George Bush junior W. Bush won election in 2000 promising a humble foreign policy no more of this nation building an intervention and reckless you know mission creep of the Clinton Gore years and it helped him to win he attacked the warfare state from the right as a conservative and said it's not conservative to do these things and Barack Obama John Kerry didn't really challenge Bush on the war at all just try to be like him so that kind of doesn't count but in 2008 Barack Obama handily defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries primarily because of her vote and support for Iraq war two and then he handily defeated John McCain for the very same reason that fall and four years later it certainly didn't hurt him that Romney was perceived as the far more bellicose leader on foreign policy and during both of those election cycles Ron Paul ran for president and not many people had ever heard of him before he was just a member of the House of Representatives he was anti-war as can be and I don't know if y'all know this but Ron Paul in both of those campaigns raised more money presumably got more votes but raised more money from active duty and veterans then all the other candidates combined and that was because he wasn't a liberal he wasn't Michael Moore he wasn't saying that you have to stop being a conservative and stop being who you are to stop believing in this nonsense and millions of people millions rallied to that Ron was giving a permission slip to American conservatives to the American right if you like your identity you can keep it but you can change your position on this and he did not win unfortunately but it was extremely powerful it changed the world forever and also look at Trump's own election now he did say a lot of hawkish things about brutalizing Al Qaeda and killing their families and these kinds of things but he also spent a lot of time attacking trigger happy Hillary that reckless interventionist Hillary Clinton who never heard of a war she didn't like might as well elect Jeb if we're going to elect her and that was a big part of the explicit strategy of Stephen Bannon when he took over the Trump campaign that our position is she's responsible for the trade deals we don't like she's responsible for the immigration patterns that we don't like and she's responsible for all these wars that now even the American right have the consensus that we don't want anymore more and she lost and that certainly helped him and there was a study done by some university professors about the most important districts in the swing states in the Midwest and they said that the counties where more active duties where more soldiers had died in Iraq and Afghanistan that those were the districts that went for Trump and against Hillary and turned those states red and secured him that election right down to the brass tacks her idea that you have to especially if you're a Democrat and especially if you're a woman that you have to be muscular in your foreign policy and you have to threaten the Russians with a no fly zone and all this blew up in her face she helped sink herself and Trump just helped push her down with the same narrative that's right she wants to do what she just said she wants to do more war and in fact one more Trump anecdote in the campaign at the beginning of the campaign South Carolina the third vote so there were still 17 people in the race Donald Trump denounced George Bush and Iraq war 2 and said Bush lied us into war and all this the next day he won two thirds of the vote and the other 17 candidates split one third Jeb had brought George Jr. out to help campaign with him and it was like the sad trombone and this is this is in South Carolina the most heavily militarized state in the Union but rather than saying yeah flags and stuff like that they said hey my little brother died over there and for what we're over it now and they rallied to a Republican antiwar message so my message then is for Trump to win reelection what he should not do is bomb Iran he should go to Iran and it would work he's already proven that he can upset the entire establishment by attempting and I'm very positive and confident and optimistic about it to make peace with North Korea and there are those in his government who would prefer to see things another way but that looks like it could happen and the American people absolutely agree and so if the Bush and Obama redirection policy has our government our CIA backing Al Qaeda terrorists because they hate Iran so much well maybe we could just make friends with Iran and they wouldn't feel like they're in such a position that they have to resort to literal treason in order to check the results of the mistakes that they have made and I think he could do it and of course just like they say only Nixon could go to China I think Donald Trump is perfect for going to Pyongyang going to Damascus going to Tehran and making friends with all supposedly the last of the rogue states and as a Republican I mean the line the speech writes itself I ain't afraid of no Ayatollah we can deal with him Barack Obama has to spend every last bit of political capital he has to try to get a nuclear deal but Donald Trump wouldn't have to he can attack the entire position from the right and now obviously there are a lot of interests in this town who would like to see that not happen and I am not saying that I necessarily think that Donald Trump has a set of principles that would really guide him in that way but I do think that his overall reaction is that it's been too long that how could it possibly be that it takes 18 years to kill 400 men