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 fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Danny Sherson.
He is formerly a major in the U.S. Army.
He was in both failed surges in Iraq, World War II, and Afghanistan, and he wrote the book Ghostwriters of Baghdad, and he's written, I don't know, about 150,000 essays against the wars, even while he was still in the Army, and is now, of course, a regular contributor to antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Danny?
Oh, I'm great, Scott.
So glad to be back on.
Happy to have you here, man.
So a lot's going on, but, and you got this great article we're going to talk about here in a minute about what's going on in Eastern Europe.
But first of all, I wanted to talk with you about Iraq a little bit here.
I'm sure you saw this piece from, what's a week or two ago, that was in Middle East Eye, U.S. seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes.
And I just interviewed the author of this thing, Suadad Alsalehi, from Baghdad.
And she was talking about, man, she's got American sources for this story.
And as we discussed the lay of the land over there and everything, we're of the same mind exactly about what this would mean, that this would mean another total war.
This would mean a real Iraq War Four against the same factions that we've been fighting for for 17 years, that we put in power in Baghdad.
Dude, like, let's, let's just be clear.
I've read the article.
I've read some other stuff on this general topic about the potential of the U.S. like trying to carve out some sort of Sunni state.
And oh, by the way, I've also read some stuff about like Israel being in favor of that, which is fascinating, but, and by fascinating, I mean darkly disturbing.
But dude, this is the same dream that ISIS had.
Like let me be clear, like, I'm not afraid to say that any longer, you know, because people are going to listen to this interview and I'm going to get my usual hate mail and they're gonna be like, oh, Danny said that American policy and Israeli policy is pro-ISIS.
And that's, that's fine.
Like, I don't care.
Shoe fits.
But like, yeah, if the shoe fits, wear it, you know, but the bottom line is this.
Like the, the Sunni mega state, which is really a misnomer because it's going to be a rump state, but like the Sunni transnational state that we're talking about, transnational because it will probably jump over the Syrian border, right?
Because Eastern Syria, you know, everyone's like, oh, the Kurds, the Kurds, the Kurds.
It's like, well, the Kurds are only 10% of Syria and they're mostly in the Northeast, right?
The North Central and Northeast.
But like the East East of Syria is, is Sunni, right?
It's Sunni Arab.
In many cases, the tribes just over the Sykes-Picot, you know, made up border that Churchill, you know, over a bunch of high balls, you know, made in a crayon.
Those tribes have a lot of familial and tribal ties with the Sunni tribes in Anbar, right?
And so what we're talking about here is, is a, is a, is a trans border, transnational Sunni rump state that while obviously the United States probably doesn't actually want like a new ISIS, is the same dream though that ISIS had, right?
Which was to like knock down the Western imposed borders and create like a Sunni, you know, caliphate that at the very least, you know, jump the border between Iraq and Syria.
So, you know, this is all fascinating and, and the thing to remember, and Scott, you know this, right?
And a lot of people don't, but you do very well.
The Sunnis of Iraq only constitute about 20% of the population, but they've ruled that country from the minute that the British put a Hashemite Saudi King on the throne in 1919 until the moment, like we discussed on the last time I was on the show that, you know, the U S like overthrew that state of affairs in 2003.
And then of course put all these people in charge that now the Sunnis are against and that now we're suddenly against cause they're too close to Iran.
But the thing to remember about that is this 20% of Iraq is Kurdish, 20% of Iraq is Sunni and 20% of Iraq and 60% of Iraq is Shia.
Now here's the deal.
One of those three in the game of musical chairs is going to be without a seat and it's the Sunnis.
I'll say why the Sunnis are holding the losing hand geographically speaking, why?
Because all the oil is in the Shia South and the vaguely Kurdish North.
So the Sunnis in Iraq, even though they dominated for, you know, 80 years are sitting on a losing hand.
But, but if you erase the Sykes Pico border and you create a Sunni transnational rump statelet, Syria doesn't have a lot of oil, but what oil it has is where it's in the East.
It's just over the Iraqi border.
So I, I mean, there's so much to be conspiratorially thinking about, but like this is a serious issue.
You're such a great historian on all this stuff, but I'm writing a history book about all this right now.
And I'm at my clean break section where I had to go back and reread Wormser.
And I don't know if you knew this, but I'm sure you've read A Clean Break and also Coping with Crumbling States, but they actually wrote a book.
I just got it.
Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein.
It's A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm in book form with a foreword by Richard Pearls published by AEI in 99.
Wow.
