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, say 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 Mark Perry, Pentagon reporter, again writing in the American Conservative magazine.
And actually, this is later, this is being recorded on December the 20th, but I'm going to paste this at the beginning of the interview, because this is the most important thing, the breaking news here from yesterday.
Trump has announced that he is in fact going to pull the troops out of Syria.
So welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Mark?
It's great to be here.
I'm doing well.
Good to be here.
Good, good.
And nice to talk about good news for a change here.
And contrary to a lot of narratives that people might be seeing on TV and reading on Twitter, you say here at TAC, Trump's decision to leave Syria was no surprise.
To say it was impulsive or that the entire military opposed it would be grossly misreading this situation.
Cool.
So we're going to get real reading on this situation here.
In fact, I got a bit of a scoop myself.
You were so kind as to send me the doc file last night before it got posted up on TAC.
So I saw your original title was Scaparrotti's Revenge.
So let's start with that.
Who's Scaparrotti and how come he gets what he wants?
Curtis Michael Scaparrotti, General Curtis Michael Scaparrotti, is the head of the European Command.
And back in, oh, March and April, he was really upset because the U.S. Central Command and his colleague, General Joe Votel, were dropping troops into Syria, and Turkey was upset.
Turkey is a member of NATO, which is what Scaparrotti was worried about.
And he went to Madison and said, what are we doing?
Are we going to sacrifice our alliance with Turkey because we want 2,000 troops in Syria who aren't doing anything?
And it turned into quite an argument between Scaparrotti and Votel.
And Mattis kind of cut the baby in half.
He said, well, we're going to keep the troops there, but it'll be temporary, and don't worry about it, and I'll talk to the Turks, and everything will be fine.
Well, that argument was resolved yesterday when Trump announced he was pulling out of Syria.
So the idea somehow that all the generals were up in arms about this is simply not true.
And whenever I hear it, I ask my colleagues, I say, well, like who?
Because that's not what I've heard.
There are obviously mostly retired generals and some senior generals in the Pentagon who opposed the move out of Syria, but there's a lot of agreement with it, and there's a lot of agreement with Trump on this.
And it's been a long time coming.
This should not be news.
Right.
So, I mean, it certainly was inevitable that at some point America was going to have to, well, have to, was going to abandon the Kurds that they had used in the fight against the Islamic State here, which America and Turkey had helped create in the first place.
But then once that got out of control and seized western Iraq, they launched Iraq War III to destroy the thing, and America started backing these Kurds.
But hey, the Syrian Kurds, they're not members of NATO, and Turkey is.
And is a huge arms customer as well.
And so, you know, I think even Mattis and even the worst Iran hawks at the end of the day would say, okay, we shouldn't do this now, but at some point, if this is what it would take to maintain the alliance with Turkey, they would virtually all agree that the Kurds are expendable.
I mean, I think that might even be the English translation of the word Kurd, right?
This is what we do.
We back them, just like in the 70s with Kissinger in Iraq.
We back them against Saddam and then let Saddam kill him.
Then the same thing in 91, urge the uprising and then let Saddam kill him.
Here we use them against the, well, first we sick the Islamic State on them, then we use them against the Islamic State, and now we turn them back over to Turkey.
Well, it's not as if the Kurds are unaware or, you know, stupid.
They can read history just like the rest of us, and your disquisition there is right on target.
They knew that sooner or later we were going to be out of Syria.
And, you know, it's not the case that we haven't stopped backing them.
We're just not going to put our troops in harm's way, in effect.
We haven't been doing that.
We've been using our aircraft to help them.
I'm not sure that's going to end.
And the other bit of truth here is that members of the Kurdish resistance of the Syrian defense forces, which are comprised of the Kurds in northeastern Syria, members in the leadership of that group have been quietly talking to Assad to come to some kind of accommodation because they knew the Americans were leaving.
Right.
OK, so, yeah, let's talk about that.
Well, there are two major questions here about, because you say in your article here that this really all came from a phone call with Recep Erdogan of Turkey last Friday and that they came to a couple of agreements here or they see eye to eye on a couple of things, one of which is what you just said that, and this is what I've always been hoping for all along, would be that the Syrian Kurds would renegotiate entry into the Syrian state with Damascus and then use Assad to keep Erdogan out.
Right.
