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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 us, he died.
We ain't killing their 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 Danny Sherson.
He is a currently serving U.S. Army major.
He's a regular for Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart's great site.
We rerun virtually all of it at antiwar.com.
He's the author of the book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad, Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.
Welcome to the show, Danny.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
So much to talk about here.
First of all, the only reason I haven't interviewed you yet is because I wanted to read your book first and then interview you.
But then I've been putting that off and I got so many damn books to read.
I decided I better go ahead and get this started.
And then secondly, I have to say to you, what do we got to do to get you conscientious subjector status?
Because I know that you know better because I've read about 10,000 words of yours before or more.
Well, I probably won't get conscientious subjector status, but I am planning to leave the army in the next few months and sort of transition into hopefully full-time writing and speaking if I can pull it off.
So I've had about enough.
I've played the game long enough, but it's time to go.
It's time to try something different and get my voice out there in a whole different way, less under the kind of the watchful eye of the army.
And then when you say play the game and all that, you mean you were in Iraq, World War II and Afghanistan?
Yeah, I was in Baghdad in 2006 and seven and watched that place fall apart into a civil war and then twiddled our thumbs in Kandahar and kept taking and losing the same ground for a year and losing soldiers.
And, you know, quite frankly, it's time to speak out.
It's been time to speak out.
And I've been doing that since 2015.
But I'll be happy the day that I can stop putting my DoD disclaimer at the front of all my interviews and at the end of all my articles, which of course is that everything I say is my opinion and certainly not the opinion of the Department of Defense or the army.
But I will be happy not to do that anymore sometime soon.
Yeah.
Well, maybe someday we'll change their minds.
After all, you guys are their men, right?
They don't want to just throw you away, do they?
Well, you might be surprised.
We're pretty expendable.
But there are a few of us, there are a few dissenting vets who are out there.
There's a couple of guys on active duty, there's a lot more who are out.
But I think it's time for veterans to speak out because whether it's right or wrong, the American people trust veterans a hell of a lot more than politicians.
And so if we can get some vets to actually speak up, I think people might listen, at least a little.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I want to talk with you about that off the air actually a little bit, maybe.
That's a different conversation.
So right before we started recording here, you said that you read my piece of the American Conservative.
And that piece was basically a distillation of different parts of my book.
But addressing the safe haven myth, which is the final excuse for why we have to stay in Afghanistan forever.
Because if we leave, then bad guys will be there.
And then they'll knock our towers down again.
And so therefore, we have to stay forever.
And you were about to say whether you agreed with me or not, I'm kind of afraid that you do.
But on the other hand, you fought in the war there.
And I stayed home in Texas and a little bit in LA this whole time, because I knew better.
So I wonder what you thought of that argument?
Well, I totally agreed.
I wish I could disagree.
I wish there was something more to the war.
Your title is pretty apt war without rationale.
And you talked about the safe haven myth.
And man, I've been banging that drum for a while to the of course, the argument is, we cannot allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for what Al Qaeda, ISIS now.
It's the most ludicrous, illogical argument of all time, because the Taliban, which is who we really fight in Afghanistan, for the most part, has never posed the transnational threat to the United States.
And even if they did, I can name 15 countries right now that are currently safe havens for Al Qaeda, ISIS or some sort of franchise.
And by that logic, we should have 10, 15, 20,000 soldiers pretty much in every country in the world.
And that is neither sustainable nor in our national security interest.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk about this counterinsurgency doctrine a little bit.
You know, I forgot who was told me some funny anecdote about Andrew Bacevich.
It must have been Kelly Vlahos talked about going to one of these pro-counterinsurgency things, probably back in 2009, at the height of CNES and all of that, where they were brave enough to have one dissenter come in.
And it was retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich.
And he got up there and he was like, Oh, yeah.
So you got this country that's near failed state and you got this terrible drug cartels that are destroying the rule of law and this and that and all that.
So when do we send the army and the Marine Corps to Mexico to occupy the place and implement the counterinsurgency strategy and win over their hearts and minds and make us make them love us more than their local security forces so we can protect them from the and then and the whole place is just sinking in their chairs.
Because the only reason that this is a legitimate argument for Afghanistan is because even though everybody knows it's complete nonsense, it's too far away for Americans to care as they kill all these people without a real rationale.
And they know that if they were to try this in Mexico, where we can see them from here, and how bad it is and how much worse it makes everything, then the American people would have reason to object as simple as that.
And he called their ass out and they didn't have a word to say to it.
You know, he's great.
I've been reading his stuff for years.
And just about every article that Colonel retired base which puts out is spot on.
And he's, he's just so pithy and, and just tight in his language.
He's absolutely right.
The coin Denise does as we like to call them, you know, these coin doctrine aficionados, or coin enthusiasts, you pick the term.
I mean, all they're peddling is snake oil.
They're peddling tactics, masquerading as strategy, and it's a formula for forever war.
And well, explain what you mean by that.
So it's non military types.
So the coin Denise, the kind of click is the General Petraeus, General Mattis, who is currently a Secretary of Defense, and they co wrote the counterinsurgency manual for the US Army in 2006.
And pretty much all the lackeys that love them, you know, for everything from full bird colonels down to a lot of junior officers.
And essentially, what they peddled was this idea that if you saturate a country with American soldiers, and quote, protect the population by living in small outposts, and sort of protecting the people that you can create legitimate governance, once you have security, and that in a one two punch, you can essentially take these societies that are broken in either civil war or mass insurgency, and turn them into, I don't know, liberal democracies in the heart of the greater Middle East.
It's never worked.
But of course, they would disagree with me.
And they would say, well, look what we accomplished in Iraq in 2007.
And I was there, I didn't feel like we accomplished a whole lot except drop in half a platoon, and eventually get given that exact space back to insurgents, and then eventually ISIS.
But that logic that they apply, see, they think it's a one size fits all.
Two years later, after the Iraq, quote, success, they said, well, let's do it in Afghanistan.
And they got President Obama to agree.
He strong armed into it, I guess didn't take too much twisting, try the same thing in Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan is a completely different society from Iraq, larger geographically, different terrain, different types of people, different ethnicities.
But no, we've got this one size fits all tactic.
We masqueraded a strategy, we sell it to the American people as snake oil, the American people don't care.
