All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Peter Van Buren.
He regularly writes for the American Conservative Magazine.
He's a former Foreign Service officer and author of the book, We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq War Two, and also Hooper's War, a novel of post World War Two, Japan.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure.
I think this is our first show of the new year 2020.
So happy New Year.
The future.
Yeah, it's, it really feels like a milestone to me.
I don't know.
It's just another day.
But it really does feel like something to me and I'm not exactly sure what but the future is pregnant with possibilities.
I didn't do it.
I didn't do it.
Yeah.
We're in the future, but we got a whole other future ahead of us too here.
And yet we're still talking about the same things, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Isn't that funny?
You know, more and more too, I see coverage of China and Russia policy.
And I think here I am still fighting the last war.
I'm writing a book about the war on terrorism and at antiwar.com where we cover a lot of Russia and China covering so much of the Middle East.
And it seems I wonder, I worry, actually, maybe I'm actually helping the cold warriors or maybe the worst hot warriors here by kind of shoring up their argument.
It's time to go ahead and quit the Middle East.
And then but their rest of the argument is so that they can escalate in Eastern Europe and in the Pacific.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
I mean, I would include myself if we were talking in 2001 as the Afghan war was started or even in 2003 when the Iraq war was started.
You know, if a me from the future would have appeared in the room with lace up sneakers and that inflatable jacket and said, hey, in 2020, you're still going to be talking about these things.
They're still going to be ongoing.
I really don't think I would have believed it.
It's quite astounding to me that we are now in our 19th year of the war in Afghanistan and we're in our 17th year of whatever version of the Iraq war that we're doing right now.
I mean, that one has had its stops and starts along the way.
But but the idea that these are ongoing, these are generational wars.
And we literally have sons and daughters following their soldier dads and moms into these conflicts.
It's quite astounding.
It's back to, you know, if you want to take the back to the future thing out there, it's kind of back to the 19th century, you know, where wars were kind of always simmering.
They didn't really start or end.
You know, when we talk about the 30 years war, the 100 years war or the British Empire, they were always sort of constantly fighting a little hotter today, a little cooler tomorrow.
But really ever wrap these things up.
That was more of a modern convenience.
And now we've sort of drifted back to this idea that as an empire, we will be constantly at war, not not new wars, but just keep the old ones kind of bubbling along.
We can't win them.
We can't lose them.
We can't end them.
And so we just will continue them.
And I don't know that there's any real plan to do anything about that.
So it's possible that in 2030, either us or our robotic descendants will be having similar conversation.
Yeah.
You know, you'll be reduced to it, to an AI program.
Or alternately, since the story doesn't really change, we could just kind of record something in advance.
You know, hey, Peter, it's 2030.
What are the chances America is going to be moving out of Afghanistan anytime soon?
Hi, Scott, 2030 here.
No, we could probably just knock that out today.
Yeah.
Cyborg Chelsea Clinton just announced that we're going to beat up on the Taliban for a few more years and then they'll be ready to negotiate on our terms.
She thanks the Taliban for their support during her last election campaign.
But unfortunately, times have changed and we're going to war with them.
Yes.
I just read there's a bush running in Texas right now.
One of these nephews.
How many of them are there?
I mean, is there no birth control left in that state?
Yeah.
Well, not for them anyway.
No, I think so.
So listen, I really think that regardless of the fact that if we free up the troops in the Navy and whoever bogged down in the terror war, that that could be counterproductive to humanity in the long term in as far as the Cold War with the other major powers goes.
But it's still the right thing to end the war on terrorism and then opposing the wars with the major powers and all that escalation is its own chore that needs to be done, too.
But it's not like it's fair to sacrifice the Afghans keeping the army bogged down fighting in their country so that we don't have to have a nuclear war or something like that or some major power conflict.
But I do really worry about what would happen if they ended the terror wars and you have this whole Pentagon and national security state with nothing to do and, you know, invading conquering Africa.
That's fun for special operations forces types, but you can't get the real army and Marine Corps and everybody in on that, I don't think.
So there's not many other continents left to conquer.
You know what I mean?
What are they going to do?
Invade Australia?
Well, we've got the Space Force and that has the potential.
There you go.
Send them all off to the moon.
I would settle for that.
The main purpose, of course, as we all know, is to generate defense spending.
And I think Space Force is a great opportunity.
Everything's going to be super expensive there.
And the other thing you got to do is keep all these bad boys busy.
Now, there's a little bit of a problem because keeping these guys busy tends to involve shooting things.
And we found during the Cold War that with a little creativity, though, we could tie up millions of troops without killing too many people on a regular basis.
And I think that's where the appeal of China is going to be very strong for the military industrial complex.
China is rapidly industrializing and creating an industrial military, which has to be countered.
And so that's great news.
There's a lot of spending inherent there.
The sphere of influence that China is interested in covers a vast geographic area throughout the Pacific.
So that means lots of ships and planes and people involved.
