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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 their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, bitch, say it, 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 Stephanie Savelle.
She is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
An anthropologist, she has also conducted research on security and civic engagement in the U.S. and in Brazil, and co-authored The Civic Imagination, Making a Difference in American Political Life.
Here she has this very interesting article at her friend, Tom Englehart's site, tomdispatch.com, the hidden costs of America's wars or the wars no one notices.
Welcome to the show, Stephanie.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks so much for having me.
Hey, very happy to have you here.
I've been talking about you because something that you wrote really stuck with me in here.
It's in regards to what you say, or what I just read in your bio there about your research on Brazil.
In fact, when I was telling the anecdote, I even got exactly your same reaction.
You say in here that whenever you mention that you work on the costs of America's wars, people say, yeah, yeah, that's good.
Okay, good for you.
Yeah, that sounds fun.
But whenever you say, yeah, I do this interesting work on police brutality in the slums in Brazil, everybody goes, oh, wow, yeah, that's neat.
Tell me all about it, blah, blah, blah.
And when I was telling that to a friend of mine, he got all interested at the Brazil ghetto part before I got to the punchline about how nobody cares about the wars.
So anyway, I'm sorry for telling your story for you, but I just think that's really interesting.
And I guess I'm really interested in police brutality in the slums in Brazil, too, not at the expense of the rest of our story here.
But I don't know, why don't you go ahead and tell us then, if it's so interesting, how you got interested in that and what is the deal?
Right, yeah.
Well, I had been doing research in the Brazilian favelas for quite some time.
And when I was down there preparing to do my dissertation research, they were starting a new community policing program that was intended to take control of the favelas or the slums from these drug trafficking gangs and back into state control.
And so they were installing police units in these places that had never had police units there before.
And as you can imagine, a lot of this activity was very militarized.
So they, in some cases, called on the Brazilian army to actually occupy urban neighborhoods.
And they were doing patrols and surveillance and you name it, it was like a war zone.
And so I was very interested in all this police militarization down there in the favelas.
And I ended up studying with my dissertation advisor, whose name was Catherine Lutz.
And she had done a ton of work on militarization in the United States, not police militarization, but just militarization of US society, the ways that we spend our money, the things that we care about, our American values and things like that.
And so with time, I went from studying police militarization in Brazil to more of a focus on the US, especially after I finished my dissertation and took on this co-directorship of the cost of war project with her.
And it is quite striking.
I mean, people have seen movies about the Brazilian favelas and you talk about drug trafficking and it's kind of sexy and dangerous and mysterious and people want to hear all about it.
And I think the contrast with kind of what we know as the war on terror is quite striking in that way, because it's the least kind of sexy, mysterious thing.
People don't want to hear about how we're spending trillions of dollars and putting our children in debt and affecting not only US soldiers lives, but the lives of people around the world for much for the worse.
And so, yeah, it's this funny reaction where I'm used to people getting excited when I tell them about my research.
Wow, you must be really brave to go into the favelas and people who even don't even know anything will say, wow, what is it like?
And are the drug traffickers really what they say?
And all this stuff.
And then about the US wars, it's kind of like, yeah, that's cool.
After this article came out, I had a friend this weekend say, I think you were writing about me because I totally have had that reaction to you talking about your work.
And I was like, yes, I don't want you to feel bad, but really I was kind of making that, telling that story in service of a point, which is, you know, Americans kind of have a really strong detachment when it comes to talking about the war on terror.
And it's a cultural thing.
It's also a generational thing.
I think, you know, I start the article saying I'm in my mid thirties.
I think it's something that especially people in my generation and younger, we just, we haven't been affected by the wars that are going on.
And, and people just don't, don't think about it.
Don't care about it really in their, in their day-to-day lives.
Yeah.
You know, it's always struck me that people complain about free Tibet when, well, that's easy because who are you even talking to?
I mean, do they even know that it's China that's occupying Tibet?
Like they even, they're just, it's some like abstract thing for people who are culturally liberal to be into.
Yeah.
If only the Buddhists of Tibet were free one day or whatever, but how meaningless.
You never see those same people.
Well, rarely do you see those same people say free Palestine, which is occupied on America's dime or free Afghanistan, free Iraq from the tyranny of American occupation and war there.
When, I mean, and I'll never forget a guy said to me one time, we had a war in Libya?
He said, yeah, you know, the wacky Colonel Gaddafi, mere sunglasses, medals on his shirt, real famous guy, Ronald Reagan bombed him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gaddafi.
I remember Gaddafi.
Yeah.
Obama murdered him.
Had an entire war there for Al Qaeda, by the way, and turned the place into a warring hellhole since then.
Oh, huh.
Never even heard of it.
And I think that's the, that's the real key to this, isn't it?
It's the partisanship.
