01/09/17 – Peter Van Buren on the Left’s irrational Russophobia – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show, finally getting back to getting some interviews done here for 2017.
And first up today is Peter Van Buren.
And he's formerly with the United States State Department, but he's all right now.
He wrote The Ghosts of Tom Jode.
And We Meant Well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
And he keeps the great blog at WeMeantWell.com.
You can follow him on Twitter at WeMeantWell.
And you can read his blog entries oftentimes at AntiWar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Peter.
How are you doing, sir?
It's a pleasure.
If people want to buy those books, that's great, because my Russian masters have really started to cut back on the secret funding that they've been giving me.
Oh, that's too bad.
To create propaganda.
Have you been getting a lot of accusations of treason lately?
You know, Scott, it is a bizarro world, because the people that used to criticize me for being too liberal are now criticizing me as a Trump supporter.
And it's a staggering world.
I occasionally do interviews with RT.
And the conservatives who used to call me a Russian patsy for doing interviews on RT have now switched over, and now it is liberal people who are calling me a Russian patsy for doing interviews on RT.
And as best I can tell, it's the same RT, the same me, and everybody from AntiWar.com to RT to, if he were to call Alex Jones, gets the same story.
It is a topsy-turvy world.
Well, and although, you know, I don't know, man, it seems like, and maybe this is just me, but it seems like the BS rap on Russia right now, well, I don't want to prejudice the question too much, as far as I know, maybe Russia did do what they say or something, but one, they haven't proven it, and two, it sounds like a bunch of BS to me anyway.
What do you think?
Oh, absolutely.
First of all, there is no proof.
Obviously, it's truly so highly classified that it can't be shared with us, which is, you know, not outside the realm of possibility, but to release a report that basically simply says, the Russians did it, trust us, thanks, I mean, you could get that into 140 characters on Twitter and save the paper.
The other thing about the national, the intelligence community report on the Russians, and I encourage everyone to take a look at it, you don't even have to read it, just kind of look at it.
It's online, it's not, it's only about 30 pages or so, but about 30 or 40 percent of the document is simply a repeated summary of Russian propaganda outlets that quite literally could have been reprinted from 1965.
You just have to update some of the things.
There's a lengthy thing about RT.com being, if you read that, you'd think that RT.com was on 24-7 in every household in America, given the credence that they give to them.
There are even things saying, this such and such is just like the Soviets used to do.
It's very scary, because it's almost as if the intelligence community took this opportunity to say, yeah, the Russians hacked, but by the way, we want to remind you that the Cold War is back on, and here's some old recycled stuff to kind of drive your fear in a new direction.
It even says in a footnote that this is reprinted from 2012.
Yeah, exactly, but if it said it was reprinted from 1965, I wouldn't have a hard time believing that either.
I mean, honestly, I've got to say, it really is almost like a community college freshman job, maybe even worse than one I would have done at Austin Community College back in the days, where they're just going, well, look, we can't demonstrate our assertions in any sense whatsoever, so let's just hire some interns to come in here and pad this thing so that Van Buren has to at least concede that it's about 30 pages long, so it sounds like there must be something in there somewhere, but no, it really is just a bunch of copy-pasted nonsense and a bunch of motive, why the Russians might want to do the things that we say they did.
It's absolutely, the college paper thing is great, because it reads exactly like, oh geez, the professor said it had to be 15 pages long, and here it is.
It's 2 a.m., and I've only got eight pages, and yeah, and then you just copy and paste a bunch of stuff in there to pad it out, oh man, he said five footnotes, oh geez, okay, it reads out just like that, and again, I do encourage people, even if you don't have time to read it, just flip through it and see that, but if you do have time to look into it a little bit, it really is quite astounding.
They talk about the Intercept, they label that a pro-left publication, there's all this talk in there about how the Russian media does not cover the United States positively, and words like that, and wow, first, what a shocking statement, second, isn't that sort of the whole First Amendment marketplace of ideas thing, that there's a variety of coverage out there?
And you know what, too?
You know what you're getting with RT, everybody knows what they're getting with RT, you know what you're getting with RT when you go on RT, you know what you're getting with RT when you watch RT, do they have an agenda, sure, is their agenda basically discredit the American Empire at every opportunity, yeah, is that also my agenda, yeah, am I doing it because that's what's good for Russia, no, and so, and for me, I used to do RT, and they actually have contacted me in the past couple of days, and I've declined to come on and take their side in this, back in, you know, 2010, I would go on there to talk about the Iraq War and stuff where Russia didn't exactly have a dog in the fight, that kind of thing, but everybody knows it's owned by the Russian government, everybody knows what their agenda is, and everybody knows it, oh good, Ray McGovern's on again, let's watch it, I mean, there's no confusion, it's not like anybody is deceived into thinking that this is, well, gee, I thought this was completely objective, like Brian Williams on NBC News, but instead, there's a slant here, my God.
