All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, y'all, introducing Danny Shurston, again, you guys know this guy, regular contributor for antiwar.com.
And before that, he was a major in the U.S. Army, where he was in the surge in Iraq War II, and the surge in Afghanistan as well.
He wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad, and the brand new one is called Patriotic Dissent.
And man, he writes so much, not just for antiwar.com, but for every goddang thing in the world.
And we're so lucky to have him.
This one is called Where Are They Now?
Leaders from my Afghan tour are on to bigger and bankable things, which is just absolutely extraordinary, and I can't wait to talk about that in a minute.
But first, I gotta ask you another question on another subject, which is, first of all, Danny, welcome to the show.
How are you?
But secondly, did you hear that it's confirmed, it's a true thing, that Colonel Douglas McGregor has been nominated to be the senior advisor to the new acting secretary of defense for the next couple of months?
It's a pretty wild thing when you think about it.
When you think about how McGregor has been just kind of a mix between ignored, pariah, by so many within the Pentagon establishment, as well as the media one.
He's been described as the rogue colonel, right?
That's like one of those buzzwords that's followed him.
It's just an interesting sort of light pejorative passive aggression, but- Yeah, it just means that he was right when he criticized what they did.
That's all.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And, you know, it's one of those funny things where you look at it and you say, imagine if we had a true foreign policy establishment that lived up to the mythology that never really was about, you know, kind of politics stopping at the ocean's edge.
Because if that were true, you might just see Douglas McGregor stay, right, for a Biden administration, which would, of course, be about the best thing we can do in this situation.
But, you know, I haven't read quite enough on it, but I would be willing to say that the vaguest odds are he's out when Trump's out.
And what we'll get instead, of course, is like the Obama retreads and the old Hillary hawks that all come over from the consultancy industrial complex, which is, of course, you know, a subsidiary of the more industrial heavy industrial complex.
So, yeah, I mean, it's great to see hopefully some good can get done with reference to Afghanistan troop withdrawals before Biden comes in.
And I fear sort of freezes withdrawals and listens to the McMaster nonsense.
But yeah, I was glad to see it, man.
And so it's just got me kicking and spitting that why didn't he do this?
And I should elaborate a little bit here for the audience, anybody not paying attention.
There's been a major purge over at the Defense Department.
All the top civilians were thrown out and replaced with guys from the National Security Council, basically from the White House, who are, you know, I guess, more politically oriented Trump loyalists.
Let's be clear here, typically on the way out when it comes to, you know, the tradition, this last second pardons of guys that used to contribute to your campaign, but were also corrupt.
Who's ever heard of like the, you know, last second in the night removal of troops from an endless war?
Wouldn't that turn the whole narrative on its head?
I mean, you almost want it to happen not only because it's the right thing and the decent thing and the strategic thing to do, but just because of the way it would be so unique in a way.
And if and if Douglas McGregor can help make that happen, I mean, you know, we talk about Ron Paul.
You know, we marched in, we marched out like that was wonderful, of course.
But remember this guy in 2019, McGregor said, I think Hill TV on antiwar.com was quoted in fact today that we should run, not walk out of Afghanistan.
I mean, what I can't think of a better way to put it, especially when time is short in a lame duck presidency.
Yeah.
Let's run.
Let's run out of Afghanistan because we'll have to.
And but, you know, I mean, we don't know that this is definitely going to happen.
And there's been a lot of, you know, hope and change narratives around Donald Trump and very little of it has come true.
I mean, he did sign a deal with the Taliban to get out by next May and that's pretty good.
But you know, assuming this does happen, it just still it just makes me that much madder that he didn't do it over the summer.
He could have done it over the summer.
He could be ending his, you know, fourth and fifth war in November and December right now instead of, you know, one and two.
I mean, he could be he could have been really making some changes and he would have won in a landslide if he'd done that.
And I can tell you right now, and I'm just making this up because of speculation, you know, because I don't know about behind the scenes conversations, but it's so obvious, right, that the obstacles to Israel lobby is he thought maybe Jared Kushner told him you need Sheldon Adelson's money.
And if you start appointing anti-war people to the Pentagon, all that's all the Israel lobby support for you is going to dry up.
And he should have bet that I don't care because I'm going to get so many raw votes out of it that it's going to more than make up for your millions.
But he was a coward and he didn't make that bet and said he waited till after the election.
So that means if we're lucky, extra super happy wish lucky, he'll get us out of Afghanistan and Somalia.
But what are the chances he's going to get us out of Syria and Iraq, too?
Almost nothing, right?
I mean, if that happens, then that's like, you know, the archangel came and made it all happen despite all human intention.
So you and I talked about this on and I'm sure you said it a number of times.
So you and I had this very conversation maybe in September or October.
Actually, it might have been the end of August because you had said starting September 1st that, you know, Trump should do like, hey, first of the month, you know, instead of a welfare check, I end the war, you know, straight up to the election.
And obviously he didn't.
But I still remain convinced that you're correct, that that would have had actual effect that could have really made a difference, not only in terms of our strategy, but even electorally.
You know, even if once if one wanted Trump to win, like that would have been a good way to help bolster that point.
Yeah.
I mean, and that was one of the major promises that he did not live up to.
You know, in fact, somebody told me that they talk is sort of hearsay stuff, but sounds right to me.
They talked to a guy who was a real expert about the upper Midwest states and how a lot of these people, maybe it was Wisconsin, I think it was Wisconsin specifically, that a lot of these people come from Norway and I don't know, whatever, Finland, whatever northern European countries.
And for them, the pacifism runs really strong.
They just hate jingoism and all of this stuff.
And that this was what gave him Wisconsin last time was she was trigger happy Hillary and he was going to bring him home.
That was the margin.
And this time he didn't even bring it up at all because who would believe him?
He's been sitting there for four years.
So instead he went to Wisconsin and hawked it up about China.
And so this time it went to the Democrats.
There's been some really serious academic work done on it.
There's a, there's an excellent article if you want to link to the show notes, I'll send it to you by a, it's coauthored by Gordon Asher, who's part of a general latest all volunteer force forum.
But basically these are like political scientists, geeks, right?
And they took a look at the different county level in the swing states up in Wisconsin area in particular and showed that like Wisconsin, Michigan, the counties that had the, the high rates of casualties in the war on terror, they like controlled for all the other variables, the way that, you know, political scientists try to do.
And they found that it had a measurable effect in getting Trump elected in 2016.
And I just wonder who in the White House, who on the campaign was reading those reports, if anybody, or who was making the argument and getting ignored, whether it was because of the Israel lobby or whoever else, because that's an important factor.
And there was nothing in Biden's rhetoric that made it sound like he was going to be more of a dove or better on the wars that, you know, that may be swung in his direction in those counties.
Yeah.
It's raises so many questions too, about whether the army will even go along with him at this point or whether they'll just say, sir, no, sir, we like the Bagram air base, screw you.
What are you going to do about it?
And then what's he going to do about it?
