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 had.
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, saying 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 William Hartung.
He is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, and he's the author of Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
And I'd encourage you to go look at this piece at Loeb's blog.
It's basically a reprint of the introduction to this new study here at Jim Loeb's blog.
It's called U.S. Military Support.
Well, that's the title of it.
U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia and the War in Yemen.
And then you can find the full PDF of the 22-page study at the bottom of that Loeb blog piece there.
So welcome back to the show, Bill.
How are you doing, sir?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me again.
Very happy to have you on the show here and great work that you've done again, this time on American military support for the Saudis.
So, I don't know, pretend for a second that, for half an hour maybe, that our audience is all 19 and they really don't know the first thing about what the Saudi military is or isn't or how it works or any kind of thing.
Actually, I was just having a discussion with Mark Perry about how dependent they are on Americans and always kind of have been for running the thing.
But what do you think are the main points for us to understand about how the system works there in Saudi Arabia?
The military system, I mean.
Yes, it's interesting because for years the Saudis were buying huge amounts of U.S. weaponry that they weren't really using.
It was more of a political trade-off.
You protect us and we'll buy your weapons.
And that changed when they went into Yemen in 2015, when they started using U.S. planes and bombs, as well as some from the U.K., to hit civilian targets at an alarming rate.
They were hitting hospitals, they were hitting marketplaces, they hit a funeral, they hit a wedding, they hit a school bus full of kids, claiming that these were all quote-unquote mistakes.
But of course, it was so common.
In fact, recently, Yemen Data Project found that about 60% of their hits in the most recent month hit civilian targets.
So from my point of view, they seem to be using this as some sort of collective punishment to say to anybody in Yemen, if you don't help us dislodge the Houthi, you're going to suffer.
So needless to say, these are violations of the laws of war, of war crimes, but more simply.
And it couldn't be done without U.S. support.
It's unclear whether we're still refueling their aircraft, which we've done for the bulk of the war that Trump people say they've stopped, but I haven't seen verification of that.
More importantly, U.S. bombs, U.S. aircraft, U.S. tanks, a good two-thirds of their air force is U.S. planes.
And in order to run them, they need U.S. spare parts, they need U.S. maintenance, they need U.S. training.
So some have said the Saudi military basically wouldn't be able to operate for more than a week without U.S. support.
I don't know if it's quite that short a time period, but the point is well taken, which is that the Saudi war machine depends heavily on the United States and couldn't be doing what it's doing in Yemen without very elaborate kinds of U.S. support.
Yeah.
Now, I just wanted to add here that Matthew Akins, back years ago, reported at the beginning of the war from Sada up in the north that he saw with his own eyes, reported this in Rolling Stone and talked about it on my show, that he saw that they had bombed the marketplaces, the car dealership, every factory and all the food resources.
And of course, there's the brand new thing out by Martha Mundy about, I talked with her too, that she did for the, I guess, World Peace Foundation, where she talks all about how they targeted the sheep.
You know, they targeted every bit of the livestock and all of the, you know, any grain silos and farm, you know, field irrigation systems and just the very bottom line components of the, you know, creation of and distribution of food resources there and this kind of thing.
I mean, it really is remarkable the length to which they've gone at that point, I guess.
Right?
Yeah.
And there's a front page article in the New York Times today about them blowing up fishing boats as well.
So.
Right.
Yeah.
That's another one.
Yep.
You know, you couldn't have a campaign that was more targeted at killing civilians if you tried, you know.
And yet the Trump administration still sort of saying, well, we're going to teach them to do better.
Of course, there's been mistakes and they're still trying to salvage the relationship in the face of the kind of opposition they're getting on the Hill now, which is finally coming around.
Well, and yeah, they had denied that they had soldiers on the ground there or pardon me, that they were coordinating the actual attacks themselves or, you know, were that directly involved.
But then, in fact, I guess it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dunford, perjured himself to Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and and had denied that.
But then Iona Craig at The Intercept did a report that had, you know, where she describes an after action report that would very, you know, that very well seems to indicate that Americans were right there in the room as the bad decisions were made, where they almost, in this instance, kill the family they happen to miss barely.
But, yeah, well, the logic doesn't hold up.
On the one hand, they say they're helping them avoid mistakes.
On the other hand, they're saying they don't know anything about where the planes are going.
So, you know, Dunford, you know, put something out there that was unsupportable.
