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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All right, you guys on the line.
I've got the great Kelly Bocar-Vlejos, and she is the Executive Editor of the American Conservative Magazine.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks, Scott.
I'm happy to have you here.
And I just love it when you talk bad about Michelle Flournoy, because I think she deserves it real bad, and nobody else ever really does it.
You're picking up the slack of 300 million Americans who should all be condemning this horrible woman.
Michelle Flournoy, Queen of the Blob, is the title of your recent piece at TACC, and for people who are just tuning in from, I don't know where they've been, what's the blob, Kelly?
Well, I say the blob is the greater foreign policy establishment, the swamp in Washington.
So you picture the Pentagon and all of its tentacles in Congress and the White House, the lobbying architecture, even academia, the think tanks, basically the whole ecosystem that subsists from pro-war industry and ideology and the whole national security state.
So it's an easy functioning word for a very awful place.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and I guess it was Ben Rhodes in the Obama government that coined the phrase, I forget, in an interview with somebody or something.
And one of the things that he talked about was, well, the blob has a playbook, and it's the playbook.
You might say it's Foreign Affairs Magazine, whichever exactly the playbook is, and maybe foreignpolicy.com instead.
But the playbook always says, do more everywhere at all times, and never back down, and never admit that the last guy was wrong either, much less your own self.
And, you know, by all means, double down always.
And as he complained about during the Obama years, and we certainly see this almost in the kind of ad absurdum sense in the Trump years, that any action they will cheer and any intention to withdraw from anywhere ever or retrench in any way leads to hysterical cries of Munich and selling out our allies, and we're going to lose our confidence in our leadership position in the world, and China's going to take it over instead now, and every kind of thing.
And they just will not tolerate dissent from the broader project of global hegemony, right?
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And this is all represented in the elites of Washington, of the United States.
So it's not just a matter, the they that you speak of are the people that are running everything.
They're running the Pentagon, they're running Capitol Hill, they're running the White House, they're running all of our Ivy League institutions, our military academies, the think tanks, the most prosperous defense think tanks in town.
And this has been happening and congealing over seven decades since World War II.
So it's a very entrenched elite, and it is very hard to penetrate what we've been finding in the last few years, thanks in part to a number of different dynamics happening, particularly that the country is tired of war and are very disappointed that all of the mythologies that they had believed in about American might and primacy was all a facade.
They saw that in what happened in Afghanistan and in Iraq, that the American people are no longer blindly following this elite narrative that you just described.
And so there's been ways that the American conservative, for example, and other institutions, scrappy, smaller institutions have been trying to penetrate this blob.
And I think we're starting to get through.
As much as I am disappointed with the Trump administration not following through on some of the promises, surprise, surprise, that it made on the campaign end about ending wars and getting us out of the Middle East, I think that has also helped in terms of allowing us to be in the conversation at a more national level instead of just sort of punching at the sidelines, punching up from the sidelines.
So I just think that I feel a little better now that I guess an alternative message is getting through, but it's been very hard, as you know, and we'll talk more about Michelle Flournoy and other elites who are so entrenched in the system, not only because they believe in this liberal internationalist order that's all about American primacy and American exceptionalism and using the military to resolve problems overseas, but they're also profiting from it.
So their very livelihoods are connected to this narrative and making sure that we stay in this narrative forever.
Right.
Well, and she really is a great poster child for that.
So let's make her famous here.
But first, you know, the thing of it is that, and you hear this a lot from all kinds of people, you know, at all different walks of life, but, you know, especially kind of in business that, hey, these are the rules of the game.
So if the lawyers say that this is the way that we can do it, then we can, and they don't know what's wrong.
Essentially, if it's legal and it's part of the system, then it would seem strange to have an ethical objection to participating in it.
So in other words, if you're the deputy secretary of defense for policy, and then you can go get a job running a lobbying shop and making tens of millions of dollars helping connect contractors with the military where you previously worked and that kind of thing, as long as it's within the rules of the game, they don't even know it looks embarrassing.
The term conflict of interest is old fashioned, gone with the 20th century.
Nobody's even heard of that anymore.
It just seems okay.
So she goes out and does these things that you're about to describe in public in such a way that is to her discredit to such a severe degree, but apparently she doesn't even really realize that.
This is just how business is done.
Just like Joseph Dunford was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and now he's sitting on the board of directors over there.
Is it Raytheon?
I forget which one.
All these guys.
That's just the rules of the game.
So it's not wrong as far as they can tell, and they just keep right on.
And you mentioned in here that there's this new report from the American Prospect, where they did kind of this deep dive on Michelle Flournoy's career since losing the Afghan War and leaving the government.
Right.
And most people haven't heard of Michelle Flournoy, and nor will they probably in any other avenue, because she's one of those, she's a classic example of, I call it blob denizens, who aren't really out for glamour or glory or making a huge splash in the media.
She's actually one of these people who have toiled away pretty effectively inside the bob, inside the Pentagon, and at least two administrations.
So she went from, I said here in the article, that she went from Beverly Hills High School to Harvard, to Oxford, back to Harvard, and then right into the first Clinton administration, working in policy, defense policy, and then shifting over to the Obama administration.
And in between, starting Think Tank, the Center for New American Security, which was supposed to be sort of a shadow government for Hillary Clinton when she ran for president in 2008.
She didn't get the, she didn't win her primary, Obama did.
And so they shifted over all of their efforts at CNS, and she ended up serving in the Obama White House in the Pentagon as an undersecretary, a very high posting.
And after Obama, and ended up, as you mentioned, like many others in the blob, profiting off of all of that experience that she had for 20 years within Washington.
So she's serving on different boards of different companies.
