All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey, look, guys, on the line, I've got Peter Van Buren.
I wonder, when you were in high school, did they call you PVB, like on the football team and stuff?
Hey, PVB.
No, you know, I never had a nickname.
It always bothered me, because, like, everybody had nicknames, and I never had a nickname.
Well, it's so obvious.
PVB.
PVB.
Yeah, I mean, the closest I ever got was Pete, and, you know, I never really kind of identified with it, but I kind of just went along with it as Pete, but I never had a nickname.
I always wanted some kind of nickname.
Can you think of anything that I could be nicknamed even now at my advanced stage here?
I've already done my best.
I'm just going to call you Pete Van Buren from now on, I guess.
Petey.
I had a girlfriend who used to call me Petey, and weirdly, my father, towards the end of his life, when he was kind of all Alzheimer-y, would call me Petey.
And diminutive there for his son, you know, that makes sense, yeah.
Yeah, there were a lot of kind of obstacles along the way.
I really wanted something cool, you know, like Viper or Hammer or, you know, something martial and kind of threatening, but it never really clicked.
That's funny.
Hammer.
Yeah, it's been a good one.
Marshall.
We could call you Grand Marshal Van Buren.
Like Dostum.
Yeah, I kind of like that.
I mean, you know, you're like the therapist in movies, man.
You just cut right through me there, and suddenly I'm splayed open in front of you without any of my defenses.
It really was quite amazing.
Ah, geez.
All right.
Well, I wasn't even trying that hard, but here we are.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, I read your books, so that means I understand you.
Also, I read a bunch of things you wrote, including this thing at TAC.
That's for those familiar.
That's the American Conservative.
Huh?
Mick.
Nick?
Mick.
Like Mick Jagger.
If I had a nickname like Mick, I think I would be comfortable.
Mick Van Buren?
Yeah.
All right.
Is that an Irish thing or?
No, no.
That's different.
No, you're Dutch, right?
Yeah.
My family is Dutch, long-term.
So, yeah.
So, no double meaning there.
No.
My articles all say Peter Van Buren, so I think we're going to be stuck with that for the purposes of this interview.
But let's look long-term.
Well, you know, when I say to Ed, hey, get me X on the show, it's PVB, you know?
Yeah.
Or, hey, man, do you have his phone number?
Because I lost it, or whatever.
Right, right.
Yeah, PVB.
Does Ed kind of call you a jerk when you do that, or you just kind of roll with it?
He's very nice to me.
I'm really not sure why.
Oh, okay, okay.
I didn't know if this was one of those late-night TV relationships where, you know, he plays the foil to your guy or something.
You know, he's probably, if you have to compare it to TV or something like that, he would be, well, you could say this about Eric Garrison, Antiwar.com, too, the voice in the box on Charlie's Angels.
Okay.
All right.
I was going to go with Greg Brady, but all right, voice in the box will work.
Or, you know, like on Knight Rider or, you know, a lot of those superhero movies, there's always, like, the hot chick in the wheelchair back at the base who runs the computers and stuff.
Right, right.
That's Ed.
Yeah.
Like in Thunderbirds, it was the guy, Brain, with the glasses.
There you go.
Intelligence on Team America.
Yeah.
There we go.
Yeah, yeah.
Listen, man, the reason I have you here is because, well, I like hearing you think about things.
And you wrote this really thinkable article here.
It looks like we forgot kind of a retrospective on the terror wars here.
So why don't you remind people you were in the State Department.
You were and, you know, I like the article before this, too, about the Widows.
That was really cool, man.
But anyway, remind us, first of all, your role in the terror wars and the book you wrote and stuff like that.
And then cut back to what you're talking about here.
You start with the media, the major media and their retrospectives, the big papers and TV and the way that they're looking back on 20 years of this.
And then, you know, talk about other things from their kind of thing.
You know, I think in the broader scope of history, assuming that there's anything approximating the United States, you know, another hundred years from now or 200 years from now, I think we're going to look back at September 11th as the seminal event of modern American history, anything since World War II.
No matter what happens after this, I think we're going to realize that that was one of those really significant turning points in history.
And maybe not for all the reasons that we like to think about.
The way it was supposed to work kind of tells you why the fact that it didn't work was so significant.
So the way it was supposed to work is we were attacked on September 11th by terrorists, and they tragically took 3,000 some lives, depending on how historical you like to be.
It was either a lot of lives or really in a geological scale, not that many.
When you compare it to losses in the American Civil War, in the scope of World War II, you know, natural disasters, sadly, 3,000 lives is just not that much, and yet it was taken as permission to become the lashful victim of all time.
It is not by accident that the United States grabbed the term ground zero to refer to New York City.
Ground zero before that, of course, had famously referred to Hiroshima, where certainly a lot more people were killed under the atomic bombing.
It certainly was in the minds of many something akin to a terrorist act that I don't want to get into.
Yes, of course, this war was declared and that war was declared, and they started it and all those other things.
I mean, the idea of dropping a nuclear weapon on an undefended city that had no real military significance, well, how do we know that?
Because we hadn't bombed it throughout all of World War II.
That's why it had no military significance, because we hadn't bombed it.
We would have if it had had any military significance.
Anyway, you know, the idea of dropping a nuclear weapon on and killing thousands and thousands of innocent civilians, children, what have you, indiscriminately, cuts pretty close to an act of terrorism by any definition other than an American one.
So the fact that that term was appropriated to describe New York City on 9-11 and the fact that those 3,000 tragic deaths were sort of used as currency for so long, for two decades' worth of American revenge, really kind of tells you how easily we slipped into this role as victim and used that as much as we could.
Now, it would have been different if it had worked out in some way.
In other words, if anyone could at this point point to some significant benefit of the last 20 years of American imperialism, colonialism, lashing out, revenge wars, pick the word.
I don't want history to get stuck on a word choice.
Oh, he said black instead of African-American.
We no longer will listen to him.
That's silly.
Words are important, but to stop the whole parade over word choice.
So regardless, for 20 years, the United States made war all across the globe, basically wherever we wanted to, under whatever terms we wanted to.
If we wanted to have a full-on World War II-style invasion of Iraq, then we did that.
And if we wanted to send in special forces and blow things up from 40,000 feet all across Africa, then we did it that way there.
But what mattered was it was done with complete impunity.
It was done without any regard for the norms of how adult countries are supposed to behave in the late 20th and 21st centuries.
This was classic 19th century imperialism.
I live here in Hawaii now, which is just an extraordinarily beautiful place with an extraordinarily messed up history.
But I was just reading about an event back in the early Hawaiian contact with the outside world.
A bunch of Hawaiians stole a British lifeboat, didn't steal it.
They actually took it for a joyride and returned it.
And the British, in retaliation, slaughtered 40 Hawaiians in cold blood, not even the guys who were directly involved in taking the lifeboat.
They just went ashore and killed 40 people.
That's real 19th century stuff.
It's like we don't even care about proportionalism.
We certainly don't see much value in, quote, native lives.
And that's basically what the United States reverted to in the late 20th century, 21st century, was this return back to a world where power came out of the barrel of a gun, and it was indiscriminate in its violence, and it was complete.
