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 took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, 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 on the line.
I've got Dan McAdams, Ron Paul's right hand man.
He runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And of course, four days a week, co-hosts the Liberty Report with Dr. Paul for many years.
Well, more than 10 years, I think he was Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor in his congressional office.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Dan?
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And sorry to start with the least important thing to me first, but it's kind of a thing.
Did you, are you still officially kicked completely off of Twitter?
Yes, I am.
I am permanently suspended, which is sort of an oxymoron, I guess, but that's, that's the latest.
And this is for making fun of Sean Hannity, really?
Yeah, for using the word retarded.
It's, you know, it's okay.
It's a schoolyard word.
It's not very funny.
Nobody ever calls anybody names on Twitter.
Where do you get off, man?
Exactly.
I should be shot, not banned.
Yeah.
Now, and every time I appeal, it's like this endless loop.
They send me the same thing that I, that I committed an attack based on someone's disability, which it was an attack and the guy's not disabled.
So are they just being cute and saying that Sean Hannity is retarded?
Because then they're the ones who are being insulting using that term, right?
I don't know how this works.
It's hard to know.
And, you know, like when you were, when you were kicked off, you kind of, you had a breath of fresh air.
And I've talked to other people like Kurt Nimmo and others that said, you know, and Jim Corbett, you know, he said when they were kicked off, it was a breath of fresh air.
And yeah, I see that because I did, I did spend too much time there in some ways.
But the problem is I had a pretty doggone good people that I followed in terms of research.
Sure.
I know, man.
It is, it feels like closing one eye, especially at first.
It's like, man, I'm really cut off from what's going on.
You think about, but you know what it is, too, is, you know, out of 10,000 tweets, you go, wow, a Seymour Hersh article that I might have missed if I wasn't on Twitter right now.
And so you get that little dopamine thing that says it's a good thing I'm here.
But in reality, someone would have sent you that Hersh piece.
You'd have seen it somewhere.
You know what I mean?
For all the garbage, all the absolutely worthless tweets and all the people mad at you for something that you got right or whatever it is.
It's just not worth as stupid.
Yeah.
And you just spent three hours trying to find that piece on Twitter when you could have found it easily elsewhere and you actually could have been written, writing your article and be done with it by then.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, it's bad for us all, too.
I mean, look at what it did to Justin.
You know, he it was the worst thing that ever happened to his article writing, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
It's true because he's spending all his time, you know, in in little Twitter fights.
And his article started just being about what happened on Twitter today.
It's just anyway.
Yeah, that's true.
I'm writing a book right now.
So another one.
Yeah.
Sorry.
That's great.
I can't I can't quit.
I hate it, but I'm stuck like this.
Great.
Man, let's talk about the wars.
I know you're wondering, but which of the wars, Scott?
Because there's so many to choose from.
I'm going to say let's talk about the border dispute going on there between the Turks and the Syrian Kurds and the Syrian Arab Army and the USA and the president and the rest of the establishment and all of these kinds of things.
And I guess we start with the latest, which is there's a ceasefire, but they're not abiding by it, I guess, this morning.
Yeah, I guess that's the case.
You know, this is probably the most misreported event, you know, in American history.
I shouldn't say that because they screw up all the time.
But if you look at the press coverage of what's happening there, it's just it's a thousand percent wrong.
It's it's it's all about let's hit Trump.
I don't care what the facts are on the ground.
We have to make Trump look stupid.
We have to make this look like a bad idea, even though, as I said early in the week, and not to credit myself, but other people have said it's a win, win, win, win.
I mean, this is the best thing we could hope for right now, which is the deal.
First of all, you know, and this didn't happen out of the blue, but Trump talking to Erdogan, announcing we're pulling back from that area.
The Kurds rushed to Assad and say, let's make a deal.
We don't want to get nuked.
That's working out fine.
If you look at the details of the deal, I think Danny Maki has it has a good Twitter Twitter thing on that.
If you look at the details of the deal, it's fine.
They're going to be incorporated into the Syrian army.
Everything is is is going OK as well as can be expected.
I'm sorry.
You say the YPG is going to be integrated into the Syrian army.
Well, the Kurds that are party to the agreement are going to be integrated into a special section of the Syrian army.
Wow.
It's part of it.
