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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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.
Introducing regular anti-war.com contributor, active duty U.S. Army Major Danny Shurson.
Welcome back to the show, Danny.
How you doing?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me on again.
You're still in the army?
Just barely, yeah.
Not for much longer.
My retirement was just approved.
The bureaucracy wheels move a little slowly, but within a few months, I think I will be able to say retired U.S. Army rather than active duty.
Hey, great article here.
Backfire, a generation of American folly.
I coined my own little term in Fool's Errand.
I don't know if you got a chance to read it yet.
I call it backdraft.
If blowback is the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies that come back to harm the American people in a way that they don't understand the reality of what's behind or what's going on there, then backdraft is when open and declared and obvious foreign policies blow up right in all of our faces in a way that's undeniable to all but those who planned for it in the first place.
So, you got backfire here.
I guess it's just in a more general sense where, oh no, it's not.
It's not a general sense of just things never work out.
It's in that Bill Hicksian way, where all of our enemies are our former friends.
Right.
Absolutely.
And so we're surprised when there's an individual incident of tragedy, which was what happened earlier this month when Sergeant Major was killed by his own police officers that he was training.
That was the 102nd time that had happened in this war.
And I got to thinking about it and felt like we're being obtuse if we only look at the individual tragedy and more than that, when if you actually take a step back, you realize not only the Afghan war, but basically all American foreign policy in the greater Middle East for the last 30 years has essentially set up these insider attacks because almost everyone who kills Americans or our allies used to be on our payroll.
Used to be armed, funded, sometimes trained by Americans.
Are you sure, though, that they're not the blue and we're the green who are shooting them in the back?
Well, you know, that's an interesting way of looking at it.
I mean, the reality is that we are an occupation force and we've been meddling in Afghan affairs since at least the late 70s, perhaps a little earlier.
And so when you look at these blue on green or green on blue sort of attacks, I mean, there's a number of perspectives to take.
But I think you could make a cogent argument that in some ways the United States is actually poisoning the well when it comes to Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Well, and so let's stick with Afghanistan because there are a lot of wars and a lot of a lot of backfiring going on here.
But, well, I don't know.
It was just in the news a few weeks ago that Jalal ad-Din Haqqani had finally died.
Here's a guy who used to work for the CIA back in the 1980s and a guy who, as Anand Gopal shows in his book, tried to surrender to the Americans at the beginning of the war.
In fact, repeatedly, he did everything he could to try to make nice with the new American occupation and the new American-installed government.
And they kept bombing him and bombing him and bombing him until he finally became an enemy.
And his group there, correct me if I'm wrong, you're a combat vet from that war, Danny, the Haqqani Network, they're second only to the Afghan Taliban in terms of combat deaths of American soldiers.
And for that matter, Afghan civilians and everybody else caught up in this thing.
That's 100% correct.
I mean, you can argue that in some ways, per capita, the Haqqani Network has been one of the, maybe the most lethal force when it comes to killing Americans, especially in the northeast of the country where there's been an enormous number of American casualties along that border.
The Haqqani Network, of course, straddles that artificial border, as you know, between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And yeah, this is a guy who, like you said, was on America's payroll, tries to surrender, and we're still fighting the Haqqani Network.
And we will continue to fight the Haqqani Network until we finally realize that the war in Afghanistan has already been a failure.
Yeah.
Well, and I also show in Fool's Errand how the Bill Clinton administration worked with Saudi and Pakistan to help install the Taliban in power.
And in fact, not only did they see them as a solution to the civil war being waged by all the Mujahideen warlords that we had helped win the war against the Soviets to kick them out and instill law and order and all that, but they even specifically intervened to prevent any kind of peace settlement.
They wanted the Taliban to win an outright victory in the civil war and conquer the entire country so that then they could have security for that oil pipeline from Turkmenistan down to the port of Karachi.
And they said it openly over and over.
I got the direct quotes of them saying, yep, that's why we're helping Saudi and Pakistan back these guys.