And it was justified by something, either that white people are better than brown people or that we were attacked on September 11th, and therefore we can do anything we want.
You know, it's a terrible, terrible turning point in American history, much of which would have been forgiven if something would have worked out.
In other words, if Iraq would have become a better place, if Afghanistan would have become a better place, or Libya, or Somalia, or Yemen, or all across Africa, or any place where we did this horrific violence, if any of those had come out of this, albeit at great cost, a better place, well, then all would have been forgiven, and off we go.
If the United States had come out of these 20 years a better place, we would have forgiven ourselves.
I'm being somewhat sarcastic because the dead are still the dead, but the way that the United States tends to rewrite our ventures overseas, if we would go and say, well, look, yeah, it was a bumpy road, but gosh, you know, Iraq is such a great place right now.
You know, Disney Baghdad is supposed to open next year, and all is good.
If we could have said that, we would have found a way to justify everything that we did there and forgotten about the stuff that was kind of a little bit too sticky.
You know, if we came out of these 20 years post-9-11 America as an introspective place, as a place a little bit humbled, a little bit less willing to use violence abroad and at home, again, we could have claimed some shred of moral victory, but none of that happened.
We're a worse place than we were 20 years ago.
We're a worse people than we were 20 years ago.
There's not a single place that we touched during these two decades that we can suggest is even on the road, possibly, maybe, to becoming a better place.
It's the anti-Midas touch.
Everything we touch turned to shit, and we simply moved on to the next place.
We grumble about refugees and refuse to talk about how many refugees we created through our own wars, and instead grumble that we're only taking in X number of Haitians.
Never mind, of course, even looking a little further back in history to how Haiti got to a place where you want to be a refugee from through America, but that's old history.
That's too much to even ask.
We're talking about asking Americans to look back 20 years, objectively, and failing on all that.
That was what I was trying to write about in this article, and be more specific, of course, along the way, because examples are good, but broadly to just simply reject the victimization argument, to reject the idea that anything good came out of this, and certainly to reject the concept of never forgetting, because we have, in fact, forgotten everything of substance about September 11th and the aftermath, what I've just riffed through there.
All we remember is that some Americans got killed.
No one wants to even look at the numbers and say, well, how many Americans got killed after 9-11 in these wars?
God forbid, never mind even asking the questions about how many Iraqis, how many Afghans.
The only thing we can really say with accuracy is we have carefully reflected on how many Saudis were killed in the aftermath of 9-11, and the answer to that is basically zero.
Yeah, except the suicide bombers they sent to Iraq to fight against our guys.
Yeah, that's kind of intramural.
You don't really count.
It's like a friendly soccer match.
It doesn't really count towards the rankings in the end.
It's just kind of for fun there.
I mean, I'm being ironic, obviously, because the Saudis were involved in 9-11 right up to their nostrils, and ironically, they are the country in the Middle East that, as far as I can tell, appears least touched by America's post-9-11 activities.
We made America safe by invading countries that had nothing to do with 9-11, and that's kind of the ugly legacy.
That's all the stuff that we forgot in the process of claiming we will never forget, and I needed to get it out this time because it was the 20th anniversary.
Anybody who's been married, anybody who's kind of past age 30 or 40, you know that the zero anniversaries always have a bigger significance.
Nobody cares about turning 42, but even the most cynical person has to acknowledge 50 is a big deal and things like that.
So having passed the 20th anniversary of 9-11, and particularly now watching Afghanistan disappear down the memory hole, I worry that next year there's not going to be anyone who wants to publish a Remember 9-11 article.
It just will be so far beyond the American consciousness that even the non-mainstream media is going to be struggling to find a hook to write something about 9-11 a year or two years or three years or whatever from now.
So I had to get this all out before I didn't have a chance to say it again.
I don't know, man, I'm sorry you say that, and I just think, yeah, until the next major attack, because our policy of dominance in the Middle East has not ceased, so why would the terrorist war against us be over now?
Yeah, you know, it depends, though, because it's all in how these things are visualized.
Imagine, it's hard to be historical, looking back and pretending things, but I mean, for example, imagine that Al Gore actually was awarded the 2000 election instead of George Bush, and instead of filling the government with neocons, with blood dripping off of their incisor teeth when they took office, and we know now very clearly that the people Bush surrounded himself in 2000 were looking for an excuse to go to war in the Middle East.
Imagine Al Gore won that election and filled the government with a bunch of wimpy policy wonks whose interest was in excise taxes, not in global conquest.
They would have mucked things up in their own way, of course, but I mean, they weren't taking office waiting for the opportunity.
Imagine President Gore launching an instant, violent, retaliatory, orgasmic strike against something, call it Afghanistan, and announcing that America had struck back and sent a message and said all the right patriotic things.
They could have sent special forces to noodle around and eventually take out bin Laden or someone they said was bin Laden, and the whole thing could have been over-ish within a couple of months, and not implement the vast internal spying on American citizens, not implement the TSA, not create this endless regime that kept terrorism on everyone's mind for a good 20 years or so.
It's not hard to see another major attack on the United States possibly handled differently by a different president with a different agenda, because that's what happened.
You had the Bush administration with an agenda, and 9-11 was a gift to that agenda, and they wrote it hard and put it away wet as things go.
You could just see, for example, how the initial Obama, the guy we voted for in 2008, his kind of like, wow, I got to do something with all this mess here.
He changed very, very quickly, and we can go into that.
The idea would be something blows up in America, as long as it's not nuclear, I think a different leader can play it a different way.
We don't have to repeat the same 20-year slog, though with the wrong guy in the chair, we of course could easily repeat the same slog.
I'll tell you what, I asked Harry Brown, who had run for president in the year 2000 as the Libertarian candidate, and who I really respected, who was a Ron Paul level genius of principle and of education and class and the rest.
He says, well, I mean, obviously, first of all, it wouldn't have happened at all, because I would have pulled out of the Middle East entirely and cut off the Israelis and the rest, and so it wouldn't have even happened.
But for the hypothetical, I would have hired under mark and reprisal a very small number of special operators to go and bring me bin Laden, either for trial or a scalp, him and his buddies.
And then that would have been it.
And I would have ended all American foreign policy in the Middle East altogether.
And then I'm paraphrasing, but very close.
And then I would have given the Statue of Liberty speech every day for another seven and a half years about how liberty is the only thing that matters.
Liberty is the only thing we care about here in America and the rest of the world.
They're not doing liberty right.
And so you ought to be more like us.
But we wouldn't be blood soaked hypocrites.
We would actually mean what we say.
And so then the lesson would be, don't knock our towers down because we will kill you.
But other than that, we don't have a problem.
You know, this is the USA and that's supposed to mean something special, not we're number one and we can blow up whatever we feel like forever.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And that's a variation, a smarter variation of what I just improvised here.
But yeah, but I mean, hell, even if it was Colin Powell, right.
And that's what the American people thought they were voting for in 2000 when they voted for W. Bush was, well, Colin Powell is going to be up there and he's a responsible guy.
We can trust him.
But he wasn't the one deciding.
It was Cheney and the neocons driving the car.
And he was marginalized.
And of course, he helped.
He lied us into war.
I'm not saying he's innocent.