And best of all, the Chinese have absolutely no interest or reason to get into a shooting war with us, which means that we don't have to actually do much in terms of nasty things like shooting each other.
We can actually just create the entire stage without having to actually go to war.
This was one of the huge mistakes of the war on terror is that it actually was an actual war, fun at first, but eventually got to be kind of a drag and the body count climbed and all that good stuff.
So I think the so-called Cold War with China is going to be massive potential to keep everybody busy.
And with Space Force soaking up all that money we're saving on social welfare programs, the future looks bright to me.
Yeah.
Well, let's hope they can keep the war cold as far as that goes anyway.
I think so.
We've had some practice.
Yeah.
Although, you know, as long as we're on this, it seems like the situation has really changed.
For example, like you're saying, China now has the beginnings of a Navy and the ability to scrap in a conventional manner, whereas before there was really nothing to Cold War against there so much, you know, they had the barest nuclear deterrent, and that was about it.
And then in Europe, I always, you know, paraphrase Pat Buchanan here about how the line used to be halfway across Germany, don't you dare come into West Germany or you and me are going to fight.
Now, the line is Russia's western border with Latvia.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Airbnb in Kiev right now.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
But the Russians, I've just never seen the fun over there.
That's old school stuff.
There's mud involved and it involves Slavic stuff.
It's just Asia's the future, man.
China is high tech.
The weapons that they're building are all stealthy and shiny and have microchips in them.
There's not a lot of mud.
We're not going to do that.
That was Vietnam.
That didn't work out.
This is going to, this is more exactly where we need to be.
A lot of expensive stuff.
Good weather.
No, I mean, the future is in Asia.
Absolutely.
And all the big ticket items.
It's the Navy and the Air Force, and that's their, their domain or the Army's more focused on Europe.
They're quite literally a dime a dozen, but when you're talking about stealth aircraft carriers at a trillion dollars a throw or something like that, plus the ongoing costs and maintenance and upgrades, it is, you know, Space Force is going to look like a bargain by the time we're done facing down the Chinese.
And the great thing is, is the competitive areas that we're competing over are essentially unpopulated rocks in the, in the Pacific ocean, which means we can just blow the hell out of these things occasionally and nobody gets harmed.
Nothing happens.
And who knows, with a little cooperation from mother nature, new volcanic islands will form that we can struggle over the, again, the potential is, is, is wide open.
And I, I see the promised land for here.
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We still got to talk about these small potatoes, terror wars then, because what's big about them at least is the timeframes involved.
As you said, you got 18 year olds who were not born at the time of the September 11th attacks who are occupying Afghanistan right now.
Actually, I don't know if that's literally true.
It's expected to be true at any time anyway.
We're certainly past 18 years now.
Yeah.
I mean, we're coming up on the 18th and a half anniversary of the 9-11 attack of the first troops going into Afghanistan.
With parental permission, you can join the military at 16.
There's no question that we've got people in the military headed out there that were not alive when this all began.
It's a generational war.
I feel I'm almost on the wrong show, because I know we're on our way to talking about the so-called Afghan papers.
For the one guy who accidentally stumbled in here thinking it was the Kiss memorabilia auction or something, the Afghan papers came out about two weeks ago.
These were a series of documents that were FOIAed by the Washington Post that formed the background of a number of reports that the military commissioned for themselves, as well as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.
This happened in Iraq as well.
Basically, both military historians and this Inspector on Reconstruction create histories of what's going on.
It's very similar to the history that we all know famously as the Pentagon Papers, but the military is very interested in history and very interested in writing down what happened.
Because they classify these histories, the ones that are classified tend to be extremely honest and very factual.
The public versions often are all about storming hills and that kind of TV stuff, but the classified ones tend to be brutally honest, and they interview the people who made the decisions.
Many times, they interview them after they've left the service, where they're a little bit freer to talk.
The Afghan papers are the raw material that went into the classified and unclassified histories of Afghanistan, and they reveal that it was all a lie.
Now, again, that's why I say I feel I'm on the wrong show, because your listeners have been hearing you and your guests talk about how the wars have been based on lies, how the claims of success over the last 19 years have been based on lies.
There's this tendency on all of our part to say, yeah, so what?
Water's wet.
The papers are not shocking the American public, because the American public is diabetic and stupid and doesn't read.
But at some point in the future, these will become the real basis of a historical understanding, and it's necessary to wake people up to the extent that it's possible.
And that's why I chose to write about one death in Afghanistan that was driven by these lies, and a case, a person that I think most Americans, even people who pay attention, don't know about, because the government went out of its way to not overemphasize her death.
In 2013, an American Foreign Service officer, State Department person named Ann Smettinghoff, was blown into pink mush in Afghanistan during a photo op.
She was sent out of a safe area where she wrote, she was a public affairs officer.
She was part of the propaganda campaign, part of the U.S. government, the State Department part, that was designed to tell the American people things are wonderful and they're getting better in Afghanistan.
