11/07/16 – David Swanson – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing David Swanson.
He's the author of Daybreak and War is a Lie.
And actually I think he's written at least one more since I've last spoken to him.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Good to be here.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
It's been way too long since we've spoken.
And I should say that beyond just being an author, you're actually kind of a nationwide anti-war activist and have really been at it for a long, long time.
And so that's really the first subject of discussion for us today, actually, before we get into this article about the drone attack, which is really just great and eye-opening.
But first of all, let's talk about this effort.
I don't know what to call it.
This new thing that you're doing to create a coalition of groups against war.
It's a very simple kind of a mission statement, one that's shortened to the point enough that hardly anyone could really disagree with it other than friends of James Woolsey, right?
And so you got an individual petition that people are signing, and then you have this group effort, and it just so happened, I think you launched this thing the day before I launched the new Libertarian Institute, and this is exactly what I want to do with the Libertarian Institute, is be part of efforts like this and try to get other libertarian groups and possibly from there even conservative groups on to join up, too.
But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Tell us about this whole thing, man.
What you're doing.
Well, I guess you're referring to this petition which we have at RootsAction.org, and people can go there and organizations can go there, RootsAction.org, and scroll down a little ways and you'll see a big graphic that says, Tell the Next U.S. President No More War.
And you click there and there's a place for individuals to sign, and there's also a link to sign as an organization, go to a different page and sign.
It's wonderful to have groups from the left and the right, libertarian groups and socialist groups and all kinds of different organizations on there together on something that all these people agree on, even though they disagree radically on many other things.
And the way that this is being done is with a petition that's quite simple.
It tells the next president we don't want these wars continued, we don't want any more wars, we don't want all this military spending, we don't want all this weapons dealing to the world from the United States.
And the criticism from some is that, well, it's too simple, and until you get into the details of particular wars, you're not actually accomplishing anything, and the new president will say they're for peace, just like the Pentagon says it's for peace, but they won't actually act for peace.
I think we have to start somewhere, and starting before the next presidency, and then potentially building this with more organizations and people, once we know which new presidency it's going to be, is a start.
And the fact that we're starting it before knowing which flavor of presidency we're going to have next year gives it a certain credibility on behalf of those of us who are actually principled against war.
It's not actually a partisan pretense.
The Democrats pretended to be against war in 2004, 2005, and they weren't.
They were against Republican wars, and that built a huge peace movement and collapsed a huge peace movement.
We need to somehow build something that's going to be more lasting.
And yeah, we'll have to deal with each particular war, but it's not that we're saying nothing.
We're saying end all of them, and then we're going to have to follow through on that.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, and listen, I think that you're absolutely right about how important it is of the timing of this, and that if this can really be made, and you already have so many groups.
I'm looking at this list of groups, and it's what, 40?
I'm guessing.
50?
Oh, yeah, it's dozens, and I think dozens more since I highlighted all of those.
Okay, great.
So I have to go through, oh, it's twice as many as it was when I made that list.
So I think you couldn't really overstate the importance of that, really, that if we can have a place to say the beginning of next year where anybody in basically TV news is where it really counts, where any of them can hear it, that there's this really big coalition of all these different groups from all across America who are saying no to war.
We're just against it kind of thing.
If we can set that mood, and I think this is a real possibility with this effort that you're spearheading here, to set that mood that whoever it is, whether it's Hillary or whether it's Trump, that as they're being sworn in, everybody knows that the American people, left and right, are sick and tired of war, and they don't want it anymore.
I even read a thing the other day about how, oh, boy, is the Washington Consensus excited for Hillary and escalating in, I think this was even the New York Times treatment on it, right, or the Washington Post, about how excited they are for Syria.
And then there's like one wonk expert in there kind of muses that, hmm, you know, I wonder if maybe the American people actually aren't up for this at all, and we're kind of in our own little bubble agreeing with each other, and we're not really taking them into account.
And he's really right.
The American people, not just the progressives like you and the libertarians like me, but the regular American non-political, just regular people, by and large, are sick and tired of this.
And I think, you know what, what you're doing can really help to crystallize that fact in the minds to get through to the people of D.C. that they understand that that's what they're up against, just like with Syria in 2013.
Yeah, we know you want to do it, but we're just telling you no.
Yeah.
And that's not just, you know, your view and my view and our speculation about what common sense would suggest or anything.
This is what the polling shows, that the people of the United States are overwhelmingly against more wars than want all the current wars ended.
