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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
All right, you guys, introducing our friend Stephen Zunas.
He is featured in the new documentary, Worth the Price?
Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
So listen, I've already interviewed you about this before a few months ago or a couple weeks ago or whenever it was, and I already interviewed Matthew Ho, who's featured in this same movie, but I hate Joe Biden, and I also want other people to hate Joe Biden.
So would you say everything that you know and think about Joe Biden that should do it?
Well, to start off with, the big issue that keeps coming up for a lot of us, of course, is the Iraq War.
And it's not just the fact that he voted for the war, as unfortunately almost all Republicans and about 40 percent of Democrats in Congress at the time did.
But Biden played a critical role in shepherding the war resolution through the Democratic Control Senate.
He was then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And here we have the most important foreign policy decision of a generation.
And he only allowed for a day and a half of hearings, a day and a half of hearings.
And obviously, a lot of us want to testify, as some of your listeners may know.
I was pretty visible at that time.
I was in on CNN, MSNBC, NPRs, Talk of the Nation, even on Fox a few times.
I was just trying to, you know, get the word out because I knew something about this sort of thing.
Before I got my job at the University of San Francisco, I was a senior researcher at the Institute for Global Security Studies, and part of my focus was on non-traditional weapons in the Middle East.
I knew Saddam didn't have all these weapons and weapons programs and weapons systems that, you know, Bush and Biden and other people were talking about.
And so I wanted to testify.
Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector, wanted to testify.
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies wanted to testify.
In fact, my senator, Senator Barbara Boxer, actually requested—she was a member of the Committee—actually requested to Biden that we be allowed to testify, but he blackballed all of us.
And instead he brought in these really sketchy Iraqi exiles, you know, who understandably, I guess, you know, given that they had lived under Saddam Hussein, wanted to get rid of them and, you know, hoped to provoke a U.S. invasion, that would do that, spout all this nonsense about, oh, they'd seen stacks of chemical weapons with their own eyes, how, of course, American troops would be, you know, treated as liberators.
And Biden, you know, brought in, you know, a whole slew of former Bush administration, you know, people to testify about this supposed great threat Iraq was and how they supposedly had ties to al-Qaeda and this kind of nonsense.
I mean, the hearings were, they were a sham.
They were just a total sham.
It amazes me that they, that this is not being brought up more, that he did not just vote for the war, but that, and he didn't just lie about the weapons of mass destruction.
He played probably the most critical role outside of the Bush administration itself in making the war possible.
I mean, here's a guy who brings in Caspar Weinberger, who insisted was a credible witness, despite multiple perjury indictments for lying before Congress and a history of grossly exaggerating the military capabilities of Nicaragua, Cuba, the Soviet Union, other designated enemies of the United States.
And he's supposed to be a credible witness to talk about this, you know, threat to Iraq.
And Ritter, you know, when it was clear that he and the rest of us won't be able to testify, you know, basically he said the whole hearings were nothing more but a political sham used to invoke a modern day Gulf of Tonkin resolution, equivalent to Iraq, you know, and, and, and, you know, it was, it was again, again, what's disturbing about this is that I keep hearing these things, oh, he made a mistake, you know, well, it was worse than a mistake.
It was a very deliberate, very conscious policy and say, well, that was a long time ago.
Well, he hasn't owned up to it.
In fact, he's repeatedly lied about his role in it, denying that he said things that he was clearly, he clearly said, the guy has not learned his lesson.
He's still a threat.
And I actually fear that if he became president, he'd, he'd trump up another kind of war to get us into for oil or something else.
Yeah.
So there's so much to go back over there, but I wanted to emphasize one of the important points that you made there about how the Democrats were in the majority.
He was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time.
And in that position, if he had really wanted to, he probably could have stopped this war single handedly if he, for example, had decided, oh yeah, well, I'm just going to keep inviting Scott Ritter to testify until this whole project is crashed on the rocks of the truth here.
