Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the White's 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 hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing David Stockman.
He was a congressman once upon a time and then a successful Wall Street trader.
He runs Contra Corner and he is the author of The Great Deformation and Peak Trump.
And here's a piece at Antiwar.com.
Bravo, Donald.
A war Washington might finally leave.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, David?
Very good.
Happy to be with you.
It's pretty rare we ever get to say bravo to a president for anything.
The last time I can think of was Obama signing the JCPOA back four years ago.
That's exactly right.
And that was kind of the headline of my post in my blog Contra Corner that day.
Bravo, Barack.
You know, it comes very rarely.
And look what happened in both cases.
The embedded opposition in Washington came out of the woodwork everywhere.
There was a determined fight to stop Obama from signing the accord.
And then finally, they come back into power through the back door with Trump, cancel it.
And now we're on the verge of a shooting war in the Persian Gulf for no reason whatsoever, except this very drastic, nasty economic sanctions and form of warfare that has been imposed on the Iranians.
So that's one case.
Here's another case.
And no sooner did Trump do the right thing and say, we're not going to stand American forces in harm's way between a simmering conflict within, I should say, a simmering conflict between the Kurds and the Turks on the northeastern border of Syria that's been going on for 400 years or longer.
The minute he decides we're going to stand down from that emerging conflict and remove a few hundred forces or even less, 50, I think it was, all of Washington breaks into a chorus of denunciation and hand-wringing about how terrible this is.
And I think it only, you know, underscores what we're up against.
The city, Imperial Washington, thrives on war.
I mean, what other, you know, conclusion can you draw?
But on the other hand, already, as I said in the article last week, the Kurds now are going to have to make a quick deal with Assad.
And that's exactly what they're in the process of doing.
And that is totally undermining the whole neocon case here.
You know, they wanted you to believe that the Kurds were an innocent ally that was being abandoned, when in fact it makes far more sense for them to support, you know, reconcile with the regime and protect their common border from the Turks.
So the reason that Washington can't abide this, of course, is that allegedly Assad is the bad guy.
Allegedly the regime has to change in Damascus.
And now we see, as, you know, this situation sorts itself out, the real motivation all along.
It wasn't ISIS.
It wasn't defending a beleaguered ally, the Kurds.
It was because the Kurds were a useful hammer against the Assad regime.
That was the underlying objective all along.
Yeah.
Now, you know, it's interesting.
I was talking with Danny Sherson, the retired army major, anti-war guy.
And he was saying, you see what's going on here was Trump, essentially, he had to do this as a surprise, because they would have ended up just countermanding it and coming up with some way to cancel it.
And so even though he really, you know, you would think would have, could have encouraged the Kurds to go ahead and make a deal with Assad before he withdrew, as you're saying, politics in Washington, D.C. absolutely forbid that.
And so this was really the only way to do it.
I agree with you.
And now this morning, among other things, abandoning an ally and all that, there's this chorus of denunciation about the process and the Lone Ranger in the Oval Office and so forth.
And you've hit the point exactly on the head.
Had he actually tried to execute this policy, which is the right policy, getting the hell out of Syria overall, but specifically out of that hotspot with American forces that shouldn't be there, had he done it through the normal bureaucratic procedures of review and vetting, it would have leaked long ago and he would have been stopped dead in the water because Lindsey Graham and all the rest of the warmongers would have been, you know, flocking down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, demanding that he continue this war that they don't want to end.
So that's exactly right.
So finally, after three years, Trump is beginning to realize, I think, that he's surrounded by enemies, that he is alone, home alone, as I sometimes say in the Oval Office.
And so this time he's struck by surprise.
And now it is set in motion a train of actions that will maybe finally clarify the whole Syrian situation, that Washington's policy was to destroy the state of Syria and the tolerable balance that the Assad regime kept among all the different minority ethnic and religious groups in the country, and that would have easily kept the caliphate, as so-called, from even emerging in the dusty plains and small towns of northeast Syria, save for U.S. intervention, the massive flow of arms and money and material to the radical Sunnis.
