Hey y'all, next Wednesday, January the 3rd, I'm giving a talk for Thaddeus Russell's Renegade University at thaddeusrussell.com on the history of the war in Afghanistan.
Of course, based on my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And it's supposed to last a couple of hours and you guys will be able to participate with questions and answers and all that.
So that's next Wednesday, January the 3rd at 8.30 Eastern, 5.30 Pacific.
And to register, just go to thaddeusrussell.com.
See you there.
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, he died.
We ain't killing they 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 Matthew Ho.
You know him, he's a whistleblower from the war in Afghanistan.
He was in Iraq War II as a Marine and then was in Afghanistan working for the State Department.
And you know, Obama could have hid behind Matt and denied the surge in 2009.
He could have said that, listen, this guy, Matthew Ho, the State Department expert just got back from there and he just said, don't do it.
And now the former general in charge and now his boss, the ambassador, agrees with him.
And we got, you know, at least what general, was it Lute or I forgot which one, one of these war czar guys up there on the National Security Council, National Security Advisor.
He didn't want to do it either.
And they're just as good as Petraeus.
And they say we shouldn't bother.
But instead he ignored Matthew Ho and he ignored Ikenberry, the ambassador, and ignored the rest of them and went ahead and gave in to Petraeus and prolonged the war and got a lot more people killed.
I'm not sure if he changed anything else there than that.
But Matt, you know, first of all, welcome back to the show.
And second of all, you know, thanks for trying, man.
That's actually a valiant effort on your part.
People should go back and look at that stuff.
Of course, it's in my book, but it's also just read it and weep at the Washington Post about how it did not have to be this way at all.
Hi.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
And yeah, happy holidays to you and yours.
And I know it's been eight years since that happened.
And as, I mean, I don't think you can find many people who were as negative as I was about where we were going in 2009, you know, particularly just because of my emotional point, you know, in 2009.
But I don't think, I don't know if anyone would believe that eight years later, we'd be at this point with Afghanistan, let alone the rest of the Muslim world that we're bombing and have troops and have proxy forces and are blockading and starving people and, you know, everything else.
But I mean, it just baffles the mind, right?
That this is where we're at.
And it's such a tragedy, but I appreciate your kind words and your comments there.
Yeah, well, you know, well, let me introduce you better here for a second.
Center for International Policy, ciponline.org.
That's where you do your work there.
People should look at that.
Sorry, I don't always get this stuff straight.
Matthewhoe.com as well, H-O-H, Matthewhoe.com.
And look, it seems like you and Daniel Davis are almost kind of bookends on the surge there in terms of your whistleblowing.
You said, don't do it.
And Davis at the end said, boy, did this not work?
It's not working.
Whatever you do, don't extend it now, kind of a thing.
And both of you put at the center of your arguments, hey, look, I'm piling around over there with guys who are now dead.
And before they died, they didn't believe in the mission because it's a stupid mission and they knew that.
And they didn't survive it.
So what the hell are we doing?
And I'm roughly paraphrasing, but the both of you said the same thing for that.
I got to look these guys in the eyes and say, go back out there?
Go back out there?
Why?
Yeah, I mean.
And they know better and they do it because they have to, but man.
Danny and I have been friends for a while.
We were friends.
I was introduced to Danny just a month or two after my resignation letter was made public by, you know, Gareth Porter introduced us.
Gareth had gotten in contact with me and he said, you know, I'm talking to this army officer.
I think it'd be really great if you guys sat down and had lunch one day.
And it was Danny.
Is that guy the best or what?
What, sorry?
I just mumbled, is that guy the best or what?
Oh yeah, Gareth is just, you know, I mean, yeah, exactly.
If anyone's listening and you haven't read Gareth Porter's stuff, stop listening and go read Gareth Porter.
Or listen to Gareth on Scott's show because he's on often.
But I mean, like, good gosh.
But yeah, we were coming from exactly that same perspective where we knew so many guys who didn't believe in a mission as well as to, you know, I mean, I go and send this resignation letter and it goes through the embassy and my counterparts, I was in Zabul province which was in the Southeast.
And we were like the fifth most violent province in Afghanistan.
But my political officer counterparts, I was with the state department and I was assigned to a provincial reconstruction team.
And I was, and so as a political officer on that team you're in charge for the politics of the region and you work daily with the governor and, you know, I mean, you're basically a quasi-colonial administrator.
So in some ways you can imagine if you come from that line of work, like I was, this is like the best job ever.
I mean, like this is just an incredible thing to have now been in, but it was built upon the lies and the death and the immorality of it all.
But anyway, my colleagues who were in Helmand and in Kandahar and Uruzgan and Nuristan and Kunar, and if you're familiar with Afghanistan, you know, those are very difficult provinces in terms of strong support for the insurgency, strong support for the Taliban, lots of American and Afghan security forces killed there.
They all agreed with me, you know, and then I get to the embassy as I'm leaving and the deputy ambassador who, he says to me, he says, you know, I got military age kids and I would not have them serving in this war.
You know, Eikenberry, of course, agrees with me.
Holbrooke tells me he agrees with me, you know, and on and on and on.
And as I'm doing this over the course of the years, I keep meeting people who were in, not the rank and file, but senior people.
I remember being in, I was doing work on the side, basically, I wasn't getting paid, but a couple of times, the Dutch, in 2010, the Dutch pulled out of, 2009, 2010, the Dutch pulled out of Afghanistan.
Then they had this crisis in government and conservative government came back in and they wanted the Dutch to go back into Afghanistan, basically to jump back into the quicksand.
And there's a lot of it was because the conservative government in Holland was aligned with, you know, this neoconservative thinking, as well as to the pressure.
I mean, I was told by the Dutch intelligence folks that the American government told the Dutch government after they pulled out of Afghanistan that we're not gonna send our ships to Rotterdam anymore.
So, but anyway, I used to go over to Holland and speak with the Dutch intel people about Afghanistan.
I remember one time giving this lecture to a roomful of them, 50 or 60 Dutch intelligence people, and this big guy sitting in the front row.
And right before we start talking, he tells me he had been the former chief of staff for, you know, Allied Forces, for ISAF, in Afghanistan.
So I'm thinking, this guy is gonna jump all over me.
And I'm not talking for more than 30 seconds, 40 seconds, that his head is bobbling, upping down like a bobblehead doll in agreement.
And I mean, practically jumping out of his seat and yelling, you know, goddamn right at some of the things I was saying.
And you just, so over time, these guys who are senior guys, three-star generals, four-star generals, ambassadors, who know it's wrong, who know it's a lost cause, who know that the people we are backing are just corrupt warlords and drug lords, and as heinous, they're heinous scumbags, just like most of the Taliban are, but they keep going along with it.