Brian sort of made up a couple of stories about his adventures in Iraq, if I recall, and you know, most journalists, if they get caught in absolute bald-faced lies, would lose their job, because it disintegrates their credibility, but I guess at NBC, the comrades who run the NBC propaganda operation, didn't really see any problems with that.
Yeah, he got a paid vacation, like a cop who shot an unarmed kid somewhere, you know?
I think the thing that confused my limited readership, you know, the seven or eight people, plus, I guess you, so that'd be nine, that actually follow what I write, I think the reason that they seem to be very confused right now, is there seems to be this conflation of if you're not screaming about Trump in apocalyptic terms, and you are criticizing the media who does this, who is doing a terrible job of reporting all this, you must be in favor of Trump and every possible thing he said.
You know, let's wind the tape back a little bit here, and look at some of the things that have happened since the election, you know, there was a whole series of stories right after Trump won, claiming that the transition was falling apart, that Trump couldn't find anyone to take cabinet positions, that it was disorganized, there was no way he was going to fill a government in time for the inauguration.
I wrote an article for, actually for Reuters, that said, no, no, no, this is on track, this is exactly how these things work, and all of a sudden, not that I was right, I simply restated the obvious, and the transition went back on track.
Then there were a whole series of articles about how there were going to be mass resignations across the federal government, it was just a new one, Mike Morell, the old CIA guy, just did another one, saying that the CIA is going to, people are going to resign en masse, and you know, it didn't happen.
There's been accusations that there's going to be, you know, pushes, and that people are going to be terminated because they supported LGTBQ rights, and none of these things have happened.
We haven't gone to war, we haven't, the Chinese haven't invaded the South Pacific, none of these things have happened, and yet the media has spewed out a constant tirade of crying wolf over each crisis.
I haven't looked on this morning and seen what the new crisis that's unfolding is, but we're still working all the, that Trump is the Manchurian candidate being controlled by Vladimir Putin.
I think it's all just going to backfire.
I mean, this is my thing maybe about my naivete on this or whatever, but it just seems so blatantly stupid.
These are the same people who just convinced themselves that like, hey, don't we all agree that Hillary's definitely going to win, and that the fact that we're accusing Trump of being Putin's stooge in the first place is what's going to guarantee that, and that didn't work.
He won anyway, and all the people who voted for them know that they don't give a crap about Russia, and they didn't vote for him because the Russians told them to.
They voted for him because they hate Hillary Clinton's guts.
That's why they voted for him.
I mean, give me a break.
This whole thing is completely ridiculous, but they're setting the bar of their narrative so high, Peter, that, oh, he's coming in as the least legitimate president-elect ever.
I mean, this is crazy.
He's known as a Putin, as you say, Manchurian candidate and all this, but what I think is only liberal media idiots on Twitter believe this, and no one in America believes this, and they might hate Trump for a thousand reasons, but they don't really believe he's owned by the Russians and all this crap.
It's so stupid.
No, it really is, and the concept of crying wolf, I think, is going to be very, very harmful.
First of all, people will just start shutting it off at some point.
When all these apocalyptic predictions fail to come through, at some point, people are just going to turn that off.
I think the other thing that's perhaps even more dangerous is that people who should be actively thinking about what's going to happen next in our government, what's going to need to be changed, what's going to need to be resisted, what have you, are going to be distracted by all these ridiculous things.
Right now, everybody's all worried about which celebrities are and are not going to appear at the inauguration, and when we're distracted by silliness like this, we're not paying attention to what's really going on.
The Obama years were full of issues that we needed to have worked on, and we didn't, because we were distracted by his charismatic nature, and we were proud of ourselves for electing a black president, and so on, so on, so on.
And now, sitting on Trump's desk are the playbook for prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, the entire script on how to use drones to assassinate, and we're leaving Trump with an army in Afghanistan, an army in Syria, an army in Iraq, and we're going to go apeshit over all those things on January 21st, as if they all kind of clicked into place that same afternoon.
We fell asleep during the Obama years to some very dangerous things, and now we're going to be distracted from those same dangerous things by silliness about celebrities at the inauguration.