That that would be the deal that Turkey wouldn't attack the YPG as long as the YPG had essentially disarmed and allowed the Turkish state to reestablish control there.
And so it sounds like maybe you're saying that that really looks like that is in the works.
But then so the most important question then is, did Trump get Erdogan's assurances that he was not going to go in there and massacre the YPG group as soon as America leaves?
I don't know the answer to that last question.
I think that I think he may well have.
But, you know, actually, I don't know.
I think that we need to put an asterisk on all of this.
It's clear that Turkey has a very strong military and they're stronger than the Kurds.
But it's not at all clear to me and it's not at all clear to the Turks that they could walk into any part of Syria and slaughter anybody.
They've had problems moving south with their troops since the beginning of this operation.
It's a top heavy army.
It's very good.
It's better than anything around any of their neighbors, except maybe the Iranians.
But it's not clear to me that even if Turks wanted to slaughter the Kurds and the Kurdish groups in Syria, which they consider terrorists, it's not clear to me that they'd have much success in doing it.
And it may be that Mr. Erdogan would be quite happy with an autonomous Kurdish state in Syria, so long as it was policed by the Syrians and so long as it, you know, stayed within its borders.
I think he could accept that.
I think that we have to take note that, you know, Erdogan views the Kurds in Syria as part of a terrorist group, as part of the PKK, and that the U.S. has been arming and helping these people, which is why he called Trump on Friday.
They've been talking about this for a long time.
But it's not clear to me that he would mind if the Syrians kind of policed the border for the Kurds and established kind of an autonomous zone for a mini-Kurdish state in northeastern Syria.
It would be very controversial.
He's likely to bang the table and protest.
But it would sure solve a lot of his problems if he could be assured that Kurds wouldn't come across, the PKK wouldn't come across the border of Syria and attack Turkish villages, which has been happening from time to time over the last 40 years.
So there is something in it for Turkey and for Erdogan here, outside of an assurance from Trump that, and outside of assurance from him that he wouldn't attack the Kurds.
This is a deal in the making.
We haven't seen the last of it.
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Okay, so please tell me everything that you can about what you just said about the Syrian Kurds are talking with Assad now.
Which ones and how much progress are they making?
I mean, what you're describing is the obvious solution, because even during this whole war, the Kurds never went to war against Damascus.
They declare their semi-independence, but there's plenty of room for compromise between Damascus and Rojava, supposedly.
You know, we should understand that Mr. Erdogan has been pounding on Donald Trump for a long time on this issue.
We have supplied and helped the Kurds in northeastern Syria, but really they're part of the PKK, which is on our State Department list of prohibited terrorist organizations.
So here we are yet again in the Middle East looking like hypocrites to everyone, because everyone in the Middle East knows the PKK is viewed by us as a terrorist organization, but we're still helping them.
And this is what Erdogan has been pounding on Trump about.
You say you're against terrorism, and yet you help the PKK, and they're our dire enemies.
You've got to stop doing it.
Which is hilarious, because the only reason we're doing it is because Turkey, even more than America, helped to create the Islamic State, and so we had to back them in order to destroy it again.
We certainly made it possible and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State, so then we were stuck with it.
So who are the best fighters in the region, in Syria and Iraq, to take on the Islamic State?
Well, in Iraq it was the Iraqi army and the Shias, backed by Iran, who we allied with, even though we say that we weren't allied with them.
In Syria it was the Syrian Kurds, who we allied with, who we have on the prohibited list of terrorist organizations.
So here we are, how many years now after 9-11?
Seventeen.
It involved up to our knees, waist, and eyeballs in Yemen, supporting the Saudis who are creating the world's greatest humanitarian disaster.
And here we are in Syria, supporting a terrorist organization that's on our prohibited list, and there we were in Iraq, fighting alongside Iraqi Shia militias supported by Iran, who we say we hate.
This couldn't be any more incoherent and any more foolish than it already is.
And how many years are we in?
And actually the situation in the Middle East is more unstable.
The malign influence here, which we say is Iran, or, you know, fill in the blank space, Russia, or Iran, or the Kurds, or whoever, the real malign influence in the region is us.
We need to get out, and I think Donald Trump has done that.
At least in Syria.
Well, at least he's ordered for that to happen.
We'll see how that goes.
We'll see how it goes.
And let me read a little bit of what you wrote last night here.
