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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter, of course, author of Manufactured Crisis, and co-author with John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer, of the CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
Really great primer on American-Iran policy there, and he writes regularly at The Gray Zone, and this one is called Trump Administration Insider Reveals How the U.S. Military Sabotaged a Peace Agreement to Prolong War in Afghanistan.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I hate this article, man.
It's terrible.
So, before we get to the insider and what he told you here, you have the whole first half of this article or more, first two-thirds of it or so, you really go through step-by-steps, just amazing how you work here, man.
I'm your biggest fan.
You just go through and break down exactly what it was that the Pentagon has done since Khalilzad signed the deal, leap day 2020, that promised to get American troops, the last combat forces, out of Afghanistan by May 1st of this year, and how essentially they're just an unstoppable force.
They've decided to overrule their civilian commanders and continue the war.
Is that correct?
That's an extremist way to put it.
No, I'm joking.
I think it's perfectly legitimate to put it that way.
In fact, that is precisely my view as well.
And in fact, this is a story that I really blame myself for not having picked up before.
I simply wasn't closely monitoring or not monitoring closely enough what was really happening in the first week, the first days of this new agreement.
And in fact, you know, all of this stuff that the military did to subvert, to undermine, to essentially sabotage this peace agreement was really done in the first week.
And it was so intensive.
It was so, you know, it was filled with so many different aspects that they clearly planned this very carefully ahead of time, weeks and weeks ahead of time.
So, and this is really, it's really a big story in that regard.
I'm glad you're choosing to start out focusing on that.
There were two stories really that we sort of stuck together here.
They are related, but they are clearly two separate stories.
And I think this one ultimately is the one that deserves the most scrutiny, the most attention by your listeners and readers.
And that is, you know, just how the US military leadership, the Pentagon, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff specifically, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Scott Miller, all participated in this carefully laid out strategy to essentially undermine this agreement, discredit it, or rather, more precisely, to discredit the Taliban and its carrying out the agreement, so that it would be easy for the military to justify essentially violating it themselves, having the Afghan government violate it, and leading ultimately to the primary interest, which was to avoid any fundamental change in the deployment of US troops in Afghanistan, which is what they certainly intended to do, and came very close to accomplishing in a way in this past year.
So in that sense, I think it's a very important story, definitely.
All right.
So they signed the deal February 29th, 2020.
And you say here, under heavy pressure to amend the agreement, Trump ordered Zalmay Khalil Zahed, the special envoy, to deliver the Taliban an ultimatum.
And this is something that goes right to the heart of why we have not had a peace deal this whole dang time, is because Obama, and Trump, and Bush before him, insisted that if there's going to be any kind of deal, it's got to be with the Kabul government.
And the Kabul government, of course, has no interest in making a deal with the Taliban, when their refusal to make a deal with the Taliban is all the incentive the Americans need to stay and prop up their power without having to compromise at all.
And then the invention of Donald Trump was that he told Khalil Zahed, forget that man, we're going to have a bilateral deal to go ahead and leave.
I'm sorry, I'm just rambling.
But this gets into the question of the deal that we do have, and the military's efforts to scotch that deal by essentially exploiting the fact that we don't have a peace between the Taliban and the government in Kabul.
Right.
So the first act of this drama, if you will, is that the Kabul government plus the US military joined together and pressured Trump to insist that there be a better deal.
And what they wanted, very badly, both the Kabul government and the US military wanted to have the deal actually bring about a full-fledged ceasefire between the two sides.
Because of course, we know the basic dynamics of the conflict have been that Kabul is getting weaker and the Taliban are getting stronger as time goes by.
And so there's every reason for the Taliban to keep up the pressure militarily.
And this was a way to stop that.
So they put pressure on Trump to give the Taliban an ultimatum that you have to agree to a ceasefire, to amend the draft agreement that had already been reached, reach a ceasefire as part of the agreement with the Kabul government.
Well, here's what's so interesting.
The Taliban waited a few days and came back and said, no, we're not going to do that.