We saw that the state of Missouri is trying to take back one of its paintings that's owned by one of the museums there, because they don't want that painting hanging in the White House while Trump is there.
This is not going to work out well.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at WallStreetWindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
WallStreetWindow.com.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, for one thing, I'll welcome the left and liberals back to the anti-war movement, even though I know that they don't mean it, because we need all the help that we can get.
Sure.
And it really is going to be difficult.
I think they're going to kind of have to come at it sort of slowly and take it easy so that the hypocrisy is not so blatant.
But yeah, I mean, what we really need is right-wingers to be anti-war right now in an only Nixon can go to China way, because on one hand, people just presume that liberals and leftists are anti-war, even if there was a real threat, that they don't know the difference anyway.
They're just listen to whatever the guy that played BJ Honeycutt says on TV or Susan Sarandon or whatever.
Meryl Streep.
Meryl Streep.
Okay.
And that they don't really mean it when the Democrats are in power.
So it's not much for opposition anyway.
But when right-wingers are anti-war, I think we can get more mileage out of that if we can get them to be.
And more and more, I think there's a little bit of that.
And with Trump, and you know how right-wingers are too, they'll adapt to their new leadership.
So if Trump is really good on, as you said, Russia and WikiLeaks, then all of a sudden they like WikiLeaks.
Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity are like, who, Julian Assange?
No, he's our hero.
They won't go back and say, so is Chelsea Manning.
But no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
But I mean, yeah, when I saw those statements by Hannity and Palin, I had to like check, am I sober?
Did someone slip acid into my milk at breakfast?
Think about the scenario, for example, in Syria.
Right now, once Trump takes office and consolidates power and burns the Reichstag down on January 20th, we are going to be looking at this bizarro world scenario where if Trump follows through and negotiates with the Russians to bring that conflict to some version of a conclusion, we can get into that more if you want to.
The idea is turn the heat down from wherever it is now to a lower setting.
If Trump is able to do that, then the liberal left will announce that this is exactly Putin's master plan and couldn't we please have more war in Syria?
But there's your opening for the conservative side of things to finally get behind some anti-war action by going along with Trump and saying, maybe we need a little less war in Syria.
And you know, we saw this in 2013, it really worked, right?
It was the talk radio community in America, not my show, but AM, Rush Limbaugh clone talk radio, they were against bombing Damascus.
And it was mostly because of the influence of people like Frank Gaffney, who hates Muslims so much that he noticed that really, we're going to overthrow a secular dictator in favor of jihadists here.
And so his kind of Islamophobia sort of point of view actually was good enough to see through the BS and notice the truth of what was going on here and how dangerous it was.
And I think that narrative kind of took hold in the talk radio community and all the Republican congressmen were hearing from their Republican constituents that we don't want to do this, man.
And that was what really made the difference, well that and the House of Commons in the UK too.
Sure.
But think about that, take that another step, pull that apart.
Whose kids are in the military right now getting shot up in Syria and Iraq?
That same talk radio audience that fell for it last time around, the time around before that.
Yeah.
The Creeps kids are not in the military and the 97% of my fellow New Yorkers, their kids are not by and large in the military.
It's the folks out there who are seen as the core Trump voters out in West Virginia and out in Kansas and out in those places.
Their kids are the ones in the military and they're the kids are in the, in many cases are the fodder of the military.
If there's a kid here who dropped out of Yale to go join the Marines, my guess is he's not going infantry.
All right, so now, well and look, I mean, doesn't it seem like Trump actually really does mean what he's saying about Syria, Obama's really already, you know, given up on regime change as he prepares to hand off the baton here and Trump's made it pretty clear over even years.
I saw a tweet that somebody found dug up from 2013 saying, you know, I love the way he says it.
Actually, we don't know who these rebels are.
In other words, we do know exactly who they are.
There have been Latin nights and he didn't want to say that because that's crossing some line or whatever, but the point is still the same.
So he's, he's pretty much made it clear.
Although now here's the big rub in the thing is Iran because he's a total Iran hawk and he's surrounded by total Iran hawks and yet Iran is on the Russia-Syria side of the axis here.
That can, if, if, if the Republicans are serious about getting out of Syria, I think there's potential there to either magic wand the Iran problem away or even if they want to negotiate.
In terms of magic wand, what I mean by that is that the Iranian presence there can be sort of ignored.
I think the American people are dumb enough that they don't even know what the word proxy forces means and that they can be sort of told, well, the Iranians have withdrawn.
And it's, you know, it's in Iran's interest to keep in the shadows on these things anyway.