In the wake of his Friday decision, the administration's foreign policy triumvirate of James Mattis, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo pushed back, arguing that keeping U.S. troops in Syria was essential.
So, oh, I may have read that wrong.
You're saying they pushed back against him in meetings in the White House, not they publicly denounced him after he announced it, which is the way I had read that originally, I think.
Yeah, no.
Well, they have not yet publicly denounced him, and they're not going to.
They're going to leave that to the Republican Senate.
But I think that, you know, I just sense in the military that there's a big sigh of relief.
At least some parts of the military.
Certainly not all of it.
There's a big sigh of relief.
What are we doing with 2,000 troops in Syria?
It's not, you know, the only thing that they're hanging out there is they're bait.
They're bait for anybody who wants to attack them.
And they're really not helping the Syrian Kurds that much.
What's helping is our, you know, our jet fighters and bombers.
That's what's helping.
So I think Trump made the right decision.
People can protest and bang the table and say, you know, it's not part of a process.
But he's the president of the United States.
He has broad powers under the Constitution and foreign policy, and he made the decision.
Yeah.
Hey, if Obama can start a war, then Trump can end one.
You know?
Why?
Why are we surprised?
He said he was going to do this.
Yeah.
All right.
So here's the scary part to me, though.
And I'm not too amped up about conflict with Iran at this point.
I'm not really seeing that.
However, your article ends here with Trump saying to Bolton, who's, you know, listening on the other connection there, hey, so could we go ahead and get the troops out of Syria now?
And Bolton says, yeah, let's do it.
And then so that was how the decision was made.
And yet Bolton is Bolton.
So that raises all kinds of questions, especially since his position on Syria, I believe all along since 2011, has been, why waste our time messing with Assad when the problem is he's loyal to the Ayatollah?
Let's just kill the Ayatollah and strike the root of this problem.
And, you know, isn't maybe that a worry here, that that kind of position, hey, we don't want to spread jihadi terrorism into the Levant in this way.
Obama had a bad idea there.
But let's spread it into Persia instead.
You know, let's do a regime change.
I think in this case, the tiger never changes his stripes.
I think John Bolton is actually, you know, a lot less of a neocon than we think.
It's worse.
He's a hawk.
And he's always been anti-Iran.
He has publicly said he wants regime change.
I don't think yesterday's decision by Mr. Trump changes that one little bit.
And we still are in, you know.
But does Trump's decision play into some long con of Bolton's?
Well, it's a good question.
I mean, I think you had it right.
I think, you know, Bolton looks at the region as being under the sway of Iran.
And if you really want to change that, you have to go to the heart of the matter.
Syria is a sideshow.
For Bolton, I think Yemen is a sideshow.
What he would love to do is to spark a conflict or a near conflict with Iran and really go to what he views as the source of the problem, which is the leadership in Tehran.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I really don't.
There's no appetite for that in this country.
It could happen by accident.
It could happen as a meeting engagement.
It could happen.
But I don't think there's any real planning going on in the national security establishment for a war with Iran.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure doesn't seem like any of them are interested.
I think I remember a time about 11, 12 years ago where it seemed like maybe the Air Force was into it, but nobody else was.
But I don't even know if that's true anymore.
Yeah, I don't think—they're definitely not into it.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Yeah.
And so then the solution is obvious, right?
Is Trump should not, you know, fly B-52s to Tehran.
He should fly Air Force One to Tehran and go and meet with the Ayatollah and just make friends with him.
I mean, if America hates Iran so bad that they're willing to back al-Qaeda against them, then why not just make friends with them so we don't have to hate them so bad anymore so our government doesn't have to resort to high treason anymore?
I hate to go out on a limb on a radio show, but I will.
I don't think it's out of the question at all.
Really?
I don't.
You know, I think that—and people have mentioned it to me.
They've said, you know what the solution is here.
Trump loves the transaction.
If he can go to North Korea, why can't he?
Yeah.
I mean, think about the dynamic where Obama had to spend every bit of political capital he had in order to get that Iran deal.
Trump could announce tomorrow, eh, I decided I like the Iran deal after all.
How do you like that?
And probably only he could do that.
He could go to Tehran.
He could announce that, like, look at how tall and rich I am.
I'm not scared to know Ayatollah.
I'm going to go over there and I'm going to put him in line and then—but go over there and put him in line with a good handshake and with, you know, some economic arrangements.
