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.
We 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 Matt Ho from the Center for International Policy.
He was a Marine Corps captain in Iraq War Two, and then he worked for the State Department in Afghanistan, where he was famously the whistleblower who tried to stop the surge of 2009 through 12 there.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Matt?
Good, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very good.
And you know, it's really good to see you in this new documentary about Joe Biden that just came out and looks like maybe it was unnecessary because he's having a real hard time as it goes, at least so far in Iowa and New Hampshire here.
I doubt he'll do too much better in South Carolina, but who knows?
But this is really important, and I don't know how well it's getting around yet, but I do hope that people will pass it around.
It's called Worth the Price, Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War, and it's narrated by Danny Glover.
And it's only 20 minutes long, put together by Mark Weisbrot.
And it features a lot of our friends, Stephen Zunis, of course.
Oh, I've got a typo here, Matthew Ho, Lawrence Wilkerson and Mark Weisbrot is in it as well.
And it's really great.
And he's really guilty.
So why don't you tell us all about how guilty Joe Biden is?
And as you do in the film, tell it why it matters so much to you.
Yeah, absolutely.
Not just to me, it matters to tens of millions of people that are, you know, still being affected by these wars.
You know, and this war, the Iraq War, of course, spawned, you know, what has occurred in Syria and in Libya and in Yemen to a degree.
It has caused things to be exacerbated in Afghanistan for a host of different reasons, but most especially because you now have an Islamic state there.
You know, I mean, and there's other reasons, too.
I mean, you have you had a we had an Afghan surge, right, Scott, because we have the success of the Iraq surge.
Right.
Right.
You know, I mean, and hopefully people are getting the sarcasm that's in my voice.
But this video can be and it is important because, yeah, though Biden has not done well in Iowa and in New Hampshire, he's still doing well nationally.
I mean, if you look at the real clear politics, if you go to their aggregation data of all the national polls, he is still second in polling after Sanders.
Here in North Carolina, where I am, and we have primary on March 3rd, he is second.
He's getting 20 percent.
You know, it's Sanders and then him and then Bloomberg, although Bloomberg's real close now, I guess.
So it is.
He's still in it.
But I think for with the film, you know, Mark Weisbrot produced it and we got, like you said, Danny Glover to narrate it.
And you can find the film at WorthThePrice.org.
And it's 19 minutes long and there's about six of us in it commenting on Joe Biden and the Iraq war and a ton of C-SPAN footage.
And I think for a lot of people, a lot of what I have gotten from people who have watched this film is that they just had, if they had been aware of how involved and how important Joe Biden was to the launch of that war, they had forgotten.
Or it's something they never realized.
It's something that was very well, certainly as, say, Obama campaigned in 2008 on how dumb of a war the Iraq war was.
This is something that was just kind of the Democrats were very able to like brush aside the fact that his vice president was integral to the launch of that war that, and as you'll see in the documentary, it's explained how the war may not have been possible without Joe Biden.
Because as in 2002 and 2003, the Democrats were in control of the Senate.
Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
That was the committee through which the authorization for that war went forward.
So without Joe Biden and his rule, there could not have been an authorization.
And you will see in the film, Biden tries to pass himself off as being a neutral host, that he is trying to moderate an evenhanded discussion of the war.
But as the film explains, that neutral or evenhanded discussion of the impending war never took place.
That Biden made sure the deck was stacked with those who were going to argue in favor of the war, and that those who were best in a position to argue against the war in 2002 were shut out, that they were left out of the process.
And so it became really in 2002, in October of 2003, when the authorization comes through, really just, you know, almost like a rubber stamp.
And I can tell you, it was important because that authorization had to occur in order for the president to mobilize the military.
I was still in the Marine Corps at that time, of course, and I was stationed in Okinawa, Japan.
And I can remember my battalion commander saying that the warning orders to the Marine Corps units in California went out literally a day or two after the authorization for war with Iraq passed the United States Congress.
So a warning order is important.
A warning order is preparation for the order to do something, and it's integral to any type of military operation.
So certainly something like this big, where the military wanted the war to take place in late winter, early spring, because they'd have better weather, they'd have better skies, they'd have, you know, all different types of reasons for why they want to launch the war then.
And they knew how long it would take roughly for them to get the 150,000 or 200,000 men and women and equipment and planes and boats and everything else over there, as well as then the president to make his case for the war.
You needed that six months.
So Biden, you know, didn't just stack the deck, but he made sure the process went through in a timely manner so that the war could take place when the Pentagon wanted it to and politically when the Bush administration wanted it to.
So let's review a little bit of this, because as you say, a lot of people didn't know this at the time, and a lot of people are too young to have known at the time.
This is all ancient history, or maybe hopefully not ancient, but it's history to them that they're really learning for the first time.
So we had, first of all, as you're saying, the Democrats were the majority in the Senate, so he wasn't just the ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
He was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee from the opposite party, from the Democratic Party opposite of the president and the vice president and their group that are pushing us into this war.
And so where probably, I believe, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or maybe one or two of those other very powerful Democratic senators, if they had really tried, they could have stopped it.
With him, there's just no question.
It's a scientific fact.
He could have stopped it, as you just said.
The authorization came out of the Foreign Relations Committee.
So Hillary Clinton could have raised a hell of a stink about it, and she had a lot of ability to do that at the time, and of course she didn't.
She went along with it all.
But this guy quite literally could have dragged out these hearings, could have brought out Scott Ritter and everyone else to debunk the case for war, could have refused to pass the authorization on to the full Senate to vote on, and hell, he could have called in all the neoconservatives to tell the story about how they've been working with this Chalabi guy for the last 10 years to push us into this thing, and all the different times that their attempts had failed in the past already, and all of these things.
And of course, as you said, he picked it up and championed the entire cause.
He made sure that this thing got through.
He did the exact opposite of try to fight it or be neutral in any way.
As you said, he portrays himself as neutral when he was taking the lead.
And I remember I was reading antiwar.com at the time, and Justin Raimondo's article from during this was called The Fix Is In, and it was all about Joe Biden's hearings and how every single one of the people testifying was a hawk and the whole thing was just fake.
And so thanks a lot, checks and balances.
This is what you get, nothing.
Yeah.
You know, and in the film too, it points out specific occurrences where various senators tried to interject, tried to ...
There's a scene with Lincoln Chaffee, the Republican from Rhode Island, who interjects and says, hey, aren't we going to hear the other side of the story on this?
All these witnesses are basically saying this hearing is you're stacking a deck, and Biden giving that mouth service or lip service to Senator Chaffee, and then nothing coming of it.