Well, they have invested a lot in their defense at like Kandahar airfield and Bagram.
We've invested a lot in green beans, coffee and burger Kings and all those other things.
And so in defense of the army, listen, it's pretty comfortable there.
I mean, that's a lot of sunk costs is what I'm saying.
And so a phone centers, volleyball courts, I mean, I'm being absurdist, but the reality is it is interesting to think about the senior leadership, which is the one that drives a lot of this, right?
The senior leadership of the military have become so politicized, but they've become so politicized in favor of the polite imperialists and democratic party.
Right.
And so you've got guys who, you, who voted for Bush twice, who, when they were colonels, who are now generals and are straight in the Biden camp straight in, whoever the Democrats would run against Trump.
And, uh, I mean, they're in subordination to the extent that it exists or their passive aggressive sort of, you know, vague, uh, dragging of the feet is in favor of extending the wars that kill the soldiers that they make such heartfelt speeches about when they die.
I mean, that is, that is a grotesque reality.
That is just a normalcy in America and you will never really see on the front page of the New York times because, oh, by the way, they're in the same tank.
Yeah.
All right.
So now here's the thing about Joe Biden.
He ain't no Barack Obama when it comes to making the young girls swoon as much as he wishes he was.
Um, so I, and I, by that, I just mean overall, he's not as impressive a character to the average, you know, left leaning person in America as Obama was.
And but for Obama, it was essential that they were in love with him so that they would overlook all of his horrible abuses.
Um, but with Biden, if Trump pulls all the troops, if he really can't succeed in getting all the troops out of Afghanistan, is buying going to reinvade Afghanistan or, and what's going to happen after that are the liberals just going to look away and not care about that is going to put on their little, there's going to put on their pussy hat and march around and complain about Trump and Russia some more.
What are they going to do, man?
Are we going to have an anti-war movement on the left and in Biden years, are we going to have an anti-war movement on the right in Biden years when of course Liz Cheney and all them, they're nervous going to be that he's weak and feckless and feminine and we need a tough guy Republican like them in there.
And will the anti-war right be able to, you know, really overcome that and change the narrative of the right to a non-interventionist one.
You know, there are so many questions that you raised there that I think are important.
I think aren't going to get much attention except in places like this, right?
How will Trump's defeat affect the anti-war libertarian ish, right?
And how will it affect the progressive anti-war movement?
I'm skeptical of a strong anti-war movement on either end.
I'm particularly skeptical on the left because as everyone knows, I secretly have a MAGA hat in my living room apparently.
So the, but the point here I think is important.
Will Biden reinvade Afghanistan?
Like obviously we're mostly kidding about that, but I do think that there is a real chance that the DNC led administration, right?
Which it depends on how, what, to what extent you think that Biden's just going to be actually purely running this show is very likely, very likely to keep, maybe even add some, but keep a significant advisory special forces and air support role there through the first administration.
I mean, that's a real possibility.
And so it could involve a small bump.
Well, what do we call it, Scott?
Is that going to be like surge 6.5?
I mean, we're really getting up there in the numbers and I wouldn't rule it out.
And as I wrote in that most recent piece about the colonels and generals that I named names, you know, my paper wasn't blank like McCarthy's was in the fifties.
I mean, there were names online of military industrial complex guys, but I talk about Biden at the end and how he's been of two minds about Afghanistan and you know as much or more about this than me, but he's been inconsistent.
His gut changes a lot, which is one of the problems with guts.
And the, if everything, if he, if the Democrats and the Biden administration do what Trump did, which is sort of, if it was Obama, it's bad, I'm switching it.
Then unfortunately one outgrowth among many, the more dangerous being Russia, for example, but one outgrowth could be, well, Trump was talking about pulling troops out and then he put this McGregor guy in charge who really started to push her troops out.
So we have to do the opposite of Trump because all things Trump are awful and therefore we are even going to double down or at least continue at a low intensity.
This a war in Afghanistan forever because everyone knows that advisors aren't really combat troops, right?
Those M fours they carry are the same toys that my three and a half year old likes to play with.
Yeah.
Man.
If Trump had done that, if he was just a couple of clicks smarter, Danny, I swear to God, you know, how obvious is it that if he'd done this in the summer, that it would have been a huge controversy like it is right now.
What do you mean he fired the top six guys at the Pentagon and put in all of his best friends in there and this kind of thing.
And then, and he did it and then he started ending wars and he's got a tough guy like McGregor to say that he's sure that this will be just fine to cover his right flank during the election as they fight about it, forcing Joe Biden and the democratic party to attack him from the right for trying to achieve peace, which would have just been the world's greatest sabotage of the Democrats, even in the most cynical way.
Even if you don't give a damn what happens to the poor posh tunes.
What about how to screw the Democrats?
And instead he just handed it to him.
Who me?
I'm at least as bad as Biden.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Run with that narrative.
You know, it's, it's funny because you had, you had Esper in there and now, you know, how long, I guess it's already happening.
How long before Mark Esper of all people becomes like the new, you know, laundered ethically laundered champion of the mainstream left.
You know, it's, it's, it's, this is a guy who he admits like his, that he wasn't loyal to Trump right now.
He's bragging about it, even though he was plenty loyal at certain points, but okay, so now he's not.
And he's saying, I was fighting against Trump all along.
It's like, well, if he wasn't loyal to Trump, let's be clear.
He wasn't loyal to the anti-war movement subversively.
He was loyal to Raytheon.
Okay.
Let's be like, let's just be understanding that this is, if I was joking about the power of the military industrial complex, I would say, and eventually they're going to take one of their lobbyists and they're going to make him secretary of defense and they're really going to marry the two.
And it's not even going to be a complex anymore.
It's just going to be the military industrial thing.
But that already happened with Mark Esper, but this guy's going to get a pass because if you're not Trump, then you're wonderful.
And there's no gradation and there's no nuance on the mainstream left.
None.
It's gone.
It's dead.
And now they're destroying the very notion of nuance and hey, that's the road to the very fascism that they're always yelling about, isn't it?
I read that somewhere.
I think that's a famous quote.
Yeah.
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I want to give you some time to talk about this article because you did such great research.
I really want people to look at this thing and you know, of course it's just completely disgusting.
Where are they now?
Leaders from my Afghan tour are on to bigger and bankable things and we don't have to go through all of this, but for people who aren't familiar, Major Sherson led some men at the height of the surge.
You know, the infantry on the ground over there doing the hard part in the Helmand province during the Afghan surge.
Okay, so this is not some bullshit.
And the men who were in charge of that, where are they now?
Danny, tell me.
Well, yeah, so I, I led a, I said Helmand, I meant Kandahar, I'm sorry.
I led a troop of scouts, uh, about, about a hundred, uh, of my own, you know, ground pounders.
We didn't really use vehicles.
There weren't any roads.
Uh, there were points we had to be airlifted in and out of our outpost period.
Right.
I mean, it was legit.
Okay.