She's serving on the Defense Policy Board, which is a pseudo-government, it's a quasi-governmental advisory board, which also comes with money.
And she started this advisory consulting business with two of Biden's former staffers, and, or Obama rather, and is making hand over fist, basically like you said, connecting corporations with federal contracts.
And so she's been very successful making more money than most Americans could even fathom in a year's salary, and would likely be a sort of front runner for a Biden appointment if he were to win in November.
And the reason why I went after Michelle, which I've written about her before, is I don't think she's a bad person.
But we have to be clear here, she, along with many of these others, have been behind some of our most destructive foreign policy and national security policies of the last 20 years.
So when she was in the Clinton administration, we were bombing Kosovo.
When she was in the Obama administration, she was supporting the surge and putting more troops in harm's way.
She has been a proponent of these destructive approaches, and as a result has been able to help maintain the status quo.
And it's people like her who never are held accountable for being at the spear point of these disasters, but yet are profiting, whether there's a recession or pandemic, they always come out on top.
And that bothers me as it should bother any other thinking American.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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You know, frankly, shame is all we've got, right?
There is no accountability for any of these people.
So all we can do is name them and shame them and say, and you know, you talked about how she doesn't seek fame in the sense of going on CNN all the time, but she absolutely does seek fame.
You can tell it's written all over her face how desperately she craves that respect inside the blob and from the rest of the Washington consensus.
And you know, I one time made fun of her on Twitter because it was so obvious that Barack Obama had offered her the job of Secretary of Defense for the waning years of his presidency and she turned it down and decided that she would go and make money for a while and wait for Hillary Clinton and she would be sure to be the Secretary of Defense to start fresh in the new Hillary Clinton years.
And so I was on Twitter going, haha, Trump won and you lost and now you're not the Secretary of Defense at all.
You could have been the Secretary of Defense and now you're not going to be because you got greedy.
And one or two of, you know, these blob people from wherever they came from came to, how dare you call her greedy?
How dare you say that she's self-interested?
This wonderful public servant, like look, argue with my narrative.
She could have been the Secretary of Defense, but she turned it down because she wanted an even better Secretary of Defense job later from somebody else.
So, you know, as part of the fresh new team of women murderers who were sure to come in and help Al-Qaeda take over Syria and start a war with Russia and whatever they were planning to do in the Hillary Clinton regime, in conspiracy with Anne-Marie Slaughter and Samantha Power and the rest of these people straight out as some Charles Dickens novel.
So yeah, and Flournoy, I don't know, that doesn't really mean anything.
But it is important, as you said, and it only got one space in your remark there, it really is worth dwelling for a moment on her role in the war in Afghanistan, where when Obama came in and you were among the very best in the society on criticizing this entire thing in the year 2009 and 10, as all of this is going down, where they pushed this fad of counterinsurgency led directly by this lady, Michelle Flournoy, at the Center for a New American Security, which is just a playoff on the neocons project for New American Century.
Same thing, only for the Democrats.
And they had, you know, a few of these, you know, goofballs like Chad, no, that's a different guy.
John Nagel and, you know, what's his name, the Australian guy and a few of these others.
And they push this whole thing that all we got to do.
I'm sorry.
Kill Cullen.
Kill Cullen.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All we got to do is triple the Afghan war and separate the people of Afghanistan from their husbands and brothers and sons and cousins and uncles, because they're not people.
They're foreign invaders or something.
Not like us.
And so we're just going to implement this coin and we're going to win the population over.
They're going to turn on all the male members of their families and tribes and turn everything over to us and turn Afghanistan into a Western European Westphalian democracy.
And everything will be perfect.
And everybody knew it was a lie at the time.
And she was the one as Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
She was in charge of implementing it.
She was essentially in the, I don't know exactly how it works, but essentially in the chain of command with Gates and Petraeus and McChrystal and their failure.
She pushed it, the whole thing, and her think tank pushed the whole thing.
And then she got the job to implement it.
And then she did.
And she got a few hundred thousand people killed and accomplished absolutely nothing and lost the war anyway.
That's right.
And yeah, exactly.
And I mean, I really appreciate your kind words to me.
I mean, you wrote a whole book on this, one of the most comprehensive books that I've ever read on the whole run up to the war and the disaster that Afghanistan was and is.
And I know why you are heated about it, because I am too, because the entire city had been wrapped around the finger of these Koinonista types and the fact that they were never held accountable.
I mean, you remember when McChrystal was leading the charge in Helmand province with the idea that they would deliver government in a box.
The funny thing is the Democrats looked at what happened in Iraq and misinterpreted everything that happened with the surge and David Petraeus.
And like the neocons on the other side said, wow, that really worked.
We can get it to work for us in Afghanistan.
But then they ladled on all this BS, democratic, liberal crap, like government in a box and even screwed it up further.
So David Petraeus paying off the sons of Iraq or whatever they were called, the Sunnis, it actually worked, but like temporarily because they bought off these guys and then took all their facial recognition and their eyeballs and everything and sold it to the Shias.
But that's a pass it over.
But that's another story.
But in Afghanistan, they never even got it working for two seconds.
The thing was a disaster.
And you were right.
She was at the spear point of this and was all cooked up in her think tank, which was the place to be in Washington in 2010.
You know, I went to their conferences, I've written about it many times.
I mean, to go into one of these annual conferences, you felt like you were surrounded by like you were in the blob.
There were military people everywhere in their military garb.
There were military people greeting you when you walked in.
The rest of the people were in dark suits.
All these contractors, lobbyists, think tankers, courtiers, hangers-on, I mean, it was hundreds of people.
