Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing our guest today, it's Michael Schwartz.
Coming back to the show, he's a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.
He writes for Mother Jones, Tom Dispatch, Asia Times, and Contexts.
He's the author of the new book, which is just about to come out, is my understanding.
It's called War Without End, The Iraq War in Context.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
Hi.
It's good to have you back on the show here.
It's only been a couple of months since we talked, but I was very interested in this article that you wrote for Tom Dispatch.
I thought since today's Memorial Day, we might, I don't know, focus on the lives of the Iraqi people and what's happened to them, rather than, you know, this narcissistic celebration of empire that everybody else is wallowing in today.
What about the million dead Iraqis, Michael?
Do they count for anything?
Well, they haven't counted for anything from the point of view of the American policy makers in the media, that's for sure.
They haven't even been counted by those folks.
It's really one of the most upsetting, I guess, and horrendous aspects of this war is that the American people are being offered a portrait of this war in which it's kind of a virginal war, where the American soldiers, though risking their lives, never hurt anybody except a handful of bad guys whom they are occasionally able to encounter and of course overwhelm.
The Iraqis should be grateful because everything our soldiers do is to help them and they ought to be grateful, right?
Right.
I mean, certainly the portrayal that's given in the American media, and I think, you know, it's worked out.
It's worked out.
You know, there haven't been that many successes for the US government in this war, but I think the propagandizing and misleading of the American people has been one of their noteworthy successes.
And for me, the most upsetting part of that is the Iraq casualty count, which, you know, is now well over a million, and last summer, a year ago now, there was a survey, a national random sample survey in the United States, and people were asked, well, how many Iraqis do you think have died in this war?
And 50% of the people said that it was under 9,000.
Under 9,000?
Under 9,000.
9,000 or below.
Most people in the United States just had no idea of the destructiveness of this war.
One million, you know, 325,000 air sorties over Iraq since this war began, and, you know, those planes carry 502,000 pound bombs, and they don't drop them in empty fields.
They drop them in populated areas, and it's not surprising that so many people are dying.
Well, and, you know, when you say million, and I'm the first one who brought up million, that was the British study by opinion business research, Alan Hyde, and I interviewed him about his methodology and the rest of it.
It seemed credible to me, you know, what little I know about statistics and so forth.
But the measure there is not just killed by American forces.
The measure there is the rate of death over and above what it was before the invasion, which by the way, I guess in parentheses, was under sanctions and blockade and no fly zone bombings and so forth.
Which was pretty horrific.
Which was already, they said, a million people had died from the sanctions, half of them children and the price was worth it.
But then this million is taking into account the death rate over and above what it was before 2003.
So this includes people who died because they couldn't get to the hospital because there was 15 checkpoints in between here and there.
And people who died of disease that would have been easily curable in a normal time, that kind of thing, right?
Well, it does, but, you know, the really definitive study, which is old now, it's almost two years old now, is done by a team of medical researchers at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and an important Iraqi university all working together.
And they were able to break down the, what they, the term they use is excess death.
And they were able to break down the excess death and, you know, it's important to keep in mind that during the period of sanctions, the number of deaths to, for example, diseases that could have been prevented, were very, very high.
I mean, some of the estimates go to about a million people during the period of sanctions died not from violence, but from simply neglect and various kinds of problems resulting from, you know, the unhealthiness of the sanction regime.
So now during this war, it turns out that only a small proportion of the surplus death of the war over and above that period are because of the further degeneration of the healthcare and the food system and the hospital system.
And a large proportion are due to violence, perhaps 80 to 85% of the excess deaths are due to violence.
There was very few violent deaths actually in Iraq during that sanctions period, except for, you know, the very considerable number that Saddam was taking out himself.
And so these are violent deaths.
So now most people I think reading the American media would assume, well, okay, we have a million or so violent deaths since the war began, probably almost all of them are due to sectarian violence.
I think that's the way the perception would be if you sit in the United States, read the papers, watch the news, and just try to follow the war that way.
But the sad fact which emerges from looking at these really careful studies by Lancet is that somewhere between 60 and 75% of the deaths due to this war, as a result of this war, are actually from firepower of the United States, the United States artillery, the United States bombing, and the United States patrols, of which there are between 1,500 and 5,000 every day that will go through neighborhoods, breaking down doors, entering people's homes, shooting at people who resist, and then opening fire on any building from which they receive any kind of resistance.