It wasn't until, you know, Christiane Amanpour and the Buddhas and, you know, Jay Leno's wife, interestingly, and some of these people who got on board for the demonized Taliban campaign a little bit later on in the Clinton years.
But originally, Bill Clinton's government helped support their rise.
Well, of course, I mean, our Saudi partners, quote unquote, were incredibly influential in spreading their sort of Wahhabi, Salafi Islamist version of Islam by setting up, you know, madrasas in the refugee camp.
So, you know, in a lot of ways, the Saudis, who, of course, have been backed by the United States since the Second World War, are largely responsible and therefore we are, too, for founding this movement that we're now about to enter our 18th year of fighting.
I mean, I can't believe I mean, I wrote an op-ed that'll come out on Sunday for the anniversary.
I think it's gonna be in stars and stripes of all places.
But, you know, I can't believe that I'm writing an 17th anniversary article of this war.
I mean, that has never happened in American history.
I mean, the length of this thing and there's no end in sight.
That's perhaps the more troubling thing is there's no end in sight.
I mean, can anyone point me to evidence that we're getting ready to leave or that this thing has any, you know, any end state or any exit strategy?
I don't think so.
I think we're gonna be celebrating the 20th anniversary of this war.
Well, I'll probably be on the show three years from now.
Yeah.
Well, unless the Americans are willing to admit defeat or just pretend it's a victory or just announce that they don't care at all either way.
I mean, the Taliban are clearly in the best position of strength they've been in this whole war long.
Absolutely.
I mean.
They control more districts.
They contest more districts than ever before.
And they're still backed by the Saudis.
Our friends, the Saudis.
Yeah.
To this day, who we just signed, what, $110 billion arms deal with.
And we've got our president, you know, doing sword dances with them on his first foreign trip.
I mean, there's no end in sight to the American support for the Saudis and for the Saudi support of various regional actors that are anti-American.
All right.
Now, Danny, after the Americans did their green on blue backstab attack against Saddam Hussein, Ronald Reagan's Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's former loyal ally and servant there.
I'm skipping ahead because I'm so interested in this subject and I'm putting you on the spot.
I don't think you wrote about this, but I just really am interested in anything you know about this, any good sources to recommend.
And that goes for anybody in the audience, too.
I'm interested in Saudi backing of the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq War II, fighting against the Americans and the American Shiite allies there.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's no way around it.
There's no way around talking about the Saudi role.
As much as they proclaim friendship for the United States, they were always, always backing the Sunni minority in Iraq.
Because the thing the Saudis are most afraid of is Shia ascendancy in Iraq.
And any democratic Iraq, just based on the demographics, is going to be Shia.
They've got the majority.
They're going to win elections.
And the Saudis don't want that, quite frankly.
But you know what's crazy is so many of those Sunni insurgents that were funded by the Saudis, who had American blood on their hands, killed our soldiers, suddenly came onto the American payroll when David Petraeus steps into Iraq.
And we start paying them not to fight us and rather to fight al-Qaeda.
But guess what happened?
When the United States left, which I'm glad we did, of course we're back there, but when the United States left, the Shia chauvinist regime wasn't going to pay those guys as police officers, wasn't going to integrate them into the armed forces.
And so what they did is they alienated these guys who had American blood on their hands.
And who did they join?
Well, they joined ISIS when ISIS became the next protector of the Sunnis in the bloc.
At first they joined the moderate rebels.
Right.
I love that term, moderate rebels.
I think I mentioned in one of my more recent articles that we spent $500 million training supposed moderate rebels in Syria.
And I think what we got was four guys was the final count.
Now be careful because you're conflating different things there.
That was the project by the military to create some Arab anti-ISIS fighters late in the game that was made to fail and went nowhere.
The CIA, on the other hand, spent a billion dollars a year and then worked also with the Israelis, the Turks, the Saudis, to back the al-Nusra Front, Arar al-Sham, and all of their allies there.
