1/4/19 Matthew Hoh and Danny Sjursen on the Consequences of America’s Wars in the Middle East

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, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Matthew Ho.
He's an Iraq war veteran and Afghanistan too.
In Afghanistan, he was working for the State Department though.
And you might remember in 2009, he blew the whistle in, I guess, the late summer of 2009, trying to give the American people the opportunity to force Barack Obama to tell the generals no on the surge, escalation of what became the surge of 2010 through 12, that it wasn't going to work and that they should, in fact, bring all the troops home and end the war instead of expanding it at that time.
And so now we are now here we are far in the future.
And it looks like maybe the next president is finally taking your advice.
What do you think, Matt?
Oh, I would hope so.
I would hope so.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Happy New Year to you and Aaron there and to everybody else and everyone listening.
Happy New Year.
Yeah, man.
Very happy to talk to you again.
So what do you think of this announcement?
I guess from what I've read, there have been no orders specifically given to the generals in Afghanistan yet.
Yeah, that's what it seems like.
And there's going to be a lot of pushback against it.
But regardless of his motivations, I think it's primarily domestically motivated for President Trump to do this.
He said he was going to end these stupid wars.
He got a lot of criticism a year and a half ago when he sent thousands more troops to Afghanistan because people were saying he was flip-flopping on what he said about the wars.
So regardless of his motivations, it's a good thing.
And regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, this is something that needs to be supported.
I mean, even if you're the most virulent anti-Trumper out there, hey, embrace the a broke clock is right twice a day thesis.
Because if this doesn't occur and this becomes—well, let me just say this.
Nothing has changed.
I mean, you opened it up, Scott, by talking about what I did 10 years ago and what has changed in the last 10 years.
I mean, it has just been the same cycle of actions and events in Afghanistan that make the front page or the Post or the New York Times or actually get reported in CNN because the explosion was so large or somebody was assassinated or because we announced we're going to talk to the Taliban.
And in the last 10 years, nothing has come of it.
So hopefully this does actually push the Afghan government to make concessions.
It does allow for a real opening for the Taliban to negotiate, make concessions on their part, see some of what they wanted.
I mean, for as long as we've been in Afghanistan and as long as the Taliban has been issuing press statements, they have said their primary condition for talking is a withdrawal of foreign forces.
And if you look into the details, what they say often is a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces.
They're not saying, hey, before we talk, the U.S. troops have to get on the plane, turn the key, and fly out.
What they're saying in more nuanced terms are, look, you have to show us that you're leaving and provide some proof of that.
So hopefully this does because at the end of this month, there's another round of talks between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and the Taliban taking place in UAE.
And so hopefully this provides somewhat of a gesture that the U.S. is serious about negotiating for peace in Afghanistan.
You know, this raises an important question, I guess, whether you think maybe this announcement of the intended withdrawal of, what, 7,000, approximately half the troops that are there, whether that's part of Zalmay Khalilzad's negotiations with the Taliban.
Yeah.
Because I saw some criticisms.
I think I even said this not as a criticism but sort of as a concession that he seems to be giving away what little leverage he has on the way out the door here.
But maybe that's not right.
Maybe this is actually him using that leverage.
Exactly.
Because we can always put the troops back in.
I mean, that's something that I don't know why people don't comprehend that or get that.
You could say the same thing about Syria.
How quickly – first of all, a year – with regards to Syria, a year ago we didn't even know we had 2,000 troops in Syria.
I think it was November of 2017 it was discovered by accident that there were 2,000 troops in Syria.
Maybe the U.S. military was saying there was only 500.
You really need to subscribe to the podcast feed here, man.
What's that?
You really need to subscribe to the podcast feed here, man.
Am I going – I'm sorry.
I'm going back over.
You're a little bit behind the curve there.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm just teasing.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, so how quickly can we put troops back in?
It's not an issue for the U.S. military.
And Khalilzad, as we were just saying, everything keeps reappearing again in Afghanistan.
Khalilzad reappears.
And much like Trump, Khalilzad's first priority is himself.
And so I think with Khalilzad you are more likely to see Khalilzad offer concessions to the Taliban, offer concessions in negotiations that other American diplomats would not.
Because Khalilzad's ego is so great that his primary purpose is to become the peacemaker of Afghanistan.
If you remember back, Khalilzad had pushed this thing where he would be the chief executive of Afghanistan.
I mean all Khalilzad wants is for grandeur and success for himself.
So when you have someone like that negotiating, I'm not afraid of him giving away the keys to the kingdom.
I'm actually pleased that he might actually give away some keys because other American negotiators are not going to do that.
They're not going to do that at all, particularly when a lot of these guys, say someone like James Dobbins or whatever, is always angling to stay within the establishment, is always angling to stay within the good graces of the Pentagon or the State Department or whatever to prolong their career.
Well, Khalilzad's got a different view of it.
He wants to be the one who brings peace to Afghanistan, write a book about it, and continue to be treated as some type of rock star in neoconservative circles.
Well, and I mean Trump must have told him that the job was negotiating an exit out of there, not some put more time on the Washington clock kind of thing.
He must have accepted the job on those terms.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I see what you mean about he cares about himself the most and first, of course, but it seems like their interests really have coincided on this, that Trump wants to be able to say that he got us out of Afghanistan.
And Khalilzad, he's the guy who picked Karzai in the first place.
He's an original neocon student of Leo Strauss, co-neocon religionist with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, dating back to the Scoop Jackson days and helped write the Defense Plan and Guidance of 1992 and was very involved in the Bush Jr. first term, especially there.
He's been ambassador to Afghanistan.
As you said, tried to make himself co-president with Karzai there for a while.
I'd forgotten that anecdote.
There's so many.
But now, so, you know, obviously the real question is, and I think quite—I'm sorry, go ahead.
I blame Khalilzad for a lot of the mess in Afghanistan, too, because when he was the ambassador in the 05 timeframe to Afghanistan, that's when a lot of the criticism of Karzai being the mayor of Kabul started to surface, when the realization was that this great experiment in democracy, this great experiment in regime change, in nation building that was occurring in Afghanistan, really wasn't working.
It's about 05 when that starts to surface and bubble.
And that's when, in result of that, you then start to see the expansion of NATO begin in that 05, 06, into 07 timeframe.
And I really put a lot of that on Khalilzad's shoulders because he was the one who really wanted to double down on that experiment, to prove that nation building can be successful.
All those things that you mentioned about Khalilzad's resume, here was his chance to actually prove all that theory right.
And who else in his circle, who else from that Chicago school, had ever had this opportunity?
He was going to be the grandest neocon of all time.
But now his protege, the man he handpicked, is being belittled as the mayor of Kabul rather than the president of Afghanistan.
And so, yeah, he's the one I really believe kicks off that NATO expansion that begins about in late 05, 06 in Afghanistan.
That just, as everyone knows now, right, that just fuels support for the Taliban.
And the Taliban find themselves not so much pushing themselves back into Afghanistan, but really pulling themselves back into Afghanistan.
As you describe in your book, Scott, you know, Fool's Errand.
If anyone here is listening, hasn't read Scott's book, Fool's Errand, do yourself a favor, read it.
It is probably the best and most definitive account of why we're at where we're at in Afghanistan.
It really is terrific.
Well, thanks a lot for saying that.
And believe me, I know it means a lot coming from you.
But now, so here's the thing.
And I'm actually about to talk with your buddy Danny Sherston here in a minute, our buddy, about Syria.
But just to bring up Syria only for analogy's sake kind of thing here.
ISIS is 99.9% obliterated.
And the mission there wasn't ever even to fight al-Qaeda.
They were only ever backing al-Qaeda there.
Smashing ISIS, that's virtually done.
They can declare victory and go, but they've got nothing like a victory in Afghanistan to declare.
And, you know, I don't know what concession Khalilzad must have gotten from the Taliban that, okay, we're going to pull out 7,000 troops, but you guys got to do something to make us believe that you're not just going to march into Kabul and kill everybody and seize the thing and go right back to an attempt to consolidate power over the entire country.
Because there are a lot of independent players.
I don't know about whether the Afghan National Army counts, but certainly there are different warlords like General Dostum and others who, you know, well, Dostum among the Uzbeks, but there are plenty of Tajik and Hazara warlords and so forth who will not want to go along with that and who will go right back.
We'll be right back where we were in 1997 or 1998, this war of the Taliban versus everybody else.