So we were about two miles from Sengasar, which is Mullah Omar's old village.
And uh, this was 2011 until early 2012.
So I commanded a troop there, two small outposts.
And um, and so I started thinking about what happened to all these guys.
And I was doing research on a completely different topic and I found the order of battle that like the Institute for the Study of War, one of those like neocon outlets does.
And they actually had an order of battle.
Like every single battalion commander and above who was in that tour and every other tour is listed.
And so I know a lot of these guys, I'd say of the 25 or so people that I named names for in this article, I've met, talked to probably 15 of them, 12 to 15.
And uh, and a lot of those generals visited my outpost because when I was forming my own warlord driven militia, uh, that we call the Afghan local police, uh, I was suddenly a hot commodity at the end of 2011, like for a moment, right?
In my 15 minutes of fame with the generals, I had four or five different generals come visit me and it was a big pain in my ass, right?
Like it always is.
So I got to thinking, where are these guys?
And decided to go down the rabbit hole.
And so a few more days without sleep and I found out what I knew I'd find out, but actually even more extreme than I expected, uh, the generals largely, uh, are working either directly in the defense industry, uh, or in the security consulting wing of the defense industry and or, and the key word there could be end in many cases, uh, affiliated with a variety of sort of hawkish think tanks.
The colonels, the lieutenant colonels and the colonels, the guys who commanded battalions of about 500 and brigades of about 5,000, uh, they are largely still in the military.
Many of them have made general and are leading top formations, uh, across the board from cyber command to ground infantry divisions and cores.
And then about 40% of them retired either because they wanted to or they didn't make general.
And most of those have now followed their old bosses into those same industries.
You know, always a bridesmaid type thing.
And they're still working below those generals in kind of parallel positions in the military industrial complex or its various wings.
So I, I did actually name names it, I will tell you it, it won't, it doesn't get the mainstream play obviously as if this thing got posted in the New York times, which isn't ever going to happen cause it's too much analysis and it's not what they like.
But through the grapevine of my texts and emails, I can tell you that there is a bit of a level of consternation out there and a lot of cheering, uh, folks have seen the piece, uh, who are still in the military.
Listen, I mean this thing deserves, this thing deserves to go so viral, man.
I mean, this is just great.
It's so in depth and we don't have time, but can we start here?
Can you do the great American fraud, David Petraeus?
Oh, I'm happy to.
I mean, I could have written a whole article on him, Admiral Mike Mullen at his retirement ceremony.
And I didn't quote it because I was already at 5,000 words.
He referred to Petraeus as now that you're retiring, you, and you can Google this guys, now that you're retiring, you can take your place among the Pantheon of quote, the great captains in American military history.
Okay.
So you talk about great fraud.
I mean, this is the most funny cause Admiral Fallon called them an ass kissing little chicken shit.
And that's the dirty secret.
Nobody liked this guy.
I mean, most of his peers loathe this guy.
I mean, read Dan Bulger's book.
I mean, he was fairly polite, but he lets you know this Lieutenant General Dan Bulger, who also was there with me, and he's kind of the exception that proves the rule.
Okay.
Cause he wrote that book, why we lost.
And he just teaches at NC state.
He didn't take any of that seven figure money, but you know, he couldn't stand Petraeus and most of his peers couldn't.
The dude married the superintendent's daughter, the superintendent at West Point right after he graduated.
Okay.
Let's just let that sink in.
Okay.
This is a guy who had stars in his eyes from the moment he got to cadet basic training as a plea.
You would not want to have a beer with this dude.
Okay.
So what has he done?
Well, he had mass scandal.
He is a convicted criminal, right?
But he has been totally accepted right back into the business and policy polite elite fold.
You know, he's a partner and chairman at KKR Global Institute.
He's on the Atlantic Council's board.
He's a NATO cooperative cyber defense center of excellence Institute for the study of war and the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition's National Security Advisory Council.
The guy has cashed in, he continues to just put his poison into not only the media, but the policy establishment.
I mean, the Atlantic Council's board of directors, which, oh, by the way, General Curtis Scaparrotti is also on, who was the commandant of West Point during my senior year.
But remember, the Atlantic Council got the third most money of any think tank in America from the U.S. government and defense contractors these last five years, to the tune of $8.7 million.
The top donations coming from you guessed it, Raytheon and Lockheed.
But I mean, look at who's on their board.
Right.
Just stop right there.
Just stop right there.
I'm sorry.
I got to emphasize just what chump change that is.
How little it costs to pay these scum, to write these studies, to justify these policies so that these companies can cash checks in the tens of billions of dollars.
Okay, go ahead, sir.
It's petty.
You're right.
It's petty cash.
It's petty cash.
And it's our money in the first place, right?
They're recycling the pennies, the remainder of their transactions back into the propaganda mill so they can keep going.
It's all it takes.
I mean, yeah.
You look at the who else is on the board.
I mean, it's a who's who of...
I mean, when I say where are they now, well, they're on the Atlantic Council board.
These guys, the generals in particular, I mean, but who else is with them?
Well, 11 three and four star generals, three CIA directors or acting directors, two deputies of Homeland Security, and you guessed it, two Airbus CEOs, one Raytheon CEO, a senior Raytheon lobbyist and a Lockheed Martin CEO.
They sit on the board of the Atlantic Council and yeah, they can buy these guys to sell war for actually relatively small amounts of money.
So that's where Petraeus is.
I mean, just going with the guys I know, right?
Oh, and oh, by the way, so General John Allen took over for Petraeus midway through my tour as the top commander.
And what does he do now?
Well, I mean, well, he champions Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Hawks.
But beyond that, he's also the president of Brookings, the oldest institution of think tankery in America.
And they only received a measly $2.5 million from US government and defense contractors over the last five years.
And again, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, and Airbus are leading the pack of 17 different corporate arms dealers who contribute to this great diplomatic organization.
But people who I knew directly, General James Huggins was one of my two division commanders during the time there.
I had the displeasure of meeting him on a Potemkin patrol that I had to put together for him.
What does he do?
Well, he works at the McChrystal Group.
The McChrystal Group, of course, is full of people from this tour.
I think I counted at least five of their 17 partners who are veterans of my tour.
Okay.
The McChrystal Group, of course, being the Stanley McChrystal Group, previous commander of the war in Afghanistan.
Gather around, boys.
Check out my insurgent math.
What we do is we lose a war and then we make millions of dollars.
I mean, War Machine, the Netflix movie, which is, you know, based on McChrystal, is actually not even that absurdist.
It's not even that tragicomic or darkomic.
It's basically nonfiction.
It's just Michael Hastings' book is all it is.
It's perfect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Michael Hastings, by the way, before I got there, when the unit before me was there, visited my little combat outpost, Combat Outpost Pashmul South, which is the base where that sergeant had the gall, and I respect it, to email McChrystal and say, hey, you're asking us to do impossible missions.
Like, it is useless for us to patrol.
It's too dangerous out there.
Why don't you come down and patrol?