All of this is now being revealed as, you know, the real disaster that Washington imposed, because if Assad now can reconcile with the Kurds, which is pretty clearly going to happen, and come to the defense of the border, they'll make a deal with the Turks to put in place this safe zone that they want along the border so that, you know, the millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey, which are overwhelming the state in their fiscal capacity, can come back home.
You know, I think it's going to sort itself out.
I don't want to be overly optimistic, but this may be the biggest defeat that the neocons and the Washington interventionists have had in a long time, and maybe at a good point in time as well, before the upcoming election.
Maybe the electorate might be awakened from its slumber here to see what sweeping change we need in our foreign policy as a result of the window on disaster that is now opening up here in Syria.
Well, you know, it's almost like Iraq War one and a half years during Bill Clinton, where the regime change has been canceled.
They announced that they're no longer seeking regime change in Damascus, and Trump in, I think, July of 2017, called off the Timber Sycamore program and the CIA support for al-Qaeda there.
But I think you're still absolutely right about essentially halfway the same point, which is it never really was about the Kurds.
These were all crocodile tears about the Kurds, because they're a good excuse for staying because of Iran and Iran's presence, and for that matter, Hezbollah's presence inside Syria, where they came to help protect Assad from the CIA's jihadists.
But since the policy has backfired so badly, now Assad is more dependent on Iran than he ever has been before.
And so I just want to share a couple of headlines with you here.
Jerusalem Post, can Israel trust the U.S. after Syria withdraw?
Jewish Daily Telegraph, Senator Lindsey Graham calls troop withdrawal from Syria a nightmare for Israel.
Reuters, Israel uneasy over Trump's refusal to stand by Kurds.
New York Times, Israelis watch U.S. abandon Kurds and worry who's next.
I think I kind of figured out maybe what's going on as far as the motivation for the panic attack on TV, David.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what.
You know, all the way through here, you can say that Trump officially abandoned regime change, but that was from his lips to nowhere in Washington, because most of the rest of the apparatus was still in that policy mode, because Assad stood in the way of their effort to drive the Iranians out of Syria in every way, shape and form.
And so the Syrian policy is simply a derivative or an extension of the anti-Iranian policy, which makes no sense either.
But that's the driving force.
And so long as the Syrians were allied with the Iranians, which is logical from a religious point of view, the Alawites and Shia are just a branch of Shia there.
So the point is Syria was really a victim of our anti-Iranian policy.
And, of course, the anti-Iranian policy suits the interests of both the Bibi Netanyahu branch of the War Party as well as Washington.
For the Bibi Netanyahu branch, it's how they stay in power, by demonizing the state of the Iranians, and Washington by creating an alleged enemy that keeps the budgetary resources flowing to the military-industrial surveillance complex.
So what's being, I think, opened up here, what's being revealed in these rapidly moving developments in Syria, is that our whole intervention there was a giant mistake and excuse for attacking the Iranians on Syrian soil.
And I think maybe all of that is coming to an end, because if the Kurds can form a working alliance and rejoin the Syrian state with some degree of autonomy, that they can negotiate with Damascus.
And if Turkey makes a border deal that satisfies their worry about armed Kurds on their border, given this whole larger issue of Kurdistan, Washington is going to be the odd man out.
Maybe we'll see some change of attitude, at least among some of the politicians who are going to be quite startled.
One, that the Islamic State is never coming back.
This is really ridiculous.
The only reason the caliphate ever survived up there in that northeast quadrant, in these small, dusty, backward towns, is because the Syrian state and the government in Damascus was under attack from all of these radicals, and the U.S. Air Force and the Persian Gulf countries, and couldn't defend their own territory.
And if this deal now happens, that's all done.
The Islamic State isn't coming back, and the old Syrian state may finally reassemble itself, and the six and a half million people that have been sent into internal exile all over the country may come back to their home communities and towns, and there is, for the first time in a long time, some hope here.