As well as too in the film, it discusses other amendments that were put forward, such as particularly discusses Senator Carl Levin from Michigan putting forward an amendment that said, look, we'll have an amendment on authorization that says the United Nations has to go along with it if we get approval from the UN, and if inspectors come back and all these things are done, and if there is an imminent threat, then you have authorization to go to war.
And even that type of amendment, by a very powerful ...
I think at that point, I don't know if he still was, but at different points, Levin had been chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He was no lightweight ...
This was a very serious person in terms of issues of war and peace, and that is not included.
That is pushed aside.
As well as he doesn't just go along with the formality of authorizing the war.
He goes along with the ...
Biden, I'm saying here, goes along with the lies of the war.
So he goes along with the fact that the danger from the nuclear and chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein possesses is imminent.
He goes along with the lie about Al-Qaeda and Iraq being linked, that Saddam Hussein was supporting Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
So it wasn't just that procedurally he didn't do his due diligence, or procedurally he didn't do enough to ensure that fair hearings were conducted.
It's that he ensured, again, that the hearings went along speedily and quickly, so the authorization could occur by the time the Pentagon wanted it to, and the Bush administration wanted to, but he was also off speaking to whoever would listen to him about why this war was necessary, why we needed to attack Saddam Hussein, why we had to go and occupy this country for now 19 ...
I'm sorry, 17 years, it'll be 17 years in March.
Kill a million Iraqis, et cetera, et cetera.
Light the whole region on fire, basically, and why Biden thought that was a good idea at the time.
And it's important.
I mean, look, one of the things I want to make sure it's clear is that, and I know a lot of people, you and I, Scott, although I know you're very much involved with the libertarian candidate this year, both you and I go through our bouts of how much we want to support electoral politics and whether or not it's worth it.
But we have to also look at this and say, look, Hillary Clinton, in 2008, did not get the nomination for president, in large part, to her vote on the Iraq War, to her support of the Iraq War.
That's right.
Right?
And then in 2016, and we have this, and I'll send you the link if you want to put it in the, include it in the little write-up about discussion, but you know, there have been studies that have shown, and I've heard other guys on your show talking about it, Scott, you know, so I know, I know you get, this has been discussed and some people have heard this before too, but in truth, for those who haven't, in 2016, Donald Trump won his presidency by winning counties that had the highest rates of casualties from the Iraq and Afghan War.
Yeah, although we know that Donald Trump is not true to his rhetoric of 2016 of being an anti-war president, you know, it is true that people voted for him because of the impact the wars had on the, in their communities.
So it's very clear to me that if a film like this can have an impact on Biden's campaign, and he's done enough to hurt himself, but again, like we discussed, he's still doing well.
When he's still lying about this and pretending that, oh no, I only was a little for it and kind of, and then I changed my mind right away and all this stuff, and he does nothing but lie.
He can't even remember what the truth is anymore.
But if we can show, if it can be shown that there is, to politicians, and I'm writing a piece now on Pete Buttigieg and his military service, I was hoping to have it done by today, but obviously it didn't get done by today, it'll be out next week.
Maybe we can stop men and women from running for office who don't just embrace the military, say as Buttigieg does, sees it as a way to, as CNN put it, gold plate his resume, but also to recognize that wars have been failures and that they've been failures, not just for the people, say like in the Middle East who are suffering and suffering, but for the United States as a whole, because even Scott, if you and I disagree on what we should do with all the leftover money from the defense budget, right, we agree that a trillion two we spend a year on military, militarism and wars is wrong.
I think you and I disagree how we would repurpose that money.
We still agree with the concept, with the ideas that this is wrong.
If we can get more politicians to openly state that, I mean we practically, Bernie Sanders is really the only one saying these kinds of things, and I feel like he has been pushed so hard on this too.
It's not coming naturally for him.
That's actually a pretty good slogan, right?
Let's fight over the peace dividend, who gets it and where does it go?
But then we're arguing past the sale that we've got to end these wars first.
Exactly.
We've got to end them first and then we can decide what we're going to do with the, I think the overseas contingency operations this year in the new request, the new Pentagon request is 740 billion.
I think the OCO, the overseas, the war fund for Afghanistan and Iraq and everywhere else is about 70 billion.
I mean, yeah, so we could fight, you, Scott, you and I could fight about how we could, you know, I could come from, you could come from your libertarian ways, I would come from my libertarian.
Well, my argument is far superior.
We just completely abolish income taxation and the IRS.
Tell you what we do.
We take the neocons and all the IRS agents and we drop them out of B-52s over Iraq for one last carpet bombing campaign and then we call the whole thing off.
You know, you could, we really could.
I mean, if you, you could do quite a bombing campaign.
If you were to just, if we were to get a bunch of buses, Scott, and drive around DC and drive around Maryland and parts of Northern Virginia where the military industrial complex has laid its roots.
And script them all.
Oh, exactly.
And then strap one of them J-Dam satellite targeting thingies to their feet and drop them right out the door.
We could flatten a lot of cities with the amount of people that work for the military industrial complex.
You know, I mean, we could, we could flatten many, many cities and I mean, it would really be a boon for, I think, our country as well.
I mean, we can do the rebuilding contracts, you know, Halliburton and Bechtel and them can get in on it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they will be the first ones on the, the, I don't know if I would choose them to be launched first or if I would choose like the, like the Beltway bandits, like Booz Allen and those folks to go first, but you know, I mean, we're joking about this, but it's true.
I mean, and this is something I think that again, like people from different sides of the political spectrum or, or oval or whatever you want to call how we view politics.
Look, Washington DC is the wealthiest place in the country.
It has, depending upon which metric you look at, it has six of the top 10, seven of the top 12, you know, wealthiest counties in the country over and over again for the top five wealthiest counties are Washington DC suburbs.
And that has all occurred in the last 20 years with the increase in the size of the federal government and in particular with the increase in the size of the military budgets, the war budgets, the intelligence budgets, and then the banking sector budgets as well to the money that goes into the banking sector and everything that's helped it out.
And that's what that's from.
It's not from anything else.
It's from that.
And so where the wealthiest parts of the country used to be Silicon Valley or used to be Tulsa in Dallas with the oil, you know, New York that actually produced things, you know, it is now Washington DC where I think anyone can agree that this should not be the wealthiest part of the country just because it takes money from the rest of the country and redistributes it to, you know, not just all industries, but specifically as redistributing it to the war making industry.
And then of course, like I said, the banks that support that.
Did you ever read that article by Kelly Vlahos in the American conservative?
It's like two or three years ago about, she's talking about this exact phenomenon and about all the McMansions going up and describing these like perfectly nice upper middle class neighborhoods with probably half million dollar homes or, you know, in the old days, whatever before the recent bubble, but pretty nice three and four bedroom homes on nice sized lots in these nice suburbs.
And they're only built in say the seventies or eighties or whatever, perfectly nice home.