And the number of people killed by this method is just astronomical, and it far outweighs anything.
I mean, we hear so many times, well, not so much lately, but of car bombs killing a hundred people or so.
You know, there have been 500 and some odd car bombs in the last couple of years, and those car bombs might have killed, you know, a really horrendous 10,000 people, which is just a horrible, horrible number.
But in that same period, the American soldiers, the American artillery, the American airpower has in all likelihood killed a hundred thousand people.
All right.
Now, let me backtrack over that a little bit.
First of all, you made the point that under the blockade of the 1990s, the Clinton blockade, where reportedly half a million children died, and here's a very short clip of the Secretary of State refusing to deny that, and in fact endorsing the killing of half a million children.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.
Okay, so there's Madeleine Albright explaining the price is worth it to kill 500,000.
And you're explaining that with all the damage to the Iraqi infrastructure before the invasion in 2003, that the invasion in 2003 really didn't make all that much difference in terms of sewage, hospital, you know, food and medicine, that kind of thing.
That's not what's made the difference.
It's been almost entirely violent deaths that account for all these excess deaths.
And then you're also telling me that this Lancet study is very specific in pointing out that the sectarian war may be part of it and so forth, bodies found on the side of the road, killed by Shiite militias, people killed by car bombs from the Sunni insurgency and so forth.
But that ultimately, even the vast majority of the violent excess deaths, quote unquote, are caused directly by the American occupation.
Is that what you're saying?
Directly by it?
The violent deaths, of the violent deaths that have occurred since the war began, surplus violent deaths if you like, but it's virtually all the violent deaths are surplus in the way the statistics are done.
Of all those deaths, at least 60% in any given year, and sometimes much more, are caused by American military.
They are the source of at least 60, sometimes as high as 80% of the deaths in any given year of this war.
The Iraqi military, which the American military commands, is responsible for a substantial proportion of the remaining deaths.
So that a very small proportion, in fact, of the total death toll is a consequence of the really the two main sources of Iraqi sectarian violence, which is the car bombs and other sorts of suicide bombing, and the death squads.
They have accounted for a relatively very small proportion of the deaths.
Now that doesn't mean that they haven't accounted for somewhere between, let's say, 150,000 and 250,000 deaths, which under any other circumstance would be simply mind-boggling.
It gives you a sense of just how horrible the sectarian warfare has been.
But when the United States has accounted for somewhere between, if we take a million as a figure, and we passed a million a long time ago, somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 deaths, you get a sense of the magnitude of the slaughter there.
This is just something that has been completely blacked out of the American media.
In fact, the article that I wrote about this a year ago has just been nominated for a Project Censor Award, because it's just this totally surprising, just amazing blackout.
One which, by the way, is not shared by the rest of the world.
In many places in the world, these numbers are understood and just absorbed as sort of part of the real situation.
It's frightening.
But to add another note to this, I think we need to understand that once we realize that a million Iraqis have died, that four million to five million Iraqis have been rendered homeless and dislocated, that another four million, on top of those, are being supported at a level that can't sustain human life over the long run.
If they don't get more food and more sustenance soon, major health problems will arise, and of course, for lots of them, they're already arising.
So we're talking about close to 10 million of the 27 million population are definitively in danger, have been rendered destitute, and the rest of the population is in not much better shape.
This is the damage that has been done by this war to this country, and yet, they haven't stopped fighting the American occupation.
They continue miraculously.
Hang on there, Michael, because I want to ask you all about, and this is really the emphasis in your article, but before we get there, I want to stay focused here a little bit on just how much America has destroyed that society.
When you said, what was it, 50 percent of people thought that less than 9,000 Iraqis had died?
Yeah.
To go along with that, obviously, if they think only 9,000 Iraqis have died, then there's a whole hell of a lot that they don't understand about the situation in Iraq.
I want to make sure that people understand, as per your best description, just exactly what kind of destruction has been rendered unto that society in terms of the different factions of Christians, the Yazidis and the Turkmen and the other ethnic minorities there that nobody talks about at all, in terms of the 4 million refugees, in terms of the economy, the unemployment rate, the electricity, the water.
