All right, y'all welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott.
And our first guest today is Kelly Blahos.
She writes for the American conservative magazine and for antiwar.com.
And, uh, she's got a piece right here at the americanconservative.com called what McChrystal's Yale perch really means.
And, uh, she's also got one at antiwar.com today, which I hope we can talk about too, the rape of our military women.
Oh, yeah.
You ought to sign your daughter up for the service.
They'll take real good care of her.
Uh, welcome back to the show.
Kelly, how are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm glad you're doing good.
Uh, glad to have you here.
Uh, so Stanley McChrystal, the, uh, former, uh, prime implementer of the coin strategy in Afghanistan who got fired because his, uh, subordinates bad-mouthed Joe Biden in the Rolling Stone a couple of years back.
He's now teaching at Yale.
What's that about?
Well, um, you know, I, as I mentioned in the story, you know, he was fired, uh, for conduct unbecoming of an officer back in July, 2010.
Um, he was able to retire with his four stars, meaning that he was retired at a pretty hefty pay grade.
Uh, he started consulting business in which he, uh, demands the speaker speeds of between 50,000 and $60,000 a year.
Um, and almost immediately after he was fired in July, 2010, Yale university reached out to him and offered him a job.
Um, they didn't see any problem with, you know, his, his conduct and the fact that he hadn't won the war and, you know, hadn't, hadn't, uh, hadn't pursued a big three or success there, but figured that he'd be a good teacher of our, of our higher education students.
So they hired him to teach leadership, um, a leadership course at Yale university, which he started, um, at the beginning of this year, I believe.
And the New York times had done a, uh, a quite glowing, um, review of not only his class, but of the atmosphere that, uh, has been pretty welcoming to Stanley McChrystal, um, since he arrived at the Yale campus.
That's funny.
You know, the way you write this thing, I got the idea that, you know, I don't know, I don't hang around at Yale or in Washington, DC or these kinds of things.
It's, it's hard for me to tell, but I sort of get the idea that the Afghan war, there, people are already starting to try to look at it like they look at the Iraq war, which is, it was a long time ago, far away, may not have even happened.
Don't worry about it.
Kind of a thing.
Um, where the population of Yale university, it seems would be, if they were anything like me, they would have a very kind of jaded skepticism towards this guy and his book and his bogus, uh, coin doctrine and, and the, the war that it turned out we were somehow like falsely tricked into believing would be okay to extend the time of it because it was actually going to work this time and all that.
And it didn't work out, you know, they don't hold anything against him or anything.
He's just, uh, I saw him on the billboard when he's coming and doing a speaking tour with, uh, Colin Powell and them.
I think he was one of them, uh, on the, on the same circuit there.
And, uh, Oh no, he's just a leader.
He's here to talk to your boy scout troop or whatever.
He's just a great American hero.
And the context of what's actually happened over there actually had really sort of has nothing to do with it.
Do you think that's about right?
Yeah.
I think in addition to dumbing down the news, which you and I have complained about for years now, um, news about the war and foreign policy, uh, the media has really fed off this generation.
I would say sort of glorification of the cult of personality.
And so put those two together and there's been this real successful separation between the war, the failures of the war and the people who've waged the war.
So Sam McChrystal, um, is a celebrity figure, um, and that, and he's had help from the media, uh, that the sycophantic, uh, reporters who have covered him in the field and back in Washington have made him out to be a sort of, uh, mythological figure, a man who, you know, he's running, he's not, you know, he, he doesn't need any sleep.
He's reading books.
He's the man, man.
And this is all combined to make him out to be some sort of Clint Eastwood heartbreak Ridge figure.
Uh, uh, for which there's not a lot of the real, they're there in the sense that he's never seen combat.
Um, and he's gone from one pretty much soft perch in the military.
Um, since the, since he was a West point grad born into military brass, as I pointed out in, in, in the article, but none of that matters.
He was fired from his job.
We're losing the war.
He did nothing to advance the war.
If anything, the war was going worse than it was ever when he was fired in 2010, the morale of the troops.
And you can look this up.
I'm not making it up within the toilet when he left because the rules of engagement were all screwed up because of the, the whole coin encounter insurgency doctrine had never really translated into reality for the, for the soldiers on the ground.