I don't think it's out of the question.
I don't think it's—you know, it's not going to happen tomorrow.
But, you know, this man in the White House prides himself on being such a transactional guy and such a great businessman, such a dealmaker.
You know, that would be the real test, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
Well, just like Obama with the Iran deal, he's Trump the Great for at least a day here or at least this week.
For those of us who think it's a mistake to have these serial kinds of interventions all over the world, he is, if only for a day.
Yeah.
And so let's hope that he hears that message, too, that we really like it when you stop doing stuff, you know, and see whether he can build on that.
Because, after all, he's got a lot of wars to end.
He could do this once every six weeks from now until 2020, you know?
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
All right.
Hold it right there just one moment.
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So yesterday I was interviewing Reese Ehrlich.
And Reese Ehrlich says, well, as I've reported, and I think pretty much alone, the U.S. is doing all the maintenance and taking care of all the Saudis' planes and this and that.
And I says, well, actually, that's great.
And I know you reported that, and that's great and everything.
But I'm pretty sure The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the L.A. Times and everybody said that all along, that America's doing, giving intelligence support and targeting support and refueling.
And I guess, you know, honestly, I went back and I really searched The Times, The Post and the other Times sites, but I hadn't had a chance to review all those articles yet.
But also, I guess part of it is I was referring to I've known all along that America always is taking care of the Saudis' planes because princelings don't do lowly work like that.
And Filipino, you know, maids and stuff aren't qualified.
And so it's American contractors and American military guys who have always taken care of all the care and feeding of the Saudis, especially big ticket military items.
And so I don't know.
But then I also thought that maybe that was in some of your previous reporting.
And I found that old Al Jazeera piece where you quote Michael Horton saying, now we're Al Qaeda's air force.
But that wasn't it.
But then you sent me this email about how we had at least discussed on the program about it.
But so I guess that's a long winded way of me asking you, what all can you report to us?
Or have you reported in the past in writing on the Internet anywhere we can read about exactly America's role in the, you know, the maintenance and the taking care of all the Saudis, especially their airplanes over there?
Well, I think it brings back interesting memories because it was several years ago that I was at a dinner with the Air Force chief of staff, General David Goldfein.
And he basically confirmed this.
He mentioned it offhandedly.
He said, you know, it's good to have allies in the Persian Gulf, but at least one of our allies is like a 16-year-old rich kid who instead of doing his own laundry just throws it away and buys new clothes.
So that's basically what the Saudis do.
They buy our weapons and then they don't maintain them.
And we have to maintain them.
It's been a source of real irritation among senior Air Force officers.
He certainly isn't alone in that.
I've heard this for several years, this kind of disgust with the way the Saudis don't maintain their own aircraft.
Now, to update that and to be fair to the Saudis, though I do so hesitantly because I'm not a fan of theirs, as you know, they have signed a number of contracts with Boeing to provide training for maintenance and to provide maintenance for some of their rotorcraft.
They also have a block of F-15E fighter aircraft.
I believe they're F-15E.
They might not be, but they're F-15s, not F-16s.
And they're maintained by a mix of American and Saudi maintenance crews.
But, you know, the whole point here is it's not simply that we're providing fuel and refueling for Saudi aircraft over Yemen.
We're also maintaining the planes that we sell them.
We have contracts to maintain the planes that we sell them.
The only thing we don't do, thankfully, yet, is provide actual soldiers for them in Yemen.
You know, Scott, honestly, I can report from any number of conversations that I've had with senior Air Force officers and senior officers of the U.S. Central Command Army, as well as Air Force, that there's a real discomfort in our military with the Saudi offensive in Yemen.
And largely that's the result of the humanitarian catastrophe that it's caused, but also because it's just a bad idea.
You know, this isn't a fight that they're going to win.
They're going to end up mired down as they have.
It's going to reflect poorly on us, and it has.
It's simply not going to work.
This is the wrong war against the wrong people at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons.
And we're paying a price in the international community for it.
Well, and you first reported that, not just the point of view, but that the generals felt that way back right after the war started.
I think your first piece after the war started in March or maybe April of 2015 in Al Jazeera was about just that.
All these generals saying what a bad idea this is, and that's the one that ends with the quote from the think tank expert Michael Horton, no relation to me, saying that, well, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's Air Force in Iraq, which is true.