And she was sent out with someone senior to her to hand a few books out to a few Afghan orphans that could be rounded up.
And pictures were going to be taken, and banners unfurled, and this was just going to be another little micro example of how all the good that we were doing, the hearts and minds that we were winning.
Unfortunately, she got caught in an IED attack that was probably aimed at the senior person that was with her, and it killed her.
And she was, and to date still is, the only State Department Foreign Service officer to die in Iraq or Afghanistan.
She was 25 years old, she was only on her second assignment.
Her whole life, her whole career was ahead of her.
And her death was largely covered up.
The State Department made a kind of a test run at declaring her a hero of the revolution, but the media wasn't really ready to bite on that.
There were far too many questions about what she was doing.
The military gunked up the original public response and inaccurately described the circumstances of her death.
And it became easier to make it all go away, and that's what happened.
It was quite literally made to disappear, and no one's ever heard of her.
And so on The American Conservative this week, I'm writing about her death and trying to help Americans understand that when we talk about the lies behind the war in Afghanistan, it's easy to let that stay in kind of the big picture mode.
But let's just pick one death.
It's hers that I focused on as a former State Department person.
It could have been a soldier, it could have been an Afghan.
The choices are literally in the tens of thousands, if not greater, which one death to pick out and blame on these lies.
But that's the one I chose.
I was struck by the cause of death.
I learned recently that in a lot of emergency rooms, when someone comes in off the street and they die in the emergency room, there's usually up to four lines for cause of death.
And this really struck me in the Afghan situation.
So for example, someone comes in and they have a heart attack in the ER, and the first line is cause of death, heart attack.
The second line is heart attack exacerbated by diabetes.
The third line is patient did not appear to be taking diabetes medicine.
And the last line is patient's relatives claim that patient had no access to diabetes medicine because of social welfare cuts.
And so the idea is, is that certificate of death starts off with the obvious.
Anne Smedinghoff was blown up by an IED planted by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But the second line is because the State Department sent her there to do a propaganda photo op.
And the third line is because they knew the war was being lost and they had to pretend something else was going on.
And the last line is because Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump lack the moral courage to admit they were wrong and bring everyone home and put this war to bed.
And so her cause of death was partially metal fragments blown through her body.
But her real cause of death were the American government's insistence that young people's lives were not very important when we had to protect what others have called a bright shining lie.
That's what I did this week.
Yeah.
And you can add the American media that tells lies all day about it.
And the American people who don't really care at all unless they're getting caught up in the counterinsurgency fad too.
You would hope that that last bit would have more truth to it.
But in fact, we're talking about the sons and daughters of the American people.
We are far too willing to send people, our kids away.
You know, I was back in the Midwest over the holidays visiting relatives and a lot of small towns in Ohio, and every one of them has a plaque or plaques to the wars with names on them.
You know, these towns are small enough that the 20 people who died during the Vietnam War, those 20 names are still worth remembering.
You come out here to New York City where I live, who knows how many people got killed in those wars in this giant metropolis and their names are forgotten and the numbers are unimportant.
They get swallowed up in all the other statistics.
But when you go out to these small towns, those 20 deaths in Vietnam are still remembered.
That number is still big enough.
And then they've got new plaques.
There's the Gulf War, the first one, and there's the War on Terror, which is kind of collective in many of these places.
But we send our kids and ourselves, I guess, off far too readily, far too easily.
We believe it at the time and we believe it again and again.
You know, the old thing about fool me once, you know, then fool me twice.
What do you do when a population is fooled serially by Republicans and Democrats?
It doesn't matter.
By things that seem to matter so much and then come to mean so, so, so little.
I watched with a very sad interest the attacks on the American embassy in Baghdad.
Oh, wait, don't don't change the subject to that yet.
Sure.
Go ahead.
We got we got a whole thing there.
But I want to mention a couple of things here real quick.
First of all, about the cover up of this young woman's death.
I don't remember this.
And when I started to read your article, my initial jump to conclusion was that you were talking about this woman who was it turns out I googled it.
She was an army specialist, Hilda Clayton, who died.
You might remember, I think it was also in 2013 in a photo op where they were demonstrating launching mortars and the mortar exploded in the tube.
And she took pictures of her own death.
Essentially, there are two still shots of the explosion that killed her and published it by the BBC.
And that was the one I was thinking of.
And then I looked and saw, oh, no, this was someone who was in the army years as a State Department.
I don't think I ever heard the story of the young State Department person who got killed by an IED in 2013.
No, my memory ain't perfect anymore.
It used to be perfect.
Well, no, it didn't ring a bell.
It was designed that way.
And need I remind the audience that you're someone who essentially follows the events in places like Afghanistan as a profession, as something you do as part of your your life.
You don't just kind of check the news once in a while.
And it was it was meant to be that way.
There was an initial attempt, as I said, to kind of say, gee, you know, here's a martyr to our cause.
But nobody was really interested in that.