And it was only a matter of time before, you know, that was proven.
All right.
So now you say in here that, oh, man, look at how responsible USA is.
Of course, all these weapons, this is all licensed.
This is not like free market, private businesses.
This is all the American combine here working together in regulated and licensed businesses.
And oftentimes these deals are brokered by the American government officials themselves for these companies.
But so you kind of break down in here.
On one hand, we give them so much that it amounts to full responsibility for what they do with what we give them in a sense.
But at the same time, then you turn around and say, yeah, but don't believe the hype about them spending so much money on our economy that what would we ever do without them or any of that?
So could you take those first one than the other?
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Saudi military and the U.S. role has accumulated over many decades.
You know, the big increase was in the 70s.
Combination of the Nixon doctrine where Nixon said, you know, we can't have more wars like Vietnam.
We can't have American boys dying.
You know, this is a fight for Asian boys.
Basically saying these are Nixon's words, by the way, you know, saying that rather than send troops, we're going to send arms.
We're going to train surrogates.
That's how the U.S. is going to work its way in the world.
So you had that which pumped up sales to places like the Shah of Iran.
And then you had OPEC oil increases.
And a lot of U.S. officials wanted to make back some of the money that was pouring over to the Middle East and oil expenditures by selling weapons to those same countries.
And they called it recycling petrodollars.
And so basically, you've got a lot of U.S. equipment in the Saudi arsenal, but it's accumulated over the decades.
And in any given year, there's big numbers thrown up of things being offered.
But many of them either don't happen or they happen over a five or 10 year period.
So there's a lot of money sloshing around.
But if you look at what happens in any given year, there's only about $2.5 billion in deliveries, which is stuff that's actually been bought and paid for.
And so that would support maybe 20,000 jobs in an economy that's got something like $160 million.
So we figured out that the jobs from Saudi arms sales were about three one hundredths of one percent of the U.S. workforce.
So, yeah, it's important to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, certain areas where the things are actually being built.
But Trump makes it sound like he's got this hundred ten billion dollar gusher of money that's coming in right this minute and that it's all at risk.
If we say boot of the Saudis, you know, so a lot of it was really going after those Trump exaggerations, which are so extreme that, you know, there's not really anybody buying it anymore.
Although a year ago, that was that was a different story.
Well, at least it's somewhat humorous about the way his mind works, I think.
And I'm assuming a little bit here, but you say here, and I've seen this number before, too.
Actual deals implemented since Trump took office total just $14.5 billion.
It seems like someone told him that or he read that somewhere.
And so he started saying $450 billion because he liked the four and the five.
So it was $450 billion now, all of a sudden, which even then they say, and I guess they just measure it by the national debt or something.
But they say we have a $20 trillion economy.
So, you know, even if all of Tucson went out of business and had to get real jobs instead of being mercenaries, then, you know, that would be tough for them that they have to rent a U-Haul and move somewhere and provide a good or service to someone in the marketplace.
But as you're saying, as far as the economy is concerned, that's not even a speed bump.
That's nothing.
No, I think that's the main thing.
You know, the system is rigged in the sense that members who represent states and districts where weapons are built often are the ones who are on armed services and defense appropriations.
They have the biggest say in how the money is spent, and they also have some sway over their colleagues.
And so there's always a bigger deal made about the economics of these things than is justified in reality.
In fact, if you did pretty much anything else with the money, including sticking it in your mattress to lower the deficit, you'd get more jobs than you get from spending on weapons systems.
Yeah, well, famously, should be famously, I don't know if anybody remembers this part, William.
But in 1984, at the part where O'Brien the Torturer is pretending to be a nice guy to our wonderful protagonist, Winston Smith, he gives them the Goldstein Report about how it all really works.
And in there, he explains that, see, the reason we keep the war going on is so that we can take the excess wealth of the people and blast it off into the stratosphere in the form of a rocket, or sink it into the ocean in the form of one of our floating fortresses, so that the people can't use that money to improve their own lives.
We need them desperate and dependent on us, you see.
And it's just straight like that.
It's been like that my whole life.
Since I read that book, it never stopped being that way.
It's a crazy amount of money.
I mean, you know, it's not the entire economy, but it's like the leeway we have.
I mean, it's money that could be used for public investment or to stimulate private activity that's locked up in this unproductive system.
Or to abolish the income tax.
How about that?