And they turned out tens of thousands of these suicide bomber murderer kooks.
You're absolutely right, and it's an important distinction that you're making.
That military program was actually relatively minor compared to what you're describing, which is more influential.
Which by the way, the CIA program had military guys actually doing the training we saw down in Jordan where you had Green Berets, I'm pretty sure it was Green Berets, who were training these jihadists down there and then got backstabbed at the checkpoint and massacred.
And, you know, basically only SoftRep and a couple of other, you know, military-oriented type websites, you know, alternative journalist type sites, even cover that at all.
They hardly made any news at all because they didn't really want to talk about well, what kind of friendly fire attack are we getting involved in Jordan now?
Oh, you're training Zawahiri's guys and they stung you, huh?
Well, that's a big surprise.
It almost makes you wonder if anyone is even steering the ship.
I mean, American policy is so clearly counterproductive at this point.
I mean, we could write article after article, we could have conversation after conversation, but it is absolutely stunning the degree to which we set ourselves up for these wars and then feel like we have to fight them forever when we created them in most cases through arming, training, you know, our next generation's enemies, which I'm sure we're making today.
Right.
Well, of course, Iran is the huge, the biggest example of this, right?
Americans stole their government in 53, allied with them, used them in alliance with the Israelis to corral all the Arab states in that manner for 25 years.
And then talk about blowback, lost that to the Shiite forces of the Ayatollahs there, and they've never got over it.
And as we've discussed before, over and over again, everything they do to try to spite the Iranians only blows up in their face in, you know, in the very worst way, which only leads us to a situation where, as we talked about, our government is willing to back al-Qaeda guys against Iran and their friends because treason against the American people is fine when it comes to fighting the enemies of the American empire over on the other side of the planet, even if they actually never attacked the American people at all.
That's how out of whack their priorities are.
And they're only so frustrated because everything they do, including backing the jihadists, empowers Iran.
It's like they're, you know, Iran, I just read, is this right that Iran has 10,000 IRGC guys in Syria?
I didn't realize it was that many.
You know, they've got a bigger, a bigger physical presence and more metaphysical influence in Syria than they've ever had before, when that's the only reason Obama backed al-Qaeda against them, against Assad in the first place, was to supposedly weaken Iran's position.
And of course, it's done nothing.
Like you said, it's done nothing but empower Iran.
And now we're being told by senior officials that actually we have to stay in Syria, not because we need to back the Kurds, not because we need to take Assad out.
No, we're staying in Syria indefinitely, we're being told, to combat Iranian influence.
That is a formula for perpetual intervention in Syria, because Iran will always have influence in Syria through their relationship between the Ayatollahs and Assad.
And it is madness to think that a few thousand American soldiers on the ground is going to change that calculus.
It is not.
But what we'll get is we'll get the next forever war.
We'll get the next, you know, we'll celebrate the 10th anniversary of American intervention in Syria some six or eight years from now.
I mean, that's what we're setting ourselves up for.
Right.
Yeah.
These generations upon generations of Mujahideen, right?
If the 80s Afghan war grows, you know, veterans grow into al-Qaeda, and then the veterans from Iraq War II go home to start the wars in Libya and Syria.
And then we have our government not just fighting them in a counterproductive way, like they so often do, but actually fighting on their side and backing their side to the tune of tens of thousands of guys in the eventual creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria for three years there.
Then, first of all, just raw numbers.
We've got, what, a couple of 10,000 guys left over from al-Nusra and ISIS and Ahrar al-Sham who are going to come to Europe, who are going to go to God knows where they're from, and continue this thing on to the next one.
And so that one, that's what looks really bad here, right?
That's why Syria has been the slowest motion, worst train wreck ever, worse than Iraq War II even, when, boy, can you see this thing coming, where you have all of these young Muslim radicals in Europe who go to travel to Syria to fight in a way that they really did not in Iraq War II for whatever combination of reasons.