So I think that's one way to do it.
The other way would be, and you mentioned Nixon going to China, you know, Iran, despite what the propaganda says, Iran, as well as North Korea and everybody else, these are not crazy people.
They are not mad, unpredictable dictators or whatever the way we like to talk about these, these regimes we don't like.
Iran has been a country for something, what, 5,000 years.
It's been an Islamic country since 1979.
And these are folks who play the great game.
They can be negotiated with.
It has to be done in different ways with different countries.
Sometimes you sit down at a table and have photo ops.
Sometimes you meet quietly in Geneva.
But Iran has its interests, America has its interests, and those things can be worked on.
I hesitate to point out to the ignorant masses of the United States that we and Iran are basically fighting on the same side currently in Iraq, at least supporting the same end state, initial end state, fighting against ISIS or whatever you want to call it.
Iran has a great interest in joining the world market system.
The United States, in theory, supports the world market system.
There are ways to do this, and maybe I'm now sounding too much like my old State Department self.
But there are ways to negotiate, and there are common interests, and if the Republicans want to do that, the opportunity is there, and especially at the beginning of a new administration, I think a lot of our friends and foes overseas are willing to say, well, let's see what the new guys got.
Yeah.
All right, now, so yeah, let's get into this a little bit more, because this is really, you know, the crux of the whole thing here, right?
If we're to tell the story of what Bush did, what it all meant was he fought a five-year war for the Shiite side in the Iraqi Civil War that he started, right?
And he helped them take all of Baghdad and all this and that.
Okay, but so now what we've just lived through over the last couple of years here is that same, it's the El Salvador option again, this time against the Islamic State in Fallujah, Samadhi, Mosul, Tikrit, and Samarra, and I'm not sure exactly, you know, to what all degrees the Sunnis have been allowed to come home.
I guess I read that they were allowed to come home to Tikrit, but I don't really know, Peter, but in other words, well, I'm skipping ahead, but what I'm trying to say is the reason that the Islamic State was able to rule Sunnistan, Iraqi Sunnistan in the west of that country there was because George Bush and the American army had helped the Shiites take all of the capital city, and so they were just left with nothing.
The Shiites had no more incentive to cooperate with them, bring them into the patronage system or any of these things that all the oils in the south and up in the north in Kurdistan and the Sunnis were the odd men out, and so they're men without a country.
And so that was how the Islamic State came in to fill that power vacuum and all that.
But now, for the past two and a half years, we've been fighting the El Salvador option again and expanding the border of Shiastan, perhaps, question mark, even further.
This has been the whole, as Patrick Coburn wrote in his brand newest one, Saudis plan to get rid of Assad and to do all this stuff to fight against the Shia.
It's backfired again, and they've just expanded Shiite power even more.
So you know me, like, I want peace with Iran, and I love the nuclear deal, I'm its greatest champion and all of these things.
But the role of the Iranians in Iraq since 03 has been absolutely horrible, and the Americans have abetted them every step of the way, and now it seems like we've helped them take maybe two or three more steps.
What's going to happen in Mosul once the Islamic State is gone?
Are they going to allow the Sunni population to stay there?
Are they going to cleanse them and push them out to the West and take that city for Shiastan?
Or what do you think?
Well, there's absolutely no question that the Shias with the Iranians will control Iraq.
That may or may not mean they control this hunk of territory or that hunk of territory per se, but in any effective definition of the word, they will control Iraq.
I think if I take the most optimistic scenario, it will be a de facto confederation where the United States will lean on the Shias and the Shias will realize that, hey, it's everybody's best interest to kind of pay lip service to the fact that we're a happy group of people.
We certainly don't want the Americans occupying the country.
We don't want to illustrate this thing in a way that traps the American president, whoever he is, into having to play in Iraq any longer than necessary.
So I think in a most optimistic scenario, the Sunnis will have some version of an enclave.
The Kurds will have some version of an enclave.
Call these things whatever word is palatable.
I'll just say confederacy for now.
The Shias will continue to run the country the way they always have and whatever is important will be done by the Shias.
The least optimistic scenarios, of course, are complete and utter chaos where the Shias decide they don't want to play word games.
They really do want to control everything and they lose control of the central Shia government, loses control of the militias that they are currently using to fight this war and the militias go hog-ass wild and you've got mass murders and things like that.
There's a lot of in-betweens in between there and a lot will depend on what the Iranians do and what vision the Iranians have.
