All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Mark Perry, Pentagon reporter writing this time for Foreign Policy.
Lloyd Austin isn't who you think he is, and some good news for me here, maybe.
Welcome back.
Mark, how are you doing?
It's great to be here.
I'm doing well.
I hope you are too.
I'm doing great, man.
Really appreciate you joining us here.
So Lloyd Austin is being named as the nominee for the new Secretary of Defense in the Biden administration, just like with James Mattis, they're going to have to get a waiver because the law says that if you are going to make a military guy the Secretary of Defense, he has to have been gone for seven years, because this is a limited constitutional republic where we have civilian supremacy over the military.
But maybe that's just the most obvious and kind of surface sort of reaction to this guy moving from CENTCOM to a board of directors or two for a few years, and then now to the Secretary of Defense job.
But you know a lot about this guy, and a lot about the way he looks at a lot of important things.
So, you know, I guess if we could just start with the basics of, I guess, in the article you talk about his role in Iraq War II and how he ended up the leader of Central Command and all this stuff.
Well, I mean, it was a, to be honest, this was a kind of a surprise appointment.
I think everyone thought it was a surprise.
David Austin is a West Point graduate, obviously African-American, well thought of inside the military, paratrooper, tough guy, very good strategically and tactically on the ground.
In the second Gulf War, he came up with the Thunder Runs to take Baghdad, received an officer evaluation report that, as I said, my article kicked him into the stratosphere and proceeded upwards, up the chain of command to four stars, a very quiet, kind of reticent officer.
I met him one time, he's huge, he's massive.
His hands are about as big as your head.
He's very gruff.
He makes George Patton appear squeamish, I would say, in comparison.
I mean, he's really an impressive figure.
But it's a controversial pick because, as you noted, he needs a waiver to serve as Secretary of Defense.
There's a lot of opposition to that because we had two previous waivers, one to George Marshall after World War II, so he could be Secretary of Defense, and one to James Mattis, as we all remember, so he could be Secretary of Defense.
So there's a lot of opposition, I think, to Austin's nomination.
I think he'll be approved, there's no question.
But there are many, many people inside the Democratic Party who are disappointed by the pick.
There are many in the Republican Party who are disappointed by the pick.
But as I said in my article, I think that a lot of the opposition comes not to Austin, but to the fact that he's an advocate for what I call strategic patience.
He's not out there willing to pick a fight.
He's very much a pro-alliance, pro-diplomacy military officer.
He's not cut in the mold of David Petraeus, or Ray Odierno, or any of the other kind of Iraq War veterans.
He's a very different kind of military officer, a believer in diplomacy.
All right, now, so that's really important, I think, that there is a real reason that there's opposition to this guy in Washington, D.C., and it's not because they believe so strongly in our constitutional tradition of civilian supremacy.
It's that they're afraid that he's not bad enough on some things.
Yeah, that's right.
We've had defense secretaries, especially under Trump, and secretaries of state under Trump, who are out there picking a fight with China, who are kind of imbued with this language that China is a major aggressor and a major threat.
I think Austin looks at it a little bit differently.
There's no question that he believes that China is a challenge, but the question is, how do you deal with that?
I think that Lloyd Austin is a builder of coalitions and alliances, as I said, a real advocate for diplomacy.
And I think this doctrine of strategic patience that he advocates is quite a counterpoint to somebody like Michelle Flournoy, who Biden might have picked but didn't.
And I think specifically for the reason that Michelle Flournoy has cut in the mold of a neoliberal interventionist, and Biden is not that, and neither is Lloyd Austin.
Well, if Biden is not that, is he not that anymore?
No, I think that there's strong reason to believe that Biden was always very reticent about the use of military force in the first years of the Obama administration when there was, as we recall, as you will recall, there was a big debate over what to do about Afghanistan.
It was Biden who weighed in with the counterterrorism strategy.
Go after al Qaeda, leave the Taliban alone, be very judicious in your military response.
Biden opposed the huge surge that Obama later approved, and Austin agreed with him.
So Biden and Austin are very compatible in terms of foreign policy and their foreign policy views.
I mean, I'd go so far as to say that if you take a look at all of the cabinet picks that Biden has made, Biden himself is to the left of everyone.
He might be, and I say this very hesitantly, but I think that there's a case that can be made.
I think that Biden is really the first true progressive president that we've had or are going to have since Franklin Roosevelt.
He's very hesitant to use force overseas.