Yeah, well, I sure like the sound of that.
It occurs to me that the U.S. hasn't fought against Iranian forces in Syria, really, the whole time.
We sat back and watched the Israelis bomb them over and over again.
But when they say that, well, we have to stay at Al-Tanf to protect against Iran, or hedge against Iran, or bounce against Iran, or something like that.
Trump said we have to stay in Iraq, or three and a half, against what's left of ISIS in western Iraq there, embedded with the Shia forces to keep an eye on Iran, he said.
But I wonder, what difference does that make?
I mean, assuming the premise that you got to check Iran's power, are we checking Iran's power with our presence in Iraq and Syria right now?
It doesn't seem to me we're doing that at all.
It's pretty obvious that that objective, which I think is an illegitimate objective, it's an objective of empire first, not America first.
Checking Iran has nothing to do with the security of the American homeland.
I mean, it's a tiny economy, $400 billion, a defense budget of $15 billion, which is about what the Pentagon wastes every seven days.
So, you know, if we would look at this in a halfway objective, rational manner, you would realize that there is no threat from the Iranians.
And if that's true, then why are we trying to check them in a, you know, patch of the Middle East that is none of our business?
You know, maybe some of this will start to come through, clarify itself as the events evolve in Syria.
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Did you happen to see Rand Paul on The View the other day talking about this?
Yes, I did.
And, you know, that was just typical.
In other words, one of the ways that the, you know, empire first, the warfare state rolls, if we can use that term, is that basically the 24-7 media and the mainstream media has abolished history.
There is no history.
I mean, when they were all coming at him, it was as if the Kurds had been America's allies since 1914 or some damn thing.
Well, you know, no sense whatsoever of what the real on-the-ground history is there.
Right.
They're acting like, oh, you're turning them over to the Russians or some scary enemy like that.
But no, we're talking about Turkey, our NATO allies for 70 years.
We're more allies with the Kurds than with the Turks now?
Yeah.
No, but it's even better than that, because a lot of whatever is happening right on the border there now, it's not just the Turkish army, but it's the remnants of the FSA, which are Sunni Arabs.
Right.
The moderate rebels.
Yeah.
The so-called moderate rebels that hate the Kurds.
OK.
And they were they were trained by us.
They were John McCain's.
And, you know, Meghan McCain was part of that piling on on Trump or on Rand Paul that day.
And, you know, the FSA was his pet little militia.
You know, he was always running up there promising them more.
You can see pictures all over the Internet still around where he, you know, was glad handing the military leaders of these militias.
And, you know, now they're fighting our other allies.
So maybe it'll wake somebody up if they would think about it for a second.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, listen, I agree with you already in the first place that, you know, you're just I know you're a total non interventionist and figure we just got to call all these things off yesterday if possible and all that.
But what about what you said about how, man, really, it was Obama who betrayed these Kurds in the first place with his policy of arming up these jihadists to the point where it blew up into the actual caliphate that conquered all of eastern Syria and western Iraq.
These genocidal lunatics.
I mean, Zarqawi with a government, for God's sake, going around killing and enslaving all these people and and inflicting themselves upon the Syrian Kurds to the point where they desperately want to needed American help to protect them from the monster that America had created for them to deal with.
And then we do help them at that point, because obviously a whole caliphate is a bridge too far.
Now we've got to undo that.
So we back the Shia in Iraq and the Kurds in Syria in order to destroy the caliphate.
And then now essentially mean as hell old Uncle Sam is saying, OK, you served your purpose for us and now we turn you back over to the Turks.
And of course, the Turks have real motive for wanting to attack them and fearing.
I'm not saying I don't know real motive.
At least they have a reason to believe that the YPG could be really destabilizing in terms of support for the PKK inside Turkey.
And they have their concern there.
And now we are just completely turning them over to the wolves.
Like I'm not proposing another alternative that includes keeping our military there longer or anything.