And they're coming in and bulldozing entire neighborhoods to build new, bigger, better McMansions on each one of those very same lots as though it's a brand new development and that kind of thing.
Cause that's how much profit there is in it to just bulldoze these perfectly good homes by the hundreds and thousands to pave over them for, as you say, this is all money straight out of the treasury, all laundered through the treasury after they steal it from us either through taxation or inflation or, you know, borrowing in our name.
And hey, I mean, I'll put a pitch in because, you know, everybody else is probably getting the same notifications from turbo tax that I'm getting, you know, and I've been a work war tax resistor for five or six years.
I don't pay my, I don't pay my taxes anymore and I haven't paid him five or six years because of the wars.
And I won't, you know, every year I send a letter to the treasury, say to, I'm sorry, to the IRS saying like, I don't pay, I'm not paying my taxes this year because of the wars.
I'm not going to pay, I'm not going to give you money to kill people.
And I mean, I think it's a concept that I would like more people to look into.
I mean, it is my, you know, some years because of my, my disabilities and everything, because I'm a hundred percent disabled and whatnot, you know, I don't make any money, you know, and being a war, as you know, Scott, this business is not, not how to become a, you know, you're not gonna become rich yelling against the wars, but, you know, and so certainly the amount of money I'm withholding from the IRS is not going to stop the American war machine, but it's one way to at least resist.
It's one way to put yourself a bit on the line and to say, Hey, I'm not taking part in this.
And, you know, so certainly if anyone is listening, who's interested in that, please, you know, contact me.
I'm happy to talk to you more about it directly, but, but certainly, you know, I mean, and that's, you know, getting back to this film, you know, the intersection of money and the wars, you know, Larry Wilkerson makes it clear in the film, he speaks about how Exxon Mobil, their biggest, their biggest customer is the department of defense.
Yeah.
So, right.
I mean, so I was so glad that he said that when he put it that way.
You can see, cause you know, I even talk about how sometimes about how, you know, the environmentalists ought to get it straight, that in, in the order of things, anti-imperialism should still be the highest priority of an environmentalist because the worst environmental actor on the planet is the DOD and they consume just in fossil fuel.
They consume almost as much as Germany or something like that every year.
And then, so, but I like, this is the other half of that connection.
And who do you think has that contract except Standard Oil in New Jersey, the Rockefeller empire who built this thing in the first place, of course, you know?
Yeah.
I mean the, that, that connection is something that is glossed over, you know, is something that is, is, is, is, it's poo-pooed I think by so many people who think that, okay, now you're verging in the realm of conspiracy, but it certainly isn't.
I mean, it's not, I mean, the, the, the money that goes into defense budget is recirculated through of course the defense industry, but then it's also, of course, yeah, recirculated through the fossil fuel industry, it is circulated through the think tanks who are then the ones that come in and brief Congress.
I don't go into Congress that often anymore, but a bunch of years ago I was going quite often multiple times a month.
And I was being told at that point, and this was about say 2011, 2012, that the majority of the briefings on the wars on say, in say spring of 2012, the majority of briefings on the situation in Libya or what was happening in Syria or what was going on in Afghanistan was being conducted not by the U.S. State Department, not by the United States Department of Defense, not by the Central Intelligence Agency, but by think tanks.
That groups like the Institute for the Study of War or the Center for New America, Center for New American Security, you know, or whoever were coming in and they were the ones who were providing most of the briefings to the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees.
You know what I mean?
So the money that is appropriated gets just recycled back that way.
And of course these people come in and they say, you know, well, we need more because of this threat.
We need more because of that threat.
It's prudent to do this.
I'm an expert.
I'm independent.
I'm neutral.
That's how they're, you know, that's how they sell themselves.
And of course they're not.
And you know, that's why you can have a Democratic Congress appropriate, how much did they appropriate?
$319 billion, you know, late last year for the Defense Department.
That's why the Defense Department is the only, literally this past year was the first year a federal agency was fully funded in time and on time within the calendar, I mean, within the fiscal year it was supposed to be, and that was the Veterans Administration.
Aside from that, in the last 20 years or so, no federal agency besides the Pentagon has been funded in time or wholly because a lot of these, you know, a lot of the budget process, you know, they, they just do it by a, what do you call it, a concurrent agreement or what number, and they just roll it over to next year and they keep getting the money that they got last year, except for the Pentagon.
The Pentagon every year is fully funded, often funded at levels way in excess of what the Pentagon or the president asked for, you know, and so you do, you have to understand that all this actually has a very real effect then on the lives we're living because it affects everything.
It affects what, you know, how much money we have, how much money the rest of the country is, I mean, I'm sorry, the rest of the political system is willing to give for other needs or other urgencies, and then it certainly affects the political process, it affects the media.
I mean, all these types of things.
One of the things as I've been doing, writing this, this, this essay on Buttigieg is that, you know, seeing just the reluctance in the media to question his, his military record, to question what he has done and what, what he actually did while in uniform.
And you know, I mean, at one point he makes a comment, he made a, that he would have the most military experience in office, in office since George H.W. Bush, which, you know, I mean, now you're comparing yourself to a guy who was a dive bomber pilot in the Pacific against the Japanese who got shot down and rescued by, you know, a, you know, who got rescued floating at sea while sharks were all around him and everything.
You know, and here's Buttigieg saying these kinds of things without actually being questioned about it or actually being examined.
And when it turns out with, with Buttigieg, of course, is that he got a direct commission into the Navy from a political benefactor, probably from when he was on the Obama campaign.
That's all, that stuff was all very murky.
And he literally did nothing in the Navy except go to Afghanistan, where because he had never even been to a military school or received any training, he was a driver his whole time in Kabul.
And he spent his time driving an SUV, driving other officers to meetings that most likely because he didn't have a high enough security clearance, he wasn't able to attend himself.
But here's, so you have this, this, this is things that people should know because he stands in front of the American people and he says, well, because I was in the Navy, I'm informed of what war and peace is like, and I would make a good commander in chief.
And I know what it's really like to go to war and what it's like to be in danger and to kill or be killed, you know, and people lap that up.
You know, so I think again, getting back to this documentary, this is important because hopefully if we can show that if again, like Clinton was held accountable and if Biden can be held accountable, then hopefully other presidential candidates can be held accountable.
And then we don't have people like, you know, Mayor Pete, you know, getting direct commissions in the Navy for the purposes of, you know, waiting down and exaggerating his resume.
Yeah.
Which is obviously the only reason he did it all is, you know, getting his ticket punched as they put it for, you know, future ambition and that kind of thing.
And it's important that you are the one doing the criticizing because I was just reading this funny thing last night where it's the liberal news hounds where they just usually attack Fox News all day kind of deal.