Never mind how it got that way.
But we're flying as al-Qaeda's Air Force in Yemen.
And that was back— Well, this was—yeah, this was the—I remember after the start of the Saudi offensive, within 24 hours of the start of the Saudi offensive against Yemen, my phone was ringing off the hook with military officers wanting to talk to me about it, which is a little unusual, to be honest with you.
And they were scratching their heads, because we had been helping the Houthis who had been fighting al-Qaeda in Yemen, because that's our enemy, al-Qaeda, right?
Now Saudi Arabia was attacking the Houthis, and there was real—in U.S. Central Command, there was real anger about this.
You know, Saudi Arabia is a longtime ally since the end of World War II, and so we pivoted, as I point out in my article on the Saudis and Sudan's efforts in Yemen.
We pivoted, and we decided to support them.
And it's just a—it was a bad idea.
It was a bad mistake, and it's turned out pretty poorly, and the war is still going very poorly for the Saudis.
Yeah.
Now, that is really shocking, and that—oh, it was April 2015, you have this article, and you talk about that in this article, too, that not only is this counterproductive, but literally you're saying Central Command had a deal with the Houthis and was supporting Houthi efforts as part of the war against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula at the time.
Very quietly.
Whereas now AQAP is part of UAE's mercenary army that America supports there in the war against the Houthis.
That's right.
I mean, it's—you know, it—I mean, here we are.
When is it?
December 2018.
It's almost four years into this thing now.
It's almost four years into this thing, and it's not at all clear to me what the war on terrorism is really all about, because I thought it was about fighting extremist Islam like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and now we're drawing up, you know, plans in the Middle East to help the Saudis fight the Houthis who are fighting al-Qaeda.
We used to be on their side.
We're in Syria.
Who knows what we're doing in Syria?
We're bogged down in a stalemate in Afghanistan, which I assume is fine, just fine with the senior military leadership, so God knows why.
And if—I mean, if you really get a chance to sit down with a senior government official in this administration or in a former government official in a previous administration and say, how are we doing on the war on terrorism, they're hard-pressed to really tell you who it is that we're fighting and why.
We haven't defeated ISIS.
They're not there to stay, but we've certainly killed a lot of them.
Al-Qaeda is still very much alive, but, you know, I don't think we're in imminent danger of being attacked by them at the homeland, knock on wood.
So what is it exactly that we're doing?
You know, any number of people will tell you, well, you know, we're—the word is equities.
We're using our equities in the region to stop Iran's malign influence.
Yeah, exactly.
Iran.
I was going to say, at what point are you finally going to say Iran?
Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran.
And here we are with a neoconservative administration, basically, that is pounding the table for some kind of response to whatever it is they think Iran is doing.
We've gotten out of the JCPOA, and the only one that it seems has interest is in fighting Iran is Israel, certainly not in our interest.
And it's not clear to me, and it's not clear to the military, that we could actually defeat Iran in a war.
We could damage their economy.
We could destroy their military.
But, you know, this wouldn't be a war where they would surrender.
So what is it exactly that we're doing that we're trying to get them to prevent?
We're the ones who are intervening in the Middle East, and we're the ones with a very high profile on Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
After 9-11, it was actually the Iranians who helped us against al Qaeda.
So, you know, if you, Scott, can come up with any better explanation of what the hell we're doing in the Middle East than I can, I'd love to hear it.
No, I mean, I think he just said it's all about Iran.
The only thing I'd like to add is it's the redirection.
That's, to me, the key, is that in 06, 07, they really realized just how badly they were losing the race with Iran to have influence over the new government that America and Iran were both working together, in essence, to install and power in Baghdad.
And that then they did what Hirsch called the redirection, where they said, OK, well, we got to—Cheney even went—it's in the WikiLeaks, right?
Cheney went to suck up to the Saudi king and say he's really sorry.
And the Saudi king says, you idiot, you were supposed to put the next mustache in line from the Baathist military in power, not empower the Shiite supermajority, you dummy.
And so Cheney says, I'm really sorry.
We promise we'll start supporting al Qaeda terrorists all over the region as you wish, my lord.
And so he started backing Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon and Muslim Brotherhood groups in Syria and Jandala in Iran.
And when Obama came into power, he basically picked up that same strategy.