And, and in fact, could you please do us a favor, especially for people who were not so plugged in back in the nineties and early two thousands and don't know, can you tell us about Scott Ritter's role?
Because in the nineties, he was known as the guy who was constantly accusing Saddam Hussein of blocking their inspections and all these things, and the Hawks were always invoking him.
And then when 2002 comes around, he's out there standing athwart history, screaming, stop at the top of his lungs.
And people thought, well, what is with this guy?
There's been a big flip-flop here, but he insisted there's no flip-flop.
I'm saying the same thing now that I'm saying then, but it seemed pretty strange to people that he had gone from spokesman for the Hawks to spokesman for the Doves.
So can you untie all that for us?
Oh, sure.
Yeah, Scott Ritter, he's a Marine veteran, registered Republican.
He was essentially the chief weapons inspector.
He wasn't the head of UNSCOM, that was Hans Blix and later Butler.
But he was the guy who actually did the stuff on the ground.
And he was right.
You know, the Iranians were running circles around them and they got to 90% of the stuff they wanted to look for.
But there was definitely a cat-and-mouse game that was really frustrating, got people to wonder, you know, are they really trying to hide anything?
We now know that part of it was a bluff, because the Iraqis wanted the Iranians to think they might have something so the Iranians wouldn't take advantage of having been totally disarmed to try anything provocative against them.
And also the guy, he was a total germaphobe, and so he didn't want these inspectors, you know, tromping around his presidential palaces or whatever.
And there were a whole series of reasons that he was doing these evasive maneuvers, but they had nothing to do with the fact, nothing to do with him actually having these kind of weapons.
Still, of course, you can understand why someone might be suspicious and frustrated.
But eventually, you know, Saddam allowed them to do more and more.
And if you're ever driven by a chemical weapons or a chemical factory of any kind, these things are massive.
You can't really hide these things, similar with a nuclear plant.
You know, these are not things that you can hide.
And you know, we had these spy satellites that are powerful enough to read on a license plate on the back of a car.
And this is Iraq, you know, where the 340 cloudless days a year, you know, so it's really hard to imagine them actually hiding things.
So in other words, what had happened was he was just a hawk as hell about that last 5% of old stuff we haven't found yet and that kind of thing.
But then when they turned around and said, oh yeah, they're making sarin, he was like, wait a minute, that's an outright lie.
That's a whole other area.
So at that point, he turned around and was just as hard on the Republicans as he'd been on the Republican Guard over there.
Exactly.
And indeed, you know, even if, you know, Saddam had not gotten rid of these weapons from way back, the shelf life of these weapons is only like three to five years.
I mean, they were no longer weapons, even if you had them, they were not weapons grade material.
I mean, you wouldn't want to eat the stuff or anything, but you know, they were not, they were certainly not a threat at that point.
And by the way, let me interject here, Stephen, I'm sorry, but this is really important.
There's this New York Times story, I'm sure you're familiar with this.
There's a New York Times story from, I'm almost certain, 2008 about chemical weapons that were found by American GIs during Iraq War II, how they were exposed, how oftentimes they were sickened, and then the whole thing was covered up.
And if anybody has a right wing Uncle Bob with an email list, then they've seen this story cited as proving that Bush was right all along.
And yet, and I hear this, people ask me about this all the time, they really do, even still.
And the simple answer is, read the whole article yourself.
Don't let somebody tell you what's in it, read the actual article and they make it clear.
This is stuff that we, the taxpayer at Ronald Reagan and George Bush's command had, Bush Senior's command, had paid for Saddam to buy from the Europeans back in the 1980s.
None of it had been made in the 90s during the inspection period or in the early 2000s These were literally found in a dump.
They were in a dump because they were no longer weapons grade.
Yeah.
I mean, these are old shells, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Right.
They were dangerous.
And that's why our GIs got sick.
But again, they were not weapons.