But isn't America mean as hell to do this to these people?
You know, like what they did with the Hmong tribesmen in Vietnam.
Here, help us fight these commies.
Oh, we're leaving.
Bye.
And then leaving them to be slaughtered.
Well, you know, it just shows you what a tangled web you create when you start mucking around in an area of the world that you do not understand in the slightest.
I mean, the ethnic and religious complexity and history here, you know, is far more difficult to sort out than anyone in Washington ever realized.
And yet, as they jumped on the case in, you know, the spring of 2011 and basically turned what was a protest into a violent civil war by arming one side.
All of the things that you've described, you know, were set in motion and you get the terrible outcome that we have today.
But I see a couple of points out of this.
Number one, in the end, maybe there's a huge lesson to the world that you were reading in some of those headlines.
Can you trust Washington?
That's a wonderful thing.
The world has to stop trusting Washington.
It has to stop joining wars when Washington calls them.
And they have to stop joining the coalition of the willing, and they should be unwilling all the way along.
The second thing is, obviously, the caliphate arose in northeastern Syria out of the wreckage of the Iraqi disaster from our second war, and the destruction of the Hussein government and the tolerable balance that he created with both oil largesse and the sword over decades.
And you ended up with the Sunni western provinces, Anbar province and, you know, the western Sunni areas, totally at the mercy of a Shia government that we imposed in Baghdad after the whole, you know, intervention and state was destroyed.
So then, you know, I think Obama did a logical thing.
He said, we can't stay here forever, which is the big question about the forever war.
They pulled out, they left all these weapons behind.
It was all the weapons in the caches and Mosul and other places in the West that allowed the ISIS to arm itself.
And then as we got in the middle of the Syrian civil war in 2011 and began to arm McCain's favorite so-called moderate rebels, who were really either jihadists or were selling the weapons that we transferred to them to the real jihadists, ISIS, you know, we basically in a one-two fashion like that from the remnants of western Iraq and then from the arming of the internal opposition in Syria, we created the Islamic State.
Now, my big point is that had we not been trying to destroy the government in Damascus, they would have snuffed out the caliphate before it occupied more than a dozen or even a half a dozen towns.
The reason that the caliphate thrived is that they thrived behind the protective wall that Washington's intervention had created in areas that the Syrian government didn't control.
And therefore, what happened is the Kurds end up having their communities overrun and their people maimed and tortured and enslaved, as you say, because a caliphate arose that the Syrian government wasn't allowed to snuff out as part of domestic security.
Because in effect, despite all our protestations about, you know, defeating ISIS and the Islamic State, we were actually providing implicitly the protection that allowed them to thrive.
So, you know, you can't even begin to enumerate what a complete mess we made out of the inherent fragile situation in Syria.
And now we come to the point where the Kurds maybe are a victim twice.
First, because we fostered the Islamic State.
And then second, when Trump finally said we can't stand between the Turks and the Kurds, some of them become a victim again.
Well, you know, where does it all stem from?
Washington mucking around in a country and in a territory that never should have been on the radar screen at all.
Yeah, well, and as we were discussing at the beginning here, the obvious solution is working itself out right now.
And that is they're bringing the Syrian army in there.
And I guess, I mean, according to the Reuters report and all that, Russia's hosting the talks.
And there didn't seem to be any question that, you know, whether the Turkish army and the Syrian army are going to go to war.
The whole point of bringing the Syrian army in there is so that they can tell the Turks there.
We are the border security, so you don't have to be.
We are filling in this buffer zone to deprive them of their excuse for intervention.
And apparently that's going to work, it looks like.
Yeah, I think of all the difficulties and pessimism you can see around the world.
This is a little point of optimism.
There's some light breaking through here because you're exactly right.
What the movement of the Syrian army and Koban and the other towns along the border will do is provide a stabilization so that the Russian conducted talks between Turkey and Syria can, you know, work out how they're going to stabilize the border.
