Hey guys, check it out.
December 8th in New York City, the Soho Forum is hosting a debate on the resolution.
While vaccine mandates are an infringement on freedom, some are justified due to their big payoff in Lives Saved.
For the affirmative will be George Mason Law Professor Ila Soman, and for the negative, our friend Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County and declared candidate for national chair of the Libertarian Party.
The live debate will be at the Sheen Center, and of course, yes, they do have the vaccine restrictions at the Sheen Center, but they do not at Gene Epstein's apartment.
They're going to have a live viewing party at Gene's house, so people who oppose the mandates can watch the debate about the mandates.
And so find out everything you need to know all about it at thesohoforum.org.
That's this December the 8th in New York.
All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, everybody, introducing the war nerd, John Dolan, aka Gary Brecher, and host of Radio War Nerd.
And he's the author of Dispatches, which I've read, which is excellent.
And also the war nerd, Iliad, which I take it is your retelling of the Iliad, is that right?
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Thanks.
I'm glad to be here.
The Iliad is a project I'm really fond of and uncharacteristically pleased about.
I figured, you know, everybody gets a taste of the Iliad, and it's enough for most people because the people who translated into English or any of the modern languages have tried to retain the meter or some sense of the meter, which is so difficult that you end up not noticing that it's an amazing tale.
So what I did was just do a prose version in contemporary colloquial English that gets at the story because it's an incredible story, and people should know that.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Oh, it was.
It was a lot of fun to write.
I mean, we ended up in a cheap Macedonian hotel in Greece where there were fights in the hallway every night, well, just at the base of the Olympic range, and I was just so happy just to be there writing the Iliad in the shadow of the Olympic range.
Well, Mount Olympus, rather.
I guess the Olympic range sounds like northern Washington state.
No, I got you.
Man, that's awesome.
Maybe one day I'll get a chance to read it.
Although with this pile of books I'm looking to attempt to surmount here, it's probably higher than any of those Greek mountains, but anyway.
It's true.
We do a podcast, too, and the strain of reading a half dozen books for every podcast is pretty much your life.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I'm way behind to say the least.
All right.
Anyway, so I'm really happy to have you on the show for this subject matter.
I've had a couple of people, but only a couple, but very insistent that I get on this and cover this issue of the war in Ethiopia, and really, I didn't know where to turn because I've been trying to keep up with the news, and Jason and Dave do a great job at antiwar.com at keeping up with the latest, but context is everything, and who has the context, and then finally I got a hold of this piece that you have written here, The Warner, the Tigray Ethiopia War that's reprinted at Naked Capitalism, and well, first of all, thank you for setting me straight.
I'm pretty sure I think that now I understand essentially who's on whose side and the chain of events here.
Yeah, it can be done, but you know, it helps that I've been writing about the wars in this area for 25 years.
I mean, you need to have a sense of precedent here, because this is an old pattern.
Right.
So, I mean, a lot of people might not have much of an idea where Ethiopia is other than somewhere in East Africa, but we're talking about the very northern portion of Ethiopia here, the Tigray region.
Is it its own kind of state or province or something, or it's just an ethnic region as you'd characterize it, or how does that work?
Yeah, well, it's an ethnic region, but that's where it gets complicated, because people know maybe that there's Eritrea just to the north of Tigray.
Tigray is basically a sort of, if you took a capital L and turned it down, it would look sort of like the shape of Tigray province.
But Tigrayan people and Tigrinya speaking people dominate Eritrea as well.
That doesn't mean they're friendly, on the contrary.
And for that matter, Eritrea used to be part of Ethiopia until it won independence in a bloody war.
So that means that Ethiopia is now a landlocked state, and Tigray is now a landlocked province in a landlocked state, with Eritrea now an independent country and its bitter enemy just to the north of it, and Ethiopia its bitter enemy to the south.
So it's in a pretty bad position.
Now, the previous leader, Meles Zanawi, George W. Bush's guy, he was Tigrayan, correct?
Oh yes, he was a really impressive person.
It was, yeah, he's...
