11/02/16 – James Carden – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing James Carden.
He is a contributing writer at The Nation and the executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accords website, eastwestaccord.com, and he's got a great one here in The Nation called Obama's Foreign Policy, a hostage to bipartisan consensus.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, James?
I'm all right.
Thanks for having me.
Very good to have you here.
And, you know, it's funny, I remember back in 2008 or 2009 or right around then, I interviewed Katrina Vanden Heuvel and her point was she was really worried about everything Obama was saying about how his foreign policy was going to be and that he's going to basically destroy himself in a Lyndon Baines Johnson kind of a way, bogging down and ruining his legacy with irresponsible foreign wars.
And it seems like that pretty much played out, except for the part of people objecting to it.
Yeah.
Nobody else really cared.
A plus to my boss for prescience.
Yeah.
Well, you know, he's not quite at Johnson levels, but, you know, it's been a very, very discouraging eight years for a lot of us who thought that Mr. Obama would kind of break with the past and break away from the, you know, the era of George W. Bush overreach.
It doesn't seem to have happened.
We're currently bombing, I think we're bombing seven countries at the moment.
We're tied back down in Iraq.
There are 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.
So the much hoped for, hoped for change on foreign policy hasn't come about.
And I think that, unfortunately, if the polls can be believed, Mrs. Clinton will be an ex-president.
And I think that we're going to head right back into George W. Bush territory.
They've made no secret, her campaign and her surrogates have made no secret of the fact that she favors a far more robust foreign policy than Mr. Obama.
And they've criticized him for his reticence regarding Syria and regarding Ukraine.
And they seem to have learned no lessons over the debacle in Iraq and in Libya.
So buckle in, folks.
Yeah, well, and you know, here's one that nobody's talked about this entire campaign long.
Afghanistan, where the 15-year war is still going on, and we still got almost 10,000 troops and probably 40 or who knows how many mercs and other contractors over there, plus the CIA and the drone force and all of that.
And they lost the war.
I mean, the Taliban are coming right back.
So Hillary's choice, assuming it's Hillary or Trump, too, he said stay in Afghanistan forever.
I'm not going to comment on the subject.
All they can do is surge again, right?
What are they going to do, declare defeat and leave?
Yeah, I mean, I like that you brought up the word surge, because Clinton seems to be in thrall to this notion that the big Betrayus, McChrystal surge at the end of the Bush administration in 2007 was some sort of wondrous success.
And so she seems to believe that, you know, a surge is the answer to almost any problem.
You may recall in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings, she called for an intelligence gathering surge.
So I think that the Clinton foreign policy is going to be characterized by ramp ups in a lot of different countries around the world.
And they'll camouflage it by calling it a surge and, you know, try to remind the American people of what a what a terrific success the first surge was.
So of course, we should we should keep on going.
Keep on going in that vein.
Yep.
Well, you know, I don't know if you know, I've been writing a book about the terror war.
And so far, I'm still stuck on Afghanistan, just like the actual war.
It's a quagmire, I tell you.
And I mean, the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life, I think, is I read Obama's wars by Bob Woodward.
And boy, I would kill for one of those about the Syria policy right now.
I swear to God, I would.
But the story of how they came to do the surge in Afghanistan is purely a story of Obama's cowardice, moral cowardice and, you know, willingness to just bend right over to his subordinates and do whatever they said when he could have absolutely shouted not just betray us.
I mean, the better way to do it would have been to frame it as just attacking McCain and saying, look, McCain lost this election.
I'm the one who won because the American people didn't want him deciding our foreign policy.
So he can sit in the Senate and cry all he wants.
No, we're not doing the stupid surge.
It's never going to work to build a Tajik army to rule the Pashtuns forever.
No.
And then he could have just said no and been brave and faced down his Republican and military opponents.
But instead, he was brave by surging and doubling the war that he knew he was bound to lose.
And yet it seems like, James, that he made the correct political decision there, because if he had quit the war, they would have attacked him mercilessly and he might have lost 2012.
But in doubling the war, he satisfied the Republicans and the liberal Democrats didn't mind at all because it was Obama's war.
So they just averted their eyes.
So it was actually probably his best reelection strategy was to double the Afghan war back then.
I don't know what else.
Because if you read about the decision making, it's clear that he knew better, by far, to do this.