The polling suggests that people buy all the hype about who the dangers are.
You know, the U.S. public thinks its biggest danger is ISIS and Russia and everything you would expect from watching U.S. media.
And climate change is down there at 4% of the U.S. public thinks that.
And I'm in that little group, thinks climate change is the more significant danger.
But, you know, you look at this poll commissioned by the Koch brothers, the institute, you know, these so-called libertarians who are funding every pro-war candidate they can get their money to, and they find an overwhelming majority of the U.S. public, I mean, almost everybody, says that the wars of the past 15 years have made us less safe, not more safe.
We should not have any more of them.
The next president should engage in less war, not more war, and so forth.
So they buy the hype about the danger, but they don't buy the solution that's offered on television and in the New York Times of more wars.
They say that's been making it worse.
And so if you were to suggest to people, if you were able to get on TV or get enough people to listen to radio shows like this one and suggest we could do something else instead, you know, if we could uphold the rule of law by example, we could be diplomatic, we could offer people things that are actually helpful rather than more bombs and guns, people would leap at it.
You know, the public is ready for that, you know, because they're already saying the only solution we've been offered is making things worse.
All right, well, so I've got the Future Freedom Foundation to sign on, and I've talked to a couple other libertarian groups who are, they're talking about it amongst themselves, but I think I'm going to be able to get at least two more on board hopefully this week, and I haven't even been able to really dedicate the time yet to really trying to get as many as I can.
But for all the libertarians listening, sign up your group, especially, I mean, sign the petition by all means and let's have as many individual signatures as possible.
But the groups, having a long, long, long list of groups where David Swanson can say with a straight face to these people, listen, I represent a coalition of Americans that's 25 million of us, and they sent me here to tell you, you know, I'm not saying it's a democracy and everything will work great or whatever, but that's what they need to hear, is that this is what the peasants with pitchforks are so pissed off about.
It's the wars.
We're tired of this stuff.
Even the pro-war among us have lost a son in this thing already, and they're tired of this, you know?
Yeah, but please don't just sign on and list some organization you're a member of.
Please only sign on organizations that you are authorized to sign on.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
If you've got the approval of your organization or you're the director or you've had a vote and you're allowed to sign it on, then please sign it on.
Otherwise, it gets very confusing making the list of organizations that have signed on.
And so once I get as many libertarians, or not I, but once we get as many libertarians as possible sign on to this thing, then, and I'm not the person, the personality to do it, but I have ideas in mind for who among the libertarians I can try to convince to go and talk to some of the more right-wing organizations.
Now, we're not going to get the Heritage Foundation and all these guys who exist only to promote war for Lockheed and whatever, but there are some conservative groups that we certainly can go to, and I think we can probably get Ray McGovern and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which he's not a conservative, but there are a lot of conservative members of that.
And then there's a couple others I have in mind, and I think that's the real key, is so that liberal groups, when they say anti-war stuff, that they can invoke libertarians and conservatives in order to protect their right flank and be able to say, see, even these conservatives say we're right about this.
Everybody knows that they're tough guys on national security, but even they agree with us now that it's time to end this thing, and I think that's a very important dynamic.
And then I also have in mind a couple of politicians in the House and the Senate.
I think you may have some as well, and then that'll really help, too, to get some national exposure to this, especially if we could get a senator to pick this up and advertise it and make a big deal about it, you know?
Absolutely, and if Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity helps in this regard, I will ask them to sign on as soon as I get off this call.
I was going to say, yeah, I could call Ray.
I only was thinking of that.
He's in Germany, and I don't think he can decide by himself, but we can certainly get them to sign on, and many others, but there will be groups on the left, the Center for American Progress and the different supposedly activist organizations that exist to do whatever Hillary tells them and even to push more war on the Democrats.
They're not going to sign on, just like the Heritage Foundation on the right, and these groups are not going to sign on.
But if we have a cross-section from left to right of all the organizations that are not bought and paid for by the weapons makers, then we've got something that we can have in motion by Inauguration Day that we can deliver to the transition office of the next president prior to Inauguration Day, and we can try to cut short the whole traditional idea of giving somebody a honeymoon.
You know, you've got Michael Moore in his new movie pushing the wonderful, glorious awesomeness of Hillary Clinton, promising that if she hasn't done everything right, everything I fantasized that she would do if she were completely different from who she is in the first two years, well then, in the second two years, I'll run a joke campaign for president against her as a candidate.
