All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Danny Davis, of course, again, Afghan War whistleblower and a combat veteran of Iraq War One, Iraq War Two, and Afghanistan, and author of the new book, The Eleventh Hour, which we talked about in our last interview, what, a week or two weeks ago.
Anyway, welcome back to the show, Danny.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Always happy to be here.
All right, man.
Well, happy to have you here.
And there's so much to talk about, but you know, I keep thinking, and honestly, man, I think I remember thinking this back like 25 years ago, when I was first deciding to really get like, yes, I'm going to be sort of this political commentator, sort of a person with my life here.
And I remember thinking about, you know, the unintended consequences of things.
I'm pretty sure like, this was even my example that what if you made a really good argument that, hey, we got to stop intervening in the Middle East, and they listen to you.
But then that just freed up resources to pick a fight with China, who have H bombs and could kill all of us.
And now it looks like, and I decided then, well, you know, you got to do the right thing anyway.
We shouldn't be killing these people in the Middle East like this.
But here we are, people are finally coming around to that point of view.
There's just no point in fighting this stupid terror war anymore.
What the hell are we doing over there?
The real enemy is China.
We need more ships and more planes and more nukes and more bombs.
And did I say China?
Because I meant Russia.
We need a new plan for building up in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from re-invading and recreating the Soviet Empire.
And here I'm thinking, geez, maybe we'd be better off fighting the Taliban forever.
No offense to the Pashtuns of Afghanistan.
It's not like it's fair to them or anything.
That still might be preferable to all of us dying in a H-bomb war.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, if those are your only alternatives, I suppose that might be the least alternative.
I think maybe they're our only alternatives, Danny.
But how about this?
What if we say, let's don't fight stupid wars and let's don't start new ones.
Let's just live good, happy, productive lives that don't result in killing anyone.
How about that?
I mean, I'm just thinking out loud here.
So wait, now all these government employees would have to get actual jobs then, you're saying?
You know, be productive.
Do something that actually has a positive outcome.
Yeah.
Providing goods and services to people on the market.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's where I'm heading.
All right.
I mean, really shocking to any military officers listening.
The reason the American people exist is to pay them, to be our security force, to stand on that wall.
Yeah.
Well, I'm okay with standing on the wall.
I'm not okay with leaving the wall and running and finding somebody to kill.
That's where we have gotten off course.
Yeah.
Well, you and your specifics.
You know, it doesn't matter which wall it is.
In fact, even that whole bit about the wall, he's talking about Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He's keeping the commies at bay down in Guantanamo?
Is that it?
Anyway.
Jack Nicholson reference, everybody, from A Few Good Men, right?
Right.
Anyway, for the young, you can handle the truth.
I believe in you.
You can handle the truth.
All right.
So, listen here, man.
The president and the would-be president had this big debate last night, and they talked about foreign policy a little bit, although I've got to admit, I was only kind of half paying attention, but did you take notes?
Was there anything that they discussed that was important?
I remember Biden coming off with his fake accusations about Russian bounties in Afghanistan, but did they discuss more than that?
Did they talk about Russia, China?
Well, they talked about Hunter Biden's China, whatever, but did they talk about China policy?
They talk about Iran and the nuclear deal?
Any of that stuff?
Yeah, I was paying a lot of attention, and I was sorely disappointed to the point of almost depressed because the moderator, as you would guess, had her hands full, and to be fair, she actually did a better job than anybody else has done in keeping it actually somewhat civil debate.
However, the downside is that they spent so much time on the coronavirus section, which was supposed to be one of seven, that she had to start cutting back on the other ones, and the biggest cut came with foreign relations, foreign policy.
In fact, whereas she would break the conversation several points and go to her questions where each would have a two-minute response on a question, and then that would lead into discussion and debate, they didn't even have one on foreign policy.
It just sort of leaked into it because it went back to the China virus and all that crap, and then that turned into Hunter Biden, and then you paid taxes to China and all this, and so she just sort of blended it in, and then about the closest they came was to throw in a question on North Korea, which they spent maybe 45 to 50 seconds talking about that, and then she ran out of time and went on to the next one.
There was no mention at all of the numerous forever wars we're fighting, and I felt like that was a great disservice to the American people and a tremendous dishonor to the men and women in uniform who are fighting every day in these unnecessary wars that you don't even find it important enough to talk about.