They were not useful as weapons.
That's why they threw them in a dump.
Let me mention, it was not just, they didn't actually, to clarify, they didn't actually buy chemical weapons from the Europeans.
What they did was we were providing them with US taxpayer dollar, pesticides and fertilizers and that kind of thing that could be converted, where the deadly material could be extracted from them and used to make chemical weapons.
And it was, and aggressional hearings in the 1990s show that the United States actually was aware that Saddam was doing this, and yet we kept on providing these fertilizers and pesticides and other raw materials that were critical for making these chemical weapons.
And of course, with a super, super strict embargo on, you know, the strictest sanctions in history on Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991, they no longer had access to the raw materials to make chemical weapons.
But another thing I should mention about our complicity in this was that we, that during the Iran-Iraq war, we had officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency on the ground in Baghdad downloading US satellite photos of Iranian troop concentrations and passing those on to the Iraqis in the full knowledge that they were using chemical weapons against them.
And this is something that the Iranians still talk about to this day, you know, one of the reasons for their fanatic anti-Americanism.
When I was in Iran last year, about this time, I actually got to interview some survivors, and they are still in very, very, very bad health impact in terms of what it did to their lungs and all that kind of stuff.
But, you know, even putting aside our complicity in Iraq developing weapons in the 1980s, by 2002, you know, they absolutely had nothing that could be used against us or against their neighbors or anything like that.
They were in no way, shape, or form a threat.
And yet here is Biden, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, kept repeating this.
And his rule shouldn't be underestimated, because, you know, when people are elected to the Senate or to the House or whatever, nobody's an expert on everything.
And so they tend to look at the head of the relevant committee for guidance in areas they don't know much about.
You know, so people look at the head of the Agriculture Committee if they don't know much about agriculture, or they'll, you know, they'll look at the head of the Armed Service Committee if they don't know much about the Pentagon or procurement, things like that.
And people will look at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for guidance on foreign policy.
And this is particularly critical since very, very few people run for Senate based on foreign policy issues.
It's one of the areas that senators tend to know the least about.
And so when the Democrats looked up and said, hey, here's our guy, here's Joe Biden, he's been in Congress for a long, long time.
We can trust him.
Yeah, that it had an impact and swaying a whole bunch of those votes.
Yeah, possibly enough to make it to have made the difference.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, now, let me ask you something, because there's a clip going around of Biden.
And it's when Scott Ritter's testifying in 1998, during the Iraq Liberation, I'm not sure if it's I think it's during the Iraq Liberation Act debate, or maybe just the debate surrounding Desert Fox and all that stuff.
But anyway, and Biden is saying nothing short of regime change is going to accomplish this.
Everybody knows that.
And that made me curious about whether back in the 90s, 98 era, especially right around then, how closely he was palling around with Richard Perle and Ahmed Chalabi and those guys who were pushing for the Bay of Goats option, the invasion and occupation of the South and all of that Chalabi, INC stuff back then.
Yeah, well, you know, a lot not everybody who voted for the Iraq Liberation Act, you know, was wanted invasion.
I mean, many of them were basically saying Saddam's a bad guy, good to get rid of him.
And, you know, maybe we can fund some opposition groups who will do it.
But but they were not advocating the United States going to war or anything like that.
Biden, however, in those hearings, literally used the words, we're going to sooner or later, we're going to need boots on the ground to get rid of Saddam.
So he says we need to get rid of Saddam.
He says we need boots on the ground to do it.
That is a call for an invasion.
OK, so this is probably before Bush and Cheney came to office.
This is before 9-11.
This is so this is and so this idea that, oh, oh, Biden, like a lot of people, got swept up in the hysteria of 9-11.
Oh, he he he naively believed all these things from Bush and Cheney, whatever.
No, he was calling for an invading Iraq before any of that.
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And now, OK, so I want to play this clip you mentioned about him being a liar.