And I think that's what we see now.
I mean, look at, people are upset about what the United States is doing, say at the UN now, you see Nikki Haley almost every day coming forth with some type of myth, truth, or falsehood, or allegation, or whatever.
And yesterday, of course, she says, we're gonna be keeping track of who votes against us.
And, you know, there are career Foreign Service people who work for her who are going along with that, who are willingly going along with the disgusting behavior of this administration, just as they went along with the behavior of the past administrations.
And it really says a lot, really says a lot about who we are as a people, I think.
Yeah, well, what are they gonna do, go get a job?
Yeah, I mean, it's almost enough to make a libertarian out of me, Scott, you know?
Listen, I got some pamphlets I'd like you to look at.
All right, so listen, I know a couple of Green Berets, and one of them I met, well, it might be confusing, two different guys.
No, the guy, the Afghan vet that I met recently, very nice guy named Adam, he was a veteran of the Korengal Valley fight, and he was like, yeah, boy, he didn't have a problem with anything I was saying, which bothered me.
You know, I would have rather have been corrected.
That, like, Horton, you're way too negative about this stuff, and then here make some good points, but no, and then I got another guy now that I'm working with on my audio book, the great Derrick Sheriff at Listen and Think, Libertarian Audiobooks, he was a Green Beret over there in Afghanistan, and then for years worked as a guard for Blackwater, standing around, I don't think committing war crimes, just standing around, listening to my show for years, and thinking, yeah, that's pretty much right.
And yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
My experience is yours only on a much lower level, right?
I got, hey, Doug McGregor liked the book.
That's pretty good.
You and Daniel Davis both said, I ain't wrong.
Anand Gopal said, I ain't wrong.
That's pretty damn good, you know?
I would like to hear somebody make a reasonable critique about how, yeah, no, you really don't understand.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I'm quoting Matthew Ho's dissenting report here, and it seems like he had his facts straight.
What are you gonna do?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I asked, so Karen DeYoung, who was the associate editor of the Washington Post, and she was assigned to Hillary Clinton in 2009, and she's the one who wrote the, it ended up being an above-the-fold front-page article on me, I don't know, 3,000 words or 2,500 words or something, no expectation that was gonna happen.
But I asked her afterwards, I said, why did you do this?
Why did you write this up about me?
And she said, because everyone I asked within the government at the White House, at the Pentagon, I mean, she's been around for a long time, Karen, at the State Department, everyone said you were right.
You know, I mean, so we have this.
We have this, this people going along with it, just going along, and we see it over and over again.
The Korengal is such a great example.
You know, when I was there in 09, Admiral Mullen showed up, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at that point, I was the acting political advisor for that part of Afghanistan, for four provinces in Afghanistan.
So I worked with Army Brigade Commander.
And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs shows up, and he goes to the Korengal, and at that point, that was the most deadly place for Americans in Afghanistan.
And he says, ask me two questions.
What are we doing there, and what happens if we leave?
And everybody from like the company commander up through the division commander all said, we can answer the second one, no problem.
Nothing happens if we leave.
Absolutely nothing happens if we leave.
The Korengalis go back to cutting trees down and doing their timber trade and happy that nobody is bothering them.
The first part of the question, why we're there, we don't know, and that was an honest thing.
And so myself and the Brigade S3 had to research this, and the S3 is an operations officer.
So myself and the Brigade S3 have to, we end up calling every company commander who had been in the Korengal, we call one guy and he said, I don't know, we just took over from the guy who was there before.
You know, this is the truth.
You know, and meanwhile, 60 kids, 60 American kids have died in this valley.
And every, you know, captain or major we talked to who have been put there and spent, you know, anywhere from 12 to 15 months there said they didn't know what they were there for.
And finally, I get a hold of a guy in Hawaii.
He was either, he was, I think, a major in the Marine Corps at that point now.
And he had been the first American into the Korengal.
And this was in about 2005.
And I said, why'd you go in there?
And he said, because we'd never been in there before.
And that was it.
That was it.
And then of course, you know, the history of the Korengal, we bring the Afghan police in, they take over the largest, I believe his name was Haji Murad.
No, no, I'm sorry.
That's not Haji Murad.
But I'm not sure, I can't remember his name.
But we take over his, we take over the wealthiest man in the Korengal valleys, Timber Mill, and allow the Afghan police to make it their post, basically, as well as we start taxing them.
You know, we basically bring in these outsiders from Kabul and say, all these mountains here that your families have been harvesting for generations to live off of on the timber, they no longer belong to you.
They belong to Kabul.
And you have to pay a tax on this.
So I mean, you get down to this whole thing where we're in the Korengal over a tax dispute, basically.
You know, and we've been lying about it over and over again, that we're in there to find high value targets or for, you know, to chase after Al-Qaeda.
Nah, I mean, like, this is a valley that, you know, people are in the year 2009 at this point, but even now in 2017, speak their own language.
They speak Korengali, and they never leave the valley.
You know, I mean, like, it was really remarkable to go through that experience.
And I can tell you, for each valley we were in like that, there were probably 25 or 50 other valleys that we were in, you know, throughout Afghanistan.
And for every valley that we were in, there were, you know, an infinite number that we weren't in.
So the notion of having a safe haven was just an absurd thing.
But yeah, it really was.
It was just shocking how, you know, to use the phrase again, the bright shining lie was just a hereto that we're here for this reason.
And this is the reason we're here for, even though there's no evidence of it.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, in Anand's book, No Good Men Among the Living, which I quote in mine, that original timber baron was targeted because of his business competition.
Said, oh, he's with the Taliban.
Get him for me.
And that was the original start of the thing was them being used.
Like, oh, look, a bad guy.
Let's go get them, boys.
And kicked off this whole thing.
Yeah, I remember- Killing innocent people.
Some of the, and that was a joke among the Afghans when I was there.
Some of the Afghans I worked with, I remember one time walking over to a couple of them and they were arguing about something, bickering about something.
And one pointed to the other one and said, this guy's Al-Qaeda, now give me some money.
You know, I mean, like, it was, you know, and Larry Wilkerson talked about this a lot, a former chief of staff to Colin Powell.
You know, the first 700 people we captured in Afghanistan in 01, 02, I guess primarily in 01, all those folks, we didn't capture them.
They were handed over to us, you know?
And then we saw, too, if you want to get into, like, take it a step further with the business competition, you know, the use of, when we do try and eradicate crops of poppies in Afghanistan, it's almost always against the poppy fields of people who are in the government, you know, people who are the competition of the people in the government.