And of course, they did eventually get him to do it and put together like a relatively safe version.
But so that actually happened at my outpost.
I was kind of- Wow.
That's where you were.
Because so I was talking to him during- I was interviewing him during that time.
I'd call and it'd be four in the morning in Afghanistan and he'd be like, what's up, Scott?
And we'd sit there and do an interview.
And like right around all of that time that that was happening.
So now, like I already had a kind of mental picture of that place from his description.
So now I can place you there.
It's like when you find that you're driving down the street, you realize, oh, this leads to that.
Oh, okay.
Nice little connection.
I'll tell you, I mean, my soldiers went on 10 times more patrols in danger than I did.
But I just got to say, it was no effing joke down there.
I mean, I personally dove into a canal before getting through the serpentine of our gate because what he described in that book was accurate.
I mean, every square inch of territory outside of those sandbagged Alamo walls was Taliban held essentially.
You literally couldn't get out of the gate.
Hey man, do you know if that's the base, that's the same place where the guy set off the suicide bomb at the gate and nothing but his feet were left and they came and stole his shoes?
I don't think that that was Pashmul South, but I think it was in the same area of rural Kandahar.
Yeah, I'm almost certain it was in Kandahar province.
And I think that really messed him up, man.
Like here are these smoking legs standing there left over, and then these poor people come and steal the shoes off the smoking legs.
I don't know if they were still smoking by then.
Came and stole the shoes and ran off.
That was just humanity at its lowest point right there.
But it sounds about right.
We used to put together this program called Cash for Work, where at one point I had like 1,200 Afghans on my payroll.
I would pay them and they'd pretend to work.
And everyone would be like, what a great success, Danny.
You're paying all these guys to work.
That's going to stop the insurgency.
Of course it didn't.
And I would say to them, I'd say, do you understand there's something afoot here?
Because the Taliban attacks our patrols sometimes before they even get out the gate.
We have to take helicopters in and out of our smaller outposts.
Isn't it strange that the Taliban doesn't attack gatherings of 1,000 workers pretending to work in canals and lining up in a literal single file line to get paid once a week?
Could it be that the Taliban is on the take and I'm funding them through this program?
I raised that and you should have seen the colonels and generals who looked at me like I was nuts for even raising it.
In other words, we don't want to think about that.
It's not that they didn't believe it.
It was like they didn't even want to think about it.
So yeah, that was the area.
That was the area.
It was wild.
And that's just the story of the whole damn war right there.
You just heard it from the horse's mouth right there, everybody.
Army officer in the Kandahar province paying the Taliban to not shoot them in the daytime.
Just so you can fight them at night.
For God's sake.
My buddy, my lieutenant at the time, Jordan Rich, I wrote an article called The Not-So-Curious Case of Jordan Rich for Kelly over at the American Conservative a couple of years back.
He was in charge of the cash work program.
You want to talk about a guy who has seen the inside of what you're describing of paying off the Taliban and just all the problems with it.
He used to get so frustrated with these guys who would come and line up to get their pay every week.
I remember one time he took his knife and he slammed it into the desk and said that if they didn't stop complaining, he was going to cut one of their tongues out or something.
Because the stress of just this program and the way it was briefed to the generals as this massive success story, it reflected well on my career, frankly, what I was doing.
And that what he was actually executing for me.
And yet it was a disaster.
The whole thing was a fraud.
The whole thing was just a backslap.
And it really does speak to the whole war.
And of course, all the generals that lauded this and came to visit and came to visit my little militia, every one of those guys I've profiled in this article.
And of course, you know, if we had time, I could talk for six hours about it.
Man, you know, is it OK if I call you back later on and we'll just finish up this interview?
Because I hate to leave it here.
I guess we could leave them wanting more, but I wouldn't mind listening to you slam these scumbags either.
Oh, I'm happy to.
Yeah.
You name the time, I'll come back and I'd be happy.
I'll start with just like the eight guys that I know something about that I met and we'll see how it goes.
OK, killer.
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Okay.
So back here with Danny and where we left off, we wanted to go down this list.
This article is so good, it should have been published in some giant important thing.
Not that antiwar.com isn't giant and important, but I just mean gianter and even more important.
It's called Where Are They Now?
Leaders from My Afghan Tour Are On to Bigger and Bankable Things.
We already went through Petraeus and Allen and a couple of more of these.
Go ahead.
Crucify away, Danny.
Let them have it, man.
Well, they deserve it.
Look, I started with the generals and I'm going to highlight some of the guys that I knew.
Okay.
So, you know, quickly running down the list, you know, many of us know Petraeus.
Many of us know John Allen, who I talked briefly about.
Lieutenant General David Rodriguez headed the actual kind of ground component, right?
So the actual joint command.
So when guys like Petraeus and Allen were dealing with more of the strategic stuff and the Afghan linkage, that was the sort of tactical ground commander.
He went on to AFRICOM.
And where did he end up?
You guessed it.
One of the 12 out of 17 partners at the Stanley McChrystal Group Consulting, who was either a military or CIA veteran, including five retired generals.
So that's where he ended up.
That whole McChrystal Group is interesting.
If you've been following the COVID stuff with any closeness, you'll note that a number of cities have hired out the CIA and military veterans with their clear epidemiological and scientific background to help with like the COVID response, or at least the public safety response, including Boston and Kansas City, right?
In my little neck of the woods.
I didn't realize that.
I didn't.
Yeah.
I didn't know.
I did see where, was it you that brought this up?
Somebody brought this up to me that the McChrystal Group, McChrystal himself was bragging that they were working and using their counterinsurgency tools from Iraq and Afghanistan against Trump.
And that wherever they could find networks of pro-Trump people on the internet, they would use their counterinsurgency doctrine to jam their signals or flood them with negative reactions or whatever it is to try to disrupt them.
Just openly bragging about it.
Like, yeah, this is part of our counterinsurgency doctrine.
We use it against the Republicans because they were threatening to withdraw from somewhere or something.
From the war that he lost personally.
Right.
And he sold us an entire enormous bill of goods on, right?
I mean, the language he used, the over promising was really phenomenal.
They openly brag, even when he started the McChrystal Group in interviews and also on their own website, they describe how, what the whole concept was, we're going to take all the stuff we learned from COIN, you know, from counterinsurgency and anti-terrorism, we're going to apply it to, you know, sell these various municipalities and corporations on the right way to do business.
Because we learned about metric centric warfare, you know, network centric warfare, all this buzzword stuff.
I mean, it's almost a theology of COIN.
What it means is killing innocent people who seem to have the wrong phone number, maybe.
Right.
We don't mention that part quite as much as we should.
And I'm going to get to some of the SF leaders who were in charge of those night raids that were essentially unannounced into ground space commanders like me who dealt with the fallout.
And you know what?
Let me mention here real quick.
I'm sorry, but let me just interject here too, that our friend Gareth Porter, the greatest reporter in the world, he won the Gellhorn Award for his coverage of the drone wars in Afghanistan based on this pseudoscience of this, you know, network link analysis, killing people over their SIM cards.