and something has gone wrong here in a way that pretty much any American could decide by now and so in conclusion and so I think that if Trump knew that the American people but most especially the American right were against the war if when he imagines the American people out the West Wing Oval Office windows there out there the Americans of his imagination do we have his back when he tells the generals no or do we care at all and I think that if he thought that he could say with a straight face and quite seriously I'm sorry General Mattis the American people and even particularly now conservatives want an end to this policy we have to figure out something else then at least he would then be in the correct political position to attempt to do so and then so that means that it's up to us to make that the reality for him Scott you have such a wonderful encyclopedic knowledge of the history of these events and if only your voice could get heard more elsewhere as well my question is you know about everything NATO expansion I was at the Council of National Policy when Arch Conservatives spoke vehemently against NATO expansion that triggered of course the Russian reaction and of course the attack on Serbia which friends of mine have said that eliminated the pro-Americans inside Moscow inside the government in Moscow but can you for your knowledge discuss a bit the expansion of NATO and the attack on Syria as related to the relations with Russia absolutely thank you the great John Basil Lutley everybody right ok so yes you're absolutely right what you're getting at there I think is that America really started it in our conflict with Russia as well in the 1990s I was surprised to see I actually was really surprised to learn that not just George Kennan who was the original author of the containment policy against the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War but even Paul Nitze who had advocated outright rollback and said containment wasn't enough that Robert McNamara who was frankly the butcher of Japan Korea and Vietnam as well and and many other you know very important previous Cold War hawks said we absolutely must not expand NATO eastward and probably most famously was George Kennan who told Thomas Friedman in 1998 that he said I tell you exactly what's going to happen here we're going to expand NATO our military alliance and we're going to expand it eastward toward Russia's borders and sooner or later we're going to get a bad reaction all the people who are telling us now this isn't about Russia this doesn't threaten Russia hell we'll create the NATO Russia Council we'll be friends it'll be fine we just this is just about security and weapon sales and it'll be cool that all those people will then say see this is why we need NATO to contain the Russian aggression that is in fact the reaction to their policy and so Bill Clinton started it in the mid-1990s his defense secretary William Perry did everything he could to stop him and you think about any president who doesn't want to do something and your secretary of defense also doesn't want to do it then just hide behind him my secretary of defense advised me that this is a really bad idea like when Gates tried to stop Obama from attacking Libya and then said okay and started the war anyway for him but so Clinton ignored him and a big part of it was just domestic politics there's a lot of Polish votes in Illinois and it's an important state and so that was a big part of what went into consideration and in fact James Carden told me a story recently about I guess he had read Strobe Talbot's memoirs where he was one of the engineers of the policy in the Clinton years and Clinton said to Strobe Talbot well I don't know Strobe George Kennan is against it isn't he your mentor and Strobe Talbot said he always hated NATO anyway and then that was it the criticism was ignored and they expanded the policy and of course George W. Bush expanded the policy even further and I was just reading an article this morning on the national interest about how Mike Pence has just spoken I think in the last week or two weeks about the current Trump administration's determination to bring Georgia former Soviet Georgia between the Black and Caspian Sea into the NATO military alliance as well which is something that the Europeans really objected to and prevented George Bush from pursuing back during his time and of course they also are continually threatening to bring Ukraine into NATO as well which is part of the motivation for American participation in the coup of 2014 against their Russian leaning government there which has created this current crisis and then just as Kennan predicted they say look at Putin Russian aggression Russian they're trying to take over they're trying to reconquer Eastern Europe and recreate either the Soviet Union or at least the Czar's old empire and it's all directly in reaction to American intervention there and you mentioned Syria of course as I said Barack Obama started backing the terrorists in Syria in 2011 it wasn't until 2015 that the Russians intervened there and they did so only when the Islamic State had severed the highway between Aleppo and Damascus and was preparing to march on Damascus and Vladimir Putin said okay in fact there's leaked audio of John Kerry who was the Secretary of State at the time meeting with some Syrian rebel representative exiles in London and they're saying to him come on give us some guns give us some money and Kerry says guys I'm sorry Syria is lousy with guns we gave you so many guns it didn't work he said we saw the rise of the Islamic State but we thought we