Right.
But if it had been him, we would have not gone to Iraq or two.
Oh, yeah, of course.
And, you know, you have plenty of examples where the administration's at various times downplayed acts of terrorism or use them in different ways, not the least of which was, you know, the bombing of our embassies in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam.
That could have been the justification for sort of anything.
You know, we could have invaded both of those countries, even though the countries themselves had little to do with the terror attacks.
But we didn't do that.
And we could have carpet bombed this or that.
The thing is, is that the Bush people wanted badly to have an excuse.
You know, you know, the famous line out of the neocon planning papers, you know, absent a Pearl Harbor scale event, we're going to it's hard to imagine us being able to run ramshot across the Middle East.
And they got their Pearl Harbor sized event.
It's just a matter of characterizing it the right way.
And that's what I wanted to write about before we forgot completely and before it just became, you know, page thirty seven news that there's another 9-11.
Well, listen, you can always talk about this stuff.
You can always talk about this stuff here, Peter, because I'm never going to get over it.
You know, it's like Waco to me.
It's always 2003.
And so, for example, one of the things that you're bringing up here about, you know, who believed in what we always talk about, who won the Civil War in the war and all that.
But here at the war at home, I was a cab driver at night at the time, which meant that.
I, you know, was essentially around working people who didn't read and didn't even really watch the news very much.
And not one of them believed in this bullshit at all.
None of them.
Every professional Tuesday night drunk, every bartender, every cab driver, every waiter, you know, every guy that worked at the Quickie Mart, just who, you know, regular people didn't believe in this stuff.
They weren't liberals.
They weren't Democrats.
They weren't hippies.
They were just not Republicans.
And they could see right through this.
They didn't believe it.
They didn't feel the slightest pressure to believe in it.
But you know who did every lawyer and every dentist and every business owner and every good church going Christian and all the people who were part of the, you know, the segments of the community who are bought into this thing.
And you know, and I've told the story a million times about the guy who was a millionaire, you know, tall and handsome and stayed at the nicest bachelor pad apartments in South Austin where I was dropping him off.
And he was a land developer, you know, of some kind and a really smart guy.
And we had a great conversation and he just knew that Saddam had had something to do with September 11th or else, quote, why would we be attacking him then?
Yeah.
Right.
It's a wonderful circular logic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so and I'm just like, you know, of course, I made the argument.
Go in there and look.
You can't find Bush or Rice or Powell or Tennant explicitly saying that only Cheney.
And he's lying.
But look at the rest.
They don't actually quite say that because they wouldn't dare because it's bullshit, you know, et cetera.
So cab driver Cook knows the truth.
Important, you know, millionaire man about town, member of the party, believes every word of it.
He has to.
Otherwise, he looks like a total jackass in front of all of his idiot friends who also believe it.
And so just like on South Park, their episode about Iraq War Two.
And of course, Saddam Hussein is a repeat repeat character on South Park, but they didn't even use him in it or barely.
The question about the war was, are you country or rock and roll?
And if you're country, you like the war.
And if you rock and roll, then you stupid Saddam didn't do 9-11.
Everybody knows that.
And isn't that what it's all about, right?
It's a bunch of idiot Americans with their own little idiot idiosyncrasies and things going on that have nothing to do with the poor Iraqis due to be carpet bombed.
Well, the thing is that if you want to take the rock and roll thing a step further, you've got to go back to the who and won't get fooled again.
New boss, same as the old boss.
We consistently find ourselves fooled.
I live among some of the most frightened people I've ever encountered in my life.
They're currently frightened about COVID.
They previously were frightened about terrorism.
Before that, they were frightened about communism, and they just have seen this acceleration of new fears in their world, and I don't think it's all by accident.
There's been a lot of research that's been done, particularly on PTSD with our veterans, that trauma is cumulative.
Each time you're traumatized, you don't spring back all the way.
You go back a little less than the time before that.
What has happened is we've all become very much like shelter dogs.
We've just snapped back too many times that the elasticity isn't there anymore.
I think that we're in a transitional phase now where having burned out the value of terrorism after 20 years, even the dumb people have figured out we didn't win and that things didn't get any better.
COVID is almost like a transitional element as the propaganda machine gets everything lined up here so that we can have a cold war with China.
It's so clear that one replaces the other.
There's a little overlap, and then suddenly we don't hear the word terrorism anymore.
We just simply hear about COVID.
More and more on the edges of what I look at and read and when I have conversations, I'm hearing more and more about the threat from China.
You go to the airport now and all the TSA stuff from 9-11, you can't bring liquids and you got to take your shoes off.
It's like residual limbs or something.
It's still all there, but it doesn't even seem to matter.
I flew recently and they just waved us through with our shoes on.
The whole thing felt perfunctory because of the emphasis on masks.
It's like, shoes, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
That was last week.
We're worried about masks now.
It just felt like we were just barely going through the terrorism motions because we had to be hyper vigilant about masking before we could get on the planes.
You know what?
Same thing happened during Trump, right?
Trump ran on, why won't Hillary say radical Islam and all this ignorant AM radio crap from the previous era, from the Obama era.
If he'd been running against Obama, he would have definitely kept that up even worse, right?
But then once he got in there, the whole narrative changed where the national security state is concerned about Donald Trump's high treason with the Russians.
And now all of the Zionist think tanks and the rest of them too, completely forgot almost, it seemed like, about this massive clash of civilizations with Islam that we were facing.
That the terrorists were just the vanguard, the sharpest edge of, but that pitted us against a billion and a half people in the world.
As they were so often saying, 10% of Muslims are these fundamentalist radicals who we have to kill, which is millions and millions of people, 10 million people.
For those of us of a certain age, we remember the same rhetoric with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and when, quote, we beat the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War.
There were books, the most well-known was The End of History, proclaiming that this had marked the end of one geological era of human accomplishment, which was the triumph of democracy and the defeat of communism and dictatorships and all that other good stuff.
It was treated kind of the same way.
It was a clash of civilizations, though we declared ourselves the winner on that one.
It had a reboot with Putin and Trump and everything, but it never really caught America's attention the way terrorism.
Terrorism was much more successful.
And like I said, COVID, to me, is a transitional, a way to keep the fear on boil, but it has no legs to it the way that something oversees.
And China is just such a wonderful possible enemy in a box kind of thing.
The big problem is that we sort of like China.
We like their food.
We like their stuff.
They make all our electronics.
They got H-bombs.
Well, yeah, we don't like their H-bombs per se, but I mean, we don't have the scariness around them.
Back in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Yellow Peril and all that, it didn't really catch on outside of California, even back then.
And I think it's going to be a harder sell only because we just like Chinese stuff so much better.
The Middle East was great.
The Arabs played the villain role for us.
They're kind of gross and stinky and they wear funny clothes and they don't like rock and roll music and women can't drive cars and stuff.
They were just wonderful bad guys.
Plus, of course, the idea that their religion was evil.
And then so suddenly China go out there and say that Buddhism is an existential threat to us or something.
That's just not going to sell.
I think it's going to be a harder ride, but I don't think our people are going to give up.
We need an enemy and we need to be afraid and we're going to find it one way or the other no matter what, what we have to do.