We will agree to a seven-day reduction in violence to show our goodwill and to establish the atmosphere in which negotiations can begin as part of the carrying out of this agreement.
But we're not going to agree ahead of time to a ceasefire with the Kabul government because that's part of what's supposed to be negotiated.
And furthermore, and this is what is I think really most interesting, the Taliban gave the US government its own ultimatum and said, if you don't agree to the deal that we're offering you, we're walking away from the table and stopping negotiations.
And Trump then caved in and agreed to go along with what the Taliban demanded.
And so you have the seven-day reduction in violence followed by then the signing of the agreement on February 29th and the beginning of its so-called implementation under circumstances, which I'll try to explain very briefly, was marked by this very detailed structure of an effort to undermine and essentially to stop the deal from being carried out by the US military.
So this brings us then to this first week of the implementation of the agreement.
And as I say, everything that they had planned was really carried out within the first seven or eight days.
And the first thing that they did was to claim that the agreement gave the US the right to defend the Afghan forces, meaning that we could continue to carry out airstrikes to help the Afghan forces when they were in trouble.
And of course, there was nothing in the agreement that actually allows that.
And we haven't talked about the exact wording of the agreement.
I think it takes a little bit too much time to go into the wording because it's somewhat indirect.
But basically, what it amounts to is that both the Taliban and the United States pledge not to use Afghan territory to attack the other side, meaning Taliban would not attack the United States, the United States would not attack the Taliban.
So this is, as I say, clearly a violation of the actual terms of the agreement to make that claim, but they did it anyway.
The second thing was that the US military then began to give the Afghan government a perfect excuse or a perfect reason not to cooperate in the implementation of the agreement, including the release of prisoners, which was an explicit part of the agreement that both sides would negotiate first thing, a release of a thousand roughly prisoners on both sides.
And so what the military did immediately was to give the Afghan government a perfect reason for refusing to carry out the agreement by saying that it was essentially going to take care of it, it would defend it, and it didn't have to worry about the military consequences of refusing to implement the agreement.
And so immediately, then what happened was that there was an airstrike carried out by the US government as a message to the Taliban.
And the government refused, as would be predicted or predict perfectly predictable, refused to carry out the negotiations for the release of prisoners.
So it was a great start, obviously, for the implementation of the agreement.
So these are all taking place in just a few days.
And, you know, I mean, these are like three of the six or seven points that I've outlined that have to do with what the US military planned and actually began to carry out in just those few days.
I don't know if you want to go through every one of them.
Oh, yeah, I do.
Of course, you know that I do.
Part of it is and this is the mantra is they're not living up to their end of the agreement.
And it's almost always without specifics.
It's just supposed to go without saying that we have to believe whatever our government says about what the Taliban is doing.
Occasionally, they'll say things like, well, they're still friends with Al-Qaeda, so they're violating the deal.
And then you go, Al-Qaeda, like what?
And they go, well, you know, they have a relationship with a guy who knows some guys who are members of Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.
And they were seen, you know, hanging around near somewhere.
And so that'll be good enough for you.
Well, actually, you know, that that part of it, which is, of course, part of the history of this agreement, for sure, was not something that the U.S. military was pushing very hard.
I mean, this was this was a secondary or tertiary level of getting at the agreement.
I think the key things were misrepresenting the agreement itself and claiming that it meant something totally different from what it actually meant.
And the key, I would say that the central theme of what the military was trying to do here in these first few days was to suggest or to argue that the Taliban had reneged on their commitments by carrying out a level of military action or activities that the U.S. military thought was was too intense, too high.
And and so they were actually arguing here that what the Taliban had agreed to was the the, quote, reduction in violence which had been carried out during the seven days before the agreement was signed.
And the fact is that the Taliban reduced the level of military operations to an extremely low level, to a tiny fraction of of the normal flow of military activity by the Taliban during those seven days.
So what the U.S. military was trying to cleverly do was to say, well, they're failing to carry out their commitment to this reduction in violence that that they should have been carrying out.
