1/22/21 David Swanson on Joe Biden’s Dangerous Cabinet Appointments

by | Jan 23, 2021 | Interviews

David Swanson discusses the foreign policy of the incoming Biden administration. On the positive side, he thinks there’s a good likelihood of ending U.S. support for the war in Yemen, lifting some of America’s oppressive economic sanctions and better relations with Iran and Cuba. But on the other hand, many of Biden’s key appointments have been people who support more war and international hegemony for the United States at any cost. In particular, this means expanding NATO even farther into Eastern Europe and challenging China for global economic supremacy. Peaceful relations with both Russia and China, Scott reminds us, are absolutely crucial not just for America, but for the future of the human race itself. Any policy that threatens this peace must be energetically opposed.

Discussed on the show:

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, radio host, and Nobel Peace Prize Nominee. He is the author of War is a LieWhen the World Outlawed War and Leaving World War II Behind. Find him on Twitter @davidcnswanson.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/ScottPhoto IQGreen Mill SupercriticalZippix Toothpicks; and Listen and Think Audio.

Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through PatreonPayPal, or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG.

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All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got David Swanson, the great antiwar activist and author.
His most recent book is Leaving World War Two Behind.
If you missed it, read the book and go back and listen to my last interview with the man about it.
It's really great.
And he also wrote War is a Lie and a ton of other stuff going back at least to the Bush years.
I know he's probably good during Clinton, too.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, man?
Great, Scott.
How are you?
Real good.
Happy to talk to you again.
And so things have changed.
And now the liberal Democrats are in power in Washington.
And I wonder what you think that means for the near term and medium and long term future of American foreign policy.
Well, nothing good guaranteed.
Not time to head off to brunch and brush off your hands and be done with activism.
Potential for some good, potential for some bad, right?
There's a possibility of ending the war on Yemen and not having it vetoed.
There's a possibility of ending sanctions on the International Criminal Court and maybe even partially on some countries where people are suffering.
There's a possibility of better relations with Iran or with Cuba.
There's also, you know, a steadfast intention to continue increasing military spending, to invest in dramatic, massive spending on good things without taking a dime of it out of the military, to put in power top officials who favor wars and coups, who want to keep the war on Afghanistan going, want to overthrow Russia, want to overthrow Venezuela, brought the coup figures to the inauguration for Venezuela.
There are, you know, people in power now who want to push the hostility, the belligerence toward Russia.
You have a secretary of state nominee who testified that yes, he would like to add Georgia, and apparently also Ukraine, to NATO, even if it means war.
This is sheer madness.
So there are good points and good promises to make sure get fulfilled and carried beyond what's been promised.
And there are some very dangerous inclinations to continue some of the same disastrous trends of the past couple of presidencies, and in some ways possibly even worse.
So David, I'm not sure if you remember this specifically, I'm sure you remember the thing, but maybe you could help me with the name here.
Wasn't it the new director of the CIA, not Sullivan, Burns, William Burns, wasn't he the guy that wrote the memo that said, Nyet means Nyet, where Sergei Lavrov told me today that if we think we're going to bring Ukraine into NATO, that we need to remember that they can be in Kiev in two weeks, and that he really meant it, and that we should listen.
I think that was the guy who's now going to be the head of the CIA that wrote that.
You're absolutely right.
And I know you're right, because I've been doing so many webinars nonstop that I've done some of them together with Ray McGovern.
And he's very big on precisely that sort of point, and on the new director of the CIA, should he be confirmed.
See, my long-term memory is awesome.
Anyway, go ahead.
It's my short-term memory matches up with your long-term memory, that's, you know, there's our strengths, you know, and converse weaknesses, maybe.
I think, you know, Ray is a believer in the potential of the CIA to be a force for good.
I see no possible good whatsoever out of the thing and want it abolished entirely and immediately.
But given that, would I rather have had Mike Morell, who many of us opposed and were delighted and proud if we contributed in any tiny way to him not getting nominated, we would rather have this guy, Burns.
Absolutely right.
Yeah, I mean, on the scale of things, not that you or I would have nominated the guy, but thank God he's not Mike Morell.
Well, tell us about why you would be so opposed to Mike Morell being the director of the CIA, because it's not like he's dead and gone or anything.
You know, he might be next.
He might very well be next.
He might be brought in somehow.
He might be used unofficially.