That's where I quote you in the book, talking about all the people showing up to see and be seen.
Elite.
Elite.
Yeah.
It was sad because it's like, you know, we, American conservative, we have an annual foreign policy conference every year.
And I say it's successful, it's interesting.
But to even get a fraction of the people that would show up at these things, they were pulling in at least 1,200 people, I think, at one point.
You know, it was just...
Because it's all business.
I mean, you guys, you hold your thing and it's about morality and principle and the national interest of this country you love.
They don't know anything about that.
No, it's all about, it's all transactional.
Because I mean, it was really weird, Scott.
There were one point where like, people were coming, I got approached, and this is just a side story, just to tell you like, the networking that was going on here.
I got approached by an FBI agent when I was leaving the conference, I remember, because of a Russian that I had interviewed about a story who was also at the conference, and they saw me talking to him, and they knew where I was from, and they followed me out to try to get me hooked up so I could spy on the Russian who they say was a spy.
Now, this has nothing to do with anything that we're talking about right now.
But the fact is, there were hundreds of people, and a lot of people were just sort of drawn like moths to the flame to these events, because that's where everything was happening.
It was very odd, and she was at the top, like on the top of the cake, the wedding cake.
Well, I'm glad you didn't go along with that, because one, it's wrong to be a rat, but two, they could have just as easy been setting you up.
Totally, because I was writing for antiwar.com at the time, and as you know, they were on the FBI's radar for no damn reason, other than that they were writing stuff that we talk about all the time on this show.
But yeah, it was just a weird time in Washington, and if you were writing critically about the war or COIN or any of that stuff, you were really on the fringe.
And the fact is, what we know now, looking at the Afghanistan papers, we know that all these people were not only not serving the best interests of the country, they were lying.
And she was lying.
And they admitted it.
Yeah, and they admit it off the record, and we know it, but yet she is still very successfully working for all these corporations, including Google affiliates who are involved in unmanned weapon systems.
I mean, the most dastardly stuff that you can imagine.
But I guess in her mind and her friend's mind and all her supporters, they're just doing they're just doing the government's work.
They're civil servants who are, you know, aiding, you know, they're just doing, facilitating, like you said, things that are well within the law.
And if your belief system is all about, you know, national defense and perpetuating this American primacy and making sure our military is strong and worthy, then why not help these defense contractors build more weapons and more ships and whatever?
I wonder how big her mansion and estate are.
Like, does she have horses and stuff like that at this point, you know?
Who knows?
But if you live around here, you know, the sad thing, and it's just like in places in California or New York City, it's like, yeah, you have a huge salary, but it doesn't go as long or as far, you know, in terms of real estate.
And so I'm sure she lives in a very nice house and lives very comfortably.
But you know, it's funny because I had seen her in a debate recently on the whole idea of realism and restraint.
And she was actually on one side with Bill Kristol and with Will Ruger.
And I forgive me because I don't remember who the other gentleman was.
I didn't watch that.
I saw that you guys had, I guess, blogged that attack or something, but I didn't watch it.
A friend sent it to me.
But I was so mad because I was supposed to debate Kristol and here's some other guy gets to debate him.
So I was like, wah!
And didn't watch.
Well, you know, it wasn't that.
It wasn't.
I mean, it was it was funny because the guys on our side were very capable.
And I felt like...
But they're gentleman types.
They're not like me.
They're like nice, professional, academic sorts.
Everybody was being polite.
And Bill Kristol and Michelle Forney, they just came off as very milquetoast and weak.
And I really got the sense that they're just, they just don't know how to debate us because I believe, I'd like to believe in their heart.
They know that, you know, this whole argument that we have to maintain this American exceptionalism overseas, maintain all of these, you know, partnerships and strategic allies and keep our troops overseas and our missiles overseas and keep involved and remain involved in these overseas operations and interventions is somehow for the better good of the country and our national security.
And it sounds so thin when they say it, because most people have woken to the reality that we couldn't even win the Iraq war or the Afghan war with all of this superior might against disparate, quote unquote, ragtag groups of of terrorists after 20 years nearly.
And so I think most Americans are like, come on, guys.
We saw Vietnam.
We see Iraq.
We see what's going on in Afghanistan today.
We're not buying it anymore.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it is just even if you don't know anything about it, all you have to know is what year it is.
You know, wait a minute.
How can it take 20 years to kill 400 guys?
OK, let's pretend that it was 4000 or 40000.
How can it take 20 years to kill 40000 guys?
And that's when you know you're lying and inflating their numbers from 400 men to 40000.
But just even then, geez, you can kill 40000 guys in a few weeks if you sent the army to do it.
Right.
Yeah.
You're killing people, Kelly.
Something's wrong.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And listen, before we get back onto the moneymaking here and her advertiser, her advisory firm here.
I love this West exec advisors.
I wanted to ask you if before we get too far from Afghanistan, if you've seen the new movie, The Outpost.
No, I haven't.
I'm probably not putting it on my list of immediate movies which to watch, because I I, I, I, I'm afraid of the Hollywood ization of the war.
Yeah.
There's a lot of that.
But, you know, it was good.
But I don't know.
Have you seen it?
I did.
I got it off the Pirate Bay the other day.
And, you know, so it's based on a Jake Tapper book.
And so Tapper, of course, has that professional news anchors overly narrow focus where he refuses to ask any of the big questions about what we're doing there or anything like that.
But at the same time, though, it's just inescapable when they show, you know, the helicopter view of this mountain range like, oh, there's 40,000 mountains and our guys occupy this one base in the valley between these four mountains and they're supposed to be accomplishing what?
I mean, they are absolutely as far as you could get from anywhere without being on your way back again.