I guess because Turkey wasn't giving them safe passage or whatever it was.
But now there are, what, thousands of these guys and they've been attacking targets in Europe since 2013.
That was the first one, was that Jewish Community Center in Brussels in 2013 and there's been quite a few attacks since then.
So, it's on now.
We're just at the very beginning of the war on terrorism.
Danny?
You're right.
The thing is, I don't even know if there is an end to this.
I don't think anyone's planning for the end.
The military, the generals are starting to use terms like generational war, which is what I think General Petraeus referred to Afghanistan as.
Infinite war.
And that was what they said in the Washington Post.
Infinite war.
It's damaging our republic on levels that we are not even cognizant of yet.
When George Marshall ran the U.S. armed services during the Second World War, he said that a democracy, quote, cannot fight a five-year war.
He thought World War II was really long and really dangerous.
It was, of course, just under five years.
He felt that a true democracy can't handle perpetual war.
But he never even dreamed of a 20-year war.
And that's what we're in now.
And it's, quite frankly, going to be longer than 20 years.
The damage, the bleeding is internal to the republic.
We don't even realize how much we're damaging our institutions by giving presidents almost unlimited power in foreign policy.
And they seize it and they wage perpetual war.
Well, it really was the four-year war of World War II that did it.
We've had the permanent national security state ever since then.
There was no going back from that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
This is just all the way, the nth degree, after the big decisions were made by FDR and Truman back then.
Yeah, I mean, the decision to permanently garrison the globe, which was a World War II or a post-World War II decision, has reverberated throughout the years.
First, it was the Cold War national security state.
When the Cold War ended, if it ever truly did, looking at the situation with Russia now, but when the Cold War ended, I mean, we could have brought America home, right?
America could have come home, but that was never in the cards.
We were going to find a new enemy and a new reason to stay overseas.
And so we're the only country on the earth that garrisons the globe.
The Chinese don't do it.
The Russians don't do it.
No matter how much we're told that there are villains at the gate, none of the other countries of the world operate militarily and as expeditionary as we do.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, one I hear a lot too is, well, if it wasn't us, it would be somebody else.
But that's pretty vague.
You actually go around the globe and there's no one really to do it.
The Russians ain't dominating the damn thing, not ever again.
Certainly not the way it was under the Soviet Union to anything like that degree.
And the Chinese, I mean, for all their problems, and they have a lot of them, including a lot of economic problems, but they've had a consistent policy for centuries of consolidating their kingdom and leaving the rest of the world alone.
They're obviously into, you know, hardcore business tactics and stuff like this.
Men with briefcases.
But in terms of like, oh, yeah, soon the Chinese are going to conquer all of Eurasia with their massive land army.
I mean, there's no reason to think that they're dumb enough to try that.
What do they think they are, Americans or something?
Right.
They're too smart for that.
You said men with briefcases.
China's ascendancy is going to be economic.
They're not foolish enough to think that they could or should militarily rule the globe.
Only the Americans have attempted that.
And it's been a sorry tale.
And the Russians, it's such a joke.
I mean, short of nuclear war, because the Russians have an enormous amount of warheads, but there will be no nuclear war unless we start one by mistake.
But outside of that, their economy is the size of Spain's.
I mean, this whole idea that the Russian bear is like, you know, raining down on us and we have to be prepared and we have to send troops to Eastern Europe.
It's a fantasy.
It's a fantasy.
The Russians don't have the capacity or the intent to conquer Western Europe.
Or even Eastern Europe at all.
Even the Baltics.
I mean.
Absolutely.
And yet we're like sending, you know, U.S. Army units as speed bumps into the, you know, Baltic states and Romania and Poland, you know, and all it does is poke the bear.
All it does is actually increase the chances of conflict rather than decrease them.
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So here's some consequences I keep thinking about is, you know, somehow getting through to the American people that they would insist that the military really back off of the Middle East that we don't have to even, you know, I'll take a Stephen Walt view.
