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, check it out, guys.
I've got Gareth the Great on the line.
Hi, Gareth the Great.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Are we actually on the radio here?
It's recorded, not live, unfortunately, but depending on how good you do, you might become the Sunday KPFK show here, although we're getting started a little bit late.
I don't think it's going to be long enough, because I've got to go at the top of the hour.
But it'll be a hell of a podcast.
Everyone's going to hear it, which is good, because they love this stuff.
That's why everybody listens to my show, because they get to listen to me talk to you.
My first question is, are you back now from Beirut?
Yes, yes, I spent two weeks there with my wife's family and visiting my wife's family and not doing too much else.
All right, I get it that you're not doing journalism there, but also there's a lot going on in Lebanon right now, and I know that you could help to explain it a lot better than a lot of people, especially since you just got back from there.
Can you give us some kind of update?
I'm sorry, I know that's not what you wrote your article about or anything, but...
Yeah, I think the key thing is that there's no doubt that there's a showdown in the making in Lebanon politically, which involves both, you know, the domestic, excuse me, the domestic forces there of those opposing Hezbollah and those supporting it, obviously, with the international sort of forces arrayed primarily, you know, against Hezbollah with the U.S., I think, leading the charge, but not alone.
And that was what was really going on here when there was shooting in the street while I was there with several people killed.
And you know, it was turned on and turned off in a way that indicated that this was not just happenstance, this was carefully planned.
So I think we can look forward to more of the same in the near future.
Well, I'm so out of date on Lebanon, I never did know that much about it in the first place, but I thought that there was a coalition between Michael Aoun, who is the leader of, you told me, which Christian faction again, and he was in a coalition with Nasrallah and Hezbollah, right?
And now are they at odds at this time?
No, no, they're still in the coalition, but there's the extreme right Christian forces under Zaza are the ones who are pushing and in the forefront of the confrontation, military style confrontation with Hezbollah and its allies, the Christian allies of Hezbollah.
And so that's what we were seeing in the street while I was there.
And then are you saying that the U.S. is behind this?
Well, I think in some sense they are supporting it.
I'm not in a position to say that they were explicitly involved in planning this, but there's no doubt in my mind that in a broader sense, they were approving of this general thrust.
That's as far as I would go at this point.
So this coalition of Hezbollah and the Christians, they are the ruling coalition, correct?
And I know it's a weird confessional constitution there.
I don't know how well you know that, if you can explain how that works at all.
Well, you know, I would just say that, yes, there there is a political system that is based on, you know, religious religious factions, both Christian and Muslim.
And that that is that has been the basis for Lebanese politics for generations.
And it's now in the process of really breaking down in the sense that it's becoming the basis for a violent confrontation, which we've not seen in generations.
And that is because of pressure from the international system led by the United States.
The outcome is yet to be clarified, but look, I mean, Hezbollah has the guns.
They have the primary military forces and they're not going to allow themselves to be pushed out of power by Zaza's extreme right wing Christians.
And I think that's the bottom line here.
They hold the higher cards.
All right.
Well, I think I need to be regularly reading Sharmin Narwani for one.
I know that I'm way behind on this.
Do you have any other good recommendations for regular writers on Lebanon?
At this point, I can't think of anybody who is really covering it that deserves to be loyally read.
I think you're on the right track.
Sharmin's coverage is going to be reliable.
Okay, cool.
Man, sorry if I sound all nervous all of a sudden, I just got invited back on the Kennedy show on Fox News.
I always get nervous when I get these emails from her producer, like, oh man, that'd be fun.
I'm going to say some anti-war stuff.
Ah, man.
Okay, listen, let me talk to you about this great article that you wrote.
I love this phrase.
You know, last night I did a presentation for a bunch of high school kids.
It was quite a few of them.
A pretty large group for this guy's history class.
And they were some bright kids.
They asked really good questions at the end, you know, like really insightful kind of ones and stuff.
It was really great.
But anyways, one of my answers to them was, you see kids, it's all a racket.