And they're supposed to be winning over this ancient, you know, tribal culture.
The guy and you hear this over and over again from real people from the war, as well as in the media, is just true that, you know, these old men would say, what are you Russians still doing here?
Why won't you leave us alone?
And they're like, we're not the Russians, you know, can't you tell from the accent?
We're from America.
They're like, what's America?
They've never even heard of the new world.
And we're sitting there warring against them in order to protect America from some Egyptian radical hijackers or some kind of thing like that or something.
And then, you know, as a war movie, it's just, you know, it's an okay war movie.
And they do a good job of making you care about these guys before you see them get killed.
And you can't help.
For me, I mean, obviously I'm twisted this way no matter what, but trying to put myself in the shoes of the average guy watching it.
I think it kind of was sort of inescapably, I don't know about Tapper, but it was part of the mode.
It had to have been part of the way the story was being told by the director too, was that what in the hell are these guys dying for out there?
Why are they there?
And then as soon as they're done dying, the survivors leave.
Well, why didn't they leave six weeks ago?
What the hell?
You know what I mean?
The whole thing is stupid.
Anyway, I was kind of hoping that other people sort of reacted to it or would see that the way that I assume that they must.
If they ask the question at all, if it comes up at all, it just seems like a fool's errand, you know, to coin a phrase.
It just seems like the dumbest thing.
Don't you resent, when you watch the movie, don't you resent the officers for putting them there?
Don't you think that some idiot who doesn't know what he's doing was making these decisions, whether it's McChrystal or somebody else, McKiernan before him?
Yes.
I mean, the answer has to be yes.
What were they even doing there?
It's crazy, you know?
You know, we had a pretty good review by Jim Pinkerton on our site on American Conservative last week.
And you know, if you had just taken the word Afghanistan.
Oh, I missed that.
I missed that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
I mean, you know, he delves into other issues, but he starts out and he had the same reaction as you had, clearly.
But if you take the word Afghanistan out of his writing and you read and you say, wow, this sounds a lot like Vietnam, where these poor grunts on the ground were the victim of bad policy up the chain.
And at a certain point, they're fighting for their lives.
They're fighting for their brothers.
They're not fighting for some bigger cause or against communism or against Al-Qaeda.
They're fighting to save their brethren right there in the ground.
And it's in that, I mean, not having seen the movie like you had, I really believe that's probably the message that that carries through.
But it's so- Right.
Yeah, that's the real danger, right?
That they launder the war through the valor of the young men.
You know, that like, oh man, this guy risked his life to save somebody else.
And what a great thing to do, which is true, but it's just not asking the right question, Well, it's not asking the right question.
But when you look at Vietnam movies of the past, or you talk with Vietnam veterans and their stories, that's the same story 40 years later, 50 years later.
And that's depressing, because if it all comes down to the survival of the guys that you put down there, you know, and they just want to get home, you're kind of losing the message that they were over there to do anything bigger than themselves.
And then you think, okay, well, maybe this whole mission of doing something bigger than themselves, whether it's going after Al-Qaeda, fighting them over there, so they don't come over here, or in the case of Vietnam, was fighting the North, so they'd stop communism, the domino effect, maybe that was all bullshit.
You know, and it's like, after 40, 50 years, we didn't learn our lesson, that they're still putting these guys in harm's way, it's stupid, you know, crap, like, you know, the outpost in the bottom of the valley, instead of on top of the mountain, so that they could do, you know, counterinsurgency, you know, these are all things they should have learned 40, 50 years before.
And what's- It is, it's just like Dien Bien Phu, it's like even before our loss in Vietnam, this is how the French lost in Vietnam, was they put all their guys down in the bottom of a valley surrounded by hillsides, where the enemy could just rain shells down on them, and then they got to Afghanistan, and they were like, oh, this looks like a great place to redo a thing like that.
Well, you know what's so ironic, is that you have, David Petraeus was part of this, you know, wing of a certain, you know, warriors of a certain age, I forgot what Andrew Bacevich called them, they were, you know, I don't, the Crusaders or whatever, who had written about and were big proponents of this theory that Vietnam could have been won if they did better counterinsurgency.
So they get their war in Iraq, they get their war in Afghanistan, and they start applying all these lessons that they supposedly learned from Vietnam, and then screw it up all over again, because they're just, because they don't work.
And then there are people like Jian Gentile, who I write about all the time, was one of these few military guys who were out there at the time going, guys, this doesn't work, we don't care what you have to say, Petraeus, and your, you know, your dissertation about Vietnam doesn't work.
Right, I mean, the whole thing is so stupid.
Imagine a foreign occupying army comes to Texas, and then they say to the women and children of Texas, we demand that you choose us over your husbands and brothers and uncles and sons who are fighting us, because they're the ones who are causing the disruption.
We're just here trying to provide security.
Now tell me that anyone would buy that and go along with that at all, other than the very few people in the mayor's office that they took over and, you know, essentially, you know, co-opt, something like that.
But everybody else would shoot at them.
That's it.
They'd be shot at until they left.
Right.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
And you remember all these attempts to establish these, you know, local police units.
And I forgot what they were called.
But you know, they established these like, you know, police, I don't know, forces, small forces at the village level.
Right.
And we'd go in there and we'd pick a side in a village that we had no idea what the dynamics were, what the local politics were.
And we'd end up choosing, of course, the wrong side.
We'd choose the warlords, the gangsters, the corrupt people, and give them guns and give them authority.
And then they go rampaging, terrorizing the local people, raping boys, raping girls, getting away with it.
And then they turn around, they go, huh, we wish the Taliban was back.
Right.