You get these guys in movements like that who are extraordinary.
He was a product of the student rebellions of the 1970s, and his TPLF, the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, walked out of Addis Ababa University in the mid-1970s and said, we're making a Maoist war, we're taking it to the people.
And they did that.
And in fact, if there are progressive readers out there who want to know how student movements matter in places where they really do matter, and how nasty it can get when you get involved in serious politics, there's a book called Wore Negare, W-O-R-E-N-E-G-A-R-E, by someone who was there, who saw Meles Zanawi and the Tigrayans walk out of these university cot chewing and drinking sessions where they were forming the basic political parties.
And Zanawi's TPLF became the most effective ethnic militia in a country full of ethnic militias, and they were allies with the Eritreans for a while in the 1980s when the Eritrean EPLF, a sort of parallel organization, Eritrean People's Liberation Front, defeated the Ethiopian military which was trying to force Eritrea back into the country.
Most dramatically at the Battle of Afabet in 1988, they wiped out the best divisions of the Ethiopian army.
And in three years, the derg, the weird, nominally communist dictatorship of Ethiopia fell.
And Zanawi then became the leader of Ethiopia, in fact, for a while, and in reality, straight till his death.
He didn't die till, I think, 2012.
And he was, he had a very mixed reputation in Ethiopian circles, but he was not an American puppet.
I mean, there's this weird ultra-left move now to say, aha, the Ethiopians are the good guys here.
Well, first of all, there doesn't have to be a good guy in the story.
Zanawi did some good things.
He had this slogan that he did straight through, which was, Ethiopians should eat three meals a day.
And he made great progress on that.
He didn't, he didn't bring democracy to the country, but, you know, I don't know quite what that would mean in an ethnically divided empire that was made by conquest only in the late 19th century, for the most part.
He had an extraordinary talent, and when he died, the Tigrayans were still in charge, but they didn't have the brains to control the whole country as effectively.
Well, I guess when I say he's W. Bush's guy, I'm just thinking of when he invaded Somalia for America in 2006 and stayed.
Yeah, well, America is so desperate to find somebody to do its work over there after the debacle at Mogadishu that they brought in Kenya, they brought in Ethiopia, yeah, they brought in anybody they can find.
But in some ways, Abiy Ahmed is very much America's idea of a leader, too.
I mean, you don't win the Nobel Peace Prize if you get an American veto.
That's given to people they consider safe, like Kissinger.
And that's the current leader that came.
Is he the guy that came to power directly after Zanawi?
Not directly, because Zanawi died, and then, you know, a few other leaders took over.
But Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, and what he did looked really good.
He made a deal with Eritrea, which is now independent, on the Red Sea, run by a very scary guy, the leader of that guerrilla movement called Isaias Afewerki.
And nobody had talked to Afewerki for a long time, and he was running a state that gets compared to North Korea, which might be a little exaggerated, but it's a pretty grim place and totally isolated.
And as Alex de Waal, one of the best writers on The Horn of Africa wrote, Abiy Ahmed, who looked good, he ran something called the Prosperity Party, he was, you know, all shiny and new, made this deal with the very grim Isaias Afewerki, and got the Nobel Prize, but they never revealed what was in the treaty.
And they signed it in Saudi Arabia, and it all went very quiet.
I am almost certain that what was in that deal, the reason that Afewerki signed it, is let's do a pincher movement against Tigray.
Eritrea from the north, Ethiopia from the south, and let's crush that place, because those Tigrayans have gotten disproportionately powerful, they're always butting into everything, and we both hate them, let's get rid of them.
And importantly, as you say here, the current leader, Abiy Ahmed, is an ethnic Amhara, which makes him opposed to the Tigray, I guess.
Yeah, well, yeah, I think there's a lot of resentment against Tigrayans for disproportionate power.
I mean, Ahmed now says he's fully Oromo, not Amhara.
His father was definitely Oromo, his mother was either an Oromo Christian or an Amhara Christian, nobody seems to be sure.
But the first people he cracked down on were the Oromo, who are the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia.