Like the soldiers call it, a self-licking ice cream cone.
And I could see all their faces kind of light up because everybody likes ice cream cones.
And then everybody pictures, tries to picture exactly how that would work.
The ice cream cone has a tongue and it eats itself or does it start from the bottom of the cone or what?
And everybody just loves that.
And even if they don't know exactly what it means, they know sort of what it means.
It sounds like some terrible perversion of correct ice cream licking, you know?
So let's start with that.
That's your title.
Self-licking ice cream cone prolonged the 20 year war in Afghanistan and you wrote it for Quincy and now it's at the antiwar.com site, of course.
So go ahead and say things now, sir.
Yeah.
So so this does, in fact, use this concept of self-licking ice cream cone to to analyze the the to to explain why this war in Afghanistan went on so damn long.
And basically, it takes as its sort of a second level of analysis, Morton Halperin's three kinds of institutional interests, which I think is a good way to sort of encapsulate the the range of of interests that were being promoted institutionally that really spelled out the the ways in which this war was prolonged.
He he lists three three kinds of institutional interests as first budgetary resources interest.
That is to say, the the interest primarily of the military services and the Pentagon generally in assuring that their budgetary resources are at least going to be maintained at the sufficiently high level, if not increased.
And of course, in the case of Afghanistan, we saw that there was a huge increase back in around 2009, 2010, which was then maintained.
It was based initially on the idea or the expectation that the U.S. military would be fighting in Iraq for many years.
And unfortunately for the U.S. military, that was not was not to be because the Iraqi government allied with Iran made it clear that they wanted the United States out over a period of relatively short period of years.
And so there was a rapid sort of rapid reduction in U.S. forces over that period from 2010 to 2014.
And that meant, of course, that somebody else, you know, some other mechanism had to be found in order to fill that gap because the Pentagon had planned to have a 14 percent increase in their budget during that period.
And this was based on the idea that the Iraq war would continue at a high level.
But instead, it was going to dwindle down.
And of course, that meant that Afghanistan had to fill the gap.
And so all those forces that were going to be committed to to Iraq had to be fighting in Afghanistan.
And so that's why the war in Afghanistan was the savior of the Pentagon and the army in particular, and allowed those institutions to maintain the kind of level of budgetary resources that they had counted on.
And so I think that's a key factor here in explaining why that war had to go on and why it had to go on at a high level.
The second kind of institutional interest that was involved were mission capabilities that the military is used to having assigned to them over some period of time.
And of course, that meant that the the army had to find the missions and the capabilities that went with maintaining their role in Afghanistan.
And that was part of the deal in which the war went on and they found constantly new missions.
And then the third one that Morton Halperin talks about is internal staff morale.
And by the way, this little asterisk here, my my piece, which I think was around twelve hundred words, should have been much longer in order to explain some of this stuff, because what that meant, in fact, although Morton Halperin himself didn't say so, was the senior staff morale, not just the it didn't have to do with GI morale.
Right.
These guys are on their seventh tour.
Exactly.
It was the generals whose morale had to be maintained.
And of course, the the war in Afghanistan was turned into a perfect you a perfect way of doing that because it it was necessary to have rapid turnover of generals in senior positions.
So or rapid, rapid turnover of senior senior staff so that the maximum number of generals could be promoted to higher levels.
And that's exactly what happened in in Afghanistan.
And as a result, you had a historic milestone here, which was that by 2020, the U.S. military had the same number of generals that it had when World War Two ended, which shows just how extreme this principle was carried to in terms of maintaining senior staff morale in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder.
He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean, and no quarter will leave his mark on you.
No question.
Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder, the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richman.
We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
Both are instant classics.
I'm proud to say that Coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians.
And Social Animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics and everything else.
You'll absolutely love it.
Then there's me.
I've written two books, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy.
It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
What a wreck.
You know, I did this radio show in Chicago where the guy's anti-war, kind of a right leaning populist sort of guy.
So he's basically anti-war on Middle East stuff.