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And now back to Michelle Flournoy and her giant mansion that she knows is built on these people's blood.
These innocent little children being raped by the warlords that she was installing in power.
That's on her and she knows it all day every day as she walks around.
She lounges by her pool that this is all built on blood.
And all of her best friends know it, too.
And yet what wave of feminism is it where, yeah, let's take over the Pentagon, girl power.
It's all just about, I guess it's the central, the centrist sort of liberalism that sees this as the epitome of equality and achievement that like, man, this lady, she's killed almost as many people as Douglas Fyfe, you know, who preceded her as Secretary of Defense for Policy.
So good for her.
You know, we ought to get her to coach our softball team.
We like her so much.
She lost the war, but she killed a lot of people during it, though, still.
So that's good.
Yeah, she she lost the war, but she's really popular in the E-ring of the of the Pentagon.
You know, I mean, it's it's like high school.
And look, if Biden wins, which he very well might, she's going to be the new secretary of defense.
That's what they say now.
She doesn't get to work with Hillary, but yeah, she's first in line under the Democrats.
They've said over and over again.
It'll be very, you know, it'll be very interesting, because if Biden does win, where, you know, where does that put all of our efforts, you know, over the last four years to try to sort of gain some inroads on beating the blob, which, you know, I have to say, I mean, these people are really fighting back.
We have a piece on today on the American conservative by Daniel Larrison about, you know, he takes apart this foreign affairs article by Michael Mazar, who basically says restraint doesn't work.
You know, it's a farce.
You know, people are, you know, pie in the sky.
There's no there's not really a blob.
There's no homogeneous foreign policy establishment.
And Daniel Larrison, you know, goes blow for blow for blow.
But the point is, we're starting to see these articles in Foreign Policy magazine and Foreign Affairs and War on the Rocks, all of these blobby websites and magazines by academics, people have worked in these administrations.
You can tell we're actually hitting a nerve because they keep fighting, but they keep pushing back and saying, we're not a blob.
We're actually doing the Lord's work.
Right.
It's the Quincy Institute to got to give credit to Trita and Andy and Eli and the rest of the guys over there that this is a big part of what they're reacting to as well.
Exactly.
And that Andrew Bacevich, he's formidable, man.
Can you imagine having to go up against him?
You know, I love interviewing the guy and reading him.
I don't agree with him on everything, but he's great.
But I can't imagine trying to be one of these, you know, blob people and having to go up against him in some kind of public forum.
He'd smash them like the Incredible Hulk.
He does smash them like Incredible Hulk.
He's my hero.
Yeah, I mean, and he's just absolutely got his act together on all the facts, too.
You know, he's one of those guys, you know, like Scott Ritter or whoever, who just has all the details at his fingertips.
Right.
Because he's been there and he's done that.
Yep.
I mean, he's a Vietnam veteran and he's an academic.
So he has all the chops, you know.
Yeah, he is a legitimate academic historian, professor at Boston University, right?
Exactly.
So and now he's the president of the Quincy Institute.
And so he's formidable in the way where they can't ignore him.
And when he and when he calls these other academics out or these other blobsters out, they get all they get all flustered because of that.
You know, unfortunately, you know, when I when I've been calling them out for how many years, they don't care because I'm just sort of like a little fly.
But like somebody who, you know, like who actually has standing within the same community as they do and is telling them they're full of it, you know, that that Petraeus was full of it.
Their coin was full of it.
You know, now they're still full of it.
They get upset because they're like, well, you know, well, you know, I named the three main people there and there are a handful of others there.
And some of them are, you know, also other, you know, important academics and that kind of thing.
But mostly I think you could say they're all relatively marginal.
You know, the great Eli Clifton, who I absolutely love.
I mean, yeah, he's in his history is writing for IPS and for Jim Loeb's blog.
And he did some stuff for the American prospect or for the Center for American Policy, I guess, before they fired him for being too good on Bloomberg's violations of people's rights when he was paying them a bunch of money.
But anyway, not to say anything bad about him, just that he never got the credit that he deserved all this time.
Right.
And I hope him and Trita Parsi, too.
You know, NIAC is important, but it's you want to take all of the think tanks in D.C.
It's one of the most marginal ones.
And now he's left them and joined this Quincy thing.
And these people together, they have really increased their own stature and their own credibility in a way that kind of I think they've succeeded in kind of forcing their way in, which is what they were trying to do.
Yeah.
And if you look if you look at their if you look at their Web site, you know, they have a ton of academics listed there as as visiting fellows, senior fellows.
And these people all have they're all in your top universities.
And I think that's what's getting, you know, aside from the great leadership of the people you just mentioned, the fact that you have you have a growing number of academics who are saying that we need a change, that the liberal, you know, world order post World War Two is not working.
And in the past, you'd have think tanks where it would be a lot of people.
Yeah, you'd have some academics, but they would be very mealy mouthed and really weren't taking a point of view.
Here we have people who are lining up and they're just and they're making they're making waves.
So I think I think you're right.
I think that they have really gotten under the skin of of the this ecosystem, the military industrial complex ecosystem.
And I love to watch it.
And I know, you know, that the Koch people, the Charles Koch Institute, they're putting a lot of money into these national security and foreign policy programs at the university level.
Right.
Which the neocons were really good about that all the way up through 9-11 and beyond.
And so you look at these grand strategy programs at like at, you know, Columbia and Yale or wherever, and they were all led by neocons.
And now you're getting your this money that cooks like, OK, we're going to play that game.
We got money, too.
And they're starting to feed these programs and you're starting to see some seed seeds blossoming, which now they're having.
They're having big conferences about restraint and and changing things and reform.