And I think it's pretty clear they have the power to march right into Kabul if they want to.
And so do you think it's even possible to negotiate an exit where they promise to not do that, that they're just going to be happy with predominant Pashtunistan and leave the rest of the country alone?
Because, I mean, I'm very hopeful about that, but I'm not optimistic about that.
I'd hate to predict it and look like a fool thinking that things are actually going to get better before, you know, or, you know, aren't going to get worse before they get better there after the U.S. leaves.
It seems like there's a major correction in power due, and that's really a big part of why they haven't been able to leave this whole time, because they built a real house of cards, and it's going to look really ugly when the NVA come marching down out of the north and seize the whole place, you know?
That's exactly right, and it gets to the question of you go back to those talks with Vietnam, with North Vietnam, and the whole idea of a decent interval, right?
Is that what Khalilzad and Trump are up to?
A decent interval, yeah, exactly.
I mean, is that it?
Is that like the Taliban, hey, give us at least two years before you take Kabul so it makes us look good and we can just blame it on the Afghans for screwing it up just like all the other people do?
I mean, I think there are some things to consider with that.
One, right now the Taliban are operating in non-Pashtun areas, but not excessively or not extensively.
I mean, there actually were reports that they just are trying to seize the oil facilities up in Saripol, which is kind of a big deal.
I mean, so you've got to look at this in the sense of, are the Taliban trying to grab as much land right now as possible before a ceasefire comes in and before they get into negotiations?
But the other thing, too, is since they haven't really been, we've seen a bit of it with the Hazaras, with the Taliban attacking the Hazara minority.
You haven't seen the Taliban really, as far as I know, operate in a major way in non-Pashtun areas.
So, I mean, we've had bombings, of course, you've had isolated attacks, you've had some atrocities, but you've not seen the type of Pashtun army invasion of non-Pashtun lands like you had in the late 90s, like you had in 1997, 1998, 1999.
So, what that would say to the Taliban, if I was looking at it from their perspective, I would say, look, right now who we're fighting in the Afghan army, in the Afghan police, are only those who are signing up to fight us because of the pay.
They're not fighting to protect their homes, they're not fighting to protect their families, they're fighting to earn a paycheck.
And that's why you see such a massively high desertion rate in the Afghan security forces.
I mean, because that army is made up of people who are joining because it's, I forget what it is, $150, $200 a month or whatever they're getting.
So, that would give the Taliban pause whether or not they want to launch back into that kind of civil war.
On the other side of it though, Scott, is, you know, 19 years ago when you and I started talking about this and you were saying this long before I was, of course, but for the last decade that you and I have been saying this and other people in our circles, the notion has been that there are moderates, as they would call them, within the Taliban who want to negotiate.
And we've seen that.
That's one of the reasons why I resigned, because we refused to negotiate even though the Taliban or elements of the Taliban wanted to negotiate 10 years ago.
I mean, we found out two years ago that the Norwegians had met with Mullah Omar in 2007-2008 to bring about a peace plan and that was scuttled, you know, as is often is done by the U.S. and NATO.
So, but the problem being is that those people, those moderates, we'll call them that for ease of terminology, they've been defeated within the Taliban circles.
They've either been killed by our airstrikes, right, or, you know, killed by our strike forces, or they've lost face.
They've lost place.
They've lost privilege within the Taliban circles because they were proven wrong.
Because the hardliners within the Taliban movement were saying, no, don't negotiate.
We've got God on our side, basically.
They really do say things like that.
And we can withstand whatever the United States is going to throw at us because we withstood what the Soviets threw at us.
Our ancestors withstood, you know, the British.
They withstood Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, et cetera.
We can do this.
And they're the ones who've been proven right.
So, you know, it's a very tricky thing to try and, you know, look into the crystal ball and see what's going to happen.
But if we don't negotiate, we're just dooming Afghanistan for another decade or so, at least, of what's been occurring for the last four decades.
And one point to make in comparison to what just happened with Syria, where with the announced pullout of troops from Syria by President Trump, what you saw happen right away was the Kurds make a deal, supposedly strike a deal with Assad's government.
Now, if the American troops were staying, the Kurds were never going to make that deal.
They were never going to talk to Assad because they had the U.S. backing them.
And that's a big, big factor that we've got to take into account when we look at negotiations is that, look, the Afghan government, President Ghani is not going to do anything as long as there's tens of thousands of American troops there forever.
You know, I mean, as long as he's got that backing, as long as he's got the biggest kid on the block, he's going to still continue to rule at the bus stop or whatnot, if you want to use him, right?
I mean, Karzai would even say that outright.
Listen, you guys are staying forever.
I don't have to tell you.
I think you might be the one telling me.
But I know from other sources, too, Karzai would say, come on, why do I got to do any work?
You guys aren't going anywhere.
Yeah, you're giving me hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, like, and you've got tens of thousands of your troops here.
You're never going to let the Taliban get on the road.
I mean, that's another thing, too, in terms of you want to get into the tactical aspects of how the Taliban – I mean, American air power is always going to be in that region.
So the idea of the Taliban kind of getting on the road and marching on Kabul is probably not going to occur just because of our air power.
I think they just walk in a few guys at a time, right, and then just one day announce, we're back.
Very true.
I mean, they already got Hekmatyar in there, who is not exactly the Taliban, but pretty much.
Yeah, he was one of Ronald Reagan's favorites, wasn't he?
Yeah, him and Haqqani, too.
And now, you know, I just read this.
Just the longevity of this, of how far this all goes back and how it's the same stuff over again.
Have you been reading Ashley Jackson?
No, I have not.
Do you know of her?
So I don't know that much about her, but she's, I guess, more of like does studies for think tanks more than just like newspaper journalism.
But so she did this one, you know, in-depth thing for foreignpolicy.com, and another she did for the Overseas Development Institute.
I'll send you the link to it.
And it came out like last June.
And so she went and interviewed a bunch of Taliban guys, and they told her basically, you know, to summarize essentially that they adopted the counterinsurgency strategy, people's war and all that, only, ha ha, guess what, they're from there.
And so instead of, you know, the old tactic of them attacking anything that the Americans built or supported in terms of the creation of a new government there or punishing people for participating in it at all, they just took it all over.
And so the Americans are paying the salaries of Taliban officials all over the country.
Oh, absolutely.
Because it's the governor, the police chief, whatever titles the Americans gave those positions, the American-backed government had created there and gave those positions, but all the people are vetted and appointed and actually hired by the Taliban to take those positions.
And how they're just, you know, they really are ascendant in the biggest way.
They really are not a shadow government, but the literal Islamic emirate of Afghanistan in half the country.
And then she talks about how they have so much influence even in the places where they don't have troops just because everybody knows how accessible they are and that the game is so badly up.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, when I was there, the way I would describe how they operated was within each province they had that political apparatus that existed, that shadow.
This is going back 10 years or so, so as you've said, they've really advanced it.
But they never really had that many Taliban soldiers per se, like in terms of, you know, guys who were actually flying the white banner of the Taliban.
A lot of it was that they were just so good at dealing with and negotiating with the local villages.
And we used to call it valleyism because they really, people in Afghanistan, in those Pashtun parts, and you get into rural areas, and people didn't leave their valleys.
They really didn't.
And what you'd find is that the valleys didn't support each other either.
Like, each Taliban group that was operating was, as we would call it, was based in a particular valley, and they didn't leave their valley.
So they didn't cross over a ridgeline to go and fight.
They only fought in their valleys.
But on top of that, there would be like the actual Taliban per se, which might only be 100 men for a whole province.
And they would come around on their motorcycles.
They would distribute money.
They would provide intelligence.
They would enforce discipline as need be, carry out punishments if need be.
But as you said, Scott, they really embraced that counterinsurgency.
I think it was in 2010 or 2011, Omar put out, the leader of the Taliban then, and the leader of the Taliban in the 90s, and for most of our occupation there, he put out guidance to that effect.
I remember very clearly where the Taliban were to punish their own members who did anything wrong.
If they abused people, if they stole, if they looted, they were to be the protector of the people, not the occupier of the people.
And yeah, I mean, in the Pashtun areas, that has had a great effect.
And when it comes down to it, if you're living in those areas, who are you gonna support at the end of the day?
Both sides have rifles.
Both sides are entering your house.
Both sides are taking from you.
But at least these guys over here, the Taliban, are related to you, or they're from here.