I mean, let's short-circuit that nonsense now.
I wish he would just have a heart attack already.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, so yeah, we're going to have to go around Michael Moore, and that'll be difficult, but I think we can do it.
Yeah, no, man, so I'm really excited about this, David, and you know me, dude.
I basically just sit here and do Pi Radio all these years, and, well, it's been a while since I was on Pi Radio, but anyway, I'm not this kind of activist.
I haven't been, but I do have a hell of a Rolodex now that I think about it, and I really want to try hard to do stuff like this, and I think that, you know, I just, I mean, I barely even know where to begin, but I'm thinking there's so many groups that are political groups that aren't really anti-war groups at all, but are just regular people who are organized around local issues in their town, you know, whether it's an environmental group here, or it's a hunting rights group there, or whoever the hell it is, the Rotary Clubs, or I don't know, man.
We ought to be able to get any and everybody on board for this thing, right?
Like, I'm not trying to convert everybody to libertarianism here.
I'm trying to say, hey, 300 million Americans, are we tired of this yet, or what, right?
All of us.
This is something that we can all agree on without having to change our mind about anything.
We already all think this, right, everybody?
You know, and just, you know, I don't know exactly how to do it, but, and by the way, that's a call out for help, too, for people who, you know, get the bug and get the idea that, hey, instead of having a lot of diffused anti-war efforts that don't really accomplish a lot, maybe this could be the thing.
The coalition of coalitions of coalitions of groups saying hell no to the war under President Hillary or Trump, whichever.
Yeah, I agree.
This is going to be very helpful, and I'm looking through the new list, and it's twice as big as, you know, when I made the list of the orgs that had already signed on.
So it is a lot of organizations, and if we can keep them active past January and if we can mobilize offline real-world events and bring pressure to bear through the media and on Congress and on the president, you know, we may be able to cut short that whole idea that we should let them have a few wars or, you know, let the other people have some wars, let Trump have some wars, or you let the men have some wars, let the woman president have some wars.
You know, if we can block that early, you know, then we have a couple years to work with before everybody gets obsessed with the next election.
And, you know, this is what it takes in U.S. politics now.
You know, it takes getting the ball going as fast as you can and then getting something done before the next election drains everything out of the world of activism.
And so, and here's what I really love about this statement here.
We call on you to end perpetual war, new president.
We're calling you to end perpetual war and end continual U.S. warfare and bloated military spending.
So this is, anybody can agree on this.
Now, in specific, we should be specific for the audience, too, that people keep in mind.
We're not just talking about, you know, maybe Hillary will start a war somewhere or maybe Trump will or this kind of thing.
America's at war all over the world right now.
And right now, everything America's done in Afghanistan is going completely up in smoke.
And there's going to be incredible pressure on President Hillary and or President Trump to resurge and double and escalate that war.
Hillary has said, yes, it's true, Libya is going to hell.
We're going to have to invade and garrison that place the same way we've been in Germany for 70 years.
We're going to have to stay in Libya for 70 years in order to make sure everything is OK there.
She really said that in a debate.
Syria, of course, is going to hell.
Both of them want to bomb East Syria.
Hillary wants to bomb West Syria, too.
You know, the war in Iraq is still going on.
This is a really big deal.
And so what they need, think of how important it is.
Everybody, just use your imagination.
Pretend it's next June and Hillary wants to deploy a brigade to Libya.
But unfortunately, the people just won't stop screaming no.
The people of the country's voice is so loud that the people of D.C. just can't ignore it.
They have to bow down.
That's what it's going to take.
Huge, overwhelming, bipartisan, trans-partisan pressure against them.
And it's not just the new wars that a new president is going to cook up by June.
And it's not just the wars they're going to jump on in late January.
It's later this week that President Obama asked Congress for a war supplemental spending bill to have extra money lying around in January for, you know, a potential assortment of wars to be continued, escalated, or created.
And, you know, we have to have, you know, all the people who have been putting so much energy into this stupid, broken, corrupt election system who are going to be burnt out this Wednesday.
They better get their acts together because they're going to be pushing through the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
They're going to be pushing through a war supplemental spending bill for all variety of wars.
And they're going to be pushing through things like undoing the right of 9-11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia or at least the right of anybody else to sue any other foreign countries for their wars and lesser acts of terrorism.
They're going to ram through everything they can, every unpopular measure they can come up with just after the election when everybody thinks their supposed work is done and nobody's paying attention and everybody can be counted on to have forgotten it all two or four years hence.