And it bothers me a lot because it seems so obvious.
It just seems like, don't you guys see this?
I see it.
Don't you see it?
It's right in front of your face.
OK, hang on just one second.
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I think a lot of people do, and I think just like you're saying, it's ringing a little hollow.
Like, what are you telling me?
You spun the globe and you ran out of enemies, so now you're going back to the guys that we already beat before.
We made friends with the Chinese back when Mao was still alive, 50 years ago.
Yep.
Yeah.
I'm hoping that hollowness gets more attention than it does.
I've got actually a piece in preparation demanding to know why the United States is pursuing this adversarial struggle with China.
They're the second largest overseas holder of our government debt.
They make all our stuff.
We buy all the stuff from them.
We are as connected as any two major countries in the world really can be in all sorts of ways.
I can't think of anything that we're both vying for.
In other words, once upon a time, we and the rest of the world were trying to divide up the oil in the Middle East.
There was a legitimate, hard, real thing you could hold in your hand that we were fighting over or some kind of territorial claim.
Other than some goofy islands that really don't matter one way or the other, I don't see what we and the Chinese are struggling to both take possession of.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
What's the contest even over?
It's not like they're trying to close the sea lanes to our guys.
Yeah.
Exactly.
I had a guy come at me on Twitter, and I mute retards, but I argue with regular people who are trying to ask a decent question in a fair way.
What about Taiwan?
The thing is, man, you're really stretching now, right?
You got to admit, Taiwan isn't really a nation.
We don't have a treaty with them.
It sure as hell ain't a state in the Union.
They're a million miles from here, and it doesn't really matter to Americans, does it, who rules Taiwan for our national interest?
Nobody wants to see anybody get exploded to death, but overall, who rules Taiwan makes no difference to us, any more than it makes a difference who rules Outer Mongolia.
The idea that we got to trade American cities in a war over Taiwan would be crazy.
It's never going to happen.
First of all, a little fact checking.
We have an agreement to defend Taiwan.
It's not a treaty because, of course, it's officially not a country, but we do have a written agreement to defend Taiwan, and that's that.
The point is, we're never going to have to do it.
What about strategic ambiguity that says, we regard it as one China ruled by Beijing, but we say that we want to see reunification peacefully, but we're not saying what we'll do about it?
That's the genius of all those agreements, is they say there is only one China, and Taiwan is a part of it.
That's the literal words in the agreements, and there's no one who disagrees with that.
Taiwan, Taipei agrees with those words.
Beijing agrees with those words.
Everybody agrees with those words.
The interpretation, obviously, is different in different capital cities, but the beauty of it is that we created, through the Taiwan, when we broke relations with Taiwan and reestablished them with Beijing, we created this wonderful fuzzy fantasy that everything is basically in agreement, and it's good enough to allow what really needs to happen to happen, which is commerce.
Taiwan does more business with China than it does with the United States.
Well, and it's kept the peace for 50 years, right?
This is the deal that Nixon struck.
I guess I'm just confused a little bit about the difference between ambiguity and no, we do have, essentially, a treaty to defend them, it sounds like you're saying.
Well, we do have a treaty to defend them, but it's not a treaty, it's an agreement, it's a technical business, but it's an agreement that need never be invoked, because there is absolutely no reason that a modern China and a modern Taiwan would have to go to war.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
The largest outside group that visits mainland China are people from Taiwan, more than any other group.
They have more business between them than with the United States.
They have absolutely no reason to not continue the same relationship that they have successfully continued for 70 years.
That is a pretty good record.
I'm not sure that too many places in the world who the United States pretends to believe are a hair's breadth away from war with each other have not fired a shot at each other for 70 years and maintained that much social, business, and other ties, never mind the cultural ties, because any war between Beijing and Taiwan would mean killing Chinese.
The Chinese, as a large group, I served with the State Department two years in Taiwan, a little bit less in Beijing and Hong Kong, I have a sense of these places.
The idea of being Chinese is an overriding connective tissue that we don't see as clearly, I think, in the United States as people in China do.
There are relatives on both sides of the strait.
They speak the same languages.
They share a 5,000-year history, which is way longer than 70 years of communism.
They revere some of the same people, such as Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who is celebrated in both Beijing and Taipei as the father of modern China.
They have way more in common in a practical sense, and the Chinese have always proven themselves to be a practical people throughout their history.
Go ahead and name the last country that China invaded, ever.
Go back as far as you want.
Korea, but it was really a defensive move.
Okay, so there you go.
We can call it, we can say they invaded Korea, and that's stretching the term invasion.
To deter Truman's aggression, is why.
And when they crossed into North Korea, they were there with the North Koreans' invitation.
They sent troops to Vietnam, but they sent them there in response to, wait for it, American aggression.
You don't see, historically, an ongoing history of overseas conquest in China.
You've got to go way, way back.
Yeah, they've had small border skirmishes with India, but as a friend pointed out to me recently, in their most recent skirmishes up there in the Himalayas, the Chinese officers ordered the men to drop their rifles, and they went over there and had a big fistfight, which is fine with me.
Totally cool with Chinese and Indian troops having fistfights, if that happens.
Punching each other up.
Have a soccer game.
Have a big fistfight.
That sounds great.
You know, by all means.
I would still argue that even if they kept the rifles, that these are not wars of conquest.
They are arguments over where existing borders really are.
But in terms of actually invading a country for regime change, I think that's the popular term these days.
You just can't find that in Chinese history.
I'm so glad that we're on this right now, and because we spent so much time talking about the Middle East over the last decade or so since I've known you, Peter, and you were in Iraq War II, of course, and you're great on all this stuff.
But as you were just mentioning in your career, you really spent a lot of time in East Asia, and of course, China is the hot topic among all the hawks right now, as you're saying.
There's a lot of long-range bombers and massive Navy ship sails on the line and all the rest of this stuff.
But I think the reality, as far as I can tell, and I know much less about China than I know about the Middle East, but it seems to me like all the hype about the rise of China is really a lot of hype.
They have a lot of economic problems and a lot of problems in dissensions in their more further-flung provinces, like in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and they have essentially an extremely political, i.e. extremely distorted economy and pricing system with necessary corrections, i.e. hell to pay in all directions and all of these things.
And so I've been arguing that this whole Thucydides trap thing is overblown because what's the trap?
If we're not supposed to be an empire in the first place, then we shouldn't mind the rise of China, right?
Who cares?
And then secondly, who says they're really rising in a way that threatens even their neighbors, much less us?
But then, I swear I'm going somewhere with this, but then I read this thing at Foreign Policy, and the thing at Foreign Policy says, no, Horton is right.
China is not a rising power.
It's a falling power.
And that's why we have to fight them or we're going to end up fighting them.
Because you know how fallen powers act?
They lash out at their enemies and this and that.
So now you would think that the whole second half of the article, he's talking about the United States of America, but he's, and he doesn't say, and yeah, this is also, you know, on the American side of the equation, kind of something that we're going through too.
None of that is in there, which is amazing.
But he says, so it's not the rise of China, it's the decline of China that makes them so dangerous.
And so what do you say to that?