I mean, so like, say, in Nangarhar province where Golgar Sirzai was the governor, you know, he was, we were eradicating poppy fields in Kandahar because that's where his family's poppy fields were.
And so we are eradicating his family's competition.
You know, I mean, it's just so surreal and so fiction-like, Scott, that if your book, which is a terrific book, and I really think the best accounting of what has happened there, particularly with all the documentation you have in there, it's just a terrific accounting of it.
But if you had written that book as a novel, Scott, no one would have published that.
They would have said, this is too far-fetched.
Get out of here.
No one's going to believe this.
This is too over the top.
You know, that this is too, this is too much even for science fiction, you know, but the reality is as the, you know, the trope goes, is reality is always stranger than fiction.
Hey, I'm Scott.
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Thanks.
So back to the politics of Obama giving in, because, you know, I really like you.
And so I kind of build you up a little bit, but it ain't you.
It's Eikenberry.
I just couldn't think of his name for a second.
So I stuttered.
But the point is, Obama could have hid behind Eikenberry.
Eikenberry wasn't some civilian weenie from the State Department.
He, like you, was from the military side.
He was the former general in charge of that war.
And he was saying, forget it.
Pack it up.
And Obama could have just said, you know, look, David Petraeus, you don't like it?
Resign.
This guy, Eikenberry, clearly is right.
You know, he makes arguments.
You have ambitions.
I mean, get the hell out of here with this.
And if he had taken the fight, and I make this case in my book and maybe I'm wrong, but I think if he had just said, yeah, that's why I won the election.
Because people didn't want John McCain and David Petraeus to decide.
They wanted me and Eikenberry to decide that he would have gotten away with that.
It would have been great.
But as it was, he got reelected anyway.
So his calculation that liberals won't mind and conservatives will be placated, you know, on that issue anyway, seemed to kind of pan out for him.
But, you know, oh, go ahead.
I was gonna say, we gotta remember what the politics at the moment were in the fall.
So when he comes in, he wants to be as tough as McCain.
He's gonna win the good war.
So right, as we know, he sends over 30, 40,000 troops right away without discussion.
You know, in the first six months of Afghanistan, we get 30,000, 40,000 more American troops into Afghanistan.
And then you get in the fall, a debate about the surge and everything.
But, you know, I became, after this thing broke about me, I became John Murtha, the former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who was one of the first to speak out against the Iraq war.
He got a hold of me and he had me address actually the entire, I think it was the second week of November of 2009, he had me address the entire Democratic caucus.
So I'm in the Capitol building, in this conference room, there are 200 some odd Democratic congressmen and women sitting there with sandwiches on their lap.
You know, they're having their caucus meeting.
And they, Murtha gets them all fired up.
I do a pretty good job of explaining why this is just completely bankrupt morally, you know, as well as too, it's not gonna work.
And then they're all, I mean, literally, they are, dozens of them are going to the microphones to make the point that they cannot let the president do this, that it's their party, that this is a mistake, that they're repeating, not Vietnam, but they're repeating the Iraq war that they're, you know, and this is against what you just said, Scott.
This is why Obama was elected, to stop these kinds of things.
You know, as much as he said he was gonna win the good war in Afghanistan, when he talked about it, he talked about sending two brigades to Afghanistan during his campaign.
He didn't talk about sending, you know, 70,000, 80,000 more American troops.
But anyway, and then as there, as this discontent is going on among the, oh, I'm not kidding, the entire Democratic caucus that they need to stand up on this, Speaker Pelosi stands up.
And this was the first Democratic caucus meeting since the House had passed the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and Speaker Pelosi pops up and she says, remember what our priorities are.
And do not paint the president into a corner.
That we just passed this, it needs to get through the Senate and we need to implement this and we cannot fight, you know, basically, she kind of basically makes the point of fighting a two-front war.
And that was it.
They all sat back down.
And with the exceptions of, you know, our friends Ron Paul and Walter Jones on the right, and Jim McGovern and Barbara Lee on the left, there was, particularly, 09 and to 10, not a lot of support in the House and only a handful of folks in the Senate who are willing to stand up to the White House and say, this is wrong, you know?
But, I mean, so we have to remember the politics of the moment and how quickly, how quickly Speaker Pelosi stopped that outburst.
What I witnessed was really remarkable.
And that was it, you know?
I mean, if you read Woodward's book on Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
Obama's war, it's called, or Obama's wars, even though it's just about one.
Yeah, what's insightful, because Woodward, and in the books about Bush and everything else, he, you know, he reveals classified information.
He reveals top secret information in the books.
I mean, like, reveals all kinds of discussions, you know?
And these guys and gals in the White House, they're backbiting and ripping on one another, and none of them ever deny that they said this stuff.
But what's missing from Woodward's book, particularly about the book about Afghanistan, is any discussion of domestic politics.
So you're telling me that all throughout this time in 2009, David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel never pulled Obama aside and said, look, this is what is gonna happen.
If you stand up against the war in Afghanistan, and there's a terror attack in New York City or Los Angeles or what have you, you are gonna be vilified by John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and the Republicans.
And you can't take that as a Black Democratic president.
You need to stand firm on this.
Like, why is that discussion not in Woodward's book?
You know, of all the things that are left out, the politics are left out of Woodward's book, particularly the Afghanistan one, the domestic politics.
And we all know, I mean, just look at it.
There's a little bit of that in there.
But yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear what's going on there where he just, well, and we see the exact same thing going on with Trump right now.
If we leave, and he said this explicitly in his speech in August when he announced the escalation, his escalation.
He said, look, if we leave, then anything bad that happens in Afghanistan makes me look bad.
But of course, if we stay, then anything bad that happens in Afghanistan, that's just despite our best efforts.
We got to keep trying.
And so that's the frame of it.
Those are my words, not exactly his, but that's the frame of it.
And so what are you going to do?
And then he, and of course, he specifically invoked Obama leaving Iraq and blamed that for the rise of the Islamic State.
In fact, he used to say that Islamic State was Obama's fault for three reasons, Libya, Syria, and leaving Iraq.
But he dropped the first two reasons and they ended up saying, oh, yeah, Obama created ISIS just because he left Iraq.
The lesson, never leave anywhere.
At least while it's your turn in office, as George W. Bush said, that will be for other presidents, plural, to decide.
In other words, we're never leaving anywhere ever.
Yeah, and that's the same thing.
I mean, you read- Because John McCain will talk bad about you.
And you won't be able to just turn it around and explain why this is all John McCain's fault and everybody knows that.
Yeah, but, and this is the same thing that haunted Lyndon Johnson.
You know what I mean?
Bill Moyers has a, and he published it actually again in 2009 because it's the first time I have read it, about Johnson's decision-making over the Vietnam War in 64 and 65 and 60, you know, late 63 and 64 and 65.
