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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR. We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had, you've been you've been who's winning?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else except as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
But we ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name and say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton show on the line.
I got Con Hallinan writing again for foreign policy in focus here.
We reran this as we do a lot of pieces from FPIF.org at anti war dot com as well.
It's called the tortured politics behind the Persian Gulf crisis.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
How are you, Scott?
I'm fine.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Listen, what a mess over there with the G.C.C.
And what a great piece that you did here, uh, breaking it all down into little pieces and put it back together in a way that makes sense.
So go ahead.
You want to kind of take us through?
Obviously, Saudi is the big king in the middle.
And then who else are the players and for what purpose?
Patrick Coburn once described the Syrian civil war is a three dimensional chess game with five players and no rules.
Well, in this case, you kind of double the numbers of players, and they're no longer even using a chessboard.
I mean, it's possible to see what people are playing here.
It certainly is led by Saudi Arabia, and it's an example of a series of really inept, um, and somewhat illogical steps that the Saudis have taken.
What the ostensible fight is about is that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are the two major players in this, they're supported at Bahrain and Egypt and the Sudan and the Maldives and things like that are going after Qatar on the basis that Qatar is supporting terrorists.
Well, first of all, you have to take a big deep breath there because of course, all of those all of those countries in one way or other, not Egypt, but certainly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, are funding various terrorist organizations in the Syrian civil war in the Libyan civil war, and other areas of the world, etc.
But what the really what it's really about is that Qatar is this has very independent foreign policy.
And and there are two things that they do that really irritate this Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And that is that they tend to support the Muslim Brotherhood, which is seen as an anathema by the monarchies of the Gulf.
And the other thing is that Al Jazeera is their news agency, and it's a very kind of independent voice in the Middle East.
And the last thing that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates like it are independent voices in the Middle East.
Same goes for Egypt as well.
So you have this group over here, which are are trying to blockade Qatar and on Qatar's side, and Qatar is about the size of a fingernail, but it's got the highest per capita income in the world.
And it has these enormous natural gas field that it shares with Iran.
And Saudi Arabian is particularly anti Iranian.
So they want Qatar to break their relations with Iran, they want Qatar to get rid of Al Jazeera and all this kind of stuff.
Now on the other side, besides Qatar, you have a very strong support from Qatar from Turkey, because the current government in Turkey is kind of a variation of the Muslim Brotherhood, very similar to to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that was overthrown two years ago in a military coup.
And the Turks are very right now very have very frozen relations with Egypt, specifically because the Egyptian military overthrew the Brotherhood.
The Americans are Americans actually lean more toward Qatar in this situation and and not so much Saudi Arabia.
So what you really have here is you have a move by Saudi Arabia to to essentially eliminate any internal and external opposition to the monarchies of the Gulf.
And they're going to do that by trying to isolate Iran.
They're going to do that by trying to crush the Muslim Brotherhood.
And they're going to do that by making certain that there are no independent voices like Al Jazeera to talk about conditions in in in their countries in the internal situation.
And it's not working.
And the thing that I find so interesting about it is, there's been a pattern of what I will call Saudi Arabian ineptness, that's come in with this, this new King Salman.
And he's appointed his son, the next, you know, when he dies, which will be relatively soon, because he has real severe health problems, apparently some dementia, too.
So then his kids going to take over.
And his kid is a very aggressive policy, started a war with Yemen.
It's in the midst of what now the United Nations describe as the single worst human catastrophe on the globe is the Yemen war.
He's, he's pushed this blockade of Qatar.
And, and, and all of these moves over the past two years by this suddenly very aggressive Saudi Arabian government have been disasters.
The Yemen war, as they say, is completely frozen.
It's a stalemate.
Nobody's going to win that war.
The Saudis are spending up to $700 million a month on that war, probably more.
It's not going anywhere.
And back in 2015, the Saudis decided that they were going to lower the price, they were going to increase the amount of oil they were pumping in order to lower the world prices of oil to get rid of small competitors, the fracking industry in the United States, the oil sands in Canada, and take a whack at some of the people they don't like, like Russia and Iran and Venezuela and Ecuador, etc.
So they lowered the price of oil, which at that time was about $80 a barrel by pumping a huge amount of oil.
Well, it was a complete catastrophe for them.
I mean, nobody in Saudi Arabia seemed to know that the Chinese economy was slowing down.
So it went from $82 a barrel down to $44 a barrel.
The thing is that the Saudis need between $95 and $105 a barrel in order to balance their budget.
And so $44 for a barrel of oil has killed the Saudi Arabian economy.