So at least they're your, they might be bad guys, but at least they're your guys.
So it's just that basic type of, I mean, there's so much here in Washington, D.C. that is amazing in terms of how out of touch people are with actual reality, with actual human experience, with how human beings actually interact and build relationships.
And speaking of the both sides thing there, I mean, there's this thing in the New York Times, and in fact, this doesn't contradict what you just said, because it's just in spite of what you, or no, what you said is right in spite of what I'm saying, which is that this is in the New York Times, that, oh, yeah, by the way, CIA death squads, the counterterrorism pursuit teams, continue to commit war crimes against men, women, and children.
Here's a story of them burning a three-year-old baby girl to death, and they still are, what you said, just blind to all of this.
I mean, how hard is that to imagine?
Like, none of these people have ever met a three-year-old girl.
They can't think for a second what that's like, that it's USA doing that to these people over there, and still, after all this time?
Well, and this has been going on for, right, I mean, for 17 years now, and a year and a half ago, roughly a year and a half ago, the CIA said, we're taking the gloves off in Afghanistan, and this is exactly what they meant.
I mean, these counterpursuit teams have been there for 17 years, but they've been giving, I guess, more latitude in the last year and a half, I don't know.
But it is.
It's this idea that somehow we're going to punish these people into accepting us is just...
I mean, the only way punishment's going to work is if you're just really going to subjugate them.
If you're going to go and you're going to be as the Romans did it, or Genghis Khan did it, you know?
And that's what I think a lot of our strategy has become.
I mean, Air Wars just put out information on Syria and Iraq, you know, and over the last two weeks of December, 35 airstrikes a day in Syria and Iraq by U.S. forces, by U.S. airplanes, right?
I mean, thousands of bombs dropped, lots of children being killed.
And as of this morning, Air Wars is saying they're clamping down on the information of how much they're bombing.
That's right.
And you know what I was going to say about the both-sides thing is, one of the survivors of the CIA death squads in Afghanistan here told the New York Times that, what's the difference between you guys and the Islamic State?
When the attacks started, we thought it was these ISIS guys, the caliphate, you know, as they called them.
But no, it was you.
But then, so all of my family's dead, all of my relatives, and I'm wounded, and all these things.
And he says, you know, you're supposed to be the government here, but I can't tell the difference between you and these other guys.
You know, if I'm in trouble, then send me a warrant.
And then if I don't show up, then you can bomb me and destroy me, he said.
The telling thing about that article was I actually looked at the comments, and I read maybe two or three comments from that article.
And the third comment was from somebody who identified himself or herself as a senior defense intelligence agency official who spent a year and a half in Afghanistan.
And let me tell you, I would never believe anything any Afghan told me, and et cetera, et cetera, and just so out of touch with reality.
So, I mean, I know exactly who this person is.
It's someone who's making now $150,000, $160,000 a year, working out of D.C.
They spent, yeah, 18 months in Kabul.
They never met an Afghan, probably, if they're in the intelligence community, because we don't let the Afghans into those places.
And if they did, the Afghans they met were on the U.S. payroll, so they told us exactly.
So, I mean, just like exactly what, you know, so blind to, again, to just reality, you know, so blind to the consequences of killing people's families, you know.
And then, you know, the Watson Institute up in Brown University just put out, you know, another study of all the places where we have our troops at, and it's 14 places around the world that the U.S. has engaged in combat in the last two years, 14 places American soldiers have killed or been killed around the world, 14 different countries, that we know about.
That doesn't, you know, that's not including what the CIA is doing, and that's not including where our Special Operations Command is working, you know, without any acknowledgement.
And that doesn't include places where things have occurred.
That 14 number doesn't include the Philippines.
It doesn't include Pakistan.
It doesn't include Chad or Nigeria.
So we know at least 18 countries in the last 17 years, U.S. troops have openly been in combat, and we still wonder why people keep joining these organizations, or at the very least not helping us, you know, because we're killing their families.
It's not any harder than that.
Hey, do you have time?
Man, I was going to talk to Danny, and I figured I'd just add him to this call.
Should I?
Yeah, sure.
I'd love to.
I've never done it.
Yeah, it'd be great.
Let's do that.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here.
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On the line currently active duty.
Still, are you out?
It's the new year.
Are you free, Danny Sherson?
I haven't.
February 11th, I'm done.
So right now I'm essentially on my final terminal leave, which means this will be the last time probably on the show that I have to give my disclaimer that I only speak for myself and not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the Department of Defense.
So I'm excited about that.
Cool.
For sure.
And now you two guys are friends and colleagues, too, Danny Sherson and Matthew Ho, right?
Yeah, we know each other.
Matt's been on my pod, and, you know, obviously we're in contact all the time, especially over email.
So me and Matthew have been sitting here talking about the war in Afghanistan and all of that.
I was, you know, having you on mostly to talk about Syria, but figured just let the conversation pick up from, you know, wherever you want.
Yeah, let's stick with Syria for a minute there, Danny.
And you know what?
Something Matthew said at the beginning of his interview, too, is that, okay, Trump is the one doing it, so everybody disclaim that it's still okay.
I don't understand that kind of because it seems like what's to hate about Trump is that he doesn't accept his policies because it's the policies that are everything, right?
So if his policies are, you know, limiting military intervention in this place or that one, then that's only to the good regardless of his character.
But apparently that really does need to be said, huh?
Well, you know, I think right now for maybe the first time in my life, I am so much more upset with the mainstream left than the right right now.
And I say that as, you know, a fairly progressive guy.
I know what to expect from Fox News, right?
I can write it off usually.
But suddenly MSNBC becoming the home of like a new breed of cold warrior, you know, or a new breed of like interventionist militarists.
I mean, what happened to Rachel Maddow?
I'd like to debate her on her own show.
Of course, that would never happen.
And get her to explain to me why a woman who wrote this pretty effective book about how American military policy has drifted off course, how can that same woman suddenly say we've got to stay in Syria indefinitely just because Trump said it?
We all know that if Barack Obama made the same damn move on Syria, half those pundits on MSNBC would say they would canonize the guy as a peacemaker.
Yeah, well, it's funny.
Of course, the reverse is true too about, you know, Fox News and all that.
But we've got to celebrate them being hypocrites on this if they're not attacking him too bad on it.
I guess the morning show is against it.
But you've got Tucker Carlson, and I guess I read that Laura Ingraham is also supporting the president on it.
So thank God for that hypocrisy.
I'll take it.
Welcome right wing to non-interventionism, man.
Let's talk more.
But, yeah, it really is ridiculous what's going on with the liberals there.
But, Matthew, what do you know about Syria here?
Well, with regards to what this discussion is, we just had that polling came out earlier in the week that you had a slight majority of Americans supporting the withdrawal.
And I unfortunately couldn't find the actual polling data to see where respondents were politically.
But I believe it's probably just as you and Danny were discussing, Republicans supporting the pullout from Syria, Democrats opposing it, which if you go back a number of years, that flips.
And so you have, whether it's Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, whether it's China, Russia, you have just this robotic adherence to whatever is dictated to them by the media outlet of choice.
And I think it's amazing that Fox is where you hear the most anti-war voices now.
Danny Davis is on Fox all the time.
Fox has on some of the women from Code Pink pretty often.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Medea, Benjamin, and Ariel Golder on Fox seems to be once every week, once every two weeks.
I sure like seeing Doug McGregor on there.
He's right a lot of the time on there.
Yeah, and Danny Davis is on almost every day.
But on MSNBC, and I don't even know what's going on on CNN, I know CNN just likes to trumpet unnamed sources from the Pentagon.
I mean, their latest thing was about Syria, CNN saying someone from the Pentagon, unnamed source from the Pentagon saying, if we pull all the troops out, everyone is going to die.
And that's what they actually published.
They actually published that.
A military unnamed source, everyone is going to die if the troops leave.
I mean, that's the quality of journalism.
My favorite CNN headline the other day was, CNN panel disapproves of recent Trump statement.
That was the headline.
Jesus.
But, you know, I mean, but unfortunately, there does seem to be, there's increased fighting in Idlib.
You know, as we were discussing earlier, Scott, you know, Air Wars has put out their data on airstrikes for the last couple of months in Syria.
And it's gone, airstrikes have gone up, you know, so many more civilians killed.
So I think where a lot of people were hoping that the war in Syria may finally be winding down and we finally may be getting the constructive talks and maybe the rebels and the Al-Qaeda and so on and so forth will finally put down their weapons.