So, you know, we've got to get this going.
We've got to get our act together, you know, by the end of this week, which is also when the new president, whichever it is, is going to be nominating the most disastrous portfolio of henchmen to run their cabinet.
You know, I mean, all the horrible proposals for Trump's drinking buddies or Hillary's partners in past war crimes, Victoria Nuland and Madeleine Albright types are going to be getting their names put in circulation.
We've got to be on the ball, you know, this month.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
Absolutely.
All right, and so now let's talk a little bit about Bloody Murder here because that's the name of this game.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess conservatives would rather hear just about how expensive it is.
But, you know, I don't know, man.
Anyway, I care.
And this article that you wrote, How Drone Pilots Talk, is just such an eye-opening thing where I guess we've all seen...
There's been a couple documentaries on Frontline and this and that, I guess.
They show the drone pilots sitting in their seats.
And I guess we've heard about some of them having PTSD.
There was the four drone whistleblowers talked a little bit about their experience.
But on the other hand, that's basically, you know, that all amounts to almost nothing compared to this massive drone war that Barack Obama has waged since his third day in office.
David, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, Somalia, and, of course, Iraq and Syria as well.
And so this is what you got here.
You got a transcript of the entire conversation leading up to a strike on some men, women, and children, innocent civilians in Afghanistan in 2010.
And, you know, your focus, I guess you can't help it, right?
Because you don't have all the pictures and everything.
You have the language that the military uses that these enlisted men use as they're discussing whether or not to kill these people.
And you found all kind of insight.
So you want to take us through this a little bit?
Yeah, people can go to davidswanson.org and click on the article, How Drone Pilots Talk.
But this was, you know, from 2010, February 2010, drones involved in a series of missile strikes, three missiles into three vehicles on a road in Afghanistan.
All of them full of men, women, and children, completely innocent civilians by everyone's definition.
And, you know, there exists video and audio of every drone murder of the past decade.
And, you know, we don't have access to any of it.
None of it has been shared with the U.S. public, you know, in our so-called democracy, all of this being done in the name of so-called democracy.
And I didn't know that we had a transcript of one of these incidents.
We do.
I mean, it's somewhat incomplete.
We don't know how many words are missing.
There are pieces that have been bleeped out.
But we have a written transcript of presumably most of the conversation that happened for hours leading up to this attack and for a better part of an hour afterwards.
And the ACLU actually got this five years ago, and the Los Angeles Times wrote about it.
But I didn't pay much attention until this new movie came out called National Bird, where the national bird, of course, is the drone.
And this is a completely nonfiction, straightforward, truthful movie with three key drone program veterans, not any of the four that you mentioned that we've seen publicly.
But these are new people.
And drone victim family members in Afghanistan, one of these former drone operation veterans goes and meets with.
And they've taken this transcript.
In this movie, National Bird, they've taken part of this transcript and dramatized it.
So they've created.
They knew what kind of vehicles, what kind of road, what the video would have looked like, more or less.
So they've recreated the video and used actors' voices to read the exact words from the transcript.
And it's far more powerful than, for example, the collateral murder video of the people killing in Baghdad because these are drone pilots, people sitting in a box in Nevada, eager to kill, thirsty for blood, demanding permission.
You know, you keep saying they're children.
I don't believe they're children.
Why can't you spot a gun instead of a child?
Why won't they tell us they're guns and they keep finding children?
You know, complaining about the other office of the U.S. military that's holding them back, that's saying, hey, we think there may be some children or, hey, we think we're not sure any of them actually has a gun.
You know, as if, you know, three carloads of commuters through a dangerous part of Afghanistan might not have a gun.
And if they had a gun, that would be justification to blow them all up.
You know, and talking about, well, if it's a male and if he's over 10, if it's double-digit age, hey, that's good enough, military-age male.
We can blow them all up.
You know, and this is not to suggest that we should find out who these drone pilots are and blame them or crucify them.
I mean, they are more than likely suffering terribly from what they've done.
But this is, you know, this exposes a program, a mentality and a culture within a program that has absolutely nothing in common with what we're presented with by speeches from Barack Obama, with fictional dramatizations like the movie Eye in the Sky.
I mean, it has absolutely nothing in common with the idea that you avoid killing civilians.
I mean, here they are in this transcript talking about calculations of how many children would it be okay to kill if we're killing adults.