could manage and that this could be useful for pressuring Assad to step down from power but he didn't do that he went to Moscow and asked Putin for help instead and so sorry kids the game is up now we're done and it was again just like in Ukraine and I'm not justifying everything the Russians have done in that war Lord knows they've killed thousands of innocent civilians in their air campaign as the Americans did in Iraq War 3 in Syria and in Iraq as well but all of the worst things from seizing the Crimean Peninsula and to backing the rebels in the Donbass region in Ukraine and their air war in Syria is all in reaction to American policies and American policies that blatantly should never have been pursued in the first place so it's not to take all of the responsibility away from the Russians who've done what they've done but it is to put the lion's share of the blame on the Americans who have provoked them and put them in that situation well done Scott nicely done as always just apropos of the question of treason regarding the enabling of Al-Qaeda jihadist terrorism I agree with you of course completely on the fundamental point here but I wonder if there isn't a previous episode here that comes well before the events that you've described which is in the 1990s in Saudi Arabia when Khobar Towers was bombed and even before that when the the National Guard, the management office of the National Guard was bombed in November 1995 we have very good evidence here that the it was done by Al-Qaeda by people who were associated with bin Laden in Afghanistan they were beheaded in 1995 in 1996 after having blown up the National Guard office and then six months later or seven months later they bombed more Al-Qaeda people bombed the Khobar Towers where 273 Americans were injured and I believe 23 were killed I can't remember the exact number at the moment but what happened was that the CIA found out that Saudi government was protecting Al-Qaeda they intercepted messages from the government that indicated that they were not going to cooperate with that investigation in any way shape or form they were going to protect the people who carried it out and without going into more detail I think the point here is that the CIA understood and the FBI should have understood that the Saudi government was protecting Al-Qaeda and done something about it and had they done that there probably would almost certainly would not have been an attack in 9 or 11 it simply wouldn't have happened because they would have been charged with really basically taking care of Al-Qaeda that's not what happened it was because of the support for the Saudi government despite all that evidence well you got here late but yeah I did talk about that how they blamed by blaming the Khobar Towers attack on Iran they completely obscured the fact that you have these you know extremely radical rightist religious rightists in Saudi Arabia who will do anything to get American combat forces off of their soil by blaming it on Iran across the Gulf now it was what just kind of a target of convenience and opportunity and they did it for no real reason except how evil Iranians are or something like that and so there was no lesson to learn from it and I think you're absolutely right that if they had been honest about that then how could they have backed the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999 after what had happened at Khobar Towers how could the CIA have contributed to the Chechen cause in their fight against Russia in the late 90's as well you know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the ringleader of the 9-11 plot earned his stripes fighting for the Mujahideen in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 and I cite in the book Bill Clinton himself, Senator Tom Lantos and Representative Brad Sherman after September 11th all three of them said something to the effect of ah jeez why would these guys attack us after we've done so much for them in Bosnia and in Kosovo and took their side and of course the occupation of Saudi and the bombing of Iraq and support for Israel and the other things that had motivated their attacks against us had not changed so as I say in the book Bill Clinton had helped to build their forces up but had failed to buy them off and ended up getting 3,000 killed and the rest is even worse history from there Thank you so much, great analysis I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the Yemen civil war that started under Obama and we're in this new moment with so much criticism for Saudi Arabia post Khashoggi and how we can work to try to end US support for Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen Yeah, great question and yeah it's one of the things I had to skip in the speech but it's another one of the terror wars that is in fact being fought for al-Qaeda and not against them I'll do the story quick, I can do this quick In 2009 Obama comes into power and he tells the CIA kill al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, bomb them Well, so they unleash the drone war and all it does is build up al-Qaeda more and more as we kill innocent people and more and more people rally to their cause there's a million pieces of journalism about that was exactly the effect, it only backfired but then in order to get away with waging that drone war Obama bribed the dictator of Yemen Abdullah Saleh with guns and money and he used the guns and the money to send his army and the Muslim Brotherhood types from the Islam movement to attack a group of Shiite known as rebels, the Houthis, in the north of the country up in the Saudi district.