And they're attacking Tucker Carlson, who never served his country for attacking Buttigieg for his, you know, great, brave combat defense department duty over there in Kabul and whatever.
Wasn't he an intelligence officer?
That was what he said.
He was an intelligence officer.
Now he's, you know, Radar O'Reilly driving around in a Jeep.
I get it.
He never received, you know, in the military, he joined the military and received what's called an MOS, a military occupational specialty.
And you get that by going to a certain school.
So you're going to be a cook, you go to cook school and then you get that MOS, right?
You're going to be an infantryman, you go to infantry school, you know, and you get that MOS.
You know, if you're going to be an intelligence officer, you go to intel.
But he never got an MOS.
He never went to schools.
There's nothing in his record that shows that.
There's actually nothing in his record that shows he ever did anything but go to Afghanistan.
He claims to, and I think, and he probably did, he claims to have gone to drill weekends.
You know, he was a reservist.
So reservists can, you know, spend two weekends a month and then two weeks, I'm sorry, a weekend a month and then two weekends, two weeks a year doing reserve duty.
And it doesn't even seem like he did that.
There's some anecdotal stuff that Buttigieg did go to reserve unit from time to time, but there's no record of it and there's no, there's nothing that can be seen in the records because they redact all the personal things that say whether or not he actually did such things.
But he certainly didn't go to school and he certainly wasn't a practicing intelligence officer.
And so when he shows up in Kabul, it seems like the best thing you could have this guy do is drive the truck around, which he was an officer.
He was a lieutenant in the Navy.
I mean, I never came across, we weren't allowed to drive as officers.
We just weren't.
You know, I mean, you did when you had to or, you know, and so it just doesn't story of him going to Somaliland and all that.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I mean, I had a lot of, I got started writing this because I had a couple of people asked me about this idea that he was with the CIA and, you know, and there's something, some idea that he went to Somaliland with the CIA, but you know, who knows?
He worked for McKinsey, you know, the big consulting firm, and they certainly have CIA linkages, you know?
But, you know- He doesn't seem like a knock to me, but I don't know.
No, he doesn't.
And he certainly doesn't have the, as far as I know- He didn't have any kind of diplomatic credentials or anything like that, right?
So if he was CIA, he was a knock, but can you imagine them putting him in the field?
I mean, and in Somaliland?
Yeah, that doesn't make sense.
I think that doesn't make sense to me.
And he doesn't have like the missing time.
You know, you need like a year and a half, two years of training in the CIA.
So if you look at a guy's resume or a gal's resume, because a lot of those knocks, those non-official covers, a lot are women, you know?
If you look at their resume, they're going to have a period of time where they are off doing something that's where they're actually, I'd say that the CIA is the farm, you know, in Virginia, training and doing whatnot.
Yeah.
Like show me where this guy is an important international oil company consultant or something like that.
You know, some good coverage.
Exactly.
She was an energy consultant or whatever.
I think she's a good example.
You know, and then too, I mean, the CIA has penetrated, I guess, probably pretty much every U.S. government agency and they do so.
I don't think they penetrate the Department of Defense.
I mean, the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, is actually bigger than the CIA.
And everything I've always known about those two organizations is where, whereas they will work together, you got to bang their heads to work together.
And so the idea that the CIA using Pete Buttigieg is some kind of deep cover in the military.
Nah, yeah, yeah, forget all that.
Yeah, exactly.
And DOD is just too protective to allow- He's too much of a goofball to be involved in anything like that.
Yeah.
Now, what is dangerous about him is the fact that like, as I was reading this stuff about him and looking at this stuff about him, there is photo after photo of him, you know, glad hatting and arm around the back with all types of different generals, that he is truly the towel boy who gets to, and in fact, in the article I linked to the, remember the Mean Joe Green Coke commercial from 1979 where he throws the kid the towel, you know, after the game, and the kid's got a big smile on his face.
And that's really the type of smile that, you know, Mayor Pete has on his face whenever he's around these generals.
He is like the nerdy kid that has been allowed to hang out with the jocks.
And the danger, I think, is that he convinces people that he actually knows what he's talking about, that he actually has had real military experience, that he has lived a life of danger, that he knows what it means to, and I can imagine that when it comes time, say he becomes president, and then he will say things when he talks about it as to, as someone who has been in the military, I know the true cost of what this means.
That's bullshit.
He doesn't know the true cost of it.
Yeah, and also, he probably doesn't know the first thing about who's who or what, and so just like Trump, the military and the spies will come to him and give him his orders, and he'll say, sir, yes, sir, because he's an empty suit and doesn't know nothing to, not nearly enough to push back against them.
Yeah, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again on your show, and I've written it, you know, one of my favorite Eisenhower quotes is, you know, towards the end of his time, and this is repeated by his daughter, you know, Eisenhower was standing in the Oval Office, and he looked at his chair, and he said, God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn't know the military as well as I do, and he wasn't talking about like, you know, the commander in chief needs to be an expert, needs to know about strategy, needs to be a tactician, or that he needs to know how to command operations or understand logistics.
What he needs to know is that the admirals and the generals lie, they always lie.
And that, you know, if the person who is in the presidency, if that man or woman does not understand that the generals and admirals lie all the time, and if that person defers to the generals and the admirals lying, it defers to them, we are going to, I mean, that's going to be no different than it is right now.
I mean, it will be worse, because we'll go from rather being, having, being involved in wars all throughout Africa and throughout the Middle East, we'll be in wars God knows where else.
I mean, hey, you know, look at the primary the other night in Nevada, where, you know, Senator Klobuchar, who's doing very well in the polls right now, or much better than people ever thought she would, doesn't know who the president of Mexico is, but she's also going to do everything she can to support the military.
And Mayor Pete, several months ago, said that he would send the military into Mexico, you know, let alone then, of course, Juan Guaido, you know, Trump's man for Venezuela, you know, he's at the State of the Union, he gets a, you know, hey, if you want to see something, watch the, watch the State of the Union when Trump introduced Guaido, and watch how fast Nancy Pelosi pops out of her seat to applaud Juan Guaido.
And all the Democrats, House and Senate, get up for the standing ovation.
Yeah, exactly.
That was just the most ridiculous gutting thing.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004 through 2019, interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
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Hey y'all, Scott here.
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Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have.
Follow through from the link in the margin at scotthorton.org for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
We're over time, but I don't care.
Let's keep going real quick.
Okay.
And we don't have time to give it full justice, but the New York Times did this questionnaire of the Democratic candidates about where they stand on foreign policy.
And so my question to you is what you thought of it when you read it.
It is as horrifying as you would expect when you read the responses from people like Biden and Klobuchar.
Interestingly, the man we were speaking about, Buttigieg, he didn't respond to a lot of the questions.