He's not a complete non-interventionist, but he says, how about some offshore balancing instead of land armies that massive bases all over the place and this kind of thing, you know, really scale it back, which is, you know, the very least we could do at this point, right?
But then what if that just frees up resources for confronting Russia and China when our government is run by such kooks where it's easy to see how from some military points of view and some think tank egghead points of view that like, come on, fighting peasants and flip-flops in Afghanistan.
This is getting tired.
We've got these F-22s and F-35s.
Let's see if we can pick a fight where we can use these damn things, instead of still losing in the same sand pit.
That's got to be boring for these guys, you know, and I could see them and I hear them all the time.
We hear them all the time.
They love to pretend and I guess they really talk themselves into believing that they're the defenders against the Russian and Chinese threats.
And I mean, we've seen what kind of trouble they can get us into.
So I don't know, like I'd hate to sacrifice all the posh tunes.
I don't mean that, but I don't want to get bogged down in Afghanistan.
Yeah, it's a terribly, almost absurd situation that we found ourselves in.
But your point resonates.
I mean, war is not an option with Russia or China.
Okay, it just isn't.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but it's not a real option.
Not when everyone has nuclear arsenals.
Not when we start talking about what the consequences would be.
The American people are not involved and that's the only reason they're able to continue so long.
If we got ourselves into a real fight that required a draft, that required some sort of conscription, the American people would call time out instantly and they would shut it down.
I think the only reason we're able to wage perpetual war is because we have an all-volunteer force that's relatively small.
I mean, it's large compared to other countries, but it's relatively small for the United States.
And you know, who cares about professional soldiers?
You know, we signed up.
We've been at war for almost 20 years.
But if the American people were actually asked to ante up whether it was in taxes or military service, I think the American people would just completely shut this down.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, there's the real world and then there's what these people sign up for when they're joining the military and they're really entirely different projects.
I mean, you could even, I mean, there's such dissonance when Barack Obama is the president.
Still, there is no higher honor ever in all of world history than serving in the U.S. Army under their command, killing the enemies they designate.
And it's just, it doesn't matter who it is or what the mission is.
It's just defending your country and fighting for freedom under any context.
And then there's a whole separate conversation about American grand strategy and a bunch of pro-Israel, pro-arms industrial firms and their agendas and crazy things Samantha Power and Nikki Haley believe and all these other things that really kind of have nothing to do with those conversations.
It's entirely separate and it's really unfortunate because it seems like if every conversation about military power began with, well, Nikki Haley thinks then maybe we wouldn't have to do so much.
Right.
You know, I died Danny putting your life at risk in order to protect me.
So, you know, when that's the starting point then it's pretty hard to criticize you for anything that you participated in.
Right.
I mean, I think it's a dangerous endeavor.
I think the way that we've kind of glamorized the military and put it on such a pedestal.
I mean, I remember you and I are both old enough to remember NFL games weren't always like a militarism show.
20 years ago.
I mean, yeah, on Veterans Day.
Yeah.
On Memorial Day, the sporting events might have soldiers on the field.
I always had the ads.
They did always have the ads.
When I was a young kid, my whole life, NFL games always had the ads though.
Yeah.
Be all you can be and all that.
But now they're militarism shows.
I mean, the flag at the beginning turned.
I mean, the militarism in our society is running so deep now that we don't even notice it.
We're like the frog in the pot that just like slowly boils.
So we don't even notice how odd this is.
Like how odd our society is, how militarist it is, because it's just kind of become the norm.
And I think that the American people don't even realize how strange and really silly it is.
I mean, counterproductive, silly, uncouth.
I can't think of all the words for it, but it's wild.
Yeah.
Well, you know what I wonder?
And I don't know how good of a take you have on this, but what about military guys?
I'm interested in other opinions.
Like, you know, when I was a kid, all the military guys I ever met or, you know, veterans, they were always very cynical.