So they let anything get by without paying much attention.
And here we are again, with another quote, surge, that's everyone's favorite term in the military.
Now it's military lexicon, surge, you can search to do anything, you could stay late at work, and you're surging to get the job done.
Or you can try to control an entire society and remake it your image.
And that's surging to Yeah, well, what's funny about that, right, is a surge is something that, by definition is temporary, right?
It's like a high tide, but it goes back again.
It's a, but it reminds me of Connelly's rice with the the time horizon.
Well, but you can never get to the horizon.
That's why it's the horizon.
It keeps moving with you as you travel, you know, call it that.
Anyways, but what they're saying now, though, is the surge has to be permanent.
This is the only problem is Obama, look at all the gains that they made.
I don't know which gains, but look at all the gains that they made in Afghanistan with the surge between 2009 and 12.
And then that week, Democrat, you know, when Obama withdrew and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and turned the country back over to the Taliban, and Haqqani who before that were back on their heels.
What about that?
Yeah, well, that that's, of course, the argument.
And it's the same argument they made in Iraq, you know, we had al Qaeda on the ropes.
And then because the weak Barack Obama soft, you know, dovish Democrat pulled this out.
And that's why ISIS rises.
It's completely mythical.
The reality is that the United States Army only ever held the ground it stood on.
It never had enough soldiers to control every district or every province.
And surge was, by its own definition, temporary, but not anymore.
See, General Petraeus gave an interview sometime this last year saying the war in Afghanistan should be considered generational, a generational war.
So what we've done now is we've taken this term surge, which by its very definition means temporary.
We've redefined it in the military and popular policymaker Washington Beltway lexicon, and now it's permanent surge.
So permanent surge is generational war is perpetual war is forever war.
These are all synonyms, but it's not a comfortable term to say it that way.
So very few of these individuals, whether they be mainstream Democrats, mainstream Republicans, or just retired or current senior military officers, they're not likely, they're not apt to say forever war.
What they are likely to say is surge, sustainable gains, lights at the end of the tunnel, gain momentum.
These are the kind of terms we're hearing about Afghanistan, quote after quote, day after day.
And it's funny because they're the same exact types of language that were used in Vietnam.
Right.
Yeah.
At most, temporary limited successes, never victory.
But so here's what's funny about this, right?
And, you know, I know I pay more attention to this kind of thing than most people, but it seems like any old regular Joe would say, well, wait, you said that the surge worked.
So if you're saying that you have to keep surging forever and ever and ever and ever, and that if you ever leave, then everything will fall apart again.
Then what you're saying is you lost.
What you're saying is the surge didn't work.
What you're saying is none of your promises came true.
And I know because it's the future and we're still there.
Right.
Right.
I mean, you're dead on.
We're everywhere, too.
I mean, we don't even know where our soldiers are.
Lindsey Graham, the hawk of the month, even he didn't know we had a thousand soldiers in Niger, in West Africa.
And yeah, sure, we don't have a hundred thousand soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria anymore, but we've spread a hundred thousand soldiers from Morocco or from West Africa over to South Asia.
Add all up, it's probably close to a hundred thousand, just like we had in Iraq and Afghanistan at the top of the surge.
And, you know, someone just needs to point to me one success.
I mean, a real success point to one place that has either made America safer or developed into a liberal democracy that we can be proud of.
Just name one.
That's what I say all the time.
Now, no one can.
They'll fiddle around the edges and say, well, Iraq is better than it was under Saddam.
I don't necessarily even think that's true from a position of regional stability.
But that's the kind of argument we're seeing made.
It's all one big myth.
It's just one big, you know, jug of snake oil.
And it's never going to work.
Two things.
Bottom line, these wars are either A, unwinnable, or B, unwinnable and not worth fighting.
So either way, you're not going to win.
I would argue that it's the latter.
They're not worth fighting because they're not in the broad national security vital interest of the United States.
And they're not winnable, because we don't have the means, the willpower, or just the size of the type of military that would be required to forever garrison the globe.
This has happened before.
We've seen it in Rome, and it didn't turn out all that well.
Yeah, well, so I want to talk about this article about Vietnam here in a minute, because it's so important to, you know, kind of the background to this whole discussion.
It's one of the examples they like to cite, where the French lost and the Americans lost, but if only.
So we'll talk about that in a second.
But I wanted to ask you, because there's so many comparisons, or lack of comparisons, in any real critical way.
But there's the supposed, as you said, one size fits all translation from Iraq strategy to Afghanistan strategy here.
And one thing that always bothered me about Iraq War Two, and it was pretty easy to know better if you were just reading about it, you know what I mean?
But if you look at TV, they would certainly never say who's who at all.
It was just the government narrative that, well, it's America and the people of Iraq against the terrorists who are trying to thwart their march to democracy.
When in fact, the whole time, it was America and the Bata Brigade against the Sunni militias of the former Ba'athist-led government and their new allies in the newly created al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And at least that way, you know, there was a little, if you look at it that way, at least you could understand who was who and what was going on.
But they never talked about it in those terms.
And a lot of times, it seemed like they were, you know, deliberately kind of ignoring, you know, what was going on there and pretending it wasn't going on, when in fact, America was really fighting on the Shiite side, even when they're cracking down on Maqtada al-Sadr in East Baghdad in 2007.
At the same time, they're completing winning the war for him and seizing the capital city away from the Sunnis permanently.
So in that sense, the counterinsurgency surge there, forget the counterinsurgency, but the surge did work, just not at what they said it was going to work at.
It didn't work at pacifying the Sunnis, but it did work at helping the Shia win the civil war.
And after all, they were the 60% super majority.
So once they had seized the capital city, they were like, all right, now what?
You know, and the Sunnis had lost.
That was it.
That was the inflection point where Bush could say, well, we'll call this relatively less violence period victory and go ahead and call it quits here, kind of a thing.
He was the one who signed the deal.
But then, so that's one thing.
But then the real point being, what about in Afghanistan?
You were in both of these wars.
And in Afghanistan, it's a coalition of minorities versus the plurality.
They're not really the majority, but they're the 40% plurality, the Pashtun tribesmen of Afghanistan.
And we're trying to force a Tajik and Uzbek and Hazara alliance of overlords against them.
And that's stupid.