And I'm sorry, this will take about a minute and a half here.
This is Biden on MSNBC being interviewed by Lawrence O'Donnell the other day, who, of course, lets him slide on all of this stuff.
But this is Biden's version of what was going on back in 2002 and three there in his role in it.
Look, the reason I wrote it the way I did was to try to prevent a war from happening, because remember, the threat was to go to war.
The argument was because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
So he said that I need to be able to get the Security Council to agree to send in inspectors to put pressure on Saddam to find out whether or not he's using is producing nuclear weapons.
And at the time I said, that's your reason.
All right, I get it.
That was the rationale was that's the way to not go to war, because I didn't believe he had those nuclear weapons.
I didn't believe he had those weapons of mass destruction.
And you may remember the debates we had after that period about when Colin said anyway.
So that was the rationale.
What happened was we went in, determined that they hyped what, in fact, was occurring.
They didn't.
There was no concrete proof of what he was doing, and they still went to war.
There you go.
That's that's his version of 2002 and three.
Your comments, sir.
Oh, it's stunning.
First of all, the International Atomic Energy Agency in their final reports in 1998 and 1999 said there is absolutely no evidence that there is anything resembling a nuclear program in Iraq.
And again, nuclear facilities are even harder to hide than chemical weapons facilities.
I mean, again, so the UN had already come in, already determined this.
There was no way in hell, especially with the given how serious the sanctions were and everything else, that they could start a nuclear program from scratch in those in the two and a half years subsequent to the International Atomic Energy Agency's detailed report.
Second thing is that Saddam Hussein had agreed for the return, unconditional return of inspectors three weeks prior to the vote.
So and and indeed, when the United States, of course, and, you know, delayed by accepting that because they wanted the United Nations to pass a resolution that said, oh, if if any member country believes that they are aren't fully complying, they have a right to take military action, which, of course, the UN was not willing to do.
They did finally pass a very strongly worded resolution in December of that year, saying 1441 that said Saddam, you know, let these guys in, let them do their thing and and it will have very, very, very serious consequences.
And if you don't and the Security Council remain seized of the matter, meaning that, again, no individual country can take action, but go back to the UN and the UN would at that point, many people soon would indeed have authorized a military force if if Saddam had not been cooperating.
But he was cooperating.
He was cooperating once the inspectors returned.
And and the thing was, but but what Biden kept on doing was that and this is where some more other atrocious lies came in, was that even when the inspectors returned in December and even though they had been, you know, had totally unrestricted access, they went to every place they wanted to go.
No problems.
They did not.
We were not finding anything.
And Bush decided to invade anyway.
Biden supported him.
Now, recent months, Biden has been lying, saying that, oh, I I oppose the actual decision to go to war.
But no, he's explicitly there.
They have him on Face the Nation and Meet the Press and and other statements saying, yes, Bush is right to go to war.
There's nothing that can be done to stop it.
Let's go ahead anyway.
And claiming Saddam wasn't cooperating when the UN said he was.
No, this is this was a he's he's just rewriting history altogether.
Well, it's just amazing.
He's not just lying.
He's turned the whole thing completely upside down where, look, I knew there were no weapons.
And so I only was trying to get the inspectors in there to disprove the case for war in order to try to stop it.
I mean, wow, that's incredible.
You know, he he kept saying categorically that Iraq had chemical weapons, that they had biological weapons, that they had nuclear weapons program, that they had these sophisticated delivery systems, SS 20s, SS 22s, you know, these kind of missiles and things like that.
And he even he even claims that, oh, everyone everyone thought Saddam had these weapons of mass destruction.
The weapons inspectors said he had them.
And the nerve.
I mean, no, there are a lot of us, especially those of us who have a background in strategic studies who are saying, no, they don't happen.
Of course, there were weapons inspector Scott Ritter was wanted to testify for his committee.
He said they didn't have him and he wouldn't let him.