You know, he had James Cartwright, the general, come up with these different options that McChrystal and Petraeus were refusing to give him and that kind of thing.
He knew better and then he did it anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that's a terrible black mark on his presidency.
It's also a story of a president being railroaded by his own government.
The options that he requested were basically ignored by Robert Gates and, as you say, the Joint Chiefs.
They narrowed the available options down to, you know, I think McChrystal wanted 40,000 and they finally settled on 33,000 with a 7,000 contingent from NATO.
So yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more.
And of course, what followed the surge was an uptick in casualties there.
There have been more casualties in Afghanistan under Obama than there were under George W.
Bush.
There's been a spate of what they call blue-eyed green attacks, which, you know, as you and I'm sure your listeners know, were, you know, the spate of attacks in 2010-11 by our purported allies in Afghanistan killing American servicemen.
So that was a terrible decision, but it just set the stage for a couple of other pretty terrible decisions that he made going forward, including Libya and including those two parallel and dangerously misconceived interventions in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, you know, poor Yemen and Somalia get overlooked too, but, you know, you mentioned seven countries were bombing.
Those are two of them, and of course, you know, both wars, especially Somalia inherited from the Bush years, but Obama's really responsible in large measure for escalating the two different wars that were waging in Yemen right now, one for al-Qaeda and one against him.
We have that habit of funding both sides.
We see that we're doing that in Syria as well.
The CIA was funding one group of opposition to Assad and the Pentagon and other, and then the end of the fighting, fighting one another.
You know, we just never seem to have learned the lessons of Iraq.
There's a lot of complaint in Washington that the lesson has been overlearned, but I'm not really sure that's true.
I don't think anything has been learned going by the record of the Obama administration.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a thing, I mean, I don't put much stock in this, don't get me wrong, it's just politics and all that, but Michael Tracy, the writer for Vice Magazine, tweeted out a quote yesterday, and as Tracy pointed out, I think quite correctly, TV news never highlights these quotes, but it's Donald Trump going back to where he was about a year ago, saying we should have never intervened over in the Middle East at all, and if we'd never gone over there 25 years ago, everything would be way better for everybody, and look how they screwed up Iraq, they screwed up Libya, they screwed up Syria, and we need change in thinking in Washington, D.C., and this kind of thing, and that's pretty good.
It's not just, I mean, sometimes he says, well, the only problem is we should have stayed in Iraq forever, but then sometimes he says these things, and it sounds more like you and me, like, hey, why are we intervening over there at all?
Why do we care if Saddam rules Kuwait or not?
These kind of questions.
And they don't ever highlight that, but I think that's a big part of his appeal to people.
We saw this, at first it was a surprise, but it shouldn't have been a surprise, that after taking on the Iraq War and George W. Bush's legacy in South Carolina, he won with an almost majority out of 15 people in the race, or something like that, after attacking the war in no uncertain terms, and it's because, hey, that was their kids that died in that thing, and who now look at it and realize that it really was all for nothing after all, and that kind of thing, and it's too bad that TV doesn't pick up on that narrative, that even though, I mean, I don't even really think it's right, but, you know, that Trump is any kind of dove, but that he positions himself as a dove compared to Hillary, at least, and that that's part of his appeal to the masses that do go for him.
Yeah, I mean, I think Donald Trump is his own worst enemy.
I think that this election should have been easily won by the Republicans, but he can't really seem to get out of his way.
If he had stuck to kind of the two core planks on which he ran in the Republican primary, that of opposition to free trade agreements and anti-military intervention, and he was able to sort of avoid all the ugliness that some of his comments have been not so wise, I think he'd be winning quite handily, but he is a very, very flawed messenger.
My fear is that he, by his association with ideas of military, you know, anti-intervention that he, hopefully he is not, but he may have, you know, poisoned them by association.
I hope it's not the case, but I can't help but wonder if someone like Rand Paul won the primary, how far he'd be ahead at the moment, because there is a, outside the beltway at least, there is an exhaustion with our endless interventions abroad.
Yeah, well Rand has certainly done much better since dropping out of the presidential race and going back to the Senate where he's tried to oppose arms sales to Saudis in the name of the war for Al-Qaeda in Yemen against the Houthis and all that, and I even heard him say on TV, which this makes him a thousand percent better than any senator on this issue, where he said, hey, imagine the future here for just a second.