If Obama's doing the mass murdering, then there must be a good reason because I like him, says the left half of the people.
Just the same as when it's George W. Bush or Donald Trump doing the killing, the right half says, well, it must be good.
Well, you know, what's funny is I think that the one issue on which, you know, people across the parties are agreeing these days, or especially Congress, in Congress is to increase the military budget, right?
That's, it's the, it's the one thing that there, there isn't a lot of partisanship on because across the board, Republicans and Democrats in kind of the mainstream are really saying, yes, of course, the military needs more money.
And you know, just approved $80 billion more in the next couple of years.
And it's just, it's just kind of insane how much money we're actually spending on, on these wars.
And one of the things that I write about in my article is that we do, we have come out with these figures, the cost of war project of how much we've spent on the war on terror.
And our estimates are that we've spent since 2001, $5.6 trillion, which is just so, it's such a large number.
You can't even, it's totally mind boggling.
Like you don't even know how to, how to hold on to that number, how to grasp it.
But, but what we've figured out is that the government does things like instead of saying, kind of making a comprehensive account of how much we've spent, they'll say, oh, we've, you know, we've spent this much money in the overseas contingency operations budget, which is an, it's an appropriations budget by the Pentagon for kind of emergencies.
So that, you know, what they do is they put the war funding in the OCO appropriations.
And so when they, when the government says, this is how much we've spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they'll say, you know, just what the OCO budget, the overseas contingency operations budget has been.
But what we say is, wait a minute, you have to count not just that, there are so many other things.
There's, of course, the, you know, increases to the Pentagon base budget, which are enormous and which wouldn't have happened had it not been for the fact that we were at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and all these other places.
And so there's that, there's money that we are obligating into the future.
So for example, the post 9-11 war veterans, we've already spent, you know, billions of dollars on, you know, care and social assistance and things like that.
And then projected into the future, our calculations or estimates are that we will spend, you know, a trillion dollars just on post 9-11 war veterans by 2056.
So if you add in those kinds of costs, then we really, it's just this kind of massive, massive investment that, you know, Congress members just really don't bat an eye.
They just kind of keep signing these blank checks for increases to the Pentagon budget.
And now, just to be clear about this, you're saying that they've spent 5.6 trillion so far, and it's impossible to even estimate how much it's going to be by 2058?
Yeah.
So basically we've spent 5.6 trillion through fiscal year 2018.
Because I remember just a few years ago, it was, well, and I'm not saying this guy's the greatest economist or whatever, but Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, I believe her name is, they put out, they wrote a book about this, even they called it the $3 trillion war.
And then they said, oops, we're wrong.
We're now estimating it could be as much as five or six.
And I admit that was a few years ago, but they were projecting into the future, right?
They were projecting like for as long as these veterans live or something like that.
And it sounds like they caught way up.
Well, exactly.
They, even their estimates, which were much more comprehensive are lower than what we have now spent.
So yeah, this war is just kind of out of proportion, more than anyone ever expected it would cost.
And I'm not even, the thing that I don't count in the 5.6 trillion, which is crazy, is the interest.
So all of this money, most of this money we have paid for through borrowing.
The Atlantic Magazine wrote a story about one of our reports that called them the credit card wars.
No other point in American history have we paid for war so much through borrowing.
And this is going to have a huge effect on future generations.
So by our estimates, even if we stopped paying for these wars right now, we would still have an extra $8 trillion in interest to add to that total.
So 5.6 trillion plus 8 trillion, again, in the next 40 years, by 2056.
So that total that we have, it includes some future obligations to veterans, but it doesn't even include all of that interest that we're going to owe.
Yeah.
And think about that when you've worked your whole life and all that has been taken from the IRS, all that has been taken out of your checks every Friday, just goes to pay some tiny remainder to some national government for their interest on the debt that they borrowed to wage these wars.
It's really discouraging.
We calculated that each American, the portion of the pie, well, each American taxpayer, it's about a little less than $24,000 that each one of us is responsible for paying since 2001.
And just imagine how that's going to grow once we start paying for all this interest.
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Now, if I remember right, there was a CIA or a National Intelligence Council, actually, National Intelligence Estimate about, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, where they said, yeah, the national debt is, you know, shaping up to be a real problem, and one of the greatest threats to the future of the country.
And yet they're at the core of the people deciding the policy to spend us into this debt.
Seems like there's some level of awareness, though, that this can only go on so long, as it is in Argentina.
It is in the USA, eventually.
You know, it does make me wonder what future generations in America are going to look like, because the levels of deficit spending that we're reaching in this country are more than ever before.
And it does, it makes me worry for my, you know, my three-year-old daughter and what her adult life is going to look like.
I think it's going to be a very different America than the one that I grew up in, that we're all used to living in, because of this debt.