You know what's funny is, when I say that, it sounds crazy.
But why does it sound crazy?
Because we have a world empire.
But if we didn't, if, like Jean Kirkpatrick said after the end of the Cold War the first time, that now we can be a normal country in a normal time, well, why would we all have to have an income tax?
That was a war tax in the first place, you know?
But they kept the war going so they could keep the tax, I think, maybe.
Wow.
Well, I mean, I'm joking around, but yeah.
But that is where it came from, right?
And I know it sounds crazy, doesn't it?
It does sound crazy to bring up abolishing the income tax, but we didn't always have an income tax.
Sounds like some weird position, but that should be the position of every businessman, certainly, you know?
No, it was customs and things like that.
That was sort of the pre-income tax revenue raiser.
And I think there's, yeah, there's certainly a link to the national security state.
I mean, before the New Deal, most of what government spent was on national defense related stuff.
And then we had Medicare and Social Security and other forms of government spending that kind of balanced it out more.
But there was a time when it was, you know, the military was the biggest item, no matter how you sliced it.
Right.
But it was certainly a much smaller endeavor, at least, well, not during World War I, but after it again, you know, they kind of scuttled back.
But no, I see what you mean.
Yeah, no, they demobilized, which didn't happen.
But for a few years after World War II.
Right.
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OK, so now let's talk about the corporations here, because, you know, it's funny.
Does this sound too communist?
I don't think so.
I have an idea that, well, if these guys are all such patriots, then maybe Boeing and Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics and General Atomics and all these guys, maybe they should all be nonprofit corporations.
And maybe instead of getting cost plus for their weapons that they manufacture, maybe they should just get cost.
And see if we could just take their, as much as possible, their motive for lobbying for more intervention and their intervention away.
And think about it like this.
If it was really an emergency, like, say, I don't know, Hitler was coming across the ocean to get us or something like that.
Well, then all the great patriotic companies of America would build a war machine to protect us, wouldn't they?
So if all of our buildup around the Middle East and around Russia and China and everywhere is all necessary, then how come our great patriotic industrialists, why shouldn't they be doing this for free?
Why shouldn't they be donating a portion of their company's efforts to making sure to defend America at their own expense because of how necessary it is instead of this system where, yeah, right, what a joke.
This whole thing is the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
Well, it's interesting because some of the PR from the companies, you would think they were doing it for free.
They kind of cry poverty all the time and they say, well, we're not making the kind of money hand over fist that the tech industry is.
But it doesn't really add up if you look at the details.
I mean, first of all, a lot of their plant and equipment, almost all their R&D money is tax money.
So they're not risking anything to begin with.
And then, of course, their executives are the top six.
You add up the CEO salaries, that's $100 million a year right there.
So there's a lot of padding in there.
And people who've been inside the Pentagon talk about how it's kind of layers and layers of overhead to end up back in the pockets of the companies.
It's almost impenetrable for the average person to understand or be aware of.
So, yeah, that would be an interesting exercise.
I mean, the way they talk, you would think they were doing it already.
But, of course, it's quite the opposite.
Yeah.
Well, and, of course, there's the ultimate case.
I'm sorry, I still haven't read your book, but I really need to.
In fact, I really need to before I put out my next book that I'm writing now, because I know how important this subject is, Lockheed especially.
And their role, not just in making a lot of money selling weapons to the military, but in helping to form the policy that the military will pursue.
And they play a huge role in, for example, bankrolling the neoconservative movement over the years and that kind of thing.
But not just the neocons.
All kinds of different think tanks, and they do all kinds of lobbying, and they make a hell of a lot of money, don't they?
Yeah, it's interesting.
On a related note, I had time on my hands, so I was watching the streamed panels of the Reagan National Defense Forum.
And, you know, not everybody would do this kind of thing.
In fact, when I was watching, I think there were like 17 people watching the stream.
But anyway, they had a representative of Boeing on a panel about security assistance and arms sales.
And she made it sound like, oh, yeah, you know, we don't really advocate.
We just kind of do, we carry out government policy, and we just want our troops to have the best weapons and so forth.
And of course, they spend immense amounts of money trying to shape government policy.
I mean, you know, in a good year, the defense industry would have up to a thousand lobbyists, you know, almost two for every member of Congress.
And that doesn't count executives and others who lobby but aren't called registered lobbyists, you know.