It's in a recession at this point, and they have a huge deficit, which is growing.
And they're not out of it yet, even though the price of oil has come up.
This morning, it was $49 and, you know, a couple spare, you know, dimes.
That the Saudis didn't recognize that the Chinese economy was going, it was slowing down is beyond me.
I mean, that's the thing that's so surprising about the Qatar situation, is that it's really a reflection of a series of major blunders that are based on, I'm not entirely sure, certainly hubris, a delusion.
And in the case of Qatar, the Saudis got the green light to do this from Donald Trump.
They, you know, he went over to Saudi Arabia, and they put on a dog and pony show for him.
He bought it.
Then he comes up and he supports the blockade of Qatar, and even tried to take credit for it.
In the meantime, his allies, Turkey, the European Union, Britain, France, are trying to get this situation cleared up and trying to get it, you know, to stop the blockade and get some sort of peaceful resolution of this whole thing.
And so it's just an absolute mess.
And it's also a dangerous mess, because at this point, the Trump administration says that it's looking for reasons to end the executive agreement with the Iranians on the nuclear weapons.
If that happens, well, you know, I don't know what's going to happen.
There could be a war with Iran that would involve Saudi Arabia, possibly the United States, possibly Israel.
And that would make the Iraq war look like a tea party.
I mean, it would, I can't even, I can't even think of all of the dominoes that would spread out from that conflict.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, number one and two on the list, well, one, two, and three have been since the same conversation in 2005, and seven, etc. is American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the Persian Gulf are right there within missile range up for grabs, sitting ducks.
Absolutely.
I mean, that goes for Kuwait, that goes for in Qatar, in Bahrain, and then of course, Bagram Air Base, and wherever we got bases in Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdistan, all that is within the range of medium range missiles.
You know, there are 10,000 American military personnel in Qatar.
It's really, it's our biggest base, or our two biggest bases in the Middle East are in Bahrain.
This is the biggest one is, in other words, well...
Yeah, you got it.
No, I know what you're going to say.
What's going on here?
Here's the biggest American base is in Qatar.
It's essential for that base to be there in order to fight the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
And our allies are trying to blockade the country that this base is part of.
I mean, I don't know what they're smoking.
Well, and you got to wonder if anybody tagged Trump that, hey, we have a base there, Mr. President, and this is kind of a thing.
I mean, well, I guess so, right?
The reporting is that Tillerson and Mattis were trying to reel them in, but it wasn't working.
No, this is a guy who's going to make a...
You know, Perry said it was, you know, it was Jared Kushner that had made a deal with his friend, the UAE prince, to go around them and do this instead.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, here the military is saying, look, you know, we can't lose this base.
And the United Arab Emirates, of course, are saying we want the base.
You know, put the base in, and that's part of this, part of this move.
I mean, what was interesting is that the whole thing started because what happened was that that the Qatari government was supposed to have posted a series of false quotes, or series of quotes that were attributed to the emir of Qatar about Iran, about Saudi Arabia, about United Arab Emirates, et cetera.
And that was the, these incendiary comments were the things that sort of touched off the current crisis, except the US intelligence has discovered that the United Arab Emirates were the people that orchestrated the hacking of the Qatari government sites and made up the quotes.
Now, you haven't seen that reported hardly anywhere in the US press.
The Washington Post ran a piece on it on July 16.
Yeah, weeks after the whole crisis had started.
Right.
And so essentially, what you had was you had a false flag kind of thing.
You know, you literally created this, this phony quotes and everything.
Then you use that to launch this blockade.
And here the United States is right in the middle of that from what is was a made up crisis.
And I think it's a sign also of growing instability.
In in a lot of these Gulf countries, you know, Saudi Arabia, 70% of its population is under the age of 30.
And a huge section of that population is unemployed.
And there is actually you'd think of, you know, tremendous wealth and everything, but there's a widespread poverty in in Saudi Arabia.
And that's a very unstable situation.
And I don't see it getting better, particularly with this particular leadership in in Saudi Arabia, they're continuing the Yemen war.
Well, they even tried a policy of saying, Listen, it's time for some of you princes to get jobs.
And it's time for we're gonna have to cut back and maybe even put some taxes and they just who were they they changed their mind on all that immediately.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, they sure did.
You got that right, Scott.
Yeah.
So I mean, you pay a bunch of pampered princes to not work for generations and then tell them to get a job and pay taxes.
Come on.
No.