You know, I wish I had the ability to be that creative in my thinking and that flexible in taking, you know, a couple of cherry picking a couple of things and trying to make a case out of it.
China is in some ways an economic competitor, but that doesn't make them an adversary.
We can compete with them without having to fight them.
I think the greatest danger is not in China lashing out, because again, we haven't seen that their history doesn't support that.
They've had a very pragmatic history of picking themselves up after they found themselves on the floor.
They were dominated by the Mongols, the Qing dynasty for almost 2000 years.
And out of that was born the Chinese revolution.
They were dominated by the British and they took their time and they eventually had Hong Kong and Macau returned to them.
Quick word on Hong Kong.
You know, Hong Kong was a British colony stolen from imperial China at gunpoint, and the British had approximately several hundred years to bring democracy to China, to bring democracy to Hong Kong and never really kind of finalized all that.
But suddenly, once it's returned to big China, then obviously that's job number one is to finish things off.
The British might have asked why they didn't let Hong Kong become its own sovereign nation the way they did Singapore, instead kept it as a colony all those years.
So that would be a fun chat to have.
But you don't see that lashing out.
You don't see that at all.
What you see is the U.S. running the playbook, which will be to create an arms race in a new part of the world.
The only thing the Biden administration has actually done vis-a-vis policy towards China kind of slipped between the cracks about two weeks ago, which is the United States is going to be selling nuclear submarines to Australia.
Australia had been operating just regular diesel submarines, you know, World War Two vintage stuff, basically.
They were planning to buy better diesel submarines from the French, and the United States swooped in and, wait for it, torpedoed the deal with France.
And now we're going to be selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.
We also cut a deal with the British.
The British have built two new supercarriers, which were designed from the ground up to fly American F-35 airplanes.
And where have the British decided to station those two aircraft carriers?
In the Pacific.
They're going to be sharing facilities with the U.S. and Japan.
So we have suddenly started to militarize using the same kind of gang of allies that we use in other places.
We're going to let the Australians go nuclear with their submarines.
We're going to let the British become a Pacific power again, which they haven't been since, you know, the 19th century, practically.
And then we're going to claim China is the aggressor.
The Japanese have been very not quietly creating a very aggressive blue-water navy that now includes aircraft carriers that were designed to be interoperable with the United States.
The Japanese have been developing, still in the early days, but have been developing an amphibious landing capability.
And they've been buying every new airplane the United States is willing to sell them.
And suddenly, it's just like the jokes about, you know, surrounding Iran being a country surrounded by American bases.
That's exactly what we are doing in the Pacific once again.
We are ramping up and putting China in a corner once again.
And then we will be shocked and angered when they respond by growing their own military.
Yeah.
You know, the Chinese.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
But so what's the steel man argument here?
I mean, we are talking about essentially a strong man, one party dictatorship.
Not exactly Maoist, but they're real jerks and they do have a giant army.
And so what's the real worst case scenario here?
I don't know.
In what sense?
Not the fake one.
You mean that there would be some kind of war?
Impossible.
Well, just their worst intentions for the region, for our friends to take Tokyo one day or whatever you could possibly imagine being, you know, really the worst they could do.
The thing is, without slipping into science fiction, I cannot imagine those things because number one, China has nuclear weapons.
And if they ever were to use those weapons, they would face a much larger devastation by American and NATO nuclear weapons.
The nuclear thing, sadly, works.
It kept the Cold War peace.
You can't start a war with somebody who has nuclear weapons.
It's just pretty much that simple.
You can ask Kim Jong-un why he still sits in power in Pyongyang.
And the reason is because he has nuclear weapons.
He watched very carefully what was happening when Saddam gave up his nuclear program.
Oops, the United States invaded.
What happened when Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program?
Oops, the United States invaded.
You know, it's not hard for him to be.
Why hasn't the United States attacked Iran?
Because we know they're a nuclear threshold state.
Same as Japan.
Right.
Japan could become a nuclear weapons state in a few weeks if they wanted to.
Right.
Yeah.
But the United States doesn't have Japan on the invasion list.
We already pretty much know.
But I just mean they have they have a latent deterrent against China themselves, even without us.
But the real idea is that the United States can't go to war with China because China has nuclear weapons.
End of end of story.
And China can't go to war with someone else because of the risk of escalation.
It's just that simple.
This is why those little goofy islands that everyone's fighting over in East Asia are never going to become mini Falklands.
You remember when the British and the Argentines went to war in the 1980s over the Falklands because of the nuclear weapons that hover in the background and it isn't going to go.
So I can't come up with a realistic scenario where China feels the need to invade Tokyo or to to to conquer Taiwan or anything.
It makes no sense financially.
It makes no sense militarily.
It makes no sense.
You'd have to ask what's in it for them to fly a different flag over the legislature in Taipei.
I mean, no, the juice isn't going to pay for the squeeze.
OK, but so back to the thing, then we have a real problem if we're completely out of enemies.
And yes, you know, it's it's funny.
In the back, my mind tells me that you and I have had this exact same conversation before.
Only maybe this was your line was about that scene in The Matrix where the agent explains that we created a perfect world for you and you hated it.
And so we decided, oh, we have to give you a bunch of enemies to struggle against because otherwise you just won't be happy.
And I'm not sure if he's talking about humans or really just Americans.
You know, I was talking to my friend Mike in Tokyo Rogers, where he's just like, you know, we like being happy.
You know, I don't know what y'all's problem is, but like most of the time we're content to just go about our day and make sure we got our stuff taken care of and not always have to have an enemy.
But it seems, you know, this is Bill Kristol's national greatness.
And maybe he's right that Americans have to have a big project to do together.
Otherwise, what makes us Americans?
It ain't liberty and justice.
So it's got to be something, you know, what you can you can look back to to to roughly a very brief moment when the United States sort of had no enemies.
During the first Bush administration, the Soviet Union had had fallen apart.
It looked like Eastern Europe was democratizing.
We hadn't decided that China was an existential threat yet, whatever.
We just were kind of stumbling around.
And the president, the first George Bush president, was talking about, you know, creating a new world order and a thousand points of light as American volunteerisms came forward.
And he very quickly kind of took a punk who was our punk and talking about Noriega in Panama and made him an enemy because we needed we needed to start scrapping again with somebody.
And so this guy Noriega, who was a CIA on the CIA payroll forever and ever and ever and was a punk dictator who did whatever like, you know, we had to invade Panama.
And then we quickly found out, found an excuse to get into the middle of a little fight between Saddam Hussein and Kuwait ostensibly to protect the Saudis.
And we found a new cause belay, which was to protect the oil in the Middle East.
And so we came up with a new problem that we were going to solve by having wars.
And there we go.
Off we went.
And then we never looked back.
There's never been a moment really since then when we've been at peace.
And it always concerns me because we don't seem to be able to function without having that war of some kind.
I'm hoping they'll be satisfied with something a lot smaller this round than what happened in the Middle East over the last 20 years.
But it concerns me greatly that we just don't like to sit still.
Yeah.
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You know, one thing that's really important in all this that, you know, it's sometimes emphasized, I guess, but should always be emphasized is George W. Bush's responsibility and Obama and Trump's, too, for that matter.
But this is the guy and, you know, and I like blaming Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, too.