You know, how he's basically, he knows the war is not worth it or can't be won.
Yet, if he doesn't commit, he will be hung up by the Congress.
He will be hung up by, you know, not just the Republicans, but members of his own party, you know?
And the two books I say, if you want to understand these wars, besides Scott Horton's Fool's Errand, you know, but the two books, I say are David Halberstam's Best and the Brightest and Neil Shaheen's A Bright Shining Line.
You know, two books about Vietnam, but those books tell you everything you need to know about why these wars have been the way they are, why they continue to be, and why we're just, you know, and that's like the blurb I wrote for your book, Scott, was because your book is gonna do the same for whatever future wars we're in.
We're in some god awful occupation in, you know, West Africa, say, or wherever it's gonna be.
You know, you can look back 20 years and read Scott Horton's book about Afghanistan and it will be the same reasons we're stuck in this occupation, stuck in this can't win war, cozied up with drug lords and warlords and despots.
Yeah, the same things keep happening over and over and over again.
Yeah, you know, I really need to study public choice theory.
I just sort of know what it is, but I haven't really looked too much at it.
But I think to boil it down, it basically just means that government employees do their own thing, basically.
So that's why the public is always confused because it seems like the things that they do are not in the national interest.
But that's because the national interest isn't what they operate on.
They operate on their own interests within the bureaucracy.
So, you know, one example of this I like is Gordon Prather talked to me and told me one time about how if you go into the nuclear weapons division of the military, well, that's just a career dead end.
Only idiots and losers and know nothings and lazy brains want to go and run the nuclear weapons complex because they just sit around doing nothing.
And that's not where the action is.
And so in the economics of the bureaucracy, you end up having people who really should not be in charge of the H-bombs, in charge of the H-bombs.
The more unreliable men who aren't really fit for duty out there in combat, but we'll have them babysit in H-bombs instead, you know?
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, and it goes, there's a sinister aspect about that too, a really nefarious, murderous aspect about that because that's, you know, and again, going back to Afghanistan, but the same thing was occurring in Iraq and had the same examples.
But since we were talking about Afghanistan, I'll talk about, you know, this one special forces team commander, this captain in 09, I mean, he was really despondent because he was gonna be evaluated on how many doors he kicked in as opposed to something more qualitative.
How many local Afghans have you spoken to?
How many have you gotten to work with us?
But no, he was gonna be compared when he was gonna go for his next promotion or his next selection for his next billet or whatever on his evaluation, when he was gonna be compared to his peers, the primary criteria for his time in Afghanistan was how many doors his team kicked in, right?
And so- Just like the police in your town.
That's exactly right.
How many people have you pulled over?
How many people have you thrown in jail?
That's exactly right.
And the drones, the drones were the same thing.
Once the drones, our drone squadrons, once that became a standard, once the body count, right, particularly once Petraeus takes over CENTCOM and goes into Afghanistan and then becomes CIA director and everything else, once the body count becomes the figure, or the number that we're all, that the folks in the White House and everything are looking at, then if you're a drone squadron commander in order to be the best, then you better kill more people than the guy before you, you know?
And then so, I mean, so you have this, just like you said, this self-interest within the bureaucracy, within the military, that destroys everything around it in order to advance itself, not just preserve itself, but to advance itself, which is why it's so nefarious.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, man, I was supposed to interview you all about the brand new national security strategy.
And boy, am I glad we didn't do this interview before I wrote the book, because then there would have been so much, your, the entire Matthew Ho chapter would have been three times as long with all this great stuff in here.
So.
And I could have sent you a photo, Scott.
It would have just made a whole great centerpiece for the book.
It really would have.
Man, I'll tell you, you know what?
They wouldn't publish my pretty pictures in that book.
So that's why there's no maps.
You got to go to foolserend.org/maps to look at the great maps that should be in there.
And slash Walker if you want to see the war crimes.
I didn't put those in the book either.
But that's the one story I really broke in there was a Walker story.
But listen, so you know what?
Let me just keep you for another few minutes if that's all right.
You got to go?
Yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
So Donald Trump puts out the new national security strategy.
And I don't know if you saw this, but there was the train wreck, which was actually a brand new government project.
And he put out a tweet incorrectly saying this is because of our old rotten infrastructure, which, you know, whatever.
But then he said, because we're wasting money on the wars.
And what I should have tweeted back, but didn't think of it until too late, was, hey, man, blink three times real slow if you're being held hostage.
Like, did they strap a bomb to him?
And they're just like, you know, anyway, I think what it is, is he has no idea what a hypocrite he is.
He puts out this national security strategy, which as I read it, says the same old world empire.
At the same time, he's complaining about the cost of war.
Yeah, I mean, and it's interesting too, because you read the national security strategy.
So I watched his speech first, which was a campaign speech, you know, and anyone else who suffered through it, it was the campaign speech.
He is the leader of American exceptionalism.
He is gonna, you know, make America great, America first, all this stuff.
But he is addressing his political base, as well as to his backers in Israel and Saudi Arabia and other places.
And of course, the defense industry.
But when you get into the national security strategy, when you read this thing, yeah, absolutely, his intro is a campaign speech again.
He says the very, the national security strategy, you know, the line that everyone's going gaga over in terms of what he said during his speech, that he was a glorious new hope, which, you know, alludes to Star Wars, I guess.
I'm not sure where he's getting that from.
But he, in the national security strategy, he basically says the same thing.
He says what, I mean, he's basically talking about what a difference his year in office has made for America.
I mean, if you read it, it is the writing of a despot, of a demagogue, how he is doing all these great things.
And so the dissonance that is within not just him, but say again, Nikki Haley up at the UN, who's able to stand and chastise the Yemeni rebels for sending one or two missiles towards Saudi Arabia, while the Saudis kill dozens and hundreds of men, women, and children every week in Yemen without blinking, you know, I mean, without even having a thought is amazing.
But the document, yeah, the document itself, when you get into the meat of it, you know, the same themes reoccur.
And basically reads to me as we're gonna sell products to people for the people who don't buy American commerce.
We're gonna do bad things to them.
We're gonna coerce them.
And for those who are in our way, like China, they better watch out.
I mean, you read this throughout.
I mean, throughout the Central, throughout the South America section, he talks about China and Russia as much as he does any other nation.
He probably references them more in that document.
And I know I'm saying he, when I know it's the staff that wrote it.
But, you know, I mean, the one thing it does tell you though is that trade in commerce and making money is what is important to him.
And anyone who is standing in the way needs to be crushed.
And that he has no idea how this is supposed to work at all.