So it was amazing to see that display.
And in a conservative crowd, I mean, I was surprised she wasn't bragging about what they were doing.
But she was quite modest about it.
And I think one of the reasons being that the moderator put the issue of arms to Saudi Arabia on the table.
In fact, he pulled some numbers, which was kind of brilliant, from Reagan Defense Forum does a survey every year.
And one of the surveys said, should we be arming autocrats who are not close US allies?
So there was a little, you know, qualifier there.
And about nine out of 10 people said, well, no.
And then they had a list of countries.
They said, you know, friend or enemy.
And more than 50 percent viewed Saudi Arabia as an enemy.
So he set up the panel that way.
And of course, you had the Khashoggi murder.
And the companies were in an awkward position to be bragging about lobbying for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
So the Boeing rep just kind of laid low and hoped nobody noticed that, you know, a huge part of their undertaking.
I mean, the way they get their business is by lobbying.
That's what they do.
It's not like a normal company.
Yeah.
And it's amazing how little they spend in the scheme of things, in the tens of millions of dollars a year per company, mostly, on direct lobbying anyway.
I don't know, support for think tanks, add another few million.
But then they get tens of billions of dollars in contracts guaranteed for what amounts to a very small amount of influence peddling.
You know, there's this great article.
I'm sorry if I already discussed this with you, but it's just so fun to bring up.
It's poignant or whatever.
Ben Freeman, writing for Tom Dispatch, wrote about this senator who had voted against selling arms to Saudi or for a new ban on it, whichever it was.
And then a Saudi lobbyist called him that day and then delivered $2,000 to him that day.
And then he changed his vote that day.
And that was it.
I mean, $2,000.
You can't even get old Dotson off a Craigslist for $2,000.
You know what I mean?
But you can buy a senator and a genocide for $2,000.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's an unbelievable return on investment for the companies.
You know, why somebody like that member would cave is another question for them to answer.
I mean, you know, maybe there were some other factors like jobs in their district or promises of money in the future.
Certainly, yeah.
They were going to go work as a lobbyist.
That's when they would cash in.
But, you know, it's unconscionable.
It's basically blood money.
Yeah, it's crazy.
All right.
So now, in your piece, I forget.
I'm sorry now.
It may have been the New York Times article I was reading.
It's kind of mentioned as an aside that at the end of his term, Obama, who had given the green light for this war and full American support for it in March of 2015, that at the end of his administration, he instituted a new ban on arms sales to Saudi, I guess, after they bombed the funeral.
Something like that.
And I just wondered, was there ever really any substance to that?
Or was that really just a public relations stunt since he knew that Trump was coming and was going to change it back anyway kind of thing?
Or do you know about that?
Well, I think there was a big internal debate.
And the human rights and peace groups were breathing down their neck and they were starting to feel the heat.
And so what they did is they suspended one particular sale of precision-guided munitions, you know, bombs.
And so that was to send a signal to the Saudis that, you know, you've got to stop killing civilians.
However, it was just that one deal that was suspended.
So the other weapons sales were continuing.
The refueling was continuing.
So it was, you know, it was a case of too little, too late.
You know, a lot of those Obama officials have now said, you know, we've got to get out of this war, which is a good thing.
But it's, you know, again, they were supportive of it initially, and they thought they had to, you know, make a gesture to the Saudis because the Saudis weren't happy about the Iran nuclear deal.
And they wanted to, you know, keep the relationship strong and show they weren't tilting towards Iran.
And also they had this illusion or maybe they were buying into bin Salman's, you know, fantasy that this was going to be a short war, which, of course, it has not been.
So a lot of the Obama folks are now on the other side of the issue.
But it's interesting how that works.
I mean, you know, we needed more people speaking out when Obama was president.
I mean, it shouldn't matter who's president when something like this is happening because it's wrong in its own right.
Yeah.
And, you know, if they would take responsibility at all, it would really help because, hey, at least they're not saying we support Trump because he's committing the same genocide as us.
And so, good for him.
Right there, at least, hypocrites, thank God, on this, flip-flopping back the right way.
Not back, but to the right direction.
But it's not like anybody's ever going to prosecute them for genocide or anything.
Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, all these people, they could just say, man, we were really wrong to do this.
And let me explain exactly just how bad it is and whatever.
And they could actually really have an effect, probably a much better effect, if they would be anything like, you know, adults about taking responsibility for their own role in the thing.