They've agreed to do that.
And and, you know, because it was that or annihilation.
And and the Syrian army is now taking they just I'm just looking at a picture of them hoisting the flag on the border crossing the Kobani.
I mean, this is this is, you know, for us, it's good news because it's really the final defeat of the United States.
And it's asinine.
Assad must go.
Let's destroy the country.
Policy started under Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Yeah.
But what about Erdogan's asinine policy of continuing this thing after we already have everything we need for a peace here with the Syrian army filling the security void that he claimed necessitated his invasion?
Yeah, but the invasion is is an is a non-invasion.
I mean, it's there.
They're in there.
The slaughter that they claimed has happened.
What happened is not happening.
He's not going to get his 30 kilometers of territory because the Russians are in between the Syrian army and the Turkish army.
And the Turks have already found out what happens when you shoot down Russian stuff.
They get pretty annoyed.
So, you know.
So and that is a huge point here, right, that the Russians went ahead and put what their infantry on the ground in Manbij.
As I understand, military police are there in the buffer zone policing the buffer zone.
But, you know, essentially, Erdogan got what he wanted, which he didn't want the YPG on his border.
Understandable when you look at the YPG and the PKK and, you know, 40 or 50 years of conflict.
He was he was adamant about it.
He feels that it's a security threat.
We probably would, too, if such an army was on our southern border.
So it's it's certainly we don't we don't commend him for for the attack.
But we understand the reasoning behind it.
But that that reason for it is now gone.
You know, the YPG has pulled back.
They're integrating into the Syrian army.
And the purpose, he's not going to be able to hold the territory.
He doesn't want to hold the territory, but he wants to get rid of some of these refugees.
He's got, what, three and a half million of them.
Of course, they're of his creation.
I mean, we can go on with recriminations.
You know, he is he is shoulder deep in this crap because he bought into the regime change stuff.
He thought it was going to.
He's crazy to want to put the refugees into Syrian Kurdistan.
Right.
And that's just going to seed all kinds of further conflict.
I wonder if he's even going to really try that.
Shouldn't he allow them to go back to the cities where they're from in the first place?
But I think there's nothing that will stop them once they cross the border to going back to where they're from.
I mean, he's not going to he's not putting him in camps in Syria.
He's basically he wants to dump him over the border.
And hopefully the people will go back to their homes.
You know, if we look at if we look at the places that the Syrian government has retaken, things have gone back to normalcy.
You know, and I'm sure it's not going to be perfect.
You've got to you've got you've got a massive disaster in the country, you know, that was precipitated by the U.S. and our allies, so-called in the Middle East.
So it's not going to be smooth.
But you do see a lot of progress in areas that Assad has retaken.
You don't see any slaughters like we've been warned.
So, you know, all in all, this is probably the best outcome we could we could hope for.
And the whole facts on the ground on the border necessitate the U.S. to further pull back, which we did in a hurry this week.
So that is great news for us.
And Scott and our primary concern is to get the U.S. out of their understanding that these people will solve their own problems.
Yeah, well, and it's such a bait and switch here, too.
It's so obvious that this has nothing to do with the Kurds.
Anyone in the American government crying over Kurds is obviously being a cynical manipulator, crying crocodile tears when they have other agendas.
And then you might go, oh, well, yeah, I guess what they're really concerned about is ISIS.
But yeah, no, that's not what it is either.
They're perfectly happy to watch Erdogan support ISIS and create this problem for the Kurds in the first place, as you just alluded to.
You listen closely and you see what they're all concerned about is the presence of Iran and Hezbollah in Syria, which has, of course, increased since Obama started this war in 2011 in order to try to limit their influence in the Levant.
And it only backfired.
And so now they say we have to stay in Syria because of Iran.
In fact, all the Israeli media had a blog about this at the Institute where there are, I don't know, six or eight headlines about, oh no, Israelis concerned about whether pullout from Kurdistan portends a further pullout from Syria and an abandonment of Israel in the face of an increased Iranian presence there.
Yeah, there you have it.
Well, that's what they did with Iraq and the Kurdish areas of Iraq.
The Israelis not only did they did they have, you know, established themselves big time, but they started launching drones on Iraq proper from there.