And it's huge and important work that people can find if they just Google those words together.
Gareth Porter and network analysis and Gellhorn Award for a couple.
Yeah, I mean, Gareth is excellent on these issues and someone he's been on my podcast.
I'm sure you've talked to him a number of times.
The whole idea, the whole big lie of COIN is its precision.
You know, this idea that it's a kinder and gentler way to win.
But a lot of that is fluff.
A lot of the stuff that you saw McChrystal talking about with his marker boards and dry erase markers showing, you know, oh, look, I'll just draw out how this is really going to work.
And it's all about relationships is a load of B.S. because the reality is it involved, especially when he was the leader of the spooks and the raiders in Iraq, it was a whole lot of killing, a whole lot of droning.
Right.
And a lot of this was based on the science of what SIM card is in your phone, as you mentioned.
One of the things that struck me about Rodriguez, these guys are all are all friends.
I mean, if you look at the McChrystal group and who's on the staff, I mean, people who were his personal sort of aides and assistants there on the staff, people even from like Australia who worked Intel on his staff from the Australian army there on the McChrystal group staff.
Right.
They're the partners.
It's really interesting.
It's an it's an old boys club.
And you're referring to Kilcullen there.
I'm not.
I'm actually not referring to Kilcullen.
It's it's a different guy who was just a brigadier general.
Kilcullen, of course, was a big Petraeus guy and helped him write.
I can't even remember the number.
We were all handed this one pager in Iraq called like, you know, the twenty seven.
I think it might have been twenty seven.
Twenty seven rules of counterinsurgency.
You know, it's this bulletized numbered list of like the things you're supposed to do and not do.
And Kilcullen was one of the primary authors of that.
Also an Australian had, you know, been in East Timor, I believe, and selling this snake oil.
This guy was undoubtedly without even doing the research, probably a lackey within the Australian establishment of Kilcullen.
And when Kilcullen moved on to bigger and more prominent things after leaving the Iraq surge, McChrystal brings in this other, I believe at the time he was a full colonel, but then retired as a brigadier general, another Australian of the same mold who, oh, by the way, of course, is now on the McChrystal group staff.
And all of these networks are connected.
And everything that I found is open source.
You know, it's open source.
Anyone could have found this out.
All you have to do is dedicate the time, which can be a lot.
These connections are out there.
They're not highlighted the way that I have, because that would be inconvenient, because it as it almost feels like a conspiracy when you do that.
And to some extent it is.
Rodriguez leaves AFRICOM, where I believe he's in command during the, you know, some of the more scandalous, you know, escalations that went on there.
And he goes to the McChrystal group.
But the thing about, and I know it's just a coincidence, but Rodriguez is born and raised in Westchester, Pennsylvania, where, of course, you and I were at the grave of Smedley Butler.
Now, Rodriguez may or may not have heard of Smedley Butler.
We know the Republican congressional candidate hadn't, who was from there.
But I mean, this guy is like the inversion of Smedley Butler, right?
Because he's, he in his post-military career is actually working directly for the consultants to the war industry.
So but as we, as we jump down further, we've got- Let me just say here real quick, you know, you brought up the C word and it's kooky if you're talking about torches and robes and eyes wide shut stuff or whatever.
But if we're just talking about corporate boardrooms, then forget, you know, conspiracy.
It's just politics.
This is politics.
That's what politics means.
It's the fight over who has control over who gets the resources and who gets to decide which direction they go.
And this is what it's all about, is what you're, what you really, that's why I was saying it's just such an important piece, is you're providing kind of a shocking window straight into this is how it really works.
These are what Obi-Wan Kenobi called the economics of politics.
Right here, bare ass naked for everyone to see exactly what's going on here.
Absolutely.
And nobody gets, no one has any consequences when they fail.
No one bears any responsibility.
There are a number of people on this list who were embroiled in scandals, either over toxic leadership.
One of them didn't make the next star because he, his email communication came out where he was referring to a visiting congresswoman as a hottie, and then talking about how he performed a certain act on himself after she left.
Another guy was somewhat, not as much as he should have been, but was sort of complicit in the, were taken to be complicit in the attack on the hospital in Kunduz.
That's John Campbell.
In other words, and then you got Petraeus, of course, John Allen was very much embroiled in the whole scandal with the, that hosts this woman down in Tampa at CENTCOM.
In other words, even when these guys not only fail to win wars, right, not even when they over promise and under deliver, but even some of their personal life scandals, they don't follow them out of the military.
I mean, these guys get on the same boards.
It really is a club and they all know each other.
And back to Petraeus for a second here.
This is one of the benefits of the CIA owning the Washington Post lock, stock, and barrel is that we really get their point of view when it's in their interest, but against the interest of a guy like Petraeus.
So one of the things, and this was all just very transparent at the time, was that once he took over CIA, he tried to force them to do a big assessment saying that the war in Afghanistan was going great as long as he was there.
And they refused to do that because it was such a lie and they put it in the Washington Post.
Petraeus is trying to make us lie and say he did a good job in Afghanistan and we don't want to.
And they made a real big deal about it.
And then it was, you know, shortly after the Broadwell scandal came out, it was Phil Giraldi and some of the other CIA officers said, this was a coup d'etat, man.
You know, he came into the CIA and started barking orders at everybody like he was still in the military, but that's not how they talked to each other at CIA very well.
And they really bucked the way he tried to get them to cover for his failure in Afghanistan like that.
And so they were the ones then who behind the scenes leaked his scandal to the FBI.
Remember, that was how the Broadwell scandal broke out was the FBI was looking at John Allen's emails in regards to it and all this stuff.
And that was really like the CIA sticking the knife in Petraeus' back, which is fine.
He deserved that.
But after losing Afghanistan and taking over CIA, he was an early and harsh proponent of the let's arm al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria policy.
So he's lucky he's not sitting in a prison cell right now.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we talked about how the McChrystal group brags about using their sort of coin and counter-terror network centric warfare experience in the private sector.
You know, I remember full well, I actually read the stuff that they gave us during the Petraeus era, especially in Iraq.
And one of the main points that they always slid in there was the importance of strategic messaging.
But if you read past that buzzword, you notice that what it was was propaganda, that that the narrative fight, they would use that term.
In fact, the narrative fight is as important as the physical fight.
This is the Petraeus game.
This is his message.
This is what he was selling us.
So now when he gets into CIA and when he gets into the private sector and he's trying to strategically message a cleansing of his own reputation, right, that that all makes sense.
And you see that these guys really are applying a formula that never worked in terms of actually winning wars or bringing any good to humanity.
But they're applying it anyway, tactically in their private lives, either to make money or or improve their reputations.
Yep.
You know, Kelly Vlahos did such great work on this back at the time during 2009 in the height of the coin fad, really, as it, you know, played out as they were rolling Obama into the surge then.