My question is, if it's not even important enough to talk about in the debate to decide who's going to be the next commander-in-chief, then how the hell can it be important enough to our national security to keep fighting them?
That's a great question, and of course the answer is it's not important enough to keep fighting them at all.
It's not.
That's right.
And yet, you're so right though, and I have to honestly wonder, you know, I thought about that a little bit too last night.
I was reminded of that guy, I'm sorry, is it Ezra something from Vox?
You know, the guy that used to be at the Washington Post?
Ezra Klein.
I'm sorry?
Yeah, Ezra Klein.
Yes, Ezra Klein.
He tweeted, he got in a little bit of hot water about a year or two ago when he was tweeting that, you know, this is the worst something or other in peacetime in a long time.
And people, you know, were quote tweeting at him, what the hell do you mean peacetime, Ezra?
But the thing is, yeah, I mean, that's where his head is at.
I mean, Iraq War II ended a long time ago, right, shrug?
And so, you know, and I honestly, I have to wonder from the moderator's point of view, like how familiar is she even with the fact that we've got Green Berets and Marines and, you know, regular army still in Afghanistan by the thousands, that we've got, you know, what five or 8,000 soldiers still in Iraq, special operations forces mostly, I guess, in Iraq and in Syria, that we're still helping Saudi bomb Yemen, that we got even infantry with the special operations forces on the ground in Somalia and a massive drone war there, of course, that we've been waiting for, you know, as long as the whole terror war, we've been having a special operations and CIA war against the Somalis there for no good reason.
And does she even have any idea of this?
Does she even have any idea that Nick Turse is writing books and books about AFRICOM's expansion, you know?
Yeah, there would have been some really solid material here.
I mean, let's just pick the Syrian one, because that's one of the most recent ones.
I mean, you could have said, hey, in, you know, a few months back, there was the last of actually a series of clashes between U.S. and Russian ground forces in Syria.
And there was a clash to where Americans were physically wounded or injured in a provoked crash between combat vehicles of the two countries.
And only the real discipline of the Americans not to return fire, which they could have given the actual laws of land warfare.
And maybe somebody else might do it the next time.
That could have sparked into an actual firefight engagement, which by itself could have sparked into something else.
And, you know, we have so many troops there, and that could have turned into an incident.
Why in God's name do we want to risk a war with Russia over something that absolutely does not have any relation to American national security?
And I would have asked the candidates, if you win, you know, next month, what will you do with the troops in Syria?
And if you keep them there, how is that in America's national interest?
No one even asked the question.
Right.
And you know what?
She could have phrased it the other way, too, that like, I'd like to give you an opportunity to explain to the American people how important it is that we stay in Syria forever.
Please go ahead.
Right.
She could have done that.
Yeah.
She could have at least brought it up, you know, in any context.
But, yeah, Syria.
I don't know.
Are we still in Syria?
Were we in Syria?
I don't know.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
It is.
It's so out of sight, out of mind that people don't even know that we're at war at all.
It's like the 1990s, even though we got, and we were at war then, too.
But, you know, people acted like it was peacetime.
I think people really think of it as peacetime now.
And after all, it is mostly.
You don't have Iraq War II level, you know, the entire 3rd Infantry Division, the entire Marine Corps marching around in there and all this stuff anymore.
So it's a lot easier to kind of airbrush away, but to just kind of completely ignore it away, to act like the terror wars are over and all of this stuff is just, it's pretty remarkable.
You know, and tell me this, Scott, what are all the family members, the tens of thousands of them of troops that are either in there, just came out or getting ready to go back in?
I see that the commander in chief and the prospective commander in chief don't even acknowledge they exist.
You tell me that.
You tell me that.
You're a career Army guy, man.
Tell me about the families and how they, what they think about that.
You know?
I mean, I'm telling you, I'm sick and tired, and I know I'm not alone in this.
I'm sick and tired of members of Congress, of the administration, of all these, you know, well-known people always saying, oh, we love our troops and we have special things for them.
All this kind of stuff that we value them.
Oh, hell no.
If you valued them, you wouldn't be throwing their lives away for nothing.
And you wouldn't be letting them be invisible in combat operations when the only time that we get to talk about this once every four years, I mean, they would actually matter so that we would talk about, is it valid?