I don't care how big your surge is, that can't work.
And I just wonder whether there's any recognition of, you know, in other words, are they so caught up in their propaganda about it's the good guys versus the bad guys that they themselves completely ignore the nonsensical nature of the program that they're on?
You made so many great points there.
I just want to kind of add on to two of them and then say something about the comparison and how the military tends to see Iraq and Afghanistan.
First of all, you're right.
The complexity of the mosaic that is, you know, Iraq's ethno sectarian life has definitely been downplayed because the American people, the owners of this country, right, quite frankly, they don't want the American people to know that complexity.
They don't think they can understand.
They count on our apathy.
The reality is that the surge in Iraq did accomplish something.
And I was in East Baghdad during the surge.
Most of the people who killed and wounded my soldiers were Shia, right?
The bad Shia under Muqtada al-Sadr.
That, you know, in quotes, air quotes, bad Shia.
Now, the reality is the United States did take the side of a certain branch of the Shia, right, SCRI and the barter brigades.
And what the surge accomplished was an ethnic cleansing of Sunnis out of Baghdad.
Baghdad was once a multi sectarian, multi religious city.
They were even Christians at one time, significant number.
And essentially now it's a Shia city.
So we did accomplish that ethnic cleansing.
That's the first thing.
The second thing, in Afghanistan, I think, and I think you'd agree with this based on your book and your articles, essentially Afghanistan has a very little history of successful centralized government from Kabul.
This is a country that has generally been, you know, based on de-evolution and local autonomy.
And that's the only way it really works in a country with so many different sort of confessional and ethnic groups.
But like you said, what we're trying to do is take the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and the Hazara with a small sprinkling of the, quote, good Pashtuns to give us legitimacy.
And then, of course, we're trying to force that down the throat of the plurality of Pashtuns in the south, east, far east and the southwest of the country.
I saw this firsthand in Afghanistan.
One of the things that stood out to me, every once in a while something happens on the ground that just is a light bulb moment.
All of the Afghan National Army soldiers that were assigned to me, right, that I was supposed to partner with, about a hundred man company, and I commanded about a 100 man cavalry troop.
About 90% of them were Tajiks or Uzbeks from the north of Afghanistan.
I, of course, was in Kandahar province in the Sunni, I'm sorry, in the Pashtu heartland of southern Afghanistan.
Well, guess what?
Those individuals in the Afghan National Army, the ones that are supposedly the legitimate government of centralized Afghanistan, most of them couldn't even speak Pashto.
So they needed an interpreter just as much as I did as an English speaking Caucasian from the United States.
So how in the world can we think that we are going to enforce a centralized presidential power type government from Kabul?
It's absolute madness.
But last point, this is what I'll tell you.
I was there for both surges, and in the second surge, probably the most frustrating aspect of it was that the colonels running the war, at least at my brigade level, they looked at Afghanistan and they saw Iraq.
No matter how many times they looked at Afghanistan, they applied the Iraq supposed lessons.
So, for example, my brigade commander had commanded a infantry battalion in West Baghdad.
Well, during the surge in West Baghdad, what did they do?
They walled off these markets and neighborhoods and created essentially secure enclaves so that the ethnic cleansing could go on, so that they could lower the violence just enough that Bush could declare victory.
So what's his plan for the small villages in rural Afghanistan?
Well, we got to wall them off.
You know what he called them?
Gated communities.
How's that for a euphemism?
He said, we need to make gated communities, so we're going to wall it off with T-walls, essentially tall concrete walls.
I said to the colonel, I said, sir, one quick problem is these people use 13th century irrigation canals, and if we surround their, you know, their little village with T-walls, we're going to cut off their water supply, and they're going to starve to death.
And he looked at me like I was crazy, because how dare I question the prevailing wisdom of the surge.
So the bottom line is, these are not- Wait, did they ring the village with the T-walls then?
No, I eventually convinced them to use concertina wire, so it looked instead like a concentration camp.
Oh, that's a big improvement over starving them, you know, immediately to death.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that was my big victory, was instead, you know, I convinced them not to destroy the irrigation canals, but instead to make them look as though they lived in a concentration camp from the Boer War or something.
Is there an Afghan section in your book, too, or it's all Iraq?
Yeah, my book is all Iraq, although I'm working on an Afghan sort of sequel that'll be very similar.
Man, I'm sorry, go ahead.
I'll try to mix in.
I'll essentially try to do what I did in the first book.
My book was Ghost Riders of Baghdad, for the listeners out there.
I essentially tried to combine the memoir with the macro analysis, so every other chapter would be, one is about me and my platoon and our experiences, and then the next chapter kind of zooms out and compares what we saw to the broader issue.
I'm working on something similar for Afghanistan now.
I think the rule is I have to wait about 10 years from when I return from those deployments to get my mind right enough to write about it.
Yeah, well, that's a hell of a lot of notes, and writing books is difficult, I know, so.
It really is.
It is for me, anyway.
I was just reading, I mean, just interviewing May Yang, Zhang, from The Intercept, who's a reporter over there, and, you know, I mean, I stayed here because I don't want to be over there, and I don't want to have this first-hand experience to be able to tell you, but so that makes me kind of self-conscious that, I mean, Anand Gopal said it wasn't wrong, so that's pretty good, you know?
Right, right.
Patrick Cockburn likes it, so screw you, but no, I mean, the more people like yourself or like May who read it and tell me that, yeah, no, that's pretty much it, the better it is for my own kind of self-consciousness about the fact that I'm not a real journalist.
I mean, I interview guys like you, so that sort of counts.
If I wrote it up, it could be an article, I guess, but I certainly don't go over there, and I certainly never joined the Army, so I got to have as many and the best first-hand sources as I can get, you know?
Well, it's interesting you'd say that.
A lot of people have this idea that if you haven't been somewhere, you have no right to talk about it.
I fundamentally disagree with that, because, in fact, I would say that most people who sort of served on the ground, what we see of the war, if we don't branch out and get into the scholarship, if we don't do that, like most veterans don't, we see the war essentially from, you know, through a straw hole at 30,000 feet, you know?