Remember, it was like three weeks ago that they launched a drone from the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Oh, you know, I had missed that, that they had launched that from Syrian Kurdistan.
I mean, from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yeah, that was a report.
Yeah, that was a report.
So, you know, that tends to irritate people.
So I think that's that's a good reason.
Iran is probably the main reason.
But the other reason why everyone is blindly all of a sudden discovering the Kurds is it's just a way to give Trump another black eye.
And, you know, neither of us are Trump fans, let's be honest.
But they can't stand the idea that Trump might be ending one of Obama's wars because, of course, Obama is the great peacemaker and Trump is the great warmonger.
So that's the narrative.
And you don't dare undermine it, you know.
I mean, hey, in the House, they passed this thing.
Every single Democrat, unanimous, every single Democrat voted to condemn the withdrawal of a thousand soldiers from northeastern Syria.
Yeah, it wasn't even a thousand, though, because the actual number of soldiers who pulled out was, I think, less than 100.
You know, it was it was this is not a massive withdrawal and they didn't leave Syria.
You know, this is the thing that a point that I made on the Liberty Report earlier this year or earlier this week.
And it was something that I picked up in Defense One, which is a pretty handy website.
But the fact is that these soldiers, these U.S. soldiers and these outposts that withdrawn, they were smack.
They were just a few dozen smack in between an advancing Turkish army, an advancing Syrian Arab army, the Russians and the Kurds.
So these guys were in the kill zone and President Trump wisely pulled them out of the kill zone.
And everyone is screaming, how dare you pull these troops out?
What would they have said if Trump had left them in and they'd been blown to bits?
Oh, Trump, what a scumbag.
You know, dereliction of duty.
You let these guys get killed.
So, you know, there's just, you know, I hate sounding like I'm defending Trump, but there's no way to win with these people.
They don't care about the troops.
They don't care about the policy.
They're so blinded with hatred for a person that, you know, it's just it's I've never seen such an insanity before.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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You know, the fun thing here, too, is it's impossible to take a position for intervention in Syria.
That is not a contradiction.
So these people go, oh, yeah, no, we have to protect the Kurds.
Well, protect them from who?
The Free Syrian Army, the mythical moderates who are just trying to create a democracy over there.
The guys who, you know, I got an email yesterday about this female Kurdish military leader, YPG leader that was captured and executed by them, allegedly.
But, yeah, you know, there have been a lot of nights, but sometimes we like them when we're using them against the Shia.
But anyway, oh, no, I mean, in this case, they're terrible Turkish terrorists fighting against our precious Kurds that we love so much.
We'll get back to favoring the Free Syrian Army next week again.
Yeah, and they're not even Turks.
You know, they're basically, as you point out, they're elements of the Free Syrian Army and other splinter groups.
I saw a graphic recently.
These are all the people the Turks are using there.
And there's like 30 or so different of these jihadist groups.
Interestingly enough, you know, what precipitated this rapid withdrawal was the fact that it was elements of the Free Syrian Army that started shooting at the American troops there.
And that's why we had to get out of there in a hurry.
So, you know, there's a lot of things you get there.
Yeah, and people will remember, of course, from back a couple of years ago, there were reports in the LA Times and other places where you had outright battles between the YPG and the FSA, where it was DOD on one side and CIA on the other.
Yeah, it's sick.
You know, it's cynical.
This is what happens when you think you can manipulate the world.
You know, that's—but, you know, the interesting news, I saw something in The Hill.
There was a Hill-Harris poll that was released.
And this is what I wish—because Trump seems to be besieged by all sides.
Again, it's not like I'm defending him.
I'm not.
But this is a smart policy.
But he should look, even in the face of this overwhelming propaganda of the House of Mitch McConnell saying he's got to do something even stronger against Trump pulling the troops, even in the face of all this, the public opinion in the U.S. right now to removing troops is about evenly divided.
And more importantly, 51 percent of Republicans back Trump's decision, you know, and even in the face of everyone from Fox News to MSNBC talking about how terrible this was.
What's the percent of Democrats?
This is what's interesting, too.
Only 53 percent oppose the move.
So it's not like 80 percent of Dems think this is a nightmare.
So the Democrats, in going whole hog, like you said, unanimous support for condemning the president, even that, they're going against half of their own electorate here in the face of propaganda.