He thinks it's all zero sum game of national competition between states.
That's exactly right.
The phrase that some of his surrogates are using is a coopetition or something like that, or some type of cross between cooperation and competition.
Like it is some type of reality show, TV game.
I mean, we can't, you know, one of the things I think that we do as a people is we look back in history and we can see the faults in past leaders.
We can see that this man was, what he did and I'm trying to, now I'm stuck on the name of the general of the British forces, of the British Expeditionary Forces in World War I.
But anyway, he used to hold seances, right?
So you're like, oh, it makes sense how the Brits got 50,000 people killed to some, you know, the guy who led them actually used to believe in seances.
But I think as people, we tend to not believe that our current leaders, that the people who surround us currently are capable of such fallacies, are capable of such faults, you know?
And with Trump, I mean, I think the best example is when you get to the conclusion of a mass security strategy.
And if you suffer through the whole thing, there's about a half page conclusion.
And it talks about principled realism.
And I mean, you're just like, those two words have nothing to do with anything that this document is about in terms of principles or realism or the reality of things.
I mean, because it's all about, again, just trade and forcing people to bend to your will.
And reality, it's spurs with all this language about democracy and freedom and liberty and what a bright shining beacon the United States is for the rest of the world and how in the last year, the rest of the world has really started to look up to America again.
And we're once again, achieving greatness.
I mean, so it's just the dissonance.
And like you said, you know, and I thought this after watching Nikki Haley again, is this, and I'm not sure, is this sociopathy or is this psychopathy?
I'm not sure what the difference is.
But these people have serious problems and that's not being glib.
That's not being, you know, I'm not some type of lefty who wants to have the elections turned back over.
And, you know, I'm not a Russiagate, you know, person, blah, blah, blah.
You know, I'm not gonna get on Mother Jones and start cheering for Russiagate or anything like that.
But, you know, what is happening here is we do, we have these people who just have this dissonance, who have this inability to understand, not just the reality that's around them, but what their actions actually cause, what they actually do.
Yeah, well, and the thing is with Nikki Haley, I mean, I guess, you know, I don't know that much about her, but she seems like she's just bright enough to believe in everything she hears along these lines.
And that's about it.
You know what I mean?
She's just the perfect worst kind of person to be in this situation, in the position that she's in for that reason.
You know, like John Bolton is smart enough to be a cynical SOB doing the exact same thing as her, but she seems like maybe she just really thinks so.
And she starts with such a self-justification and self-righteousness that anyone who opposes us is on the side of the devil, you know, that kind of way of thinking.
I agree.
I mean, I'm sure she may never even have heard of Yemen, say, before she became the UN ambassador.
While Bolton is a guy you can understand, why does he want to kill millions of people in Korea?
Because he's a bully.
This is the same guy, remember, who, you know, they had a, when they appointed him to the UN under the Bush administration, they did so on a recess appointment, if I remember right, because of all, not accusations, but the findings that he's a guy who picks on women, who chases women, who chases them in the office when he's angry, who like, you know, he's one step away from being, you know, should be in prison.
And so you understand where he comes from because he's a bully, you know?
And that's where he gets off on being on Fox News, talking about the deaths of millions of people so cavalierly because that's what he is as a person.
Yeah, but with Haley, yeah, I agree, Scott.
I don't think she could have found Yemen on the map or maybe even heard of Yemen prior to her becoming.
But now that she's been told about it, her certainty in herself, her confidence in herself means that if you're not in agreement with her, you must be wrong, which is dangerous.
And this doesn't just extend to the right.
I mean, I can tell you that this is, I mean, certainly, you know, anyone who looks at the election in 2016, that's certainly the autopsy that's coming out of the Democratic Party, you know what I mean, right?
If you didn't agree with the Clintons, then you were wrong and you were not just wrong, but you were the enemy.
And I can tell you, again, going back to Afghanistan in 09, that's how McChrystal was.
McChrystal and his people, General McChrystal and his people in 09, if you did not agree with him, if you did not agree with his plan, and you were outside of his bubble, you weren't just wrong, but you were the enemy.
And that's how they treated people, you know?
I mean, and what do you get, right?
What do you get for people who work for Haley, for people who work for Clinton, say, for people who work for McChrystal, are you get sycophants.
And it just reinforces the whole decision-making process.
And I think that's the value in the Trump, in this Trump National Security document for those who work at state and CIA and Pentagon and the NSC and everything, is that if for some reason you find yourself in the Oval Office, you know what he's gonna wanna hear.
He's gonna wanna hear about trade.
And as you said, zero-sum competition, right?
That's what he's gonna, that's how you have to phrase everything for this man.
And can you imagine him and Kushner and Nikki Haley in a room having a conversation about what they agree is true and what they should do about it?
My God.
I've never, yeah, I've never, I don't even know what to say about that.
I've never had such a thought.
That's why I like Reed Woodward.
I mean, it's crazy.
It's a funhouse mirror version of every single thing in the world.
But it's just interesting to me, the dynamics, because really everything he writes in there, it's all them ratting on each other and accusing each other of stuff.
You know, he's kind of a gossip columnist to the National Security Council in a way, you know?
And so, yeah, you know, I forget now if it's his book.
There's so many, there's like four or five really good reports on this, including Michael Hastings, and I think Josh Rogan, who's a bad guy, but a good source on this, and a few others who talked about how they decided on Libya and how the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Advisor and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were against it.
But Samantha Power and Susan Rice, Samantha was the something on the NSC at the time.
And Rice, I guess, was the ambassador to the UN and Hillary was the Secretary of State.
And they were lined up and he basically, I think, was it, I forgot who paraphrased him this way, but I think it was Gates who said that Obama said out loud that it was a 51, 49% decision to go ahead and start the war against Libya.
And it was, and over the objection, not just for, nevermind Ikenberry, the ambassador, former general, right?
In this case, his own Republican Secretary of Defense is saying, you don't have to do this, Obama.
And he's like, yeah, I'm gonna anyway.
It was a favor to Hillary because she was gonna run on it as her great victory in 2016, that she led the great heroic war in Libya.
You notice she didn't highlight that so much during the campaign instead.
Yeah, I think it was Scott Shane at the New York Times who wrote a good profile of that, how Libya was supposed to be the soft power example for Hillary Clinton.
That was gonna be her foreign policy credentials.
What was gonna put her over the top to stand among all these men at the debates.
And she was gonna be, she would have the biggest penis type of deal.
I mean, that's how they would look at it.
You know what I mean?
Like that she has the best credentials.
She's the toughest.
She's killed more people and she's killed more dictators and she's done it well and no one else has.
And of course, yeah.