He is a supporter of wars and coups and torture, you know, but he's matched by the already confirmed new director of national intelligence, who is in theory the boss of the director of the CIA.
I'm talking about Averill Haynes, who not only drafted the legalistic-ish memos that, you know, justified blowing people up with missiles from drones and who was not asked a single question about missiles or drones or killing anyone during her confirmation hearing, at least the public bit of it, and who has not only supported a previous nominee for CIA, who was instrumental in the torture program, but also defended the torture program and awarded and refused to punish the members of the CIA who hacked into the Senate computers to sabotage the Senate report on torture, and who censored three quarters of that report on torture from the public.
And she was, and she was asked ludicrously, do you support torture?
And she said, no, sir.
And that was the end of it.
She wasn't asked about a single horrible thing she'd done in the past.
And so how is she going to work out, you know, as a past apologist, facilitator of torture and murder with this guy Burns at director of CIA, who comes from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, which I think unfortunately says a lot more about the Carnegie Endowment for Peace partially funded by the United Arab Emirates than it does about the CIA as an institution and who himself, you know, has supported war on Syria and so forth.
You know, what's, what's going to be the outcome of putting these people with apparently clashing histories together in the so-called intelligence, so-called community?
I don't know.
Yeah, man, you know, I, please don't anyone get me wrong that I'm all caught up in believing in hope and change or any of these things, but I do kind of get the feeling that Biden is one of the least worst hawks in his government.
And I know he's horrible on East Europe issues.
I mean, he helped do the coup in Ukraine in 14.
So and that's the only issue in the world that matters.
America's relationship with Russia.
Every other issue in the world is in a millionth place after that.
I mean, this is the war that could end humankind, set our civilizations back 10,000 years for the few survivors if we had a real nuclear war with Russia.
So there's that.
But on the other hand, I guess I'm imagining this guy, Sullivan, saying to Biden, you know, we really can't bring Ukraine into NATO because then we'll all die in a nuclear war, see.
And then Biden possibly saying that that makes good sense, you know, rather than being as as horrible as he could be.
I could see him being less than as horrible as he could be.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Biden, Biden opposed, supposedly opposed the war on Libya for good reasons, but didn't, you know, publicly oppose it, didn't, you know, throw didn't resign over it.
And so what was the wisdom that Joe Biden had to oppose that war that doesn't apply to every other current and potential war?
Right.
I've I've just today you can go to WorldBeyondWar.org, DavidSwanson.org.
I've written an open letter to Biden quoting his pope.
You know, this is a Catholic president with a pope who back in October of of this past year finally came out against all wars, current and potential.
They are all wrong.
Now, I don't want blind obedience to anybody's head of their religion, but at least give it a modicum of consideration.
Right.
And you, Scott, you'd probably be more pleased by this bit than than I am.
But in that that hearing with with Blinken for secretary of state, you sat through all these senators, several senators with not a word of criticism of his past record of war after war after war until you got to Rand Paul.
It took it took getting all the way down the list to Rand Paul before anybody said, Mr. Blinken, you supported this war.
Have you learned anything?
And then you supported this war.
Have you learned anything?
Right.
And and who pushed him on this, adding adding Georgia and Ukraine to NATO.
So it's you know, there was a little teeny bit of of question.
I haven't seen that.
I'm glad that that happened.
Thank you for telling me about that.
I'll look that up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Two days ago now, I saw a couple of clips from the hearing, but I didn't see that part.
So, yeah, that's great.
That was that was key because, you know, somebody had to do it.
But but, you know, the vast bulk of the questions in that hearing and in Avril Haines hearing and in other hearings had nothing to do with the past performance of the nominees and had everything to do with how much will you hate China?
Are you really willing to hate China?
Just how belligerent can we get with China?
I mean, just this is it's insane.
It was it was it was stunning.
Yeah.
It really is amazing.
And well, so let's focus on China then a bit more.
For all their bluster, anybody refer to anything the Chinese had actually done that we should be concerned about or just they look funny or something or don't like red flags?
They claim to live near the South China Sea, which, as you and I know, is just off the coast of the United States.
They also mistreat Uyghurs and mistreat this group and mistreat that group and have a poor human rights record and so forth.
You know, much of which is true, much of which is false.
Everybody's got a horrible government, including the Chinese.
But but absolute madness in terms of hostility and potential steps to take on China.
And really, the bulk of it came down not to some particular atrocity the Chinese had committed real or fictional, but to competitiveness.