And the thing is that, of course, here you've got this odd situation of where one of the ways of course, that the Saudi current, the House of Saud remains in power is because it is turned over the whole area of religion to this very conservative, very reactionary form of Islam called Wahhabism.
And and they've given the Wahhabis essentially carte blanche, except that the Wahhabist ideology of Islam is exactly what fuels some of Saudi Arabia's most deadly enemies, particularly the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, etc.
And and so you have this contradiction of the Saudi government pushing Wahhabism, which is the ideology which is producing forces, which is trying to overthrow Saudi Arabia.
Well, it's just the same thing is the whole thing is just one big Benghazi, right?
It's just like Americans backing their enemies.
And then, hey, just because you love them doesn't mean they love you back.
They'll still kill your ambassador, dude.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
And the question is, is how, how long, how long this can continue?
The blockade has not been a success, because Iran and Turkey, and even countries like Morocco, which you would think of as as countries that were, you know, normally aligned with Saudi Arabia and have close relations with Saudi Arabia, have been sending supplies into to to Qatar.
And the big important countries in the Islamic world, specifically Indonesia and Pakistan, have made it quite clear they have no intention of being part of this boycott.
They have no intention of breaking off relations with Iran.
They don't want anything to do with this.
And they're opposed to what to what's happening here.
So it's less that Qatar is being isolated than Saudi Arabia is being isolated.
The thing that I find interesting here is that the Saudis, for the past 30 years, 40 years, have been a major player in foreign affairs, but always in the shadows.
You know, they funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
They underwrote Saddam Hussein's war with Iran.
They essentially, you know, bankrolled insurgent forces and Wahhabism sort of all over the world.
But they always did it behind the scenes.
You could never you could never see them being part of it.
Well, now they've taken exactly the opposite.
Now they're suddenly out in front of all these things, except that all these things they're out in front of are just disastrous.
Every single one of them has backfired.
Well, so do you think this could really lead to a war, especially when you have the Turks there who are, I guess, at least they think big enough to tell the Saudis, no, it seems like things could spiral out of control here, maybe?
I don't think there would be a war, there would be an attack on Qatar.
And I think you're absolutely correct.
The two things that prevent that is the fact that there are 10,000 American soldiers there and the several thousand Turkish soldiers and more Turkish soldiers are on their way.
I don't think there could be a war with Qatar.
My worry is that this ends up being a war with Iran.
And with the statement yesterday that came out in the press that essentially Trump has said, find a reason to break the agreement with Iran.
That's a little scary, because I do think that there is a potential for a war with Iran.
Now, wait a minute, though.
So that's kind of one to skip a few.
So if America did break the deal, then we still have the nonproliferation treaty and the safeguards agreement.
And they still have a deal with the rest of the major powers.
And I would assert to you that they don't have any intention of making a nuke or withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty anyway.
And they already got their money.
And so America could say, well, we're abrogating the deal and we want to pick a fight with you.
But their position since the turn of the century has been, hey, hands up, books wide open.
We're not making nukes.
You got no excuse to attack us.
And that's it.
So what would change that could end up?
What are the steps between America leaving the deal and actually picking a real fight?
Well, first of all, you're absolutely correct.
One thing is that the United States would be absolutely isolated because part of that agreement is Russia and China, Germany and the United Nations and the European Union.
Yeah, France and Britain, too.
Absolutely.
So we would be isolated from those things.
However, the problem is that even though we would be isolated, the U.S. is so powerful economically and also because we control SWIFT, which is the way that banks exchange money internationally, etc.
And the Iranians have been banned from using SWIFT, etc.
There are a lot of countries that even though they may disagree with the United States, they're not going to take a chance that they would violate Washington's definition of sanctions.
And that's one of the reasons why even though there's this agreement, there's been no big rush of investment by other countries in Iran because they're worried about the fact that they would come down on the wrong side of the United States.
So how could this lead to a war?
Well, you have three forces which are pushing a war at this point with Iran.
One is Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
That doesn't necessarily include Kuwait.
It actually doesn't include Oman.
It doesn't include all the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
So you have Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, you have Israel, and you have the neocons in Washington, people like Bannon, etc.
And also a lot of people around the foreign policy establishment during the Bush administration, etc.
They're pushing.
Now, is that enough to start a war?
No.
But what happens if there's some kind of incident?
It's not easy.
It's not hard to get an incident in the Middle East which leads to someplace very unpleasant.
There could be a dust up between the Republican, the Iranian Navy and the US Navy.
And before you know it, somebody bombs somebody and off you go on an escalation.
These are real possibilities.
And I think that there were certainly people who argue that we have to just...