He's a domestic policy president.
He believes in building American strength internally.
And as I said, he doubles down on the use of diplomacy.
He's very much a pro-diplomacy political thinker.
Well, I mean, he was horrible on Iraq War II, but then again, I think he got really burned by that.
And you're right that he was the absolutely least worst person in the Obama cabinet when it came to the Afghan surge and really tried to talk Obama out of that.
You know, they say, in fact, I've read a couple of good reports about the fight in the Oval Office over Libya, and he was supposedly on the good side of that one.
But, you know, I don't know, Mark, about what Biden's position ever was on Syria.
The only thing I know about that is the great quote from where he's at Harvard University, and he blames it all on our allies, of course, but he's indicting his own and Obama's own policy of backing the jihadists in Syria and that whole thing getting out of control.
Do you know about that, whether he had advised for or against that or what he thought about regime change against Assad?
Biden is not without his negatives.
I was reading this morning that he believes in forward deployment.
I'm not so sure that's true, but that seems to be where the evidence is that he's, you know, he's forward deployment of American troops.
I find that disturbing.
He was hesitant about an involvement in Syria.
He was hesitant about an involvement in Libya, but he went along.
Let's not forget, he voted for Gulf War II.
So there are some negatives there.
But I think on balance and considering the alternatives in the Democratic Party and the kind of the Hillary Clinton, Michelle Flournoy mafia that we're faced with, that he's probably, you know, he's the best hope for a foreign policy of offshore balancing, of staying away from the serial interventions that we've had over how many years now, 19 years in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
He's not a guy who's going to come in and withdraw American troops overseas and close the bases and cut the Defense Department and the State Department.
He's not that kind of a guy.
He's basically, I guess my best hope for his foreign policy within reason would be that he would essentially have like a Tulsi Gabbard policy, which is she's a real hawk on al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Just no more regime change wars on their behalf, please, which is reasonable enough, you know, as far as it goes.
But I think that seems to be his idea, right?
Going back to Afghanistan in 2009, let's just focus on killing the bad guys.
But the thing is, if you ask Gabbard or Biden, that's a pretty long list if you want, because you can throw in al-Shabaab and you could throw in three or four different groups calling themselves al-Qaeda or ISIS in North Africa and West Africa.
You could go as far as the Philippines.
You could stay in Afghanistan.
It doesn't matter that they never prove it.
They just say every once in a while that, well, the UN says there's still al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
So you could take that and run with it for eight years and have a war on, even if they don't overthrow a single more secular dictator, they could still fight bin Ladenite militias from here to the other side of the world for the next two terms, seems like.
Well, I mean, I think the litmus test we're going to be faced with here early on is Yemen.
Austin is very, was very hesitant to support the Saudi intervention in Yemen.
Why make a bad situation worse?
He was really angry about it.
The Saudis did not give us a heads up on what they were going to do.
He predicted that they would have trouble.
They've had trouble.
He predicted that we would end up having to help them out of a mess that they created.
He was right.
So I think that the early test in the first months of the Biden administration are going to be whether we continue to support this completely irrational Saudi intervention.
And if I were a betting man, and I am, I would bet that the Biden administration would send a clear message to the Saudis that it's time to end this misadventure.
And I think the second test is what Biden would do about our continued support for dictators, especially in the Middle East and especially in Egypt.
And my bet is that Biden would send a very strong signal to Sisi in Egypt that there's a limit to our patience with his continued serial violations of human rights.
It'll be interesting to see what form that takes.
We're not sure, but I'll bet that those two things will happen pretty early on and that they'll be controversial in the Congress.
They'll be controversial among the neoconservatives and the neoliberals.
But my sense is that that's where Biden's heart is, that he's fed up with the United States supporting very questionable interventions, particularly in the Middle East.
Yeah.
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Well, okay, I want to get back to Egypt in a second there because that's interesting, but on Yemen, this of course is the worst war going on in the world right now.
It's the worst thing America's done since Syria and Iraq war two.
It's equivalent to the two other worst things America has done in this century.
You know, and of course Libya and Afghanistan are right there too, but it's just crazy because the way that the war is designed, it's deliberately designed to inflict punishment on the civilian population of the country in a way.
You know, they call it leading from behind.
It's the Saudi's war.
It's just America's enabling every inch of it, but it's being waged in a way that is absolutely in defiance of the War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions that our Senate has ratified and the rest of it.
And so importantly, isn't this great?