I mean, in the words of Blinken, China wants to be the leading country in the world.
I mean, this I mean, it's just irrational, childish.
We don't want them to be the number one country on Earth, whatever the hell that means.
Right.
As if a country with many times the people and many times the poor people shouldn't have more money than a country with with many times fewer the people.
I mean, who wouldn't want that?
As though there's one pile of money that America and China are fighting over sharing rather than we have to work together to generate more wealth for everyone from now on, of course.
And what did President Carter tell President Trump?
China is beating you economically because they don't spend all their money on wars.
And so how does the United States propose to respond to that?
More wars because China, I mean, that's irrational on its own terms.
Seriously.
Even if the money was free somehow, just think of the opportunity cost of all those engineers whose job it has been to work at the Pentagon, slaving away at these absolutely useless projects for even just since the end of the Cold War, even just since the dawn of the 21st century here.
I mean, what would America be like if all those talented men and women had just had real jobs in the world instead of this waste?
How do we deliver a high explosive to some woman's head?
Yeah, no question about it.
And the economists have no dispute about it.
And you get more jobs and better paying jobs by putting the money into anything else and even not taxing it from working people in the first place.
We are.
Trump.
You know, Trump leaving is 60 years from Eisenhower leaving and warning of the military industrial complex corrupting every fiber of our society.
And he couldn't have been more right.
And you know that the facts are against it.
But the mythology, the culture is in favor of it.
So we need to educate people.
Yeah.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
If you want a real education in history and economics, you should check out Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Tom and a really great group of professors and experts have put together an entire education of everything they didn't teach you in school, but should have follow through from the link in the margin at Scott Horton dot org for Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
Look here.
You and I both know that what you need is some Libertarian Institute things like shirts and sweatshirts and mugs and stickers to put on the back of your truck and to give to your friends, too, that say Libertarian Institute on them so that everyone will know the origins of your oppositional defiant disorder and where they can listen to all the best podcasts.
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Go to Libertas Bella dot com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at Libertarian Institute dot org Libertas Bella dot com.
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Time to end the war on terrorism.
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I have the list and you will be getting all your stuff as soon as my boxes of wholesale copies arrive.
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You know, there's this phenomenon and I know you're so familiar with it, too, that especially among liberal Democrats, you know, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, just stick with Blinken for a second.
I mean, he's the poster boy for this, right?
That like, OK, yes, I'm a Democrat and not a Republican, but I'm not a hippie.
I'm not a leftist.
I'm not a peacenik.
Please don't think that about me.
In fact, let me demonstrate how wonky an interventionist I am, why I think we could apply smart pressure and sanctions and regime changes and the thing and the thing.
And look at me.
I'm a think tank, imperialist wonk, just like you guys.
So please don't think me a wimp.
Right.
Hillary Clinton is, you know, obviously the ultimate example of this.
You know, everything has to be muscular, muscular to prove what feminine and peaceful woman she's not.
Right.
Or prove what a hippie liberal leftist she's not.
And so I wonder how we overcome that.
Right.
Where so much of this comes down to the most kind of, as you said, childish, just sort of social psychology.
Right.
Like if you look at at Barack Obama giving in to Petraeus on Afghanistan, well, he didn't want to look weak.
So he gave in to his general and launched a big, tough war.
Right.
So on one hand, he was absolutely being weak and looked weak.
But on the other hand, he looked tough by launching a big war.
And so he made that political gamble and it paid off for him instead of not paying off for him.
David, you know, Senator Jean Shaheen in the Blinken hearing said, will you support this bit of militarism?
Will you support this war?
Will you support that war?
And then after an endless series of these sorts of, you know, warmongering questions, she said, now, are you aware that studies show that when you let women participate in the peace negotiations, you have a 35 percent higher likelihood of a lasting peace settlement.
And are you ready to empower women?
You know, and you had another senator asking, now, what steps will you take to empower the LGBT community and so forth and all of these, you know, all of these steps.
But under the banner of slaughtering men, women and children for women's rights, you know, it's just maddening.
I mean, isn't the right not to have your house blown up a human right?
Doesn't that count as a right for men, women, children of every demographic?
It's just, it's just insane.
I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to criticize women in particular for pushing back against the stereotypes they face, but it's, it's men and women, both in the U.S. government with, with, you know, a few key exceptions who are disproportionately women, that, that, that drive this, this militarism, this, this military madness, as Dr. King called it.