Iran cannot be allowed to develop into an independent political power in the Middle East and Central Asia.
That's a threat.
That's a long-term security threat to the United States.
And that we ought to deal with it.
We ought to deal with it now.
Do I think those people have a majority?
No, I don't think they have a majority in the American people.
I don't think they have a majority in the Congress.
But it's not an insignificant group of people.
And it's one that can stampede public opinion very quickly.
I mean, if you think back, Scott, to, say, Iraq, the invasion of Iraq, you know, the polls showed that people didn't support the invasion of Iraq.
But once that happened, then they got behind it.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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Yeah.
Well, I mean, Americans will believe anything as long as it's not true.
Look at all this hype about Russia right now.
Yeah, I agree.
It's the same thing with the whole terror war.
All of a sudden, everybody who never paid attention to anything before all of a sudden was the world's greatest expert on why the government must be right about everything.
And then they went away again after they had served their purpose of being the useful pressure from below to allow them to get away with it.
Same as always.
And yet, as you say, though, Iran is biting off more than the Marines or the Army wanted to.
And it's funny to me that I'm having trouble keeping track on my little Kremlinology scoreboard here.
But it seems to me like Mattis and McMaster, the so-called adults in the room, they're worse on Afghanistan.
Bannon wants out of Afghanistan.
Now, I'm not saying Merckx is a better idea, but I'm just saying at least he wants out of there.
And Merckx was like his idea for some excuse to get out of there.
Anyway, but then Mattis and McMaster seem to be the relative doves when it comes to Iran.
And when Trump wanted out of the deal, they teamed up with Tillerson to say, no, no, no, stay in the deal.
They even got the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dunford, in there and said, hey, stay in the deal, right, guys?
We want to stay in the deal.
And then apparently Trump got mad at Tillerson because Tillerson was supposed to come up with a plan to get out of the deal, but he didn't.
And so now Trump has ordered the White House staff to come up with one.
So Bannon and them are worse on Iran.
But then when it comes to Syria, where the whole thing is a proxy war against Iran anyway, as we just finished talking about with Gareth Porter a minute ago, it seems like Mattis and McMaster, or certainly at least McMaster, was the one who wanted to put troops in there.
And it was Bannon who was leaking to his buddies at Breitbart and that kind of thing that we got to stop McMaster.
He wants to invade and occupy eastern Syria.
And so I don't know if they're all equally horrible on Somalia or what.
I guess nobody cares about that.
And I don't know if there's a split at all on Yemen.
But it just seems, it's interesting to me, I don't know if you have an opinion about who's in the driver's seat on any of this stuff or why Bannon, for example, is worse on Iran.
That doesn't make much sense to me.
It seems like if he's more of a Buchananite, then he would see that, hey, Iranian power in the region is George W. Bush's fault.
So shrug, what are you going to do?
Well, I think in the case of Bannon, if you look at his writings and what he said over the past several years, the two things that he's talked about are he has this idea that the United States has to be the preeminent force in the world and that two of the competitors who stand in the way of that is China and Iran.
And China, he said, we will be at war with China in the South China Sea sometime in the next 10 years.
I think he's looking in a very strategic kind of way at Iran.
I think McMaster's looks at Iran and he sees it like a general.
There are 81 million people in that country.
It's a country in which most of the people, regardless of whether you think of their government, most of the people support their government, very nationalistic.
That's a military nightmare.
I don't want anything to do with that.
Something like Syria, he looks at and says, well, we'll put special forces in there.
Afghanistan, the same kind of thing.
He knows it's not a major commitment.
What I see is one thing about generals, a couple of things that generals always kind of avoid.
One is two front wars.
A war with Iran would be a big war.
Things like war in Syria and war in Afghanistan are, in terms of the overall American military expenditures, it's not a huge amount of money.
And it fits into their thing of also training, testing out weapons, training troops, etc., and it's directed against terrorism.
And they generally see terrorism as the main thing.
I'm not at all surprised that McMaster doesn't want anything to do with Iran, because I think any general would look at that situation and say, really, let's not go there.
We couldn't win the war in Iraq, and there were, what, 26 million people in Iraq?
The idea of invading Iran, it's, you know, the three...
Well, but really all they want to do is just bomb the hell out of them and tell them what to do, right?
Nobody says send in the 3rd Infantry Division.
Yeah, but then how do you end it?
Okay, so you bomb them.
The Iranians don't give up.
I mean, in the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians got shellacked at the beginning of the war.
They just didn't give up.
So they're not going to give up.
How are you going to end that?