And so he left, he left a real mess back there, but he doesn't get blamed for it.
And I think a lot of that is because of the media and also this effort by, um, and as I, as I point out in the article and a very well-funded effort to sort of promote, um, the permanent warfare state at these universities, bringing Sam McChrystal on board as a lead, as not only a celebrity, but a leadership figure just promotes the positive of the positive image of war as opposed to the image of failure.
Um, well, so what is he teaching anyway?
Well, we don't know much about what he's teaching because as I point out, the classes are off the record, meaning it's classified.
These kids have to sign some sort of, I don't know, I would imagine some sort of, uh, a gag order, uh, before they get this in.
And it sounds like they'll do anything to get into that classroom.
That's the other troubling thing about this whole story is as you pointed out, these are students of Yale university, which has a rich and long protest background.
I mean, some of the most violent anti-war, um, protests in the history of this country took place on our universities and Yale being one of them.
Well, and hey, they're supposed to be smart.
They're supposed to have a little bit of critical thinking skills, you know?
Yeah.
So when you see that these Yale students are lining up, they had 200 applicants for 20 slots in this classroom and they're interviewing students around saying, Oh, I just wanted to see what it'd be like to be taught by Stan McChrystal and Stan McChrystal himself saying, I was kind of disappointed because there was no opposition to me coming to town.
And you think what, you know, and I don't want to disparage or use the broad brush on Yale students, but it seems kind of lame that there were no, there were no voices, at least in this article, aside from a few, you know, Faye professors that they barely even interviewed anybody on the other side, you know, saying something lame about, you know, warriors and war or whatever.
Um, that, you know, it doesn't seem, I, you know, it, there, there wasn't any opposition to this guy and it sounded like they would have done anything to get into his classroom, the gag order, you know, not with standing.
So I don't know.
So we don't know how much, what they're, they're, they're learning.
We do know that he's not teaching military history.
He's not teaching military strategy.
He's not teaching anything that he was trained in the army to do.
He's teaching this sort of vague, you know, subject of, of leadership.
Meaning from what I'm gathering is, is, is one anecdote, personal anecdote after another, in his point of view, from his point of view, and we'll never really know because it's off the record.
What a joke.
You know, what's funny too is, um, this guy's a torturer.
Don't they know that?
It was in Esquire.
Don't Yale people read Esquire?
Stanley McChrystal was running the Delta force in Iraq, torturing people.
But, um, oh, well, I mean, I guess as the ninth circuit court ruled the other day, hey, the definition of torture was in dispute at that time.
And so it's okay.
He has immunity.
We all do.
All right.
We'll be right back with Kelly Vallejos right after this.
The American conservative.com antiwar.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Kelly Vallejos and, uh, yeah, that's right.
Uh, Stanley McChrystal.
Uh, you can read all about, uh, the torture at camp Nama in Esquire magazine.
Esquire.com by Tim Heffernan.
Spelled just like it sounds Heffernan.
Um, it's a good reporting from a few years back, uh, 2009.
Um, and now, uh, if you had anything more to say about, uh, Stan McChrystal, I'll let you, otherwise I'd like to get to your piece on antiwar.com today.
Sure.
I mean, that, that whole issue with Stan McChrystal, I mean, I think it's fodder for a book because I think it's part of a greater effort on the part of the warmongers of this country, um, who are well-funded and well-connected and they see academia as the next sort of front and their, uh, movement to militarize our society.
And, um, I think the, the, the colleges and universities in this country are ripe for this kind of manipulation because they need money.
And so they're, they're all for, you know, putting these endowments, um, in these schools like Yale, Duke university, Columbia university now have these military strategy and counterterrorism programs that they didn't have before where they're inviting all of these, um, ex generals and ex officers to speak, but they're not teaching history, Scott.
They're not teaching what is warfare?
What is war?
What is the history of war?
What are the lessons of war?
They're teaching the warfare state, why we need to be at war.
It's two different things.
And I think that we need to open our eyes because if people are spending tens of thousands of dollars to go to these schools and what they're just using them to like pump out future cadres for the national security state, I think it's up to us to put up a stink.
Cause obviously the students aren't, you know, and, um, as a mother and as a, you know, a citizen of this country, I, you know, I, I don't like what's happening and I think it's very manipulative and it's very insidious.