America has basically taken Iraq and slammed it up against the wall, just like in the Ledeen Doctrine, right?
The actual destruction, physical and personal destruction in Iraq is beyond, I think, people's imagination, and certainly the American people have been fully insulated from any sense that this is going on.
When I talk to people about this and I start giving them some sense of what's going on in Iraq, they say, gee, I had no idea that this was going on.
And, of course, if they did, there would be much more outrage by the war.
I mean, it's very hard in a short period of time to describe just how horrible things are, but let me just give two examples that have been in the news in the last few days.
One is, let's take the Battle of Basra, in which a group of Iraqi troops were sent into Basra and were immediately pushed back to conquer various areas of the city that were held by Muqtada al-Sadr's group, the Sadrists of Mahdi's army, right?
And so, in order to rescue these Iraqi troops that were in danger, the United States unleashed its normal air power.
Now, the air war is highly destructive.
I mean, all air wars are highly destructive, and we know this going back to World War II.
In Iraq, what the air war did in Fallujah was result, along with artillery, air and artillery, basically, resulted in the destruction of 70% of the buildings in the city.
70% need to be rebuilt, and the other 30% are heavily damaged, often by the fact that the way American soldiers enter buildings when they're on the ground is by throwing hand grenades into the front door and blowing up the place room by room.
So, the type, the strategy of the war is itself immensely destructive.
These 2,000-pound bombs will take out six or seven fairly substantial buildings with one bomb.
So, if you're targeting a building where, let's say, there's a sniper and you drop a 2,000-pound bomb on it, you wipe out the surrounding buildings, including the people who are in it, right?
So, you get high levels of destruction and high levels of death and high levels of mayhem and high levels of injury and amputation and all of the really serious injuries that come from war.
This is the way they're conducting the war.
So, in Basra, when the Iraqi troops, who are lightly armed, fortunately, from the point of view of the residents of these communities, right, were failing, then what happened was you brought in the U.S. artillery, you brought in tanks, and you brought in the most lethal of all, the air power, right?
And so, certain sectors of Basra have now been reduced to look quite a bit like Fallujah, which is a rubble-ized city, right?
So, that's one piece of the news that, you know, I think we should keep in mind.
Now, another piece of the recent news is this offensive in Sadr City, and one of the big features of the offensive is that the United States is building a wall to cordon off a section of Sadr City that American troops entered into, and they built this wall.
It's 12 feet concrete walls, and these concrete walls are all over Iraq.
Well, they're mostly in Baghdad, but they've spread from Baghdad to the rest of Iraq, and Baghdad has been separated into these tiny enclaves, you know, of a few thousand people surrounded by walls, right?
And then there are certain breaks in the walls that are manned by checkpoints, and people can or can't go in and out, depending on whether they have permission.
Now, one of the things that's never mentioned, the U.S. has the nerve to call these walled-in areas gated cities, right, as though they are the equivalent of the richest areas in American cities, right?
Now, in fact, what these walls do is they absolutely annihilate the social, economic, and political life of the areas that are surrounded.
These people no longer have a viable life because, for example, the children have to go to school in an area beyond the wall.
They can't get there.
People who work have to go to work beyond an area of the wall.
They can't get there.
They have to go through the checkpoints, which sometimes take hours and, in any case, are not well located, and besides that, it's now become totally dangerous.
So, and the employers cannot get their workers there.
Shops, stores, manufacturing establishments cannot function.
They don't even have electricity, right, because they can't get either employees or customers or both.
Food has great difficulty getting into these areas.
They're highly unstable economically, politically, and socially.
People can't visit their relatives.
They can't get to the doctor.
They can't do anything.
What you have is a type of prison, and it's not just a type of prison, but it's a type of prison that can't really be effectively supplied with what it needs to sustain life so that people there are declining economically as time goes on, and this is what the success of the so-called surge is about, right, is that what we've done is we've created these enclaves in which people are slowly becoming more and more and more miserable, and, of course, what people do in that situation is they take drastic action to save their families.
The most common drastic action is to leave, so the building of these walls in Baghdad has been one of the key elements, along with all the fighting that has been accompanied of that, right, the fact that in Baghdad lost a million people.