You know, unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen.
And I think it won't be as bad as it was maybe three or four or five years ago in Syria.
But parts of Syria are still going to be really pretty awful for the foreseeable future.
And you know what else is interesting is, Trump already appears to potentially be, you know, backtracking on his announcement about Syria.
You know, we'll never know.
I mean, when I first wrote my articles backing Trump, which got me in plenty of trouble with my friends on the left, saying, hey, this is the right decision.
I had a caveat in the first few sentences by saying, look, but he might change his mind, you know, because he's kind of backtracked before.
And, you know, you have this meeting with Lindsey Graham, talk about like the fact that anyone is still listening to Lindsey Graham on foreign policy when he's been wrong about every major foreign policy decision for the last 20 years.
Blows my mind.
But he's an adult in the room, right?
So Lindsey Graham comes out of the press conference.
He's like, oh, we're slowing things down.
We're in a pause.
And then Trump gives some statements that make it seem like maybe he is going to slow down the withdrawal.
But then he gives other tweets that stand by his original announcement.
It's just, I'm just wondering how policy is even made in this White House.
It just seems so inherently ad hoc.
And it's, I don't trust that we are leaving Syria.
I hope we are.
Yeah, I think so, because just, I mean, it's really not based on much.
But in the press conference at the cabinet meeting where he goes, no, he goes, you know, I said a few weeks.
Now they say four months.
I never said four months, but I guess, you know, yeah, whatever.
But no, we're leaving.
I'm pretty sure that he is leaving by, you know, spring here, sometime in April, right around there.
There's just really nothing much to stay there for.
And as Matthew was actually pointing out before he got on the line here, that because of the announced withdrawal, the Kurds finally went and cut the same deal with Assad that we know they should have cut a long time ago to get the Syrian Arab army to stand between them and the Turks and get the Turks to call off their impending invasion of east of the Euphrates and, you know, undermine that whole talking point that we can't go.
Which, by the way, Lindsey Graham, I heard, this is real.
It goes back to what you guys were saying on NPR, all the liberal consensus.
It wasn't all things considered.
It was earlier in the daytime show.
But the very liberal Hillary Clintonite NPR ladies all agreed that, thank God, that Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton had some really strong things to say about Trump's reckless Syria disengagement.
And just, they said it full force.
There was no hint of irony whatsoever.
That like, am I really invoking Tom Cotton right now for this?
That like, yeah, they were going for it.
Full bore, blue pill.
You know, let's do this.
This is crazy.
The cognitive dissonance that's required to do that is staggering even in 2019, right?
Even after all we've been through.
Every once in a while I catch myself in a moment where like, I cannot believe that these people lack such self-awareness that they can do this.
Yeah.
And the other part too is that, you know, in that cabinet meeting, Trump said a number of things.
People have really jumped upon his comments about Afghanistan and what the Soviets were doing there and everything.
And very few people have caught on to his other comments, the more substantive important ones, about how he's going to stop the Inspector General reports from being released to the public.
I mean, so you have this, and we saw this, as you and I were discussing earlier, Scott, you know, with the information that the military was putting out about our airstrikes, how that's been cut back, how that transparency is going away.
So we continue to see, and the chief architect of cutting back this transparency with the military was Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who is now a hero of the left, even though he should be the last.
He's the butcher of Fallujah.
Yeah, exactly.
But in his time as Secretary of Defense, yeah, he escalated airstrikes, caused civilian casualties.
You know, he got fired by Obama because he wanted to go to war with Iran.
I mean, this is not the guy we should be lionizing on the left.
And a big thing he did was he refused to take journalists with him when he traveled, or he only took a few journalists with him.
As well as cutting back other forms of transparency, classifying information from the inspector general's reports.
And so we've seen, and what is really staggering to me is at the beginning of December, Vice News, Nick Terse, I know Nick's been on your show a lot, right, had an interview with the general who had been the previous commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan.
And this general rattled off a list of seven or eight countries where the U.S. has taken casualties and in combat.
And this General Bulldog, his name's Donald Bulldog, says, we kept it quiet, no one found out about it, no one talked about it, to paraphrase what he said.
I mean, here you have an American general admitting that we are suppressing casualty information from the American public.
And there's no ruckus.
There's no uproar.
Which, by the way, how does that work when it comes to their family members and stuff?
Or they just pick guys for those missions that have no families, or what?
I mean, I don't really know.
I think at that point, Danny, correct me if you're wrong, you're still in, I mean, within that special operations community, I think the Kool-Aid has been drunk so much that everyone is going along with their purposes.
So that someone's killed, you know, it's part of the narrative that we're silent warriors, so to speak.
So they just call it a training accident in San Diego.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the family gets paid its $400,000 or whatever, you know, and then they're forgotten about.
You know, before we get off the topic, I would like to bash former Secretary of Defense Mattis for a few more minutes.
Good.
And I'm really enjoying the fact that he's not in my chain of command as of like three days ago, because now I'm allowed to be contemptuous, right?
Because that's what they investigated me for, was being contemptuous of Mattis and Trump.
So I still can't be contemptuous of Trump.
I'll try not to be.
But, yeah, so let's talk about Jim Mattis for a second.
Why is he lionized, which was a great word that Matt used by the left and the mainstream right?
Supposedly it's for two reasons, from what I can tell, right?
His judgment, impeccable judgment, and his ironclad ethics, right?
That's what we're told.
Well, here's the thing that gets me about that.
Jim Mattis, really?
The thing you chose to fall on your sword for?
The straw that broke the camel's back for you was pulling out of Syria?
And we're supposed to believe that you have such judgment and ethics, such a moral core?
So Yemen, 85,000 starved children, you were okay with that, right?
You stuck with that, right?
Afghanistan, failing war.
He knows it's failing deep in his heart.
You were willing to, like, stay on board with that, right?
Saudi Arabia, keep selling them more weapons.
Israel, keep selling them more weapons despite the fact that they're breaking every international law in the books.
All of those things were cool with Jim Mattis.
But the minute that the president, his commander-in-chief, made a decision to modestly de-escalate American militarism in the region, he's like, nope, I'm out, and he falls on his sword.
See, to me, that just erases any semblance of respect that I should have to have for this guy.
Well, and, you know, something that I really liked about Trump's press conference was the way he talked about Mattis, and not just Mattis, but the generals, which you could take to include John Nicholson, who was the commander of the war in Afghanistan when he came into power and this kind of thing.
He talks about them the way a civilian elected president of the United States should talk about them, which is that, yeah, there's some guys with some government jobs, and sometimes they do it well and usually they don't, and et cetera like that, and enough of this stuff where there are gods on Mount Olympus beyond our criticism, especially when they're all nothing but a bunch of failures.
If you take, you know, Emperor's New Clothes, look at it.
Petraeus and McChrystal, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, these guys have produced nothing but failure and catastrophe everywhere they've gone this whole time.
And he just says, yeah, the generals, where's their successes?
I told them what to do.
They didn't do it.
They didn't do it well.
Look at where we are now.
Not my fault.
Looks like it's more their fault than mine.
And this kind of thing, which I think is perfectly correct and is exactly the right attitude.
I mean, the only improvement I think would be if Trump ordered Mattis to give him 50 push-ups or something like that and really rub it in about who is in charge here, as opposed to the narrative that, oh my God, I'm just aghast because the generals are telling the news that they disapprove of Trump's decision, and how dare he go against the generals?
I mean, what a backwards and just upside-down view of the way power is supposed to work in this country at all, never mind under the Constitution, but even just under basic traditions of authority here and whose roles these different men are playing, you know, which roles they're playing with each other there.
But then there's one more thing I want to bring up.
Neither of you guys can say whatever you want about that if you want, but the other thing was that Trump recounted this anecdote where when he became president, they took him into the fanciest, most high-tech screen-having room at the Pentagon they could find to impress him, and they gave him a big lecture about what?
About al-Qaeda?
About Ayman al-Zawahiri's suicide bomber attackers?
No.
Iran, Iran, Iran.
And guess what?
For some reason that James Mattis isn't quite sure because he doesn't remember where he was in 2003 or something, but somehow Saddam Hussein is gone, and that has helped to empower Iran in Iraq.
And then for some reason Assad invited them into Syria in, like, 2012 or so.
Not sure why there, but so they've increased in their power and authority in Syria.
