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All right, y'all.
And introducing Andrew J. Bacevich.
He is the author of, well, the book I'm writing right now.
He already wrote it last year, America's War for the Greater Middle East.
And of course, he's a regular over at tomdispatch.com, which means we get to rerun everything he writes at antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Andrew?
I'm doing great.
Thanks very much.
Good, good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show here today.
And I want you to know that as I'm writing my book, I'm only going back and reading your chapters after mine so that I don't plagiarize you too bad.
The one thing I'm doing is I'm stealing your idea and breaking my Afghanistan chapter in half, although it may have to be in thirds now because the thing is 100 pages long just on Afghanistan.
What's the scope of your book?
Well, the working title, which everybody hates, but the idea is the war on terror refuted.
And so, you know, attempting to debunk the whole dang thing, just like you did, only not as good.
We'll see.
Yeah.
But so as soon as I finished the first rough draft of my Afghan chapter, then I went back and read your Afghan chapters just to make sure I didn't miss anything, but didn't want to come off sounding too much like what you wrote.
All right.
And that's going to be the process all the way through the book with Iraq and everything else.
But anyway, that's a good approach.
And everybody asked me, say, what should I be reading right now?
And I say this right now, go and get base, which America's war for the greater Middle East, the complete debunking of everything and early.
All right.
Hey, great piece that you wrote here for Tom Dispatch.
Pretty much like all that.
You're right.
This one's about nukes and about the presidential debate between Hillary and Trump, the first one and what they had to say about nukes.
And Lester Holt, he brought it up in an interesting way.
As you point out, he sort of stated the question in a way that left it kind of open to as a test of the knowledge of the candidates.
And well, go ahead.
How did Donald Trump respond when Lester Holt asked about the use of nuclear weapons?
It was pretty clear, at least to me, that Trump had no idea what Lester Holt was talking about.
The question had to do with the concept of first use.
And although that seems like a very simple term in the theology of nuclear strategy, it has a very, very specific meaning.
So by using the term, Lester Holt, in effect, was saying to the candidates, prove to me that you have some reasonable knowledge of the essentials of nuclear strategy.
As a would-be commander in chief, presumably we want to have those folks understand nuclear strategy.
And Trump's answer, his rambling answer, rather quickly revealed that he knew next to nothing about nuclear strategy.
And perhaps that's not all that surprising, although it was instructive to have it demonstrated, you know, before this enormous nationwide and indeed global audience.
Hillary Clinton then was asked to address the same question.
And what she did was to basically dodge it.
So rather than talking about nuclear strategy, she went off on a platitude-filled tangent about the importance of America being good as its word and standing up to bullies, and basically didn't tell us anything about what she knows about nuclear strategy.
My guess is she knows more than Trump does, but she certainly did not use the opportunity to educate us about what she knows.
And of course, in a sense, that's typical Clinton behavior, to dodge the issue and offer cliches instead of substance.
You know, it's funny, I used to think that Rand Paul had the world record for greatest blown opportunity ever in this presidential campaign year.
But no, it's got to be Donald Trump.
Because it's so many times, it's the dog that didn't bark, the wide open shot that he has at Hillary Clinton that he doesn't take, because he doesn't know anything about anything.
If he even had the basic knowledge of the history of the 21st century, even, he could be tearing her to shreds.
And, you know, the thing that comes to my mind, if you say Hillary and nukes is, when they asked Barack Obama, wow, you're going to bomb Pakistan to kill al Qaeda guys, but you wouldn't use nukes, would you?
And Barack Obama said, no, I wouldn't use nukes.
I mean, we're talking about Pakistani tribesmen, and so we're not going to use nukes on them.
And Hillary Clinton, this was in 2008, Hillary Clinton denounced Barack Obama and said, you should never say who you won't nuke in a first strike.
We reserve the right to use nukes.
Yes, even against an allied state like Pakistan, against some helpless tribesmen off in the Swat Valley somewhere.
Well, I had forgotten that particular exchange, but it is a revealing one.
And what it reveals to me, or at least confirms for me, is what I've come to believe about Secretary Clinton.
And that is that on the one hand, she is seasoned and well schooled and has a basic understanding of the principles of American statecraft.
But on the other hand, I think she's remarkably unreflective, unimaginative, lacking in creativity.
And therefore, her inclination is to go to that playbook that the foreign policy establishment has developed over the course of the past 60 years, and to use that playbook as the basis for responding to a particular problem.
And my point there is, she does not seem to be a person who is able to appreciate that the circumstances that we confront today are radically different from the circumstances that existed when the foreign policy establishment put together that playbook.
So she's stuck in the past.
And that's a problem.
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It is interesting about her intellect that, you know, if you go back to her Senate confirmation hearing, she clearly is well briefed.
I mean, binders full of wars here that she is the master of.
She's, you know, class president of a failed generation, as David Stockman calls her.