I mean, that's what all people like McMaster and all those are looking at, is that any good general knows that the first thing you have to figure out in a war is how you end it.
I remember Gareth, actually, years ago, had a report about when Admiral Fallon was telling Dick Cheney, no, the commander of Central Command was overruling the president and the vice president, was just telling him, like, you're just not going to do this on my watch.
And Gareth said, see, the doctrine here is escalation dominance.
That's what the military calls it.
And that means they, to them, in their plan, the way the war is supposed to go, they must be the dominant force at every stage and determine every turn in the conflict as far as they can possibly see.
And if they see it ever getting out of their control, then that is too many variables, and they don't want to do it at all.
That's right.
I mean, the essence of American military doctrine, and really any serious military doctrine, is that you have to hold the initiative.
You know, it's got to be you have to make the decisions about what happens.
Now, in reality, as von Clausewitz pointed out, the only thing you can really determine in a war is who fires the first shot.
After that, it's all smoke and fog, as Iraq was a perfect example of doing so.
This thing about Afghanistan is kind of interesting, because I would think by this point, that any American general would recognize that Afghanistan is one of those places that people, every several hundred years, makes a decision to invade and concludes it was a really bad idea.
You know, I would like to think that maybe people read some Kipling before they went into Afghanistan.
They clearly didn't.
And the idea that any kind of surge in Afghanistan is going to make any difference at this point is just silly.
That's a lost war.
And the most you can do at this point is to see if you can't get some kind of political settlement, which is a possibility.
And if you go back to in 2007, the Taliban came out with a proposal that said they would agree to cease fire.
The Constitution would have to be renegotiated, because they weren't part of pulling it together.
They would agree under no circumstances to export any kind of military or political stuff to other countries in the region.
But they would have to be part of the government.
The U.S.'s response to that was, you have to surrender, you have to accept the Constitution, and we'll integrate you back into society.
Well, you know, if you win in the war, why are you going to do that?
So of course they didn't do it.
So we had this opportunity, and we blew it.
Is it too late now?
I don't know.
No, I mean, they've said a million times they're not going to negotiate until we're already gone.
Yeah, and they want foreign troops out.
But they were willing in 2007 to not insist that the troops leave before negotiations began, but that ultimately they would have to leave.
I think one of the problems in Afghanistan is that the U.S. targeted the Taliban leadership.
And in the secondary leadership as well.
So what you have now is a very atomized force.
It's not centrally directed.
It's based now in Pakistan, which it was not before, among the Haqqani.
And it's going to be much more difficult now to get an agreement because you're not talking about talking with, you know, four or five key people and sitting down.
All of these Taliban units all over the country kind of have their own little, their own leaders, their own local issues, their own good thing.
And they're very different too.
I mean, some places the Taliban encourage girls to go to school, other places they burn down the schools.
So it's not an ideologically or politically centralized, consistent organization.
And that's largely because of the way we fought the war.
Essentially what we did was that we eliminated the people who had that kind of authority over the Taliban, over their troops.
And so how that ends, I don't know, Scott.
You're going to love my new book, Khan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's coming out in like, I don't know, a week or two or something.
Oh, really?
What's it about?
It's about ending the war in Afghanistan.
Uh-huh.
And it says all the things that you just said.
It said the 2007 thing.
Now I got a bunch of Googling to do.
What is it?
What's your feeling on that, Scott?
Do you think that there's a way out of that?
Yes.
The only way out is for Trump to say, listen, fighting a bunch of Pashtun tribesmen is stupid and it has nothing to do with the war against international Arab terrorists trying to attack New York City or anything like that.
And so we don't care about that.
And the Kabul government, that's the Bush-Obama government in Kabul, has nothing to do with me.
The fact that it can't exist without our help means that they did it wrong in the first place.
And the American people aren't willing to try again and give their second son to this thing now.
And so it's over.
That's it.
We're done.
And if you've got a problem with it, take it up with Barack Obama.
Take it up with George W. Bush, these idiots who thought that they could voice this tiny minority coalition government on the plurality Pashtun tribesmen warrior population that would never give in to such tyranny at the hands of the Tajiks and a bunch of North Americans.
What a ridiculous joke.
Yeah.
You know, and I tend to think that most Americans would say, yeah, they agree.
You don't see some sort of big groundswell for...
Yeah, and the whole thing with negotiate, oh, we got to negotiate.
Let's make a big deal.
Why make a deal?
Can you imagine really McMaster sitting down and telling the Taliban, okay, you're going to share power in Kabul.