A million people were dislocated in the year 2007 in Baghdad, one million people out of a four-million-person community.
The rest of them are not living a viable existence.
This cannot go on like this, right?
So then you get further rebellion, which is what happens.
You get further protest of various sorts, and you get people dying and being miserable silently suffering, right?
And this is what this wall that's getting built in Sadr City, and what are the Sadrists doing, the Mahdi's army?
They're blowing up the wall, right?
They're trying to blow up the wall because they understand what the consequences of the wall are, right?
And what the purpose of the wall is, right?
I mean, this is the West Bank model for how to ruin people and conquer them forever.
Right.
Well, there's no question that, I mean, there's lots and lots of coverage now that the United States has consulted at great length with the Israelis about all sorts of matters of strategy, and it's impossible to believe that they didn't get the idea for the wall from the Israelis.
I actually think, without being an expert on what's going on in the West Bank, that the way the United States is using these walls is one step more draconian than even the Israelis, or at least the Israelis before the latest crisis, because the squeeze that's put on them, and the size of the enclaves that they create, and the inadequacy of the supplies coming into those enclaves is so drastic and so dire that you feel like this is saying, well, if the Israelis can do this, we can go one step better.
But the larger point is that we read in the paper, we're exposed to this idea that, oh, they're walling off their part of Sadr City in order to protect it from attack, and what in reality is going on is they're walling off an area of the city which will guarantee it sinking into deeper and deeper destitution.
Right.
And then, of course, when people take those drastic measures that you described, that becomes the excuse, just like in the Israeli model, that becomes the excuse for the next round of attacks against them.
That's right.
And then that is what happens.
And, of course, the United States then began using air power against the Sadrists who were trying to blow down the wall, and they were using air power in the other parts of Sadr City.
So you have that, but, you know, again, just to make this point, these people keep fighting this, right?
I mean, in many ways, they have no choice, because they're facing families starving to death very often, or being endangered in so many other ways that resistance is a logical thing to do.
But I also think we have to realize that the fact of this resistance going on for this long has really, you know, altered and frustrated the, you can only call it imperial design, of the American government in Washington, right?
When this war started, the Bush administration, and the Democrats, by the way, you know, wholly on board in those days, right, looked forward to a short war, a home base for a very large American contingent in the Middle East, and a huge amount of pressure on Iran, oil flowing at twice, maybe four times the rate that it had before, U.S., the most powerful force in the region of the Middle East by now, not by now, by 2005, really, they thought.
And instead what they have is a situation in which the United States is looking weaker and weaker, and the idea of bringing Iran to heel has reversed itself, and it's now a matter that Iran has been strengthened in the Middle East, and even had to mediate the battle in Basra, which the United States could not manage.
And so this whole idea of the unipolar world that has been the guiding philosophy not just of the neoconservatives, but also of the Clinton administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party, that the United States should be the dominant force in the world and should be able to impose its interest on the rest of the world, this guiding idea has really taken a beating, and it's all because the Iraqi people are basically more willing to die fighting than they are willing to die being economically oppressed.
Well, it seems like they've really proven the point.
I remember Pat Buchanan said that the high tide of American empire was at Fallujah in 2004, and that that was it, the rest is all downhill from here.
It sort of proves the point, when you have the most powerful army in the world versus rag-tag militias of guys with AKs and homemade bombs, that really, I guess in the post-Kalashnikov era, colonialism is impossible.
Nobody can conquer anybody else's neighborhood where they don't have at least some semblance of legitimacy there, where they're somewhat welcome.
I hope you're right that nobody can do it anymore, because it does seem like our government is very anxious to do it, but I do agree with you that they certainly have not succeeded in Iraq.
Well, we know that they could just kill everybody.
If I was living in Latin America, I would give my prayers every night to the Iraqis, because I think a lot of the relieved pressure in Latin America as a result that the United States is so tied down in Iraq, I feel very strongly that Chavez would have been militarily attacked by the U.S. if they had had the wherewithal to do it, for example.
And the Iranians, of course, have to say that also, and who knows who all else.