Well, and all the inspectors on the ground, as you said, were complaining for months.
I mean, the war didn't kick off until March and the inspectors were going, look, we went to every place you told us to go and there was nothing there.
You claim you have all this intelligence, you know, for a fact he's got the stuff.
Give us some updated coordinates and we'll go look there, too.
But we looked everywhere there is to look so far and found nothing.
Exactly, exactly.
And and when and in spite not finding anything, when Biden, when Bush was clear he's going to go to war, you know, this is just the 24 hours before the launch of the war.
He said, I support the president.
Diplomacy over avoiding war is dead.
I do not see any alternative.
It's not as if we can back away now.
Let loose the dogs of war.
I'm confident we will win.
And then he co-sponsored a resolution supporting Bush in the invasion.
Now he's coming back and saying, oh, I didn't support that.
I wish we hadn't gone to war.
I opposed the launching of the war.
And this is this is a thing.
I mean, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, when, you know, I think of Susan Collins saying, oh, Bush learned his lesson, you know, from the or whatever, you know, on the whole Ukraine deal.
And clearly he hadn't.
Now people are saying the same kind of thing about Biden.
Oh, he learned his lesson, you know, from his mistake on Iraq.
So he wouldn't do anything like that as president.
Well, if he'd learned his lesson, he wouldn't be continually lying about it.
Right.
Well, he just he lies about everything, too, which is kind of a different subject.
But for a guy who and you know what?
There's a Ted Koppel clip from it's in War Made Easy by Norman Solomon where Ted Koppel, too, says, let loose the dogs of war.
Listen, you can't pretend you were anti-war when you said it like that.
You know, some of these people built in weasel words.
There's no weasel words in unleash the dogs of war.
You're now guilty of genocide.
That's all.
Very, very much so.
And I get it's stunning that he's he's he's getting away with this.
He's been, you know, giving been given a pass on these things, including on a supposedly liberal network like MSNBC.
I mean, it's startling.
The excuses and the and the rationalizations that I'm I'm I'm hearing from people saying, oh, it was a long time ago.
You know, why don't we just own up to it, own up to it?
And a long time ago, we're in the middle of a wreck.
We're three and a half right now.
Exactly.
Two Americans were killed yesterday and they're blaming it on Iran.
I mean, this is not over.
Yeah.
And there would be no American bases in Iraq where Americans would be vulnerable.
If if Biden and the others hadn't pushed this war resolution through, there would be no pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.
If we hadn't gotten rid of the anti-Iranian Saddam Hussein in our invasion that that Biden and the others backed.
And so, yeah, it is still very relevant because people are still suffering and dying as re as a result of this.
But, you know, again, the thing is, is refusal to own up to it in an honest way.
And, you know, I I you know, I this is and some people are even making comparisons.
Well, you know, people didn't talk about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the 1980s.
But, you know, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was Johnson used to justify the escalation of Vietnam, that was done with no debate.
He pushed that thing in on an August night and there is no debate and no investigation of the supposed North Vietnamese attacks on the American naval ships or anything like that.
And the thing of the Iraq war was there'd been months and months and months and months of debate and and people had plenty of time to think about it.
But Biden, you know.
You know, stifled the opportunity for senators to hear the debate firsthand.
And plus, people should have been attacked over the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the 1980s.
How can you go along with something with no debate?
You didn't get a chance to hear from the captain at all.
And you voted for a war that killed a couple of three million people.
Exactly.
It makes the Iraq war look like nothing.
And by the way, I did say genocide a minute ago.
And I get I know people go, oh, when only the Holocaust is genocide.
Well, actually, you know what?
They killed at least a million Iraqis, thrown another half a million Syrians and the rest of the chaos that's going to be in, you know, in Mesopotamia and the Levant for the rest of our lifetimes.
It's not really it doesn't have to be total mass murder.
It's the destruction of a nation is what that means.
And this was part of Biden's plan, too.
You know what?