You know, thank goodness that Ilhan Omar is there, that Ayanna Pressley is there, that AOC is there, that, you know, that, that Ro Khanna represents the, you know, the entire male gender, that, that there are a handful that are beginning to push back and that Congresswoman Lee and Congressman Pocan are forming a military spending reduction caucus that they call the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus to actually get Congress members to take a stand for moving money out of the military.
The vast majority of the U.S. public could go for that, but the vast majority of the U.S. Congress is not yet there.
Yeah.
All right.
So is this really right?
I had missed this.
Did you say that they brought the Juan Guaido and his friends to Joe Biden's inauguration?
The Democrats did?
Not Guaido himself, but his leading, his leading coup instigator.
I'm forgetting the guy's name for a second here.
But I can, I can tell you.
Is it Lopez?
Something like that?
Leopoldo Lopez or something?
Maybe.
You can, you can find it in 30 seconds.
But it wasn't Ted Cruz that brought him.
It was the Democrats that brought him?
No, no.
It was Biden.
It was Biden.
And, and, and again, Blinken was asked point blank in, in his confirmation hearing as Secretary of State, not Secretary of War, do you support the ongoing efforts to instigate a coup and install Juan Guaido in Venezuela?
And he said, yes, hell yes.
So you know, the, the, the coups are ongoing.
I mean, and, and, and of course, Victoria Nuland, who is nominated to be Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, openly supports a coup in Russia.
If you want to, if you want to up your level of insanity a bit.
Yeah.
And she's, of course, Robert Kagan's wife.
And I don't want anyone to misunderstand like that's a, some sort of sexist thing or anything like that.
It's just that he is one of the worst architects of American imperialism and intellectual, you know, water carriers, I guess.
That's just as bad.
Yeah.
I mean, he is, he's the guy that wrote with Bill Kristol in 1996, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, where they declared benevolent global hegemony and was really, you know, helped found PNAC and was one of the major architects outside of government of getting us into Iraq War II and all of these things.
And she has been, you know, very involved in a lot of this stuff, worked for Dick Cheney, helped do the coup in Ukraine in 2014, as you said, has threatened the Russians.
And I just saw this.
I didn't put in my book because I felt like I'd be stealing it from Max Blumenthal, but I saw it on Twitter.
I hadn't realized this, that she had written in Foreign Affairs that Trump should not be fighting ISIS in Syria because he's just giving a helping hand to Iran for free.
Yes.
She also worked for Dick Cheney.
She also was instrumental in facilitating a coup in Ukraine and went around the square handing out cookies to the, to the coup makers, you know, a, a, a not literally Nazi aligned government there in Ukraine.
She's been pushing to, to arm Ukraine, which Obama wouldn't do, but Trump did and which Blinken supports and Biden apparently supports, you know, she, she openly advocates trying to overthrow the government of Russia.
I mean, this is, this is insane.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't care, you know, who she was married to, but, but her, she and her husband are not a, you know, a mixed family with the, with the, you know, the conservative against the liberal.
They are, they are right in line in, you know, in pushing warmongering on the entire U.S. government.
Yeah, absolutely.
And also the in-laws, Fred Kagan, Robert's brother and his wife, Kimberly Kagan.
They run the Institute for the Study of War.
Fred was a big propagandist for the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And their father, of course, is Donald Kagan.
In fact, I bet, you know, this Dave, you know, all this stuff, but for the audience, look this up.
It's a lot of fun.
It's I believe two days after September 11th, September 12th, or possibly 13th.
And Fred and Donald Kagan are interviewed and they say, George Bush has sent the Marine Corps to cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians to start the war on terrorism.
See, Biden, Biden has appointed people into his government who support exactly that view and who support the exact opposite of that view.
And whose will is going to win out?
How much Biden himself is going to decide everything is very much a question.
But some of these people, some of the worst of them, like Victoria Nuland, have not yet been confirmed.
And you can tell your senators, for God's sake, question her and oppose her and vote against her.
And, you know, RootsAction.org, WorldBeyondWar.org.
You can go and you can contact, email and phone your senators and tell them to stop some of these people who have not yet been confirmed, which includes Blinken.
Unfortunately, Haynes is already confirmed by your U.S. Senate.
Yeah.
You know, maybe this is a thing that people can bring up because it's sort of catchy and reminds people the most coverage, the most fame that Victoria Nuland ever got out in the world was when she was recorded saying, F the EU.