You know, the idea that we will only use a drone strike when there is near certainty of not killing any civilians.
Well, if there's got to be near certainty of zero, then how can you be calculating how many is all right?
You know, and so it ought to be eye-opening, and it's the only actual piece of reality from out of the actual non-fictional drone program that anybody has access to.
So people should go and read that transcript or see this movie National Bird opens in New York this week on Armistice Day, what some people call Veterans Day, and see for themselves because it has nothing to do with the myths we've been fed.
You know, the thing is, too, man, all you have to do is put shoes on the other feet for just a second, right?
If you had quotes of Afghans talking about American children that they're killing like this, this is the definition.
This is what proves that they are barbarians and that it's okay to kill them, right?
It's as simple as that.
This is what our government would say.
Look at these people.
They're barbarians.
Look at the way they talk about killing children.
And that's what they are.
Now, here's the other thing that I really like about it, too, is all the Orwellian newspeak.
And this is my favorite thing about the military, really, is all the language.
Everything has an acronym and everything has a new name and nothing is what you call it in real life.
And one I remember from the Iraq War, I remember Sergeant Fishback, or maybe he was, I forget his rank, but Fishback was one of the whistleblowers from the military special forces torture regime there at Camp Nama in Iraq.
And he said, well, you know, they had a thing where, you know, one of their detainees would be called a PUC, P-U-C, person under control.
So then, once you're a PUC, you're not a person, you're a PUC.
And what do we do with PUCs?
Well, we smack the crap out of them with sticks is what we do with PUCs.
And sometimes we like to, I guess we like wrap them up in a blanket and then just use them as a heavy bag and beat the crap out of them or burn them with cigarettes.
I'm gonna go smoke a PUC.
I'm gonna go beat a PUC.
I'm gonna go this and that and the other thing to a PUC.
And they're not even calling them the sand N-word or a haji or, you know, whatever.
They have a brand new, call it racist, slur, right?
It's like saying gook, only it's just PUC.
But in this one, you have the same thing here where it's almost like, it's not even really a racist slur, it's like a high-tech slur, but it denies them their humanity and makes it okay to murder them.
Yeah, no, that's right.
And they use, instead of calling things cars, houses, pedestrians, people walking around, they use terms like vehicle, compound, dismounts, egresses, movers, you know.
And once they've killed somebody, they talk about them as bug splat.
Bug splat.
They're not humans, they're insects, right?
And this is, you watch this Netflix show called Black Mirror.
They've got this episode about war where in the future they've programmed the soldiers to literally see the enemy as monsters with fangs and weird faces and so forth.
And they're ordinary humans and they're trying to figure out how to deprogram the soldiers to see them as humans.
And they talk about the enemy as roaches.
You know, they call them roaches and they literally see them as part roaches.
Well, this is how you distance from the crime.
You know, people are sitting in a box in Nevada.
They're physically distant.
They're able to think of themselves as psychologically distant from the crime.
And they're looking at these little blurry green, you know, linear figures on a computer that looks like it was made in the 1980s.
And they're saying, let's, you know, let's take out those, I see definite tactical movements whenever anybody moves, you know.
They're, you know, putting people in the car.
They must be, you know, loading up some civilian shields.
And, you know, they fantasize because they're imagining what they want behind these little fuzzy blurs on their computer screen.
And yet they still suffer PTSD.
This young woman in this film, National Bird, you know, it has, the military recognizes her and funds her for having PTSD.
She has moral regret.
She has guilt.
She has suffering for what she did, even though she was thousands of miles away from where she did it.
And she has friends who were in the drone program with her who, like her, weren't even pushing the button, but were telling other people when it was okay to push the button, who have killed themselves and others who have become so alcoholic they just can't speak out about it.
So she says, I don't like speaking out about this.
I'm doing it for these other veterans who can't because they're either dead or drunk.
You know, it's not as if there was one person who had a hard time in the drone program and should have been, should have had a different job, as Donald Trump would say.
No, the PTSD and the suffering and the moral regret are, if anything, more intense in the drone program than outside of it.
Yeah, a lot of that I've read before about how, well, part of that too is, you know, if you're flying an F-15, you drop your bomb, you find out when you get back to base whether you hit your target or not, or maybe that's the way they used to say it anyway.
Or you avoid finding out.
Yeah, when you're driving a Reaper drone, you're hovering around, staying around, watching people bleed out and die, watching the grandma scream at the dead baby and whatever all this is happening.