And that was why when we first started looking at this war in Radio Warner, I mean, you go to the maps first, the maps always matter.
And you can see that the plan was, okay, we'll crush Tigray, Eritrea from the north, Amhara from the south, but then what's to the south of the Amhara?
The Oromo, the biggest ethnic group in the country, who have been getting more and more pissed off at being excluded from power.
And now he has to face Oromo revolts, there is an official alliance between the Tigrayans and the Oromo.
All right, now, so we're skipping ahead.
Let's go back to a year ago, when they launched this pincer strategy.
And again, so this is the national government and its army invading the northern province in alliance with the state to the north, Eritrea, and now do the Eritreans invade at the exact same time?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
It was definitely a coordinated attack.
And there was backing from a lot of places.
I mean, the reason that there was this early success for the invasion, because, you know, a year ago, a little over a year ago, when the invasion started, it looked like the Tigrayans were going to be wiped out.
And literally, like there was a kind of genocidal feeling in the air.
But what made the Ethiopian Eritrean force effective was the drones.
They had lots and lots of shiny new drones.
And drones are very, very effective on the battlefield.
That's what the war between Nagorno Karabakh, well, Artsakh and Azerbaijan showed.
The Armenians tried to fortify hilltops, they tried to use armor, and the drones just sort of floated overhead because drones can stay up there for hours.
And then they found a target and just wiped it out.
And that happened in Tigray, too.
The Tigrayans are very, very good fighters.
They made up 90% of the army that wiped out the Ethiopian dictatorship in the 1980s.
But they're very poor, and they don't have any drones, and it makes a real difference.
So it looked like they were defeated, but they were not.
Well, and as you say here, that's because all of the best guys in the national government's army also are Tigrayan and switched sides right away?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they did.
Half of the Tigrayan officers stationed in Tigray just went over to what was the TPLF and it's now the TDF.
You know how it is with these insurgent movements.
You get a lot of initials, a lot of name changes.
I'm glad I read your article twice.
It helped me to keep it straight.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, they went over and the Tigrayans, what I've discovered, and I didn't really know this before, is it's pretty clear that Tigrayans are the combat strength of most things that happen in this part of the world.
Tigrayans are the strength of the Eritrean army, too.
That's the weird part.
They have no problem killing other Tigrayans, but you know, Isaias Afawereke, the dictator of Eritrea, he's Tigrayan.
He doesn't say it very loudly, but he is, and most of his officers are, too.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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And then you were saying that the national government almost immediately resorted, I think as you put it, out of necessity, at least quote unquote necessity from their point of view, of using their ethnic Amhara militias to commit war crimes against the civilians of Tigray too.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Especially in the west of Tigray.
These are, yeah, they're called Fano, and they're probably not very good as combat units, but you know, the St. Gettysburg, this is a very common form of warfare too.
You use your combat units to push up the main road toward the Tigrayan capital, and you unleash the ethnic militias basically to terrorize people, Tigrayan villagers, because a lot of people don't realize, if you really want to wipe people out, you don't usually go through shooting everybody.
You commit a few atrocities so awful that whole villages flee.
And when poor people in a poor country flee, they die, and children die first.
Children die within a few days.
So you're wiping out the next generation already.
So yeah, that was a big part of the plan.
And then, so you said, I'm sure this is right, you said, well, back when this all happened a year ago over at Radio Warner, we said, hold your horses, because one, these guys like to fight, or at least they know how to, and two, we're talking some bad lands too, where they have the capability of retreating and coming back to fight in an insurgent fashion.
And I think you even mentioned, we have the perfect examples of Iraq and Afghanistan, of how well this can work, if you're willing to try it, right?
Laying out in front of us here.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know if the big conventional armies realize this yet, but you know, the news is out.
It's like, there's an old Far Side cartoon with an alien stumbling off a flying saucer flat on its face, and the punchline is, so much for instilling them with a sense of awe.
That goes for shock and awe too.
The shock and awe is over.
You may bomb the capital, as the Ethiopian Air Force did.