And, you know, of course, everything that the Houthis have gained in Yemen is also Iran's responsibility, so this is why we've got to hem them in, Mr. President.
Iran, Iran, Iran.
And I want to know what you guys think of that, because that's not just the Israel lobby, you know, when you're talking about in the tank down there at the Pentagon.
What is these guys' problem when their policy, essentially, as we've seen under Obama in Syria, has amounted to support for al-Qaeda, for al-Zawahiri's guys?
And also, which is going on in Yemen right now, too, which they're still bombing al-Qaeda, but they're helping them more than they're harming them, I think we all agree.
I'll take the first crack at that.
Point one that you brought up was the generals and the lack of accountability.
And it was refreshing to hear Donald Trump actually call them to charge.
Like, you know what?
Here's the mission.
They're not accomplishing it.
Now, I happen to think the missions are not accomplishable.
I don't think these wars are winnable because I don't think they have a strategic end state.
But it was refreshing to see some accountability.
You know, during the Second World War, because, you know, I double as a historian, dozens, dozens, dozens of American generals were relieved for tactical incompetence.
That doesn't happen anymore.
Because you're right, generals are considered untouchable.
They don't have to provide any results.
All they've got to do is wear their ribbons when they go in front of Congress, and everybody bows down to them like a golden calf.
First point.
Second point on Iran, we've talked about this before.
America's obsession with Iran, the Pentagon's obsession with Iran is pathological.
And you're right.
It must go past the Israel lobby.
It must go past the Saudi lobby.
It's just become ingrained in the institution.
And it's so illogical because you're right.
We have more in common in terms of vital strategic national security interests with Iran than we do have differences.
And by forcing every single issue into the box of Iran, Iran, Iran, we do end up allying ourselves with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-like groups or franchises.
It's a pathology of Iranophobia, and it is highly destructive, I think, to anything close to cogent foreign policy.
All right.
Hold it right there just one moment.
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Yeah, you know, I mean, getting back to these generals that just— General Stan McChrystal is now back as a hero because he has criticized Trump's moral leadership.
And, you know, he's right about that, I guess, whatever.
But, I mean, nobody, everyone forgets about what happened with Stan McChrystal in Iraq when he was in charge of JSOC there.
And they had Camp Nama and a bunch of other detention facilities where torture was widespread.
You know, and the same thing, too, in Afghanistan during his time there.
Torture among our Afghan—via the Afghan security forces was widespread.
Yet here's a man who, because he's got these four stars, even though he was fired by President Obama for criticizing the president, he is lionized again.
He is held up in a clerical fashion as almost like they're holy, as some part of a church, that they're beyond criticism or they're beyond any type of fault.
But in this issue, what you guys said about Iran is absolutely true.
And it really is.
It's a great word, pathological.
I think there's some elements with Iran because for so many of the men and women who are colonels and generals now, the Iranians were such great villains in the 80s that some of their first memories were their Iranian hostage crisis.
I mean, that's for me.
I'm 45 years old, and, you know, that's one of the first memories I have is of the Iranian hostage crisis.
So that kind of informs, I think, the narrative that has pushed them along and allows them to have this obsession with Iran.
Some of it, I think, is because Iran is a good target for the U.S. military.
Aside from some awful invasion of Iran a la Iraq, Iran has the conventional forces that our Navy and our Air Force like to destroy.
And they can't really punch back like the Chinese or the Russians can.
So if we're ever actually going to use these F-22s and F-35s and prove the worth of our supercarriers and launch our cruise missiles from our submarines and stuff and destroy actual real targets of value like these men and women were trained to do in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, then it's got to be against someone like Iran or maybe someone like Venezuela.
Right?
I mean, so that's why you have this obsession with them, I think, or two of the areas, I believe, where the obsession comes from.
But it is, it is.
It's an unthinking, reflexive, tribal, primitive-like attitude towards Iran.
Well, and, you know, there's the old saying from the 1990s on the Joint Staff where terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
But it seems kind of difficult to understand the idea in the 2000 teens that supporting al-Qaeda and the terrorism and the Islamic State break-off group and the terrorism that that engenders and promises to spread for the next, you know, years into the future is a small price to pay to oppose Iran by hurting their friend Assad.
I mean, that kind of thing, not to just rehash the whole dang Syria war, but that is what started it was America and its Sunni allies doing this as though it could possibly be worth it or worth the risk, as though they didn't really realize that al-Qaeda in Iraq and this worst bin Ladenite part of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq had just been defeated and wasn't completely gone.
But then they just brought it right back to life.
And to think that they just let that happen.
And I know Seymour Hersh said that, I guess, probably Mike Flynn's DIA, really, was funneling information through the Germans to Assad to help fight these guys at the same time the CIA was supporting them.
So there is that in the Pentagon.
But, you know, overall the policy was to support these guys because Iran is worse.
And certainly the Pentagon didn't put their foot down and stop it or anything like that.
I don't know.
Well, you know, Anna, let's think about Iran for a second in terms of, like, tangible threats, which I know we're in such a—we're so delusional now in the U.S. national security state we don't even think this way, but empirical facts.
When was the last time an Iranian national killed Americans on American soil?
No time in the last 40 years.
When was the last time that an Iranian proxy killed an American soldier or kidnapped an American in the Middle East?
Late 80s, at best, early 90s, depending on what you believe about Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
So we're talking about decades in the past since Iran has done anything nearing what al-Qaeda has done, and of course it never did.
In fact, we killed more people in that airliner we shot down in the 80s and refused to apologize for.
Thank you, George H.W. Hague-Geographic Bush.
Okay?
We killed more Iranians by mistake in that civilian airliner than they have ever killed American soldiers or American civilians.
So, I mean, it's so lopsided and illogical, but someone needs to explain to me where the real threat from Iran comes.
This is a non-nuclear nation that's not currently seeking nuclear weapons, and yet we look the other way when Israel illegally develops nuclear weapons and, you know, murders just a few thousand Palestinian civilians.
That's okay.
But Iran, you can't even point to a tangible threat from Iran.
The only thing they've got, okay, is Iranian-supported militias killing Americans in Iraq.
But even that isn't so clear-cut, as I think all three of us know.
Yeah.
I was just going to ask about that because I know part of your time in Iraq was fighting the Shiite part of the insurgency, which was the smallest part of it, Muqtada al-Sadr's groups and all of that.
And so, you know, I think it's doubly important to hear you dismissing that because it really is so overblown that Iran was responsible for all of that.
But anyway, I'm sorry, Matthew, I think you were going to say.
Oh, I was just going to say, you know, and it is so clear-cut what we've been doing in Syria regarding Iran and our purposes in Syria as defined by Iran.
I mean, it's been so clear-cut.
It's been so easy to see.
I'm reminded of about a year and a half, two years ago or so, Michael Vickers, who used to be the head guy at the Defense Department for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, and Vickers goes back to the 80s in Afghanistan.
But he wrote his op-ed for The Washington Post, and he said that.
I mean, so here's the guy who's in charge of special operations for the U.S. military, and he says that we are in Syria because of Iran.
You know, I mean, and again, there's no questioning of it.
There is no—it doesn't cause a ruckus.
It doesn't cause an issue.
How many hundreds of thousands of dead?
Because we're playing a game of risk, basically, with Iran.
We want to make sure that Syria is our color on the map and not the Iranians.
And that's the narrative.
But the narrative that we have here in this country of what we're doing, what our forces abroad are doing, and the purposes just continues to defy any examination, any evidence, any actual visage of reality.
You know, it's amazing.
I mean, it is amazing, really.
Well, and of course, ever since Trump announced that, yeah, we're leaving, there have been all of these articles, you know, Bret Stephens in The New York Times, but then at least as I've seen a good half dozen others that just outright say oftentimes in the headline, this is bad for Israel because if America leaves, then— And I don't know why they assume that Iran would want to stay there or that the Syrian government would want Iran's forces to stay there, which are just in the low thousands anyway, longer, you know, one day longer than it takes to kill the last Islamic State fighter anyway.
But they seem to think that, oh, yeah, see, it's the land bridge, also known as a road, that would go through what used to be Saddam Hussein's Iraq but is now Iraqi Shiastan, I guess Shiite-controlled Sunnistan there across to Syria, and that therefore necessarily—and maybe this is true.
I don't want to be too naive.
You guys are a couple of military guys.