And I'm like, wow, I mean, as much as it sounds sort of like very, you know, establishment, it's like sometimes you've got to fight on their turf.
Yeah.
Well, and also it's a matter of, again, with the calendar here that they lost all these wars.
I mean, the reason that the liberal international order is in such jeopardy is because of Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria and Yemen and the absolute chaos.
You know, that has been unleashed from all of these wars.
So it's not like they have anything to blame but themselves.
You know, it's not like a series of hurricanes came and destroyed most of America's economy or any kind of thing like this is.
They blew their whole wad in the sands of Iraq because they knew that they were so smart and knew what to do.
And they didn't.
And as we reported it back then, that was the high tide of the American empire was right there in the spring of 2003.
And it's been downhill ever since then is because of the decisions that they've made.
And the worst things get, the more they lash out, the more they blame everybody else.
That's right.
They have only themselves to blame for it all.
Yep.
Well, and so and now on the as far as the restraint thing goes, you know, I think there really is a danger that some intervention gets a stamp of approval under restraint where, hey, at least it's better than the worst thing of all.
But that's not really the measure.
So I think, you know, for those of us, well, I think at the American Conservative and at antiwar.com especially, you know, our position still has to be hardcore and strict non interventionism and total opposition to interventionism.
And then, you know, in the whole dialectic kind of scheme of things, let Andy and treat as split the difference and call it restraint and offshore balancing and whatever, whatever.
But we're the ones who are right.
They're the ones who should have to justify, you know, the burden of proof is on them to even have a global Navy, to even have American bases in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, anywhere.
The burden of proof is on them that we should continue to do any of the things that they call upholding leadership and the world order and whatever, all this crap, you know, they've ruined everything up until this point and completely bankrupted the country.
I mean, that's it was Ron Paul always says, bottom line is we don't have the money.
How are you going to take over the world when you've got to borrow the money from China to hem them in with, you know, this whole thing is nuts.
And so that's that's kind of what I worry about is that that maybe they won't take the opportunity to really that they do have to really just turn the tables on the rest of the establishment that they are really, you know, should be feeling very much on the defensive that the American people have no confidence in them whatsoever.
The whole blob we would like to see, you know, frozen and then smashed.
And and I worry that if they go, come on, guys, how about a little restraint some more that they're actually kind of giving away the store to the guys who already lost it to us?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
But a lot of you know, much of them and I totally get what you're saying.
I realize that that whole that our whole, you know, coalition, if you will, is is a coalition.
So you're going to have people who are less non interventionist than others, others who are more sort of still have one foot and the sort of old order and then everybody in between.
But I think one of the messages that I've seen and that I've heard and I think are very is very salient here is that and I agree with you, the burden should be on the other side to prove that all of these existing, you know, allies and partnerships and, you know, security agreements are still working.
And if not, let's make a change.
And I feel like when I've heard debates or I've heard the other side talk about this, they very condescendingly say, well, we're not going to leave our allies hanging in Europe because there's the threat from Russia.
We're not going to leave our allies hanging in the South China Sea because of China or North Korea.
And that's the end of the argument.
And I think what Trita and the others have been doing very effectively have been pushing back and say, no, let's take every agreement separately.
Let's talk about it.
Let's talk about the ramifications of bringing tens of thousands of troops home.
Let's talk about the ramifications of not only not expanding NATO, but actually dissolving it.
You know, and let's talk about that in a serious way without you guys making us feel as though we're idiots or condescendingly saying that, you know, obviously the whole world would go in a hell in a handbasket if we did that.
End of story.
And I think that's where we, I think the American people are prime right now for this conversation because, you know, we're hurting financially here.
We see that things aren't working.
We don't feel any safer.
And when you tell people, yeah, we got, you know, how many, 28,000 troops, you know, in, on the Korean peninsula here, we have tens of thousands there.
Oh, we're shifting some over to Poland now.
Why?
You know, and I think we can have an adult conversation about that.
And the other side for years has just gotten by with this standard boilerplate.
We have to, we can't let our allies down.
And people are looking around going, hey, I kind of think that's bullshit.
Yeah.
And really, I mean, that's the thing, right, is they need to be just laughed down, right?
Because the thing is, if they get away with the premise that, well, everybody knows what a giant threat Russia is in the first place, then you want to do nothing about that isn't a very good argument.
It's got to be, don't give me that crap.
You know what?
Show me.
Our government complains constantly under Bush, probably under Clinton too, but certainly under Bush, under Obama and under Trump, Germany doesn't spend enough on their military.
Well, why is that?
It's because they don't want to fight Russia again.
And it's because they don't feel a threat from Russia, obviously, or they'd be spending the money to build up their forces.
That's it.
So if the Germans are scientifically proven to not feel a threat from Russia, then that is meaningful.
I insist.
And let them defend themselves if it comes down to that.
But we don't have anything like the conflict between Nazism and communism going on in Eastern Europe right now.
You know, this whole thing about, oh, Putin wants to be a czar and reconquer Eastern Europe and all of this stuff, march into Poland or whatever, is garbage.
Nobody really believes that.
Even the hawks don't really believe that.
They're pretending to believe that.
They're the aggressors there.
Again, it all comes back to West exec advisors helping hook up the business of the military industrial complex, the biggest racket in the world.
Right.
I mean, is it profitable to say, well, maybe we should take all those troops home?
Maybe we should bring those missiles back.
You know, maybe we don't need the ships in that part of the world.
That's not profitable.
So you're going to see tens of thousands of jobs lost.
And I'm not saying that in a way where, oh, my God, we have to keep it going because of tens of thousands of jobs.
What I'm saying is you're seeing a lot of livelihoods at risk.