Is it necessary for our security to continue to sacrifice, even if it's in just bits and pieces, their lives on a routine basis in wars that don't matter?
And of course the answer is no, but damn it, ask the question.
Yeah.
You know, I know.
And people, you know, Americans, a lot of people, but Americans too, are still dying in these wars.
And you know, yeah.
And I mean, even think about the way you phrase it there about like, at least we get to discuss this once every four years, right?
When it's a presidential election, we get to at least have some kind of debate about this.
Correct or not?
Or what?
Even the once every four years, we don't even get to make a pit stop at this argument, you know?
Yeah.
And I remember in the 2016, there was, you know, there was a dearth of discussion about it even then, but I think it made like one of the debates, they actually had some discussion on it, but there was none here.
At least, yeah, Trump had, you know, coined the phrase trigger happy Hillary and how reckless she is with her wars.
You know, this is something too that you think I can't win for, you know, learn from his own success last time around.
You might think.
And of course, the answer is because he doesn't know the first thing about it or and apparently none of his staff do either.
But man, he could have beat the crap out of Biden on a rock war to that, like, hey, ladies and gentlemen, there was no man in D.C. more important to the launch of that war other than Bush and Cheney themselves.
Joe Biden played a more significant role in starting that war even than Paul Wolfowitz.
He was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and he was the whip that got all of the Democrat, the most important Democrat senators to support that war.
Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in the House, the majority of them opposed the Iraq War resolution in October 2002.
But in the Senate, because of Joe Biden, they supported it and helped push that thing through.
And meanwhile, what's the opposite of that?
He could have stopped the war.
He could have said, this is crazy.
No, we're not going all the way to Baghdad.
And no, Saddam does not have a top secret Manhattan Project somewhere that we can't find.
This is, you know, nonsense.
And instead, he was the greatest champion of that authorization for war and of the war.
And now he lies about it and says, oh, yeah, I only supported it till it started and then I immediately turned against it, which is just not true.
He supported it until the surge.
He didn't support the surge, but he supported every aspect of it up until 2007.
And then even then, it wasn't like he was saying, we got to get out of there now.
You know, he was more like the James Baker committee, you know, come out, leave in 08 instead of now, that kind of thing.
The problem is that that means people have to have some knowledge about what happened more than, you know, four months ago.
And there just doesn't seem to be much institutional knowledge.
But, you know, there is an institutional resentment about Iraq, though, right?
It is a curse word like Vietnam now.
It is a thing that we all know we shouldn't have done.
So it's, you know, he wouldn't have had to tell the story that good, but he could have just said, Joe Biden, he didn't just support that war.
He was one of the ringleaders of that war and it was all his fault.
And he's the one who killed all those people and all those soldiers.
And that would he could have.
But no, they don't even know that they have at worst, they would say he supported it.
You say we all know, but I don't know that that's accurate.
I mean, there's still a lot of very unrepentant cheerleaders that say, no, it was actually right.
We did the right thing.
It was it was OK.
Just we didn't do it out, handle it very well afterwards.
But, you know, that's tactical problems here and there.
There's still people that say that, not the least of which is still Dick Cheney and Wolfowitz and several of these others.
You know, there's still cheerleaders for that stuff and people listen to them still.
So only some people, you know, I don't think we have anywhere near the negative stigma to this as we did to Vietnam, which was kind of across the board now.
But I think Trump has really done a lot to advance this narrative because he ran on it that, you know, Jeb is bad because he's George Bush's brother and George Bush is bad because of Iraq War two.
And he got the Republican right to rally around that message, which was, you know, the most wonderful thing to happen, really, in American society in a long time.
I don't know who else could have possibly gotten them to change their minds en masse like that the way they did.
And you're right.
It's not, you know, completely solid.
But major progress has been made on that front, I think, you know, and there are dead enders, but I think they're mostly all in D.C.
Well, yeah, that's true.
But then again, when you look at what the American people say, like 70 some odd percent say that these wars should end, so it's overwhelming.
And yet you see there's still people in Washington that, you know, hang on.
And you know, that's really one of the things that I think needs a little bit of illumination here is that, you know, on almost any subject you want to talk about where the election is hinging and you want to, you know, do what the American people support so that you get most of their votes, you know, and people are going left and right on those things.
This is one of the few issues that you have overwhelming majorities of Americans that agree on that this is a bad thing and needs to change.
