01/06/16 – Greg Archetto – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
All right, next up is Greg Arquetto, very interesting piece here.
It's at SoftRep, which I think I used to know what that stood for, special forces type website.
And Greg is a former State Department and Defense Department official, who it says here specializes in security cooperation issues in the Middle East.
He has an archive at TheReasonableRepublican.com and at Human Events.
But check this out.
The title of the article is The Conscience of an Arms Dealer, How a Bombed Airport in Yemen and My Year with Rand Paul Made Me Quit the Pentagon.
All right, you got me interested.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Greg?
I'm doing excellent.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate that.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So I guess, start with Yemen.
What was your job?
What were you doing there?
Starting when?
So I moved from the State Department to the Defense Department in 2010.
And the portfolio that I took over was Yemen.
And it was right at the time I described in the article, it was right after the underwear bomber had tried to blow up a flight above Detroit on Christmas in 2009.
And his extremism and the type of explosive was actually traced back to Yemen.
So one of the things that we were tasked with doing was creating, standing up a train and assist program, replete with arms and training for the Yemeni military, so as to combat terrorists in Yemen and in that region.
So I was there.
I started in mid-2010.
And that was my first trip out to the region, was in 2010.
And that's when I saw.
And I spent the better part of a week out there, actually over a week.
And like I said in the article, I saw almost a comical concoction of solutions from previous aid packages that just, they weren't working as, you know, as they were expected.
And so you see these, yeah, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So there were previous good intentions I was seeing, and it was less than optimal, to say the least.
All right.
Now, but just to clarify, your job was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for what?
No, no, no, no, no.
So I worked for Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is a subset of Office Secretary of Defense.
OK.
And I was an action officer tasked with creating these programs and helping manage them once they got off the ground in conjunction with the State Department and other folks within the Pentagon.
OK.
And and then, yeah, as you say, I thought of Harry Brown when I was reading this.
He used to say, the military, come on, it's nothing but the post office with M-16s.
And it sounds like the post office was running American operations in Yemen over there, huh?
Well, I think one of the biggest issues I saw, Scott, was the fact that government had just gotten so huge that one hand literally didn't know what the other hand was doing.
And that was one of the problems.
I think I highlighted in the middle of the article, we would try to put our proposals up through the chain of command and they would go off into a black hole and we wouldn't see them for months.
And the issue with that was, you know, a lot of these programs that you have to put together have very long lead times with respect to contracts.
So that's not very helpful for getting all the contracts put in place and everything that you need to do.
I mean, this is stuff that goes on for years once you get the ball rolling.
So it's a very long logistical process.
But it was hurry up and wait for four months and then, you know, hit the ground and move before the funding and the authorization expired.
It was it was just it was not run well, in my opinion.
Okay.
But so we know we have the CIA and the Air Force are running the drone war at the time.
But what exactly you guys are working with the Yemeni government, the Saleh government at the time to do what exactly?
At the time.
Well, essentially, when we trace these threats back to the region, we have a lot of partners throughout the region and throughout the world that we would have military to military ties with.
A lot of these places, some of the best ties that we have are formally diplomatic.
But the best ties we have are between the military with Yemen's military.
People tend to see another country's military and think of it as our own specific units and specific titles and jobs and missions.
But a lot of these third world countries, it's a bunch of guys cobbled together, mismatched uniforms.
It's not what you think.
So it was really kind of culture shock when you see a lot of these different militaries that are that are not up to snuff as good as ours.
And you have to work with them.
And so they're all a lot of them are in kind of different levels of expertise.
In other words, you're giving them guns that they can't fire and trucks that they can't drive.
Well, no, not necessarily.
We try to build them up as best you can.
But the issue that I saw is we were kind of trying to go from instead of a crawl, walk, run approach.
We were going from crawl to straight sprint.
And that's not conducive to spending taxpayer dollars wisely, as evidenced by what I wrote in the article.
That was just one of the frustrations that I had.
And now, I'm sorry, it's been a couple of days since I read this thing.
I'm trying to remember.
I think you did talk about in here, didn't you, that Saleh had his own agenda, which didn't really have much to do with worrying about Al-Qaeda.
His problem was his now allies, the Houthis, that he picked four wars with and I believe lost four times.
Were you there?
You were there during at least one of those, right?
No, I was actually I highlighted in the article I was there in between the end of this.
I think it was like the fifth or sixth Houthi war and then the Arab Spring in the beginning of 2011.
Oh, right.
Got there right after the last war against the Houthis.
Yeah, it was going to get it was about as peaceful as it was going to get.
But yeah, that was one of the issues was it wasn't that they weren't they were concerned about terrorists in their backfield and ungoverned spaces in their country.
It's just that that wasn't their top priority.
And anybody that had been there for any amount of time and you talk to them, they're like that they they don't see it like that.
We're coming in there and telling them, here's the stuff and you need it to do X.
And they're saying, well, I don't really see that as big of a problem.
I'll take it and then I'll do what I want with it.
So it was kind of the two missions were not matched up optimally.