You tell me that the Iranians are now going to use this land bridge to ship, you know, their longer-range missiles and more heavy-duty hardware through Iraq, Syria, and to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
And so this is the great betrayal.
This is why we have to stay.
This is why we picked this fight in the first place was to limit Iranian influence.
And now that that didn't work and Iranian influence has increased, that's why we have to stay even longer.
So from their point of view, it's a really bad time to call this off right when everything's backfired.
That's ludicrous.
Yeah, that's the narrative.
But all that alarmist rhetoric that you're talking about in these op-eds is ludicrous for a number of reasons.
Like, it ignores the fact that Iran has airplanes, and if they really want to move missiles, they don't need a road, OK?
They're not moving the army by horse and buggy, OK?
This alarmist rhetoric does two things.
It overestimates both the capacity of Iran and the intent of Iran, right?
So for all the high-flung rhetoric that's used mostly for domestic consumption among the Ayatollahs about Israel bombing Israel, all that, the reality is Iran knows full well that they have to limit any of their proxy or direct attacks on Israel because they understand that they hold the weaker military hand.
I tend to agree with what you said earlier, Scott, that one of the reasons—I think, Matt, you said the same thing— one of the reasons Iran is such a perfect enemy is because they meet all the criteria for a perfect enemy for both Washington and specifically the Pentagon.
So what are those criteria, OK?
Well, I'm going to argue they're the same criteria that made Iraq such a great enemy until 2003.
In order to be a perfect enemy to plan against, right, a perfect enemy to scare Americans with, they have to be the following things.
Foreign, preferably of a different religion, OK?
Their leader has to be either like a theocracy-type guy or a wild authoritarian like Kim Jong-un.
But they can't have nuclear weapons, right, because then you really can't invade them, right?
If they've got nuclear weapons, they've kind of got the trump card.
Unless you want nuclear war, you can't really invade them.
And they have to have a second- or third-rate military.
Well, Iran meets all of those criteria, right, all of them.
Most of their tanks are leftovers from the stuff that we gave the Shah in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
OK, they don't yet have nuclear weapons.
They're not even as close as they're made out to be.
They make a great enemy because they're a bunch of Islamist theocrats, so we're told.
And the reality is, I think if we fight them, I think if we invade them, it'll end up being a quagmire that makes Iraq look like a cakewalk.
But from the Pentagon's point of view, like, yeah, this is a fight we can win in the desert with tanks.
Now the reality will be much messier than all that.
But that's what they like.
Fighting Russia, that's not plausible, not in any real sense.
China, land war in Asia, not really plausible.
Even fighting North Korea, not truly plausible.
But Iran, now that's a perfect enemy, just like Saddam was a perfect enemy.
Well, I like to think—one thing real quick, Matthew, and then I'm sorry.
But I really like to think that that's really not right, that Iran is the perfect Cold War enemy, and that really they did Iraq because of all those things you said.
Iraq was doable.
Iran wasn't.
And, in fact, this is actually what worries me, though, about the current situation, is if John Bolton is going along with getting out of Syria, we know his position has always been, publicly has been, why bother with Assad when the only reason we don't like Assad is because he's allied with Iran?
Strike the root.
But, I mean, hasn't it been—you guys, Marine Corps, U.S. Army— hasn't it been in the Pentagon and among the services that they really don't want to do Iran?
Because that's biting off more than they can chew.
Even the Air Force needs guys on the ground to take out all the anti-aircraft stuff, and the guys that do that don't want to do that, right?
Because it's not doable, because it's way bigger than Iraq, and it's got mountains, and they have not been at war and besieged this whole time the way Iraq was in 2003.
They haven't been at war since 1989.
So, I don't know.
Oh, I agree with you.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
I think what the Army and the Pentagon like most is to prepare for an enemy they'll never fight.
I mean, that's what they like.
Yeah, that's a great excuse to sell planes for some day that never comes, we hope.
They love the Cold War, right, Matt?
Tell me if I'm wrong.
I know I've just cut you off, but true or false, the senior NCOs and the senior officers that we served under, especially in the early 2000s, they looked back fondly on East Berlin and the Cold War stasis, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I was in the Marine Corps.
They talk about every year you'd send a brigade from North Carolina up to Norway, because you're going to fight the Soviets or the Russians as they come into Norway and defend NATO's northern flank or left flank.
And they like that.
I mean, I saw this in 2009.
One of the things that, and Danny knows exactly what I'm talking about, when we had a brigade come into our part of Afghanistan as part of the surge in 2009, a mechanized brigade, when they put their tactical symbols on a map, so what they were going to do when they illustrated their mission graphically on a map, the symbols they used, were all the same symbols that I had been taught in the 90s to fight the Russians, to fight the Soviets, to stop a Soviet motorized rifle regiment.
So they're using tactical graphics, tactical symbols, because that's what they were taught and that's what exists inside of them.
That's what they were brought up on.
That's what they know so well.
And this all goes back to me.
I mean, this should not be a surprise that this is kind of the way organizations work.
Organizations are going to look to not just sustain themselves, but to grow.
I mean, I always think of the grapes of wrath.
We're talking about the banks.
And the banks have to grow or they're going to die.
And that's why they have to keep swallowing up these farms.
What are they going to do with these farms?
Nothing.
But they've got to grow so they take people's farms.
And that's the way, one of my favorite quotes about the military comes from, supposedly comes from Curtis LeMay, who was the commander of strategic air command in the 1950s and very much the epitome of the Cold War warrior.
And supposedly one time a subordinate said something to him about the Russians being the enemy.
And Curtis LeMay, who was an Air Force general, said, now, son, you got it all wrong.
The Russians are an adversary.
The Navy is the enemy.
Right?
I mean, and that's the way you look at it.
And it makes sense because, you know, 1947, we have the National Security Act.
And it creates the permanent war state.
It creates the Department of Defense.
It creates the CIA.
But it creates, you know, 48 George Kennan issues, his policy paper where he says, the purpose, you know, the United States has 60% of the world's wealth, but only 5% of the world's population.
The purpose going forward of this government is always going to be to create that disparity, you know, to protect that disparity.
You know, and then in 49, NATO was created.
So we've had 70 years of NATO now.
And what purpose is?
You got to not just forget about growing and expanding, but you got to have a purpose.
So just getting back to like what, you know, you guys are saying about Iran being the perfect purpose.
Now, China comes into this and Russia comes into this as well, in terms of what Danny was just saying about having an enemy you're never going to fight.
Because Russia is great because we can put all these tanks into Europe.
And we can have these massive field exercises.
And we can prepare for a war that we're never going to have.
China, the same way for our Navy, you know, and for our Air Force, because we're going to have this massive sea battle, the Battle of Midway II, basically, as they see it.
And it is.
It's exciting for them.
But more importantly, it allows their various components, Air Force, Navy, Army, what have you, to grow and expand.
And that's why you see so much of this rhetoric.
And that's why this rhetoric isn't just rhetoric, but it's actual belief that is indoctrinated into these officers so that they actually believe it by the time they're colonels and generals.
It's unthinking for – it's impossible for them to deviate from that type of thinking.
A great point about the inter-service rivalry on the budgets.
And I think that each of the services, including the Marines, but especially the Army, Air Force, and the Navy, each of the services has a favorite enemy that they would like us to focus on.
And they create doctrines that – they create the doctrine first, and then they find the enemy to justify it.
So, for example, there's this new thing called air-sea battle.
It's this doctrine of the Air Force and the Navy working together to destroy an adversary.
Well, guess who the Air Force and the Navy really think our biggest adversary ought to be?
China, because China is an air-sea battle perfect enemy.
We're not – we can't really put our measly 500,000 American soldiers in a major land war in China, in the interior of China.
No, we can't do that.
But what we can do is fight over the Spratly Islands.
We can fight over the Taiwan Straits, and we can play out all our toys or at least buy the toys and then never use them.
Whereas the Army – and I can tell you this 100 percent accurately, even in the last few years, every general that came to the Command and General Staff College, the school for majors, every one of these division and corps commanders that came to talk to us, all they trumpeted as the most important mission for the Army was all this new deployment of tanks to Russia or to Eastern Europe.
Back into the Baltic states, back into Eastern Europe.
Let's send an aviation squadron and 400 tanks to Romania.
It's ludicrous.
But for the Army, Russia is the perfect target because that allows us to go back to Cold War thinking, which is more tanks, more troops, more personnel carriers as far east as we can get them.