But boy, when we got to China, he got all hawkish.
And I was just telling him, oh, man, all that's so overblown.
And he was so resistant to hearing it from me.
And then I said, come on, everybody knows, you know, and I know, and the whole audience knows, everyone knows America is corrupt to its core.
And the key to it all is the military industrial complex, the companies that make the ships and the long range bombers.
They bribe the government to continue these policies.
And he said to me, you know, that does sound right.
Yeah, I think you know what?
I think I think you really got a point there, Horton.
I'm like, yeah, of course, man.
Come on.
China ain't coming here.
China's already an overextended empire, man.
They're not coming this way.
Yeah, so so this is this is really true.
Not to start talking about China, but just to talk about the racket.
Right.
Right.
The self-thinking ice cream cone is an idea which is really going to catch on now because everybody knows that it's true when you explain it.
It's clearly so true that it's undeniable.
And and so it's it's really as I see it, this is this is the future of analysis of the war system.
And let me just add that.
That there was there were points here that I really didn't have a chance to cover in my piece, but, you know, really to fill out this concept really should have been covered.
And one is that there was never any real national security need for U.S. troops to be in Afghanistan from the very beginning.
It was entirely just a convenience for the U.S. military to keep the troops there.
And it was so obviously not necessary in U.S. national interest that as I've written, and I'm sure you will recall when I bring it back to memory, there were U.S. generals whose whose primary interest was NATO, who were able to convince the Pentagon that that they should turn the war over to NATO, which had no business whatsoever running a war in Afghanistan.
Right.
But they it was agreed to because it was regarded as such a sideshow of no real importance.
I quote in the book, I quote in the book, Gareth, the general, I can bury before he was ambassador, I can bury positively.
He's not being, you know, cynical about it.
He's saying that, yeah, this is a really great team building exercise for the NATO alliance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was all about the NATO alliance not having anything to show for itself.
They needed a war.
They needed a cause.
And this was a gift to them to allow them to to make that argument.
And they made a complete hash of it.
I mean, it was, you know, the NATO, the Canadian general who was in charge of NATO's forces in Afghanistan later wrote a book, as I've again written about years ago, saying that we didn't know what we're doing.
We made a hash of it.
And it was a mess.
Yeah.
So and listen, it's also it should be pointed out, too, that a big part of the reason that they had, quote unquote, to stay in Afghanistan was just as a bridge to the war in Iraq.
It was going to take them like a year and a half.
I don't know why it took them that long.
It's like a year and a half to build up the forces required to invade Iraq.
And so they needed to be able to say to the American people, oh, there's a big old war going on out there, when in fact there was just a couple of hundred guys and they let them get away.
And in fact, I learned a new anecdote, Gareth, about Tora Bora.
There was a piece in Task and Purpose about it was a profile of the guy who was, you know, the man on the scene, the lead Air Force air controller on the ground, a one man air traffic control and bombing run coordinator and everything.
And he ran the entire air war at Tora Bora there attached to the Delta Force.
And they just make the statement out of, you know, with no particular relevance.
It just shows up there in the story of his life that they canceled the whole thing on December the 9th.
And Bin Laden didn't get away till the 17th.
So even where I've always said, you know, they did call in some big air power and they could have got them, but they refused to send in the Green Berets and the Rangers like Delta was begging for and the nevermind the Marines.
But in fact, they didn't.
I'm giving them too much credit even for the air power.
They canceled the airstrikes on the 9th.
And by the way, they said, because there was a friendly fire incident somewhere else in the country, they had really scaled back other airstrikes elsewhere in the country that were as of lower priority.
And so they had all of these extra planes for the Battle of Tora Bora.
It all the whole country worth of planes.
Everybody's in Nangarhar province.
And they canceled.
I'm sorry, I'm just going on and on.
Man, what this reveals, obviously, is that the operations of the U.S. military are never really about a genuine national security need or requirement.
They are about the internal interests of the national security state itself.
Now, you know, there are conflicts within those interests, right?