And if they hadn't been in Vietnam, then they'd find some secret war in Paraguay or some kind of thing and say how it really is, kid.
You know, what the U.S. Army is really about, what American policy is really about.
That was always the way I kind of heard it.
And it seems like, jeez, you see this stuff firsthand.
And hell, I meet a lot of veterans who tell me they agree with the things that I write in my book and the things that they hear on the show and that kind of thing.
So obviously there's some degree of that.
And also, I mean, you don't have to be a foreign policy expert to know that all this is bullshit.
I mean, come on.
Like you said, we're going on 18 years of war in Afghanistan.
Something ain't right here.
And even Donald Trump could tell you that.
Any, you know, crotchety old right-wing Fox News fan could tell you that this is all too expensive by now, that there must be a better way to do this.
So I wonder what you think, you know, Army officers think at different ranks, what enlisted men think, and how cynical they might be.
Tell me.
Well, you know, I'm often amazed by how few of us there are.
And by us, I mean dissenting military officers and soldiers.
I mean, I know personally almost all the guys and gals who have spoken out against this war in print or after they retired or, you know, on TV.
And there's not very many of us.
And that's one of the things that blows my mind that more soldiers aren't more cynical, that more soldiers aren't fed up with this.
I think part of it is that, well, it's three things.
Number one, the type of people who tend to join the military in the all-volunteer era tend to be politically conservative.
OK, that's they tend to be rural, Southern, Western and conservative.
OK, just like across the board.
So that's one.
You know, the second issue is that the military is like the ultimate welfare state.
You know, I mean, it's socialism.
It's relatively good pay.
It's great health care.
So, you know, no one wants to jeopardize that.
And finally, I think the military just like is not a really critically thinking organization.
It says it is.
It purports to be.
But in reality, it squelches dissent.
The you know, the censors are pretty they're pretty strict.
You've got to be careful when you say anything bad about the president.
You can be charged with contemptuous behavior, which is actually against the law, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
So I'm sort of blown away by the fact that there's not after 18 years of war, none of none of those wars, by the way, have made us any safer or had a positive conclusion.
But it blows my mind that there aren't more of us.
In fact, it makes me want to bang my head against the wall and and wonder, you know, is there something wrong with me?
Why am I speaking out?
I think if you scratch the surface, because I know a lot of people who are still in the military.
If you really ask them, you give them a few beers and you sit down and they trust you and you talk to them.
A lot of these guys are pretty cynical.
They're just not speaking out, you know, because it's their identity and it's their livelihood.
But very few people in the military today are truly idealistic anymore.
Well, cynical in the right word is my word.
You know, that's not necessarily the right term for it.
It's where in both campaigns, Ron Paul got more donations from military guys, the anti-war Republican, than all other candidates in both parties combined in the 2008 campaign and in the 2012 campaign.
And that was officers and enlisted serving and veterans as well.
Like, however you broke it down.
Yeah, you know, there's definitely a libertarian political streak among, I know mostly officers, but there's definitely a libertarian streak.
You're right.
Ron Paul, Rand Paul, relatively popular with the military.
I mean, because the overall mythology here is your job is defending the American people, right?
So if you're off doing other jobs that aren't defending the American people, you know, you ain't a dummy, right?
You figure this out at some point.
Yeah, I mean, I've never felt like I was truly defending the American people.
None of those, in my opinion, have actually made us safer or defended the homeland.
I mean, they've just destabilized the region that was already unstable.
I mean, we've just made it worse.
Yeah, it seems to me like if you could, well, just like with Ron Paul, if the anti-war message is this non-interventionist fight for, you know, defense only kind of attitude, that really can carry the right and carry military people who do believe in that ultimately.
But if they see the opposite of the current policy as just Jane Fonda on her anti-aircraft gun again or whatever, then they're never going to come over.
It's got to be more of a conservative take that, boy, we sure are expending a lot when we're supposed to be conserving, guys, you know, that kind of stuff.
Absolutely.