Everybody, I got Mark Perry on the line.
He's the guy that wrote in March of 2015 that the guys at Central Command, they don't like this, not one bit.
And you know, famously now, everyone knows because I say it every day, that the Wall Street Journal and Almonitor, Barbara Slavin and Almonitor, both reported in January of 2015 that Central Command was working with the Houthis.
And Michael Vickers, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, explained to the Atlantic Council that, yeah, what we're doing is we're giving the Houthis intel and they're using it to kill Al-Qaeda guys.
And now you're reminding me, and this is in your piece, who was running CENTCOM at the time?
General Lloyd Austin.
So not only was he against intervening, which he did, he clicked his heels and enforced these orders rather than quitting, but he was the guy who had been working with the Houthis and was being told now to turn around and stab them in the back on behalf of the Saudis and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Yes, that's right.
That's exactly right.
You know your history and you have a good memory.
Not many Americans do on foreign policy issues.
But this is now our new Secretary of Defense designate.
And I think that we need to at least give a nod to the opposition here who are likely to kind of ignore the history that you cite and to hide behind this, well, this is bad for civilian-military relations and Biden is flouting the law.
Biden is doing no such thing.
Biden has acknowledged that he needs a waiver.
That's acknowledging the civilian-military divide.
Right.
You know what?
The PC aspect is going to cover that anyway.
He's not going to have a problem getting sworn in.
I think that you're right.
But you know, as we saw yesterday, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about, you know, from a Republican, no less neoconservative, we need to be concerned about civilian-military relations.
Well, they weren't so concerned about civilian-military relations when it came to James Mattis.
And in my estimation, Mattis was not that effectively a head of the Pentagon.
He surrounded himself with military officers, kind of a Mattis mafia that really built walls between the military and civilian leadership.
Austin has already vowed that he won't do that.
He's very aware of the Mattis reputation on this.
So, you know, there are some pluses here outside of the foreign policy issue.
And I think that it could be a real plus that we have a four-star, particularly now when we are facing some real changes inside the Pentagon, including a prospective cut to its budget.
Austin is the guy who's going to have to implement that.
I mean, here's the deal.
So, I'm glad you brought up Mattis because we just had this discussion.
I forget which show it was.
Somebody was interviewing me and we were talking about how when Trump hired Mattis, what he obviously should have done, and apparently they did not have this conversation, right?
But the conversation was supposed to have been, listen, I'm going to bring the troops home from the Middle East.
Mr. Secretary General, your job is going to be to stand there and cover my right flank and tell the American people that it's okay to do this.
We are ending these wars.
That's the job.
Do you want it?
And they didn't have that conversation.
But that's the exact same conversation that Biden needs to be having with this guy, Austin, right now.
Say they're going to keep the terror wars going.
I expect that and accept that.
I'm against it, but you know what I mean, but just the reality of it.
But say like on China, this guy wants to have strategic patience on China.
Well, Joe Biden needs a really big, strong, tough general guy to say that actually we're not too worried about China and we can take this slow and we don't need to panic and we don't need to build five new aircraft carriers and put a thousand new nukes online and this kind of thing because his right flank is covered.
Lindsey Graham can't call him a wimp because he's got Lloyd Austin standing there.
Now, is that or is that not the job that he was hired to do, to protect Biden's right flank as he does dove-ish sort of things?
And that to me is the only question that it really comes down to.
I don't disagree with you, but if you and I follow the logic of this to its natural conclusion, here's what I think we're going to see as a result of my articles and your radio spots and your articles and where we are in the world, is that Lloyd Austin is going to come up for his confirmation hearings and he's going to say stuff like, no, no, no, no, no, I think that China is a real threat and don't you worry, Senators, I'm going to face them down.
And when he does that, I think that now he's going to be more or less forced to do that just so he doesn't lose votes in the Senate Armed Services Committee, sadly.
When he does that, you and I can sit back with a wry smile and hope that what he's doing is getting his confirmation numbers in order, but that deep down, he's a guy who's favoring strategic patience.
If I had to predict, I would think that that's what Lloyd Austin is going to do.
He's going to shore up his right wing, as you rightly point out, as the guy who's the tough guy.
But when he gets into the Pentagon, he's going to be facing an agenda from the President of the United States that is primarily and almost solely domestic, as Biden himself has made clear.
Yeah, we'll see about that.
In an empire, foreign policy always comes first.
Don't you know there's a war on?