That's the best way I could put it.
They had different different ideas.
Right now, I guess I think I've learned this, but I've repeated it enough times that now it's sort of just a cliche and I want to make sure the truth of it.
Is it really right to say that in all these attacks against the Houthis, that Saleh really just ended up making them more powerful each time he lost and that that's what led to the current situation?
Well, I'll tell you, there's a great book on the Saleh regime and Yemen in general.
It's called Dancing on the Heads of Snakes.
And if you really want to wrap your mind around how Yemen works, I would highly recommend that book if you want to get into the politics of Yemen and its history.
And interestingly, this guy was playing all sides for many, many years.
And that's what I highlighted in the article about the tribal intrigue.
It got to the point where Saleh was buying off his allies, his tribal allies, with arms and his enemies with arms.
And they were uncomfortably bumping into each other at the same place to go pick up their guns.
Now, this is prior to our involvement, but this was kind of a tribal intrigue that was going on.
So he was playing all sides.
He was really adept at it.
And that was the other thing is he was not necessarily a fun guy to be around, but he happened to be the partner that the U.S. government wanted to partner with in Yemen.
And obviously, he's not there now.
It's another ungoverned space.
It's a huge mess over there now that the Houthis took over and it's a proxy war for the Saudis and the Iranians and whoever else wants to mix it up over there.
And unfortunately, the Yemeni people suffer.
Yeah.
And Saleh has allied with the Houthis and brought some army divisions with him.
Yeah, he will.
But he was he was unpleased.
He was not very pleased that he was kind of pushed out during the Arab Spring and he tried to hold on.
But again, this goes back to, again, I can't say enough about the book because it shows you how it goes back into the history of Yemen when Yemen was separated in the 90s and the South was actually a communist state.
And how the southern tribes don't trust the northern tribes.
Yeah, but he had been he had been playing with the playing the strings for a long time and pulling the string.
All right.
Well, we're going to pause and take this break for just a minute.
But when we get back, we're going to talk with Greg Arquetto a little bit more about his career in the Defense Department and how it came to an end.
Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton and Libya.
The conscience of an arms dealer is the article.
It's at soft rep dot com.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Talking with Greg Arquetto about this article he wrote, the conscience of an arms dealer, how a bombed airport in Yemen and my year with Rand Paul made me quit the Pentagon.
He was helping coordinate all the efforts in the terror war over in Yemen over the last few years there.
And we're talking about the Salah's war against the Houthis and and all the problems that came with that and him playing all sides.
But I wanted to ask you about the fight against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as well from back your time there.
And I'm sorry, you don't really get into this too much in the article, but still you were there and that was your job.
So I'm interested.
It seems like Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as you say, they were a problem already, you know, before you got there in 2010.
But it seems like they're far bigger now.
And I wonder if you chalk that up to America attacking them all the time and killing innocent civilians while doing so, or whether you would blame kind of what you describe in the article as a bureaucratic inability to wage an effective fight against them.
Well, I think, Scott, part of it is just a failure of strategy.
And one of the things that we try to take is lessons from our other allies who have been fighting this, the terror fight as well.
And one is from the Israelis.
And they'll tell you when you cut off one head, three more grow in its place.
And so it does become to a point where it feels like it's self-defeating and you are exacerbating the problem.
I think part of it was also the fact that Yemen was never really well governed to begin with.
So whatever cancer was going to fester was going to fester more easily there.
Obviously, there are always second and third order effects when you take kinetic action.
And unfortunately, I don't think we have thought through as a national security establishment very well how that affects our strategy and the enemy strategy.
And I think that's one of the biggest frustrations I had was basically, as I highlight later in the article, it was evident to me after a while that there was really no top level driven strategy.
And that was that was the most exasperating part for me was the meeting that I highlight later on when we were talking about an overall Levant strategy, which is the region of Iraq, Syria, just a Middle East strategy.
And the folks from the White House came in and basically said, well, just give us a bunch of options and then we'll tell you what strategy is.
And I was looking at my boss at the time and I said, that's not really how this works.
You give us the strategy and then we salute smartly and move out.
So that that was a huge, huge kind of disappointment.
Well, I mean, yeah, even on the face of it, we're fighting on both sides of the Yemen war right now as we're fighting al-Qaeda's worst enemies, the Houthis with the Saudis and with literal and and apparently large al-Qaeda gains on the ground, seizing towns, seizing ports and weapons magazines from the military and this kind of thing.
At the very same time, just in the last couple of weeks, there were reports of CIA drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets.
Well, I'm not saying those, but I do know that because Yemen is such a soup of just various different factions with respect to who the Iranians may be backing, the Houthis, their own personal agendas.
They'll take help from the Iranians, but then they may have their own agenda.
I mean, a lot of these these conflicts you're seeing right now, this is a proxy war between Sunni Saudi regime and Shia Iranian regime.
And this is a battle that's been fought for fourteen hundred years.
And we're trying to mix it up and get involved.