And if you go back and, and, and carefully read A Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States, you see here that this is the whole plan in the first place was to empower the Jordanian king over Iraqi Sunni Stan.
And then they were going to lord it over the rest of the Iraqis.
And it's hilarious the way Chalabi convinced them that, oh yeah, the Iraqi Shiite supermajority, they love bending over and taking it from Americans and Brits and Hashemites from Arabia and Jordan.
And they love doing whatever they're told.
Don't worry about that.
And this is the solution to our problems over there is to knock all this stuff down.
And then we have all these reports that this David Wormser is now advising the Trump White House.
The same guy who handed Iraq to Iran in the name of breaking the Shiite alliance and who succeeded only in handing them Baghdad is now coming in and advising them that the way to solve the problem that he created would be, apparently it's him, I'm not sure the exact connection, but seemingly this is Wormser's advice that they're following and what they're going to try to do is create the Islamic State.
I guess they're going to not call it that.
They're going to try to, what, put some Ba'athists back in charge?
I was joking with her.
They're going to dig up Uday and Qusay and put them in charge over there.
Hey, why not?
With some smelling salts, we could definitely get a Ouija board out and bring back the ghost of Uday and Qusay and make them the leaders of the rump state.
I think that's a great idea.
For all the amateurs in the audience trying to keep up here, and I know it's hard in these sandy weeds, but basically this is the redirection again.
They fought Iraq War II for the Shia, so they wish they didn't, so they launched the redirection, which ended up leading to the rise of the Islamic State.
So then they launched Iraq War III again for the same Shia they wish they hadn't launched Iraq War II for, and now that they're done with that, they really wish they hadn't done that either.
So now they want to go ahead and create this Sunni state only without Baghdadi as the caliph.
Right, yeah, we're going to have to call it something different.
We can't call it ISIS 2.0 because that won't play.
And the local Sunnis aren't going to put up with this anyway.
They're not going to all of a sudden say, oh, thank God the Yanks are here to take care of us after all we put them through.
It's so insane.
But like, you know, I just wrote a very, very, I think, my tour de force, my magnum opus on Israel-Palestine that'll publish at Truthdig pretty soon, and then of course will get reposted by Antiwar.com like it always is because, you know, those two great sites, despite the fact that they're ideologically opposed on the, you know, on the surface, always repost.
But like, one of the things I write about in this article that will post on Truthdig very soon and probably be on Antiwar early next week is that Israel senior serving and retired Israeli officials, like we're talking several, not one, have said like the following quote, right?
And I don't have, you know, the site up in front of me, but trust me when I tell you, Google it, listeners.
They've said that if it comes to a choice between Iran and ISIS in Syria, that they are pro-ISIS.
And what they mean is that they are more comfortable with an ISIS carved caliphate out of Syria than Iranian stabilizing influence in Syria.
So what you've got is you've got Israel.
I mean, this gets so complicated.
I'm genuinely sorry for the listeners who aren't like as dug into this as me and you, Scott.
But like, you know what, let me stop you right there because I kind of get this a lot.
But my experience with listening to talk radio, I remember they were arguing about whether to legalize people taking out a second mortgage or not.
And in 1996, here in Texas, and I didn't know what they're talking about, but I and they knew the callers and the hosts, they all knew the law and the letter of it and the spirit and the history and all these things.
And I couldn't really keep up with what they're saying.
But it was interesting to me, the fact just to be exposed to these people knew that much about it.
And if it was a subject I was interested in, it was proof that I could really know about this too.
And so I was in a sense, the hosts are shaming me and telling me keep up.
And so that's why we don't dumb it down.
You know, I try to go back over the basics on this show, but we delve into the weeds here too, because I'm trying to learn stuff here.
I'm not just trying to tell everybody what I already know.
I want to learn new things.
And I want people to be exposed to that.
And if it feels like they can't keep up, that's tough.
But only for a minute.
All you have to do is just keep listening, keep reading the articles that the people who come on the show write, and you'll get it just like with anything else.
And you'll pick it up pretty soon in the Sunni-Shia wars.
It ain't that hard, really.
All you have to remember is that this is all George W. Bush's fault.
So go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
So let me try to give a little context to the listener.
In the early 80s, okay, you guys can Google this.
The Israeli National Security State, senior Israeli strategists, which should be put in quotes, because Israeli strategy is staggeringly counterproductive.
And the only country which has an equally staggeringly counterproductive foreign policy is the United States.
Because Israel is basically like our little brother, but like our more extreme, more like off-the-rails schizophrenic little foreign policy brother.