For example, whether the Iranians' vision is to have a client state that they can manipulate and control in Iraq or whether they feel that maintaining in Iraq that hovers in a form of sort of benign minor chaos and therefore will never be a threat to Iran, whether that's their preference.
I can't begin to guess what the Iranians would want but I can suggest that the United States can play a role in discussions with the Iranians and say, look, it's in our interest to have a stable Iraq and we want your help in making that happen.
Here's what we're prepared to give in return.
Here's where our red lines are.
For example, any kind of mass murders against the Sunnis that would require us to step back.
There's a lot to be negotiated here.
There's a lot of things that everybody wants that can be horse-traded to a more or less stable and somewhat benign conclusion.
Whether or not the Trump administration will have the smarts and the patience to do something like that, I can't tell you.
I choose not to believe that everybody in the U.S. government is going to be completely insane for the next four years.
There are plenty of ideologues.
There always are.
Anybody who wants to say Susan Rice is not an ideologue, or Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State wasn't an ideologue, they just happen to have an ideology that more of the media found palatable.
Anyway, we'll try to keep a happy face.
There's the Dalla Party.
They're ideologues too.
That's my thing.
There's a lot of reporting that says, yeah, that Nouri al-Maliki, that SOB, well, look, he was George Bush's guy.
He was America's best guy.
They didn't like Jafari, so they replaced him with his colleague from the same party, and now he's been replaced with the new guy who is also from the Dalla Party.
I read a thing, I guess a couple years ago now, I can't remember, saying, basically from the Shiite point of view, the Iraqi Shiite point of view, saying the Sunnis cry all day, the leaders cry all day about being frozen out of power, but they would settle for nothing less than the good old days under Saddam Hussein, where Sunni, Ba'athist, fascist, completely ruled the Shiite majority with an iron fist, and so, yeah, give us the defense ministry or else this insurgency will continue.
Well, screw you.
Come on then.
What are we going to do?
Are we going to dive into that?
And, you know, they have a point.
It's just like that quote where Bandar was telling Richard Dearlove, the British spy, that, listen, we're just sick and tired of the Shiites and we're just going to, you know, we're not going to settle for them controlling Baghdad.
Well, what are you going to do, fling suicide bombers at them forever, or what?
Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, there's a transition, and that's kind of what I mean by low-level chaos, is that, yeah, that could be what sort of continues.
The Iranians may find it in their interest to keep the Shias powerful, but, you know, not too powerful.
Keep a Sunni insurgency brewing at a certain level so that, you know, they can keep everybody on edge.
That also would keep the Shias dependent on the Iranians for help and things like that.
It's possible that what you're looking at now, minus ISIS, because, I mean, eventually ISIS is going to be pushed out of Iraq or marginalized to the point where they're just a bunch of troublemakers.
I mean, there's just far too much weaponry aimed at them right now for them to, you know, continue to exist as a serious force.
I mean, it's just physics at this point.
But you know, the Iranians are smart people.
The Middle East is full of folks who know how to play, you know, multiple levels simultaneously.
I mean, the Saudis are always good at that, for example, and I think the Iranians would be too.
The trick is to sort of know that's going on.
America has never been particularly good at that kind of thing.
Boy.
All right, one more.
I know you've got to go, but what about Afghanistan?
They're sending hundreds of Marines to Helmand Province.
Are they going to get that surge to work this time or what?
Oh, yeah, sure.
Everything's going to be fixed.
Probably end of the month, maybe.
Something like that.
No, I mean, here's an actual better question.
Is that a signal of Secretary of Defense Mattis's forthcoming policy?
They wouldn't do this without his approval, right, during this transition period?
Maybe.
Maybe.
I mean, Obama is seemingly going out the door, tweaking Trump's nipple at every possible opportunity.
So it may be a way of forcing the Trump people to stay engaged, at least initially.
But you know, Afghanistan is going to be, it's like a tire fire.
You know, I don't know, maybe if you're a Simpsons fan, you've seen their tire fire.
But I mean, in real life, tire fires burn forever.
They never really get to be a big fire, but they never really get to go out.
And I think watching what happened to the way Obama was pummeled in 2011 as the Iraq War closed down politically, how he got beaten up so badly.
I don't know that any president, Republican, Democrat, you know, the ghost of the Libertarian Party, whatever.
I mean, no one would find a good way to get out of Afghanistan or a good reason to do it.
I think the idea would be that nobody wants Afghanistan to bubble over into Iraq of 2014.
Nobody wants, nobody can figure out a way to get out.
Nobody can figure out a way to win.