And then President Obama, when he leaves office and he says to the Atlantic Magazine that, I believe it was the Atlantic, that Libya was his biggest mistake.
Now he qualifies that because there wasn't a plan afterwards after Qaddafi was killed.
Right, he should have rolled on in with the 3rd Infantry Division like George W. Bush did.
That was his lesson from Libya.
You know, but at least he omitted Libya as much as I think Obama probably will ever omit any mistakes or anything.
At least he did omit that, that that was a mistake.
But yeah, and you look at it and you look at the catastrophe that's happened, you know, in Libya and the tens of thousands of people who have died by drowning because they're trying to escape that country, you know, and then the refugee crisis in Europe.
What boggles my mind is that these European governments continue to go along, say in Finland, you got this issue in Finland right now where you've got one of the Finnish parties is running their main, big part of their platform is to join NATO.
And I'm not sure, I don't know, I don't think that will happen or not, that they'll win or not.
But the, you know, it's like the reason you have this refugee problem, this crisis is because of the wars, because of these wars that NATO has instigated, has supported, has kept going.
This is why you have this refugee crisis in Europe.
This is why tens of thousands of people are, you know, trying to cross.
Thousands of bodies have washed ashore on Greece and Italy and everything.
I mean, the horror of it is staggering.
You know, but yet the Europeans, I mean, not just to put our folks down, you know, it's got to be fair.
The Europeans, they continue to go along with it too.
You know, so there is, and I don't know, you can get into, I guess, deeper things about why that is, but just to take it in and to understand it, that the reality that so many millions of people are facing because of the decisions of these people and the decisions that keep getting made over and over again, despite of the evidence.
And then you see the Trump-NASA security strategy or Nikki Haley at the UN, you know, as well as you go back, you know, look at Obama, Bush, you know, Clinton, you know, whatever.
It is, it is, it's really, it's really quite astounding.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, did you notice the new and improved show notes?
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So check out the links for all the information we talk about in these interviews.
You guys have been asking for that for a long time.
Well, we got it now.
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All right, so listen, on the China question in the national security strategy there, I mean, I really appreciate the counsel of David Stockman who says, don't believe the hype about the rise of China.
You wanna talk about a distortion in the real estate market.
Holy crap.
They've got a crash coming the likes of which the world has never seen.
They have, you know, they switched from communism to fascism, not to free markets.
So they have very huge economic decisions that are made by politicians and bureaucrats and not property owners.
And you can see the Austrian school advice about why not to run your economy that way in theirs.
However, that's almost beside the point because what really matters is the American empire's perception of China, which is that they want to replace us as the world empire as soon as possible.
And I don't really know why to believe that that's true at all.
It seems like they have barely kind of a coastal defense and not much of a blue water Navy at all.
But, you know, I guess that could change.
But anyways, so I wonder what you think of that.
And I wonder whether you think that based on historical examples and things like that, that anyone that could, you know, be considered, you know, someone with the responsibility on the American side can say like, hey, in order to avoid a hydrogen bomb exchange with China, to whatever degree they rise, we're going to have to figure out a way to get along now that the old rules of world empires are canceled because of fission and fusion, right?
So, but otherwise it could be a real problem.
And it seems like from junior to Obama to Trump now, the idea is, boy, we better contain them.
We better pivot.
We better double down on all our support for all of their rivals on the, you know, in ringing them there in Korea and down through Vietnam.
And of course, Japan and even troops, Marines in Australia now and all this stuff.
So I wonder, well, you're, you know, a little bit sort of kind of associated with this think tank world, man, as you've talked about, you talk with these congressmen sometimes, you're at the center for international policy.
And I wonder whether anybody is thinking straight about this in the, you know, medium to longer term of how we're going to live in a world with a quote, rising China and an America that, you know, obviously is extremely reluctant to accept that.
Yeah.
I mean, China has been rising my whole adult life.
I mean, I was, I guess a sophomore in high school when the Tiananmen Square episode happened, you know, and, but they've been this riot, my whole adult life, I'm 44 now, we're about the same age, right?
So it's been a rising our whole lives.
And what we've done though, is put these bases around China.
And then like, I'll say to people, look, NASA security strategy is one thing, but we really want to understand what the Department of Defense is going to do, what the U.S. government's going to do, look at the budget and what they're, what they're concerned about, look at the budget.
And you look at the budget and you look and you see we've got, they want to build 10 new aircraft carriers at $13 billion a piece or whatever.
We're going to build a new nuclear armed bomber that the Air Force won't even say how much that's going to cost.
We've got a $1 trillion modernization of our nuclear weapons program, you know, to include, you know, nuclear cruise missiles, as well as we've redone the nukes on our submarines so that they are now able to be first strike capable, you know, all these things.
And who's that geared towards?
At least according to our politicians and according to what we hear from people, whether, you know, it's the Chinese.
So what we've seen with the Chinese is not this explosion of growth overseas in terms of aggressive growth and building military bases.
I think this past year, they opened up their first overseas military base in Africa, which from what I understand is really just their refueling point, like a logistics hub, nothing more than that.
But so they've got one overseas base and we've got 800 overseas bases.
I mean, the issue with the Spratly Islands, you know, that's an issue that occurs with countries all over the world and should be mediated through international system, as opposed to the United States keeping an aircraft carrier off of China's coast all the time to intimidate them.
You know, as you said, Scott, I had never heard that before, but that China didn't transition from communism to capitalism, to communism to fascism, that's absolutely spot on.
And their concern are gonna be the billion, three billion, four Chinese within their borders, keeping them fed, keeping them in electronics and in cars and in all the things that they've come to be accustomed to over the last couple of decades.
They're not looking outward for expansion except for in trade and in commerce.
I mean, we're not gonna see, but if you read this national security strategy from Trump, where China is just referenced over and over again, if you read it, you would expect that the Chinese have military bases all throughout Latin America, all throughout Africa, that they were gonna, you know, take over the North Pole.
I mean, like the hysteria over China.
So no, to your answers, I don't think anyone has got their head straight.
And I can tell you a story from friends of mine who worked at Pacific Command in the early part of the Obama administration, about 2011, 2012.
So I guess the midpoint of Obama administration, when the Pacific pivot, the Asia pivot was being announced, the giddiness among the admirals and generals at PACOM, the Air Force and Navy admirals and generals, because what that meant was the money was gonna be transitioning away from these wars where the Air Force and the Navy didn't have the role that the Marine Corps and the Army had, and they'd be transitioning towards things like bombers, F-22s, F-35, new nuclear missile submarines, new aircraft carriers.
So what do you do?
You hype everything up.
You know, you make everything seem worse than it actually is, because this is the gold rush is coming and you have a chance to buy all these new things.