In the early 80s, there was a memo, a strategy memo, which was as important to Israeli policy as NSC-68, right, or whatever that was called, which was the American national security memo that was written early in the Cold War that basically said we have to contain Russia and we have to like follow this domino theory, right?
Yeah.
So it was, you know, this is equally important.
And what this memo said, and this is very important, guys, was that Israel's interest is best served by fostering and encouraging two things.
One, intra-Arab conflict.
In other words, Israel's national security interest is best served by encouraging other Arab states to fight one another or other Muslim states to fight one another.
Just to be clear, you're talking about the Oded Yanan plan or something else?
Correct.
Yeah.
No, correct.
The best thing that could happen for Israel in the 80s, right, which they loved- By the way, for people who want to look this up, it's Y-I-N-O-N, Yanan, Oded Yanan is the name of the author that wrote the plan.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, it's great.
It's so important that you tell them that because it's worth Googling.
And the thing is, the Iran-Iraq war, right, 1980 to 1988, a million deaths, the most bloody conventional war of the second half of the 20th century, depending on how you count conventional wars, was in their interest, they thought, right, because it keeps Iraq and Iran busy, the two biggest military powers besides Egypt, and they had already signed sort of like a peace, a cynical peace with Egypt.
But what the plan said, though, was the second part, and this is the more important part for today, it said that Israel's interest is also best served by fostering and encouraging through Shin Bet, their CIA, or not Shin Bet, their FBI, but you know what I mean, Mossad, the best thing they could do is encourage intra-Arab instability.
In other words, civil wars within Arab countries that have significant minorities, right, is in the interest of Israel.
That's what they thought.
It's a terrible idea, but they thought it was good.
And so what am I talking about?
States like Lebanon, which border Israel, and which fought a 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990, and which could kick off into a civil war at any moment.
Syria, which is a mosaic, a cornucopia of minority groups, right, they love the civil war in Syria, Israel does, they love it, because their fears are counterproductive, ahistorical, and outdated.
In other words, Israel thinks that they still thought in the 1980s, and I think they still think to a certain extent today, that the biggest threat to their security is an Arab alliance, right, a multinational Arab alliance that colludes and then invades Israel all at once.
And so one of the best ways to avoid that is to encourage internal instability in these Arab states, and of course Syria is one of the main Arab states.
So Israel prefers then and now, based on this memo, right, based on this policy, they prefer a Syria that is in the midst of civil war to a unified, stable Syria that might try to take the Golan Heights back.
Now, we both know that that's ludicrous.
Israeli military technological power is such that no one in the region can truly challenge them any longer, but they're stuck, right, they're stuck in the old way of thinking.
They are obsessed with, because of their history, they're obsessed with the notion that they are a lone Jewish state in a nefarious neighborhood.
Well, listen, I mean, the Oded Yanan plan begins with the triumph of Soviet communism over the entire planet is nigh.
What are we going to do when we're the last country in the world that they haven't conquered yet?
Right?
I mean, that's how it begins.
That's correct.
Written eight years before Soviet communism completely ceased to exist.
This is really, really important, what you're saying.
I mean, Israel, they still adhere to some extent to that plan.
Look, I mean, the point is this, they know that they have peace with Egypt, they have peace with Jordan, they could have had peace with Syria all along.
Ehud Olmert was prepared to negotiate to give Golan back and have a permanent peace deal and Condoleezza Rice stopped them.
That was just 12 years ago, all right?
And they can have peace with the Palestinians.
The problem is, and they have, you know, better than peace with Saudi Arabia right now in that relationship.
Iran is a Jordan and Iraq away and has no field army, doesn't threaten them in any way, has no access to their country.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
The only reason that they don't have peace with Syria and with the Palestinians is because they would rather steal.
They don't want to have peace.
That's what the clean break is all about, is forget Oslo and forget a comprehensive peace with all of our neighbors so that we can all just get along into the indefinite future.
What we need is a balance of power that favors us so we can just stick it to everybody and not just have to do what we say.
And of course, none of it works out.
The whole history of Iraq war two and three that we started talking about here is all the consequence of that is what Gareth Porter's book about Vietnam is called the perils of dominance and applies to Israel as much as America.
You think you're such a big shot that you can have your way and yet look, it never works out like you said it was going to, although you got to admit Judea and Samaria, that's working out.
That's what they wanted.
They can call it whatever they want, but it's the territory that they're taking.
And we don't need to make the entire show about Israel, Palestine, but I will say this, right?
Like I think this is important.