We see a tiny moment in time and a tiny sort of region of space, and actually, sometimes it can be deceptive and give you a warped view of the war, and actually, I've found that oftentimes either academics or journalists from outside the military who take a more macro perspective get it right, whereas, you know, and I understand why, you know, this isn't a knock at vets, but if you were to ask a lot of my soldiers, you know, I don't know that they would have a very detailed view of, like, the broad Iraq war or the broad Afghan war, and part of the reason for that is it's hard for them to dissent and say the war wasn't worth anything because their goddamn friends died for these little patches of ground in neighborhoods of Baghdad, and so it's sort of, it takes on a meaning it might not otherwise have for the veteran, and I fully understand that.
I think you see the same with a lot of Vietnam veterans.
I would argue that sort of the scholars among us, the soldier scholars among us have to have the intellectual honesty to pull ourselves out from those individual experiences and take a broader look.
It's hard to do.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when millions of guys have served in these wars at this point, in Iraq War II and in Afghanistan, try telling all their dads it wasn't worth it, too.
You know what I mean?
Right.
That's a pretty bitter pill to swallow when Junior doesn't have his leg anymore and this kind of thing.
It must have been for something.
Everything happens for a reason.
I'm pretty sure this was a really good one.
It must have been, you know, that kind of thing.
Right.
It's a hard thing to convince someone of.
Well, you know what?
I kind of thought, I started writing a book about the whole terror war, and I thought the fact that I haven't been to any of the wars in this case is really a benefit because otherwise how could I have one chapter on eight different wars, and I would have had to stay home in order to be able to have that broad of a view on it, but then once chapter two became a whole book on Afghanistan, I thought, well, that might really be considered a weakness, that I'm not a real academic, I'm not a journalist, I'm not a veteran, so who the hell am I to say all this other than I've just been doing a lot of interviews for a lot of years about it, you know?
Right.
Well, I think you've done a good job, and from what I can tell from your articles, you know, your conclusions are spot on, and we need as many people in as many different professions and as many different outlets yelling this from the rooftops and screaming it from the mountaintop because what we have now is national apathy because there's no draft, and the wars just drank on and on and on, and the all-volunteer force is, you know, it's getting broken down, quite frankly, we're breaking the army, we're breaking the ground forces in general through these massive deployments, look at the suicide rates, look at the divorce rates, it's honestly a national tragedy, and our Congress, whether we're talking about mainstream Democrats or mainstream Republicans, quite frankly, has completely handed in its duty or given up its duty to control war and fund it and actually take a critical look, and they let the president, the imperial presidency, just run amok, and it's an actual national tragedy.
Hey, people keep telling me, man, you've got great show notes on your show nowadays, and that's all thanks to Damon, who's doing the great editing and posting of the interviews, so everybody make sure and check out, even if you're just signed up to the podcast feed, make sure and check out the entries at libertarianinstitute.org and at scotthorton.org for all the great show notes, he's doing a really great job on that, and now here's the sponsors of the show that makes the show possible, so you should help to make them possible, that's ZenCash, zensystem.io, a great new digital currency, it's also a secure messaging app and all this great stuff, you can read all about it, zensystem.io, and then Mike Swanson is really my best sponsor, and in two ways here, The War State, first of all, which is a great history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II, and then also his investment advice informed by great libertarian economic theory, that's all at wallstreetwindow.com, and now when you follow his investment advice, which I'm sure includes imprecious metals, and so what you want to do is go to robertsandrobertsbrokerageinc.com, that's rrbi.co, rrbi.co for your gold, silver, platinum, or palladium, and if you buy with bitcoin, there's no premium at all, that's rrbi.co for robertsandrobertsbrokerageinc, and then of course get your anti-government propaganda at libertystickers.com, new art and a brand new website coming soon, and speaking of brand new websites, if you want a brand new website, a 2018 model, badass new website, then you just go to expanddesigns.com slash scott, and you'll save 500 bucks.
All right, let's talk about your great article about Vietnam here, so part of the problem for you and for me and for everybody is that we're so far in the future now that people who are young adults, to them, Vietnam is way in the past, it's like World War II or Korea is to me, even though I was born right after Vietnam in 76, so like two years later, year and a half later kind of thing, right, so I grew up in the shadow of the thing, but for a lot of these millennials and those younger listening to this show, we're talking about ancient history here, and why does it even matter, and yet I know and you know that older generations are still, and especially military men, are absolutely obsessed with this topic, why do they lose, like Hillary Clinton, it's everybody else's fault, other than those who came up with the plan to do it, and those who carried it out, so and this is, as you talk about here, this isn't just a cottage industry, this is a small economy in America is doing revisionist stuff about how we could have won Vietnam if only, well if only what, Danny?
Right, it's woulda, coulda, shoulda, and what's most incredible about the Vietnam War, which is now, you know, 50 years old, quite frankly, is that it's so alive in the American memory, and that war and how people came down on deciding whether they were pro or anti-war, it still really controls the language we use to talk about the two political parties, so the idea of the Republicans as hawks, as pro-America, as patriots, and the Democrats as kind of soft and weak, you know, neither of those things is absolutely true, but the reason we feel that way, a lot of it comes from the Vietnam era, what I talked about in the article, more specifically, was how senior military officers, the guys running the show now, how they feel about Vietnam, and I found something really fascinating, which is a significant number of these officers, all right, who are at the top of the establishment, two of them are in Trump's small circle of cabinet members, H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor, and General Jim Mattis, its Secretary of Defense, these guys all served in the shadow of Vietnam, they came into the army within two to ten years of the end of that war, they served in its shadow, all their mentors were Vietnam veterans, and they all chose to study Vietnam when they went and did their master's or their doctoral work, and so this is General Petraeus, he does his dissertation at Princeton on Vietnam, H.R. McMaster does his on Vietnam, and Jim Mattis uses counterinsurgency theory and the example from Vietnam to inform his co-writing of FM 324, the counterinsurgency manual.
Here's what I've, what the conclusion I've come to is that they have all drawn the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War.
Most of the military officers at the top of the Trump administration, quite frankly, the top of the Bush administration and the Obama administration before that, fall into one of two revisionist categories when it comes to the Vietnam War.
You see, the orthodox tradition in Vietnam War scholarship is that they call it the unwinnable war tradition.
Essentially, this war was not worth fighting, and it was probably unwinnable.
This is the consensus of a significant number of historians.
That is not the consensus among most senior military officers.