And the details of her death were too fuzzy.
So the decision was made to basically make it go away.
The State Department held no formal ceremony in Washington, D.C., to remember her or honor her.
She just disappeared into the fog of of all these things that were going on.
I can talk to State Department colleagues who are unfamiliar with her story.
Her name was quietly added.
There's a plaque in the lobby of the main State Department building in Washington that chronicles the the on duty deaths of Foreign Service officers going all the way back into the 18th century.
And it's it's it's interesting, actually, to look at it, because, you know, if the early deaths are things like malaria or shipwrecks or or, you know, kill that, you know, in the Battle of the Crimea or something like that.
And then in modern times, of course, it's more self-inflicted.
It's terrorist bombings.
It's it's this young woman in Afghanistan.
And she her name was just quietly added to the list one day.
If you hadn't been paying attention, you you wouldn't have noticed.
Hasn't been any media about her death really since her death in 2013.
Very few.
There's one journalist who attempted to look into it, and he was stymied.
The State Department hid behind privacy and claims of we don't want to politicize her death and wouldn't interact with him.
But in fact, her death was as political as it comes.
And her life was politicized by the State Department.
Why not?
Why?
Why quibble over politicizing her death?
And then it's so important to focus on the time frame here.
2013.
Well, this is after the surge and and McChrystal and Petraeus's giant failure of 2010 through 12 had come to an end.
This is after not just Matthew Ho, but Daniel Davis had come out and said Petraeus is lying.
Forget the Afghan papers and what's classified.
Here I am swearing before Congress.
They're not telling the truth.
We already lost.
We've got to call it off.
Yes.
This was after that.
I remember way back in in graduate school, Robert McNamara, who was the secretary of defense, who was largely responsible for building up the American presence in Vietnam way back in the day and making public speeches when he was increasing the troop count there and watching the body count rise, making speeches about how we've turned this corner and we're on the road to victory and light at the end of the tunnel.
And in his later years of his life, he had a kind of a calling to Jesus and started to be to release documentation and diaries and things that showed that he didn't believe a word he was saying.
And I had a professor who assigned me this as a as a topic for a research paper.
And when he read the paper, he was he was a Vietnam veteran.
And when he read my paper, which was nothing extraordinary, was basically just linking McNamara's diary entries to his public statements and showing he lied.
He lied every every statement.
I watched my professor break down and cry in his office and say, you know, they died for nothing.
We believed every single word of this and they all died for nothing.
And it certainly could have been me.
That photo op that killed Anne Smedinghoff could have been me.
It could have been any State Department person.
And we and most of us for a while, I did, too.
We all believe this.
And it's easy in retrospect to say, wow, Danny Davis, man, he had this wired up.
He knew the story years ago.
But in fact, there's a there's another Danny Davis out there somewhere today telling us what we're doing wrong right now, who we are not believing, who we are sidelining, who we are putting in jail on some excuse, who we are not allowing to appear on CNN or MSNBC because we don't want to hear what they've got to say.
Eight years from now, we'll look back and say, wow, yeah, I guess that guy was right about fill in the blank.
And that problem here and what I don't know how people like Danny Davis gets himself out of bed every day, knowing how right he was, how castigated he was for being right.
And then seeing.
The proof come out where it's obvious that he was telling the truth and they were lying, even as he was called a liar by so many, I don't know how you can get yourself up out of bed and go out and keep doing it, but God bless him and others who do do that.
Chelsea Manning is still in jail.
Julian Assange is still in jail for mentioning both of them.
You know, they do go without saying sometimes, you know, a week in a week out on this show.
But especially Manning, you know, I think I guess I think of Julian Assange as a tougher character who knew what he was getting into in a way where Chelsea Manning is a wreck.
And and just, you know, like the fact that she has already done so much time on this and is back in jail on on that heroic leak.
You know, talk about the Afghan papers.
Chelsea Manning leaked the Afghan war logs in the year 2010.
Yep.
You know, it just yeah.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
That's a whole other tangent.
But it's important that people keep that in mind and look at the importance of WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange is in jail, but look at WikiLeaks exposing recently all these new leaks exposing the Douma hoax from 2018 and this kind of thing.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's not journalism.
That's a anti-government intelligence agency or some some garbage.
No, this is the best journalism in the world is what it is.
That's all it is.
But so here's our segue to the Iraq thing, because we've got to talk about Iraq war, maybe four about to break out over there by my count.
And the segue to that is this young woman was over there.
She thought at least, well, I don't know what she thought.
She was told I know that she was told that her job was to help people, her job.
She was on one of these provisional provincial reconstruction teams.
You wrote your book is called We Meant Well, and it's kind of tongue in cheek, but it's also not that this is how these wars go on is because bait in and throughout every bit of the narratives of all of these wars and all of the deaths in the wars, for that matter, are horrible maimings and woundings and deaths of good people on, you know, in all directions and on all sides.
But the price is worth it because we're helping the people.