I don't know if they called it the redirection, but it's basically operation make up for stupid George W. Bush's giant own goal in giving Baghdad to Tehran.
And as Obama put it to Jeffrey Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, if we get rid of Bashar al-Assad, that'll help bring Iran down a peg.
We can't do a whole new sectarian cleansing campaign facing east now and kick all the Shiites out of Baghdad and turn it back over to the Sunnis, can we?
But maybe we can get rid of Assad and Syria as a consolation prize.
And so then they got another half a million people killed or more or whatever, which led to the rise of the Islamic State, which this is the great irony of it all, right?
Is that in Iraq War II, they thought that they were going to gain dominance over the Iraqi Shiite supermajority and that would give them dominance over Iran.
Oops, it just gave Iran more dominance than Iraq.
So then what do they do?
They try to get rid of Assad.
But what does that do?
That leads to the rise of the Islamic State.
So then what do they do?
They got to go back to backing Iran and Iran's pet Shiite militias in Iraq to force the Islamic State out of western Iraq again.
So to redo, you know, Rumsfeld's El Salvador option for the Shiite side again in Iraq War III.
And so now they're squealing mad as hell, these neocons, because everything they do makes Iran more powerful.
Just like in Yemen, where Iran has virtually nothing to do with it, except that America gives them public relations points for every accomplishment of the Houthis, like holding off America and Saudi for four years.
And so they build that up as part of the Iranian threat, the Shiite crescent, that everything they do makes it more powerful and makes them madder and madder and makes them do more stupid, horrible things.
I think that there is a little bit of sunlight in all of this mess.
And it comes down to this, that 17 years after 9-11, I think there's a growing realization and a growing consensus, especially in our military, not necessarily in the full foreign policy establishment, but certainly in our military, that the best way out of this is probably out of it.
Now, you'll hear senior officers say, well, we've got to stay in Afghanistan.
But there's a real discomfort with that position, and there's real questioning of whether what we're doing in Syria is really that effective.
And there's an attempted re-pivot.
God forbid that we would ever cut the defense budget.
So now we have a new study on the defense budget that says we need more money because of the emerging threats of Russia and China, which I think is greatly exaggerated.
But at least there is that bit of good news, that there's a growing sense in the military, and I suppose I'd go so far as to say the foreign policy establishment, that what we tried to do in the Middle East just hasn't worked and isn't working now and is not going to work in the future.
And that the best, our best option will probably be to let the region to itself, let the people there sort it all out.
And Israel is more than capable of defending itself.
They don't need us.
Obviously, we're going to continue to sell them weapons and applaud them at the appropriate points.
But there is a sense that this is getting really now too costly, and it's eroding our military capabilities significantly and crucially.
So I do think, you know, don't hold me to this and don't quote me, but I do think that in a few more years, we're going to be out because we're just not doing anything effective in the region.
Well, you know, I mean, the real flaw in that whole thing is the safe haven myth.
Everywhere we are, we have to stay.
And especially that's reinforced by the kind of half-truth story of Iraq War III, where because American soldiers weren't there in Western Iraq, ISIS was able to roll in.
And Trump cited specifically that same thing in his speech announcing the escalation in Afghanistan.
And it's in the Woodward book that Mattis basically just outright resorted to extortion and just said, if you pull out of Afghanistan, anything bad happens thereafter that I'm blaming it on you.
And so not even anything bad that happens here because a Egyptian terrorist launches an attack from Afghanistan somehow.
But anything bad happens there, I'm going to hang you out to dry, Mr. President.
And so that was what it took to get him to finally back down.
But they bring that up all the time everywhere.
And there's not a very good answer for that, right?
Because at this point, there's a brand new study out, I don't know exactly how accurate it is, that says that there are now tens of thousands of these bin Ladenite, either ISIS or al-Qaeda type fighters from Nigeria to the Philippines.
And it's hard to end that sentence for an expert.
It's hard to end that sentence with anything but and we have to do something about it.
And never mind the fact that everything they do makes it worse and worse and worse.
And a lot of times, terrorism is just an excuse for getting away with completely unrelated agendas.
It always just makes the terrorism problem worse and worse.
So, you know, the best argument that well, we just have to quit and hope it dries up, but no longer try to, to kill it away anymore.
That's not a very satisfying answer for a lot of never mind people who are in the foreign policy establishment, but just regular American hawks.