Which is funny because he did respond to some of them.
So he could have just ignored it and pretended to be busy or something.
Instead, it was like, I refuse to take a position on that.
Thank you.
And the ones he did respond to, he referred to previous statements he had given, like one he referred to the Council on Foreign Relations where he gave a statement.
And they all were nothing specific, of course, and all very much could be taken any different way.
You know, Tulsi Gabbard, who is still in the race, did herself no favors by not responding.
They sent her a questionnaire and Tulsi Gabbard did not respond, which I thought- This was supposed to be her issue.
I don't know why she wouldn't- Big mistake.
You know, I mean, hey, you can decry the New York Times as being part of the establishment that is making everything so bad in this country.
But you also have to recognize that they are part of the establishment and that they have a huge readership and they still have a huge sway.
And you need to go along with the game to a certain degree.
Sanders was probably, you saw, one of the things, because it's tied into the news cycle right now, is as the United States and the Taliban begin a reduction in violence in Afghanistan this week that hopefully will lead to some type of first stage of a peace process in Afghanistan.
You see a number of the candidates, you know, including Joe Biden, saying, I will remove the combat troops but keep the counterterrorism troops there.
Which I don't know if you saw that thing by Kimberly Dozier and I guess AP saying that, according to her sources anyway, their secret annexes with the Taliban allow us to keep 8,500- Exactly.
So that's the Biden plan from 2009.
Exactly.
And this whole notion that Biden was against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in 2009 was not true.
He thought McChrystal wanted 40,000, Biden wanted 20,000, so Obama split the difference as he often did in everything, and 30,000 went.
And on top of the 40,000 had already gone.
The worst aspect of this New York Times questionnaire on foreign policy was really Bernie Sanders' response to the question.
And you can realize a lot about the New York Times and about establishment foreign policy thinking when you realize that David Sanger was one of the two people who helped write this questionnaire.
But the question about North Korea and Iran, I think the only question about those two, if I remember correctly, was, would U.S. president launch a preemptive strike against the North Korean or Iranian nuclear weapons test?
Not that they have one, not that they're about to evaporate Tel Aviv, none of that stuff.
God forbid asking about how they feel about Israel having 100 nuclear weapons or whatever it is that Israelis actually have.
And Sanders responded back simply, yes.
He said, yes, I would launch a preemptive strike against Iran or North Korea to stop a nuclear weapons test.
Again, not that they're going to vaporize Tel Aviv or vaporize Seoul or Tokyo or something like that, but that they are just conducting a test.
And I thought that what I really thought with the Sanders campaign is that, again, like I said earlier, they've had to be pushed on a lot of these issues.
He had to really be pushed.
Because for years, people have been saying, people on the left have been saying to Sanders, when you talk about your climate change plan, or particularly when you talk about Medicare for all, and people ask where the money is going to come from, why don't you just say from the military?
Why don't you just bring up how much we're spending on the military?
And only in the last six months, I feel like he's really been doing that, and that's because he's been pushed.
And so I think with the Sanders campaign, and this is the biggest dove that we've had in contention for the presidency in God knows how long, and he has to be pushed on all these issues.
And then he feels like he has to hedge on other ones, so that if he's going to be good on Afghanistan, where he says by the end of my first term in office, all the troops will be out of Afghanistan.
Which, that just pissed me off, too.
What do you mean by the end of your first term?
Didn't you mean by the end of your first hundred days?
What are you talking about, end of your first term?
It's 2020 right now.
Yeah, and it doesn't even...
Sorry, I'm kind of like this.
The way it's phrased, though, I mean, no, it's insane.
Because why can't you just say, I'm going to tell the troops to get on a plane, and they're going to push the button or turn the key on the plane, however they work, crank up the propellers and get them out of there?
And he could say by the end of the first year, he didn't have to be so radical as me, a hundred days, but he could just say, yeah, no, as soon as practically possible, we're getting them out.
It's all meant because...
But also, too, I mean, if you look at the polling, though, Scott, and this is a real serious issue for us, in the sense that if you look at the polling consistently, with the exception of, say, maybe right after the 9-11 attacks or right after the start of the Iraq invasion or...
Foreign affairs, international policy, the wars don't rank in the top concerns of the American public when they're voting.
They may have thoughts on it.
They may not want us to be in Afghanistan.
They may not want us to be in Iraq.
But for the most part, people aren't going out there and voting in the general elections, in particular the congressional elections, on foreign policy.
They're just not.
We're not seeing the data to prove that.
Although there have been times when things have occurred, like, say, Obama and Clinton in 2008, right?
And then, as we said, those counties that voted for Trump, that made up a difference in 2016.
So this is a bit of a dialectic where I think maybe both things are true.
But it's hard to get, particularly when you have a campaign like the Sanders campaign, that obviously his priorities are his domestic plan.
His priorities are his Medicare for all, his college tuition, those types of domestic issues.
I think they take this back to where they saw LBJ, where LBJ's plan for America, his, what do you call it, in the 60s, but anyway, that it was torpedoed by the Vietnam War, that his domestic policies, to the point where he couldn't even run for office again, were shut down by the Vietnam War.
And I think many Democrats and strategists in the Democratic Party feel that if you advance into a certain realm where you take on those issues and make those issues your own and tie yourself to them, that it's not a risk that you want to take, and it's going to spend political capital.
And I do have a story about this.
In 2009, when I first came out against the Iraq War, I got invited to speak to the entire House Democratic Caucus by John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, who was one of the first to go against the Iraq War.
And Murtha had been in the Vietnam War as a Marine, and he brought me in to speak to the whole House Democratic Caucus.
And I'm in one of the basement rooms of the House, and there's 180, 200 members of the House all sitting there, listening to me talk about Afghanistan.
And then when I'm done, and this is November of 2009, and so the president is debating about what's he going to do with Afghanistan, members of Congress are jumping up and down and yelling about how we can't let this happen.
This is just like Iraq.
This is just like Afghanistan.
And then Nancy Pelosi pops up, and she is the speaker at the time, of course, and she shuts everyone down.
And this occurred on a Wednesday.
And on the Friday before, the House had just passed the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and it was on to the Senate.
And Nancy Pelosi basically said, I know how you feel.
I don't like it either.
But the president's priority is the Affordable Care Act, and we simply do not have the political capital to paint the president in a corner on this issue.
So however you feel about Afghanistan and the wars, that needs to take a backseat to us passing the ACA.
And that's how politics works.
And that's a very real thing for us, who understand that, man, these issues, hey, as important as fixing- That's why they call it the welfare warfare state, man.
Yeah, exactly.
So you can't divorce these things.
And then we also have to realize, too, the reality of what these men and women in office are going to do.