We're there because we're trying to help them.
I actually had this argument with Walter Jones a little bit that he would never mention the innocent dead civilians.
He would only mention the troops.
And I said, why don't you ever mention the dead civilians?
And he said, well, I can't even get people to care about the dead troops.
And I said, well, you know what it is, though, is the idea is that those troops have sacrificed their lives to do the right thing to help these poor peasants over there, man.
And that was why it was worth it for what they did and that they knew the risks when they did it.
And that was what made it such a noble thing for them to do.
And so if you're not undermining the narrative that this is all that the Iraqi people are way better off now and all this, like they say, or like they used to say, at least, then you kind of you're not really protecting those soldiers fully, the same ones you're trying to protect and get people to care about.
The point is, it's a useless sacrifice.
It it never accomplished.
It was never going to accomplish what they said it was going to.
Back to the beginning, all they did was spend money and, you know, some others collected that money.
That's at the root of most of this.
Of course, there's Israel and oil and whatever.
But, you know, most of this is all the self-licking ice cream cone of America's permanent wartime economy.
And they told everybody that it was something else, you know, and that's the part I want you to talk about is like, you know, this wasn't just a photo op, right?
This was a photo op that whether it's in Afghanistan in this case or in Iraq, where this was meant to demonstrate that we it really is working.
Please give us time because of what a great job we're doing.
Right.
At least to some degree, there was honest sentiment underlying all of that.
We liked America.
This is the story America likes to tell itself, that we're always doing the right thing.
And even if we sometimes stumble along the way or there are little detours where we don't do in small ways the right thing, the bigger picture is always moving in that direction.
You know, other countries make war to possess territory or resources.
America makes war to free people.
That's the story we want to tell ourselves.
And it's much better if you look back at the rhetoric of the 19th century where we were saying, no, we're conquering these ignorant savages in fill in the blanks, the Western United States, the Philippines, wherever the Central America, you know, we were much more honest with ourselves.
We're we're going over there to take those ignorant slopes out of the Stone Age and, you know, teach them democracy and give them a better life, whether they know it or need it or want it or not.
And, you know, we're a little bit more honest about ourselves.
But following World War Two with the Cold War, we needed something more noble.
And so we created this dynamic concept that America was the last best country, that we were the shining city on the hill, that we were the beacon of democracy.
You know, you know these phrases, they're they're almost cliches.
But when they were first uttered, they were uttered with with complete seriousness and they were believed.
And that's how we do it.
And we fall for the same trick every time.
All you got to do is stand up and announce we're freeing someone and the American people will stand behind you and rush to send they'll push each other aside to get in line to volunteer and sign up and and things like that.
I almost like the little bit there was a brief moment of honesty there after 9-11 when George Bush basically said, we're going to go kill a whole bunch of people in revenge for what happened to us on 9-11.
That was a very brief little thing.
And he was corrected and they got it cleaned up.
And we're going to liberate Afghanistan, which it quickly changed to we're going to liberate Afghanistan from the evil Taliban.
And women can wear mini skirts and men can shave their beards unless they're Taliban hipsters and then they can keep their beards.
It's up to them.
It's freedom.
You know, we very quickly got it back on on track.
And, you know, look at look at the noise that was made when when Trump said something about where the troops and the American troops in Syria are there to guard oil or something like that.
And everybody went berserk.
You know, if he had just said we're there to free the Syrian people from an evil dictator, there would have been cheers.
OK, yeah.
Free the free the evil people from the dictator.
No, the people from the evil dictator.
That's that's the way it's.
And we buy this story every time.
It doesn't change.
It's the same story.
And we buy it time and time again.
And that's what really when you look at those plaques in the small towns where I was over the holidays, you realize every single one of those people died believing they were accomplishing some greater good out there, when in fact it was the same old story.
It was feeding their flesh into the war machine.
It was the permanent state of war that funds the American wartime economy.
It was all those those kinds of things.
I'd rather they just stood up and said, we're conquering territory because we want it and we want the resources in it.
We're going to enslave the damn people that are that are there.
At least there'd be a point for honesty in all that.
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And thanks.
Well, so let me ask you this.
Is America about to launch Iraq War four against the very same people that we fought Iraq War two and Iraq War three for?
Yeah, I would say probably not.
This is something that I've been giving a lot of thought to watching the the demonstrators, protesters, militia, whatever they are, break into the American embassy there.
By the way, I know exactly where those riots were.
That's the visitors gate to the American embassy.
It's it's an outer gate.
There's stuff.
There's a lot of stuff behind it before you get to the good part of the embassy.
Nothing was particularly in danger.
And there's nobody left there but Marines by the time they broke in.
And I don't know how many real State Department people are left, but it's a very small, small number.
And they easily fit into one of the many helicopters that are always available.
So nobody's in any real danger.
I mean, it would it would be very embarrassing to see that embassy in flames.
But that's about the extent of it.
So I don't think what I think what we're what we saw this.