And unfortunately, having trying to drop democracy in a box in there and think it's going to work in over the course of 10 years is frankly ludicrous.
We need to be rethinking this.
And that's actually one of the things that I found so refreshing is my time with Senator Paul is, you know, I was a good fit for his office when I came on board and trying to kind of give him advice on foreign policy and national security issues.
I tried to boil it down as much as I could, and it was a good exercise as well.
And I essentially told him, I said, sir, if we're going to get involved in a war, our national security establishment should be asking three questions.
What is the national interest?
What is the military objective?
And what is the exit strategy?
And not only have we not answered those questions in most of these conflicts we've gotten into, we haven't even asked them.
And that's one of the reasons why, you know, it's just been so frustrating for a lot of folks at the the action officer level, even middle management within the national security establishment that are just frustrated to the point where some people quit, like I did, just because, you know, you need leadership and we're not seeing it.
Well, so, yeah, let me ask you more about Rand Paul, because he certainly was good on Libya in 2011, and he's good, certainly on war against the western half of Syria.
That is, he's opposed to bombing Assad.
But then again, he's not wrong either.
And he's been very hawkish on the Islamic State, which could include another war in Libya.
I don't know if he, you know, has said he's for that or not.
And he came out and just outright lied about a bunch of make believe reasons to oppose the Iran deal when he opposed that.
And I wonder what's your read on him, you know, in terms of foreign policy?
Does he seem very principled to you?
Or I mean, obviously, he's the son of Ron, so he can see these things like you're describing about, you know, how counterproductive, you know, the Hillary strategy is, for example.
But but what about Rand?
What does he really think about this stuff?
I mean, frankly, he's the most thoughtful guy that I've worked with.
And I say that with the utmost respect.
And it's a great compliment.
If you notice, if you watch, as I do, I'm a huge consumer of information and news and politics.
Everybody wants to be the first out of the gate to tweet about something or get it on Facebook or whatever.
Sometimes a lot of times you have to wait to hear what Rand has to say because he's thinking it out.
He's not shooting from the hip.
And I think that's tremendously, tremendously effective tool with how he approaches issues.
And so I know that he has received some some kind of backlash from the libertarian base that he is not seen as as pure as his father.
But I think there is a certain amount of pragmatism with respect to the national security realm.
I mean, I think he's hit all the right points where this needs to be our boots on the ground first.
This is this is a Middle East issue that these guys have been fighting out for 1400 years and they need to inevitably solve it.
I mean, I think it was Lawrence of Arabia who said, you know, leave this to the Arabs, however imperfect the solution would be, because in the end, it's their country and your time there is short.
And I wish we had more people who paid attention to history and read this stuff at the highest levels.
And Rand is one of those guys.
I mean, he's a consummate reader.
I think that he's trying to be a thoughtful, thoughtful on issues of national security.
I don't think everybody's going to be 100 percent correct all the time, but he's certainly the most thoughtful guy out there.
And then so what about the rest of them?
I can't ask for them to be thoughtful, but are they at least just frustrated and tired of this and maybe willing to shrug and give up trying to remake the Middle East the right way at this point?
The rest of who?
You mean the rest of the DC?
Yeah, sure.
And Congress and, you know, the people up there that you're piling around with more or less.
I mean, honestly, I don't I don't I don't know.
There's a lot of folks up there that are just in the in the trench of this is the way it's always been done.
I mean, it's bureaucratic sclerosis.
That's the thing you always hear in a bureaucracy, no matter where you go.
Well, this is the way it's always been done.
Well, maybe we've been doing it wrong and maybe we should try something else.
Actually, on my blog, I did write about a policy prescription for for dealing with I.S.
And it was something that I shopped around when I was in government.
I ranking enough, no one want to listen to me.
So I put it up on my blog.
I found a few months later some of the stuff came true and some of the predictions were actually spot on.
And I was like, hey, this is kind of validating.
It's just a shame that nobody with, I guess, more clout is part.
And some folks did.
And there's some good ideas there.
But I don't know.
There's there's there are folks there that just think that they can reshape the Middle East in America's image.
And that's one of the things that to me, too.
I'm a Republican.
And traditionally, you know, Republicans believe that domestic welfare creates dependency.
So why do we think international welfare is going to be any different?
That just didn't make sense.
And it's inconsistent.
And I kind of made that point.
And I said, well, all these folks that want to go out there and we need to give foreign aid to this country, that country.
And, you know, you got to question that.
It's like, well, people like you for who you are, not for what you can give them.
I mean, I learned that in kindergarten.
Yeah, and it's worse because it's it's that moral hazard, not just with regular welfare, but like with bailing out bankers and that kind of thing where it encourages bad behavior, not just unwillingness to take responsibility, but a willingness to pick fights for us to fight.
That's the area.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate talking to you.
It's been good, Greg.
Thanks so much.
And have me on any time.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for doing.
That's Greg Arquetto, former State Department and Defense Department official.
The article is The Conscience of an Arms Dealer.
It's at soft rep dot com.
Check it out.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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