But this sniveling little narrow minded, short sighted frog torturing little shit, you know, he was the one who look at me.
I'm all tough.
You know, I never could find the clip, but I remember there was a clip of him with his black overcoat on and his cowboy hat and it's snowing and he's like out in the Rose Garden and he's sticking his shoulders all forward like he's a tough guy with a big chest, even though he's not.
And he's going, oh, I'm going to get you.
I'm a big, tough guy just playing this role.
Yeah.
And and just, you know, the level of sanctimony that he, you know, not just perpetrated on us, but insisted that, you know, all of his followers also, you know, take on to browbeat everyone for so long.
I mean, it really wasn't.
And it's funny that people don't remember it this way, but I do.
It wasn't until New Orleans drowned in Katrina in the summer of 2005, late summer of 2005, that finally you are allowed to say, oh, geez, maybe these aren't the most competent administrators in world history.
Maybe we don't just have to defer to them in the name of fear, as the media had had it nonstop since the towers had fallen.
Now, finally, Anderson Cooper's crying on TV.
More than a thousand people drowned in that while the national government did nothing for five full days.
That's what finally broke the spell was a sledgehammer.
Right.
It was absolutely undeniable.
It was.
Are you kidding me?
It's Friday and they still haven't done anything right.
That was what happened finally that broke the spell of it.
But before that, all the sanctimony with which Bush and his entire movement pushed not just the war in Iraq, but the entire terror war and the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all of the rest of it and essentially, you know, co-opting patriotism, pretending like they owned it.
You know, it's disgustingly luckily, you know, the American people have risen up and, you know, we're not going to ever throw a guy whose last name is Bush in jail, but at least he's been canceled, sidelined, pushed off, pushed off stage.
We no longer hear about him or anything like that.
Oh, no.
No, actually, he's great now because he ain't Trump.
See, this is the thing.
I mean, you could be a little more generous in forgiveness if people finally somewhere along the way realized what Bush had done to this country, the crimes he had committed against us and the longevity that those crimes have taken on.
But we haven't even done that.
There's never been a reckoning of any kind.
Instead, he has been born again as a cuddly old goofy guy.
He sits there and flirts with Michelle Obama on TV.
And the fact that, as you said, he's not Trump has given him a second political life and has allowed us all to simply pay no attention to the things he did as president for eight years.
Liz Cheney is now held in high regard by many Democrats.
As you know, the person who's going to save the republic because she didn't care much for Trump and things like this.
And so we just keep stepping in it over and over again.
I mean, at some point you learn where the dog poop is and you go around it or maybe you even pick it up and throw it away.
But all we seem to do is put our foot in it time and time and time again.
And it simply begs the problem to reappear in the near future.
We're going to have an election that is looking more and more like it's going to be either Kamala Harris or some unknown person who gets launched into the media, you know, Beto or something, you know, versus Trump again.
And if anyone can see good coming out of that for America, I really would encourage them to send us a note and explain that because we are going to be just shooting ourselves again and again and again.
George Bush should be in hell by now.
Dick Cheney, I don't think, is even human enough.
But we've never had a national reckoning about torture.
We've never had a national reckoning about the lies that brought us into the Iraq war about WMDs.
We've never had any discussion at all, even with the collapse at the end of what the hell the United States was doing for 20 years in Afghanistan, why we invaded in the first place.
If it was to get Bill Bin Laden, why was he in Pakistan?
And why did we continue anything after he was you know, his head was mounted on the wall?
No one asks these questions.
I'm just stunned.
I don't hear them asked not only in press conferences, but I don't hear them asked by intelligent people, even in conversations at the coffee shop or anything.
It just seems like it's all just allowed to wash away.
And we just kind of say, you know, the easiest way to dismiss them, of course, is to say, yeah, but Trump, and even that there's not much of a discussion.
It's just assumed that saying, well, but even but Trump, you know, is enough to kind of overcome any other thing that you raise.
And going back to this article that I wrote about 9-11, really, I was trying to set down, you know, something along the lines of breadcrumbs to say at some point, if we need to walk back and figure out how we got here, let this be part of all that.
Right.
Because the genesis of my article was a long piece in the Washington Post where they reviewed the, I don't know, the most significant books to come out post 9-11.
All their own takes, basically.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they kind of grouped them by era.
You know, here's the the books that, you know, said that scary Muslim terrorists are everywhere.
And here's the books that justified the invasion of Iraq.
And here's the books explaining why David Petraeus was is the second coming.
And here's the books explaining.
And they were all these garbage books that were just wrong.
Consistently, completely, utterly wrong.
And yet this is what they're there.
I mean, we can get into this argument.
Well, you know, Mein Kampf was significant, not because it sold great things, but it was, you know, it's a historical document and we can get into that side of it.
And sure, some of these books belong, need to be reread as examples of how wrong smart people can be.
Right.
But that really wasn't how it was being presented.
It was like these are the people who got it right, telling us about how wrong everybody else got it, which was still wrong.
Or the best kind were the ones that were right at the time.
You know, if only we'd known in retrospect.
Yes, of course.
Particularly, that's how they treated a lot of the nation building books, which is a particularly sore spot for me because, of course, my time in Iraq was spent helping screw up the nation building program.
But, you know, the nation building programs, you know, they're all looked at here as, well, you know, at the time it was a good idea.
We didn't really know what was going to happen next.
And everybody's everybody's correct in hindsight.
And what The Washington Post, they've done is a great disservice because by listing all the books that were wrong and making lots of happy excuses for them being wrong, they've ignored the fact that there were a lot of people who understood these things as horrible, as evil, as wrong, as failures in real time.
The whistleblowers, the non-mainstream journalists, the anti-war activists, the people who the weapons inspectors who had come back and said, honestly, there are no weapons of mass destruction there.
All of these people wrote books to try to get appearances on mainstream media, tried to act in some way out of conscious.
And they were forgotten from by The Washington Post in real time.
And they were forgotten in the retrospect.
And by further sidelining them and letting history be written in this case by the losers, they're assuring that it will certainly happen again.
Yep.
So well said.
And, you know, never mind the fact that you and I both wrote great books that should have been on those lists.
But as you're saying, a lot of other people, too, a lot of great books.
Think about Eric Margulies and what he had to say in American Raj that came out 15 years ago or whatever it was, you know, and there's a million of them, too.
So many great books.
I've got a lot of them linked in my article on The American Conservative.
If people want to go over there and find my article, I have linked to a handful of books that were right when they came out.
They were contemporarily correct about what was going on.
And my guess is you probably have not you, but many people have not heard of them because they never got the publicity that they needed and deserved.
So if you take a look at my article and follow some of those links, you may find some some of the books you should have been reading in 2010.
But go ahead and read them in 2021.
It's still worth it.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, one more thing I wanted to talk with you about is in regards to your article about where you were on September 11th and and dealing with the Japanese widows of some of the victims of the attack in New York.
But, you know, it ends with to spoil it for everybody, it ends with what was it all about and what's it all for?
Why did they die?
I guess it was not what was it all about?
Like in a grand sense, which is why did they die?
And then so the answer I wanted to point to this thing.