You would think that just the politician in these guys would go, oh, well, if that's where the wind's blowing and it's really blowing hard there, let me get behind this so that I can get the votes of the American people who think that.
And instead, they just ignore that.
And part of me wonders why that is.
Why would they not?
It's the bubble that they live in, right?
Yeah, it's because they live in Washington, D.C., where everybody agrees.
I mean, this is look at Hillary Clinton as the perfect example of this, because she's always a student, but no wisdom.
You know what I mean?
Just by the books only kind of thing.
And so her idea was, if I run as a really mean, muscular hawk, that'll win over Republicans.
That's what Republicans want to hear.
And she didn't realize it.
Like, wait a minute, I'm Hillary Clinton and all Republicans always hate me no matter what and always will.
She was looking at it like, well, Robert Kagan likes me.
If Robert Kagan likes me because of my warmongering, then that's a signal that I can win over the rest of the Republican right by being a war hawk.
She even convinced herself she could win Arizona and Texas by being a hawk.
And she just presumed that that was their highest value and it would be enough to convince them to come over, you know?
Yeah, I guess you can't blame it, argue with you there.
And so, yeah, I mean, she didn't realize that.
And so this is the thing was, you know, they had the university study that came out that said that she lost the election in those swing states in the Midwest.
And they went and looked county by county and said it was the communities that lost the most combat deaths in Iraq, World War II and Afghanistan that voted for Trump and against her, which you would think that's against the conventional wisdom, right?
That the Democrats are the doves and the Republicans are the hawks.
But in this case, she made it so clear.
No, I'm the hawk.
I'm the hawk.
He's an isolationist.
And they were like, oh, good.
That's what we want.
We want a right wing dove.
We'll vote for him.
You know?
Yeah.
So.
And look, you know, I've I've had a problem with a number of Trump's policies, which we talked about here over the years.
But the fact is, he has not started any new wars.
And I think that's like the first president in what decades, many decades that hasn't at least started one new war since he's been on.
So I mean, Reagan's were were mostly, you know, I mean, Nicaragua and El Salvador were brutal, but they're more covert action, you know, comparable to Obama in Syria.
Still really bad, but not exactly a full war.
I mean, Grenada, if you want to count Grenada.
But yeah, no, certainly since H.W. Bush, though, you know.
Yeah, Bush and even Clinton into the Bosnians, a couple of other things in Haiti and Kosovo and, of course, bombed Iraq every three days for eight years straight.
That counts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then Bush and Obama had his, you know, that's with all over the place.
So this at least there hasn't been any new ones.
I mean, let's get rid of the ones we have.
But I guess you got to be thankful where you can find it.
Right.
I mean, really, the most productive thing that he's done is just say antiwar things in a way that has influenced the point of view of Republican voters that, yeah, yeah, we don't want to be the policemen of the world.
We don't believe in nation building.
We don't believe in leading the world at the expense of our own nation.
This is crazy.
And, you know, that's the thing about Trump, too, right?
Trump doesn't have any sound ideology of peace and commerce and anything at all.
He just doesn't believe in all of the, you know, catechisms of the empire, you know, all of this kind of religion, you know, this sort of mystical destiny of America to, you know, act in place of Jesus till he gets here and all of this stuff.
It's just silly to him.
You know, it's a waste of money.
Why would we defend the Japanese?
You know how productive the Japanese are?
We got to fight their battles.
Why?
And he just, you know, he doesn't see it.
And so that's the thing.
He doesn't have, he doesn't have a worldview that could replace this, you know, America's exceptional destiny stuff, but he doesn't buy it.
So at least we got that going for us, you know?
Yeah.
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Now so let's talk about Korea because Biden just mercilessly attacked him for sucking up to the wily tyrant Kim Jong Un.
What'd you think of all that?
Yeah, and that really illustrates something that partially that was even part of it wasn't discussed, which I hope we don't get.
In the event that Biden wins, what I hope he doesn't do is what Trump did to his predecessor.
Anything that had that word Obama on it, he wanted to get rid of and undo whatever.
So I hope that a Biden administration, if he should win, doesn't come in and go, okay, we don't like what Trump did in North Korea.
We don't like what he's doing in NATO, so let's go back to normal.
Let's go back to what Obama did in the past.