Whatever you care about has got to wait, you know, so we'll see.
But so there's a couple more things I want to ask you about here.
Michelle Flournoy, why didn't she get the job, Mark?
Well, my understanding is that the president-elect early on, soon after his election, had a long discussion, Sunday afternoon discussion with her, telephone conversation.
And she was the presumptive nominee.
She's very intelligent.
She's extremely well connected.
She connects Biden to the Hillary Clinton side of the party very effectively.
But that conversation did not go well.
And I think that it was in the wake of that conversation that Biden began to search around for an alternative.
You know, the bench isn't actually that deep for potential Pentagon nominees.
And I mean, to be honest, Biden was having a lot of pressure being brought to bear by James Clyburn to appoint somebody who was an African American.
But I think that what really weighed in is Biden had a strong personal relationship with Lloyd Austin, admired him.
You know, they're not fast friends.
I have a packet of materials here that shows them at a Christmas party together at the vice president's residence.
They've known each other since at least 2010.
And I, you know, I think that Washington being what it is, being what it is, at the end of the day, it was a strong personal relationship that really made a difference.
Biden is just comfortable with this guy.
And that matters.
Do you know, it sounds like you got a pretty good source or two on this.
Do you know what it was that Flournoy said that really alarmed Biden or made him not like her in that call?
Well, I think that she overplayed her hand.
My understanding is that she overplayed her hand.
Then, you know, he said to her, well, maybe, you know, we don't really agree on key foreign policy issues.
And she said, oh, I'm not so sure that's true.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing here from accounts that I've been given.
She said, I'm not so sure that's true, but I'm a consensus builder.
And that kind of, you know, that kind of set Biden back a little bit.
He's not looking for a consensus builder.
He's looking for a strong personality.
And, you know, Biden and Flournoy, they go back a ways.
I mean, she stood on the other side of issues in Syria and Libya, on Iraq.
You know, she was not supportive of his point of view when he was vice president.
So, you know, the air presumptive in these cases are, and the person whose name is on everyone's lips very often don't get these kinds of positions.
And it just turned out to be that was the case with her.
I think she will get a prominent position somewhere in the national security establishment.
And she could even be the Secretary of Defense in waiting.
But for now, I think it was her, it was really a policy decision on the part of the vice president.
He wanted somebody who agreed with his views.
And that's Lloyd Austin.
Well, and yeah, she certainly was, you know, one of the leaders.
She was the co-founder of CNAS for the purpose of pushing the Afghan surge, and, you know, wanted even more than the 60,000 extra troops they got and all that.
So she was the worst of the worst on that.
And you know what, Mark, I saw this headline, and then I went back looking for it, and I couldn't find it anywhere.
Maybe I need to try this again.
But I saw some kind of headline that referenced that Biden had a grudge against her, not from the start of the Afghan surge, but from the end of it.
And that in 2011, or 12 ish, that the quote was something to the effect of she had tried to game Obama on the drawdown from the surge.
And, you know, by I guess, we won't call them combat troops, we'll call them something else, one of these kinds of things.
And that Biden kind of took that personally and had a grudge on that, where they were sort of trying to end run and resist Obama's holding them to their promise that they were going to accomplish this surge in 18 months and then draw down.
That was the deal.
And they didn't want to live up to their end of the deal.
I think that's quite possible.
I know that Biden was rubbed a little raw by the decision making process on the Afghan surge.
He even believed, I think, that Obama was kind of gamed by the military on the numbers.
And he felt it was kind of his job as vice president to protect the young president from a military that was selling him a bill of goods.
And he did.
He regularly warned Obama about the military, got to be careful of these guys.
And, you know, if you're going to trace the details of the Afghan surge debate and write about it, as I have, it's the ins and outs are really fascinating.
And the one guy who kind of comes across as being the most reticent and questioning of the military is Joe Biden, not Barack Obama.
And I think that that's a key ingredient to understanding what kind of president he will be.
Yeah, I hope that's right.
Although, you know, I mean, Jake Sullivan, that's Hillary Clinton's right hand man, alter ego, mirror image.
He's not just her assistant.
He apparently, the way I've read about him recently, there was a bunch of kind of write ups of him where, you know, these two are Siamese twins, him and Hillary Clinton.
He's the worst hawk on everything, refuses to admit that Libya might have been a mistake even now, and says that, oh, no, well, there's a real problem with the Houthis.
We should double our support for the Saudis and because of their security challenges that they're facing.