I wrote an article, it's my most recent article for Antiwar dot com.
It's about how Peter Bergen says he's the former CNN producer who's now, you know, cottage industry terrorism expert guy and works for CNN, writes all these books about bin Laden and stuff.
And he says, look, bin Laden said we're a paper tiger.
He'd hit us when we run away like a crying little girl.
And then America doubled and tripled and quadrupled down, which he did not expect at all.
And then it's only after the fact that he said he was bogging us down to bleed us to bankruptcy.
But he was just rationalizing his failure.
So I wrote an article called No, Peter Bergen is mistaken about Osama bin Laden's strategy here.
And I cited all these things where it was really more of like a plan A and a plan B. They want to turn around and run fine.
But if they want to come here even better and let's bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy and force them out the hard way like the Soviet Union.
And I found multiple sources from before September 11th saying that.
But here's the point I'm trying to get to is one of the things I found, of course, was Peter Arnett's interview of Osama bin Laden that Bergen it wasn't even Bergen's interview.
He was just the producer there.
But anyway, Peter Arnett interviews the guy and this is the same report Bergen was there for.
And the entire program and I link to the YouTube there, the entire program is about how they're mad about our basis in Saudi Arabia and support for Israel.
And nobody says anything about Islamic extremism, forcing us to convert, hating our freedom or any of that, because George W.
Bush and the neoconservatives hadn't begun to tell those lies yet.
And so it's all just, you know, because Bush was the first one who said they hate our freedom.
Nobody said that that was what it was about.
Everybody knew if you looked at if you read Robert Fisk or saw ABC News, John Miller from 1998 and I'd been reading Newsweek who, you know, my parents had a subscription to Newsweek.
And so I've been reading about Al-Qaeda since at least 96, if not even earlier than that.
It was an interesting topic which they covered from time to time.
Nobody ever said they hate us for what angels we are.
Everybody knew it was because we had Christian combat forces stationed on the Holy Arabian Peninsula for the purpose of bombing the Iraqis endlessly in the excuse under the excuse of the no-fly zones.
And then, of course, as bin Laden was, you know, it's the first thing he says to these guys is America supports Israel and their brutality against the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
He doesn't just say, you know, they're occupying the land of, you know, Jerusalem and whatever.
But the violence against the innocent civilians there is what he cited over and over and over and over again.
And nobody pretended otherwise until W.
Bush after September 11th.
That's right.
And if you want to run it through the sniff test, it passes that as well.
For bin Laden to do what he did and for the other all the different groups, ISIS, whatever they're, you know, all of them, you have to remember who they are talking to.
They're talking to their own people who.
They're trying to convince to to support them, perhaps even at the cost of their own lives.
You don't do that by speaking to your own people in a foreigner's language.
You don't say, you know, we despise the freedom of Americans twelve thousand miles away.
Let's let's go get them.
Not at all.
You have to talk about the things that will resonate with your own people and what will resonate with them are the fact that the United States has troops in Saudi Arabia, that the United States is using a Muslim country to attack other Muslims, that the United States has essentially declared war on.
Arabs and Muslims, and you can look out your window and basically see it.
You can call your cousin in Baghdad and hear it.
That will resonate with the people he's trying to reach, not some BS about American freedoms and girls wear mini skirts over there and all that other silliness that was created by our leader trying to find a language that would resonate with our people.
The fact that George Bush and others actually kind of turned around, you know, one of the things bin Laden was preaching was not only did the United States occupy the infidels, occupy Muslim lands, they did it with women.
You know, some of our soldiers were female.
And, you know, Bush and his people actually twisted that around by saying, you know, we Americans believe that we should be able to do whatever we want around the world.
And if that means women soldiers, then, you know, those guys are just going to have to suck on it.
And it was just a twisting of the same actual thing.
There are women soldiers in Saudi Arabia, but it was played by both sides in completely different directions because they were addressing different audiences.
They don't hate our freedoms.
They hate the fact that the only Americans they encounter have camouflage and a rifle.
Pretty obvious.
And, you know, come on, put your shoe on the other foot for just a second.
What if the governor of Texas invited these guys to build a military base in San Antonio that then they were going to use to bomb Mexico for 10 years?
We kill them, man.
And we wouldn't give a damn what the governor said.
In fact, we might kill him, you know.
You know, it's easy to use that logic and people just just ignore it.
You know, what if there was a Chinese base in Hawaii?
You know, what if what if somewhere back in history, the Chinese, you know, had gotten a little toehold on an island and that Chinese military base still existed on American soil today?
I could look out my window and see it.
I mean, we would go nuts.
But when we do that in other countries, either something kind of historical like Guantanamo in Cuba or something new where we, quote, get permission to build a base in a foreign country, the idea of foreign troops living in your country and using your soil as a base to do violence at other places.
I mean, this is just something that Americans take for granted that we are.
It's OK when we do it and terrible when other people do it.
You know, the Chinese have one overseas base in somewhere in, I think, Djibouti or something, you know, where they refuel ships and things like that.
But the fact that we establish strings of bases around the world encircle our enemies somehow is part of the good news of all this.
And I just roll my eyes when I encounter Americans who can't think through that, even in the abstract.
There's a brand new report about that, by the way, and I was supposed to, it's David Vine and a couple other people, and I was supposed to interview one of them today, but it fell through about there's still 700 and something bases around the world.
Yeah, and that's just kind of taken for granted that that's that's a good thing.
And there you go.
We just kind of we just assume it's a good thing and move on from there.
They should be glad to have us.
We're protecting them.
It's so hard to to to break through the thought patterns of Americans.
And, you know, I used to blame us collectively for just being dumb.
But I realize now that we when you and I say things like we're trying to do, if we try to switch over to persuasion mode with people who don't agree with us, we're not just trying to get past somebody's ignorance.
We are fighting this massive propaganda machine that has metastasized well out of government into taking over the commercial media now that is saying the opposite, much louder, with better looking people, you know, and, you know, as entertainment.
I mean, everybody remembers the show 24 that came out in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, right?
That basically was a very slickly produced justification for torture.
And how can you get how can somebody like Code Pink stand up in front of a crowd and try to explain why torture is wrong when you've got every tool in the Hollywood toolbox being employed to make this great drama, which is very exciting, explaining why torture is a good thing.
You just can't compete.
Yeah, that's certainly how it was at the time.
I had a bumper sticker.
That was my fighting back.
It said Torture Kiefer.
Which never happened.
So it was, you know, it was the actor who played the main torturer in the thing.
For those of you who were not yet born, this is something that increasingly is also an issue is that our wonderful American habit of moving on from things just we're running out of people who remember what happened.
And when they reach back to read about what happened, they end up with the books that are on the Washington Post's best books of 9-11 list.
And the people who have firsthand knowledge are starting to age through.
I mean, there's another 20 years on everybody since the events of September 11th.
I think I've mentioned this before on your show, but I went to do a bit of public speaking at a large university and I made a couple of references to Vietnam.
And at the break, the professor sort of was laughing.
And he's saying, you know, if you're going to try to make Vietnam references to this age group, you're really going to need to explain them.
Don't just say.
And of course, this was reminiscent of the cords program or this was like the evacuation of Saigon.