You may roll up the road with your main battle tanks.
That's not going to scare anybody.
The drones do scare.
They're dead, but they're not impressed.
No, they're dead, but they're not impressed, because their cousins have gone off to the mountains, and they will never forgive you.
And you know, this is an area of poor people with big families.
They're not going to forgive.
And you talk about how they know what they're doing in terms of, not just, oh no, we better run away and fight another day, but they were planning for this.
I think you said they knew the war was coming, so they started it with sneak attacks on national government forces in the Tigray province to get it kicked off, and then they really were planning on running away as a deliberate strategy thought of beforehand, and then they really deployed that strategy, I think you say, in June of this year, correct?
Yeah, when they took back Mekella to the total shock of everyone, myself included.
As I said in the article, I didn't completely dismiss their claims that we're a Maoist outfit, we go to the country and then we strangle the cities, but I also have heard that a lot of times, and it's sort of like, you know, I'm an old Raiders fan, and I had the sound of a Raiders saying, you know, wait until next year, but as it turned out, they meant it.
And yeah, it's pretty easy to do if the population is with you, and the Ethiopian army, and especially the Eritrean army, were so brutal in Tigray that they created unanimous support for the resistance, for the TDF within Tigray.
When you got that kind of support, you can move easily, people tell you, you know, oh yeah, they do those patrols, they try to stagger them, but they always go out at the same time, or you know, the night shift over there is really lazy, you could go in around 2am, you know what's going on, and then you take your time, you wait for them to get slack, and then you strike.
Yeah, I guess the whole shock and awe and commit all the atrocities and intimidate and cleanse the area and all that stuff, it works real well if it works real well right away, but if not, then it's only extremely counterproductive, because you've just made sure that there's not going to be any compromise here.
Yeah, that's over with.
I think it can work sometimes if you're dealing with a top-heavy regime with very little popular support, so to an extent it worked against Saddam Hussein, because he wasn't as universally hated as they claim, but he wasn't really popular with a lot of the people either.
But if you're dealing with a genuinely popular ethnic movement, it's probably not going to work.
You can't have the U.S. Army officer saying, hey, you know the counterinsurgency thing doesn't work.
Sure.
Well, there are a lot of people who said that before they tried it in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then said, told you so, after it didn't work in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah.
It's true.
I told them that.
Of course you did.
Yeah, there was a moment 20 years ago when I actually thought, you know, I could go with this Iraq thing and I could make a million, but no!
And it wasn't that I was virtuous, it was more like snobbery, like, no!
These are amateurs!
No!
Yeah, there's no way that was going to work, and then it didn't.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so, all right.
Catch us up then since, what's happened since last June?
They turned everything around, I mean, when I put it in Google, they say that the momentum is with government forces now, but I don't know if that's right or current.
Well, it's really hard to know, because one of the things the Ethiopian government did right when they started, very effectively, was to cut communications to Tigray.
And it turns out, you know, people think their cell phones make them more plugged in, but not if somebody turns off the towers, not if somebody turns off the whole system.
And that's what the Ethiopian government did.
A lot of the people in charge here, on both sides, have an electronic warfare background.
Abiy Ahmed has that background, and so does the leader of the TPLF, or TDF, Debret Sion Gebremichael.
He was a famous hacker back against the Ethiopian dictatorship.
So these guys know what they're doing with turning off the cell phones.
When you do that, you can black out the whole area, and they did.
So it's hard to know what's going on.
It wasn't until they actually published photos of thousands of Ethiopian prisoners of war being marched through Mekelle, the Tigrayan capital, that people realized, whoa, they weren't just woofing, it was real.
So by now, yes, they have definitely, the TDF, the armed wing of the TPLF, now allied with the Oromo Liberation Army, they have moved way down the main road toward Addis Ababa into an ethnically Oromo area of Amhara state, and they look pretty unstoppable until recently.
It looks like the Ethiopian army, the ENDF, has been pushing back.
Abiy Ahmed made a big grandstand move.