And that's not what we need.
Trump opened up an opportunity.
So he didn't handle it well.
He let Bolton jack it up, especially in Hanoi in 2019.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
Take advantage of the opportunity here and let's keep moving towards peace and use the diplomacy in ways that Trump didn't.
Let's build on what he had success.
Let's don't go into NATO and say, okay, let's go back to normal.
You guys don't worry about, we won't really leave or anything.
Even if you don't pay your fair share or whatever, we'll just keep providing your security.
No, let's go away.
It's time to relook at NATO in its entirety, because the world is radically different today than it was when it was formed in 1949.
Radically different than even in 1992 when the Soviet Union fell apart.
Let's don't go backwards.
Let's go forward and reform things and make substantive changes here.
But build on what's already started, because Trump did some positive things about getting NATO to move more and provide its own directions, even though he did it messily.
But don't throw it out and just say, because Trump had something to do with it, let's reject it, which is kind of what it sounded like Biden was saying.
So I hope that that was just him wanting to stake out a position of being different than Trump.
And really emphasized, oh, Kim Jong Un's a thug and all this.
Look, you've got to talk to people, whether you think they're a thug or not.
He is the leader of that country.
He does have a pretty potent military, at least regionally.
And so you've got to deal with him, or otherwise it's just going to stay an open festering sewer which could break out into something else.
So you've got to deal with what you have, not what you wish you had.
I just hate it when I hear liberals or conservatives or whoever attacking a politician for wanting to negotiate and meet and talk with leaders of foreign countries.
This was the Cheney Doctrine, that if you talk to them, then you grant them legitimacy.
Well, you know what?
North Korea's had a seat at the United Nations since 1950-something, whatever it is.
And the guy inherited the dictatorship from his grandfather.
It's not like Trump is allowing him to be the dictator of North Korea.
He is the dictator of North Korea.
It is a sovereign nation.
It is what it is.
We all live here in space-time together.
Why are we pretending that if Bill Clinton shakes somebody's hand, that that makes them now a legitimate leader?
And especially the hated, horrible Donald Trump.
If anything, he would take legitimacy away from Kim Jong-un just by standing next to him, right?
I guess we don't need consistency in any of these silly arguments.
It's funny, because they talk, oh yeah, he just loves dictators so much.
Well, I mean, it's not like he's getting along with the Ayatollah right now.
The reason that he's getting along with the dictator of North Korea is because North Korea has a dictatorship.
And that's the government that he's trying to work with in order to stave off what they all in Washington, D.C., the whole damn national security state was calling this red line, this danger that the North Koreans could marry a nuke to a missile, that they could deliver it here.
And so we're either going to attack them, or we're going to make a deal.
Because they had already decided that, unlike LBJ and Mao Zedong, that they were not going to allow for this capability to become real.
And so what was he supposed to do?
But they don't talk about any of that at all.
They're just like, oh, you love dictators a lot, and all this crap.
And then meanwhile- Yeah, I mean, what's the alternative?
You're going to go to war, because that's what would have happened.
Right.
And that's what we'll do anyway.
And what did Trump do anyway?
Fix that.
Yeah, and he didn't even make a deal.
All he did was turn the temperature down a notch.
Oh, how dare he prevent a war?
And you know, like in the new Woodward book, he makes it sound like they really did come very close to going ahead and attacking.
That's what McMaster wanted to do, was go ahead and hit their missiles in their warehouses and what have you, and set them back.
Which could have been a nightmare, of course.
No, you wouldn't have set them back, dude.
You would have unleashed the rest of them on Seoul.
And that's easy for you to do, because you're not going to suffer the consequences.
Because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of South Koreans would pay the price for that stupidity.
Thank God that didn't happen here.
But we're playing too loose and casual with other people's lives, and that's a problem to me as well.
Yeah.
You know, so in the book Rage, Mattis talks about that his job as Secretary of Defense was he had to consider killing a couple million people.
And he said, no one has the right, incinerating them I think he even said, and he says, no one has the right, but that's what I have to confront.
That's what he was telling Woodward in real time, I have to confront, present tense.
That I have to consider, and meanwhile, wait a minute, even if we went to nuclear war with North Korea, why would we have to nuke Pyongyang?
You're going to nuke the capital city full of two million civilians?
That's the war plan?