And she talked about this is one of the things I quoted in my book from her was talking about going to these conferences in D.C. where everyone is wearing their smart skirts.
I'm not exactly sure what makes a skirt smart, but it's part of business where that it's a very smart skirt that these women are wearing.
And these very snappy and shiny dress uniforms from these junior officers.
And they're all just, you know, and there's three piece suit guys there, too, and whatever pantsuit type civilian types, too.
And they're all just milling about all being very important and all getting attention for being there and making their connections and this whole thing.
And this is a social circuit.
That's all it is.
This is the military industrial complex having drinks and talking about how they can justify their own existence.
You'd recognize it as the simplest racket in the world in any other context, you know.
And I mean, that's what it is.
It really is a racket.
It's a rebranding of failure.
And every one of these guys was in on it.
You know, as I go through the folks that I know, right.
So James Terry commanded the 10th Mountain Division, Danny Davis, who many of your listeners know, and I know you do, had his own run ins with James Terry, Major General type, and, you know, doesn't have the most positive view of him.
And I remember when he was my division commander in 10th Mountain Division down in Kandahar.
Well, you know, he visited and, you know, he was a big proponent of pretty much anything that came out of the bosses above his mouth, whether it was McChrystal and then Petraeus and then Allen and on and on.
Well, he retires in November 2015 after becoming lieutenant general, but not quite getting that fourth star, you know.
And he said that, oh, when I retire, I'm not going to do anything too fast.
I'm going to shave my head and grow a beard and walk the Appalachian Trail.
We'll see.
But instead, he stuck to those business suits and business as usual.
And so what is he doing?
Well, after graduating a class behind the guy who took over for him, General Huggins, my other division commander, in quote, the from the battlefield to the boardroom National Association of Corporate Directors program.
They literally have a annual class.
He walked into Cubic Global Defense, where he is literally listed as a senior vice president in quote, the contractor's global defense business segment.
OK, his boss, his new boss, himself a retired vice admiral, explained that the reason it's so good to have Terry is because he's going to oversee efforts to pursue business opportunities in ground training systems and services for the Army, the Marine Corps, special forces in the Middle East region.
I mean, they brag.
This is on their website.
This is in the announcements.
They brag about basically insider knowledge, conflicts of interest.
And so as I drop down now a bit, right, as I drop down to the colonels, that's how it happens.
How it happens is, and a lot of folks who've studied the military industrial complex talk about this.
But what I tried to do here was personalize it a bit, right, to put place names.
Not everyone liked that I did that.
Whatever.
I don't care.
We've got to name names.
But what happens now is the general moves to the boardroom.
The colonel moves to be the next general.
And these relationships stay strong.
And oh, by the way, so does the influence, OK?
One of the good ones, my old first sergeant, Eric Diaz, right, he just texted me to say happy Veterans Day.
We're still buddies.
And he still says, hey, sir, happy Veterans Day.
It's an old habit.
The reason I mention that is he's a good dude who didn't take the Army too seriously despite doing a career in it.
And he put his soldiers first, which is a rare thing.
What do you think these guys do?
They still maintain that relationship.
The general who's now in the boardroom is still sir, and the colonel who becomes the general and now has the ability to affect acquisitions, to affect which systems they're using, they step up to the plate, right?
They reach the helm, and that influence continues.
And they're groomed, as I said in the subtitle of one section of my article, they're now groomed for the McNext.
They're groomed to go to the next boardroom and consultancy.
So just dropping down, I mean, the fastest, I mean, I could do it so fast.
Colonel Robin Fontes, who was in charge of training Afghan security forces in the north, okay, well, what does she do now?
Well, she is the deputy head of Cyber Command.
Oh, that's a pretty decent perch to maybe pitch yourself to Palantir Technologies, you know, the CIA-seeded organization that General John Tulin, who commanded Helmand when I was there, now works advising, right?
And oh, why would Palantir hire Tulin?
I mean, why hire a guy who only topped out at three stars?
Could it be related to the fact that when he was in Afghanistan with me in Helmand, that he praised the company in a letter to the Marine Corps Counterterrorism Center, saying that Palantir reduced the time required to do our work, and he even said, I hope the Marine Corps will further its relationship with Palantir, right?
So they hire him, and now Robin Fontes, right, she's at Cyber Command, and I can't say for sure what she's going to do, but I'll tell you what, that's a place where I bet Palantir would like to see some more business.
You know, and you drop down, and who do you got next?
Well, Colonel Mark Schwartz was in charge of the night raiders, right?
He was in charge of JSOC Task Force Afghanistan during the second half of my tour, right?
These guys who were just causing chaos, and usually didn't even really announce they were coming into our sector to do a raid, didn't even tell us what the intelligence was about.
If they told us at all, it was 30 minutes before, and just like a, hey, you know, just so you know, we're doing this.
Well, he's a three-star general now, and he works where?
Well, as the US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but they shouldn't even mention the Palestinian Authority, because every single move he's made, every single speech he's given to Israeli bond investors, literally, has been utterly pro-Israel, which is no surprise.
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Womack, who on his rise to his now one-star general perch, was accused of toxic leadership and retaliation against the whistleblower, Major, who called out fraud, waste, and abuse in the 25th Infantry Division, whereas he's out in Poland using his international level toxicity to maybe, you know, provoke unnecessary conflict with Russia, because he's out there as the Deputy Chief of Staff of NATO Poland, right?
NATO Multinational Corps Northeast.
And you could just go on and on, and you drop down to each level.
Pat Matlock, who was a colonel in charge of a brigade combat team in northern Afghanistan, you know, he's up at US Forces Korea.
Down the list, the guys who retired, like Colonel Creighton up in Erzgun Province, right, where he took over for the Dutch in 2010 or 11, I think in 2010, because he was there for the first half of my tour, he's consulting at PASS LLC, right, a consultancy partnering with a variety of stakeholders around the world.
Well, who are their clients?
Well, they list them out, not only global humanitarian and development organizations, but governments and IGOs, right, intergovernmental organizations.
And of course, PASS LLC is registered as an agent of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
But I don't know if he'll stick with them, because he just won a Republican seat in the New Hampshire state legislature.
And you know, I only picked three of the guys who retired, but Colonel James Blackburn works, he's been working for quite some time for Mistral Incorporated, which admits that it serves as, quote, a bridge between the requirements of our armed forces and innovative, relevant, ready solutions.
In other words, look, they use their insider knowledge, and they peddle different, you know, things that the organizations they work for either build or sell to the military, using their relationships, using the knowledge, including, in Mistral's case, trying to sell a tactical electric scooter to JSOC.
And you know, it goes on and on.
Brian Denny works for the Spectrum Group, you know, which lists its own services as government relations, government solutions, defense aerospace systems, and defense groups, right?
And now he's a consultant and partner at MASS X5, Roman numerals, MASS 15, Maneuver Combat Systems Consulting, which provides unique perspectives on maneuver combat systems, blah, blah, blah, to the Army and Marine Corps, which means he takes his experience as a cavalry squadron commander, and he is able to sell maneuver combat systems, which means ground vehicles, folks, to the Army and the Marine Corps.