That sounds like surrender to the bad guys and whatever, you know, that, that, yeah, that's right.
It does make people feel uncomfortable.
But there was a time in our history as a country, where our leaders realized that there were just some things that we couldn't do anything about.
You know, the Chinese Civil War raged, there was a civil war in China that lasted two decades before Japan's invasion, we stayed out.
There wasn't any way that we could affect the outcome of that, or that we even considered it was our business.
We stayed out of World War One for three years.
And I think it's still debatable among American historians, whether it was really that wise decision to get involved.
The American people recoiled from that after the end of World War One, decided to stay out of Europe's business.
People decry that now as appeasement, wasn't appeasement.
You know, it was a decision we made because people did not want to send their sons to Europe to die in wars between France and Germany, which seems to me to be an eminently reasonable position to take.
There are just some things in the world that we can't do anything about.
And people say, well, you know, we have to shape and listen, we, you know, our, our diplomatic arm of our foreign policy establishment is unused.
And the military arm of our foreign policy establishment is overused.
So if we really want to, you know, rebuild the American Republic, the one way we could do that would be to stop the serial deployments of American forces overseas, save ourselves a few bucks, and we'll live with the results of whatever it is.
Syria staying with Assad.
It's a shame.
It's too bad.
But really, it's not our business.
It's not.
And, and, and this might be eminently more reasonable and less costly foreign policy than the one we've been married to over the last 15 years, which has not worked.
Yeah, well, you know, they call it liberal hegemony, and either liberal means commit genocide, or they forgot about the liberal part.
And it's just hegemony.
You know, it's funny, it's amazing, actually, from here in Texas, especially here, I appreciate being removed from all this to see all the wonks argue about, you know, what the policy should be, without ever really having to acknowledge anything like a realistic appraisal of the amount of pain and suffering and what would be called murder, if it wasn't government forces doing it, that had been perpetrated by American power, just in the century so far.
And they, they say it hasn't worked, but they don't say, man, we might go to hell for what we did.
You know, it's what we did was wrong.
You know, they're not worried about whether it was wrong.
They're just worried about whether it worked.
I can remember coming home from the Middle East in the midst of the Anbar uprising, and the second Intifada in the West Bank had just cooled down.
And I remember thinking, you know, we're going to pay, we're going to pay for this hubris for generations.
And I think we are.
I think we are going to pay for it.
I think we are going to pay for it.
But what's interesting about the current situation is that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi has kind of become a rallying point for cleaning up our foreign policy.
I mean, I, you know, I, and I don't mean to be overly disrespectful or glib or sound glib, but I don't, I don't think that any of these senators who are opposed to this Saudi intervention in Yemen and are voting to end our help to the Saudis on this war are doing so because they have absolute respect for freedom of the press and a guy like Jamal Khashoggi.
The discomfort was there long before he was murdered, and it's now been, but he's now served as a kind of a rallying cry for getting us the hell out of this war.
And I think that that instinct, that kind of default position of enough of this is actually a good sign.
It shows that 15 years after 9-11, the American people are fed up, I think exhausted by this, these kinds of conflicts and don't see any use in them.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, someone was pointing out to me a YouTube video of American special operations forces fighting in Afghanistan and how the comment section had a lot of, Hey, good shot.
And thanks for serving your country and whatever.
But it also had a lot of comments that said, what are we doing in Afghanistan after all these years?
Which is, you know, not typically the place you would expect to find comments like that, but it's people who are totally, you know, gung ho pro soldier and into, you know, army culture and watching war videos on YouTube and this kind of thing.
And, you know, they basically sound like Ron Paul by now.
Like, well, I'm not against you shooting people in principle, but I do have to wonder about the utility of this.
Well, I think that there's another kind of current that we're seeing, and that is the, you know, there's a sense, I think, a growing sense among large numbers of Americans, maybe not the majority, but large numbers of Americans that the United States has been poorly served by its senior military leaders, that they are not what we think they are.
And I take some recent examples, you know, Stanley McChrystal blabbing to a Rolling Stone reporter and basically being fired by President Obama is now writing a book on leadership and running a course on leadership at Yale University, which leads me astounded.
I know, man.
You know what?
Here in town, I've seen billboards for him and Petraeus and all these others doing speaking tours and Colin Powell doing speaking tours about how to be a great man and all this stuff.