Just remember the big issue, even though Turkey, you know, has been opposed to Assad and the Syrian government for many years now.
But the big issue is there's something like 3 million Syrians in Turkey that are creating all kinds of instability that the Turks legitimately want to permit to return to their home country.
So if they can stabilize the border with this safe zone and if they can get the Syrian government in as the military force on the border and not the armed Kurds, which, you know, the whole issue is the Kurds are a nation of 30 million without a country.
And it's only a small piece of the Kurdish population, maybe 2 million or so that are actually in these contested areas along the border.
There's 12 or 15 million Kurds in Turkey and another 6 million each in Iraq and Iran and other places.
So the Turks legitimately are worried about an armed Kurdish force on their border, and that was the pretext for this military action.
And maybe now this is going to get itself sorted out.
You know, the Kurdish force will move back.
Some kind of safe zone will be guaranteed by the Syrian government and Turkey will pull its forces right back to the border.
And maybe there'll be a little, you know, peace for everybody involved.
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And thanks.
Now, back in the Bill Clinton years, the U.S. gave Turkey all kinds of money and weapons to crush Turkish Kurdish PKK uprising.
Then killed at least tens of thousands of them.
It was barely covered at all.
I only knew about it because of reading Noam Chomsky, but that was hardly ever covered anywhere in major media.
But then, I mean, it's been a while, but their leader, Ocalan, has been arrested and they have, you know, normalized, right?
Like the IRA gave way to the Sinn Fein and they became politicians there.
And I mean, there have been fights over Erdogan treating them unfairly in the parliament and this and that.
But they're not in open insurgency inside Turkey right now.
I wonder if you think that Erdogan has a legitimate fear that independent or autonomous Rojava state there run by the YPG really would amount to a security threat to Turkey.
Yeah, you know, I think that's a legitimate point.
I think he's probably exaggerating it for his own political reasons since, you know, Erdogan has suffered huge setbacks, as we know, recently from these elections.
But they had stabilized an internal peace in the last election.
The Kurds did quite well.
I think they were the third party at the polls relative to their population.
So a situation that was heading towards some kind of normalization and peaceful democratic resolution over time was in peril when the U.S. spent billions of dollars arming a Kurdish force, albeit inside the Syrian border, that could, you know, be seen as an incipient basis for reviving the armed insurrection.
That had gone on for 30 years inside Turkey.
So, yeah, again, it was just another collateral consequence of Washington mucking around in Syria and attempting to overthrow the regime and lining up with anybody who didn't like Damascus and Assad without understanding the consequences two or three or four moves down the road.
So, you know, this, I think, maybe is another good lesson if someone wants to learn it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm afraid that Donald Trump probably isn't reading the Contra Corner, but you get on TV sometimes with all your prominence and all.
And so, you know, what I would think would be the most important thing for you to say, no matter what they ask you, would be to talk about what good politics it is for Trump to do stuff like this, if for no other reason than it's a judo move that forces the Democrats to attack him from the right and the bad kind of right.
And they're the national security hawks who insist on the wars.
And he's basically forcing them to run on that and to tell the Democratic voters of America that, yeah, above all, we have to preserve George Bush's wars.
And but the only way to succeed with that is he has to keep ending them.
He has to keep pulling troops out of places, not just northeastern Syria, but southeastern Syria and east and western Iraq and Libya and Yemen, especially.
And and we have so many wars.
He could end one every couple of months until Election Day and really be on a roll and really sabotage the Democrats by forcing them to all run as a bunch of Hillary Clinton maniacs and drive their own selves into the ground.
Well, I couldn't agree with that more.
And, you know, he's starting to get the hint on that, because if you look at some of his tweets in the last day or two, he was pointing out by the oh, by your way, the Kurds are good people.
But the YPG is basically a left wing crypto communist political philosophy.
And, you know, we've gotten ourselves aligned with some pretty strange bedfellows that make no sense in the larger picture.
So I think he's beginning to realize the way he can spin this, the way he can pitch this.