Iran, I think, is kind of a perfect confluence of all of the above because Iran would require a land invasion, meaning lots of tanks, and it would require an air-sea combination against anti-aircraft and possibly an amphibious assault, and that's where the Marines come in.
Yeah, man.
Well, we certainly don't want to see that.
And I guess in that scheme, though, SOCOM gets Africa.
Is that it?
SOCOM gets everything else.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
And it's not any more complex than what Danny described.
I know people want to think that there's a lot of nuance to it, that there's a lot of that this can't be the way it actually operates, that it can't be just like where I work at.
But it is because these generals and admirals who have climbed the ranks of their services are creatures of their organization.
And so, yeah, to have this kind of conversation is not – this is not – we're not making things up here.
This is exactly how it is within the services, this type of rivalry, this type of need for a mission, this create the enemy that fits our needs best as opposed to what fits the needs of the country.
So, yeah, it's exactly as Danny describes it.
Sorry, just one second.
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All right, now here's one more thing from Trump's press conference.
And, well, first of all, on Twitter the other day, he, I think, I don't know how well this worked, but he is the president, even the Republican president of the United States, said to Lindsey Graham that, oh, I guess Lindsey Graham doesn't care about American soldiers.
I want to bring them home safe and sound.
Or apparently he doesn't care if they get hurt or not.
Some kind of thing like that, which is actually what I've been saying all along, that to support the troops, oppose the policy.
You want them safe, training at Fort Bliss, screwing around?
Or you want them out there getting shot and dying for nothing?
You know, this is crazy.
But so the president of the United States is taking the support the troops thing as, you know, all the hawks have hid behind this whole time to support the troops.
You have to support the wars that they're in, they've said.
And he's turned it upside down.
And then in the press conference the other day, too, he said, look, I go to Walter Reed.
I see these guys.
I don't want to make any more of them.
Now, you could say, and I guess a lot of people would assume and why not presume that Donald Trump doesn't mean anything.
He's a complete sociopath and he's just preying on these emotion things that he imagines other people have somehow.
But it seems like that's the kind of thing I've heard you say before, Matthew.
And I know that you've had some injuries, although you still have all your hands and feet, I think.
You came back wounded from the wars where you're a combat veteran and Marine in Iraq War II.
And so can you tell us a little bit about that?
And because I know you've had some real progress on in some ways and some setbacks and others.
But I also know that you have a lot to say about organizations where other people like you can really get important help that they need.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks, Scott.
Yeah, so I'm dealing right now with – well, I have been dealing and I spoke about publicly about my issue with PTSD and issues of guilt of things I did and took part in during the war.
That drove me to near suicide.
And then, of course, the substance abuse and the depression that comes with that.
But I've also – I was a combat engineer, so I was around a lot of explosions, a lot of them in training, but also too a lot during the wars.
And about three and a half years ago started dealing with the residuals of traumatic brain injury.
So very similar to what the football players and the boxers and the rugby players are experiencing where you have this latent development or latent manifestation.
And then of symptoms of the injury.
So for me, it's a decade, decade and a half afterwards.
All of a sudden I start having these really debilitating headaches and awful fatigue issues and what the VA calls a stress disorder where any little thing gets you overwhelmed.
I mean so just any little thing.
I mean like tying your tie, trying to put your leash on your dog.
I mean any little thing and you are overwhelmed.
You start shutting down.
It's like for me, it's as if all of a sudden tunnel vision occurs and it's getting tighter and tighter on me.
And this starts occurring a few years ago.
And so, of course, that's coupled with the PTSD and everything else.
But yeah, it got so bad that in the past year, I've been bedbound about five days of the week because of the headaches, because of the fatigue, because of this being overwhelmed.
Just being unable to function in a basically dissociative state.
And a lot of guys are experiencing this.
This is not unique to me.
And the problem being though is that even though a lot of guys are experiencing this and gals are experiencing it, it's unique to each person and how the manifestations occur and how the injury is present and what needs to be done about it.
So it took a number of years, but I got a great neurologist at the VA now for the last six, seven months.
And the last two or three months have been life-changing for me because of the medical – of the medicine I've been taking as well as a few other things she's had me do.
But I tell you what, like I said earlier, Scott, I would not have done this interview three months ago because the – more than likely, I would not have been functioning today.
I would have been in bed right now, passed out, medicated out, unable to function due to these problems.
But hopefully that's past me now or at least past me for a time period moving forward.
But there are a lot of issues that a lot of veterans are experiencing, suicide, this traumatic brain injuries.
There are a lot of respiratory problems guys are experiencing, a lot of gastrointestinal issues.
The causes of these – and I'm probably forgetting others too, but the causes of these aren't well understood other than the fact that they are clustered within Iraq and Afghan war veterans.
So whether it's because of – whether it's because of the stress of combat, whether it's because of burning oil smoke, whether it's because of depleted uranium, whether it's because of burn pit fires, we don't know.
But we do know that Iraq and Afghan veterans, like the veterans of pretty much every war, are experiencing health consequences even though they're otherwise seemingly healthy.
So Danny, do you want to chime in on any of that, what you're seeing and what you're – Well, when I was listening to you, Matt, I was sort of using a checklist in my mind and going through some of the similar things that I've been experiencing.
And everyone suffers differently, but I think you're right that the common denominator is that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as a whole today are suffering these things at a much higher rate than our peers out in the civilian world.
For me, obviously I'm being retired a couple years early for PTSD and depression sort of symptoms brought on by that.
So I'm no longer of use to the Army according to doctors, which is fine.
And yeah, that's definitely over the last couple years manifested itself in pretty serious substance abuse, broken down, probably unsalvageable marriage.
And so much to the extent that, yeah, I'm considering a little bit of inpatient treatment on the way out, on the way out of the Army while it's still free.
So I'll get back to Scott's point though, which I think both of our stories kind of gets at, which is, look, I can't say whether Trump's a sociopath or not, and I can't even give my opinion on that because he's still my commander in chief.
But what I will say is even if that were true, even if that critique was true that he doesn't really care, he doesn't care about anything, he's just playing the veterans, even if that were true, let's support him when he's right.
So in other words, if he's saying the best way to support veterans, unlike Lindsey Graham, is to create less of them, then I think this president really enjoys adulation from the public, then let's give him it when Pavlov's dogs, when he's doing the thing that is best.
Because I agree that the best way, and I mean, geez, I have a pin on my laptop case that says this, if you want to support veterans, create less of us, create less Mats and Dannys and a million guys who have it worse than both of us.
Right.
And of course, you know, he heard this massive response from the media and all the spies that are the guests on the TV news all day for weeks and weeks and weeks that, you know, boo his, they all hate him.
And this is proof.
This is the worst thing about him ever, that he would get out of Syria, that he would announce partial withdrawal from Afghanistan and this kind of thing.
But to what degree did he hear a response from his base that they support this?
And I think, you know, over at Breitbart, they seem to be supportive of this kind of thing.
I don't know how broad that is on kind of right wing radio.
I guess I read that Laura Ingram has lately been having a real change of heart and is joining Tucker Carlson in more of an anti-war right wing kind of point of view.
But I think it's really important that especially veterans and especially combat veterans of these wars contact not just your congressman, but contact the White House and tell them, look, I'm this name, rank and serial number.
And I was here there in the other place.
And I support this because that's what he needs to hear more than anything else is that, hey, Mr. President, regardless of what all these weenies on CNN say, the combat vets are responding.
They're leaving voicemails.
They're sending in emails and they're saying that this is what they want to hear.
Please keep it up, sir.
Because you talk about, you know, classical conditioning and all that.
That's how you get him to know that it's right, you know, that it's the right thing for him to do.
Yeah, and it's not just supporting the president on this, but the few Democratic politicians we have and the few Republican politicians, say like Walter Jones in North Carolina, though he's retiring, I believe, after this time.
But say someone like Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii, Democrat from Hawaii, she, two years ago, roughly two years ago, when Trump launched those missiles into Syria, she criticized him for it.
She went against most of the political media establishment and said it wasn't presidential for him to fire off these missiles into Syria.
And she had an extremely tough time of it from the Democratic Party, from the media.
And her office was desperate to get any endorsement from people, any support from people, because just to help show that, look, this is what many Americans believe and what many Americans have found.
And actually, to the point about the Republican base that elected Trump, there have been studies of some of these districts where Trump's positions against the war, clashing against Clinton's positions against the war, positions for the war, I should say, made a difference.