Yeah, you make the point in the article that the Iraqi people, at least in some respects, would be in a better situation, at least, you know, in the shortest term, if they just said, okay, fine, you Americans, you're the boss, you do what you want, whatever, and try to return to some sort of normalcy, that really, they've made this sacrifice on behalf of the rest of the world that they are going to fight not only for themselves, but to at least in effect break the American empire over the rocks in the Iraqi desert.
Yeah, I mean, I do feel that way, that, I mean, listen, they got a taste of what was in store for them, you know, and this is in my book.
As soon as Bremer took over, he began an economic revolution that created a depression in Iraq that is unimaginable.
I mean, in the American Depression, you know, we peaked out at about 30 percent unemployment in some really hard-hit areas.
In Iraq, it's fairly typical for unemployment to be over 50 percent, and it's often over 70 percent.
And that unemployment was deliberately initiated at the beginning of the war, at the beginning of the occupation, even before there really was a war.
You know, this was going to be classic economic shock treatment of the neoliberal sort.
And this was the Heritage Foundation plan you're referring to?
What?
This is the Heritage Foundation plan, the economic plans?
Well, there was an economic plan, the Heritage Foundation was involved in it, there were a bunch of different groups involved in it, but, you know, it's the plan that Bremer instituted.
I mean, the key element of it was the dismantling of the Ba'athist state and the shuttering of 192 business enterprises that were owned by the state, which accounted for 35 percent of the Iraqi economy.
And with multiplier effect, you know, for example, the Kurdish economy was dropped into a horrible depression, even though they didn't have any of the national, they didn't have any of the state-owned businesses there, because a huge number of the businesses in the Kurdish area were wholly dependent on state-owned businesses.
The leather business, for example, which employed 192,000 people in Iraq, and the center of which was the slaughtering of animals and the conversion of their hides into leather, was owned by the government, and they supplied the entire leather industry, leather goods industry, in Iraq all the way up through Kurdistan, and they closed down the slaughtering and hiding process.
The entire industry was collapsed, and it dropped from 192,000 employees to 15,000 employees in the space of about six months.
And of course, when you have this occurring in every area of the economy, what you get is complete devastation.
And it's this economic devastation, together with a whole bunch of social devastation that the United States also caused, in the infrastructure and so on and so forth, schools being closed and on and on, that generated the rebellion and generated the anger that has sustained the rebellion.
So they had plenty of good reason to be rebellious, and yet their reward for being rebellious, when they protested, instead of getting some redress for their grievances, the army was brought out and they were shot into the crowd.
And so then, the Iraqis started arming and fighting a guerrilla war.
And the reward for that was, for example, Fallujah, in which the entire city was destroyed.
Yeah, you just want to go and identify cause and effect, and identify things that happen on timelines, but we create our own reality.
We're an empire now.
Yeah, right.
Well, let me pick one fight with you, Michael, because you know I really like you, and I have great respect for you, and I know you lean a little left, and I think you know that I'm a libertarian, but I want to ask you, as a personal favor to me, and this is something that you do in your article, could you please not call this free market economics?
Because what we're talking about, sir, is fascism, right?
We're talking about the US Army pointing machine guns at people's heads and telling them what to do.
That's not the free market.
I mean, maybe if you want to give it ironic quotes or something, I'd accept it with ironic quotes, but this is a lousy affair.
This is empire.
Well, I think you have a point, but you know, you also have to have, you also have to go and scold the neoliberals, right?
Absolutely.
The neoliberal economists who have, you know, pretty effectively co-opted that term free market economics.
They sure have.
So that the world associates free market economics with their policy.
So we need to not accept their lingo.
I mean, I can call murder self-defense if I murder somebody, but I'd just be a liar, right?
Let's not call protectionism and mercantilism and war the free market.
We can, in fact, have fun pointing out that that's what the fascists call it, and aren't they a bunch of big liars?
Yeah, well, I think you have a point there.
I think, you know, you've got, I think you've got a beef with both sides on this.
You've got a beef with the neoliberals for stealing the concept of free market, and you've got a beef with the rest of us who criticize them and go along with the fact that their definition of the free market, we accept it, you know, and we just go along and say, yeah, that's free market, right?
Absolutely.
You know, but there is a larger issue here, right?
And I would raise it, and maybe this is the point on which you and I disagree.