I think we all need to get wise to it.
Yep.
Well, that's all I have to say.
Yeah, no, Hey, you're right.
It's, it's really important.
I was thinking back that, uh, I guess in ninth grade, there was one teacher at the school who, I don't think he was one of my teachers, but, you know, and seeing him around or whatever, and he went off to the desert storm and the fact that he went there and then came back and talked about it, uh, just to just help to reinforce that whole, you know, the legitimacy of the whole thing that, you know, you guys are all kids, but those of us who are grown, responsible adults, sometimes we do what you gotta do.
And that means going to war and being tough in order to save the poor people of Kuwait and whatever.
And it just seems so, uh, already decided and inevitable like world war one or whatever, it just, you know, it was just, um, yeah.
We were, you know, and we've talked about this before, you know, this post Vietnam, um, ethos in which we are so afraid to insult the troops.
We're so afraid to blame them, um, for atrocities that, you know, uh, we, we, our default position is to accept, uh, the troops and the soldiers and the generals and the brass as being so, uh, for, for, in some ways separate from all of the gruesome wrong things that happen in war.
So when they're offering to pay for an endowed chair at your school or send recruiters in your school or send, you know, uh, veterans in your school to talk about war, you know, you say, yeah, let's do it because we don't want to insult you.
We want to embrace you.
And I think that's the best they're in.
And, and I think as far as liberal as professors are supposed to are supposedly, you have an environment, you know, at these universities where, um, there is not, you know, an anti-war movement.
There is not, you know, um, you know, there, there, there, there's not this fervor against the war.
So, you know, they're, there's, they sort of lay down and succumb to it, unfortunately, and don't question, they don't question the authority of these generals when they come in.
They see them as celebrities, unfortunately.
Well, I guess the faculty now, they were too young during Vietnam, I guess.
They're not the old anti-war people from Vietnam.
Yeah.
Well, maybe, you know, I, you know, there's still older professors hanging around there, but you know, I think like, you know, they, it was drilled into our heads that somehow, you know, uh, the troops were spit on, you know, uh, and somehow we'd, like we said, we have to separate the troops from the war, and I think that, that maybe, you know, these professors are sort of, um, muzzled when, you know, when these, these programs come into the school, you know, it's all about money, Scott.
Well, and it's all, you know, these professors, they don't know their ass from the hole in the ground either.
Anyway, you know, I saw, I can't get over this, actually.
I'm going to keep talking about this for a while.
I think the Washington post had a piece called, uh, Hey, the Muslim brotherhood seems to be increasing in power, uh, in the rebellion against Assad in Syria, huh?
And I'm going, man, are you guys really come on?
This is what we've been saying at antiwar.com for a decade.
Is that if you go, cause Ariel Sharon a decade ago said you better go to Syria next.
So that was why we thought it was serious.
Um, and we said, look, if you go and regime change Syria, who's left, who's got organization, who's got heft, who can make it happen in Syria other than the Baathists, the Muslim brotherhood, obviously are the default power next.
Is that really what you want?
And they are actually in the middle of this thing saying, huh, I wonder if maybe we're doing the wrong thing.
Like they really actually have no idea.
And that's the people running the show at the state department.
Nevermind the professors who taught them so much, you know, it's ridiculous.
They actually know nothing.
Uh, I, I really think the average reader of antiwar.com probably knows, at least has better context for what's going on in the world than these, you know, mucky muck experts up there.
Well, you know, that's the, and that's the point it's context.
If you had context and you saw Stanley McChrystal come into your school, you'd say, well, huh, head of JSOC, you know, was accused of covering up the Pat Tillman friendly fire death, um, was accused of running torture camps in Iraq.
You know, maybe he's not the best person to be teaching leadership on my campus, but instead that wasn't even brought up in the New York times article.
They weren't even compelled to include that because they don't, they think people don't care, maybe they don't care, but you, like you said, it's context.
And he's be, he's able and his handlers are able to create his context, which is of a mythological general warrior scholar is what they call him.
Well, you know, you talk about the separation of the war and the actors in it and that kind of thing.
Um, that sort of seems to be the same way with the consequences for the soldiers.
Even though, you know, I mean, whatever I grew up, I was a kid in the eighties and the nineties, right?