So, I mean, it's no different than I think what the United States military did throughout a lot of the Cold War, hyping the Soviet Union.
But it's very dangerous because what we've seen, the way the Chinese have reacted to it, they are upgrading their nuclear forces.
They've installed over the last several years, early warning radar systems, which they really didn't have before.
So we can't really put this all on Trump because we have to look at the modernization of the nuclear forces that occurred under Obama, particularly this ability to have these first strikes from our nuclear submarines, which scares the hell, and rightly should, out of the Russians and the Chinese, particularly when you have a document or you have politicians on both sides of the aisle that demonize them constantly.
So yeah, no one's got their head on straight because the evidence and the facts, and China's a despotic nation, right?
I mean, they have more journalists in prison than anyone else.
You know, I mean, they have, they are, fascism is the best way to describe it, like you said, Scott, but we don't do anything about all our factories that are over there.
I'm sitting here talking to you on my Apple computer.
You know, I mean, that was made in China.
Hey, and get real, fascism has served them a hell of a lot better than communism ever did back when they were starving to death by the tens of millions.
But yeah, no, they're not free.
I mean, they have a one-party dictatorship there and, I mean, what's fascism except a cronyized economy?
At least they're not in a state of permanent war.
Otherwise, they'd be the carbon copy of us.
They have almost as many people in prison as we do for a nation with more than twice the population.
Yeah, about three times the population, maybe even more.
You know, but then you get guys like Tom Friedman who go over there, you know, from the New York Times and write these glowing reports about how modern they are and how the system is, you know, working and how they're gonna eclipse us.
So you have these stenographers for the empire who are going along with that China is rising.
They're gonna take us over.
See, this is why people need Austrian business cycle theory, you know, because we understand the effect of inflation on distorting your markets.
And I'm sure people have at least heard of, if not read about, and it's easy to read about the Chinese ghost cities where they even built a replica of Paris and nobody lives there.
It was just a political decision to do so.
It was, and they built things, you know, metropolises that look like downtown Dallas or something.
And then people are just supposed to go and live there.
I've read one report where people are just investing in the empty condos themselves as they continue to appreciate and they keep flipping them and flipping them and making all this money.
And they're putting all their life savings into condos that have no actual demand for them whatsoever in empty cities that were created.
I mean, there's just no way that a private economy would ever make such a huge mistake.
And that includes America in the Bush years, in the setup and the Clinton years before that, really, in the setup, the Greenspan bubble in the setup for the crash of 08.
What they have going on in China right now, at some point when they deflate, it's gonna be the world's greatest disaster, you know?
Oh, exactly.
You know, I mean, you just, you know, I actually forget, John Pilger has a film out called The Coming War on China.
I think you can find it.
I don't know if you can find it on YouTube.
I know it's been on Al Jazeera, but he goes into a lot of this and that, you know.
But yeah, absolutely.
And so the Chinese leadership are focused within their own borders and on their periphery.
Yeah, and if you had a belligerent nation like the United States, whose politicians were constantly running their mouths about you, as well as a nation like the United States that is currently bombing seven other countries, if they keep parking an aircraft carrier off of your coast or two aircraft carriers off of your coast all the time, yeah, you're gonna be a little concerned about what's happening in your periphery.
And not to say it again, not saying that the Chinese leadership springs from a fountain of goodness or anything.
I mean, certainly you can talk to the Koreans and the Vietnamese and other folks about that or the other folks in Tibet.
But, you know, there is also too this hysteria.
But where does it come from?
You know, and again, a lot of it coming from within the military, because this allows us to buy the big ticket things, the $13 billion aircraft carriers and the $1 billion Air Force bombers or whatever those things are gonna cost us.
You know, as well as too, it's good for the politicians.
It's a populist thing.
People are afraid of, I mean, you wanna talk about the Russian scare, people are- Let's stick with China for a second, because I read about how, and, you know, they would have done some modernization anyway, but the two big moves by China to improve and modernize their military forces came with the aftermath of Iraq War I, and then when Bill Clinton sailed the Seventh Fleet in between China and Taiwan when they were doing some missile tests, and there was no real threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but Bill Clinton went and did his show of force, and it was those two things, Iraq War I, in other words, wars of choice and intervention by America far away from our own shores that had provoked them to begin to, hey, maybe we should have at least one aircraft carrier.
Yeah, yeah, and from what I know, I haven't looked at the status of that carrier, which I believe they bought from the Russians, the last, I mean, she could barely get to sea, you know, I mean, like, it's, you know, and comparing them to our carrier, everything else, but yeah, I mean, great example with the invasion of Taiwan, that's been a thing for decades now, about how the Chinese are gonna invade Taiwan.
You know, you look at the Chinese Navy, they simply don't have the ability to transport, you know, a million soldiers across to Taiwan to take it over, they don't have the ships for that, you know what I mean?
So all this hysteria is just not based on the evidence and the fact, but it's good for rhetoric, and I was gonna say, with regards to Russia, I mean, the Russia scare, but what about the yellow scare?
I mean, this feeds into that as well, in terms of like, if you're looking for a populist narrative, someone to blame things on, someone to blame factory closings on, and how bad, you know, the economy is, or how come wages haven't grown, or anything else, let's blame it on the Chinese, you know, and so yeah, they're a perfect villain for a host of folks within the US government, as well as at the different think tanks that serve those interests.
Yeah, and it's, you know, like, oh, now I'm blanking on his name from Cato, just wrote a really great piece on Korea, and on how we're playing- Banda, yeah, thank you.
Yeah, one of the best pieces I've read on Korea, and on how we're playing chicken with this, and how it's not just Trump, we've done this before, it's like you said, Clinton did it, you know, Bush certainly did it, Obama's done it, we, at some point, in regards to a nuclear exchange, in regards to something that will be unable to walk away from the consequences of, it's gonna come, it's gonna come at some point, time is gonna run out, or our luck is gonna run out, odds are gonna come up, and we are gonna really be faced in this country with the consequences of our actions overseas, and it's a terrifying thought, because, you know, you know as well as I do, I mean, we need like, what, 0.1% of the nuclear weapons that we have to go off, to give us a nuclear winner of 10 years, you know, I mean, it's really minor, how many nukes need to be detonated to kill off about 2 billion people in this world, you know- Mother of hell, what if somebody set off the weakest, littlest nuke in any city, anywhere, just think of the destruction beyond imagination, I mean, you know what I mean?
I mean, we, Dan Ellsberg is now coining the term, maybe it's been around for a while, but he's publicizing the term, Omnicide, for when one day America and Russia kill every human being in the world forever, but until then, it seems like even just having one small fission device go off, in say, Seattle, would be the worst thing that had happened since, well, in this hemisphere, in a very long time.