They fall into the revisionist categories, and the revisionists are essentially the winnable war tradition, and the point is the Vietnam War could have, would have, should have been won.
Now, there's two broad schools that fall under that revisionist category.
The first one is the Clausewitzians.
These are the guys who essentially say, and H.R. McMaster is probably pretty close to a Clausewitzian.
They say the military could have won if only it had invaded North Vietnam, bombed North Vietnam into a parking lot, put soldiers in Cambodia and Laos, essentially increased the number of American soldiers by several hundred thousand.
If we did that, we would have won.
The second school of thought, and this is Petraeus and Jim Mattis who kind of feel this way, are what we call the hearts and minders, and they say the problem isn't that we didn't, you know, put enough conventional soldiers on the ground and invade Hanoi.
The problem isn't that we didn't do that.
The problem is we didn't do counterinsurgency well enough.
You see, if we had only protected the population and done coin and applied these hearts and minds techniques of building schools and building legitimacy of the government, that then we would have won.
And that's essentially General Petraeus's viewpoint.
Both are wildly flawed and generally reviled by the serious Vietnam scholars in the Orthodox school.
The problem is neither of them injects any Vietnamese voices.
If you read the books of these gentlemen, they're almost completely Amaro-centric.
They're completely Euro-centric books.
Any decision that happens in Vietnam was really made in Washington.
There's no agency for the Vietnamese.
It doesn't look at the decisions in North Vietnam, and it doesn't recognize the extent to which South Vietnam was a fabricated creation of the United States that did not have proper legitimacy.
And you know what's interesting about that is as I started thinking about the lack of legitimacy of our partners in Saigon and South Vietnam, I couldn't help but think about Afghanistan and where we have the same problem with corruption and most people not supporting the government and most people not seeing Kabul as really the heart of the power or the legitimate authority in their government.
And I said, man, if we haven't gotten Vietnam right, if so many of the senior officers haven't gotten to the right conclusions about Vietnam, what does that say for Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria?
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing is these guys really, they just can stand on their theories and persist here 16, 17 years into this war.
And they even have a Laos and Cambodia safe haven for the enemy in Pakistan.
And they continue to create huge incentives for the Pakistanis to continue to back our enemies there and allow them to have that safe haven.
Not that they can always do something about it, but a lot of the time they can and don't.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
I guess I wonder how honest any of this is when the Klaus Witzians, for example, saying, oh, yeah, no, if only we'd bombed North Vietnam more.
Really?
Because I remember them bombing the hell out of North Vietnam.
And I think I remember the argument being that if we'd gone ahead and just full scale invaded North Vietnam, then we're risking the same thing that happened when MacArthur full scale invaded North Korea.
And that is all of a sudden, now you have half a million Chinese volunteers pouring over the border to, quote, help on Ho Chi Minh side.
And they didn't want to provoke that or even a nuclear war with the communist powers at that point.
So the best they could settle for was trying to keep them out of the south.
But then I know you know a lot more than me.
What percent of the enemy during that war were actually South Vietnamese with rifles picking up and joining the VC in order to fight the Americans versus actual NVA forces invading South, quote unquote, invading South Vietnam?
Well, there was both.
And there was always a North Vietnamese component.
But the majority, at least until the Tet Offensive of 1968, so the first half of our war, the majority of our enemy was always NLF, National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, as we called them.
We never really accepted the extent to which the insurgency in South Vietnam was a homegrown phenomenon.
Now, it was certainly supported by North Vietnam.
It certainly used the North Vietnamese soldiers and weapons.
But this was a homegrown insurgency.
Saigon lacked legitimacy.
The government in Saigon did.
Essentially, we backed up one authoritarian strongman after another.
The elections, just like the elections for president in Afghanistan, were highly unusual and highly corrupt.
And the truth of the matter is that more of the people fighting against the United States were nationalists who essentially wanted foreign control out of their country and wanted a unified Vietnam than were dyed-in-the-wool communists.
Now, there was always overlap, and certainly there was a communist component.
But I don't think we ever accepted the extent to which this was a genuine nationalist rebellion.
I saw something similar in Iraq, something similar in Afghanistan.
And the reality is, not to simplify, but people don't like being occupied.
And for Americans who've watched both iterations of the Red Dawn movies, you can count on the fact that if this country was ever occupied by a, quote, benevolent foreign country, that there would be a significant insurgency here, too.
Sometimes it's inconvenient to note, but it is sometimes the case that the very presence of American soldiers can stir up an insurgency and can stir up a rebellion.
I think that's what we're seeing across the greater Middle East.
Well, that's the whole thing.
I mean, if you want to blame this on communism or blame it on Islam, you have to first explain a way that it's definitely not the combat forces stationed in their countries and using violence against them.
We know they love dying.
That's not it.
You know, they love it when you kill their little sister.
That, they don't, no, that's not it.
What it is is their religion makes them hate you for being innocent.
That's the real problem.
You better start committing some sins or else they're really gonna kill you.
But they don't have to, right?
They don't ever have to explain away the obvious before they get to.
It must be, it must be that a bunch of illiterate Vietnamese peasants from this desperately poor country have all been sitting around reading Das Kapital and are determined to somehow destroy America by not letting America take over the south of their country.
You know, I don't know.
I don't see how grown adults can sit here and tell each other these myths.
And now, so let me ask you something else, though, is when I was writing the book, I found in the Pentagon Papers where they were saying that, look, it was always counterinsurgency from the very beginning, the strategic Hamlet program and this and that, hearts and minds, protect the people from their husbands and brothers who are the insurgency so that they prefer you to them and all of that.
And yet that's the argument always was that no, Westmoreland just wanted to go out there and search and destroy instead of doing the clearing and holding and building that was necessary.
And so if only Abrams had had more time and this and that.
So what's the truth to that?
Well, that's, you know, there's one author that I would point to, which is a retired colonel, Greg Dattis.
Full disclosure, he was my boss when I taught at West Point.
But he has written three successive books essentially deflating that myth.
And and the myth is is what I'm sorry, you said his name was what?
Gregory Dattis, D-A-D-D-I-S.
Check out his books, Westmoreland's War and then most recently, Withdrawal is the name of the second book.
And he takes this on this myth.
We would call it the better war myth.