Yeah, Charles Coyette, who, I don't know if he's an economist, but he sure is an expert on this stuff, an author, he's saying, look, we're at the point of the national debt is 100% of GDP.
You think you can just do that?
You're wrong, you know?
Right.
Yeah, and as interest rates go up, that was the thing.
He was projecting the amount of money we'd be paying just as interest on the debt every year in the national government budget, and that's assuming that interest rates stay where they are when they're already creeping up, because of all this monetary inflation and extra debt.
Right.
And, you know, I think we kind of have a lot of myths in this country about, you know, Pentagon money and thinking, oh, it's for the troops.
You know, it's almost considered unpatriotic to say, let's not spend so much money on the military.
Certainly, you know, what's going on in Congress right now and with the president, you know, shows that.
But, you know, we're going to have a $700 billion Pentagon budget in 2018, $716 billion Pentagon budget in 2019.
And the thing about this money is it doesn't necessarily help our military be more ready, which is what it's always saying.
We have a readiness crisis, and it doesn't help.
It doesn't even help us fight terrorism, because what happens is so much of that money goes to waste and fraud and corruption.
Half of that Pentagon budget per year goes to private corporations.
And those companies, the private contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, they're making huge, huge profits off this money.
And they're, you know, hugely influential in why the Pentagon is getting these kinds of increases in the first place.
And if you think about it, the CEOs of the top five companies, including Lockheed Martin, they make hundreds of millions per year, just the top five CEOs.
And then think about all the people who work for those companies in addition.
So there's that.
And then, you know, of course, there's been all this recent news about this lost money, the $800 million lost by the Defense Logistics Agency recently when they were audited.
They couldn't account for $800 million.
And then kind of the list goes on.
A lot more of these cases are coming to light, but that still doesn't seem to affect anything.
You know, it's like, okay, well, just kind of keep throwing money at them and forget that it's not being used well or accounted for.
And then, of course, there's the issue of, you know, what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq?
You know, are all of our actions there actually serving to reduce terrorism?
And the answer is no.
You know, the chaos and the disorder that are going on in the war zones because of our activities there are actually propelling more and more people to join insurgent groups.
There are far more insurgent groups and terrorist activity in Afghanistan now than when we entered there in 2001.
So we just have to kind of think carefully about, you know, how all this money is being used and whether or not it really is worth it in terms of our goals of countering terrorism and having a strong military and those sorts of things.
Well, and I'm sure you guys have noticed too that Obama's, we're spending a trillion dollars completely revamping the nuclear weapons arsenal.
And for that matter, the nuclear weapons industry and all the government laboratories and everything has already become $1.7 trillion under Trump.
And I don't even know if they passed something like that or they just started saying it that way in the press because get used to it.
And that was predictable enough, right?
It'll be $3 or $4 trillion by the time they're done.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's really scary.
And they already have 7,000 H-bombs, by the way.
It's not like they need to do this.
And this goes to the thing, what you're saying about the military industrial complex firms here, and especially the very big ones, General Dynamics and Lockheed and them that you mentioned, that they spend a measly couple of $10 million a year on lobbying, which is just absolutely nothing compared to, you know, it's got to be the highest investment return ratio in the history of all humanity, bribing Congress to be able to reach into the Pentagon's budget this way.
They take home tens of billions of dollars a year, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars a year, companies like Lockheed.
And I remember there was even a scandal a few years ago.
Lockheed spent $14 million.
And I was like, a million?
That was it?
On lobbying?
Was that by some steak dinners and some cocaine for some congressmen for a summer?
I mean, that's nothing, right?
Yeah.
It's really shocking and disturbing.
It really is.
So, when you think about $700 billion a year Pentagon budget this coming year, and think just how much money, if you think about half of that, $350 billion going to these companies, it really just puts things into perspective, I think.
Well, and also, when we know that, for example, they're spending more than a trillion on the F-35 that we've all known all along for, what, 15 years straight, is a complete turkey, and it's never going anywhere.
That's what the guy that designed the F-15 and F-16 says about it anyway, right?
Right.
It can't turn, it can't climb, it's not fast, it's not stealth, it can't carry a bomb load, it can't fight a dogfight against a 1974 model F-16 or 77 model F-16.
It's a hugely expensive weapons program that's just going nowhere.
And I mean, the thing is, the U.S. military already is the biggest.
We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined.
So, we're already spending so much more money on our military.
And we do have a very strong Air Force, Navy, Ground Force, all of those elements of the military.
It's just false to say that they're not strong and not ready, and we are.
Yeah, well, you know, Major Danny Shurston was on the show a couple of weeks ago and pointed out that, listen, our Air Force and Navy have been at war since 1991.
They never stopped.
They've been, you know, that's not the same necessarily for the Marine Corps itself and all of that.