I screwed up.
It's not working.
Let's split the country into thirds.
But not asking, oh, yeah, but who's going to control the capital city and what's going to happen to the minority when they're on the losing end of that one?
There's a genocide right there.
You know, three or four thousand dead Sunnis every month for a year and a half as America and the Shiite forces cleanse that city of Sunni Arabs.
That's Joe Biden's save Iraq plan from, you know, phase two after getting us into it.
That's his plan for fixing it.
I wrote about that at the time, actually, that and just how dangerous it was.
I mean, it was interesting.
I pointed out that close to 90 percent of middle U.S.-Middle East scholars and 80 percent of State Department Mideast specialists opposed the idea of invading Iraq.
So these are these are across the spectrum.
So these are not not just, you know, leftists and libertarians.
We're talking about, you know, mainstream liberals, you know, moderates, conservatives, you know, who just knew the region enough to say, hey, look at Bob Novak on CNN and Pat Buchanan.
And yeah, anybody who knew anything about it and wasn't just partisan first, that's who that's who was against it.
And they opposed it.
But, you know, the totals for the and this breakup Iraq, Iraq and the third and two and two to three, that was more like ninety eight percent of people because they knew that was a bad idea.
I mean, even even more so because, you know, again, this is this, you know, these kind of divisions generally do not work well because, of course, what it is, this entrenches the the ethnic and the sectarian identities even stronger.
And they are and the.
And again, what if you are a minority within these this divided thing, because remember before the U.S. invasion, Sunnis and Shias intermarried, it wasn't a big deal.
It was if there was a village, only one mosque, Sunnis and Shias worship together.
I mean, the difference between Sunnis and Shias theologically are even less than they are between Catholics and Protestants.
It's not a matter of, oh, Saddam kept the lid on.
We got rid of him.
These ancient hatreds came out of the woodwork.
No, they were not these ancient hatreds.
I mean, there were religious wars back in the seven hundred seven eight to ninth centuries.
It was a Sunni dominated state.
And we changed that.
That's the big deal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you're right.
As far as the population is concerned, they were all mixed together just like Americans are.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And some areas are more, you know, I mean, just like Germany is more Catholics in the south and more Protestants in the north on average.
You know, there's a mixture.
And similarly, you know, in the more Sunni areas, more Shia areas.
But it's not a clear division that that Biden wanted to carve things up in.
And so these sectarian tensions were a direct impact of the U.S. invasion, where we did this deliberate divide and rule strategy, where we got rid of the two main institutions of secular identity, that is, the armed forces and the civil service.
And so which then became fiefdoms of these sectarian groups.
When we got when we got rid of the army, I mean, obviously, you know, getting rid of the the generals and top people who engage in war crimes, that kind of thing, that's quite reasonable.
But but getting rid of it.
But everybody in the armed forces and when starting from scratch, who do we go to?
We went to the to the Badr Corps, which was the as to form the core of the new Iraqi army, the Badr Corps, which was the armed force of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was the government that which was the government exile recognized by Iran.
And the Badr Corps was organized and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
They actually fought on Iran's side during the Iran-Iraq war.
So you can imagine all these Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, saying, oh, my God, the people who are fought and killed our brethren on behalf of the Persians, our ancient enemies, and who are put in power by the Americans and British are more modern enemies.
And therefore the Shias are part of this conspiracy.
So let's go after some more fanatical Sunnis started going after random Shias.
And so then the Shias went after random Sunnis.
And it was more like Northern Ireland.
I mean, Northern Ireland, they weren't fighting over theological issues.
They were fighting because historically the Protestants identified with the Unionists and the Catholics identified with the Irish Republic.
And similarly, this was not about a sectarian conflict per se, but because the way the political things aligned and thanks to the to the U.S. invasion.
So we are directly responsible and I say we, meaning the people in the Bush administration, Congress has made this possible, including Biden.