She really does know her stuff.
And yet, as you're saying, no imagination really at all.
The kind of conversations like you and I would have on here about, well, but, you know, so what is the real context of what Russia's position is in Eastern Europe or something like that?
That's not really the way she thinks, right?
The way she thinks is, what do we think about Russia's position in Eastern Europe?
Not and really try to wonder and tease it out and figure out for herself with any kind of subtlety.
It's you know, my my this is merely guessing now, but my guess is that her worldview is the kind of strange combination of the way things look during the Cold War, when we were pitted against the Soviet adversary, combined with the way things looked in the 1990s, right after the Cold War, when people in Washington fancied that we were now the sole superpower, and that therefore, henceforth, the United States was going to call the shots.
My own sense would be that, you know, given where we are in 2016, the Cold War comparisons simply are not valid.
And events have demonstrated that thinking of ourselves as the sole superpower empowered to run the world is a recipe for disaster.
So there needs to be a new way of thinking about the world, and a new way of thinking about America's place in the world.
And I just simply don't believe that she has the capacity to think anew.
She's going to give us more of the same.
And that's, that's not what we need.
Yeah, Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, cartoonist who's been commentating on especially Trump's role in the campaign has said, you know, both of these two are 70 something years old.
In what other situation would you hire someone in their 70s to be the CEO of whatever your operation is?
I mean, just, they should be retired.
I mean, I was being interviewed the other day and was talking about all that Trump would have to learn, would have to master in order to be an effective president.
And I said, it's as if me at my age, being required to master what it takes to be a successful corporate executive in the world of big business.
I've never been in the world of big business.
And at age 69, I'm not sure that I have the capacity to do the learning that would enable me to be effective in such a different environment.
And I think the same thing very much pertains to Trump.
It's hard for people to learn when they get beyond a certain age.
And Trump is beyond that age.
And quite frankly, Trump doesn't seem to be inclined to be a learner in it at any rate.
Yeah, I was going to say, at least you're intelligent and curious and thoughtful.
So I'd give you a pretty good shot if somebody dropped in the middle of a corporate kind of a thing that you'd figure out your place in it and how to make it work pretty quick.
But compared to him, you know, you have to finish the sentence.
All right.
So but finish this one for me real quick.
And I know you got to go.
But you brought up three pretty good questions about nuclear weapons and what a president should be thinking about in terms of their possession and use.
Well, I mean, a couple of them.
First is, you know, the nuclear strike force that we have today is the one that was designed during the Cold War, the so-called triad consisting of manned bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and then submarine-based missiles.
And I think one very good question is, why do we need this triad?
Why does a model that seemed to be appropriate when it was designed back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, why is it automatically assumed that that model is appropriate today?
And then I think another question has to do with the Obama administration's planned trillion-dollar modernization of that nuclear arsenal.
Over the course of the next roughly 30 years, we're going to spend a ton of money building a new manned bomber, fielding new ICBMs, new submarines, and new warheads.
And why are we spending this money?
Why is it necessary?
And I'm just struck by the absence of any serious discussion in our politics.
There's no other type of initiative where if somebody said, let's go spend a trillion dollars, that you wouldn't have a serious and thoughtful critical debate as to whether or not that level of expenditure has made sense.
Right.
And here we're talking about H-bombs, city killers, and it's just, meh, I'll never understand it.
I mean, I really won't.
Because it's even, you know, as TV people might call it, a sexy issue, right?
If you show stock footage of H-bombs going off and having a little bit of a controversy about that, that's a thing we could have a public discussion about.
Why not?
Yeah, you know, I can see why the politicians want to perhaps steer clear of that, because the environment is one that if a member of Congress raises critical questions about some weapons program, first, they're going to annoy parts of the military industrial complex.
And secondly, they're going to be open to the criticism of somehow not supporting the troops or not supporting a strong defense.
But your point is a good one.
You would think that the media would be all over this as a story that they can promote something where they could, you know, stir the pot, which is one of the things that the media ought to be doing, particularly on matters that the politicians don't want to talk about.
And instead, all we get is 60 minutes going, oh, the Red Menace again.
Yeah, so it mystifies me that within the press, this issue has not gotten a lot more attention than it has.
All right, well, listen, thanks for making time and coming back on the show with us.
I appreciate it.
I enjoyed it.
Thanks.
All right, good deal.
That is the great Andrew Bacevich, y'all.
He's a former colonel in the U.S. Army, and now he's an anti-war writer.
He's written a ton of great books.
And the newest one, it's what I'm going for with mine, too.
It's the encyclopedia of everything that's gone wrong in American foreign policy for the last 40 years.
It's called America's War for the Greater Middle East, a Military History.
And check out his article at antiwar.com and at TomDispatch.com, the national security void or what we talk about when we don't want to talk about nuclear war.
And that's The Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org.
Sign up for the podcast feed there and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
All right, y'all.
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