You're seeing a lot of promotions at risk.
You're seeing people's bonuses and salaries, you know.
And so why would you be arguing otherwise?
I mean, the status quo has benefited this particular elite class for 70 years, and they're not going to go easily.
They're just not.
And so I agree with you.
It's shame is a great way.
If we can't do more at this moment, we can't elect a president that would actually get us out of these wars or populate these administrations with people who are our side of things from our point of view.
Then the best thing that we can do is be on these shows and write the stories and books that we're doing and keep hammering away and hope that it'll just pop the bubble at some point.
I know we've been working on it for a while, but I see with the opposition being so peevish lately, I think that we're having some effect.
Yeah.
I'm hoping.
And hey, they screwed up everything.
I mean, what are they going to do?
Argue that no, they really were right and it worked great?
What was it that they did that worked great?
What did they accomplish other than getting a couple of million people killed and causing a massive refugee crisis in Europe and all of this?
I mean, in fact, we're talking about the liberal world order.
The EU is coming apart at the seams in direct reaction to the consequence of the wars.
That was their greatest, highest priority project of the entire Western establishment from the end of World War II was uniting Europe and in permanent alliance with the United States and the whole thing's falling apart and they're the ones who broke it.
So what are they going to do?
Sit here and say that?
Well, I don't know.
I need to read Larrison's article and the one he's writing about that.
Obviously, all they could do is just deny.
All they could do is just lie by omission if they want to pretend that any of these things worked.
Hey, you know what?
Their supermajority has a democratic government in Iraq now.
Now, there might be some more things that you need to know about Iraq, but let's just leave it at that.
Kelly, how about that?
Yeah.
They have a plan.
I'll make a gratuitous plug for our new podcast, The Empire Has No Clothes, because we do a weekly show, me, Daniel Larrison, and Matt Purple, and we were just talking about this.
In that vein, Robert Kagan, the infamous academic, neoconservative, centrist, Blobbian has written about this recently in his new book, Back to the Jungle, or Return to the Jungle, in which he basically says that the world order of American exceptionalism is strong, despite some of these mistakes along the way.
These mistakes along the way are Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, so they literally- Little old things like that, yeah.
They literally view all of these foreign policy disasters as bumps in the road, but feel that the overall worldview or approach to foreign policy is sound.
Right.
I mean, this is how they get around what you just said.
Yeah.
Well, they do say with a straight face, listen, these international institutions have kept the peace for 70 years.
Right.
It could have been so much worse.
And what they mean by that is Germany and America and Russia haven't gotten into another world war.
But what they don't mean by that is that all the Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Indonesians, Congolese, Iraqis, Afghans, all of those who would have been alive are now, because yeah, they couldn't possibly make that case, could they?
But kept the peace, eh, whatever.
You know, they mean among, you know, sorry, I don't want to sound all social justice in the middle of a leftist revolution here, but they mean the white nations haven't fought.
You can slaughter any number of Asians and that's different.
Right, exactly.
And we haven't had any major terrorist attacks here since 9-11, and so that's also touted as success, you know, of their interventionism abroad.
And that's, it's part of the hubris of the last seven years.
You just have to ignore quite a few actual successful terrorist attacks in the country that have taken place since then, you know.
But yeah, they'll still say that.
Of course, Jeb Bush, remember Jeb Bush in the debate said, my brother kept us safe.
Remember the rubble?
And Donald Trump was like, what?
Yeah, I do remember the rubble.
How's that back up your first claim there?
What are you talking about?
Oh no, everybody knows he gets a free pass on the first eight months in office.
I mean, after that.
Yeah.
And then the fact that all the terrorist attacks, there were probably 10 that happened during Obama times, you know, Fort Hood and San Bernardino and there was one, you know, failed but real attack in, in New Jersey, the sidewalk attacks, the Times Square attack was another, you know, fail.
The, the Christmas Day attempted bombing of the plane over Detroit.
So I guess many of those were failed, but they were legit, not FBI setups, but like real attacks by the enemy, you know, in that case, in those cases.
So, but you're right.
They will pretend that those things didn't happen.
You know?
Right.
The Omar Mateen massacre at the Pulse nightclub, they pretend that's because he was a repressed homosexual who was acting out his Islamic repression on these poor young men when in fact that was a total lie.
None of it was true.
None of it at all.
It was 100% about foreign policy and 0% about homosexuality.
And they knew that and they were lying the whole time in order to just, because it was a horrible massacre.
And think about how successful they were at making gay people like the gay community and political groups and organized groups and stuff feel like, Oh my God, these Islamic terrorists are coming for us because we're gay.
And so maybe we need to rally behind the war on terrorism kind of thing, which is something that they're, you know, mostly not lot, you know, bias towards supporting.
And then meanwhile, nope.
It turns out that the Pulse nightclub was just the first Google result for nightclub after he was discouraged from attacking Disney world because they had too much security.
So he Googled nightclub and the first one that came up was Pulse.
And then he wrote on Facebook and told the 911 operator over and over again, this is 100% blow back from foreign policy and nothing to do with the gayness of the victims whatsoever at all.
What a great lie.
You got to give them credit for getting away with stuff like that.
You know, it's just the same way as they got away with accusing Russia, paying for American scalps in Afghanistan.
And a couple of weeks later they back off and go, Oh yeah, we were just bluffing about that.
But they get away with that stuff.
They get away with tell whatever lie they want.
I kind of admire them for in a sick way that just to have that much influence where it makes no difference whether what you say is true or not, you can just get the whole society to go along with whatever it is.
Right.
Because the mainstream media and the corporate media is, is four square behind it.