After World War II, when there was this tremendously successful reconstruction in, let's say, Germany and Japan, right?
They aren't the only places, but those are the two that everybody always looks at.
The method that was used for that reconstruction is to construct a very strong state that had tremendous regulatory powers over most of the industry, and to use that state to select what industries would be reconstructed and then to guide and control an awful lot of the reconstruction that took place, you know, it's called state-centered economic development now in the scholastic, you know, the scholarly jargon, right?
Well, I'm no expert.
I'm no expert on the Marshall Plan, but I'll tell you this.
I interviewed an economist, an anti-empire economist on the show last week named Christopher Coyne, and I asked him about the Japan and Germany model because, of course, the war party likes to use them as the excuse.
I know you're not, but he was saying, he said actually and told this anecdote about a guy who went over the head of his military commanders and announced on the radio in Germany that all price controls are lifted, and he got in trouble for it.
Why did you do that?
You weren't supposed to do that.
Our wonderful economic plan has these price controls in place, and it was a guy who went over their head, basically announced it on the radio, ended the price controls.
That was what really saved the German economy, but, of course, you know, Austrian economists and you are going to disagree about that.
Well, you know, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that particular point.
It may have been that price controls were not a good idea and that getting rid of them really was a crucial thing, right?
But I would argue the larger point that the centrality of the state in the economic development was a crucial and positive and absolutely necessary part of those reconstructions.
Well, that very well may be, and here's something that I know that you and I will agree on 100 percent, that if America left Iraq and the people of Iraq were allowed to create their own economy their own way, whether they want to nationalize everything or have somewhat free markets or what have you, that no matter what they decide, it will be better than what our government has decided for them.
Oh, that's certainly true.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I wish more people in the United States could just hear that idea, let alone hear the evidence behind it.
That is just kept off the national media, the idea that that might be true.
Well, you know, that's what the Iraqi people all say in the opinion polls is they want us to leave yesterday.
Yeah.
Everybody, in case you didn't know, in case you tuned in late, it's Michael Schwartz.
He's got this great article he wrote with Tom Englehart called River of Resistance.
It's at TomDispatch.com and also at AntiWar.com slash Englehart.
The new book is called War Without End, The Iraq War in Context.
When's that coming out?
I mean, I'm actually afraid to ask the publisher the date because I'm so far behind, but I think in mid-July it'll be out, maybe before that.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I really look forward to reading that.
I always like reading your articles.
And, you know, I don't know why it is such a special quality to, you know, take into account for a moment the fact that Iraqis are people and that what happens to them matters, but it is a very special quality, apparently, and it's one you possess, and I sure appreciate it.
Well, you know, I appreciate your concern for them, too, and I hope we can find more and more people here who understand that.
You know, I do think that it's a question of ignorance because when people do hear some of the stories that are coming out of Iraq of, you know, what the people there have to endure, they really are moved by them.
I don't think Americans are as crass as we think they are.
I think Americans have been victimized by this very systematic and horrifying propaganda, really, that they've been getting not just from the government but also from the media, which is so cooperative with the government on so many things, even while they're willing to be very critical on other things.
You know, somebody sent me a clip, I guess the trailer, of a new movie that's coming out, and I'm sorry I forget the name of it, but I'm hopefully trying to arrange a copy and an interview, but it was about some American peacemaker types.
I don't know if they're Catholic socialist worker types or exactly what, but they went to Iran and basically just got a bunch of footage of Iranians being Iranians, and they made a whole movie out of it, and wow, like that actually is earth-shattering news, that here are people going about their day-to-day life.
Look, here's some moms and children at the park, here's some businessmen on their lunch break, you know, walking back to work.
Here are human beings who just happen to live somewhere else, and yet this is footage that we never, ever see, not even on C-SPAN, nowhere in the United States of America could we even see footage of Iranians being Iranians on Iranian streets, in Iranian homes.
Yeah, it's really sad that we're deprived of that.
It's really sad.
All right, well, I sure appreciate your time on the show today, everybody.
That's Michael Schwartz, he's a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.
He writes for Mother Jones, Tom Dispatch, Asia Times, and Context.
The new book coming out in hopefully July is called War Without End, the Iraq War in Context.
Thanks very much for your time today, Michael.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