Well, just like Obama Saleh wasn't really good at it and everything that he did ended up resulting in the Houthi movement gaining in more and more power and influence every time that he attacked them they won, it was like four little mini wars in a row then the Arab Spring came and virtually all factions in the country said that they wanted rid of Saleh and to hold elections and there was an assassination attempt or two and I guess on the second one he was wounded and he was at home convalescing and so Hillary Clinton and the Saudis moved in and engineered a regime change where they pushed Saleh out and supported the vice president the successor, I guess that much of it was constitutional but it was engineered from abroad and his name was Mansour Hadi and Hadi had very little political support he did not have a lot of different factions backing him other than the foreigners and Hillary, they even arranged literally to have an election with one man on the ballot one man, one picture, one oval for your check mark and Hillary hailed this as the advent of democracy for the people of Yemen and the thing is he just didn't have the stature for the position at all and he also tried to replicate Saleh's same mistake in attacking the Houthis and in attacking the Houthis he made them even more powerful and he also announced a strong federalism plan that would have cut the Houthi region off from the Red Sea and so that was absolutely something for them to go to war for but then, here's the punchline and it's not that funny it turns out that Saleh instead of just retiring back to Mount Vernon or something took the army with him when he left much of it turns out that though he was not a Houthi Saleh was a Zaydi Shia, just like the Houthis and had that much in common with them and so formed an alliance with his former enemies in the north of the country and then they started marching south down to seize the capital of Sana'a in the middle of the country at the end of 2014, beginning of 2015 now, the excuse for the war that broke out since then was that the Houthis are controlled by Iran, they're basically the Hezbollah of Yemen and they're the Iranians, Shiite, cat's paw see, Shiite, and so that's all you need to know and so that's why we have to do what we have to do but we know that that's not true because Barack Obama himself the president who started this war said on video, admitted that the Iranians had warned their friends, the Houthis not to sack the capital city that this would provoke a terrible response from the Saudis and then we won't be able to do anything for you so don't bite off more than you can chew and the Houthis ignored the Iranians, their supposed masters and did it anyway, and then the Iranians' prediction immediately came true, and the war was launched and guess who launched it?
It was Mohammed bin Salman who was then the 29 year old brand new defense minister and deputy crown prince who had all of his own public choice theory, selfish personal, political reasons to launch a war to solidify his position as a powerful prince within the kingdom and it did work at least at first, it helped apparently with solidifying his position as he moved to isolate his cousins and uncles and other challengers to the throne as he made himself now the crown prince and he's the one that they launched this war for, and I swear you can find this, and it may be the most relevant quote of the 21st century, it's so important to me I think, I just don't know how to get over it, the Obama administration put a press release in the New York Times, it wasn't a scoop, it was like based on 17 official sources off the record, and they said listen, we knew that the war would be long, bloody and indeterminate long, bloody and indeterminate I mean they didn't even have an idea what the end game could be, they didn't believe for a minute, that yeah we'll put Hadi back on the throne, it'll be fine it'll be long, bloody and indeterminate, but why are we doing it anyway?
We have to placate the Saudis because the Saudis are upset that Obama signed the nuclear deal with Iran now, if the Saudis were actually worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon, then the JCPOA was great, because the deal locked down the Iranian civilian nuclear program double, more than ever before under the non-proliferation treaty, and far more than any other non-proliferation regime in history, but that wasn't what they were worried about, what they were worried about was that Obama and America were tilting back toward Iran that we were going to stop being so close of allies with them, and they had to make moves to assure that that wasn't happening, and I think we all understand that that was never in the cards, Obama didn't want a new alliance with Iran, all he wanted was to take the threat of war over their nuclear program off the table, and that was the only purpose of the deal but the Saudis were afraid that they were losing their place in our order in the Middle East, and that was a huge part of launching the war, and then according to all of the biggest and most official newspapers, the Americans have been helping pick the targets, helping coordinate all the intelligence, helping obviously, as we all know, with the refueling of the Saudi fighter bombers on the way to their sorties, and the US Navy enforces the blockade with the Saudis off the coast in what they're literally waging a medieval siege warfare, attempting to starve the people of Yemen into submission, and according to the UN, virtually the entire population are in need of food assistance, prices for the most basic staples are absolutely unaffordable through the roof, all international trade has been shut down, and the people are starving and dying by the tens of thousands, the worst cholera epidemic in living memory broke out last year, and unfortunately it hasn't been as bad this year, but thousands of people died of it, mostly young children die from dehydration from diarrhea and vomiting themselves to death and that's the war that we're waging for the most spurious of reasons, a war that again, this is against the Houthis, this isn't the war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, this is the war for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against their most bitter enemies the Houthis, that's what our government does when we give them a writ to protect us from terrorism, because they take the side of our enemies against theirs.
Maybe not the best line to leave on, but thank you all very much for listening to me, I appreciate it tip your cab drivers well