Not to attack their missile facilities and their nuclear facilities, but to hit, drop megatons on the capital?
And what do you think is going to happen in response, man?
They're going to do the same thing, whether they can hit Washington or not, separate issue, but they damn sure can hit Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas.
Sure, Tokyo, yeah, why not?
There's no reason for them to withhold.
Once you do that, there's no reason for them to withhold.
Right now there is.
They would not use those things offensively ever, because they know that we outnumber them like, what is it, a hundred to one in nuclear rounds.
So of course they're not going to unilaterally use them as a first strike, because there won't be a second option for them.
But if you strike them, now then they don't have any motivation to withhold and they'll lash out like they can.
That's why it would be insane to do something like that, to even contemplate it.
And then, you know, meanwhile, like we're talking about, you know, they didn't even, you know, he was accused, they, in fact, the media and the Democrats helped ruin the deal when they met in Vietnam, because they had this entire narrative.
First of all, the Democrats held hearings where they were interrogating his lawyer at the same time he was meeting with Kim.
So that way they could frame it that if he had a success at all, that he's just trying to distract from the brutal truths of the Cohen testimony, of which there were none.
And then they also said, oh, he's just going to let Kim walk all over.
I mean, you know, they got a memo at every channel that here's our narrative.
Our narrative is that Kim Jong-un is a brilliant genius, James Bond villain, you know, dastardly mastermind genius, and he's going to completely walk all over Trump, who is helpless before his wiles and is going to give away the entire store.
And they just push that so hard that essentially Trump had to walk away.
He almost had to walk away, essentially, from, you know, the way that they framed it.
And then that was it.
We didn't get a deal at all.
All they did was ratchet down tensions a bit where they could have had a real deal.
They could have signed a peace agreement to finally, truly end the Korean War of the 1950s.
They could have dropped sanctions and gone much further than they did.
And still Trump's attacked for being a naive tool of a tyrant.
And South Korea desperately wants that.
To this day, they still want that.
They're looking for any way to get that so that they can, we can delegate, you know, to their president the ability to have targeted sanctions relief in exchange for positive actions.
You know, so this whole step-by-step thing, which is inherent in any positive, successful negotiations in diplomacy, where you have to give something to give something and you just do it in increments so that people continue to move in the right direction towards peace.
Maybe sometimes later on we can get to denuclearization, maybe.
But what we can definitely do is get to peace to where there doesn't have to be any war or even the real threat of nuclear war.
And that's where we need to get to.
Yeah.
All right.
So now let me ask you a little bit about what you think about Joe Biden's foreign policy here.
I'll set you up a little bit with, I think he sort of kind of was chastened by the disaster of Iraq War II.
As I mentioned, he did oppose the surge.
He was the least worst in the cabinet, him and Lute, on tripling the Afghan war in 2009 and urged Obama not to do that.
And they say, although I don't know that there's really hard evidence of this, but apparently he was on the good guy side in opposing the war in Libya.
And I don't know about Syria.
And I don't know about whether he argued against launching the war in Yemen.
I know he says he wants to end it now, but he also is surrounded by all of Obama's hawks and really the entire foreign policy establishment is rallying around Joe Biden.
And so I wonder, and he's getting old too, man.
So I wonder whether you think this is just going to be a disastrous Barack Obama type administration of expanded war across Africa and God knows where, Russia and China or who knows what.
Or do you think that he'll actually, you know, maybe try to ratchet things down rather than up?
Well, here's what we got to look at.
This was at play actually in the beginning of the Trump administration too.
He said many of the right things in 2016, you know, a lot of them in terms of foreign policy.
And I think he actually meant it.
Maybe as you said, he didn't have any, you know, deep abiding philosophy or strategy, but he's like, okay, this seems right to me.
His instinct for these stupid words don't make any sense.
Afghanistan doesn't make any sense.
Let's shut it down.
But he surrounded himself exclusively with all of these hawk types, you know, because he just, that was, you know, being an outsider might be on the one hand good because you're not a standard politician, so you can do things differently.
But on the other, the second side of that, the flip side, is that you don't know who to put on your, you know, key national security advice because you don't have any personal knowledge about this stuff.
So he, he hired what he thought, you know, was good.
He, you know, the four star generals or people who had all this experience, I mean, seemed to make sense to him as far as he knew.