So my whole life, I saw Vietnam veterans on the side of the road.
Who's homeless and hungry?
Vietnam veterans.
Apparently something about going through a war is a hard on a guy.
Uh, and yet if you think about 10 years ago on the eve of the Iraq war, everybody's just pretending like that never happened, that there were no lessons we ever learned from Vietnam.
Everybody gets, um, uh, sort of a clean slate and, you know, we hear.
In fact, everybody knows somebody who was ever in the military and they all have a very jaded view of the thing.
They're not, uh, they don't usually just, uh, straight, you know, the older veterans anyway, they don't just believe in whatever the myths are of, of, uh, the way warfare is, and we see news stories all the time of guys going without medical care of their bodies being dumped in the garbage, uh, landfill or buried with the wrong, uh, tombstone over their remains, uh, or, uh, being discharged, Joshua chorus did those great things, uh, and, and, and, and, Joshua chorus did those great, uh, that great series for the nation, at least two or three pieces there about, uh, people being discharged from the army in the name of having a mental disorder that apparently you must've had before you got here and so therefore no medical care for you, our entire contract with you, our end of it is off.
So thanks for going and killing people for us now go live under a bridge, they say, and we all kind of know that, right?
Everybody knows that at least a little bit, you know, I'm not saying everybody talks about it at the water cooler all day or whatever, but people kind of know that our government pretty much treats our soldiers like crap.
And yet the narrative that they don't, the narrative that these are our heroes and our golden boys and our idols, and we love them and, and they're, and we would never, ever spit on them again.
Um, that still, you know, remains the truth that people abide by when they're even going down to with their daughter to sign up their daughter to go serve in the military.
Uh, they're, they're not going on the facts that even they already know.
They're going with the myth.
They're going with the TV ad that they play during the football game about, you know, being the best you can be and being a professional when you grow up and whatever.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
It's a, it's a, it's a weird, it's a weird parallel universe verse you have.
On one hand, you could turn on the television, you see these commercials for wounded warrior, where you're watching these severely disfigured men and women, um, you know, amputees and they're calling out for help.
They're saying, I would have killed myself.
I didn't have this help.
And they're showing this, you're seeing these, you know, these Olympics with amputees running through the, across the track.
And you, so you know that we, there's a generation of disabled veterans of mind and body and spirit and all the things you just talked about.
But at the same time, at the same time, we accept the fact that we have to keep putting these men and women through a meat grinder and we don't blame the government for these images that we're seeing.
It's, it's, it's unbelievable to me.
Yeah, well it is.
It's a, it's that weird double thing, that cognitive dissonance.
I'm thinking, um, you know, personal experiences.
I know people I've known who were in the military.
Who knew better, who knew that the government is just shorthand for the worst people in the whole world whose agendas are all corrupt and whose statements are never to be trusted.
And yet, Hey man, it's just a job.
You got to do what you got to do and whatever.
That's how people look at it.
You know, exactly.
And you know, we were told in no uncertain terms, the beginning of this war after nine 11, that if we didn't support it, we weren't supporting the troops.
And I think a lot of those Vietnam veterans that you talk of that I've met in my lifetime as a reporter and as, you know, just as a member of my family with veterans is that, you know, they, they knew what we were getting into and they had all of those gripes, the government, but they believe that they have to support the war.
So that quote, it would never happen again.
If somehow they'd be wiping the slate clean and, and, and look towards this world with some pride.
And I don't know how they came to that conclusion, other that the media and the Bush administration and the whole sort of cacophony of voices and messages coming through were that, that they have to support at war, that somehow that there would be, there would be disgrace for the, for the troops once again.
And it, it, it, it, it was vicious, but it happened.
And meanwhile, it's the government that's spitting on them.
It's the government that lets the women in the army get raped and have no ability to, you know, for accountability.
It's the government that says, yeah, your camp is going to be near this chemical burn pit where you're going to have nothing but benzene in your blood for the rest of your short life.
Or we're going to, you know, send you off to get sniped, to take the Korengal Valley for a couple of years and then give it back up to the Taliban again, anyway, because it turns out we don't need it or, or literally throw you in the garbage.
I used to always say, this was my, you know, cliche.
They throw you in the garbage when they're done with you.