And look, Sanders has been a career politician.
He's done nothing but be a politician, from everything I know about him.
So of course, look, he voted, this is the guy who's supposedly so against the military industrial complex, but he was all in favor of bringing the F-35 up to, I mean, the worst, the only thing I imagine, the military industrial complex has always been around.
It was around in Imperial Britain.
I'm sure the Roman Empire had it.
I'm sure at some point, the Roman Empire ordered the best and newest chariots, and they came out with square wheels or something, right?
And that's like the F-35.
And Sanders is, he was very vocal in bringing the F-35 to the Vermont Air National Guard.
I mean, so we have to really understand these men and women as they are and what they've done, and that they're not pushed.
If they don't see some type of political benefit for them, that they're going to go with whatever is going to provide them with the most benefit.
And when the military industrial complex is, Versailles over there in D.C. is spouting out, what's the new budget going to be?
$6 trillion or something like that, right?
As long as it's spilling out $6 trillion a year, and the huge amounts of that are going to the military and to the wars, both parties are not going to do anything about these wars unless they're giving some good political reason not to.
Yep.
Well, and that's the thing of it too, though, is that if the politicians would lead at all on this, it should be easy.
I mean, Sanders, for example, has been really good on Yemen in the Senate in helping push the war powers resolutions through and all that kind of thing.
So if the American people aren't any good on Yemen, his point of view should be, well, that's just because they don't know about it yet.
But guess who gives a speech to 10,000 people every day?
Me.
Maybe I'll go and I'll bring it up.
And I'll say, actually, this is why I'm running.
Because this is the worst thing our government is doing right now.
And all we have to do to stop is stop.
We don't need a whole new program.
We just have to call it off.
And if you haven't heard of it, well, read up.
But still, this is my priority because I say it's the most important thing.
And if he says it's the most important thing, well, that'll make it the most important thing to a lot of his people too.
And maybe he could show us by example right now just how well he uses that bully pulpit, but I'm not seeing it.
He's never been that.
And this is to me the hilarious irony of it all.
What is the point of being a Marxist if you're not an anti-imperialist?
What, conscript us all into your agricultural army or something?
Anti-imperialism first.
That should go for any commie or any libertarian, no matter what.
And conservatives too, for that matter.
But still, it's just amazing to me that he could deprioritize foreign policy as badly as he has his whole career.
And he's been bad on things from time to time too.
He's voted for the appropriations bills, as you say, and voted for the war for the KLA in Kosovo and all of that.
And he has, as you said, he has the ability.
The wars don't get mentioned at all.
Nothing in foreign policy gets mentioned at all in the Nevada debates the other night.
And he very well, and I explained this in the film, there wasn't 4,500 Americans killed in Iraq.
The number is 10,000.
When you count the contractors, you count the suicides, 10,000 killed in Iraq.
You're telling me Sanders can't stand there and say, we're not, and make a point about that?
He can't chastise, I don't even know whoever ran the debate the other night, NBC, or I can't remember who did the debate the other night, but he can't chastise them for not asking that questions.
Ridicule the DNC, knock down Biden on it again.
If you're not going to make a point about 10,000 Americans being killed in a fraudulent war built on lies that completely failed and made everything worse, then what are you going to make a point on?
Are you just going to continue to offer things to people?
And I agree.
I want Medicare for all.
I want college debt abolished.
I want all these things.
But I also want us, more importantly, to stop killing millions of people.
Hey, let me ask you this real quick.
This will be the last question.
Why do you think that Tulsi Gabbard has had such a hard time?
I mean, I know, I get it that the war is such a long way from here and all that.
But still, it's not that far away.
And it's not that it's even over yet.
You know, so but there's just her not not perfect, but her by far superior anti-interventionist position compared to the rest has just not resonated with the kids at all, man.
And she's done.
She's been a rock star in some of the debates.
I mean, she's the one who, you know, a lot of people give her a good amount of credit for knocking Kamala Harris out of the race.
She's the one who took Kamala Harris on about her prosecutor, her role as a prosecutor.
I think there's a couple of things.
One, I think she's had some bad people in her campaign.
I mean, it started off poorly, the campaign, like the campaign launched.
And it seemed as if they weren't going to be asked about her past and about her, you know, anti-LGBTQ statements, which were pretty horrific, you know, statements she made.
She made them when she was 20.
And then she eventually recovered from that and made some really, really poignant speeches about that, you know, but that should have been so but they weren't even ready for that.
So I think the campaign itself was not a very well run campaign.
And then also, too, I mean, I think there has been a lot in the media against her that has been pushed by the DNC, and by the Hillary Clinton wing of the DNC, which is still very, very powerful.
You know, this is what Sanders is going to be up against.
I think that, you know, and everything I know about media is that every time a media source would give Tulsi Gabbard attention or time, or gave her or did not, or the attention was favorable and not unfavorable, I'm sure that media source heard it from the Clinton surrogates.
And these people who work in the media are no different than any of us.
You know, most of the bookers and producers and writers are in their 20s and 30s, and they don't want to be hassled by, you know, some Clinton operative, you know, every time they write something that's not negative about Gabbard.
So then you just don't even write about her, you know, or, you know, in this way, the people who are going to write negatively about her own all the airwaves about her.
But you're right, her message, her Aloha campaign just never really got anywhere.
And she chose not to run in Iowa, she chose not to do anything in Iowa.
And then she had to focus on New Hampshire.
And she only got, I forget, seven or 8000 votes in New Hampshire, you know, I mean, came below Tom Steyer, I think, in the polls there in the primary there.
I mean, so she really, because I think that she wasn't able to connect on issues that people agree with her on that affected their own lives.
Again, I think a lot of times, they, you know, x amount of population will say, you know, these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake, they were wrong, we never should have done them.
You know, they really care, though.
Yeah.
But when you ask first about, hey, you know, your kids education, or about your own student loan debt, or, you know, this person's offering to take care of this issue for you, or, you know, whatever.
Yeah, then you vote on that issue.
I learned this from, you know, because when I did my, when we did the Afghan study group stuff years ago, 10 years ago now, or however long it was, Grover Norquist, we had a really bipartisan effort on that.
And Grover Norquist from, you know, Americans for Tax Reform, and whatever other conservative organizations he, you know, he was leading at the time, was involved.
And we got him involved, because we went into his office, and we said, hey, you know, Mr. Norquist, do you know how much money the Afghan war is going to cost this year?
And he said, no.
And we said $100 billion.
And he fell out of his chair.
He had no idea.
But so we got that whole sector of the, you know, fiscally conservative Republicans on board with us.
You know, but he taught me a lesson that when his first political campaign, decades ago, was focused on prayer in school, and prayer in school, the numbers were terrific, like 70, 80% of Americans thought kids should be able to pray in school.