So they'll continue perpetuating that story on about the bounties, whether it's the reporting was solid or not, whether it's already been proven a lie or not.
That's right.
The FBI says, yeah, that's all they need.
You see it all over Twitter.
I mean, people are still talking about it as though it's a solid fact.
Yep.
Oh yeah.
And, and they're still doing followups based on it too.
There's a big followup in the New York times I was complaining about on the blog at antiwar.com where they have this one big paragraph that says, well, you know, if it's confirmed that it's true, then this would be big.
Like they, some editor insisted that they have to put that in there.
This big disclaimer that we have, we have no reason to believe that this is true.
Anyway, go ahead with the story.
You know?
Huh?
It's right there in the New York times, the newspaper of record, you know, right.
Because most people will skim over that part, but they've covered their butts in the meantime.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't even know why they bother, right?
It's like, why torture some Libyan into pretending that Saddam Hussein taught Al-Qaeda how to make chemical weapons?
Just make up a lie.
You got to torture some innocent guy or not innocent guy.
He wasn't Al-Qaeda guy, but you got to torture him into accusing Saddam.
Just pretend he accused Saddam.
Why are you going to torture the guy?
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Let's go ahead and tell the lie.
Now you're lying when you pretend to believe it, right?
So what's the difference?
Yeah.
And you see the same thing in the reporting on Iran too.
I mean, it's taken for granted that every time one of their leaders gets up there behind a microphone, they're saying death to America, death to Israel.
And then when you actually go to look at the transcriptions of some of these speeches that are touted all over, you know, mainstream media here saying white devils, you know, Holocaust Jews, all this stuff.
And then you can't, you can't really drill down on the actual translations of some of these speeches.
And then you find out it was like memory or some other outfit that told, you know, whatever politician here or media person there that that was indeed the transcription.
And it just makes you second guess everything that you see.
Right.
Yeah.
And then you have the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying that they're going to wipe Israel off the map.
Right.
Which was just completely wrong.
And for people who are interested in that, you can read a, I hate to say it, but one Cole wrote a great thing because he can understand the language and translate it for you.
And some others wrote it up too.
And the quote was that the Zionist regime, the government in Israel will one day vanish from the page of time, which was a paraphrase of the old dead Ayatollah Khomeini saying that one day the regime in Moscow will vanish from the page of time.
Now, I don't think anybody thought that the Ayatollah Khomeini was threatening aggressive war against the Soviet Union in 1984 or whatever it was.
He was saying that one day it will cease to exist and then it did.
Right.
And he, by the way, was paraphrasing an ancient poem.
So this is like a famous kind of Persian idiom that something horrible.
In other words, it's almost like saying, be patient.
One day you'll go away.
Just like they did with Khrushchev saying, we will bury you.
All that meant was I'll be at your funeral.
You'll die before me.
We'll outlast you.
That's what it means.
We will bury you.
We will outlast you.
Not we're going to kill you by burying you alive in nuclear radiation or whatever they pretended to believe he meant by that.
You know?
Right.
I mean, there's no doubt that these both sides are enemies, but as a consumer of news, I want to make sure what I'm reading is truthful.
That's all I ask.
And when you have intermediaries translating speeches and then whatever those translations are are taken for truth and passed on over and over and over again without question, that bothers me because then I question everything that I read after that.
And but we see that you see that in the bounty story.
You see that in many other stories of the whole Russian meddling story.
And you know, I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Donald Trump, but when you start digging into these things and you realize how fast and loose that they're playing with the facts on the ground and you realize, wow, I can't believe I can't believe anything these Democrats are saying about Russian meddling.
Well, that's good.
I mean, nobody should ever believe them.
Everything that they say, I mean, particularly if what they're saying is accusing somebody else of something, the burden of proof is on them and beyond a reasonable doubt isn't good enough.
I want beyond a shadow of a doubt that what they say is true or else I'm not having it.
And that's no matter who they're picking on, whether they're accusing, you know, a foreign dictator, the very worst one.
I don't care.
I mean, North Korea is probably the most totalitarian state in the world.
But if they're accusing Kim Jong Un of something, the first question is, why are they accusing?
Not whether it's true or not.
Take for granted that it's true.
But what's their point?
You know, if they're just saying that he's a bad guy, they want to demonize him for something or whatever.
They always try to conflate the ruthlessness of a dictator with their willingness to invade foreign countries, which are entirely separate questions.
You know, they want to conflate things like that all the time.
That ruthless means insane and impossible to estimate in reasonable calculation what they might do, which is nonsense.
You know, I tell that to Fatah al-Sisi.
Tell me he's not a psychopath.
But he's a loyal, reliable sock puppet.
They're not worried about what he's going to do because he belongs to them.
Ditto for Saudi Arabia and MBS.
I was just thinking, too, you know, the whole argument about Iraq War I was like, Saddam, if we don't do anything, he could take over Saudi Arabia, too.
And then what?
Turn it into a secular fascist dictatorship instead of a royal theocracy?
I don't know.
Right.
I bet the people of Saudi Arabia probably would have preferred to live under Saddam Hussein.
Not that he was really going to invade Saudi Arabia.
That was a lie, of course.
Right.
But I'm just saying, if that had happened, I don't know.
Why do I care again?
I don't see it.
All right.
Well, anyway, I'm sorry.
I have yelled at you during your interview for a good hour here.
And I appreciate your patience with me.
No, this is wonderful.
I always have a great time here.
Great.
Well, it's great to talk to you again.
And you talk about wanting to know the truth and that you can rely on it.
Well, that's what the American Conservative Magazine is for.
And we do rely on you guys a great deal for all of the great work that you do.
That's why we link to you virtually.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