I'm going to the front in Afar state, because the road from Afar state, which is to the east of Tigray, is the road from Djibouti to Addis Ababa.
And if you're a landlocked state, Djibouti is the only port you can access.
They can't get goods from Eritrea, God knows.
So the TDF and Oromo Liberation Army have cut that road.
So Abiy has gone there to inspire the troops, or at least to do a publicity stunt.
If they can cut off the advance, then that would be a big blow to the TDF.
Just today, they bombed a big dam power plant inside Tigray.
That's the kind of vengeful war that they can wage right now.
They do have the Air Force, and much more importantly, they do have the drones, because drones are a lot more effective than piloted aircraft.
And so they can definitely inflict a lot of casualties.
Whether they can stop the advance, I don't know.
And now, in this war that started a year ago with this pincher maneuver, they've now got themselves trapped in one, now that the Tigrayans have this new alliance with the Oromo.
But now, in your article, you say the Oromo don't really have much to bring to bear here.
But what do you think exactly about that?
Yeah, I don't know.
They don't have...
All I can do is find what information there is and make my best guess.
And when you look, for example, at Ethiopian nationalist Twitter, which is a fascinating field, you see they talk very differently about the TDF, the Tigrayans, and the Oromo Liberation Army, the OLA.
They hate the TDF, but they also fear it.
They don't seem to fear the OLA.
In fact, they sneer at it.
But that's a tricky thing to do, too.
The Tigrayans are only 6% of the Ethiopian population.
The Oromo are at least 30%.
That's a huge pool to draw from.
And they have a grudge that goes back a long time, because basically, power in Ethiopia has been passed between the Habesha, the highland peoples, basically the Tigrayans, and the Amhara.
It was just a duel between those two.
And everybody else was just seen as a potential slave.
And that's changing.
The Oromo say, you know, if we're citizens, we've got to have some rights, too.
So if they ever do get organized, that would be it for Abiy Ahmed's government, I think.
I mean, there are things the government is doing now that are really scary and mean a lot of suffering.
But also, they're the things that get done by people who are in deep trouble, like organizing vigilante groups in the capital, in Addis Ababa, encouraging a bunch of paranoid civilians to arm themselves with clubs or axes or whatever, and go around looking for traitors and spies.
Not a good way to catch a traitor and spies, but a good way to do pogroms on any Tigrayans you can find.
Not going to change the war, though.
It seems like flailing.
If anything saves them, the drones will save them.
Naturally, they're getting a new supply of the BT-2 drone from Turkey, which is basically what won the war for Azerbaijan.
And you know, the Turkish government, one of the weirdest things about American policy is the Turkish state can do anything it wants.
And it's been using these drones to kill Kurdish people in eastern Turkey.
Francis Fukuyama actually spoke out in favor of that, like, isn't this wonderful, Turkey now has its own murder drones.
And it is now exporting them to Eritrea and Ethiopia, and they'll be used to blow up maybe guerrillas, maybe villagers going to market, whatever.
That might make a difference, but I don't see the Tigrayans going back in their box easily.
Well, hadn't you heard?
History's over.
They can do whatever they want.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so obviously the big question here, John, is what's the CIA's role?
Yeah, I think the CIA was totally on board with Abiy Ahmed and they were waiting to see if he won.
I mean, I think that's it's pretty much that simple.
The U.S. invested a whole lot in making Ethiopia its biggest and most powerful proxy in the early 21st century.
And that wasn't because they particularly loved the people who ruled it at the time.
They just thought there are a lot of educated people who want to learn tech, want to be part of the global economy.
We can use that.
And they did.
But the problem is he didn't win.
And I would think the CIA at this point is watching and trying to find out who wins and then probably doing as much harm as it can in the meantime.
They may be farming it out, you know, to the UAE and to Turkey because the big fight now is, you know, who's going to supply the Ethiopian government with drones?
Because those are the pivotal weapons at the moment.
China is trying to supply Ethiopia with drones.
And at the moment, because, you know, the whole Russophobia thing failed, you can drum up a lot of phobia about China.