If we do drive the Houthis out of power in Sanaa, Al-Qaeda might be next.
There's no guarantee that the Saudi choice of Hadi is going to be the president, we don't know what's going to happen over there.
So, you know, he didn't have the courage to sound like that in the primaries at all, or maybe he would have beat Donald Trump.
He said he ran as Jeb Bush and got crushed.
So yeah, it's not a happy future that we're looking at either way, but I don't suspect that even with all the events of the past week that it's possible for him to pull it out.
I'm not even sure it would be desirable, because he seems to me to be a bit of an unhinged character.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think they're both worse than each other.
I don't know why anybody feels like they have to commit to either or even lean one way or the other.
Yeah, there's an old Russian expression you may have heard, both are worse.
Yeah.
Oh, is that a Russian thing?
I thought I had coined that myself, but okay.
I'll have my wife translate it into Russian for me.
Yeah, now, so I wonder if you saw this thing yesterday that came out in, I guess, the latest batch of emails.
I can't keep track, but it was in some of the Podesta emails where all of Hillary's staff were conspiring to come up with the proper spin during the Benghazi hearings.
Not so much on the Benghazi attack itself, but on the question, based on the false premise that the Republicans are going to attack us for what a terrible catastrophe the Libya war has turned out to be overall, and when they do that, here are the talking points for blaming it on the Libyans for not taking advantage of the wonderful opportunity we've given them and these other things, and then the joke, of course, being that the Republicans never brought up any of that, because the Libya war was their war, too.
They demanded it, and so they refused to broaden out their questioning beyond the lack of security and the lack of rescue on September 11, 2012, at the Benghazi makeshift consulate thingamajig, and it completely excluded all other questions of the Libya war, and so they got off easy there.
She never was called to account for completely destroying the center of North Africa.
Right.
And one of the biggest missed opportunities at those hearings was, instead of the focus on, and there were legitimate questions there, I believe, of the lack of security, what they could have been asking is why on earth the ambassador was there in the first place.
I think that there are some pretty serious unanswered questions as to whether or not the United States was running arms from Libya into Syria, and that will be interesting if anyone is able to ever get a hold of that story.
It seems to me that there is a far bigger scandal than the lack of security, not to downplay that.
Hey, that's a perjury charge, too, because, again, Rand Paul called her out on that in front of the Senate, and she denied all knowledge and was clearly lying.
We have reporting by Seymour Hersh, but we also have the documents from Judicial Watch lawsuit that Judge Napolitano has written up about the Qataris are running the guns and the CIA supervising the whole thing.
Yeah, and then, of course, there's the larger geopolitical question as to whether or not we should have been pushing for a no-fly zone over Libya, whether the overthrow of Gaddafi was actually in our national interest, whether or not the very hyped-up media reports that Gaddafi was about to unleash a wholesale massacre on the civilian population in Benghazi, I mean, all of that actually was pretty well known at the time that that was not what he was going to do, and they knew that he was not going to do that because he didn't do that in the other cities, that they eventually, that the government actually won back.
And so there's the false premise of the Libyan catastrophe, which people are still pushing.
And I think the other thing that we should, one of the fallout, one of the most important pieces of fallout of the Libyan disaster was that it really was the beginning of the end of the very brief detente between the United States and Russia, because Russia at the time, Medvedev was president.
Wait, hold that thought for just a second.
I was just about to ask you about that, but I want to stick to Libya for just a moment here to bring up this quote of Hillary, well, there's a couple of very important ones.
It was from the debate where, when she was finally confronted with this, she said, it was Obama's fault.
It wasn't my war.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm just Secretary of State, and Obama's the one who called the shot.
And yeah, I mean, I think it was a good one, but yeah, no, it was, look at him, not me.
Which is true, but then again, she made him do it, and we all know that, and she crowed about it at the time during her mission accomplished moment and all that.
One of the quotes here, and this is just a perfect exemplary statement of Hillary Clinton's mindset, I think, James, where she says, yes, we did try, without success, because of the Libyans' obstruction to our efforts, but we did try, and we will continue to try to help the Libyan people.
And then that goes to the other quote, and everybody can find this at RealClearPolitics.com, and it's Clinton defends ongoing anarchy in Libya by saying, hey, we're still in Korea, we're still in Germany.