The better war myth is put forward by a Vietnam veteran and scholar named Lewis Sorley.
And he wrote a book called A Better War.
And his argument was what the one that you just made, which is that Westmoreland wanted to fight a conventional war and was wedded to the old World War Two way, and that his successor in 1969, Creighton Abrams, was some sort of counterinsurgency guru who had a better path and that Abrams had actually started to win the war until the weak Democrats cut off the funding.
And if you know what it could have showed, if Creighton Abrams was there from the start, we would have won.
Colonel Dattis totally devastates that myth by showing through looking at the primary sources that actually General Westmoreland had a very complex view of the war.
And he was doing both counterinsurgency and big unit fighting from the very beginning.
The strategic hamlet program is one example.
He was doing counterinsurgency, what was really called pacification at the time, from the very start.
So that better war narrative is an oversimplification.
It's an elimination of context and nuance, which by the way, tyranny requires that, by the way.
But the elimination of nuance, the elimination of context and oversimplifying a past event in order to put forward what's really a political narrative rather than a genuine historical argument that's provable through any sort of empirical evidence.
Check out Greg Dattis' book, Westmoreland's War, and then most recently, Withdrawal.
And he really takes that thesis apart and shows how bunk it really is.
But beyond that, it's not just that it's poor scholarship, it's goddamn dangerous.
When you create these myths, when you craft these comforting narratives that we could have won in Vietnam, it would be one thing if this was a bunch of academics talking.
It's not.
It's the National Security Advisor of the United States, okay?
It is the senior generals at the top of the United States Army.
In Iraq in 2008 and 2009, the commander of the entire force in Baghdad was giving out Louis Sorley's book about Vietnam, A Better War, as part of his reading list to his junior officers.
This shit is dangerous because quite frankly, what it does is it convinces us and it provides sort of a fake scholarly consensus behind forever war.
Because if you're in Iraq and you read Sorley's book about how we could have won in Vietnam if we just did X, you're going to come to the conclusion that, you know what?
We can win in Iraq.
Not only can we win in Iraq, but it's worth winning.
And if we just tweak things a little bit, we can win.
The problem is, while you're tweaking on the edges of tactics for year after year, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis or Afghans are dying.
And again, it is an absolute tragedy and it's a farce.
This is dangerous.
If you don't get the history right, then you're going to misunderstand the present.
Yeah, you know, I read Wrong Turn by Colonel Gian Gentile, something like that.
I'm probably saying it wrong.
Yeah, he also taught at West Point.
Oh, he taught there, yeah.
And he does a great job of debunking all this too.
And I think it was General Eikenberry who compared the coin incantations of these political military officers in D.C. that they were like the Maoist Red Guards chanting these slogans like it was a religious thing almost, you know, where it was, you have to believe in this, even as it's completely falling apart before their eyes.
You know, you used the phrase earlier about war through a soda straw, looking at war through a soda straw.
That was what, I don't know if this is where you're getting it from, or if you guys already all said this, but it was Robert Gates when Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange released the collateral murder video of the Apache helicopter killing the Reuters reporters and a bunch of other innocent civilians.
And Gates said, yeah, yeah, but you're looking at war through a soda straw, you don't understand what's really going on there.
And then, but of course, the joke was they were fighting in Sadr City when the whole war was for the United Iraqi Alliance that he was fully one-third of.
And it still remains in the catbird seat, you know, backing major power factions in the Iraqi parliament to this day.
It was, America was at Sadr's service, and it was Gates who was so lost looking at the war through a soda straw that he didn't realize that he was wasting his guy's lives and these innocent people's lives on the ground, fighting the guy that he was fighting for.
As you say, oh good or bad, she or whatever, they were all part of one big party at the time.
You know, Hakeem, the Islamic, Supreme Islamic Council, the Sadrists and the Dawa party were one big United Iraqi Alliance in 2007 when that footage was taken.
So, and I always wondered, because Gates seemed, you know, not capable, but smart enough to understand these kinds of things.
But I don't know really how lost he was looking through that soda straw, honestly, because it seemed like he was making some really stupid decisions there, him and Petraeus.
Well, the thing that's most dangerous about people like Secretary Gates and people like General, and then later CIA Director Petraeus, is they are, they are really smart guys.
They're really polished.
And unlike, you know, for example, a lot of the people like this president, for example, who's coarse and unsophisticated in his language, these guys are not, okay?
They are bright guys who can communicate effectively.
So they can make a losing strategy.
They can make a myth that they believe in sound really great.
And they're salesmen.
I mean, they go in front of Congress and they got all those medals.
They look like a, like a, you know, a sort of like a South American general with like 5,000 medals.
And man, they look pretty crisp and they speak effectively.
Remember when Petraeus passed out and hit his head on the table at that thing when he was lying about the benchmark?
I got a little Ray McGovern on my shoulder saying, remember, Robert Gates was running the CIA back when they missed the disintegration of Soviet communism and the USSR.
So, it was because he had a vested interest in selling the narrative that they were 12 feet tall and we better step it up.
Right.
And actually, you know, Gates was one of the people who was unwilling to trust Gorbachev, actually, when, even when President Reagan kind of shifted and started to trust Gorbachev and think that he really was going to end the Cold War, because Gorbachev's the real protagonist in that story.
People like Gates were, you're right, they were very skeptical.
And they were like, no, no, Gorbachev's playing us.
The Soviets are evil.
They're an evil empire.
Don't trust them.
And of course, they turned out to be wrong.
And they, you know, the CIA didn't know the Berlin Wall was coming down any sooner than the cameras and the media did.
So, great, great job with prediction there.
You know, I want to believe that a lot of these people are genuine patriots who think they're doing the right thing and are just wrong intellectually about these things.
But it's becoming more and more difficult to believe that.
I almost hope they believe their own myths and that it's not something more nefarious.
And I think I'm just optimistic enough to believe that they do believe this.
They've convinced themselves that coin can work.
They've convinced themselves that, you know, we can win in the greater Middle East, even though no one has defined what victory would be.
Because if not, then there would be something a lot darker in their personalities.
Well, now, so Trump, at least, has said no nation building.
We just want to go over there and, you know, beat up on the Taliban for a while.
We're not even going to talk to them for another few years.
Apparently, they're not even going to try to.
They're just going to fight them.