Armando used to say they should turn it into the Museum of American Atrocities.
I was going to go with a really big Bed, Bath and Beyond store in the middle of the you know, kind of foothold in the Middle East.
Settle for that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it might work either way.
The idea is, is that what we've been seeing recently in Iraq with, you know, in the three way between U.S., Iraq and Iran is I don't think the start of something new.
I think it's a continuation of something, you know, a decade old, actually.
And that is this sort of proxy war between the United States and Iran that plays out in different parts of the Middle East in different ways.
It flares and it cools and it flares and it cools.
If you walk back a couple of steps, there were there had been a lot of rocket attacks against American installations in Iraq.
No doubt perpetrated by Iranian backed or controlled militias.
The U.S. kind of pretended those weren't going on until they killed an American contractor, I guess was a week ago or something like that.
Prior to that, we just kind of shrugged it off as part of the game.
I'm sure undocumented.
Don't forget the part about how the Israelis have been bombing them for months and from American controlled Kurdistan, too.
Yeah, well, you know, the Israelis got their own kind of sideline going, but the idea with the American with the Americans, these these rocket attacks against our installations have been going on for some time.
No doubt each of them had been either the retaliation against something we did that we don't know about or were retaliated against in kind by us.
It's this thing that's been going on with the Iranians and their their proxies in Iraq for really a decade.
An American contractor got killed and that Trump decided that one was, you know, they pushed a little too far.
And so then we conducted some bombing raids and I think we killed 25, supposedly killed 25 Iranian backed, controlled militia.
And the Iranians decided, well, that one was a was a too too hard.
You know, we kill one of yours, you kill five of ours.
That's that's within the boundaries.
But this was too much.
And so they let loose the militias against the the embassy there.
Now, the whole thing was highly controlled.
They picked the visitors gate.
They didn't go all the way into the inner compound.
The Iraqi security forces were there to kind of keep the left and right boundaries in place.
The American side, we understood what was going on because we didn't do strafing runs down the street, which would have cleared that crowd out in about two seconds.
No, we fired some rubber bullets and some tear gas.
And two days later, after a lot of rhetoric, it's over.
This this this episode is over.
There'll be another one.
And it may be a little fiery or it may be less fiery than this one.
But it's just part of an ongoing push pull proxy battle that pops up in Syria, that pops up when the with the Israelis, it pops up in Iraq, it pops up in places that we don't even hear about.
And it's all a matter of both sides using what they hope to be carefully escalated and de-escalated acts of violence as part of an ongoing.
I'll say political process, I say political, not in the sense that we're actually leading to something, you know, in negotiating or heading towards a goal, but the inner course between the U.S. and Iran right now happens in this fashion.
People forget the night of the before Obama's.
What do you call the nuclear agreement with Iran, the American sailors were kidnapped in the Gulf, you remember that, and everyone decided on the American side that this wasn't going to be, quote, a big deal.
And the whole thing was allowed to kind of quietly fade away.
The sailors were released, no blood, no foul, guys.
You could also imagine under different circumstances the kidnapping of American sailors leading to all sorts of kinetic activity.
I think there's a question about where they were sailing and why, too, that maybe that was a bit of a sabotage.
But the idea of just like during the Cold War, violations occur all the time.
It's a matter of which one has a political reason for you to notice and be and be shocked by and react to and which ones don't.
You've got in Syria, for example, you've got Americans occasionally fighting alongside Iranian controlled forces.
You've got Americans occasionally fighting against Iranian controlled forces.
Certainly Western Iraq right now, the reason the American soldiers are still there is they're fighting with the Iraqi army and its PMU Shiite militias in fighting Iraq War three and a half against what's left of the Sunni based insurgency in the West.
Exactly.
And so these these you don't even want to call them alliances.
That gives it a credibility and an attack ability that that doesn't exist.
These little sort of conveniences are part of this bizarro proxy war.
That's going on.
It's push and pull.
And it's the nature of this.
Occasionally one side, you know, I fight with my dog all the time.
She loves to pull the bring.
We have a towel and she brings the towel to me and I grab one end and she grabs the other end and we pull each other.
And we you know, we have this sort of back and forth kind of thing.
And every once in a while she'll slip and her teeth will nick me or I'll pull too hard and her head will hit the table leg or something.
And then we stop like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Didn't mean that.
That was an accident.
Didn't that shouldn't have happened.
And then, you know, we'll kind of come back and play again.
And there's a lot of element to that in this.
You push too hard over here.
We're going to get so it's a brushback pitch.
I like that metaphor, because in this case, then Iran is the dog.
And they came and brought the towel to George W.
Bush and he pulled them right into Iraq.
And this is the part that I guess my worry is that no one in D.C. ever says that, look, this is the result of Iraq war two.
And so everyone who's responsible for Iraq war two is not allowed to complain about increased Iranian power and influence here.
And the whole joke is that the standing order from the Iranian government to the Supreme Islamic Council was go along with the Americans, make best friends with them, do whatever they say, because everything's going our way.