But we've been bombing Iraq this whole time for 27 years now.
You know, they only, they stopped in 2012 and 13 for like a year and a half.
And then now they've stopped for the last six months again.
They're the only times we haven't been bombing Iraq.
Yeah, but you know, we're bombing other places.
You know, we issued a, one of our recent, most recent reports that we issued on the site was a map of U.S. counterterror war locations.
And if you go to, you can just go most easily to www.costsofwar.org and it will direct you to the site on the Watson Institute.
It shows that the U.S. has counterterror activities in 76 countries in the world.
It's kind of insane, but that's 40% of countries in the world.
And I actually did the research to put together this map and it's kind of crazy the extent of our kind of tentacles into so many places.
Like, you know, in this country we are, you know, training the border security to have better surveillance in order to be able to kind of catch terrorists that way.
And in this country we're conducting joint military exercises.
And in this country we're, you know, dropping bombs, doing drone strikes.
And here we have kind of, you know, combat troops.
The troops in Niger that we all heard about in October, the ones that, the four men who were killed on the ground in Niger and everyone said, wait a minute, what were they doing there in the first place?
Even Congress people were saying, well, we didn't, we had no idea we had people, combat troops in Niger.
Well, those people were doing what the U.S. calls basically security training and assistance.
And so in all, in so many of these countries around the world, we are training local troops to combat terrorism.
And, and that's what those four guys were there officially doing.
So here they are officially training, you know, presumably Niger troops from Niger, how to combat terrorism.
And they're doing, you know, and all of a sudden they're, they're doing a ground patrol and they, and they get killed.
So what, which really makes you wonder what, what does training, so what does this training really look like?
And, and, you know, the, the, the kind of scope and the scale of this vast kind of military U.S. military footprint on the world is, is also something to think about and to wonder, is that worth it?
You know, is that really serving to, serving our purposes?
And can we even begin to think about combating terrorism on this global level?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I sometimes quote these, I guess I won't read them to you, but there's a great quote in the New York times where they talk about, well, this is a few years ago now that we're pulling out of Iraq and mostly out of Afghanistan, we're looking for new missions around the world.
And so, yeah, what we're going to do is we're looking at Africa.
There's a big new thing and it's David Rodriguez, the guy that helped lose Iraq, the Afghan war there under McChrystal.
And then the other one, I like this one best.
It's the dagger brigade, the army's dagger brigade at Fort Riley, Kansas.
And they say, well, yeah, now that we're pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly we're looking for ways to stay globally engaged.
In other words, and so we're going to Africa again, they don't want to have to get jobs.
That's all they're saying.
They don't want to have to get jobs.
And so they're looking for new things to do.
It's not that, wow, George Bush wasn't lying when he said Al Qaeda had a strong presence in 60 countries.
Yeah, no, he was.
It's just that his policy and Obama's and now Trump since then has helped to spread it to 60 countries.
That's different.
Right.
In fact, I had a CIA analyst on the show who was right there with them at the dawn of the terror war in 2001, who said, confirmed to me on the show, at that time, there were 400 members of Al Qaeda hiding with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
That's it.
Everybody since then is new.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
These, I mean, arguably the US activity abroad is really only serving to fuel the flames of terrorism rather than the other way around.
So it's just, it's just absurd.
Yeah.
Remember, I like this one in right after the fall of Baghdad and Saddam fled and they pulled down the statue and then Bush submitted to Congress his request for $87 billion.
And everybody went, what?
$87 billion?
I thought this was going to be short and free and easy.
And yet that's nothing, right?
We spent $870 billion roughly since then every year on this terror war.
People were shocked.
You remember how shocked they were by that?
In the spring of 2003, $87 billion.
It was like, guys, we're only just getting started.
Don't tell me you thought the oil money was going to pay for it or something.
Right.
Oh yeah.
There were all kinds of crazy ideas about how the wars were going to pay for themselves.
I mean, that's just, it was just ridiculous.
Yeah.
Amazing.
All right.
Well, listen, I think it's such important work that you do there and I wish everyone would go and look, first of all, at your great article at TomDispatch.com.
It's Stephanie Savelle, The Hidden Costs of America's Wars.
It's maybe the article before last up there or most, actually I think it's the most recent article there on the front page of TomDispatch.com.
And then also it's CostsofWar.org for the project and all the information going back for years now, right?
Yes, that's right.
Since 2011.
Great.
All right.
Well, thank you again very much for your time.
Really appreciate it, Stephanie.
Thanks a lot for having me on.
Take care.
All right, you guys.
Stephanie Savelle, again, CostsofWar.org.
And I'm at ScottHorton.org, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, iTunes and Stitcher and all those things.
Antiwar.com, LibertarianInstitute.org, FoolsErrand.us for my book, Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