The Trump deal of the century, which should really be called the scam, the deceit of the century, right?
If he is going to have fun monikers like the showman he is, then I'm going to, you know, I'm going to put forward others because I really, really like dabbling in language, linguistics and lexicon.
But this plan, this peace plan, which is really an ultimatum for unconditional surrender is actually profound because what it does is it refreshingly almost, I say this about Trump all the time, I find him refreshing because unlike mainstream Democrats and Republicans, he doesn't hide what's happening.
He sort of says what everyone else is thinking, right?
And so what he's doing is erasing the Palestinians and he's not afraid to say it.
You know, like he just comes right out and he's like, here's the new plan.
And the new plan is what, Scott?
It's apartheid.
Apartheid has been the policy of Israel since 1967 at the very latest, but Trump and Bibi in my latest article, I call them Jay and Bay.
I refer to them as Jay-Z and Beyonce because that's fun for me.
And I'm trying to, and I'm trying to get a late, late Gen X, early millennial audience rather than just the old folks that read my stuff now.
I got to tell you, I'm late Gen X.
I'm the very last kid born in Generation X.
And I don't know a thing about either of those two, but go ahead.
No, that's okay.
That's okay.
It's better that you don't, but that actually is a credit to your character.
But like the point is, this plan is, is once and for all America saying what it's always hidden, but applied, which is that we are now going to de facto sanction apartheid in, in Israel, right?
In Israel and Palestine.
And, and, and, and that, and that's where we are.
And look guys, like, don't be so surprised because which, let's go back to the eighties.
Anybody else watch the Cosby show?
I did.
Oh yeah.
I did.
Do you remember their refrigerator in the second half, right?
In the, in, in the later Cosby show years on their refrigerator, there was a sticker.
Do you remember where to, do you remember the sticker Scott?
And apartheid in South Africa.
And apartheid in South Africa, right?
So this, this was, and you know what, the spinoff, a different world had anti-apartheid stuff everywhere.
That's right.
Now here's my point.
Apartheid in South Africa, the gold standard, the gold standard in apartheid, I mean, they, they did it right, right?
It was officially the policy of South Africa from 1948 until 1994.
In reality, apartheid had existed in a de facto sense long before 1948.
But nevertheless, people like to think that America was on the right side of that issue because at the very end, right, late Bush one and early Clinton, we were rhetorically at least on the right side of that issue.
But what a lot of people don't realize is that in the Reagan years, and even to some extent in the George HW Bush, Bush, the elder years, the United States was a singular and exceptional nation.
And I love playing with the word exceptionalism.
We were a singular and exceptional nation in the sense that we were almost alone in the world for backing South Africa when the rest of the international community had made them a pariah state.
Yeah, not quite though.
Don't forget Begin's Israel.
Well, Scott, you ruined your punchline.
You stole my punchline, which is that the other state, besides like the Pacific protectorate islands that we stole after World War II that do whatever we say, was Israel.
Israel and South Africa, dude, listeners, Google Israel and South Africa.
These two settler colonial apartheid states throughout the 1970s and 80s had an extraordinary relationship.
It was a political relationship.
It was a military relationship.
They were sharing technology.
They were related to one another financially, militarily.
They were chums because even though it wasn't popular to publicize it, they were both apartheid states and they had a lot to learn from one another.
And so for a long time, there was this triumvirate of evil, call it an axis of evil, kids, between Israel, South Africa and the United States.
And remember this, Reagan backed South African apartheid because it was, quote, anti-communist well into his second term.
And Nelson Mandela, the Gandhi of the late 20th century, was on the State Department's terrorist list well into the Bush administration, Bush II in the 2000s.
He was not removed from the State Department's list of terrorist figures until well into the 2000s.
What this tells you is that while the Cosbys had stickers against apartheid, the American government in collusion in a conspiracy of sorts with the Israelis were the last ride or die backers of the South African apartheid system in the world.
And I think that's instructive.
And I think you can't understand the Trump peace plan, in quotes, the deal of the century without understanding the history of the collusion of Israel, America and South Africa in the 1980s.
Yeah.
And listen, you know, you and I were both raised in America, too.
And I know that you understand this as well, that most people, they just don't have the first clue about this.
All they know is the Israelis are the most American like ones.
And they're up against the Islamic hordes of orcs coming to try to kill them all and push them in the sea.
And so, of course, we're on their side and of course, they're the good guys.
But it might be confusing to people why so many Americans, including so many Jews, have a problem with the system over there.