Like, oh, my God, this is the new national security advisor.
Well, you're right.
And there's no way for me to kind of soft pedal that.
No silver lining on him.
No silver lining.
But, you know, my I suppose my, you know, my hope here is that, you know, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken are creatures of Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is going to be the commander in chief.
And Jake Sullivan is a savvy internal affairs kind of operator.
He knows where all the levers and bells and whistles are in the national security establishment.
You need a guy like that.
Blinken, it would not be Tony Blinken without Joe Biden.
You know, these are not officials who are going to go willy nilly off on their own doing whatever they want.
So, you know, the question then for us is, is Joe Biden going to be a strong commander in chief, a strong leader?
Is he, you know, is he going to stand up as president ought to do to his national security staff and say, no, let's not do that or let's do this instead?
And I, you know, depends on your faith in Joe Biden.
I have a lot more faith in him than a lot of people I know.
I think that Joe Biden could be quite a good leader.
Well, you know, I disagree with that for a great number of reasons.
But if you're grading him on a curve, at least he knows how to read, unlike our last two Republican presidents.
And when you compare him to Obama, the Democrat between them, he was right there, VP.
And he was apparently, you know, I know on Afghanistan for sure, as we've established, but apparently he was the least worst on a lot of these wars in the Obama years and tended to counsel patients.
After all, we should mention this.
I think, you know, why not?
This is a huge part of this is at some point, Mark, Biden realized that he killed Beau.
And Beau Biden, he didn't get shot in Iraq, but he died of brain cancer that he got from the burn pit next to the base where he was stationed there in Iraq War Two.
And at some point, I think after he died, somebody pointed out that there's a whole chapter about your son in Joseph Hickman's book, The Burn Pits.
And this is what happened.
And I think Joe can't forget the fact that he was George Bush's whip in the Senate in 2002, in lying us and pushing us into that war and forbidding all antiwar dissent from testifying at his bogus hearings and giving long winded speeches about the danger of Iraq's weapons and ties to Osama and the rest of it.
And so that's really, to me, if I could say anything about Biden, I think he's a bit more human than a lot of these senators, you know, like Mitt Romney.
I don't know.
But Joe Biden, I could see him really having bitter regret.
But with the real understanding of his own responsibility to not just blaming it all on Bush or Cheney, but knowing that he was the one who helped them to do it.
And so if he hadn't learned a good lesson from that, then we're just screwed.
But that seems like, you know, a good reason to think that maybe this is the less worse version of Biden that's ever really been in power this whole time.
Well, you know what I'm going to say?
I'm not in the business of doing psychological profiles of presidents or anyone.
But I think that Joe Biden justifiably feels a deep emotional tug to bow.
And I don't doubt that he's turned over in his mind a series of steps that he took in his life, perhaps some regrets.
But my other comment is, you know, I understand the discomfort among some with Joe Biden's previous votes on these war issues.
But you know, I'm with you, the bar is low.
Thank God we have four years of Joe Biden and not another four of Donald Trump.
All of that said, I still believe very firmly given the evidence we have, that is the appointments that Joe Biden has made in the national security establishment, that Joe Biden is likely to be a far more progressive president than Barack Obama.
Who would have guessed that 12 years ago?
But that we're about to see the advent of a much more rational and restrained foreign policy.
At least that's my hope.
Right on.
Well, you know what?
I've been trying to put myself out of business this whole time, and I totally suck at it.
So if Joe Biden wants to end the wars, and I got to go get a real job then that'd be great.
I'll take it for sure.
Let me ask you one more thing before I let you go.
Listen, what's this about Egypt?
Did Biden say something specific about he does not cut into the way Sisi's running Egypt right now?
He made an allusion to Egypt that, you know, we need to have a rethink on foreign policy, and particularly as regards autocratic governments and in the Middle East.
This was about a week and a half ago.
And I take that as kind of a signal that we're going to rethink Sisi.
I have no idea what that rethinking would involve.
Yeah, I mean, I hope that doesn't mean another regime change, you know.
You know, Egypt has been marginalized anyway.
It's not the cornerstone that it was once of our foreign policy.
It'll be interesting to see what Joe Biden does.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time on the show again, Mark.
Hope you have a great Merry Christmas and all of that.
Merry Christmas to you.
Thank you very much.
All right, you guys.
That's Mark Perry.
He is at this time at foreignpolicy.com.
Lloyd Austin isn't who you think he is.