And that was, of course, what got all the headlines.
But so that's a great icebreaker conversation started at.
Remember the F the EU tape.
Listen to the actual tape.
This is a dangerous woman.
The audio is her plotting a coup that took place exactly as she described.
Let's do it this way.
Two weeks later.
And she started a war where, you know, more than 10,000 people were killed in eastern Ukraine in that war because of her.
She's a Froot Loop and a nutcase and a destabilizing force in the world, man.
Yes, indeed.
And even people who actually know that who are, you know, one in a million, most of them seem to think that that that phone call was leaked after the coup.
No, we knew about that phone call and what was planned before it happened.
Nobody did anything to prevent it.
Seriously.
And and, you know, what's funny, too, is they kind of cried about, well, the Russians leaked it or something.
But that was, you know, before all the before Russiagate.
Right.
So the answer still was so.
And if it was the Russians who leaked it, it's clearly newsworthy.
And we deserve to know.
And so their only fallback position was really just to ignore the entire content and just say that it was scandalous because she used a grown up word and kind of divert everybody off onto that.
But of course, it went without saying at the time that who cares if it was the Russians who tapped her phone and leaked the call and put it on YouTube?
Good for us.
By the way, Russia, if you're listening, there are still 30,000 missing emails that Hillary Clinton deleted that we haven't seen and we would like to see.
I don't it's incredible to me the extent to which you can just say this information came from Russia and therefore it must be ignored.
I mean, I'm surprised ExxonMobil hasn't declared, you know, climate facts to be the creation of Russia.
Right.
You get pulled over by the cops, you know, that that speed radar was manufactured in Russia.
I mean, it's just it's madness.
Who the hell?
If Russia informs us of what our government is doing to abuse us and keeping secret, we ought to thank Russia.
If you can't bring yourself to thank Russia, at least facts are facts.
It doesn't matter where they came from.
You know?
Yeah, seriously.
The whole thing is nuts.
And one more thing on Newland, just because I can't help myself.
And I had never noticed this until very recently, double checking a thing at the end of 2012 when Obama's State Department admitted that Jabhat al-Nusra was just an alias for al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That press release had Victoria Newland's name on it.
So she was admitting that, yes, our government is guilty of high treason.
Watch as we put guns in the hands of these men that we admit are from Zarqawi's group, the bad guys from the last war.
Yeah.
So I just love my little Victoria Newland footnotes.
Hey, man.
So let's talk about Yemen.
Here's some possibly good news, right?
Like there's real reason to think that the Democrats are going to force an end to this, right?
Please tell me.
Oh, I think it's entirely possible.
Blinken was questioned and said, yes, he supports ending the war on Yemen.
There was no detail, no pressing on whether that includes providing information, whether that includes providing weapons.
But this is something where the Congress has voted for it.
The public favors it.
It was vetoed by Trump.
Biden campaigned on it.
Blinken still, you know, it's the only good thing anybody got out of his mouth, you know, he still supports ending the war on Yemen, albeit without any details.
You know, Monday is going to be a day of actions all over the world demanding an end to the war on Yemen.
And it's going to be Biden's fifth or sixth day, depending how you count it.
Will he end it?
Will Congress, you know, get off its rear end and end it again and not have it vetoed?
There certainly is hope.
It is universally understood to be the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
Little children are dying every day for no earthly reason.
I think there is every possibility of ending it.
But will it be ended in its entirety?
Will it end the policy of stirring up violence with missiles from drones?
Will it end the provision of weapons to certain abusive governments?
What about all the other abusive governments?
What about all governments?
You know, why should any of them get weapons of war?
It remains to be seen.
But my preference, you know, would be for Congress to immediately today vote again, as promised, to end the war on Yemen under the War Powers Resolution and for Biden to not veto it and to actually end it in its entirety.
And that would be because I want the Congress to realize its power and to end three or four more wars the next day or as soon as we can pressure them sufficiently to do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, you mentioned Rand Paul there and the pressure from the right and Trump.
And this is I don't know who could dispute this.
The best thing that Trump ever did in his entire life was denounce Bush's wars and break the Republican voter from that legacy that even though he didn't end any of the wars, he denounced them.
And as they love to brag, he didn't start any new ones, which is a lot better than a lot of conservative and right wing narratives can be.
I know that, you know.
So there's more and more pressure from the conservative right against the wars.