Seriously, Dan McAdams, think about going to a meeting of progressives and telling them, OK, everybody, here's why we have to stay at war.
All those things you thought about the most important issue in the world for the last 20 years of your life are now meaningless.
And here's why.
It's because the Republicans sometimes say antiwar things and we got to be the opposite of that.
OK, everybody, how are you going to get people to go along with that?
Obviously, it's pretty difficult.
And some guy stands up in the back and says, yeah, we've got to fight ISIS.
And someone says, no, shut up, you idiot.
It's about the Kurds this week, not ISIS.
No, it's Iran.
Iran, dum-dum.
The Yezidis, something.
Hezbollah.
Oh, yeah, no, we got to save the Yezidis on the mountain, man.
Don't you know?
30 days.
We'll be out in 30 days is what Obama said.
Oh, man.
So now here's the bad news.
And I'm not really sure the context of this, whether he was really told to say this or not, if this was like an official walk back.
But Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, already started walking this back and saying, well, you know, Trump likes to make decisions.
And then think about it some more and sometimes change his mind about stuff and this and that.
So in the context, I wasn't sure if that was an official walk back or that was him hoping, you know, or what.
But that is the danger here.
You know, he tried this last December and he changed his mind.
I mean, here's where Trump is a total idiot.
You know, he surrounded himself with people who vehemently disagree with his own policy positions.
And America is with him.
You know, America likes this.
They want to get out of these wars.
But he surrounded himself with people who vehemently oppose him.
And they are not—they're emboldened.
They don't get smacked down for opposing him in public.
He has no one—he has no one like, you know, for example, a Doug McGregor to sit down with him and say, Mr. President, you know, here is why this is a good decision.
Give him some talking points.
Let him go out.
And even go out—I mean just imagine if he had a real secretary of state who went out and defended the position.
And here's why.
You know, you and I in about two and a half minutes could write down ten bullet points for why—you know, to defend this position.
But he surrounded himself with people who hate this, who want more war.
So I don't know what—I really don't know what's wrong with that guy.
I really don't.
Well, you know, I mean I think the real way to look at it is that his policy is keep the wars going, kick a lot of Muslim butt, sell a lot of weapons, and keep the military industries on lockdown in support of his government.
Keep the Israelis and their lobby in support of his government.
And then jerk the American people's chain every once in a while about how bad he wants to end the wars.
He never ends.
You cynic.
I mean that's— You're a bad guy.
That is the model that best explains the situation that we're in.
He, you know, he could have had a deal with the Taliban two, three weeks ago, and then he just put it down and walked away from it.
Yeah, you know, you're probably right.
You know, the only thing I would say is that he's not an expert in any of these areas.
If he had people around him who understood these things, he might have been able to close some of these deals.
But he sits down in a room, and you know how all these smartasses are that work in the second and third tiers of foreign policy.
They're going to throw out a million statistics, blindside the guy.
He's going to feel like a dope.
He's not going to want to—even though he's a boss, he's not going to want to say, hey, hold on.
And that's the problem, and there's just no fix for it.
You know, the rot is so deep in our foreign policy establishment that I don't think there's a fix for it.
The only fix is that facts on the ground are demonstrating that the U.S. is not the player it thinks it is in the Middle East.
Yeah, and I mean it's fair to say in his favor that he doesn't believe in the empire and America's sacred mission to launch wars all the time and all this garbage that you're supposed to have to believe in to join the inner party.
And that's what they really hate about him.
It's not that he really was ever—he never even said he wanted to get out of NATO.
But they just—you know, it's like he's cursing Christ in church when he's saying, why are we even bothering with this NATO thing anyway, or whatever.
He's undermining the whole thing.
And you know, the idea of the whole thing.
So that's enough for them to object to.
But at the same time, he's not opposed to it, really, in any Ron Paul-ian way.
Or like you said, he'd be able to withstand the arguments.
It's just he more has like a feeling like, meh, this seems like it's too expensive.
And they're like, oh, no, sir, we've got to do this.
And he goes, OK, I guess you're right.
He's that easy to push over because he doesn't stand for anything at all.
Yeah, he doesn't really care that much about it.
But his instincts are good, I think, on these things.
But I think this is why they want to destroy him so much.
And you're right.