And America, you know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, they fought this whole war for the Ayatollah.
And they've been spitting mad and having a temper tantrum about it ever since then.
That's one of my proudest little bits of pseudo journalism.
Way back in 2011, when my book came out and I was kind of a celebrity for 15 minutes, Tom Ricks in The Washington Post offered me space in his column to write something about Iraq.
And I wrote that the winner of the U.S.-Iraq war is Iran in 2011.
And it was a big fuss about whether they should print it.
And, you know, was I losing my mind?
But that's what happened here.
And we just need to understand that if there's any listeners out there who are who are not familiar with the work of the Canadian military historian Gwynne Dyer, D-Y-E-R, he's not as active these days, but he wrote a number of books around the year 2000 where he basically said the next great struggle is going to be with the United States and Iran in the Middle East.
It's going to take a number of forms.
And he pursued that idea intellectually right through about 2005 or so.
And then he I don't know if he retired or what.
But if you go back and read his books, they were very informative to me when I was out there on the ground.
And in retrospect, they're very prescient.
He understood the power dynamics there.
And that's that's what's playing out is this proxy war.
And I'll never forget the Ayatollah Sistani, who's the highest ranking Shiite cleric in the world, who was born in Iran and lives in Basra in January of 2004, told George Bush, we want one man, one vote or we're going to have to start this war all over again.
And Bush said, I am your humble servant.
And from that, I mean, people can check the archives of my show in 2004.
There's Juan Cole and Bob Dreyfus explaining all about the Dawa party and the Supreme Islamic Council and how they work for the Ayatollahs and how George Bush works for them, how Paul Wolfowitz's big score actually blew up right in his face.
And that was and in fact, the I don't know how famous he is anymore, but there was a great blogger named Bill Mahn.
And in fact, the Moon of Alabama blog is a spinoff of the Bill Mahn blog.
And I remember when they had the election of January 2005, one year later, when the Sunnis boycotted and the Shiites won the super duper majority with the Purple Fingers and Jon Stewart swooned and everything.
And Bill Mahn wrote a blog entry titled Ayatollah, you so and it was all about how here it is, man, the supreme, the the Al-Hakim family, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim.
This guy is essentially part of the Quds Force or, you know, is an agent of the Iranian intelligence and special operations divisions.
From the get go, oh, and by the way, Jonathan Landay told the story on the show of being in Kurdistan and sitting there watching with his own eyes as Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim came across the border from Iran, right, you know, two days after Baghdad fell or whatever it was in 03.
There is a very big I was fortunate enough to go to Iran, but that was two years ago.
And in there and saw a very large monument with lots and lots of names on it.
I mean, hundreds of names, if not more, dedicated to the Iranian martyrs who lost their lives in Iraq fighting there for Islam was how they put it.
You know, there was there's no question what's going on.
I think the US initially wanted to be ignorant of it.
Eventually, we just pretend to we pretended to be ignorant.
We knew the truth.
And now we are engaged in a proxy war that has spread all over the Middle East.
Yemen, Saudi, Syria, wherever, with Iran and what we saw recently in Baghdad with the storming of the American embassy was just another incident of that larger proxy war.
And because it is just part of a continuing struggle that has stayed largely on the back burner of international attention for almost for a decade, really, I don't think in summation here, it's that we're leading to any bigger war in the Middle East over this.
The Iranians will poke us, we'll poke them on and on and on.
Neither side of us or them benefits from an open conflict.
The Iranians absolutely know that the Israelis need only half an excuse to launch against them.
And they are very cautious about not offering that that that smidgen of an excuse.
And the game is calibrated, and I think both sides benefit from respecting that calibration and will push each other back a little bit if one side kind of steps too close to the line.
But if anybody's out there rooting for another Benghazi or rooting for another major war, I think they're going to be disappointed.
Sorry to finish the interview on kind of a bummer there.
Yeah, geez.
No, I'll settle for that.
But you know what, though?
I'll keep interviewing you for a minute here.
The policy is not not even a coup, really, or or a war.
The policy is we're going to sanction them until the people of Iran rise up and overthrow the government.
But we already know that doesn't work.
The price is worth it.
But how so when the the means never achieve the ends?
I mean, even the war in Yemen is the same policy only with a genocidal air campaign, too.
And still they don't give in over, you know, economic pressure in that way.
There's no chance in the world that the regime in Tehran is going to fall.
But so that means that if the policy doesn't change here and the sanctions, you know, what do they call the maximum pressure campaign against Iran fails to dislodge the regime, then what?
I mean, I like the idea of like you say, well, ratchet it back a little bit, but I don't really see that happening.
At the same time, I agree with you that there's no momentum for war here.
There's no consensus for war.
I can't imagine that the army and the Marine Corps would let that happen.
They got to be begging the president to not do it kind of thing, you know, if they thought he would do it.