In other words, the first thing she's going to do when she's president is invade Libya and garrison the place and stay forever, because, hey, their obstruction to our efforts has made it where her wonderful war hasn't quite worked out, so now she's going to fix it by tripling down.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I mean, it's really worked out, it's really worked out so well in all the other places that we've tried it.
I find it amusing that she would use Germany and the Korean D.M.Z. zone as some sort of rational justification for intervening in Libya in a civil war that we have had absolutely no interest in intervening in.
We also don't have any—this is sort of parallel between Libya and what's going on in Syria.
It really is not in our interest to overthrow these rather sinister but secular leaders, because what replaces them are the worst kind of radical Islamists, fundamentalists, and we provide—when we overthrow these secular regimes, we provide safe haven for the likes of ISIS and the al-Nusra Front.
So these are horribly misconceived ideas that if we overthrow, say, Assad, that the peaceful pro-democracy liberals in Syria—all 20 of them, I guess—are going to take over the reins of power in Syria and give us a government, I guess, like Adenauer's Germany.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's laughable on its face.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it reminds me of the quote from Hosni Mubarak back in 2002, or maybe three, when he said—our sock puppet fascist secular dictator in Egypt said, hey, if you do this and invade Iraq, you're going to create 10,000 bin Ladens.
And then that's exactly what happened.
And then Obama took the side of the 10,000 bin Ladens in Libya and Syria.
And that's the confounding part, is when George W. Bush created jihadistan in all of western Iraq, it was because he was a stupid idiot.
It was a horrible effect of the war.
But it was not what he was trying to do in the first place.
But Obama has outright sided with him.
You know, back to Hirsch and that Ratline article, wow, these al-Qaeda guys are great in Libya.
Let's move them on to Syria, then.
This is easy and fun.
Right.
I love how, like, you know, Mubarak—Clinton, I believe, wrote this in her memoir.
She considered Mubarak's very good friends.
I love how, you know, we would just ignore, you know, that warning from Mubarak.
Why is it that we think we have a better grasp of what's going on in the Middle East than someone like Hosni Mubarak?
I mean, you know, it's just, it's incredible.
But we're blinded by this pro-democratization ideology that both parties, both major parties share it.
And it's, you know, it's what's called democratic peace theory, right?
The myth that pro-democracy movements are naturally in our interest because other democracies don't fight each other.
So, hey, so that's why we throw our support, or why we say we throw our support, behind all these disparate sort of pro-democracy movements that end up ushering in regimes that are completely inimical to U.S. national security interests.
And that just doesn't happen in the Middle East, by the way.
It also happened two years ago in a country called Ukraine.
Yeah.
All right.
So here, let me give you a segue to that back where I interrupted you from.
People might remember 2011, Putin was, what, the prime minister for a while and the president was, I assume, I really don't know very much about him, but it was a Putin protege, Medvedev.
And it was Hillary went over and had the big reset button that they had the translation wrong and everything.
So let's reset and let's be friends and let's get along.
And then she influenced him and convinced him to support the U.N. resolution for the no-fly zone over Libya.
And then, as you said, it was a bait and switch and it was for regime change anyway.
I don't know if anybody's ever explained to me why the Russians cared or whether, I mean, surely they must have known it was going to be a bait and switch for regime change in Tripoli in the first place anyway.
But you're saying that really burned their high, that they got tricked on that U.N. resolution?
Yeah, I mean, it certainly burned Putin's.
And I think that that certainly sort of soured the relationship between him and his protege.
And I have a feeling, though I don't know, that that was one of the reasons or one of the things that convinced him to retake the reins, because Medvedev was a very enthusiastic partner of the of the United States and of the West.
And he and Obama actually got on quite, quite famously.
I was actually in the White House in 2010, a friend of mine worked there, and we were walking down the hall and there was a picture of Obama and Medvedev.
And this guy out of nowhere just pointed at the picture and he said to me, Obama loves this guy.
And so they had a real rapport.
And I think that, you know, I think it was sort of mutual in a way.
But once the once, you know, Putin correctly foresaw what was going to happen, that the no-fly zone wasn't really a no-fly zone, it was, you know, a mechanism for regime change.
And once that happened, that was it.
And we burned, we lost a lot of trust there between the United States and Russia when that happened.
All right.