So you know, that's just a cursory look at a list of about, you know, I don't know, 20 names that I chose to name.
I like this.
Yeah.
If I had more time, I could do all 50 of them.
Sure.
And I mean, the article is so great.
I'm begging people, you've got to go and read through this whole thing.
But it's great.
I love the way you describe that, because essentially what he is, is a bizarro world car salesman, right?
Where like, in the actual, you know, economy, if his job was providing goods and services to people, he would sell Chevys, which, you know, people smear car salesmen.
I don't know, maybe you got to be kind of a snake to be good at it.
But anyway, at least he would be providing transportation to civilians who want some, or something like that, you know, on the market in a voluntary sense.
Instead, all his talents are just being wasted, just like all the money that goes into this.
Just think of the lost opportunity costs of all of these brains.
And for that matter, you know, forearms in all of the goods and services that could be provided out there in the world.
How many hammers aren't being swung and how many, you know, new methods of distribution of goods and services to people aren't being engineered.
Because instead they're sitting there drawing some stupid machine gun for a Bradley fighting vehicle they don't even need.
No, I mean, absolutely.
You know, John Campbell, who commanded RC East, right, commanded the whole 101st Airborne, which is just like all of the mountains on the Pakistani border.
He works for BAE Systems, right, Board of Directors.
Well, what does BAE produce?
They produce every ground combat vehicle, all the vehicles, right, for all the US Army armored brigades, right, except for the Abrams tank itself, which is made elsewhere.
But all the other vehicles, we're talking like a dozen different vehicles.
They produce it.
This guy retires and within 47 days, 47 days of his retirement, he's on the Board of Directors of the organization, right, the Military Industrial Complex War Industry Profiteer Organization that provides all the vehicles except one for the very ground combat units he was responsible for commanding for 30 something years in the Army.
There aren't ...
We don't even pretend that we have ethics laws that get followed when it comes to the Military Industrial Complex and nobody talks about it.
Everyone pats on the back.
It's Veterans Day today as we record.
We have to thank him for his service, right?
Oh, he's a hero.
We adulate our generals.
No one talks about the fact that, as I mentioned at the end of the article, the soldiers, many of them, but the one that bled to death because the Medevac helicopter didn't get there in time for a number of reasons made $29,000 in base pay on that tour.
What do you think BAE Systems is paying John Campbell?
Do you think John Campbell really spends that much time wondering about the, since he was a division commander, dozens or scores of soldiers who died on the same kind of air assaults under his command for a war that was ludicrous from the start and he's feeding now, that he's feeding the perpetuation of?
I refuse to adulate these guys and put them on a pedestal, refuse, because I think we all ought to.
I'll tell you, one of the things that came out of Trump talking about the military and kind of attacking the generals there, especially at the end, was this idea that the whole military was turning against Trump.
It's not all about Trump, but it's about what he said and the idea that the rank and file is going to follow the political instincts and recommendations of the type of guys who write letters to the Washington Post against Trump is a total misunderstanding of a rank and file that doesn't even trust me as a captain implicitly, let alone the senior officers who are from another species as far as most soldiers are concerned.
Yeah.
In the 1990s, I used to listen to a lot of Colonel David Hackworth, who he was the most decorated officer from the Vietnam War.
He ended up dying of bladder cancer from the Agent Blue poisoning.
But anyway, so his whole thing was essentially, you know, he was like a right wing anti-war guy.
And his whole thing was essentially like class war on behalf of the enlisted men.
And the way he talked about it was the enlisted men, they're the humans, right?
They're the American people who are serving their country.
The officers, that's the government.
That's the enemy.
And they don't give a damn about the enlisted men.
And they'd be happy to click their heels and follow the dumbest civilian orders and march their men right off a cliff like lemmings and this kind of thing.
And that was why they needed people like him on the outside to be such strong advocates.
And so his opposition to Iraq War II was solely from that point of view, was that he was trying to fight against the start of that war because it's going to be bad for the GIs, period.
They're going to be fighting.
Sure, Sean Hannity, this is all fun and games to you, but these boys are going to be fighting in strange cities.
They're going to be sniped at from rooftops.
They're going to have bombs set off, landmines on roads they're not familiar with, fighting between buildings and other people's towns on the far side of the planet.
Ain't going to be fun.
And that was his whole thing about it was, that was the division to him between enlisted and officers was everything.
And in his point of view, the officers couldn't care less about the GIs.
I mean, too many of them, no one wants to talk about it in the civilian world where we lump all soldiers together.
We don't care if you were a fueler or a Navy SEAL.
We don't care if you were a private or a general, right?
Everyone's a hero.
But the reality is that there has always been a massive class, but more cultural even, divide within the military.
I wrote about it a little bit in Ghostwriters, I think, but I remember sitting in the bleachers, I think it was right after we got back from Iraq, you know, waiting for like some ceremony or something.
And my buddies, guys I liked, okay, that I hung out with, were literally talking about like day trading stocks and, you know, what kind of jobs they wanted to get with their West Point degrees after the war, you know, after they got out of the army at their five year minimum commitment.
And they were saying this within, they were talking about this within earshot of their own soldiers.
And I don't know, it struck me, it made my stomach hurt.
And I felt like I don't fit with either of these groups.
And I don't mean to personalize, but that's always been an issue for me.
But you know, a lot of the soldiers have the feeling that, you know, Joseph Heller got in Catch-22 where he had Yossarian say, the enemy, he said, is anybody who's going to get you killed no matter which side he's on.
And that includes Colonel Cathcart.
And in other words, like I saw that, I saw soldiers get killed and lose their legs and get wounded on missions, especially like on like air assaults and these just like kinetic actions and raids that we literally did because the boss's boss said, I want to do X number of these, you know, every month or something.
I want to show how aggressive I am.
And your officer evaluation report, when you write the report card on junior people below you, you're coached, hey, make sure you use like measurable numbers and statistics, measurable things.
So a lot of, like I've got officer evaluation reports that say, uh, Danny completed X number of patrols or whatever.
And so if, if you're a Colonel and you can have it say, oh, he did 19 air assaults during the course of his time.
I mean, that's a ticket to the next level.
And if you don't think that that drives these people, then I mean, you're misunderstanding human nature.
It's not even just about them.
They're not all sociopaths, although a surprising number are, it's, it's just how it works in any job.
The problem is that in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan in 2011 and 12 and you know, throughout the war, but especially during the surge that a lot of people died behind that nonsense.
A lot of people die behind that nonsense and none of them were seen as candidates, right?
To rotate through the revolving door to these six and seven figure jobs.
That wasn't an option for Chas Ray Clark, who's the soldier from Michigan with a wife and a mother and a step child who bled to death with both his legs off on the LZ.
There was no option for him, right?
They weren't, they weren't looking at him for the next job on the board of advisors at BAE, which buys all the vehicles for the brigades.