What he didn't know was that they were all entirely opposed to what he was for and what he ran on and what the people voted on, part of whom on that very, you know, report that you cited a second ago about the, you know, the people who had suffered the most casualties from the war throughout the United States.
And that's going to be the situation with Biden here.
He's saying a lot of the right things here, and you're right.
He has, I think he has learned from some of his past mistakes.
Good on him for that.
I think that's positive.
He did push back against the Iraq surge, the Afghanistan surge, sorry, in 2009.
He was, he was definitely opposed to that.
I actually had some engagement, which I mentioned in the book that I have written with some of his advisors actually at the time, and I know for a fact that he was adamantly opposed to that and expended a considerable amount of capital inside to try to convince them not to.
So, so good on him for that too.
But the problem is, if he gets in and, and all he does is surround himself with the same, you know, Obama version three aides, which is what it looks like so far, because when you look at the people who are advising his campaign, most of them, if not all of them, did come from the Obama administration or at least that era.
And if he surrounds himself with all those people that are, that were all about, you know, intervention and, and, you know, and wanting to help, you know, nation build and all this kind of thing, I mean, then it's going to be really hard for him to push back unless he just says, all right, fellas, I'm the president, I'm going to decide, I'm not asking your opinion on this one, I'm just telling you to execute.
I'd like to see that.
I just don't know that he's going to have that, that kind of wherewithal to, to stand up to it because I fear that he, you know, too much of the politician in him will say, okay, well, let's just, let's reduce the number of troops in Iraq and in Syria and let's eventually get out of Afghanistan, but let's keep, you know, a residual, you know, so we just slows it down, but doesn't end anything.
And that's, that's kind of where I'm afraid he may go.
And in other words, it's the Tulsi Gabbard policy of, look, we're not going to overthrow any more secular dictators, whether they are our clients or whether they're not our clients, we're not going to do that.
But we are going to fight the war against bin Laden night terrorism forever and ever.
And that means wherever there's a Sunni with a rifle who opposes a government that we favor, we're going to take that government side and send in JSOC and SOCOM and AFRICOM and whoever to chase them around and fight them.
Complete disaster.
CIA drones.
Yeah.
What can never, ever, ever succeed in doing, in what they think they're going to accomplish.
Never, never.
It is like, Scott, 100%.
It's like saying, I'm going to drain Lake Erie with this eyedropper.
Yeah.
Every time you stick that eyedropper in there, you can take out a vial of water.
You can do it every single time you can succeed in that operation, but it will never, ever make any difference to the lake.
And that's the case here.
You can have military operations in Somalia and Niger and Mali and wherever, all these whatever, seven or eight places throughout Africa that we have, we actually conduct combat operations or throughout the Middle East.
You can succeed tactically in taking out whatever target you want to use because we have the technology and the skill and the training to do that, but it won't ever make any difference except that, perversely, it does keep people against you and it does continue to regenerate more opposition to you, but it won't ever solve the problem, period.
It won't.
So don't try to do something that can't succeed, but that may be counterproductive.
That just makes no sense, and it's time we acknowledge that and take action based on it.
Right.
Except that, right back where we started here, if the goal is to find work and to make work to do, to stay busy, then embedding with the government of Niger to hunt down any insurgents in their country, which just drives more resistance, is a perfect make work project for the government to engage in.
And in fact, a relatively safe one politically too, again, right?
Because nobody cares if it's just special operations forces scattered throughout Africa in small numbers or if it's Reaper drones dropping Hellfire missiles on people and stuff like that, but it gives them something to do without having to get a real job.
And so if staying busy is the goal, then it is a smart tactic.
It is successful in that regard.
But you see that they're also, the industry, that's probably the right term militarily, is very adept at keeping this going on.
Because one of my biggest gripes about the media, just in general, is that whether it's JSOC or some of these other special operations groups or AFRICOM or whoever, or CENTCOM in the Middle East, they will all the time put out these press releases, you know, we took out this really important terrorist leader, this al-Shabaab leader, or this al-Qaeda person second in command of this region or whatever.
And there's never any context.
And so the media just dutifully reports it, giving the impression without overtly saying it that we're making progress.
Hey, we took out another bad guy.
That's always good, right?
But it's not always good because it's not useful, and it does have negative implications.
But it also gives the false impression that the mission is making progress and keeping us safe.