And then Biden has the nerve after creating this sectarian mess to say, oh, let's just split up the country into three.
Yeah, man, all right, I want to play this clip to this is Joe Biden confronted by some Iraq war vets and, you know, maybe a lot of people have heard this, but maybe you hadn't.
And I think it's important to hear the coward Joe Biden hide behind his dead son because that's all he's got.
I'm an Air Force veteran.
I'm an Army veteran.
We're just wondering why we should vote for a war and thousands of our brothers and sisters.
You gave a medal to a man who also gave a medal to a man who gave a medal to that war cousin.
Why is he here?
And you're just fine, right?
You're just fine.
You're just fine.
I got it.
My friends.
My son was in Iraq for a year.
That doesn't matter.
Right.
No, it doesn't matter.
It matters to my kids.
I'm serious, though.
I'm serious.
I'm not going after your son.
You better remember.
I'm not going after your son.
You better remember.
I'm not going after your son.
You're just fine.
You're just fine.
So there's the coward Joe Biden.
He brings up his son and the guy says, I'm not bringing up your son.
And he says, yeah, you better not.
And then meanwhile, his son, actually, he did kill his son in that war.
His son, Beau, the one that wasn't a crackhead, he died of brain cancer from the burn pit.
And absolutely, Joe Biden did kill his son.
But then again, the way he kind of frames it like, oh, my son died in the war over there.
And so that means I paid my price for being wrong about it?
I mean, he didn't say that.
That was kind of half the implication, maybe, sort of, that, oh, yeah, well, something bad happened to me, too, because of it, which he didn't even realize.
I read a quote where it wasn't until the burn pit book came out, and there's a whole chapter about his son in there, that he finally made the connection that he was the one who had given Beau brain cancer.
But that's all he's got.
The guy says, you're disqualified.
You got us into the Iraq war.
And he doesn't have anything to say about that, other than to just invoke his dead son to hide behind.
He can't formulate any other approach to it.
And, you know, if you really want to see a difference in attitudes in Biden, about Biden, the division is really clear about those of us who know about Iraq, those of us who remember his role, those who have been impacted by Iraq in terms of losing a loved one, by serving over there and coming back with physical and psychological struggles.
I mean, these are the people who are the most anti-Biden people out there.
And here's the crazy irony about saying, oh, getting an anti-war person like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or somebody like that, you know, that Trump can beat.
No, it's just the opposite.
I mean, in the sense that Trump, ironically, you know, ran to Hillary Clinton's left on foreign policy.
He kept bringing up her support for the Iraq war, saying, oh, I opposed it, which isn't true.
Trump actually supported it, but he claimed he opposed it.
And I will not send your children off to die in overseas wars, America first, bring the troops home, spend our money here, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, of course, he's actually increased the number of troops in the Middle East.
He's increased the military spending for overseas wars and that kind of thing.
But again, that was the line that he used, and he used it to great effect.
And what's interesting, if you look at the areas that switched most dramatically from supporting the anti-Iraq war, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, to supporting Bush in 2016, they parallel almost exactly.
Trump, you meant.
I'm sorry, Trump, yeah, Trump in 2016.
They parallel almost exactly to the areas that had the highest casualty rates from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And so by nominating a so-called moderate, because he might be easier to defeat Bush than an anti-establishment candidate like Sanders, sorry, more likely to defeat Trump than an anti-establishment candidate like Sanders, in fact, it's going to be just the opposite.
It's going to be just the opposite.
It's going to, not only will the more anti-traditional, anti-war left people stay home, or at least not campaign or contribute, lowering the enthusiasm gap, lowering the turnout, raising the third party vote.
But the more kind of libertarian or more centrist kind of anti-war people who might sometimes vote Democratic, sometimes vote Republican, depending on who they believe will be less likely to get into war, a lot of those folks who would otherwise vote for someone like Sanders, they're not going to vote for Biden.
Right.
I totally agree with that.