And now, you know, I'm always curious about what happened with that coup in Ukraine, because, you know, obviously we have in the leaked plot to do it, Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt, the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs and the ambassador to Ukraine.
And they say, you know what, we're going to get, she says, Nuland says, yeah, we're going to get Joe Biden to come in here, the vice president.
He's the one who's going to, you know, put it all through him and this guy working for the UN.
We're going to go around the Germans because they're taking too long.
And we're going to go ahead and glue this thing and midwife it and all this, that and the other thing.
So that makes it sound like a real special project of the White House, if the vice president is helping run the operation and all this kind of thing.
And yet Obama's done a pretty good job of portraying himself as almost an innocent bystander in this that, oh, gee, look what the State Department did.
And and then when it came down to the war that he caused there, he backed off and where Strobe Talbot and all the people who were responsible for NATO expansion in the first place were saying, now we have to triple down and arm up the Ukrainian government in their war with the eastern Ukrainian separatists.
And I guess, you know, Russian special forces backing them there.
Obama backed down.
Thank God he went down like Bush did in Georgia in 2008 and spared us a worse war with Russia.
But so I wonder just what's even going on there.
Is this guy even in control of his government or he would prefer us to think that he's not.
But he's really just as bad as any of these people.
No, I don't think that he's I think it's pretty well known that he simply isn't that interested in Europe.
So I think that he's surrounded by pretty, pretty bad, pretty bad advisers.
And I think that he probably just went on faith that what they were telling him that, you know, this was this was good for American interests, you know, and everything would work out fine and we should support this coup.
And he went along with it until it was too late.
And then it became quite obvious that the people that we have empowered are almost immediately began, as they say it with Assad, killing their own people.
They started waging war on their own people.
We don't phrase it like that when it comes to Ukraine, right?
It's a Russian invasion, right?
It's pro-Russian separatists.
But what is really happening is that Kiev is waging a war on the Russian-speaking population of the east because they're perceived to be, in some cases they are, you know, pro-Russian and anti-Maidan.
But yeah, I don't I don't I don't understand.
Biden seems to be somewhat oddly aloof from his from his own from his own foreign policy apparatus.
But that could very well be because he learned early on, as we were talking about with Afghanistan, that maybe he knows the fight that he can't win and he's going to get railroaded anyway.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's just so easy to imagine, isn't it?
If you're the president saying no to these people, I don't know.
And he talks about them as though he's separate from them.
Yeah, this darn blob that's always trying to tell me what to do.
But boy, he sure does do what they say a lot.
That's true.
I mean, I give him I give him points for for recognizing that that there is such a thing, that the blob surely does exist and it's it's bipartisan.
It is in control of all the major media outlets, cable television outlets, even purportedly, you know, so-called progressive channels like MSNBC.
They're all on the same page.
And it's all about, you know, America has to be the policeman of the world.
We can intervene anywhere and anywhere for the sake of democracy, Scott.
Isn't that wonderful?
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of which, I think these are probably, you know, two of the biggest developments that go most, you know, sort of unremarked upon.
And that is the pivot to Asia, which was really one of, you know, aside from the Libya war was Hillary's big accomplishment as secretary of state.
She wrote that big thing or had written for her that big thing in foreign policy.
There's the whole Navy, Air Force, Air Sea battle plan for China and all this.
And then, as Nick Turse has instructed us, the army is jealous because I guess the Marines sort of have a role with the air sea battle.
But where's what's the army supposed to do when we're at war with China?
Well, they're going to just occupy Africa, starting with the Special Forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, and then following up with General Infantry being stationed all over the continent and just looking for things to do.
And, you know, they sure don't seem to have trouble finding many.
Right.
No, that sounds like a plan.
You know, one of the things I, you know, was sorry because I ran out of room.
But one of the things that I sort of neglected in my in my overview or autopsy of the Obama foreign policy was the was this pivot to China.
It was actually, in large part, the brainchild of former Senator Jim Webbs, and Webb had shown, I think, some really good instincts on foreign policy.
But here, I'm not so sure.
You know, this is basically containment 2.0 for the Asia-Pacific, and I think that we're in the process of sort of shifting the ground of the U.S.-China relationship from finance and business and import-export to rallying what are called bandwagoning states, you know, the smaller states on the periphery of China to contain them.
And I find it very puzzling when very serious foreign policy analysts say that we have core national interests in the South China Sea and that these islands that China is in the process of constructing, this poses a grave threat to U.S. national security interests.