Okay, we're going to let you rule all of Pashtunistan.
What's going to happen is the only way it's going to end is just like with Nixon.
Just end the thing and lose.
You lost, dude.
Taliban is going to rule what Taliban is going to rule.
And the North Americans aren't going to be able to sit on it forever.
So no, they can't.
Absolutely not.
I mean, when you think about it, it also keeps the situation in Pakistan unstable.
It keeps the situation on the Chinese border unstable.
It spreads instability into Central Asia, into Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
I mean, it just...
I'll tell you, though, the American military increasingly, increasingly resembles the old British imperial military.
Can I go back to Trump for a second here?
I'm really ruining my own stupid book here.
But here's the thing.
Remember how we're talking about how horrible Trump is on Iran?
Yes.
Well, I have a theory that he's like that because two years ago when he started running, he decided politically, and it was smart too, that he would just go, ah, the Iran deal is the most horrible thing ever, ever.
That way, any other Republican saying the same thing was only a pale imitation of him because he was staking out the most radical position on it, that horrible, evil Obama, worst deal ever.
And even though it was obvious he never read the thing, doesn't know the first thing about it, didn't matter, right?
But then here we are two years later, he really believes this stuff.
And even when his entire cabinet is going, chill, Mr. President, he doesn't want to.
He's amped up and hates Iran over really what was just, my theory goes, just a line in a campaign that now he's like brainwashed himself with this.
But so there's another example of this that works in our favor, which is he spent five years denouncing Barack Obama for the war in Afghanistan.
And so this is the stupidest thing ever.
It's a giant waste of money.
And the guys, the army we're training kills our trainers and stabs us in the back.
They hate us and all of this, and it's horrible.
And when Obama fought the generals on the timeline and said, no, we really are winding the thing down back in 2012 when they wanted to keep the surge levels the same, he said, I support Obama and this thing.
And he was really good on Afghanistan, just on Twitter, but still, he was really good on it for years and years and years.
And so my thing is, first of all, he's obviously right.
But second of all, he can't escape the fact that he does know better than this, right?
Because it was his own position for so long.
And I think that's why he's dragged ass all this time in deciding the escalation.
I think this is why he's taken so long to decide the escalation.
They were supposed to announce it originally back in March, you know?
Yeah.
He's had a few other things on his mind.
Yeah, that's true.
But I mean, they keep kicking the can down the road.
And there are some reports that he's saying, well, look, Alexander the Great couldn't do it, and the Russians couldn't do it, meaning pacify the local population there, right?
Not fight international terrorism.
So he can differentiate.
We know he can differentiate between, you know, the Taliban and al-Qaeda for, as they like to put it, you know?
So I mean, that's the thing is not that he's going to make the right decision or a moral decision or anything like that.
But it just seems like it really is his opinion.
And it seems to be so far that Mattis has had a hard time getting him to budge on sending more.
Like apparently he said, OK, go ahead and send more.
But then they still didn't do it because they apparently don't think he's really behind it.
And they don't want to.
He doesn't want to be his decision, not theirs, you know?
Yeah, he is not enthusiastic about that.
There's no question about it.
We've got to find a way to exploit that, you know?
I agree.
It's just like with Obama.
Obama knew that it was wrong.
But looking out the window of the White House, the people out there, are they against this?
And the answer was, nah, they don't care.
The liberals don't care because it's Obama.
And the Republicans don't care because it's war.
So they're like, OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think you're right.
I think one of the things I do have to say, Scott, is that I'm sitting at my desk and I have this, I don't know, 40 or 50 files and piles of stuff and stuff I'm working on, all this kind of thing.
And it's very hard to figure out what we should be focusing on, because this is an administration in which, you know, every day I go pick up the newspaper and I feel like I'm opening a can and I don't know what's going to be inside, you know, like a spitting cobra or a green mambo or, you know, I just don't know.
It's true.
Every time I get an instant message from Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, I'm like, oh, no, what?
I'm prepared for, like, some mass shooting.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm sure that that is the case.
I mean, I know.
Yes.
How many times have we said in the last six months?
Oh, no.
You know, and it's not all on foreign policy.
A lot of it is on domestic policy, et cetera.
But, you know, this last thing with the White House, with this new White House spokesman getting on the...
Well, I refuse to pay attention to spokesmen.
I'm sticking with the actual things.
No, but I'm talking about him going off on this attack, you know, on his enemies in the White House, all public, talking to a New Yorker reporter.
I mean, it's that level of where you just go, oh, no, what?
What is going on here?
That's a little hard.
Yeah.