And then it came out, they literally were throwing the corpses in the garbage.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You can't even mock and parody these people.
Yeah.
The leaders, the ones in charge of this.
You couldn't come up with clearer symbolism than that.
But, you know, you mentioned that the mental disorders and the discharges and, you know, you know, that what I was writing about today about the women who are sexually assaulted, went and complained, did what they were supposed to, go to the chain of command.
And what happened?
They were squeezed out on personality disorder discharges, which is exactly what you're talking about.
They get no benefits.
They're, they're, they're, they're pretty much stigmatized for life.
They don't get their retirement and they're being told that they came with that disability.
Not that the rape or sexual assault might've caused them to have some adjustment issues after it happened, but it was a punishment and they're suing for that.
But yeah, I mean, and you got to figure personality disorder doesn't mean anything.
There's no germ.
There's no, that's not a real diagnosis.
That's pretend to pseudoscience, you know, in a later era or from another country.
That is a laughable joke.
It is beyond preposterous, a personality disorder.
Well, it's a scapegoat for the military, so they don't have to pay out the benefits.
I wonder how many personality disorders I have.
I mean, it allows the military to sweep under the rug and embarrassing and ugly charge against one of their service members of rape or sexual assault or harassment by getting rid of the problem, which is the woman.
And you tell her that she has a personality disorder, which they were able and that she had it when she got into the military.
So they'd be able to wipe their hands clean.
They don't have to pay her health care or her disability benefits.
Then she, I mean, and then if she wants to appeal it, there's a, there's a million claims backlogged at the VA.
So even if she could appeal it, would they do allow an appeal?
So it would take years.
In the meantime, she's got to go find her own counseling.
She has to go try to find a job.
And then she has like personality disorder, discharge on her references.
I mean, people are scrambling and scratching for jobs these days.
You get a woman or anybody, a veteran that comes to you and they were discharged for a personality disorder.
You're going on the bottom of the pile.
You know, it sticks with you for the rest of your life.
And for what?
Because the military didn't want to deal, which is, it's become a very crisis in the military right now.
And that's just not my words.
People have been studying this for years.
I've been watching the number of rapes and assaults go, go exponentially up since the wars began, because, you know, like I said, in my story, you're shock integrating hundreds of thousands of women into combat related roles overseas, living and working together in conditions that, you know, things are going to happen, bad things.
And there's no system in place or, you know, for women to go to a safe place, to a safe superior, to say, hey, this happened to me, because the culture is still in the caveman days.
Yeah, that's all that honor and valor and glory.
This is how they take care of the weakest among them in the brotherhood of the military and whatever.
The weakest one, the raped woman, they just throw her to the wolves.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you put your finger on it.
It's still a brother.
They're like the Taliban.
Oh, you got raped.
Now you got to marry him.
You know, that kind of thing.
No respect whatsoever.
Hey, you said it.
I didn't.
But this is this is reminiscent of a traditional culture in which a woman is blamed when she is assaulted or raped by a member of the opposite sex.
They are shamed.
And this is what's happening.
And this isn't just one or two or three women.
This has been happening for 10 years.
It's just that there's this this wall that, you know, you know, reporters and investigators have been reporting this for years.
It's just that it has it never really reaches a mainstream saturation in terms of the news.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that personality disorder thing is like the magic wand, the catch all or something, because Joshua Corbis was reporting not just about rape victims, but everybody else.
Anybody who becomes a problem, anybody who just costs too much for our local branch of the V.A. or whatever, and we don't feel like treating you anymore, whatever reason you had a personality disorder, you must have always had it.
And so therefore, you must have, like, lied on your contract, even get into the military and all benefits are off.
And yeah, as you said, good luck appealing.
You know, maybe if your dad's a congressman, but then again, if your dad was a congressman, you wouldn't be an army veteran anyway, would you?
So.
And then you go to the V.A.
And they don't have they don't have a proper they don't have the proper resources in place for women, much less women who are victims of sexual assault.
I mean, there's still this disparity between services for women in the V.A. after all these years.
It's not like women just got in the military.
For goodness sake, I kept you way over time and we got to go.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate your time.
Kelly Vallejos, everybody, the American conservative dot com and anti war dot com her piece today, the rape of our military women.