It's not because he's going to start listening to back interviews of The Scott Horton Show and get his foreign policy from there.
That's not it.
Even that tiny little deviation, that tiny little, hey, what's up with NATO?
I'm not into it.
Even that, it's just like when Ron Paul was the only no vote on a bill.
All the press went crazy.
How dare you vote no?
Paul Jeff Dice, who was the press officer at the time, you know, what is going on?
What did he vote?
And Jeff would always say, why don't you ask the other guys why they voted yes?
You know, I mean, this is one vote.
Why are you obsessing about it?
And I think that's what it is.
It is.
It's like the party, the inner party.
They have to have unanimity.
Everyone has to be for Nikki Ceausescu.
There can't be a single person out of the whole country who's a skeptic.
You know, you're off to the gulag.
Yeah.
Well, the good news here, and I don't know if you saw my piece at antiwar.com yesterday, but the thing is, he says enough good stuff about this for good anti-war right wingers to make good hay out of it.
I mean, imagine, it really is a miracle that you could say, you know what?
Our incumbent president is right.
Going to the Middle East at all was the worst decision anyone ever made.
Wow.
That's pretty good.
You know?
Yeah.
And you could say, I support the president if you're at a rally.
You know, bring them home.
That was great.
In terms of strategy, that was really good.
And I like your piece because it was kind of a good news piece.
You know, I feel like it's always doom and gloom.
And you're saying, hey, we can do something.
If you want to do something, here's something to do.
Right.
And you know what?
With Trump, just like you're talking about, he's so easy to push around.
But so in what context, right?
He needs to believe.
It needs to be kind of inescapable all the time that like, ah, geez, I don't know.
When I go to these rallies, these people want the wars ended.
It doesn't seem to be much debate about it.
Muslim hate or no Muslim hate.
They just don't want Obama anymore.
They just lost interest in this whole damn thing.
And they just don't want to do it.
If he knows that, that that's just true, that's just inescapable, then that'll be important when he's arguing with his next Bolton.
You know, I don't know, man.
Some people seem to disagree with you guys about this.
It's not just me.
But, you know, that's what he needs is like the social psychology of the situation to feel like it's really OK to go ahead and stand up to those guys and win.
I mean, they say sometimes he screams right in the general's faces and cusses at him and stuff and calls them losers and failures, which is true.
Yeah, it is true.
Yeah.
I mean, there's something there to be built on.
It could be.
And that seems to me to be the most important part of it is for him to.
And the change has already been made.
We saw that last time.
This is how he beat Hillary.
This was his margin of victory, which she wanted to escalate in Syria.
And he said, let's not.
Yeah, exactly.
And there's social scientists prove that from MIT.
And I forgot.
No, I forget which all colleges.
I had it written down somewhere.
But they did a big study about this.
Two different universities worked together to study this.
And these were the swing votes in the precincts in the swing states that won him the election in the Midwest right there in the Electoral College.
Wow.
I hope he read that study.
I mean, he might have heard of that.
He probably did hear that because it's kind of ironical, right?
That's why it made headlines was the Republican beat the Democrat because she was such a warmonger.
And that's supposed to defy expectations there in a way.
Yeah, I was encouraged by the young fellow from Idaho that you referenced in your article who's trying to make some of this stuff happen, the war veteran.
So hopefully more groups like that will spring up or they'll have more chapters to affect change that way.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I mean, this country's got a couple of million veterans of the war on terrorism.
And there are plenty of anti-war guys among them.
Yeah, remember that recent poll that said most of them thought the whole thing is not worth it after having come home from it.
Yeah, 60-something percent tied with the public at large in a super majority.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Hopefully he reads that.
All right, well, listen, man.
It's in large measure because of the work that you and Dr. Paul are doing over there on the Liberty Report.
It's just huge stuff, and I really like how it just goes without saying that all that you guys care about is the wars because what else matters other than this stuff?
And you guys just do such a great job every single day, you and the greatest American hero ever, Ron Paul.
So thank you so much for that and your time again on the show.
Thanks so much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Dan McAdams.
He is at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
He's the director there.
And also find him at RonPaulLibertyReport.com and on YouTube for The Great Liberty Report.
Chris Rossini is there with Ron on Fridays to talk economics, too.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fools Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