Still, you sit around for the rest of your shift.
Right.
You know, loitering at the crime scene.
And sometimes it's people you've watched for weeks so you know something about them.
And then you kill them, and then you watch them bleed to death.
Even though it's a fuzzy little video, you know that's what you're watching.
Yeah.
And see, this is what I like about the language thing.
I mean, not like, but you know what I mean.
Dismounts and movers.
I like that.
Those are, as you explain in here, that just means pedestrians.
Or a dismount is someone who gets out of a car.
Right.
But now they're not a person who got out of a car.
Now they are a dismount.
And it just has built into it that we already know that this person is militant or is militarized, is a target to some degree.
This isn't a question of, basically, that puzzle's already been solved, whether this is just a civilian or not.
If it was a person, you'd just call it a person.
The fact that it's a dismount and a mover and that their moves are tactical moves, that just, it just goes to show that by changing the language, the way the Army changes the language, it puts the operators in the position because they have to use it, right?
That's right.
They have all the presumed guilt built into the way that they put it.
And as you're saying, of course, they know in their brains, these are adult human beings who know ultimately that this is all BS, right?
That these are the lies we tell ourselves when we drone murder people.
And that's why the depression and everything, as you say, it's not really PTSD.
It's moral injury.
Jeez, I don't know.
I had a license to kill, but it wasn't really right what I was doing, you know?
Yeah, but these presumably young men and women, we don't know if they're men or women, in this transcript, they've more or less convinced themselves that these are all fighters.
They see three or four people get together and they say, well, that's a commander with a security guard.
And anybody leaves the group, they describe them as squirters.
They're squirting out of the, like they're some inhuman blob.
And they've got themselves fully convinced.
But then toward the end, once they've killed most of these people and they see that, bizarrely, none of the survivors are running, they see babies in parents' arms, they see not a gun in sight, they start having a little bit of doubt because they really had convinced themselves otherwise.
They weren't looking for excuses to murder men, women, and children.
They were convincing themselves that these were dangerous monsters.
And when that's thrown into doubt, they're hit a little bit with that toward the end of this transcript.
But the whole thing reads so outrageously because we know, after the fact, we all know as a matter of fact and admission by the U.S. military that this was all a convoy of civilians, that these were all men, women, and children, in fact, from a different ethnic group from the Taliban in the area who were themselves more afraid of the Taliban than of U.S. drones.
They had no idea.
And these are the people supposedly being liberated and protected and so on.
And here they are on the basis of nothing being observed and identified as evil monsters.
And one of them takes a step, and I saw a tactical move.
It would be comical if it weren't so horrific because we know the reality, and we know that there isn't any more substantive evidence to the contrary than what we're reading here.
And it's just ludicrous.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, my favorite phrase from the Iraq War is Robert Gates on the collateral murder video that you reference in here from the Apache helicopter fighting in Sadr City in 2007 from the leak from the heroic Chelsea Manning, where Robert Gates says, oh, yeah, well, but you're just looking at the war through a soda straw.
And so, okay, that looks bad and everything, but you don't get the context.
But then that's the joke, right?
He's the one looking through the soda straw.
We're the ones looking at the real context.
What was he doing fighting against Sadr in Sadr City when the whole war was for the United Iraqi Alliance that Sadr was a part of to put him and his guys in power?
What the hell were they doing fighting against him?
And you know what I mean?
In this one, okay, yeah, but you don't understand the context.
Gotta fight the Taliban.
But why?
Are they even the Taliban?
Are they just, you know, fighters from around there because it's their country we're there from and they're defending it from foreign invaders?
And even if it is the Taliban, who are you protecting from them?
You know what I mean?
The whole thing is completely ridiculous.
The only way you could justify what's going on in Afghanistan is by looking at it through a soda straw and saying, oh, my God, look, a man with a gun.
He must be a terrorist.
If you zoom out at all, you go, why is the middle part of North America occupying the middle part of Eurasia?
And after 15 years accomplishing nothing and losing everything they supposedly gained, and what is even the point of it at all?
You know, that's the thing.
Well, there isn't.
Cool.
Well, thanks very much for coming back on the show, man.
I look forward to working with you more, David.
Yeah, sounds great.
Absolutely appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That is David Swanson.davidswanson.org is his website.
And go to rootsaction.org and tell the president, the next U.S. president, no more war.
And you can read all about that also on the blog at libertarianinstitute.org.
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