Like, all you guys have done is started and lost and started and escalated and lost wars.
How in the world can they be up on that stage bragging like they've accomplished anything?
And then David Petraeus giving classified information to a woman he's having an affair with.
John Kelly talking about, you know, a member of Congress being an empty barrel.
You know, this this kind of goes on and on.
And you think that I asked senior officers who I know well, you know, from the Army, I said, who's the who's the best officer in your lifetime?
And they'll say Stanley McChrystal, I think.
Wow, the bar must really be low.
And their second answer is usually David Petraeus.
Well, they really do say that, huh?
Because I was wondering if that was just public relations or what?
Actual soldiers think that these two clowns that lost two wars in a row are their greatest heroes?
Well, I mean, they make they make the claims and I and I think they're defensible claims.
Well, these are the really good soldiers knew what they were doing, put in impossible situations that may well be.
But I'm not even I'm not even talking about the wars.
I'm talking about, you know, the public humiliation of having to admit that you talked about the vice president of the United States while drinking Bud Light limes in a European bar.
Out of turn when you shouldn't have in front of a Rolling Stone reporter.
What kind of leadership is that?
Or David Petraeus, you know, admitting to an affair with a young woman who wrote a high geography about him and he gave her classified information.
Or John Kelly, who serves the president of the United States, and we dub him the adult in the room.
And it turns out he's not really that much of an adult.
He's basically a Boston conservative.
You know, good for him.
That's his background.
But he's not the adult in the room, as it turns out.
So you've got and you've got instances of this over and over and over again.
And I think it comprises a kind of crisis in leadership in our military.
We simply don't have the kinds of senior leaders that we need to to lead our military.
And we haven't quite sometimes.
These guys are not Eisenhower and Marshall.
You know, they're Petraeus, Kelly and McChrystal.
And I think people feel let down by that.
There is a sense of we have not been as well served as we would like to think.
Fine, we can stand up in the fourth inning of a baseball game to applaud our veterans.
Fine, we can, you know, listen to them as they sit portentously at Yale University and lecture us about leadership.
But they've come up short, I think, in public perception.
Yeah, well, I mean, this is no way a representative sample or anything, obviously.
But in my line of work, I get a lot of contact from veterans all the time now, at least, you know, regularly, I guess would be the word for it, who agree with me, and who review my book on Amazon and what have you, what have you and just say, you know, this is it.
A guy just said the other day, one of the reviews, like, hey, I've spent a good part of my life in Afghanistan and different roles over there and hate to say it, but this book is spot on and damn it.
You know, so that's pretty good.
And, and you know what, it's not that it's that persuasive of an argument.
It's just that I happen to be correct.
And so it's a pretty easy case to make that, as you said, it's crazy.
How can anybody believe in the Afghan war at this point, you know?
Yeah, no, this is, this string is out on, I think, the Afghan war.
It'll be interesting in the years ahead, once we get past our current domestic political crisis, which would probably last another year or two, that, you know, there's, I think that there's going to be a reckoning, I suppose is the way you would put it, there's going to be a reckoning on all of this.
And I think that we're going to see the American people who are divided, but I think that they're united on becoming more and more united on these.
If only Ron Paul was 25 years younger right now, you know?
Well, we're going to have to look for different leadership.
That's for sure.
Yeah, Dennis Kucinich is still young, but he doesn't have a seat in Congress anymore.
They gerrymandered him right out of his seat since they couldn't defeat him at the ballot box.
All right, so you got to go.
We don't have time still.
We don't have time to talk about your Sudan piece.
I think we're going to have to wait.
We're going to have to wait on it.
I've got an 1130 and I'm a little bit late on it.
That's all right.
And after we put this together, it's going to be more than an hour anyway.
But I'll mention it's Saudi Arabia's blood pact with a genocidal strongman.
That's about Sudanese mercs in the Yemen war.
Thanks so much for your time, Mark.
Listen, I appreciate it as always.
All right, you guys.
The American Conservative magazine is where you can find that as well as today's spotlight on antiwar.com.
Trump's decision to leave Syria was no surprise.
We heard Scott talk about the crowdsourcing effort on Reddit about his upcoming book.
All you got to do to get in is to donate $5 a month to Scott's Patreon and request to join the private Reddit group.
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If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either myself at Birdarkist or Car at Car Camp It 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.