They're not all the same.
They're very different at the same moment and different moments.
So you see, you know, some people within the military who are upset at what's going on and what's been decided.
But the reason is that other institutional interests are being served.
So that's I mean, it's always about that.
And, you know, another point that I could have made and should have made but didn't have the space was to talk about how, you know, Afghanistan was a vehicle to make new major careers for both McChrystal and Petraeus.
Well, Petraeus, you know, had already started to make his career in Iraq.
And McMaster.
And McMaster as well.
But, you know, I mean, these were days when they were able to use a war to promote themselves.
And it was nothing more than that.
I mean, they knew that this war was unwinnable.
As I point out in the article, McChrystal said in his campaign plan that, look, we have a fundamental problem here because the major interests in this society have already decided that they need to align with the Taliban in order to basically prevent these warlords from wreaking havoc in the society.
And he had no answer to that.
He never did find an answer to that.
In fact, you know, the warlords were his allies as of necessity.
He decided to align with them.
And he knew that that was a loser from the very beginning.
And for Petraeus, of course, I mean, he knew that he was not going to win this war.
He knew that it was not winnable.
But he decided to go out because it was part of his career building plan.
And so I think everybody needs to understand that this is what these wars are really all about.
Hey, listen, I got to tell you, I got more and more and more friends who fought in that war all the time.
And I've been traveling a lot this year, and I've met a lot of guys who, you know, fought in Iraq and or Afghanistan both.
And that's the thing that gets lost in all this, you know, Petraeus and McChrystal and the rest of these guys getting their ticket punched.
These State Department goons and CIA, you know, spooks and whoever people getting their jabs done, you know, for their own interest.
They're getting people blown up to death and maimed beyond belief.
And, you know, you start your article out talking about this guy, Joe Kent, a Republican running for Congress.
And I think you saw, is that what you linked to here is this Fox News interview?
Yes.
So we saw the same Fox News interview where, hey, this guy takes it personally that these people lied the whole time because he took a sacred oath and risked everything and lost everything, including his own spouse.
And as he complained that interview, it was after Trump tried to get everybody out of Syria, which happened twice, that the military just essentially said, belay that order and forced Trump to back down and kept the people in Syria.
But also, I think he said he was an Afghan.
I forget Iraq, but I think he was an Afghan war vet and had lost people there.
And that's the part of this that always gets left out.
It's all, you know, you can have all kinds of ruthless politics around who runs housing and urban development, but you're not talking about people getting the bottom half of their body blown off by an IED when it comes to the consequences of who wins and loses those, you know, political battles here.
Yeah.
It's about time that those issues, that issue particularly, be brought to the center of the entire political fight over national security policy.
I mean, that's got to be done.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm about out of time here, Gareth, but I appreciate you coming on the show and all your great analysis.
And am I right?
Is it OK for me to ask you here for the record?
Is it right that you're writing a new book about the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1940s?
It's not about the origins of the Cold War.
It's about the Cold War as precisely what we're talking about, a vehicle for the institutional interests of the military and the Pentagon, particularly, and their non-military allies from time to time, but primarily the military and the Pentagon to advance their institutional interests.
And it will document some unknown cases of this, of how they deceived the public, deceived the president, deceived Congress in order to advance those interests.
So it's really a complete sort of rewriting.
Not a complete rewriting, but a major revisionist view of the Cold War in light of what both you and I now know about what it was really all about.
Yeah.
Awesome.
All right.
Can't wait.
Thank you so much, Gareth, for your time.
Thank you.
Glad to be back, Scott.
All right, you guys, listen, just about everything Gareth wrote in the last 20 years can be found in his archive at Antiwar.com.
And that's for Truthout and for IPS News and Truthdig and everything except the American Conservative Magazine.
All of that stuff is at TAC, and we all just link to that.
But Responsible Statecraft and, of course, the Grayzone Project, all of that stuff is at all those places I just named.
And it's also all in the archives at Antiwar.com.
So go and catch up.