They kind of act like, oh, yeah, well, that, but never mind that, you know.
Small point, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm glad they're speaking out now.
And I think it has an effect on folks like Pelosi, who's now on board while she was kind of keeping a distance from the issue for quite a while.
Oh, is that true?
I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah.
So she and all the Democratic leadership now are basically saying, you know, we've got to stop U.S. support for this war.
So, you know, that's a positive result.
But there's no question part of it was a reaction to Trump and certainly a reaction to the murder.
But, you know, my feeling is, however people ended up here, the Yemen war is now on the agenda.
And we've got to stay after that because I think the Trump people, they were trying to somehow draw a distinction.
You know, yes, it's a terrible thing what happened to this journalist and it must be pursued.
But we can't let it undermine our important security relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is really, as Trump has kind of acknowledged, more of a money relationship than anything that protects U.S. security.
Right.
And then, as you're saying, he has to embellish the gains so badly in order to try to justify it when we're talking about priceless human lives here.
What in the world is he doing?
You know, yeah, but it's a very productive business for Lockheed.
Yeah, like, you know, at least a gentleman isn't supposed to say that part out loud, Bill, you know?
Yeah, well, that's definitely nobody ever accused Trump of being a gentleman, that's for sure.
But the thing that I need to learn more about is, you know, they also want to sell nuclear reactors to the Saudis.
And that may get caught up in this, all this controversy.
But, you know, when he throws out...
Is there a real discussion of that going on right now, of doing that?
Yeah, apparently so, yes.
And I need to dig a little deeper on that.
But I've talked to people who are following it and I've been remiss in getting the full details.
But I think when Trump throws around these big numbers, he's got great hopes that that would be another avenue of sales.
I can hear Jimmy Carter's toast to the stability of the Shah's regime in Iran ringing in my ear.
And now, so you made an important point here about the refueling, which is huge and important, as this New York Times story pointed out.
I guess not many people really elaborate on this, that the midair refueling, it isn't just because of the distance from their airfields to their targets.
It's that this allows them to loiter and fly circles and just fly around Yemeni airspace looking for things to bomb, basically on the pilot's view from 40,000 feet, which is worthless.
And, you know, has a huge, you know, has much to do with what's going on there.
But then you were saying earlier, yeah, so now they say that they have halted that, although then later reports said the only reason that they halted it is because the Saudis are good enough at doing it themselves now that they don't need us anymore.
But now you're saying that, hey, we still have no real confirmation of that.
That was just reported one place or something, huh?
Well, I mean, it's all kind of shrouded.
You know, I think they probably are letting up.
But, you know, how do you verify this?
This is the same administration that said, oh, we don't keep track of the airstrikes one day.
And that's it.
Oh, yeah, we're carefully trying to keep them from making mistakes the next day.
And when they report on the amount of refueling, sometimes we report by country, by region.
You know, there's just a lot that we don't know.
And then when the airstrikes are investigated, the Saudis have their own little investigation unit, which has never really found a strike that it could hold itself accountable for because they're investigating themselves.
And they've made it very hard for journalists to get into the country, although there's been some recent cases.
Times magazine piece, Nicholas Kristof was there.
The person who did the front page piece about the bombing of the fishing boats got into Yemen.
But for a long time, it was just, you know, Iona Craig, some freelancers, some human rights advocates were the main source of information of what was happening on the ground.
So, yeah, there's just a lot that's still there's a lot more we could use to know, especially if they're winding down the war to make sure that they're really doing it.
Hang on just one sec for me.
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And now one last thing here was, you know, we're thinking we're talking about Orwell a bit earlier or I was anyway.
Part of now that the New York Times is there, Nasser Arabi got them into the country and stuff, which is nice.
Including Kristof, which I don't think there was.
Unusually, there's nothing really objectionable about Kristof.
He didn't say we should invade in order to free the people or anything this time.
So that was good, at least.
But one of the things is they talk about in there, going to Tucson, Arizona and talking with the people who make the bombs.
And this was reminiscent of something that I'm pretty sure was in Bowling to Columbine.
Or I think one of those movies back, you know, Michael Moore movies, where they talk to the workers at the bomb factory.
And especially in this New York Times article, they really elaborate about how they have these giant posters up of the workers, children who are in the military hanging on the walls in there.