David Stockman says that Donald Trump is like Kevin McAllister in Home Alone, and he's just locked up there by himself, not really knowing what to do, you know, surrounded by these terrible people after him.
And if I had to predict, you know, someone were to say, well, you know, what do you predict six months from now in, say, Korea?
Okay.
I wouldn't know what to tell him.
I mean, at this point, it looks like the South Koreans and the South Koreans do not want a war.
And so the South Koreans are talking about negotiations.
It might be a peaceful resolution, but I don't know what that guy Trump is going to do.
I mean, I just, I don't have a feel for it.
I don't know.
You know, the thing that concerns me right now is that the tensions between India and Pakistan and the tensions between India and China, those are the things that scare me right now.
As much as I'm concerned about a war with Iran, I'm more concerned at this point of the possibility of a conflict between nuclear powers in the case of India and Pakistan.
Well, so do you mean that the status quo in Kashmir is changing or just that it's time has come?
It cannot last?
Well, I think two things is one, I don't think India can continue the situation in Kashmir without some kind of political resolution of the, you know, the issue of Kashmiri autonomy, you know, et cetera.
But I'm concerned about the fact that the Pakistani and the Indian military have made a series of moves that make the possibility of triggering a nuclear exchange between both countries much, much simpler.
The Pakistanis have given authority for frontline commanders to use tactical nuclear weapons.
And India said that any use of tactical nuclear weapons will ignite a general nuclear war because they don't have tactical nuclear weapons.
And then there's these tensions between China and India on the border, which is, you know, it's long standing tensions going back to the war in 1962 between China and India.
But at this point, you have soldiers shooting at one another.
You have a very, very aggressive government in India and a pretty aggressive government in Beijing as well.
Those are things which don't get reported on a whole lot, but which in the middle of the night, it's those things that go bump for me.
If there was a nuclear war, say, between India and Pakistan, which I think is the most likely, if there is going to be a nuclear war, that would be the most likely place for it to be.
If there was an exchange, even of 100 Hiroshima type bombs, the studies have shown that that would create worldwide disaster.
You would be unable to grow wheat in the northern United States and much of Russia and parts of Canada.
You would have worldwide famine.
You would have a reduction of the monsoon by 10 percent, which could produce famine in Asia.
And you would put a hole in the ozone layer that would allow enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation to come out.
It would be a worldwide catastrophe.
It's hard to imagine that it would even stop at that, right?
Once you have a nuclear bomb war that big between India and Pakistan, then that involves China, and then that means that Russia and America start making threats about what people better do or else, and we all die.
Yeah, no.
What's the line in a nuclear war?
Use them or lose them.
As much as I worry about a war with Iran, when I'm with my grandkids, I think the thing that in so many ways scares me most of all is the possibility of some kind of nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.
And as you say, there's no such thing as just a nuclear war that involves two countries, because all of those countries are in some way or other tied into other countries as well, which are also nuclear powers.
And then we're talking about survival, and that's what I don't see people talking about.
That's why all of this stuff about Putin and the elections and all that kind of stuff, I say, well, wait a minute, maybe that's not the most important issue right now.
Well, it is, except everybody's just got it upside down, right?
Because you want to talk about the problems of nuclear war.
The nuclear war between America and Russia would certainly be the end of northern human civilization.
I don't know if some people in the South might end up getting by eventually after generations or centuries go by or something.
Some humans might survive.
But America's relationship with Russia is, in the scheme of things, the only issue that matters in the whole world.
And every other issue is in 100,000th place compared to America's relationship with Russia.
Yeah, I agree.
Well, you know, one of the things that's happened is that there's this huge land rush going on in New Zealand.
And billionaires are buying huge tracts of land in New Zealand because they foresee the possibility of a nuclear war and they want someplace to go to survive.
35% of it, the last time I looked, 35% of that money was for Americans.
So I don't know.
Do you remember that book, On the Beach?
Yeah.
Well, you know, the joke there is that these are the people who could do something about it, right?
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm going to fund a congressman, any congressman who says that they want to get along with Russia, I'll give you $50,000, right?
That's chump change to a billionaire.
Stick your neck out a little bit.
You got young men getting their body parts blown off, driving their Humvees around the far side of Tatooine from here, giving everything for nothing.
You'd find one or two billionaires willing to bankroll peace.
You know, there's the Kochs, but that's it.
And the Kochs, they're kind of half-hearted.
No, they're not half-hearted.
Well, yeah, compared to their resources, they are half-hearted in their support for peace groups, I think.