You know, what are we doing lining up with radical leftists in, you know, a godforsaken corner of Syria?
Yeah.
And isn't it funny to watch the Democrats say that?
No, we have to keep all the wars going.
We can never leave anywhere or something bad might happen.
And attacking him for dealing with Kim, for example.
I mean, that was Dick Cheney's policy that Dick Cheney is such an angel that if he were to if his government was to negotiate with a tyrant, it would bestow legitimacy onto that tyrant.
And so any country we don't like must be confronted with brute force rather than negotiation.
And somehow that's now become the major party platform of the Democrats.
And they're going to attack Trump for trying to deal.
And I'm under no illusions about him.
But I'm just trying to think, I mean, really, if I don't think he's that good a foreign policy at all.
But I think he is a bit crafty at politics.
And if he can see the advantage in it.
And also, this is the one thing where he is the commander in chief.
And if he wants to order troops home, nobody can stop him if he really insists.
Right?
Right.
I think that's right.
But you know, you have to, you know, if you if you focus on what really happened on Friday, it's I think it's essentially 50 embedded forces that were right in harm's way along the border as the Turkish troops were moving, that he redeployed or repositioned out of harm's way.
And all of a sudden, Washington, entire political Washington, official Washington is up in arms because he moved forward.
50 people.
I mean, this, this, maybe this finally, you know, will wake people up that the whole empire emperor and I don't mean Trump, I mean, the reigning deep state emperor is naked.
I mean, you can't move 50 people a few miles without the world coming to an end.
What kind of, you know, ridiculous proposition is that?
Yeah.
And, you know, the other thing that you're making, I think it's a good point.
And Trump ought to start making it.
You know, I'm only trying to resolve things through negotiations, through diplomacy, through understanding correctly what our interests are and what they're not.
He basically said, you know, over and over this past weekend, we have no dog in that hunt been going on for decades and centuries between the Turks and the Kurds.
But he ought to start saying, you know, I'm, I'm willing to try to negotiate with all of these people, savory and otherwise, unsavory and otherwise, because after all, Nixon went to China in 1972, after Mao had just starved about 40 million people to death.
Okay.
Nixon went to Moscow and met with Brezhnev at the peak of, you know, the old Soviet totalitarian empire.
So if that could happen in the past, and of course, Kennedy negotiated that, you know, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even Johnson made his efforts with the Soviet Union, what, how have we reached the point where you can't, it's considered some kind of sign of treason or betrayal if you try to negotiate with the opposition?
Maybe Trump's beginning to open up that field as well.
Yeah, you know, it all comes down to his advisors, and he knows that he could just, I forget, it was Tom Woods was saying to me last week, all he has to do is ask Rand and Rand could probably come up with a list of some really good writers over at the National Interest, and maybe David Stockman for Treasury and a few others.
And he could staff his government with essentially, I'm oversimplifying, but anti-war right wingers.
There's one good bench full that he could have running his National Security Council, his Defense Department, his intelligence agencies, and get this stuff done.
Including Rand himself would be an obvious candidate for Secretary of State.
He wants to run for president again.
That's a good enough spot to run from, Jefferson's seat.
Yep, yep.
There you go.
You know, I agree.
And fortunately, Trump is his own worst enemy.
He keeps picking extremely bad people for all of these slots in the national security apparatus.
And, and then he's surprised that he's continuously undermined almost on every front where he's tried to make, you know, change the direction of policy and implement something that resembles even in a vague way, America first, as opposed to empire first.
Yeah.
All right.
One last question, though.
Do you worry that when he's in all this political trouble at home that he's going to end up becoming more and more dependent on the Israel lobby as his last real bulwark of support?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a, that's a really clear and present worry, danger.
Absolutely.