I'm not sure I understand that.
Maybe you do.
But to think that we can wage another policy of containment, which means militarized relationship, not relationship, adversarial relationship with China, given that we are overstretched as it is, seems to me the height of folly.
And if we were to do that, it would be a good idea, if we were to really be serious about containing China, there's a country in that area that might be, that we might recruit to the cause, a country that shares a rather sizable border with them, that has actually fought a land war with them as recently as 1968, that country is Russia.
But what we're doing is alienating both Russia and China at the same time.
It seems to me to be a brilliant strategy.
And it's a strategy that Obama has been pursuing.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of Chalmers Johnson talking about back in the George W. Bush years, when the Europeans started making all these arms deals with the Chinese and right when the Russians were signing the big red treaty and all that, where, hey, look, it's that Berlin, Moscow, Beijing axis that was always the absolute worst nightmare of American policymakers during the Cold War.
And it's George W. Bush who's accomplishing all of it for them, and pushing them all together again to the, you know, supposed detriment of the interests of the US, although we're defining the US here, I think, just as the American empire, not the American people, because I don't know what we have to lose by any of that.
Or gain.
I mean, you know, you brought up the reason why, who cares about these rocks in the South China Sea?
And the answer, of course, is it's the same reason that they hate Cuba and the same reason they hate Iran.
It's just the precedent set.
Nobody's allowed to tell Uncle Sam no about anything ever, or there will be some hell to pay.
You know, maybe we don't want to get in a nuclear war with China, hopefully, over this stuff, but we'll hurt them somehow, because you're just not allowed to say no to the USA.
That's it.
You know, even though Cuba, I mean, what threat to America is Cuba for crying out loud, you know?
I'm surprised, really, at the, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, that's a bit naive, maybe, but I'm surprised at the depth of anger over the opening to Cuba.
You know, people are really invested, for whatever reason, in painting Cuba as some sort of American adversary.
I don't know.
It's a strange state of affairs, but I have a feeling that things are only going to get worse.
Yep.
Afraid so.
I think, you know, I've even seen Obama hating Republicans, and I don't just mean never-Trump neocons either, but just plain old kind of right-wing rank-and-file types musing that, you know, geez, whatever happens, it's going to be worse than Obama starting next year.
There's basically no way around it.
This whole thing is just a catastrophe.
It's too late for anything different to be done, too.
Yeah.
No, so I think that...
Good luck to us.
Well, what, you know, what can, you know, what can be done?
I mean, if all of the, if our predictions of what Hillary is about to bring forth are correct, I think that it would probably be a very good idea for libertarian supporters of Rand Paul to start yesterday on his 2020 bid, and I think it would be a very good idea for the Democrats to find an alternative to Sanders, but someone who, you know, preaches Well, yeah, I mean, you're certainly right on with the trans-partisan alliance and that kind of thing.
I mean, I'm only just getting started to see if I can try to help with this thing, but I want to try to get as many groups as I know our members of to try to get in with this and, hey, you've got a really great group there, the East-West Accord, the Committee for East-West Accord, and this is a thing that David Swanson is putting together.
Tell the next president no more war, and it's at RootsAction.org, and he's trying to put together a coalition of groups to tell Hillary or Trump, you know, whoever they are, whether it's Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere else, the answer's no.
We absolutely are against any escalation anywhere and want the troops home, and I think it's a brief enough statement that there's not much to argue with there.
So maybe I'll get back with you, James, about seeing if we can get the committee to sign up.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, efforts grassroots, you know, efforts like that are, you know, are extremely important, and it's hard work.
I mean, you know, the committee on East-West Accord has a former defense secretary, former presidential candidate, and senator, and some distinguished ambassadors, but I tell you that it's not easy getting a hearing.
It's not easy finding people who will speak out or even host, you know, discussions.
So it's a very alarming state of affairs.
I mean, these are not fringe voices, I think you'll agree, at all, and it's tough going.
And it's largely because, you know, as Obama termed it, the blob, or the Washington playbook, is in such control.
Yep.
Right.
So, all right.
Well, I'll let you go.
I sure appreciate you coming back on the show, James, as always.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
And I certainly will get back with you in terms of seeing if we can get the committee signed up for this thing, too.
Okay.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Have a good one.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
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