So it'll be like, we have to give them drones so that China doesn't give them drones.
And I can see this leading to the whole Cold War thing, like, you know, let's give these guys horrible mass murder weapons, because if we don't, the other guys will.
But I don't think the CIA knew this would happen, and I don't think they have a very good plan.
And I don't think they're exactly backing one side or the other.
I think they're kind of out of it and maybe farming it out to the Turks.
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I did see where the Chinese foreign minister went to visit and show support for the current leader.
So I can see what you're talking about.
And they say this about Saudi Arabia, right?
If we don't keep helping them carpet bomb the poor Yemenis, then the Russians or the Chinese might come in and start selling them stuff instead.
Yeah, yeah.
So I, you know, and this is a country that doesn't even have oil or the very long corrupt relationship with the US that the Saudis have.
Ethiopia was seen as a rogue leftist state in the late 20th century until basically early 90s, when the derg, the Marxist dictatorship was overthrown.
And then, then things changed fast, but they'll probably change again.
I mean, basically, you got to figure out that there's going to be a deal made somewhere, like maybe, okay, we'll get rid of Abiy.
And we'll go back to a really federal system where you can do what you want up in Tigray, you leave us alone.
I can see army officers making a deal like that, but I can't claim to know what's going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in reading this, it sort of seems like reading the past and future history of this whole continent, where mostly European empires, but not entirely European ones, sometimes just African ones, have drawn these borders in crazy places where people are either, you know, divided and conquered or grouped together and conquered or whatever in strange ways where you probably don't have a border where it really would belong if, you know, Kang and Kodos came in from above trying to make it fair and make it, you know, more or less ethnic states, you know, wherever they are kind of thing.
And so it's just going to continue to be like this all over the damn place from now on.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's been going on for a long time.
I mean, yeah, there have been a lot of great battles in this era that, in this area rather that are now battle sites again, like Adwa, the great victory of an Ethiopian army over an Italian army, basically.
They defeated 15,000 Italian and Eritrean troops, basically cut them to pieces.
People talk about the Russo-Japanese War as a big morale building movement for non-European nations, but so was Adwa.
Adwa meant a lot to a lot of people.
So, you know, that but yeah, but that was the victory of a state that was colonial in its own right, because Ethiopia expanded like three times over in the 19th century because the Ethiopian emperors pushed south and east into areas that were not ethnically related to them at all.
So yeah, it's a rough, rough neighborhood.
All right.
Real quick, a couple Somalia questions for you.
First of all, you talk about Somalian troops came to Ethiopia to help fight against the Tigrayans, but I thought that the Somali government really only existed with the explicit and substantial support of Ethiopian forces in their country.
So who the hell is keeping al-Shabaab out of Mogadishu if what counts as a national army in Somalia is off running errands in Ethiopia?
I mean, yeah, in Ethiopia.
And then secondly, you also mentioned Turkey's substantial role in Somalia.
And I was wondering whose side they're on there, because I really could flip a coin.
I'm not sure.
They could be selling drones to either side as far as I know.
Yeah, well, I think Turkey is doing a very effective job in Somalia.
And as far as I know, they're pretty popular with most people in Somalia.
They have advisors and merchants and people on the ground all through Somalia, as far as I know, and nobody is attacking them.
They're making a big deal out of being fellow Muslims and they're expending money to help the place.
And it's working very well.
So they're on the side of the American-supported government in Mogadishu then?
Maybe.
They're on their own side.
Yeah, yeah.
Turkey is an independent power at this point.
It's weird how people won't admit that.
Like when Michael Flynn finally went down, I couldn't believe how nobody noticed that he'd had to register as a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government.
That was his first public corruption.
But because the Turkish government gets a pass in the US every single time, nobody even noticed that.
They were busy falsely accusing him of treason with the Kremlin, so that was more important.
Yeah, it has to be the Kremlin.
Don't get me started.
But anyway, as far as where these Turkish mercenaries came from, I don't know where they came from.
They were definitely mercenaries.
They were sort of rented, maybe from the Somaliland government, I'm not really sure.