He says it's not going to stick.
You're going to have to explain it because they don't know that history.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many people who say to me, you know, I hear all the time it's kind of how they introduce themselves to me.
Well, geez, I was in third grade when it happened.
I was in fifth grade.
I was a toddler, you know, this kind of thing.
So it reminds me all the time that I'm old and I've been doing this same thing a very long time.
And my audience is getting younger and younger relative to me.
And a lot of them don't know very much of this stuff at all.
Which, by the way, it's speaking of books, parentheses, I just want to brag a little bit that I don't know if you saw that.
Noam Chomsky said that my book, Fool's Aaron, was the best book he ever read on Afghanistan.
Did not see that.
Congratulations.
My recent blurb to add to the pile, which you're on my pile of blurbs already, gave me a very nice one back then.
I'm in a pile somewhere.
Yes.
Yes.
You're in a giant pile of blurbs.
This is fool's Aaron dot US.
And I told Harley, my webmaster, put the Chomsky quote right next to Douglas McGregor, the army colonel, the gruff old hero of Iraq War One, the big tank battle of Iraq War One.
Mean old Fox News guest.
And I thought those two guys go pretty good together.
But yeah.
Anyway, I wanted to ask if you I don't care how over time we are.
I do this afternoon.
Did you want to talk about your great article about where you were on September 11th over there in the Far East and what you had to do with there?
Because it seemed like there was a lot of meaningful in there.
Just very briefly, again, on the American conservative, if you want to read the whole thing, you're welcome to it.
But something that I hadn't hadn't been a secret or anything, but something I really had kind of kept for myself for most of these these 20 years by accident.
I was working at the American embassy in Tokyo, Japan on September 11th.
The attacks took place at night, our time because of the the time difference.
And we went into the embassy kind of confused about what was going on.
We were on the other side of the world.
We had been aware of threats, chatter, what have you, all summer.
But the kind of consensus was that one of our embassies overseas was going to be attacked, the same as Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
The the idea was that that's where America was was vulnerable, not in New York or Washington, places like that.
So to say we were surprised is certainly not an exaggeration.
And when we went into work that night, it was after midnight.
There was already a vigil of young Japanese people who had set themselves up spontaneously outside the embassy gate with candles.
The Marines which guard the who guard the embassy were in full full combat gear out there as well.
And they were sobbing as we filed in to go to work.
They understood what was what was coming.
And after a while, it sort of normalized because the threats didn't happen to us.
And Japan, it turned out, was pretty far away from a lot of the events.
And we were certainly immune from the craziness that was unfolding in the United States, where people were calling the police to report, you know, an Indian gentleman waiting for a bus or something, you know, things like that.
But it all came very, very back to us.
It turned out that there were about 28 Japanese men killed on September 11th in New York, and most of them had wives who were in Japan who all of a sudden found themselves deeply tied up in the American bureaucracy.
They were trying to make insurance claims.
They were trying to get death certificates out of the city of New York.
And all of this was proving nearly impossible to do from Japan.
So the job was kind of dumped from one office to the job of helping them was dumped from one office to the other to the other until it finally ended up in my office.
And this was largely supposed to be and largely was an exercise in paperwork and translation.
How do you get a death certificate in New York if you don't live in New York?
How do you file these things?
What forms do you need?
A lot of it was just real simple bureaucratic stuff.
But we couldn't escape the idea of who we were talking to.
These were women who had most of them were fairly young.
Their husbands were generally in their 30s and 40s.
They had usually had one or two small kids.
And these were the people who truly were the living victims of all that had happened, whether you blame the terrorists for hating our freedoms or the Americans for setting up a ring of bases across the Middle East.
It all sort of ends up somewhere.
And it ended up with these young women who truly couldn't understand what had happened to to them and the world that they knew that most of them, almost all of them were not political people.
They read the news here and there.
But but otherwise, this was all a great mystery to them what had happened and why it had to involve their their husbands who were who were sort of bankers in the trade towers, you know, as far away in their minds from all this as possible.
And the fact that I was the only actual U.S. government official that any of them had ever encountered or ever would encounter, because certainly the political people in the embassy wanted no part of any of this.
I mean, the last thing, you know, a political appointee or someone who has ambitions wants is to be in a room alone with an unpredictable widow and have to answer for the U.S. government's actions.
So this this was quickly devolved down to my level and things.
And I started to realize who these people were and they started to realize who I was.
And the paperwork was was nearly endless.
So we got to know each other in an odd sort of way.
And they found out I was originally from New York and many of them had not visited the city and wanted to know so much more about it.
You know, my husband lived in this area.
What's that neighborhood like?
He used to complain about the subway.
What what is he what did he mean by all that?
Why did things work the way they did?
And so we got to know each other and I became.
Chained to them because this was my earliest red pilling, if to use that expression, this was my first hint that so much more was going on behind the big picture politics that were otherwise the focus of what I did as a job, as my profession.
And they would tell me stories about how they can't get their kid from third to fourth grade because they don't have the paperwork to explain why the child's father can't sign off on documents.
This is Japan where sometimes the rules work very differently than they do in the United States and just day to day problems that had impacted them, which led us eventually to start talking about what the elephant in the room was, which is, you know, at age 35, they were a widow with two young children who may not even be old enough to remember their father.
And at some point I realized that I was connected into all of this.
There was one woman who got very angry at me towards the end, mainly because I was the only U.S. government official that she could ever interact with.
And I stood there for the very first time in my life, actually, truly representing everything about America.
And I didn't like what I saw.
And she yelled at me and she demanded to know in the end why her husband died.
And I certainly could not answer that question for her.
And 20 years later, I'm still struggling with that question.
But I've added to the list not only her husband, but of course, all those soldiers, all those Iraqi civilians, all those Afghan wedding parties.
Why did they all have to die?
There's usually an explanation.
Oh, he died because he was driving drunk or he died because he's old and cancer took him and that's God's will or or what have you.
He died because the Israelis insisted on the dual containment policy in the Middle East.
And you're left with answers like this.
He died because of America's Israeli policy.
He died because the World Trade Center became a symbol of America's economic imperialism.
He died because we fought a war with Saddam Hussein over somebody else's oil.
He died because of the policies of the government that I stood there representing.
And your husband is dead and you're a widow and your kids will never see their father because of of of me.
And that's but no, I mean, you either take the responsibility.
I mean, hey, at the time you were part of we you were part of I was you know, yeah, I worked for him.
Yeah, yeah.
You're that guy.
And, you know, the idea that I had any power to stop George Bush from invading Iraq, I mean, of course not.
I couldn't I couldn't order office supplies without he couldn't have done it without you either.
Right.
But they couldn't have done it without lots of me's.
And in the end of it all, that's what I learned on September 11th.
And it took me a long time to actually get it all organized and write my whistleblowing book and get my ass out of government and speak like I do now.
But it all really started with those widows and and their pain.
Yeah, man, that's a hell of a story.
I'm really glad that you wrote that.
And I'm sorry that I had missed that the first time.
But it's also at TAC.
It's called The Widowed and the Fatherless.
And then the latest one is called It Looks Like We Forgot Peter Van Buren.
And those are both at the American conservative dot com.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