Not even that, say, just say, you know, I mean, as Bandau, you know, is pointing out with this game of chicken, you know, one of our helicopters, you know, crosses over the DMZ in the North Korea and shoot it down, it can happen, you know, I mean, helos, I mean, like, it could happen, something like that could happen, what's going to be the response?
You know, and that was the same thing too, with when Obama was pushing Pakistan and we were doing things against Pakistan and we were right on that border there, what happens when the Paks, when the Pakistanis shoot down one of our Blackhawks and kill eight of our guys?
What do we have to do then?
What is the response going to be?
You know, what can we, I mean, and so the madness of it and the media and the people in political circles like to think that there are these adults in this room that somehow, that's a phrase they use, adults in this room, that somehow Kelly and Mattis and McMaster are going to, you know, stop.
When has that ever happened?
When has an American general ever defied and said, I'm not going to do this?
And if you look back a couple months ago, when Trump had all his generals in and they were standing there getting their photo taken with him and the generals and all their wives and Trump made some comment about wait and see what happens.
Something big is happening.
Not one of the generals said anything.
I mean, here's a man joking about war, killing millions of people and not one of the generals said anything like that's inappropriate.
All they did was smile, grin and laugh and go along with the president.
So if anyone thinks that we can count on the military leadership to do the right thing, to be the adults in the room as the Times and the Post and CNN and everyone else keeps saying, they've got to be kidding themselves.
What are they basing that on?
When did that happen?
You know, show me when in American history, when the adults in the room have risen to stop the American president from doing something egregious.
You know, especially when it seems like, and it is a little bit different on different issues.
Maybe they're a little bit better than him on Iran, but he's certainly as bad as them or worse on Afghanistan.
And maybe they're tied on Syria.
But yeah, I mean, they in practice, they sure don't seem to be much better than him.
And you look at this national security strategy.
This was written up by McMaster and the National Security Council staff.
This is what he wants it to say.
He and Mattis and I don't know who else besides those two in the president had much say in what it said.
But this is the Pentagon's doctrine that they've come and brought to the president for him to rubber stamp, which is audience.
Just like I told you a year and a half before he got elected, that was exactly what he was going to do is say to the generals, sir, yes, sir, sir, just go ahead and do whatever you want, but make sure to brief me.
That that's exactly right.
I mean, that he is the most malleable person we have ever in that office, ever in the White House in terms of he's willing, as long as it goes along to that, we can go back to it as a security strategy.
As long as he goes back to we're selling products, we're exporting products, we're making money, and we're crushing our competition.
As long as it fits into that, he's going to be happy with it.
And he's obviously, I mean, he went to France and he was there for Bastille Day and he was delighted with the parade that he saw in Paris.
And what do you say?
He says, we need to have a parade of our own.
We need to have, I mean, this is a man whose association with the military and war is based upon popular culture, film, from what he remembers from being in military school as a teenager.
This is what his association with it is.
And he is just delighted that he has these, I saw him actually in New York.
His motorcade went by me.
I was up there during the UN General Assembly and Trump's motorcade comes by and you can see him in his limousine and you can see him waving.
No one's waving back, but you could see him waving.
Just the sense you could get of just the delight at the position he has found himself in, that he has won the game, that he is at this point.
And yeah, and as you say, Scott, yeah, this is what the generals want, this type of security strategy where we're just going to crush competition, not just safeguard American promisee, but expand American promisee.
And this goes back to something, I've been talking about for a while now with regards to, you go and you look at particularly what Mattis and Kelly have said about America and its place in the world.
And you see that Mattis and Kelly view themselves as modern day legionnaires.
They really do believe that their purpose is to defend the American Republic or empire.
And that is what they should be doing.
And that is their only purpose and their main purpose and the purpose of the government.
And what difference does it make to them, whether it's sort of a Republican, faux nationalist, eagles and flags kind of a thing, or whether it's liberal Obama, you know, more NATO, more UN internationalism.
This is certainly all the same project to the Pentagon.
And absolutely.
And we saw that, right?
We saw that in Obama.
Again, we saw the modernization of the nuclear weapons program.
We saw the threatening of China.
And then of course, with Russia, I mean, you had General Breedlove in Russia for a number, in Europe as the head of American forces and the head of NATO in Europe for a couple of years, Air Force General.
I mean, this guy was a carbon copy of the old strategic air command general, Curtis LeMay, who, you know, George Patton's character in Dr. Strangelove was based upon the way he talked about Russia.
And underneath Obama, you saw the expansion of NATO even greater than it had been, right?
Now we have forces stationed in the Baltics.
We have forces stationed in Poland.
We've had the largest ammunition shipments in decades into Europe.
You know, we're running military exercises up and down the Russian coastline and the Russian land borders.
And under Obama, Breedlove, every chance he got, talked about the threat from Russia and hinted that we have to not just be ready to fight them, but to go on the offensive.
I mean, so again, it's not Trump.
This is what the military leadership has been and what the Pentagon wants and how they view themselves.
And it is, it's quite dangerous.
And like you said, it doesn't matter to these guys, whether it's Trump or Obama, as long as they are fulfilling the roles that they see themselves.
And I really would, I'd say, go back and look at Kelly's remarks or Mattis's remarks.
Go back 10, 15 years.
A really great speech to look at from Mattis is when he addresses the Naval Academy, either in 2003 or 2004.
And he talks about American primacy and America being the apex of civilization and basically the barbarians at the gates.
You know, Kelly, everyone talks about the speech that Kelly gave after his son was killed in Afghanistan.
But you read through that and you see the chief of staff of the White House, a four-star Marine Corps general, say it doesn't matter what our adversaries think.
It doesn't matter what they believe.
It doesn't matter why they're doing their actions.
They just hate us.
That type of depth of thinking, that type of morality and that type of American exceptionalism that has perverted, or maybe it's always been there, but that infects the leadership that is guiding Trump.
And again, Trump being one of the most malleable presidents, if not the most malleable president we've ever had.
All right, you guys.
That's Matthew Ho.
He's at ciponline.org.
That's the Center for International Policy.
And he's published a hell of a lot of things all over the place.
Read all about him in my book, Fool's Aaron, for he was a very important whistleblower in the Afghan war in 2009.
Check out his great website, matthewho.com.
That's H-O-H, matthewho.com.
Thank you again, my friend.
Hey, thanks, Scott.
All right, and you guys know me.
I'm scotthorton.org, antiwar.com.libertarianinstitute.org.foolsaarond.us for the book.
Buy my book.
Read it.
You'll like it.
Everybody likes it, seems like.
And follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