Maybe it wasn't from Mogadishu, but they were rented like Hessians, you know, you can have a thousand of our guys if you pay me, you know, two million dollars right now.
And they were told they were going to, because there are no jobs, you know, Somalis are this highly dynamic people and they got no economy to speak of at the moment.
They were told they could go to the UAE and work there, you know, sounded good.
Rich country, probably won't have to do too much, it's not a very effective warlike country.
Next thing they know, they end up fighting in Tigray against people who know the ground and will fight to the death.
So that, you know, that's what happens to cannon fodder.
It's always a really depressing story.
Yeah.
All right.
And then, I'm sorry, before I let you go, I got to ask you one more, which is, what's your take on the end of the war in Afghanistan?
Well, it was, you know, like 15 years late, but it had to be done.
It was more sensible than any other move the U.S. could make.
The size of the U.S. debacle, the scale of the debacle is extraordinary.
And as far as I can tell, it's gone into silence now, because basically within American discourse right now, you're either saying, yay Trump, or you're saying, yay Biden, which is just so unbelievably lame.
But that's the way it works.
So if the Trump people are angry about Biden leaving Afghanistan, the Biden people can't bear to think, you know, that maybe we should look back on 20 years of extraordinary corruption, trillions of dollars wasted with zero return, nothing.
I mean, people compare this to the fall of South Vietnam.
South Vietnam held out a lot harder than the so-called Afghan government and the fictional Afghan army ever did.
The U.S. now specializes in creating ghost armies, like the one that was supposedly holding Mosul in 2014, when Islamic State took the place with basically 500 Toyota pickup trucks.
Because as it turned out, there was no Iraqi army.
There was just American tax money buying a lot of villas in Switzerland.
And that's basically what happened in Afghanistan, too.
Yep.
Hey, for 20 years only, so it could have been worse, maybe.
Slow learners.
These things happen over and over and over again.
They happen.
Yeah.
But it's the silence now.
It's like, is anybody still mad about, I mean, if you're mad about what we did in Afghanistan, I guess that makes you a Trumpy now.
And I keep running into that.
Well, there's one lady from Human Rights Watch who just keeps harping on how bad the Taliban are.
But yeah, I'm sorry.
You're just kind of sore losing now.
The question is really, I mean, the whole country obviously is facing a Great Depression after the massive bubble of international aid is broken.
And so who's going to feed them is the only real question, helping the population survive.
And then I think the same silence that you're talking about from the shame of the humiliation of the defeat there then means that, you know, they're just going to, there's no pressure on them really, or certainly there's much less pressure than they have come in the other direction about the shame of holding on to all of that money that belongs to the Afghan national government, whoever rules it now.
And the, you know, shipping a grain over there and whatever, help people get through the winter at least.
You know what I mean?
We have to put them on welfare forever, but be nice to just ship them some wheat to eat maybe.
It would be nice.
But, you know, I mean, I'm so old, I remember Vietnam and younger people have this idea that, you know, Vietnam became cool pretty quick.
It didn't.
There were many years where nobody talked about Vietnam.
They were after, you know, after that shot of the helicopter on the roof in Saigon, nobody wanted to hear about it.
And I can see something like that happening with Afghanistan.
All right.
Okay.
Sorry.
One more question.
If you got a minute.
Sure.
Okay.
So I read your book a long time ago about where you just cover every war in the world.
I want to reread that one one time.
I remember the Colombian knife fights and all that.
There's a bunch of great shit in there.
So, you know, you've got a really good perspective on a lot of these things all over the place.
And one of the things I was thinking about when I was reading this was, what do you think are the chances for or the danger of some kind of really bad, dirty war breaking out in America with the fall of our empire here and possibly the next economic crash and such division between left and right and racial issues and all these things and a hell of an armed population?
Yep.
And the Constitution, it ain't magic.
I think we all know that.
So no, no, I've thought about this a lot, but I can't say I know for sure what's going to happen.
I think you can't look for a parallel to the the civil war, because despite all the cliches about brother against brother, it wasn't usually that it was north against south, it pretty much was that.