That's, and that's exactly what they intended to accomplish.
And so it continues on.
But the media doesn't ever ask that second question.
And what's the significance of this?
You've been telling me this for 20-something years.
And there's no difference today than there was 14 years ago or 12 years ago or seven years ago or 20 years ago.
So why is this any different and why do I care?
But no one ever asked that context question.
Right.
Yep.
And so to go on, and that's really probably the same thing, whether it's under Trump or Biden or whoever even comes next after them, that the war on terrorism will go on.
And, you know, I'm sitting here trying to wrap up this book about the war on terrorism and so much of it feels like it's just about the Bush and Obama eras.
And, you know, of course, I'm updating everything to include what Trump's done so far and that kind of thing.
But again, to the American people, it all seems so long ago and far away.
And yet we're, as far as I know, we're just right in the middle.
Cheney's grim vision.
That's what the Seattle Post-Intelligence called it back then.
Cheney's grim vision, decades of war, a generational struggle, as General Petraeus called it.
Well, that's 100% what H.R. McMaster does.
That's what in his book tour right now that he's going on.
That's exactly what he said, which was reported by Josh Rogin in the Washington Post a few days ago.
That's exactly what he's saying.
He said, we need to have the will to continue fighting against the fact that the will to do what?
You know, you can't win that war militarily, but no discussion of that.
His absolute unequivocal position, and he represents so many who believe this, is that we just need to stay and perpetually fight.
And he keeps bringing it up here.
Look what we did in Korea.
Which that's Suwari's doctrine, right?
That's exactly what Ayman al-Suwari says, that we got to just keep fighting.
It'll work out.
Oh, God.
I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's embarrassing.
Well, you know, McMaster, he's not that sound of mind.
He doesn't seem like, to me.
Again, with the bubble, he's just, he's such a, you know him a lot better than I do.
I never met the guy, but he just seems like such a pompous, self-important person.
You know that he can't help but be wrong.
You know what I mean?
He doesn't know anything except how to try to justify what he already thinks, which is ridiculous.
He wasn't like that in the past, and that's why I've been so disappointed in how he's turned out after he got those stars pinned on him.
It's like he became somebody different, because, I mean, he was kind of the champion of a lot of this abuse of doing the right thing and what made sense.
But I don't know.
Well, you know what?
Isn't it right that his book on Vietnam, I never read it, but they say, you know, he gets all this credit for saying that the generals didn't do their duty in telling the truth to the Johnson administration about the war, and that was a dereliction of duty on their part.
But then it's just like Obama saying, yeah, the problem in Libya is we should have invaded and stayed forever.
You know, he goes, yeah, the problem is in Vietnam is the generals should have told Johnson, we need the entire American male population to invade and conquer Vietnam to finally win and pacify this war, which would have been fine.
It's just that we needed to be honest about that so that he knew that that's what it would take.
And then that would be great.
And so I think Obama, you know, I think the bigger point was he said they should have been honest that it can't be it can't be won, that what they were trying to get accomplished wasn't going to succeed.
And instead they just went ahead and did it, which seems kind of what a lot of them are doing today.
So, yeah, you'll figure that.
Well, so he so what he wrote, then it really was more along the lines of what you wrote, which was it can't be won, not we just they should have been honest that it'll take even more than what we've given to make it work.
Well, I don't think that he wrote the book as a commentary that the war should have ended.
I think he was merely looking at it that they did not do their job.
I think he really focused on were they honest in their advice and the things that they did and told the president and he concluded that they were not in their election duty.
But I don't think that that was his intent.
He didn't focus on that, but he did say because I remember there were several sections where they were given advice that they knew wasn't, you know, they were being told to do stuff and they knew that it wasn't going to work.
But instead of saying so, they just, you know, followed orders and kept going.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And it makes sense that he would have written the book so that the Doves or the Hawks can cite it, too.
Right.
That's good salesmanship there that, you know, I suppose.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway, listen, I should let you go.
I know you got a busy day here.
I appreciate your time so much, Danny, and thank you again for coming back on the show.
Hey, always my pleasure, Scott.
Anytime.
All right, you guys.
That is retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis.
His new book is called Eleventh Hour in 2020 America, how America's foreign policy got jacked up and how the next administration can fix it.
And of course, he's at defense priorities.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