And they have this propaganda that it really occurred to me just kind of what, in a sense, like, you know, program, mental programming it is in a way.
The way these workers said the same thing in these two reports 20 years apart, where they say, you know, these are the people who make the bombs.
Who, you know, they show them, you know, dropping the chemicals in and screwing on the tail and whatever.
These are the, you know, the dropped bombs and the satellite guided bombs and what have you.
And they say the same thing, which is that, well, you know, you know, when they're questioning at all about what they're doing, that, you know, they're not hurting any good people.
As far as they're concerned, their only job is helping to protect American soldiers on the ground.
And they say this like a mantra, almost apparently, that they just pretend they must know that that's not true.
That actually many airstrikes are not in direct support of infantry in battle and that a lot of times innocent people are being killed in these airstrikes.
And that they have some responsibility for that, don't they?
That that's their profession, making these bombs.
We're not defending ourselves from invasion somehow.
I mean, Uncle Sam says it's okay.
I get that.
But they have to outright lie to themselves and lie to the camera in what seems like kind of a ridiculous fashion to say that these bombs that are killing women and children in Yemen are, all of these are dropped by what, A-10s?
Flying low altitude air support missions or something like that, they think.
They tell each other and themselves when they must know better.
That to me was pretty Orwellian, especially when they talk about the posters on the walls and the kind of consensus, the way they talk about it and stuff like that, you know?
Yeah, well, that's the kind of $100,000 question is how much do people know?
I mean, you would think somebody who's working in the industry would want to know, you know, how the product was being used.
But if you look at that Reagan poll that they did, which, you know, I don't know if it was 100% accurate.
I don't know how they did the survey.
But anyway, nine out of 10 Americans don't want to be arming autocracies unless there are close allies.
What does that mean?
Which are the close allied autocracies that it's okay to work with?
But nonetheless, there's this pretty strong impulse to say we shouldn't be arming undemocratic regimes.
But of course, it's done routinely.
So are people just giving the government a pass?
Are they busy doing other things?
How does that all come together?
It's a bit of a puzzle.
But it's true to penetrate the kind of PR and kind of the way it's normally framed can be difficult.
Because if it's all about the troops, then people are like, oh, fine.
It's protecting the troops.
We respect the troops.
They're courageous.
Game over.
But if you start looking at the consequences of it, and not just for the victims, which is, of course, the first consideration that we should be thinking about, the people who are on the receiving end of these things.
But also, you know, the troops have been fighting in these wars in this century have suffered terribly.
And, you know, the question is, were the wars worth fighting in the first place?
Right.
And that's the whole thing, right, is the public relations department always wants to change the subject to the infantryman needing close air support and his bravery and his sacrifice on behalf of his country and freedom and whatever.
And without ever asking, which hill is he dying on?
And how far away is it?
And what the hell is he doing there in the first place at all?
Now, what are you doing?
Criticizing specialist hero out there?
You're crazy.
You can't do that.
So you're to be ignored.
But I guess we're finally over that now, right?
After 17 years, people are willing to kind of revise some of these takes finally.
Yeah.
I mean, I sort of start at the top.
I mean, you know, I think, sure, it takes courage to run into a battle zone the way a lot of these folks have done.
But who's deciding that these wars should be fought?
You know, that's, you know, that's my ultimate concern.
The think tank eggheads.
No offense, right?
Like the bad kind.
They're giving think tanks a bad name.
This is very true.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, great to have you back on the show as always, Bill.
Great work and very important stuff that you're doing here.
And, you know, I saw people discussing this here and there.
So I know it's having some effect.
So really appreciate your time as always.
Yeah.
Good to talk to you.
All right, you guys, that's William Hartung.
He wrote the book on Lockheed, Prophets of War.
And I'll double entendre for you there.
And this is for, what was it, the CSIS?
No, the CIS, the Center for International Policy.
CSIS are the bad guys, but they do some good work.
But yeah, but no.
And then this is called U.S. Military Support for Saudi Arabia and the War in Yemen.
And you can find the hot link to it at Jim Loeb's blog.
Loeb-log.
Thanks, guys.
In Scott's Reddit group, you will find a pin post outlining the details for how you can help find source material for Scott's upcoming book by listening to archived interviews and taking a few notes.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either myself, at Birdarkist, or Car, at CarCampIt on Twitter, and we'll be happy to help.
We look forward to seeing you in there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