I know there are a lot of exceptions, but basically that's that's how it was.
You can't get that now.
What you could have maybe is sort of city against country, which would be more like Paris versus the countryside in 19th century France.
And that was an ugly war.
And I can see something like that happening.
But a lot of things that people don't think about would be like where you get your water from and what's the organizing principle of militia is going to be.
But I would think people have kind of underestimated the churches in that regard.
I can see armed militias aligned with certain faiths becoming very powerful.
I can see a big die off if that happens, because there are too many people to feed if the interstates get closed.
It's really easy to close an interstate, you know, you burn a few tires in an oil can and stand around with AR-15s and that's a roadblock.
And you start charging toll and pretty soon they don't want to come through there anymore.
And some city is going to starve.
And then you start making a deal and it's easy to see that army units might split.
And different factions of the National Guard, which is organized by state, they might split too.
If there's a fight between the army and the National Guard, it's not hard to figure out how that would end.
But you know, there would be a lot of warlords, a lot of shifting alliances, and a lot of corporate money.
I don't think it would even need foreign involvement.
If you were running a foreign country, it would be hard to resist.
Yeah, I think it is a possibility, but I just have trouble with the geography.
It's very annoying in a way.
You can't draw any good lines.
Basically you could draw a line which was the old Confederacy plus where its people moved to in the inland west.
Yeah, that could be an entity.
But I don't know that it would be allowed to exist without interruptions.
Well, you're right that it would be, you know, the town and country split is where it's, you know, Dallas, I don't think it's quite as liberal as Austin, but these are two pretty democratic cities.
And Dallas, one of the most important and biggest cities in the country in a very red state.
Well, formerly a very red state, I don't know.
There's another major ethnic divide where, hey, right now we all get along, but you could see that change here between Anglos and Hispanics, you know, in the worst case scenario, I'm just saying.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Oh, they would be.
I mean, I remember one of the biggest surprises of my life when I moved to British Columbia was, whoa, they have inter-ethnic gangs here, and they really did.
Not all of them, but, you know, you'd see some gang gets rounded up and it's like, you know, O'Reilly, Chang, Vladimirovich, everybody.
And you don't get that in the U.S.
I mean, wars have always been pretty much ethnic in the U.S., and it would be interesting to see if that held or what the ethnic lines would be.
They might not be as simple as people think.
I don't know.
I mean, that would overlap with the religious stuff, because a lot of the more militant evangelical churches are, you know, pretty mixed ethnically.
Not all ethnic groups, but several ethnic groups in them.
Well, so in all of this, I mean, I'm not really asking you percentages for all this, like how likely you think this is to all break out or whatever, but say if you had to compare between chaos and a lot of peaceful secession, what do you think the chances are that you just figure out a way to go back to the Articles of Confederation or better and have that strong federalism like you were talking about for Ethiopia, maybe live and let live a little bit more?
Well, you know, I'm no expert, but somehow I don't see that happening at all.
The Constitution that, you know, that document you mentioned, it's pretty conservative about such things.
I mean, there's always somebody wanting to secede.
There are parts of California and Oregon that want to secede now, but I don't know.
I don't think that would happen peacefully.
We're not a peaceful people.
Yeah.
That could be the dark cloud on the silver lining there, as far as bringing all the troops home from the world empires.
Well, they've got to shoot at somebody, don't they?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Then the tactics might actually work better in the U.S. than they have in those other places.
At least they'd speak the language.
You know, that's a big help.
And they do have landing strips already kind of available.
Yeah.
I-80.
Big landing strip.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, John Dolan with the bad news.
Listen, no, I really appreciate it, man.
You write great stuff and sorry we haven't talked in a very long time, but I've been reading you more or less all along here and always love your stuff.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
It was fun.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys.
That's John Dolan, a.k.a.
Gary Bretscher, the war nerd.
And here he is.
This one's reprinted at Naked Capitalism, the war nerd, the Tigray-Ethiopia War.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, www.antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