You know, what's interesting is, you know, the Democrats are not going to save us.
Look at this latest military budget vote.
I think it was in the Senate.
It was maybe 93 to 7.
Besides Bernie Sanders, the other six no votes against the current inflated military budget were all Republicans.
Libertarian-leaning Republicans.
And so it's really interesting because I'm a liberal.
You know, I'm much more liberal than you.
But I am aware of one fact, which is that salvation is not going to save us.
It's not coming from the Democrats.
They've been bought and sold long ago, too.
They vote for every war.
They vote for every budget.
And they don't take a stand against intervention because they're too worried about domestic issues and they're too afraid to look soft on foreign policy.
So in some ways, if we're going to get on a non-interventionist platform, it's going to come from the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party, because liberal and Democratic voters, their rank and file aren't very militaristic.
I mean, you can get them on board if Obama says get on board, they'll follow or at least they'll be silent about it.
But by and large, they're not pro-intervention all the time and pro-war.
And they're really perceived that way, right?
So even if they were working hard, it doesn't necessarily move the needle very far because what has to happen is the right has to be moved from the right.
And all this interventionism, it can quite correctly, depending on your own point of view, but there's a lot to say that our current foreign policy is very progressive and Wilsonian and like some kind of sociology experiment run crazy.
Like, you know, Richard Perle's a card-carrying Democrat to this day.
He's living in this permanent revolution, all this stuff.
So what's so bad about the right-wing hawks is they're really a bunch of liberals.
And so attack the right from the right in that way and stick to the national debt and the gold standard and the IRS and some things that right-wingers can, you know, sink their feet into while they change their mind about the rest of the world.
Yeah, absolutely.
They're the ones who are it's taken for granted that they support it all.
And I guess they've shown in supporting Donald Trump who denounced this stuff that that was what they wanted to hear at this late date.
Or I don't know.
I guess you're saying it was just the anti-immigration stuff or what?
Because he said some anti-war stuff and I guess the impression that was picked up was that the military communities actually didn't mind that stuff so much.
Denouncing Bush and denouncing the Iraq war, yeah, I mean, I think so.
During the campaign on foreign policy, Donald Trump often sounded more sane than Hillary Clinton, the ultimate hawk.
I mean, Hillary Clinton's been on the wrong side of every foreign policy decision for a generation.
During, I mean, even when President Trump in August of 17 announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, which was really just more of the same, he said in the beginning that his first instinct was to pull out.
And I believe that.
I think that was, I think that was his instinct and he was convinced by his advisers who are more mainstream deep staters that he should stay.
But I think the man's instincts are actually sometimes correct on foreign policy.
You know, I'm not like a big partisan for this president, but I think we have to be honest.
If he was making the decisions in a vacuum, I think we'd be doing less war, not more.
Yeah.
No, it's true.
And then, but the wars, the problem is, of course, what the hell?
Why not?
He doesn't, he doesn't have like a principle take against it.
He's just like, it's kind of like when he crosses his arms and is kind of like, man, this is too expensive or something, you know, that kind of thing where it doesn't have enough principle behind it for him to be stubborn enough.
So as you say, he ends up giving in because, hey, after all, it's money for the military.
He likes that and it's explosions and that's good for votes.
And so, you know.
Absolutely.
I think you're right about his basic set of principles, you know, where they exist.
He's not, foreign policy is not where he like makes his money.
He's, he's, I don't think he's, I think he's squishy on foreign policy, like you said.
I don't think he's set on anything.
I think his general instincts are towards less intervention.
But like you said, he's just as soon escalate if that's politically popular or if that's what his party wants, which most mainstream Republicans do want.
I mean, the Lindsey Graham wing, the John McCain, Lindsey Graham wing of the Republican Party is highly interventionist and highly hawk.
They've never seen a problem they don't want to try to solve with our military.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
And of course, Lindsey Graham has done a real good job of insinuating himself with Trump and flattering him and getting his ear and all that.