I mean, the fact that they're running the centrist as the safe candidate is, I mean, that's the same math that they used in 2004 when they put up John Kerry, who lost the same, hell, this is the same thing they did in 2000 with Al Gore, Hillary Clinton in 08, and Hillary Clinton again in 16.
And clearly the Americans, if they're going to support anybody at all, the fact that Donald Trump is the president right now is all you need to know that the winger is the strong one in the general.
In fact, it's funny to see Trump making the same mistake Hillary made about him.
And he's doing his own Pied Piper strategy, going out harder after Biden on the assumption that Sanders is the weaker candidate in the general, which is the exact same mistake that the Hillary team made about him.
But he's not that bright.
So what the hell?
Yeah, I know there are a lot of Democrats who are desperate enough to get rid of Trump that they'd be willing to support anybody, even when they may have serious disagreements with if they thought they could, if they thought they had the best chance of defeating Trump.
And what's been scary is people I know, Democrats who are definitely on the more anti-interventionist wing of the party, who are closer to people like Sanders and Warren ideologically, but nevertheless have gone ahead to support Biden because the mainstream media has kept saying, oh, Biden is more electable, Biden is more electable.
Oh, these anti-interventionist people or these left-leaning people, these anti-establishment people like Sanders and Warren, oh, they could never, never win.
If you support them, you're supporting Trump.
And you keep hearing this over and over and over again.
And people naively believe it.
The fact is, is frankly, I think of all the major candidates running, or were running, Biden, I would argue, is probably the weakest the Democrats could possibly nominate.
Yeah.
Well, other than maybe Klobuchar.
No, I don't know.
And this is the other thing, is they got a severe dearth of talent going on.
They tried to run 20 people or something in the primary, and all of them just went down in flames.
I mean, come on, you know?
It's just ridiculous.
I know.
It is.
It's a hell of a thing to watch.
But it's good for my guy, Hornberger, so I'm cool with it.
But listen, thank you so much for your time on the show, but also just for continuing to be focused on 2002.
You're just like me.
You just can't get over 2002.
I never can.
I live that same year over and over again.
Because of this one issue, the Iraq War, and lying us into it in super slow motion for a year and a half is just the most incredible thing.
And I know that you fought such a good fight back then, and I really appreciate that you're not over it yet, and that you're still holding people to account for it.
It was not a long time ago.
It was not a long time ago.
It might as well have been yesterday.
And think of the suffering that's still going on in Iraq right now, the suffering of Americans who've been there and back.
As Matthew Ho says, this needs to get more, people need to adopt this.
People need to talk like this more.
I think Matthew Ho really sets a great example.
He goes, listen, we're talking about 4,500 combat forces died over there in the war.
But just as many contractors also died.
Not all mercenaries.
Some of them little old ladies driving trucks and stuff like that.
And then also the suicides, and the veteran suicides.
And when you add all that up, 10,000, and that's not including the sacrifice of the Iraqis there, certainly well over a million by now, by whoever's estimate, dead in this thing.
But that's 10,000 Americans died in Iraq War II.
And when I act like, oh yeah, no, that was just, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done Kosovo.
Yeah, no, this is not forgivable at all.
You know?
Very well said.
Very well said.
You know, anyway, they're running this guy.
He's already won.
They don't have anybody else.
He's the nominee.
That's the occasion of this conversation.
I'm tripping.
That's great.
It's horrible and terrific and just, it's something else.
Just like everything else right now in this era, I guess.
Blows me away.
And thank you for keeping the issue alive, though, because the mainstream media is so busy ignoring it or covering up for it.
So we really need people like you more than ever.
So I really, really appreciate what you're doing here.
Cool.
Well, thanks for being somebody for me to talk to here on this show, man.
I do appreciate it a lot, Stephen.
Thanks again.
All right, you guys.
That is Stephen Zunis.
And check out the video, Worth the Price, Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