And so they, in the, I guess it's probably the early 80s, they ran a bunch of candidates, the Republican Party ran a bunch of candidates on this issue with the primary focus being prayer in school.
And they got beat.
They all got beat.
The reason why is because, yeah, people believe in prayer in school, maybe, but they believe in better jobs, they believe in, you know, I mean, whatever the issue is, before they're going to vote on prayer in school.
And so, you know, it comes down to priorities, as opposed to what people like, you know.
And so that was, I think that's real important.
I think maybe that's what the Gabbard campaign is looking about.
Because you can blame, I mean, like I just did, blame the Clinton side of the DNC for, you know, continuing to hate Tulsi Gabbard ever since she left.
She was a vice chairperson of the DNC, if I remember correctly, right.
And then she dropped off the DNC in protest of how the DNC was handling Sanders.
And she was one of the first people to endorse Sanders in 2016.
So you can credit like her not doing well a lot with, you know, the dislike of her by the Clinton wing and by the DNC.
But you certainly can't say that's the reason why.
You have to look at, I think that she just had a lot of bad people in her campaign.
They weren't ready for prime time.
And the fact that, yeah, these issues, people agree, yeah, these wars are wrong.
Yeah, they're wasteful.
But, you know, if you're not making that connection, we used to, when I used to go around the country speaking about the Afghan war, you know, 10 years ago, and it was at a time we had that really bad economic downturn, right, we had the Great Recession.
And every county, every municipality was laying off police and firefighters.
And wherever I went, Cleveland or Tulsa, or wherever I went to, I would Google police layoffs, Cleveland, and of course, cops have been laid off there.
And then I would begin my talk by talking about how Cleveland just laid off 300 police officers, yet we're paying for all the salaries of the Afghan police.
Do you think that's right?
You know, so you make that connection with people so that they, I remember doing it in Newark, Newark, New Jersey, where they were having 15 carjackings a day or something like that, something crazy in Newark.
I don't remember the exact number was, but it was amazing how many carjackings they were having.
And, you know, I remember them, like them just being, people being so upset when they learned that, you know, these were happening daily in their city, because there's almost no police presence there, you know, as well as all the other problems too, that caused things like that.
But, you know, in Afghanistan, we were fully funding, you know, police who were high on hashish most of the time anyway.
Yeah.
And whose main job is hunting down runaway women and girls.
Exactly.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
That's not even, I mean, we could be here.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Let's not, let's not start an Afghan interview.
It is worth bringing up one more time though, just to end here about what you said, that they are, they do apparently have some kind of peace deal.
I guess we'll see exactly what happens, but it should mean the end of major combat operations for the Marines down in Helmand province, if not an end of the Green Berets war in Anghar, I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, I hope so.
You know, I mean, we'll see the secret annex, right.
That the, that supposedly says 8,600 counter-terrorism troops who will be doing, if they're doing counter-terrorism, what you're doing is you're, you're, you're bombing villages, you're droning villages, you're sending Delta and SEAL teams in.
Yeah.
What's supposed to change is now we're being directed to our targets by the Taliban instead of against the Taliban.
Two things, Scott, you know, two things I think we can see happen.
One in a short term, one, if not one, maybe two or three democratic presidential candidates are now going to come out against the peace deal on Afghanistan, because if Trump is for it, they're going to be against it.
Right.
You're going to see that.
So a guy like Bloomberg or Biden or somebody will say, you know, or Klobuchar or whatnot will say, we can't do it.
It's precipitous.
Yeah.
And exactly.
Yeah.
Way too soon to be doing that kind of thing, you know?
And then the other thing will be, yeah, watch in a few years, we'll be talking about how we have now sided with the Taliban in Afghanistan, that the Taliban is like our paramilitary force there, you know, that we've got.
Called the awakening.
They're the concerned local citizens.
That's exactly right.
And I heard you talking with, oh, she was really good.
The journalist from Iraq a week or two ago, you know, but talking about how this is, yeah, coming back again to, you know, you always bring up that great Seymour Hersh piece, the redirection, you know, from 07 or whatever that was.
Yeah.
He wrote that.
Right.
And here we go again.
Like, we are always.
And look, one of the things I write about in this, this, this thing I'll kind of next week is that we have known for a long time that the biggest, as far as I recall from reading the classified stuff and everything, you know, years ago, the biggest source of financing for the Taliban was not the drug trade was, was, was, was, was not siphoning money off of our reconstruction contracts and everything else.
It was either the Pakistanis or it was the Gulf monarchies.
It was the Saudis, the Qataris, the Bahrainis, you know, I mean.
Our closest allies, you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, it would make sense, of course, for us to to us.
Same for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
That's exactly, exactly right.
Exactly.
Right.
I mean, look, look, we did, man, if I was you, I'd be really pissed.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, I'm pissed, but I didn't have to.
I wasn't on the receiving end of that Saudi financed violence, you know?
Yeah.
It's not even that.
Well, it's also to our finance.
I mean, like what happened with, you know, Iraq war three, right.
With, you know, I mean, that was, that came about because we thought that the Saudis, I mean, sorry, that the Islamic state there in eastern Syria could be utilized to overthrow the Assad government.
But they wouldn't cross that line in the sand, that imaginary border.
Right.
And bother with Iraq again.
That even though most of the Islamic state was Iraqi, that they weren't going to then turn around, you know, with all the money we were giving them in 2012, 2013, all the equipment, all the weapons, everything that was going their way.
And with Western Iraq wide open for the taking.
Exactly.
And that Western Iraq that was then, of course, being oppressed by the Shia government once again, you know, just the same reason why they were fighting us because we were backing, we were the ones propping up and helping oppress them via that Shia government in 04, 05, 06, 07.
You know, so as soon as that has happened again in 11, 12, 13, you know, the Shia government starts oppressing the Sunnis, you know, who do they turn to?
It's, you know, it's the same thing that happened in Afghanistan.
Which by the way, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I have to bring this up.
Yesterday in foreign affair, sorry, foreignpolicy.com, John Hanna, Dick Cheney's man from the vice president's office who helped us in Iraq war two, has a piece called Iraq needs another regime change.
And it's all about how, somehow, never you mind how the Iranian backed Shiite groups like the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah party have taken control of that government over there.
And they're not doing a very good job at all.
And something's got to be done about it.
You know, I think my, uh, I'm not supposed to with, with my problems, with my moral injury and stuff from the war, I'm not as supposed to read things that get my anger up to a point where I become homicidal.
And I'm pretty certain those types of articles by John Hanna are where my psychologist tells me to draw the line.
You know what, I feel you.
If you can twist it into humor, then do that.
But if not, then no.
Oh man.