That in rural areas where they have felt the wars, where they know people whose kid was killed, or who the kid across the street now doesn't have a leg, or he's got problems and can't work, he's not the same kid they once knew, et cetera, who actually have seen the cost of these wars, that they voted on that and voted for Trump.
So there is data and evidence that anti-war sentiment helped Trump in certain districts, which makes sense.
I mean, which absolutely makes sense.to attack him from the right and be even worse than him on the very worst thing, which their base does not agree with.
And so they won't vote for him in 2020, but they'll stay home just like they did for Hillary Clinton again, because he'll force Nancy Pelosi to turn further into Dick Cheney here, which does not suit her well as far as her regular constituents are concerned.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen that.
We've seen that already starting to occur, because this week Elizabeth Warren said that she was broadly in agreement with Trump on pulling troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
And immediately, the criticism of her begins, that while she's not really a foreign affairs person, that she's more about domestic policy, that she's just using this to differentiate herself from the Democratic PAC, but the majority of the Democrats are going to go along with the sensible, the typical or the usual military force.
You know, Joe Biden, you know, you're talking before about the generals, you know, being so wrong about everything, but Joe Biden on foreign policy, the man was wrong on almost everything, you know, but he gets held up as someone who might run, who has experience in foreign policy, and he's the one who's wise on this.
So we're already seeing that type of the establishment supporting the conventional narrative of that U.S. military force abroad is not just good, but necessary.
And we're going to see more of that.
And I think that's what you're probably going to see with the Democrats in terms of your, unfortunately, I think, in 2020 campaign, have a Democratic contender who is very pro-intervention, very pro-keeping 800 U.S. military bases around the world, is saying, I'm not going to spend $750 billion on defense, I'm going to spend $800 billion on defense, just to make a dichotomy between themselves and Trump.
Yeah, I think the worst thing the Democrats could do is put Biden up, and I'll get to why in a second.
Matt, as another, as a fellow progressive, I know you and I are to the left of Scott, but, you know, as a fellow progressive, doesn't it interest you that whenever you watch like MSNBC or CNN, they list the early polling on who Democrats want to be the president or to run in 2020?
Biden's been on top over and over again with like 31 percent and nobody else is even in double digits.
And it really blows my mind because like that's not the sense that I get from the grassroots left.
Like that's not the blue wave or whatever you want to call what just happened in 2018.
They don't seem to be like Biden guys or gals.
And so it's interesting to me that he's coming up so high.
The problem with Biden is he, like everyone else in his baby boomer sort of generation, anybody who was in power in 2003 during the Iraq vote or 2002 during the Iraq war vote, who had any presidential aspirations, every one of them, Kerry, Clinton, Schumer, Biden, all voted for that war.
And he was also the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and held all the rigged hearings where only hawks were allowed to testify, too.
So he was really in on it.
Trump would eat him alive on foreign policy over that vote.
Trump's not done with bashing the Iraq war and bashing the Iraq war is still broadly popular.
And it would, I think Trump's current and recent decisions would force someone like Biden to run to the right of Trump on foreign policy, to run on the Mattis-Clinton sort of bipartisan militarism line.
And I just don't think that's a great thing for the Democrats because like you said, the people who voted for Ocasio-Cortez, they might just stay home.
Well, I didn't realize that Elizabeth Warren had said she broadly agreed.
I like broadly is like, it's not my fault.
It's a separate issue kind of thing.
Never mind that it's Trump.
It's just the right thing to wind these things down.
And that's good to hear that she's taking that stand.
And at least from her political wisdom point of view, it's better to take a further left position rather than a Biden, Hillary-ite, centrist CIA position here.
And maybe she really believes that, too.
It's obviously the right thing.
If I'm recalling the article correctly, there's a day or two ago in the Washington Post that article.
Half of that article is devoted to, if I'm thinking of the right article, half of that article is devoted then to the ruminations of James Dobbins, the former ambassador, very much involved with anything establishment, was a big deal at Rand Corporation for a while.
But half of that article or a third of that article is devoted to his ruminations about why such a stance by Democratic presidential contenders is foolish.
And it is presented by the Washington Post to the public as a grand old man of diplomacy, someone who is completely wise, someone we should listen to, someone who is reasonable.
But like you said with the generals, one of these guys who has never been right in anything, never accomplished anything.
But the press gives him so much, you know, it gives just so much attention to men like Dobbins, you know, or any other talking heads that you see on CNN or MSNBC, that it's really hard for people to think of any other way that the world can work, except for the way it's working right now.
It really does.
It really is effective the way that consensus is presented.
And I'm sorry, guys, I just realized how late I am for my next interview, because we really could keep doing this all day long with these Democrats and these different things.
But Matt, one thing real quick, though, I wanted you, if you could, to list a couple of the better organizations other than obviously the VA.
But the fact that, as you said, that you went through this suicidal period and here you are on the other side of that ought to give hope to somebody or it could in some circumstances.
So maybe they'd like to hear from you which number to call or which URL to type real quick and maybe get a hand here.
Sure.
Yeah.
First, I just thought about a story about and I said, time's up.
But not James Risen, but Jim Risen, one time who was I think he was running for Newsweek at a time about four years or so ago, asked me about safe havens and for terrorists overseas.
And I said, look, you really don't need safe havens.
And he said, wait, wait, stop.
You're destroying the narrative.
I don't have enough space in my article to reassert or redefine or reconstruct the narrative.
So we have to go with the narrative as the public knows it.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a lot of it is that you have this.
Noam Chomsky said this too.
You have this element or you have the way CNN or MSNBC is constructed.
These men and women on there only have two or three minutes.
So to say that Russia's bad or Iran is bad or that we went into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction or to deal with al Qaeda or whatever so many people in this country still believe, you can say that in one sentence.
But to deconstruct it all, to explain that while the U.S. and NATO have been expanding up to Russia's borders, that takes more than two or three minutes.
So you can never challenge a narrative just based upon how the news is presented, in the format it's presented, or the fact that articles online are only 600 or 700 words.
And you can't deconstruct the narrative in 600 or 700 words.
So effectively, the media has positioned itself or has formulated itself in a way that just reasserts the narrative, whether they want to or not.
But to get to the point about other organizations, the first thing I would say is that every state has a VA within the state.
And some are better than others.
But I know both in North Carolina and Virginia, where I have used state-level veterans assistance officers, they have been excellent.
And each state also has a number of services that are available to veterans that many people don't know about because they just kind of look at the federal VA.
But at the state level, take a look at your veterans organizations.
I'll say one organization that is really terrific, that provides a lot of help, is an organization called Give an Hour.
Give an Hour, G-I-V-E-A-N-H-O-U-R.
And that's an organization that will match you up with mental health professionals in your area.
So this is how my wife and I found a marriage counselor.
Because just like Danny said, he's got issues with his relationship.
PTSD just destroys relationships.
And what it does is your poor wife or your poor spouse, they end up getting PTSD because they're living with you and they are walking on eggshells every day.
And it just wrecks them.
So we're in marriage counseling, just like so many other people are, trying to save this.
Our relationship goes back 14 years.
So she knew me before I went to war and changed.
So to try and save that, we go to marriage counselor.
We found our marriage counselor through Give an Hour.
So get on the Give an Hour website, whatever you're looking for.
There are plenty of professionals around the country who are willing to, either free of charge or at reduced charges, provide mental health care or mental health services.
Finally, just one more organization that I'm a real big fan of is an organization called the Semper Fi Fund.
They're based out of California.
They're smaller than, say, Wounded Warrior Program, but they, I think, are much more effective, much more efficient.
I haven't done anything with them in the last couple of years, but for the 10 years I knew of them and worked with them, they did really terrific work for military members, retired military members, wounded military members, and their families.
Yeah, again, it's called the Semper Fi Fund.
They do all kinds of great stuff, all kinds of terrific programs.
And that'd be another organization I would direct people to.
HOST 1 Cool.
All right, you guys, I'm sorry I got to go.
I'm so late.
I got Elijah Magnier on Syria here in a minute.
Well, here 10 minutes ago.
So this is Matthew Ho, former State Department.
Are you with any of your other institute at this point, Matt?
I'm sorry.
HOST 2 I'm with the Center for International Policy.
HOST 1 Thanks, Scott.
HOST 2 Yeah, thanks, Scott.
Absolute pleasure, as always.
HOST 1 All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.