But that means that there's a huge demand for leftist pressure on the Democrats that you guys absolutely have to knock this off.
We won't tolerate it.
And we don't care about criticism that you receive from Marco Rubio and Republican hawks.
And I think this would be a great way for leftists to phrase their criticism and pressure on the Democrats, too, is that, look, we got a handful of right wing conservative anti-war senators.
Right.
Never mind the people in the country.
We got right wing conservative Republican anti-war people in the Congress.
And you, Congresswoman, Congressman, Senator, cannot be worse than them.
They're right wingers.
You have to be to the left of them on war by definition or you're fired.
That's it.
The left, the progressives, the socialists and whatever activists in the in the movement that's to the left of the Democratic Party that has priorities higher than Democratic Party partisanship.
If that's their message, if that's your message, I think that you can go a long way with that.
And it's desperately needed right now is our pincher strategy against them.
Well, I think the not starting a new war is a remarkable breakthrough that ought to be celebrated and imposed on every subsequent president.
Let's not have you be the one who goes back to starting new wars.
But I think the rhetoric of I'm a war opponent while funding and arming and escalating and continuing wars should be given very little credit because it gets so many Congress members, senators and presidents off the hook and has for decades.
And I don't I don't much value it.
I think.
Well, but I guess what I meant, though, what I meant, though, was what it did for the minds of American Republican Party voters who were so loyal to George Bush and those wars just a few years ago.
And then Trump says, we don't believe in that anymore.
And they say, we don't believe in that anymore.
And that to me is what's valuable.
And you're right, though, it shouldn't it shouldn't help cover bad congressmen getting away with doing bad things, though.
It's potentially valuable.
It has to be put to use.
It has to drive passionate, intense activism that takes a stand that says we insist that you actually end a war or we will we will hurt you politically.
I mean, that it has potential.
But, you know, what's actually happened through the Obama years and through the Trump years is these wars have gone from from primarily, you know, land wars to air wars, which has meant more death, more suffering, more refugees, more homelessness, more destruction.
But an even higher percentage of it imposed on non-Americans.
The U.S. death toll dropped even further to a teeny tiny percentage of these wars.
And this is acceptable to much of the U.S. public, especially as it's not really told in the U.S. media.
You know, and then we've had, you know, Congress not only for the first time vote to end a war but get it vetoed, but also for the first time start passing legislation to forbid ending wars.
You know, Donald Trump or any any of his successors shall not remove troops from Afghanistan or for that matter, Germany or Korea, for God's sake.
I mean, this is a very dangerous step taken not by Trump, but by Congress during the Trump presidency.
You know, Congress dramatically asserting a power it should be asserting.
We will end a war finally, but also a power that it shouldn't.
We will forbid ending a war.
That's crazy.
And that has to be ended.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, they have no authority to do that whatsoever.
The president, if Barack Obama can start a war in Libya by snapping his fingers while on a tour of Brazil, then any president can end a war anywhere he wants.
I'm sorry.
I agree.
Joe Biden could launch all the H-bombs right now with a spoken command, but he can't bring troops home.
Come on.
Because Liz Cheney says so.
Right.
But but because no, because the liberals and the Russian Pelosi says so.
And because Trump said something bad about NATO, even though he expanded it and got its members to buy more weapons and put more money into it and strengthen it.
And you know, it's now a good liberal position to love NATO and to love troops in Germany and so forth.
Actually, I've got a webinar coming up on NATO.
People go to DavidSwanson.org and look at the upcoming events.
This is, you know, this is a new madness, this Russiagaitism that it remains to be seen how it will endure post-Trump.
Right.
Well, they did say they want back in the New START treaty, which they've only got two weeks to sign.
But Putin had also said, well, let's just extend it and we can keep negotiating later.
But so I think we have agreement on that.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And for five years, according to Biden, the day after, Blinken wouldn't say how many years maybe because Biden hadn't told him that presidents love five years.
You know why?
Because they get four year terms.
Right.
But I think that's a great step.
But now you you rejoin the Open Skies treaty.
You rejoin the INF treaty.
You rejoin the ABM treaty.
You start joining the basic treaties of the world that the United States has never joined.
Right.
Absolutely.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm out of time.
I would love to interview you all afternoon.
I'm sure you got to go to.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show, David.
You're great.
Right on.
Thank you, Scott.
We appreciate you guys.
That is David Swanson.
He's at davidswanson.org, rootsaction.org and worldbeyondwar.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.

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