But they have kind of painted themselves into a corner here with the stupid renunciation of the nuclear deal and all of these sanctions when their means and ends just don't match.
So now what?
I think more of the same, that's that's like I said, this has been ongoing for a decade or more.
It got got everybody's attention here in America because it was the embassy.
But, you know, that was this week.
Next week, it'll be something else.
It'll be something that doesn't matter so much or the media will lose interest or what have you.
So I think it would just be pretty much what we see.
And if you want to kind of challenge the idea of how long can we get to make this work or how long can we do this?
I point you to North Korea, where we have done it for, what, seventy five years, basically a series of sanctions against a regime that we imagine is teetering, but never seems to teeter and fall.
And we just keep kind of putting sanctions on them and building a wall of military around them.
But it doesn't really get any better, but it doesn't really get appreciably worse in any significant grand way.
And I think that's sort of the strategy of with Iran.
Call it whatever you want to call it, containment or something like that.
Even at the Obama nuclear accords, which I support and I would welcome Trump or a future president bringing them back in some form.
It's always better to talk like that than to talk otherwise.
But the Iranians know perfectly well agreement or no agreement.
There is a hard line about how far they can go in terms of nuclear development, because the Israelis, at the minimum, the Israelis and us as well.
But the Israelis watch that type of thing as closely as anything they pay attention to.
They have their survival depends on being the only effective nuclear power in the Middle East.
And they would never allow the Iranians to cross a certain line in terms of nuclear development, whether there's an agreement with the U.S. or not.
And the Iranians know this, too.
And that is going to keep this whole thing on simmer for a very, very, very long time.
Yeah, I don't I can't possibly foresee a conclusion in any kind of historical terms.
I think that's right.
In other words, the only real red line, the only real causes belly that would get the Americans and the Israelis to start carpet bombing inside Persia would be if they started to enrich up to weapons grade and attempt to make a nuke.
And since they're not doing that, they've made the decision long ago.
They're not doing that.
That essentially means Cold War.
It is.
Yeah, it's it would be a suicidal move on their part and actually a largely unnecessary move because you can be a threshold state and ostensibly not be a nuclear danger.
You know, people understand these things.
The Israelis know exactly how to make a nuclear bomb.
They've had they've had lots of practice at that.
So, I mean, the idea would be that Iran can get most of its deterrent value out of being a threshold state without risking carpet bombing by the U.S. or the Israelis by becoming a nuclear state.
I'm actually going to going to kind of slap myself on the wrist a little bit because I would have said the same thing about North Korea 15 years ago.
And I was and still am surprised that North Korea stepped over the line and actually became a nuclear state rather than letting themselves exist right on that threshold edge where the West could pretend they weren't nuclear, when in fact they were a very small step away.
I'm actually quite surprised they took that final step.
I would of the many historical mysteries that I hope are revealed to me when I achieve total consciousness on my deathbed.
That's one of them.
Welcome to total enlightenment.
I hope you don't die of it, but I'll tell you exactly how that was all George Bush's fault and probably deliberately provoked them into doing it was first they abrogated the agreed framework deal.
Then they announced a whole new round of sanctions.
Then they announced the proliferation security initiative, which said that we can seize all your boats on the high seas and do whatever we want with them.
You were in the State Department at the time, right?
And then they announced the nuclear posture review and said we just might attack you with nuclear weapons.
And only then did the North Koreans withdraw from their end of the agreed framework, announced that they were withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty like in the deal that says you have to announce six months beforehand.
And only then did they withdraw from the treaty and kick the IAEA out and start making nukes.
And it seemed to me like, hey, I guess the thinking, if you can call it thinking, the thinking was, don't worry, we'll be done in Baghdad and we'll be ready to go to Pyongyang before they get their first nuke together.
Except, oops, instead we just essentially handed them an arsenal of nuclear weapons when they were perfectly happy within the non-proliferation treaty as a threshold state under the agreed framework deal, which America had never even lived up to our side of.
It just took Bush repudiating it and threatening them with a H-bomb first strike to make them withdraw from their end.
No, total consciousness still eludes me.
I mean, I'm familiar with all that history.
I guess the part of it that I don't get is the decision by the North Koreans to call America's bluff, to become a nuclear state in the midst of all that and absolutely certain that the US was not going to attack them.
The idea would be that in Tehran, they've made a different calculus and they've said we're not going to step over that line and detonate a nuclear weapon.
We're going to walk up to it.
We're going to flirt with it.
We're going to stay a threshold state.
Right.
Whereas the North Koreans just said, ah, we're going to go for it.
Right.
Yeah.
The Ayatollah said, yeah, our policy is we got our hands up and so you can't shoot, man, which they don't know American cops.
But hey, Iranian lives matter.
All right, my friend.
Thanks very much for your time again on the show, Peter.
Great to talk to you about in 2020.
And I look forward to doing it with you.
Best wishes.
Great.
Have a good one, man.
Happy New Year to you.
Happy New Year.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