No offense, guys, I would like your mind.
I keep waiting for sensible people to make themselves heard, and I don't know, Scott.
Boy, I'll tell you what, liberals don't like hearing that.
Yeah, the Koch brothers are actually not too bad on foreign policy, because that's like saying a lie with the devil or the Ku Klux Klan or whatever to them.
But those guys are ideologically peaceful guys.
They have been for decades.
Well, the thing is, it's that refusal by liberals, I think, to look at what happened in this last election.
And if you conclude that Donald Trump won because all the racists and fascists voted for him, well, then we're in really serious trouble, Scott.
And I don't believe it anyhow.
And I think in some ways that the recent British election was a perfect example of it.
People said when the British and the Welsh voted to leave the European Union, it was just racism and xenophobia and all this kind of stuff.
Well, then they have a general election.
Labor comes out with a very progressive platform.
And what happens, a huge section of those people who voted for Brexit and who voted for the United Kingdom party, Independence Party, which is a right-wing, extremely right-wing organization, all those people turn around and vote for labor.
Because what they were looking for is a program that deals with the crisis of their lives, what globalization has done to people.
The fact that it has more than what it's due to.
First and foremost, independence, right?
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Yep.
Well, you know, I saw Bill Burr is my favorite comedian or second favorite of this generation.
And I saw him, I think on Jay Leno or one of those clone shows, where he says, oh yeah, no, I love the Democrats' narrative about this election that Trump won just because racism and racist.
Yeah, the racist.
I guess this was before the Russia story got so out of control.
He said, oh yeah, the racist, like just a bunch of these weird rednecks all just came out of the forest to vote.
Now they couldn't be bothered to try to stop the black guy that won the last two elections, but they all came out to stop the white lady, these racists, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not, and of course it's a self-serving narrative because what it says is, well, if it's all a bunch of racists and the Russians manipulate the election, well, then we don't have to make any changes.
We just have to keep the Russians from, you know, manipulating the elections.
And we have to isolate these racists.
And instead of saying we ran a horrible campaign with a terrible candidate and we got our asses handed to us, period.
Well, you know, whether they do, whether they do that, Scott, I don't know.
There's a, there's a, there's a battle.
There's going to be a battle over the soul of the Democratic Party over the next year.
It's not just that they're all guilty.
They all know that she was horrible, but this is the tension between Democratic voters, which I never was one.
I'm a libertarian as you know, but this is a tension between what they want and what the donors to the Democratic Party want, which are entirely different things.
And so we have a lot of those splits on the right as well.
I mean, that was the appeal of Trump.
I'm not saying it was legitimate, but in marketing terms, his sales pitch was, I'm so rich, nobody can buy me.
I'm so rich that I really am in it for you.
And Sheldon Adelson and everybody else can, I don't care about any of you guys.
I'm just going to do the right thing at my own expense.
I'm going to make no money for eight years so that I can make America great again.
And people bought that.
Here's a guy who he, he, in the past was so corrupt that he got so rich that now he doesn't need to be corrupt anymore.
Well, you know, that made sense to people.
Whereas Hillary Clinton, of course, is completely dependent on the left.
And in the absence of any really good program, you know, that talked to the place that people were, yeah, sure.
That's going to sell.
But again, if you go back to Jeremy Corbyn and Britain and that new program they put out there and they ended up, the conservatives ended up getting their ears boxed.
Right.
As you say, it's because it's not about left and right.
It's about, you know, elite power versus regular people and devolved power, which regular people instinctually prefer.
Independence for their local political community as best they can.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, instead we're going to get a nuclear war.
So anyway.
Well, let's hope not.
All right.
Hey, thanks for coming back on the show, Con.
Well, anytime.
And by the way, listen, good look on your book, Scott, huh?
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Knock them dead.
Cool.
I appreciate it.
I'll send you a copy as soon as it's out.
Please send me a copy.
I'll review it.
Great.
Okay.
All right.
I hope you like it.
Oh, I'm glad.
I'm glad you phoned me.
It's been a pleasant hour.
All right.
Good deal.
Good to talk to you, too.
All righty.
Bye.
All right, you guys.
That's Con Hallinan.
He's at Foreign Policy and Focus.
That's fpif.org, Foreign Policy and Focus.
And this one is called The Tortured Politics Behind the Persian Gulf Crisis.
We also ran it at antiwar.com.
It's a really good one.
You read this thing maybe twice and you'll have it solid.
Eh, three times.
All right.
I don't know, maybe once if you're really bright.
Check out my archives at scotthorton.org and the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