We can, with the application of reasonably minor amounts of force, I mean, 300 Marines is just not that big a deal if you want to think kind of militarily.
We can keep this on a low simmer and basically continue to make it go away from the consciousness of Americans.
I mean, if I were to open the window and yell outside, how many years have we been at war in Afghanistan?
I doubt I could get a reasonable answer and, you know, I'm in a neighborhood of smart people.
Yeah, it's true.
Nobody pays any attention whatsoever.
It's on the far side of Persia from where all the action is as far as that goes.
And that would be, I think, what President Trump will want to do is keep people not paying attention.
Don't do anything real big that gets noise.
Don't let things fall apart that gets noise.
You know, just fly over there once every Thanksgiving, shake a few hands with the troops and, you know, just let it go.
That 10,000 troops is enough to keep Saigon from falling forever.
It has been.
You know, and the Taliban, I think, learns their lesson that their power lies outside.
And as long as the United States is willing to keep 10,000 troops, I don't know that because again, keep in mind, when we say the Taliban on your show, we're using it as kind of a shorthand for a whole bunch of disparate groups that would just as soon start nipping at each other if there were not Americans and whatever's left of the Afghan National Army to fight at.
You know, these are guys who control one group controls a valley and another group controls another valley.
You know, there's not like a Taliban Pentagon someplace.
I don't know what though, Hekmatyar and the Hizb-e-Islami guys are back in Kabul now.
And I can't help but wonder whether that's a Trojan horse kind of thing where he's trying to beat the other Taliban type leaders from getting there.
But he's got, I mean, I think they at least agreed to let him bring 20,000 men with him.
But I mean, you know, if the CIA decides to do something, I mean, that's a 50 cent solution, right?
He could fall down the stairs with a bullet in the back of his head and we'll move on from that.
I think the United States has the ability to keep Afghanistan more or less where it is right now, whatever word you want to apply to that.
And you know, if you need to throw in another couple of hundred troops, throw in a couple of hundred troops.
If you need to drop some bombs, you drop some bombs.
But I think we've given up on any concept of winning, quitting, withdrawing, or concluding.
This war will be going on when my grandkids are talking to your grandkids on the anti-war show a decade from now.
All right.
Thanks very much, Peter.
Good to talk to you again.
When are we going to do the interview?
I mean, it's been great sitting here chatting with you about these things.
When are we going to do the interview, Scott?
Yeah, I should ask you about some of the things on the list.
What was that you wrote about?
Wasn't Obama going to close the Guantanamo Bay prison?
And he never did?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was actually the first thing on my list here.
Well, no.
He's still got time.
I mean, the inauguration is until a week from Friday.
Yeah, that's true.
There's only, what, a couple score left there?
Somewhere, yeah.
50-something.
It's something.
I mean, that's great.
There's fewer.
I'll, you know, great, credit where credit is due.
But the fact that the doors are still open means that the doors are still open.
Anyone who gets propaganda value off of the fact that Guantanamo exists continues to get it.
You know, the people who are, the terrorists who are recruiting off the presence of Guantanamo aren't going to recruit less people because there's 10 fewer guys there locked up this month than last month.
That isn't going to change any of that.for all you Trump fans out there.
The Guantanamo is up, running, ready, locked and cocked, ready for Trump to put some new people in there.
So thanks, Obama.
Yep.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Now I'll let you go.
All right.
Take care, my friend.
Appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
All right.
So that's Peter Van Buren.
He's at WeMentWell.com.
WeMentWell.com slash blog.
Check out his great blog there, and we reprint it all at Antiwar.com.
Oh, and the book is Ghosts of Tom Joad.
Before that, WeMentWell, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
You drink coffee.
I drink coffee.
Just about everyone drinks coffee.
So why bother with anything but the best?
Darren's Coffee is roasted at his new shop in Claremont, Indiana.
And coming soon, you can order on Amazon and support the show by using Scott Horton's affiliate link, darrenscoffee.com.
Because everyone deserves to drink great coffee.
Hey, Al Scott here for Ry Guys T-Shirts.
Ry Guys, that's W-R-Y, guys.com.
Great irreverent, thought-provoking T-Shirts upholding a pro-freedom perspective.
Inspired by such classic humorous as Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Oscar Wilde, they invoke the wit and wisdom of the past to satirize modern myths.
These high-quality shirts for men and women look good and feel good, and they make great gifts.
Use the coupon code SCOTT for 15% off.
Ry Guys T-Shirts at ryguys.com.
That's W-R-Y, guys.com.