So, and, you know, he at least seems like he thinks he knows what he's talking about when he says stuff.
And so, that's the kind of guy that Trump likes to listen to is somebody who has simplistic and confident answers to everything.
You know, it's all Iran's fault, whatever it is, stuff like that.
It's pretty easy to get through to him in that way.
So, yeah, it really is on Rand because there's not too much leadership pushing the other way on that.
No, and there's not.
I mean, what we really need is an alliance of non-interventionist liberals and non-interventionist conservatives until the libertarian wing of the Republican Party can kind of make nice with the anti-interventionist wing of the Democratic Party.
We're never going to have that.
We're never going to have the votes necessary to get us out of places like Yemen or whatever the next intervention is.
You know what?
It really does come down to like you were saying before, officers being willing to dissent.
It's really, that's what it's going to take, right?
Some three-star general saying, ah, what the hell, I'm almost dead anyway.
Let me tell you, here's what's going on.
You know, my grandkids got to live in this world and so I'm going to tell you the truth, so go ahead and punish me.
Right?
And there's just no leadership on that level.
Well, most of the problem is that there's a revolving door for these generals.
So, you know, they don't speak out largely because, let's be honest, I mean, what do they all do when they retire?
They go work for defense contractors.
Of course.
They go be a member of the board for some major corporation.
I mean, the revolving door is a really dangerous thing because who wants to give up that six-figure salary on top of the pension?
You know, most people don't and that's why, I mean, you know, Smedley Butler was the Marine general who had twice won the Medal of Honor and then he spoke out against war after he retired.
But, like, I haven't seen this generation of Smedley Butler yet but I think we need one.
I'm too...
And there's got to be a couple generals with rich wives out there who don't really need the Raytheon money, you know?
I would hope.
I would hope.
I don't know.
I mean, we haven't seen them yet, unfortunately.
Man, all right.
Well, listen, I sure like talking with you, and it's great work that you do and you set a great example for other soldiers as well.
By the way, tell me about your podcast that you have because you have a partner here and everything.
I'm sorry, I haven't listened to it.
I never do listen to shows.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, Fortress on a Hill is our podcast.
Me and Chris Henry Henriksen, he's another veteran, enlisted guy, sergeant, Iraq War veteran and, you know, pretty much every week we either talk about the headlines or interview a guest and really just try to be a dissenting veteran voice because there's not a whole lot of us.
So we're trying to slowly build that up, you know, and let people know that soldiers are not a monolith and some of us actually think and some of us are actually anti-war.
Cool, man.
All right.
So that's Fortress on a Hill is the name of the podcast there.
The book, which, you know, I don't know if you know, but I quit my abusive Twitter habit, cold turkey.
And so now I'm reading books again and I've already read six of them and yours is up near the top of the pile here.
Ghostwriters have begged.
I really want to read your take on your time in Iraq War Two before it's too ancient of history here.
So, yeah, I appreciate that.
I'm going to have to eventually write the sequel about my time in Afghanistan, but my emotional health is not ready for it yet.
But someday I'm going to be writing that one as well.
Well, first things first, man.
Yeah, no problem.
Get yourself back into the private sector where you belong.
And, you know, by the way, as long as we're talking about, there are a lot of great articles by Danny Sherson about Afghanistan.
So if you guys especially check out his archives at TomDispatch.com and or at Antiwar.com, you'll find a lot of really great stuff there.
So, all right, Major.
Well, thanks again.
Talk to you soon.
Yeah, talk to you soon.
Thanks very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Danny Sherson.
He's in the U.S. Army and he writes for Antiwar.com.
How do you like that?
Check him out at Antiwar.com this week.
It's in the viewpoint section.
We just ran a couple of articles on the topic.
It's in the viewpoint section.
We just ran a couple of articles on the topic.
It's in the viewpoint section.
We just ran a couple of articles on the topic a couple of days ago.
Backfire, a generation of American folly.
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, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