And that's because of all the Palestinians being held captive and having all of their land and all of their rights taken away and their lives as well.
And so that's the part of the story that people don't hear.
And so, but they ought to wonder, what's all this talk about apartheid?
Yeah, there's something to it.
It's like Danny's making this stuff up.
You could come up with lots of things to accuse them of other than that.
Maybe if you think that that sounds so off base, you're kind of off base and need to learn a little bit of the history.
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Okay, so we're back after an intervening interview and we have Danny here and the subject was, as we've been talking about here a little bit off the air, was about moveon.org and their invitation to Eric Garris, the center of antiwar.com, to come to their rally.
So what was the story there, Danny?
So, you know, so I talked to Eric yesterday and we were talking about my next column, you know, like we always do and he was really upset and he just wanted to bullshit with me, you know, and we're friends as well as colleagues and so we're talking on the phone and he's like, hey, like moveon.org, just, you know, contact me to come to like a rally about why Trump should have been impeached and, you know, all this.
And of course, Eric being a principled guy was like, well, I actually think that impeachment was like a distraction and a charade, which of course I agree with if you read my columns.
Not because I like Trump, but because I think the Democrats are like venal and like totally incompetent, you know.
But anyway, when Eric told the moveon crowd that he wasn't coming to the rally, they told him to his face, like over the phone, I'm taking you off of our email distribution list.
Of course, Eric was like, whatever.
But here's what I'm saying.
Here's what I'm saying, Scott.
That's why the anti-war movement is failing today, because you and I may not agree, right, on health care or welfare or a million issues, but it doesn't matter because none of those issues are even worth talking about until we end the fiscal military warfare state.
And if if if moveon wants to blackball Eric Garris from anti-war.com and by extension you, Scott, right, then them, they don't understand how you make a mass movement.
They don't understand activism.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, Justin Raimondo wrote an article back in 2002 during the anti-war movement, then trying to stop Iraq War II.
And it was called, This Isn't About You, you know, and it was, which is a really hard lesson to get across to leftist activists, because after all, and it's fine, they've got a lot on their mind.
You know, free Leonard Peltier.
You know what?
Free Leonard Peltier should be set free, too.
I think it does matter.
But I agree.
I agree.
I mean, but yeah, at our anti-war rally, we got it's a you know, you can't just be trying to recruit for the socialist cause.
We're trying to stop the war in Iraq.
That's what this is about.
And, you know, just this happened just the other day when the first time in 11 years there was a real anti or maybe more.
There was a real leftist anti-war rally.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, they've been showing up and doing the hard work all along.
Oh, yeah.
No, they have.
But in much smaller numbers.
But wait, wait, wait.
So at the.
I know Medea Benjamin personally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, they're great.
They're totally great.
And at anti-war.com, we've always had a great relationship with them.
They're wonderful.
But I'm just saying the overall leftist movement has been completely gone.
But then they all come out for the Iran thing after the killing of Soleimani and the scare about maybe we're going to have a war with Iran.
And they all come out to do anti-Iran protest, anti-Iran war protests, which is wonderful.
But then.
And you couldn't make this stuff up.
They really literally not just figuratively somehow, but they actually brought Jane Fonda out to be the keynote speaker at one of these rallies.
I think the one in L.A. or somewhere in Southern California.
Because, hey, gee, who's a better known anti-war activist than her?
With no introspection, no wisdom whatsoever to see, to even question how that looks to everyone else when everyone to the right of the middle, at least, blames her for losing Vietnam, dude.
Right.
And it doesn't even matter if it's true.
Of course, it doesn't matter if it's true.
And of course, it's not true.
Right.
But she made one really, really bad photo op mistake, which she's apologized for a million times over.
But still, it just means I'll give you a thousand bucks if you just stay home.
Please don't keynote the goddamn protest, because you can't undo that in people's mind on the right.
They still demonize her.
Her and Walter Cronkite.
If it hadn't have been for them, then clear hold and build would have worked, Danny.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Well, they believe that.
And I'll tell you, I was I keynoted my local protest on that same day, because, as you know, it was like a, quote, international day of action.
Right.
It was like two Saturdays ago against the war in Iran or escalation of the war in Iran.
And let me tell you, listeners like I love street activism.
I love it.
I love it.
Whenever I leave those rallies, I feel like a real citizen.
But but dot, dot, dot, dot, right.
But dot, dot, dot.
It's also highly disturbing.
And I'll tell you why.
So I gave a raucous 12 minute speech through a megaphone that I thought was pretty good, you know.
But what was my audience?