And, you know, enough of Abrams.
We're going back to Westmoreland over there.
That'll teach them Talibans.
So, what about that?
Is coin really gone?
I mean, it is McMaster who was, and Mattis, for that matter, both of who, as you were saying, they were in on this whole counterinsurgency doctrine during Iraq War Two and during Afghan Surge One or whatever the hell it was in the first Obama term.
Well, remember that President Trump, it appears, thinks the last thing he heard.
So the last person that talked to him seems to have influence over his strategy.
You know, funny thing, I wrote an article about how I think President Trump, for all his lack of sophistication and coarse rhetoric, his instincts, which were to pull out of Afghanistan, were probably right.
And you got to give it to him.
You know, I don't like the guy, but I have to be intellectually honest and say his instincts, if those were really his instincts, were correct.
But yet, he has been convinced by what I would call the Beltway mainstream of interventionists.
So now we're talking the Mattises, the McMasters of the world, have convinced him to give coin another try just under a different name.
And I'll give two examples.
So, first of all, OK, yeah, we're going to drop bigger bombs and we're going to be more tough in Afghanistan.
But look, all the generals know how to do anymore is coin.
All they know how to do is counterinsurgency.
You know, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
These guys don't know how to do anything else.
So if you give them 1,000, 4,000, whatever extra soldiers, they're going to do some version of counterinsurgency because that's what they've been doing their entire military careers.
Right.
You can almost can't blame them.
And the second thing is Secretary Tillerson, Secretary of State, he just said about Syria, he said two things out of both sides of his mouth.
And it's unbelievable how the two just make no sense when when laying next to each other.
He said, first of all, we're not doing nation building.
OK.
The second thing he said was, but we're not leaving Syria until Assad leaves and we get a settlement we're happy with in Geneva.
And he said, oh, by the way, we're not going to nation building, but we do have to do things like open schools and get the you know, the electricity running and make sure there's stability.
Well, that's coin.
I mean, that's counterinsurgency one on one.
So he's saying out of one end of his mouth, hey, look, we're not going to do counterinsurgency.
We're not going to do nation building in Syria.
And out of the other other under his mouth says, but we're not leaving anytime soon.
And guess what?
If your soldiers are the only game in town and there's no electricity, that's on you.
They're going to blame the United States if there's famine or high food prices.
That's an American problem.
And meanwhile, he's sitting there and allowing the Turks to slaughter his allies where they're building all these bases in Syrian Kurdistan.
Absolutely.
There's a real chance of a broad regional war and there's war crimes going on.
I don't know if you saw yesterday, but on Twitter, there's footage of war crimes being committed by, you know, Obama and Brennan's moderate al Qaeda fighters against the Syrian Kurdish female fighters, the women fighters.
I don't want to describe and they're pretty ugly.
People want to go look.
It's pretty ugly.
It's an it's an the situation in Syria is an absolute nightmare.
I have another piece coming out that basically describes what why I think this is a is the next major, I'll say the fourth major folly, the first being Afghanistan, the second Iraq, the third Libya.
And this, I believe Syria is going to be the fourth massive American folly in the last 15 years or so.
Look, the Kurds, I'm torn on this issue, but here's what I know.
When we needed ISIS gone, it was Kurdish blood and American bombs.
These people fought long and hard for their lives, for their territory and for us.
And to let them to give them to the wolves, to turn them over to the Turks, to let them be slaughtered by not only the Turks, but some of the allies of the Turks, you have to remember, are some pretty extremist Sunni militias.
And that's what you're sort of talking about with Nusra and the other al Qaeda franchises in Syria.
I don't know what the right answer is.
I'm not even convinced that we can solve this problem or that we should or that we should stay forever in Syria.
I'm very, very, very sort of, you know, I'm uncomfortable with that.
But you know what else is ugly?
Leaving the people that you supported to be slaughtered.
And unfortunately, I think that's what can happen in northeast Syria, because President Trump is malleable.
Well, look, I mean, I think we got to we got to stab everybody in the back and leave them high and dry one last time.
And that's it.
I mean, when we leave Afghanistan, there's civil war is going to get worse.
I'm almost certain of that.
But I'm just saying so what staying only means that that same scenario is going to happen only later, with a lot more killing in the meantime.
And it's the same thing here.
You know, there's a great article today, we're running on antiwar.com by Ted Snyder, America, the Kurds in history, only a pawn in their game.
And, you know, a lot of us are familiar with the great stab in the back of 1991, when Bush senior urged the Shia and the Kurds to rise up against Saddam, and then stood back and let Saddam massacre them with his helicopters and tanks and killed probably 100,000 people on both sides, there are other Kurds and the Shia.
Well, Ted brings up back under Nixon, when Nixon and Kissinger made a deal with Iran, but the Kurds only went along with it because of the Americans promise because they knew the Shah was going to stab them in the back.
But the Shah was backing them against Saddam.
And the Americans said, Don't worry, we got your back.
It's all right.
And then when it came down to it, Saddam was after him, they were losing, and the Shah wouldn't support them.
And Henry Kissinger said, up later for you, and stabbed them in the back and let Saddam massacre him way back then too.
So this is now just an American tradition to tell Kurds trust us whether and then he also talks about all during Iraq War Two.
Remember when Turkey would always bomb the PKK hiding in the Iraqi mountains?
Sure, because of course, the Kurds in charge in Iraqi Kurdistan are not PKK types.
It's the different factions there.
Well, that was all coordinated.
He cites the WikiLeaks with Connelisa Rice, that was all coordinated between the Americans and the Turks, allowing them to bomb all those PKK guys.
I guess you may already know that.
But anyway, yeah, well, I just want to say one thing about Kissinger real quick, because you sparked my interest.
Kissinger does sell out the Kurds back during the Nixon administration.
And one of the things I write about in the article is, I call it the subheading of this part of the article, reading the wrong books.
And I talk about how military officers, senior military officers, they distribute reading lists to their junior officers, you're supposed to read these books that the generals think are important.
Well, a significant number of the generals atop the military today and atop the military for the last several years, not only they have all these books that are wrong on Vietnam, they also include books by Kissinger, two different books by Kissinger.
Kissinger, the war criminal, okay, who is complicit in war crimes in, count them, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and among the Iraqi Kurds.