It's just, but you know, I mean, think of Bill Hicks, you can get a hoot, go ahead and get a hoot, man.
It's all right.
But, you know, I mean, I've got on my desktop here, you know, I mean, my, I had a colleague in Iraq for my first time there.
He was a, a young Sunni man.
He was late twenties in, in, um, Saladin province, which is a mixed province.
North of Baghdad is this province where Saddam Hussein was from.
And, uh, I've got still on my desktop, a photo of his six-year-old son from that.
He sent me in January of 2006.
And, um, you know, that young man, uh, you know, if, if his son is still alive, you know, if a Mars son is still alive, he would be, um, you know, like 20 years old.
Yeah.
And I can't imagine they is alive because where they lived to Crete is a place called Al-Alam.
And Al-Alam fought the Islamic state when the Islamic state came South down from Mosul and the Islamic state just, just completely, uh, they massacred everybody there.
And, you know, so Hussein Jabari, whose photo I'm looking at right now, you know, young six-year-old kid, you know, uh, yeah, I've got other photos of him wearing like Mickey mouse stuff and everything.
Yeah.
If he survived, let alone his daughter, God knows what they, God knows what they did to a Mars daughter, Hussein's sister, you know?
So yeah, it is, this is always going to be personal for me and it's always going to verge on where I need to.
And a lot of, and this is why, you know, Scott, you don't see a lot of other veterans talking about this stuff because it's just, it's just too hard.
It's just not worth it.
It's just, it's just too difficult, you know?
And I certainly go in and out of, as you know, of being involved in this stuff, there'll be years that I don't talk to you, right.
You know, as I kind of have to take a break from this stuff and then, you know, come back up and do it again.
But yeah, it is, you know, and the thing about it, and to get back to what we originally talked about, the whole Joe Biden and the launch of the Iraq war, you know, worththeprice.org and please watch that film and circulate it, is that those people in Iraq are still suffering.
And even though the war is not the way it was a few years ago, there are still, every city in the Sunni river valleys, the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys have been flattened.
There are still tens of thousands of peace people missing in the rubble.
You know, about more than 500 protesters have been gunned down by the Iraqi government, by Iraqi security forces that have been trained and supplied by the U.S., you know.
And even like, Scott, if you and I could like flip the switch or wave the magic wand, the Iraqis, their kids are going to keep dying for generations, because just like in Vietnam with Agent Orange and the deforestation campaign, you know, we've polluted the land and the water there so that their children are being born, stillborn.
Their children are being born with awful deformities and disabilities for life.
They're dying when they're toddlers.
And this stuff gets passed through our genes.
So like their great grandchildren are still going to be having these problems.
Their great great grandchildren are still going to be born, you know, missing limbs and being born stillborn and being, you know, dying when they're two years old because their lungs never fully formed or, you know, whatever the issue is.
And this is what we've done.
And this is why, you know, we're never going to see a man like Biden go to jail, which is where he should be.
But, you know, maybe we can keep him from, he's got the gall to run for president, though.
I mean, it tells you what type of person he is.
Well, and, you know, you get to and we got to stop here instead of going down this road, but we talked about it before.
We're going to be talking about it from now on is the perpetually unresolved status of the Anbar province and I guess up there around Mosul in the western part of Iraq where, yeah, it's going to be chaos, Saudi backed chaos versus Iran and their friends from now on for the rest of our lives because of that war.
And so I'll call it Iraq war three and a half right now.
I don't know how long this phase of it lasts, but.
I don't know how it can only simmer.
I mean, at some point it is going to, I mean, one, you've got a revenge cycle that's still going on there.
I mean, that's basically a lot of what wars are, you know, cycles, right?
It's still going on.
People still want revenge.
There's still that hatred, you know, neither side understands themselves as being vanquished.
And they both have very powerful benefactors who are more than willing to see them each other than slaughter each other because they're playing some type of, whether they be in Riyadh or in DC or London or Tehran, because these men and women are playing some type of real life game of risk, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, that's the, that's the reality of it.
And you're right.
We're going to be talking about this for a long time.
And who knows what it's going to look like?
Who knows what it's going to entail, but it's going to be, you know, the one thing I know what it will look like, it'll look like the same with masses and masses of civilians being killed.
You know, that's how these wars are.
Yeah.
And I mean, the change is going to come never because the change has got to be that the King of Saudi Arabia accepts the results of 03 through 11 and that Baghdad is a Shiite city now.
And there's just no way to undo that.
Took the army Marine Corps to help them make it that way.
And it took them five years at that rate.
And so you know what it is, what it is pal, but they don't accept that their idea is what the Shiites rule in Arab capital city.
Nah, I'll fling suicide bombers at you from now into eternity and I won't change it, but I won't accept it either.
Right.
Quote, Ben Solomon.
Yeah.
And as long as, as, as we said before, as, as you know, Larry Wilkerson said, as long as Exxon Mobil's biggest customer is the department of defense.
And as long as the department of defense is getting the lion's share, that $1.2 trillion spent each year on war by the U S federal government, you know, the Middle East is going to be where we're at because that's where the wars are going to be.
That's where the resources are going to be fought over.
You know, that, that exists because that exists in these countries that were drawn because of other wars a century ago, you know, as well then too, there's all kinds of other things.
Like we were talking about mayor Pete before, you know, he, you know, he, he talks about being in the military and shows off pictures of him in his uniform, holding his rifle every chance he gets because people like GI Joe, they do, they think for whatever reason they do, you know, and then of course you have the influence of Israel, right?
The, and then it's the people who think that who think that American primacy is essential, who believe that the maintenance of the American empire is the responsibility of the United States president.
And that goes back to George Kennan, you know, and, and the whole national security act in 1947 and Kennan's memorandum in 1948 and everything else.
That's the purpose of the U S federal government is to maintain the American empire.
And then now, yeah, now we can get into the whole thing about the petrodollar and everything else.
There was, you know, the world's reserve currency.
I mean, but yeah, absolutely.
So, yeah, we'll be talking about this for, for quite a while.
Yeah.
Sorry about that, but I'm glad that you're here, man.
And I'm glad that we have you at a time where you are okay to talk about this.
And I do hope that you feel okay to take your breaks when you need them to, and not feel bad about that.
And there's always a place for you here.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I appreciate that, Scott.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, listen everybody it's worth the price.org.
We didn't even really talk about this aspect that he paraphrases the exact Madeline Albright quote about worth the price for rack war one and a half in saying, let's go ahead and launch Iraq war two worth the price.org.
How Joe Biden lied us into Iraq war two there for you and featuring Matthew Ho and Steven Zunis and Steven Kinzer and a bunch of other great guys too.
So check that out and help spread it around.
And thank you again, Matt.
You bet Scott.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton show and anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