OK.
I live in the People's Republic of Lawrence, Kansas.
The University of Kansas has about 30,000 students between undergrads and grads.
OK.
And it is a liberal Mecca.
Theoretically, right now, we had a rally two Saturdays ago as part of the International Theoretically Day of Action.
How many people showed up?
I'll tell you how many.
About 40.
Now that's already disturbing in a liberal city.
Now of that 40, how many of them were students at the University of Kansas, a school, by the way, that literally burned down their student union, got into firefights, gunfire, firefights with the cops in 1970 after the invasion, Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State massacre.
So much so that this entire city was put, the National Guard was called out.
And you can Google this.
And...
Well, the answer to your question is those are the people who turned out, the Vietnam War era anti-war protesters.
That's right.
So 35 out of 40 of the people who turned out for me, well, not for me, but, you know, when I was speaking, yeah, were hippies from the 60s.
There were about five students from KU.
At one point, we actually heard a bunch of cheering and yelling because the campus was about four blocks from where we rallied.
And the reason that I heard all this cheering is because KU basketball was playing.
Yeah.
KU basketball was playing.
And if you ever, if you watch my speech on YouTube, I make a really like flippant, angry comment.
And I say, hey, I don't know if anybody else has heard, but about four blocks that way, there's a major research university.
You know what I mean?
And we couldn't, we got five students, dude, five.
We got five.
So, I mean, what the hell is going on there?
I mean, I get it.
There's a lot of just...
I'll tell you what, I'm sorry to cut you off, Scott, but I'll tell you what's going on.
It's not that...
It's Putin.
It's not, yeah, it's always Putin.
It's not that the University of Kansas isn't political.
It is, vapidly, vacuously, a veneer of political.
But they think that activism is, you know, making murals in chalk on campus or on their Instagram talking about transgender rights.
They think that's activism.
Like this entire generation, and I'm sorry, I know every generation says this.
I know that like every older generation has said this since the beginning of time.
But I'm sorry, there is something profoundly broken in the generation that's in college now.
Well, it would seem like being raised during the era of Bush and Obama's wars, that they would not believe in them at all.
It's not that they support them, right?
It's just that they don't care at all.
It's been so deprioritized.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Right.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I doubt they support any of the wars.
They just...
No, they don't.
They just don't care.
That's the thing.
I mean, they're apathetic.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
This has been a frustration of mine for a very long time.
People get, oh man, they were sure interested in foreign policy when we're starting a war in Iraq.
But after the summer of 03, they pretty much mostly lost interest and went back to regular TV.
And that was it.
And so for people who are interested in foreign policy stuff, they're interested in it.
But for everybody else, they're just not.
You're right.
You're right.
It's just like, I'm not interested in golf because that's not my thing.
It's the same way that golfers aren't interested in wars because that's my thing.
But the thing is, I'm often asked in my speeches and stuff, I'm often asked by people, well, how do you get the apathetic public to care?
And I always say the same thing, and it's kind of fatalistic.
I'm basically like Lord Byron on the scene.
How do you like that?
Some golfer's listening to me on his ear pods right now going, hey, I thought I was welcome here.
You are.
I'm sorry.
I take it back.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was like, hey, do you know how good my handicap is?
Anyway, that's as much as I know about golf.
But anyway, my point is this, you know, I always say the same thing when I get that question and I'm like, I'm not hopeful, by the way, I'm a fatalist.
I'm a Camus existentialist.
So like, I don't believe in much of anything in terms of hope.
But if if we are going to have a mass movement against these wars, the only way we're going to do it is to demonstrate empirically somehow.
I don't know, Scott, I don't know how we're going to do it, because your pod and my pod and all the pods I go on, they're not helping.
And that's not a knock at what you do.
It's not a knock at what I do.
We're doing our best.
But the only way we're going to create a mass movement is if we demonstrate to the people this the 99 percent that don't serve in these wars, that the warfare state, the national security state, the forever war complex is hurting them.
Whether it be financially or in terms of civil liberties, until we can convince them that the wars that I carried water for when I was an imperial soldier, until we can convince them that those wars are hurting them day to day in the absence of a draft.
That's the only way we're going to get them involved.
And the thing to remember, and I say this in all of my speeches, is that the warfare state, the military industrial complex, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, I don't even care anymore.
Whatever you want to call it.
What is the number one thing they are counting on?
What is the number one thing that they need in order to maintain their vice like grip on Washington?
Well, I'll tell you, citizen apathy, apathy, and division, what they require, they require they need it.