And that's at a bare minimum.
So, oh, yeah, Indonesia and Bangladesh and- Absolutely.
All over Africa.
This guy's got so much blood on his hands.
And now- Palestinians.
In the beltway, he is a mainstream figure that we all look up to.
Hillary Clinton's talking to him, during the campaign.
And all these generals have Kissinger's book, Diplomacy, on their reading list, unironically.
They have them there unironically.
And it's unbelievable because, you know what?
If a general puts a book on a list, that's actually pretty- I wish they'd put my book on the list because then I might make some money because a lot of people pay attention to those reading lists.
Yeah.
Well, Colonel McGregor tried to get them to add my book to one of their lists at some officer school or another.
I forget.
Well, it'd be great if they did.
I don't guess they went along with it.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
They only like things that cohere with their preferred narrative.
And challenging their intellectual sort of dogma is not their favorite thing.
Hey, listen, before you leave the army, you should steal a bunch of classified documents and leak them to the media.
I'm going to say nothing about that because I'm sure that I'm being listened to.
And I'm certainly not going to do that.
You know, the thing is, I wish I had some sort of big secret that I could tell, but I don't.
And the reality is, I'm just sort of a humble soldier who just happened to be in two losing wars.
But it has been life-altering to kind of open my eyes and see the broader problems with what's going on, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But I feel terribly bad for the soldiers and the all-volunteer force who are deployed today in Somalia, Yemen, Niger, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
And they're fighting losing wars.
And neither the mainstream Republicans nor the mainstream Democrats have the guts to call them on it and to cut off the funding or to ask some tough questions.
And that's the national tragedy.
Yeah.
You know what?
One more thing here, man, before I let you go.
Even, you know, turning over the South to the North Vietnamese victorious conquering army and all that, that's a pretty deep black eye for the American political class losing face for their failure there.
But at this point, after not just Bush, but after Obama's foreign policy of helping to spread the jihad all through Africa and into the Levant and all of this, we're talking about a hell of a lot more loose ends.
We've gone from 400 al-Qaeda in the world to maybe 40,000, depending on how you count them with al-Shabaab and Boko Haram or not, or whatever the hell.
But man, how would any president...
See, it seems to me like Trump could have, if he really knew what he was doing and really wanted to, could have said, all of this is Bush and Obama's fault.
Not America's fault.
Bush and Obama's fault.
Screw them.
But now I'm in charge and we're making a total break from whatever their stupid policies were, and I can do whatever I want, and that's it.
And just refuse to be saddled with their stupid legacy and the responsibility of tying up all their loose ends.
But it already seems to be too late for that, and he would have never thought of it anyway.
And it was one of Bannon's priorities, but it was a low priority.
And that just, it's over for that.
But so, I mean, what do you do, really, when there are bin Laden knights with AKs in Syria, in, well, count them, you know where they are, all through North Africa and the Middle East now.
You have even, you know, Pakistani tribal fighters calling themselves the Islamic State in Afghanistan.
How the hell do you ever call this off in a situation such as they've led us into?
Yeah, you gotta be really careful about letting sunken costs drive you.
And I think that's what's happening right now, is we've dedicated so much blood and treasure to these wars that it becomes politically impossible to extricate ourselves.
You know, I'm not great at predicting the future.
I think that any historian who tries too hard to do that is asking for trouble.
But what I'm calling for is the do less strategy, to keep it simple.
The minute that we're intellectually honest and we admit that we're making things worse through our presence, we have got to remove ourselves from the situation.
It doesn't mean it's going to be pretty.
It doesn't mean it's going to solve the problem of terrorism.
It doesn't mean there's not going to be some ugly stuff happening in those regions.
But you know what?
If there are al-Qaeda franchises running around with AKs in West Africa or in Syria, that is the responsibility of the local actors.
And all these regimes that we've propped up in Egypt and in Saudi Arabia and in Jordan, they need to step up.
Because these al-Qaeda types aren't just a threat to us.
They're a more pressing threat to the dictatorial authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
They should deal with that problem.
Because America's presence, when you put a white Christian army from the United States in the middle of the greater Middle East, it's a target.
It becomes an actor.
We inevitably have to take sides.
And I would argue that recent history proves we generally make things worse.
That takes courage.
That takes the kind of courage that probably less than five senators have right now.
That takes to pull out and cut your losses and craft a new strategy and to do less in the world.
That takes courage.
That takes more courage than charging a machine gun.
And quite frankly, I don't think that very many people in public life have that courage today.
Yeah, no.
They hide behind the physical courage of these young men that they send out there because of their complete lack of moral courage to just stand up and do the right thing.
The biggest thing to me, or a great example of this, I guess, is the refusal of anyone to call David Petraeus the world's greatest loser, the great American fraud who never won a fight in his life.
Why the hell would anybody listen to him about anything?
He's the old wise sage.
He's like the new Kissinger for the Coindonista generation.
Look, I don't think he's an evil person.
I don't even want to question his motives.
Here's what the empirical evidence states.
He presided over two losing wars.
I'm not saying that's all his fault.
I think that the context he was given, he wasn't going to win.
But it's amazing.
You're right.
It is amazing how these people sit at the helm of sort of like military strategy.
And they're still advisors.
And you'll see him on MSNBC and Fox and all these things.
And they're experts.
But experts in what?
I mean, I guess experts in forever war, experts in losing surges, experts in selling victory when it's really defeat.
That's about it.
Yeah.
Adding time to the Washington clock.
I like that.
Just keep fighting.
That way somebody else loses later.
Yeah.
Don't worry, though.
It's the all-volunteer force has a knack for skipping over the sons and daughters of the Washington elite.
So it's not their kids for the most part.
Yep.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry I kept you a whole hour here.
But thanks very much for your time on the show, Danny.
I really appreciate it.
No, I enjoyed it.
Let's do it again sometime.
All right.
Good deal.
Keep writing.
You guys, that is Major Danny Sherson.
He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com.
And we run it all, pretty much all of it at AntiWar.com.
And his book is Ghost Riders of Baghdad about the failure of the surge in Iraq War Two there.
And you know me, I'm Scott Horton.
So I'm ScottHorton.org for the show, AntiWar.com and the Libertarian Institute for things I want you to read.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
That's at Fool'sErrand.us.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