And even beyond that, that he might do something provocative, because when all else fails, especially if the economy takes a spill and the market takes a spill, which I think is very probable within the next 13 months, that he may resort to some kind of what, you know, wag the dog sort of maneuver in order to save himself, because what he's very realistic, and the one thing he understands is that if he loses the election, he's going to spend the rest of his life either fighting the democratic prosecutors, or he's going to end up in a place not nearly as commodious as Trump Tower.
Yeah, well, oh, so he will be desperate to be reelected.
And that's where, you know, the man on the white horse could emerge out of the, you know, gray mop or out of the orange mop that sits there now.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's why it's, it's got to be driven home the point that, you know, what to do would be another one of these, where you do a surprise withdrawal from somewhere, as the wag the dog scenario, we got so many wars, you can end some, that'll take all the attention off, because they'll attack you for that.
They'll freak out about that, as we see.
That'll do you the favor of taking the attention off of whatever trouble you're in.
But instead of making things worse, you're making things that much better.
Yeah, if he were, see, the problem is he is alone.
He is home alone in the damn Oval Office.
If he was smart, right now with this situation, as pregnant as it is at the moment, he could pick up the red phone, call Putin, agree to join him in hosting a conference, a peace conference to resolve this between the Turks and the Kurds and Assad and all the other forces in the region, and maybe get himself a Nobel Prize.
He could do that right now, but it's very unlikely, and I'm sure that Putin, who is one sharp cookie when it comes to strategic maneuver, would be more than happy to share the glory, because he would be driving the show, and basically Putin's the winner in this whole mess anyway, as it's finally, you know, shaking out.
But he could do that and go from that to, you know, a lot of other positive maneuvers, including, you know, that might create enough trust where he could then have the basis for a meeting with Rouhani and find some way to begin to de-escalate that one as well.
I mean, you know, it could be, he could have a peace offensive for the next 13 months, if he would start right now by calling Putin this very moment, but, you know, he's surrounded by so many enemies of peace that it's very unlikely that, you know, he'll either think about it, or if he does, actually be able to execute it.
It's such a funny thing.
You and I both sound so naive, like there's some hope in this guy or this kind of thing, but that's sort of, it is true.
It's one thing that we do know about him.
It's not that he has any kind of Ron Paulian ideology against war necessarily in that way, but it's just that he doesn't believe in it.
He doesn't believe in all the things he's supposed to believe in, in order to keep the things going.
And so he really, he's stated over and over again, in a way that you can tell he's thought some about it, that this is so wasteful, and it's gone on so long, and it's just, it's time.
So there really is something there.
If we could just figure out a way to prod him from that side.
But it's just, it seems like such a hopeless case, especially, I mean, if you just look at the math, presume that he's just lying and jerking our chain the whole time, and look at the reality.
Oh, well, he's escalated in Afghanistan, and in Yemen, and in Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iraq.
So, yeah, you know.
If he could just get one voice close to him in there on a daily basis, I mean, the greatest thing to happen would be if he could somehow get rid of Pompeo, who's awful, awful, awful, I can't say enough bad things about that jerk, send him back to Kansas, and put a Rand Paul in there who had his ear every day.
You could turn this whole situation around.
You could put Trump on the, as I say, the path of peace for the next 13 months, and maybe he could rescue his re-election as well.
But I, yeah, I just don't think that's going to happen, unfortunately.
Yeah, I'm afraid not.
All right.
Well, fun to think about, though.
Yeah.
At least there's a little bit of hope on a Monday morning.
Yeah, you know what?
Again, yeah, back where we started, this whole giant crisis, everybody was pretending to be so concerned about it, already seems to be resolving itself.
So, that is a pretty good way to start a Monday, whether, you know, Ron's son gets the Secretary of State job one day or not.
So, we can be happy with that, for sure.
Yep.
All right.
Thank you again for coming back on the show, David.
Really appreciate it.
Okay.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that's David Stockman.
He was a congressman, and he runs Contra Corner, David Stockman's Contra Corner, and he wrote The Great Deformation, and also Peek Trump.
And here he is at antiwar.com.
Bravo, Donald!
A war Washington might finally leave.
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.