They need Nancy Pelosi to rip that speech up.
They need that.
She thinks she's a hero, but all she did was further the cause of the militarists.
Because the militarists don't belong to any particular political party, do they?
Right?
Right.
They don't.
Right.
Would you agree with that, Scott?
Right.
Some of them are Democrats.
Some of them are Republicans.
Most of them don't give a.
And so my point is this.
What they want is apathy.
Now, one of the best ways to breed apathy is to create or to catalyze a political system of tribal division.
Of course.
You know, George Carlin said this when I was a kid about that's why all they ever talk about is all of our differences, race and sex and gender and politics and this and that and every other thing in the world other than the difference between the powerful and those who don't have it.
That's what's really going on here, dude, dude, it's all it's ever been my I promise my last point for I turn it back over to you is this.
The one thing they don't talk about is class.
Now, you and I might disagree about what that means in a Marxist sense, but here's what's true and you'll agree with this because you're historically astute in the trenches of World War One, which was the most important war that was ever fought in history.
Most important war, way more important than World War Two, despite the fact that three or four times more people died in World War Two, way more important than World War Two is World War One, because what World War One demonstrated was that, well, it demonstrated two things.
Number one, nationalism as an ism, as an ideology, the only logical outgrowth of nationalism is world war.
That's the first thing it demonstrated.
The second thing it demonstrated was the weakness, vapidity and cynicism of the left.
Now I say that as a Bernie supporting leftist, OK?
So for the listeners out there, I'm not saying this because I hate the left.
What I'm saying is this, Europe in 1914, OK, right before war was declared and everyone went off killing each other.
By the way, a million soldiers died between August 5th, my birthday, and December 31st of 1914.
So what we're talking about is what, about four and a half months?
A million soldiers died.
A million.
Speaking of the Woodrow Wilson flu, right in the middle of the world's worst flu, he puts all these guys on ships together and sends them across the Atlantic and then back and forth too.
That's why almost three times as many Americans died of the flu as from combat in World War One.
But that's a whole other subject.
But- But caused by it.
Yeah.
People who would have been on their farm in the middle of Kansas somewhere.
That's right.
Or in New York back in, you know, in Tennessee.
But you know, nevertheless, here's what I'm saying.
In July of 1914, so we're talking a month before the war breaks out, Europe was highly, highly influenced by socialist philosophies.
Social Democrats dominated the parliaments, or the Reichstag, or whatever, of most European nations.
Now, when the monarchical militarists, the only exception being France, which was notionally a democracy, when they decided that war was inevitable, the socialists, the social Democrats, which is like socialism lite, had a choice to make, didn't they?
The choice they had to make was this.
They knew in their hearts, they knew, don't for a second believe they didn't, they knew in their hearts that they had more in common with the German a hundred meters away in the trenches than they did with their own government.
But every single mainstream social democratic and socialist political party in Europe sided with their government and told their members to enlist.
Now why do I tell this story, Scott?
Because what it demonstrates is the fallibility, the cynicism, and ultimately the ineffable nature of the anti-war left.
And I say that, Scott, as a member of the left.
But here's the thing.
I write papers for three different think tanks monthly.
Every one of them is libertarian.
And I'm not a libertarian.
What does that tell us?
It tells us that the left, to the extent that it even exists anymore or is even meaningful, the left has jettisoned, has jettisoned the anti-war cause in favor of trans, racial, sexuality rights.
And that's why the most profound voices in the anti-war movement today come from the libertarian right.
Well, and you know, here's the thing of it too, man.
And this, you know, is certainly not universal in terms of the left and progressives through history and what have you.
But you know, at the end of the day, there's a, it's not really surprising.
It's part of their biography and it's an important part of it.
That the neocons are leftists, former leftists, who moved right because they put their dedication to militarism and Israel as their highest priorities.
But they believed in those things when they were leftists too.
And that, you know, there's this great Rothbard article, I'm going to send it to you.
It's called World War I as Fulfillment, Power and the Intellectuals.
So it's not just that they compromised with JP Morgan and the nationalist, you know, military industrial complex right at the time.
It was that, oh goody, here's a chance to use power to remake the world.
And this was something that, you know, was often said, or I don't know how often, but it was said also about the war in Vietnam.
People try to separate, liberals and leftists especially, try to say, well, you know, the war in Vietnam was terrible, but the Great Society was great.
But the thing is, is the war in Vietnam was part of the Great Society and it was the very same men who did it.
And it was the very same ideology that said that the national government is going to fix the problems for all the people who need its help, whether here or in Vietnam.