And I don't know, there's just, we don't talk about this enough.
Maybe it's because the military industrial complex has a hyphen in it and anything with a hyphen is too complicated and large of a systemic issue.
That's what I was trying to do here, really.
And I hope, I hope I had some success.
And look, I mean, on the very lowest end of this, you got guys who are, I don't know if they were even illegal immigrants.
Maybe they were just immigrants on a green card who fought in the war and then they still can't even have citizenship.
They're deported.
So talk about not getting a dividend from BAE systems.
How about get your ass back to Madam Morris because you're still not welcome here.
I don't care if you did lose half your leg in Kandahar province.
You know, I've, I've had soldiers who were, were immigrants.
I have had soldiers who were undocumented who were killed and wounded under my command.
I'm wearing, you know, I'm wearing the name of one on my wrist right now.
And yeah, I mean it's, the whole thing is, is absolutely, it's, it's ludicrous.
It is, it is so, it is not spoken enough one thousandth as much as it should be.
And you're not going to see it as much in the New York Times and the Washington Post because they're all in on the same game.
They go, I mean it's a platitude, but it's true.
And Kelly mentioned it and you quoted her earlier.
They go to the same parties, they like the same restaurants, you know, they're all part of the same game.
So when you see those pictures of like Clinton, Obama and Bush slapping each other on the back, don't think that doesn't go down a few levels, right?
To the senior officers and the mid-level civilian, you know, managers of the war state.
It's, it's, this is how it works.
And my soldiers and everybody else's soldiers, it's a big club as George Carlin used to say, and you ain't in it.
Well, they ain't in it.
That's right.
None of us are.
You know what too, man, just to me, this is the perfect little bit of it, is this is how the war in Libya got started, was after George Bush made friends with Gaddafi, John McCain went over there with Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, the three amigos they call themselves, which is just a disgrace to Martin Short and Steve Martin and Chevy Chase, who were great.
But anyway, they call it, they were the three worst hawks in the Senate, in other words.
And they went over there to sell them some armored personnel carriers on behalf of BAE systems.
In fact, it was the one time my voice, not my face, but my voice made it onto the old Colbert report.
It was, I was explaining that to Judge Napolitano on Fox Business Channel.
And they sampled that like, actually, John McCain was just trying to sell armored personnel carriers to Gaddafi just a couple of years ago.
But that was the thing.
He wouldn't just give up the money and take the stupid trucks.
So they killed him.
And John McCain, of course, I mean, I guess a simpler explanation would be to protect from the embarrassment that he had been trying to sell this guy weapons so recently, he decided to cry the loudest for regime change to protect himself.
The same as Sarkozy in France, who'd taken all that money from Gaddafi for his election, who decided who Gaddafi?
I've never heard of him.
Let's go get him.
Yeah.
Who's he?
He sounds bad.
Same kind of deal.
And you know, if they hadn't done that, then they would have never created the Islamic State in Syria either.
And you probably have, you know, half a million or more Syrians still alive right now.
I mean, it is it is connected to that level.
I mean, you're not exaggerating.
That's the crazy part.
Right.
Don't you wish that some of what we're talking about here was hyperbole?
I really wish it was.
But many of these guys who were architects or executors of, say, the Iraq surge and then the early Afghan surge, when they rotated either into senior civilian government officials like Petraeus or rotated into the military industrial complex consulting or think tank world, they were some of the loudest voices, as you mentioned, loudest voices for regime change in Libya, for regime change and arming the, quote, moderate rebels in Syria.
These are the same guys.
Right.
So they as if enough failure and enough American blood on their hands, you know, trying to put in place these these ridiculous snake oil strategies wasn't enough.
They don't just retire and go teach military history at some college where they can't do that much harm.
No, no, no, no, no.
They lend their voice, their weight, their relationships on the inside to push for these profitable in terms of money for the military industrial complex, but not profitable in blood and cost to both the American taxpayer and in many cases, like you mentioned, up to a half a million civilians and the creation of the Islamic State.
None of that is hyperbole.
It's all demonstrable.
You know, someone someone pay me at The New York Times and I'll write you an article like this every week and I'll never run out of stories and I won't even have to try that hard.
Well, you know what?
The Democratic secretary of defense, who was also in your chain of command back in 2010, the deputy secretary of defense for policy, the cross eyed idiot, Michelle Flournoy, who got paid millions of dollars to create the Center for a New American Security with John Nagel and all those other hacks back in 2008 and nine.
They created originally to be the defense and State Department in waiting for Hillary Clinton, basically.
But then Obama won.
So they just took over his government instead.
And they were the ones who forced him to do the search, who was seen as was at the core of all of that.
And then Flournoy took the undersecretary for policy spot and right there along with Petraeus McChrystal.
And you lost that war.
Oh, no offense.
I mean, it was their fault, not yours.
But yeah, I totally take my role seriously.
She's been cashing in in the meantime, too.
I know you do.
I wouldn't.
You know, I remember.
I think I mentioned that the Atlantic Council was the number three recipient of defense contractor.
Yeah.
I'm looking at the report right now from C.I.P.
You know, Center for New American Security.
It's the number two recipient of contractor in U.S. government money.
But it's really number one if you rule out the Rand Corporation, because Rand is basically a subsidiary of the U.S. government.
Right.
And they were in the Air Force, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Rand is number two at eight point nine million, which is just over the last five years.
And again, it is a pittance, you know, how easy it is to buy these people off.
But if you look at Biden's team, this is a seen as team.
This is the consultancy industrial complex team.
I can't remember which one.
I think it's I think it's Jake Sullivan, who was by Clinton's side.
I think even Ghost wrote some of the chapters for her book.
He was with her in like one hundred nine countries.
I think you mentioned Lieberman earlier, Lieberman and McCain.
I'm pretty sure.
I'll double check it.
But one of the guys listed by Max Boot as Biden's A team on foreign policy, and I do think it's Sullivan, who's very close to Flournoy, I believe his wife was a senior advisor on foreign policy, too.
Well, she was to the Biden, I mean, to the McCain Lieberman team.
Right.
So in other words, this is a bipartisan enterprise, even through marriage, even through that.
But that's a really important thing to note, is that this Biden team coming in is as thickly dug into this as anybody else, just because they weren't a lobbyist directly for Raytheon.
Don't let that fool you.
These guys were big proponents of all the failure of the last 12 years.
Yeah.
You know, Christian, I'm a poor married Jamie Rubin right in the middle of the Kosovo war while she's selling that thing on CNN, hardcore back in ninety nine.
It's all fun, you know, but for now, I'll let you go and have dinner with your people But thank you so much for your time.
It's great talking to you as always, Danny.
Hey, man.
Thanks a lot.
I appreciate everything.
We'll talk soon.
And again, everybody, the article is where are they now?
Leaders from my Afghan tour are on to bigger and bankable things.
It's at antiwar dot com and, you know, post it and share it and show all your friends.
It's really something else.
This one.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A., APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