And there wasn't really a separation there at all.
The fact that that coincided with the goals of the helicopter salesman and the right wing was, you know, incidental and, you know, important, but it was really the new left that, you know, reacted against that, that, you know, we remember as the anti-Vietnam war hippies and all of that kind of thing.
But that stuff, it wasn't the Eisenhower policy nearly as much as it was the Johnson one, you know?
No, of course.
I mean, look, there's a lot of debate among historians regarding JFK, right?
The big question among historians, and no one agrees, literally no one agrees.
Like most history in academia has a consensus at this point, right?
You name me an American event and I'll tell you what the consensus of historians believes, right?
It's a thing.
It's usually leftist, although usually also accurate.
But on Vietnam, they don't agree.
They do not agree to this thing because a lot of these historians were children or teenagers when JFK was shot, right?
When JFK was assassinated.
And a lot of them need, they need, trust me, it's a need.
It's not a want.
It's a need.
They need to believe that if JFK lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam.
Well, I mean, the entire Cold War and the rest of it.
This in spite of the fact that empirically the evidence points to the exact opposite, right?
And much of it, you know what I have to say, I think Mike Swanson does a really great job in the worst state of making the former case there.
Although there is a lot to the other side.
Go ahead.
No.
So I'm, listen, I'm not like an anti-JFK partisan and I would rather have seen what JFK did than what Lyndon Johnson did.
But I am not ready to fold to the JFK was a hero, JFK would have saved us crowd.
Which I don't want to oversimplify what Mike Swanson says in that book either.
No, and I know that book and it's a good, it's an excellent book.
Let me just say real quick, essentially he says that the narrative that, yeah, he really does seem to have wanted to end the war in Vietnam does seem to be true as opposed to the narrative.
Not, he doesn't say the whole thing about how everything would have been great if only and all that kind of thing.
I never meant to say that.
So no, no.
So I don't disagree with him actually.
I mean, I would rather Kennedy have won a second term and shepherded the first four years of what became the Vietnam war than Johnson because Johnson was problematic from the start based on his relationship with the Southern Democrats and based on his own like foibles and insecurities.
My point more broadly is this, like war, expeditionary wars of choice are the last bipartisan enterprise in American politics.
If you needed proof of that, you watched the state of the union address, which I did, which I did for my sins.
It was one of the worst experiences of my life.
And I've seen a child blown halfway through a windshield of a car in the aftermath of a market suicide bombing.
So I don't, I'm sorry, I just want, I'm sorry, you just got to let me be me.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, you have to be sorry.
I'm just laughing.
Like I've seen human beings do things to one another that literally made me an agnostic.
Okay.
That being said, my point is this, like if you watch the state of the union address, the petulant children that call themselves Democrats, petulant children, did you see Nancy Pelosi rip up that speech?
That's what a four year old does.
I know that like the left is like, Oh my God, she's a hero.
I'm like, no, she's a petulant child.
Well, and they probably planned it with a focus group and a big meeting beforehand to, you know, I know honestly when, when she did that, I was like, that is the most immature thing I've ever seen.
And I hate Trump.
I hate Trump.
I hate Republicans.
I hate the whole thing, but I'm also a thinking, rational human being.
And so when I saw Nancy Pelosi, who I've loathed, when I saw her rip up that speech, I was like, you know what?
You just handed him a talking point.
Did you notice that there were like four or five times when Nancy stood up and applauded with him?
Well, it all started.
The first one at least was for Juan Guaido and then higher, right?
The entire Democratic side of the goddang thing, house and Senate all stood up for a coup leader, a coup leader, a failed one.
And the, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States referred to him as the president of Venezuela four or five times, but he's not, he's not.
And that just really goes to show you, doesn't it?
I mean, man.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Like I'm sorry about the curse words, Scott, like I, my, my, my point is this, like the only issue that is bipartisan today is American militarism.
Well, and I liked the way you put it before that it's the last thing that they all agree on.
It might be the last thing they all agree on.
And I guess we're out of time to talk about it, but it's a good segue to say, I mean, this is your most recent piece at antiwar.com is beyond Ukraine.
America's coming, losing battle for Eurasia and yeah, I don't care.
I got all the time in the world.
Let's talk about this.
You want to?
No.
I want to talk about it.
Let's I'll tell you what, let's split this up and we'll, we'll run them a couple interviews apart and we'll make this a separate interview because we're at an hour anyway.
Uh, Danny Sherson, he's our guy at antiwar.com.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, apsradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