And it was simply a completely dishonest effort to suggest that what they'd agreed to for those seven days was what they'd agreed to for the entire length of the actually implementation of the agreement.
And I would say that that is probably the central, the central lie and the central method of trying to sabotage this agreement that that the military did carry out in those days.
And yet that was a year ago and Donald Trump could have fired his secretary of defense and fired his secretary of state and whoever else was conspiring against him on this.
He could have asked Zalmay Khalilzad.
Is that really right?
Is that the deal you agreed to or not?
Right.
Yeah, absolutely right.
You know, there's no question that he was not he was not following things carefully or he was just too stupid or too, for whatever reason, distracted and paid no attention to what they were doing or or they they kept, you know, they had whispered in his ears, in his ear, excuse me, throughout this period.
OK, here's what we're doing.
Here's why we're doing it.
And he didn't have the wit or didn't have any advisers surrounding him or next to him to tell him, Mr. President, they're lying to you.
So in any case, he clearly was not equipped to do anything about what they were what they were up to to sabotage his agreement.
And that's that's really a yet another strike against his presidency, obviously.
So so the other one that I want to mention here is that the the military and Esper claimed that this is a conditions based agreement.
Now, this was the most outrageous claim that one can imagine.
It was the exact opposite of a conditions based agreement, meaning what they meant by that was that that we will decide whether the conditions are ripe or appropriate for the United States to withdraw.
Well, the actual agreement was exactly the opposite of that.
The actual agreement was that you will withdraw a portion, a portion of your forces by May 1st of.
I forgot what the exact date was in 2020.
And of course, that what the military was trying to do was to get the American public to ignore what the reality was and to accept their totally outrageous lie about what was going on.
So, I mean, to my mind, this is really one of the most far reaching.
Plots by the U.S. military that I can recall to to basically carry out their their own to achieve their own interests at the expense of the actual policy of the U.S. government.
Right.
And that that deserves really to be scrutinized by Congress.
There should be hearings.
Of course, there won't be.
There should be hearings.
There should be people who are still the top figures in the U.S. military who should be held accountable for this.
This is this is something that is a it's an indication of just how far we are from having a government that that is accountable.
Yeah.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, I mean, you go back and look at how much pressure they put on Obama to do the surge and how they tried to stop him from ending it.
But I guess at the end of the day, when he said, no, we're sticking to the timeline, I guess he did extend a couple of months, a few months.
And he said, no, we're we're getting out.
The surge is over.
Pull the troops out.
They didn't stick to the deal to end the war by 2014, which is what he promised.
But at least the military didn't dare just say, no, we refuse to end the surge on your order, Mr. President, or we're just going to lie to you and pretend that.
And I guess with those kind of numbers, there's no way to get away with it.
But you're right that this does seem to be like a whole other level of manipulation where they're just absolutely insubordinate against a president telling them to go.
Yeah.
And of course, it was the compliant, lying U.S. news media that made this possible.
I mean, they they made no effort whatsoever to check, you know, when when these statements were being made.
Well, is that really true?
I mean, had they spent, you know, five minutes to to, you know, ask the question and follow up on the obvious answer, you know, story might have been a bit different.
Yeah, but they were too busy claiming that their secret annexes that say that the Taliban said we can stay anyway and too busy claiming that Putin is behind bounties for American scalps in Afghanistan.
And so if we leave now, then we're doing what Putin wants.
And so that would be treason.
It was that summer that they, you know, plotted this this whole story of the bounty gate and completely withdrew any scrutiny.
Well, there wasn't any scrutiny, but if there had been any scrutiny, it would have been withdrawn completely and refocused on this ridiculous tale that mesmerized the media for weeks.
And which, by the way, I guess Trump really was saying that he wanted to go ahead and get out before the election.
And they floated that trial balloon.
And it was the bounty story that shut that down, I think.
I think that's right.
Yes.
Now, the other side of that is, however, that even before the bounty gate story, weeks before the bounty gate story, the New York Times, true to its real role in helping the U.S. military to carry out its to achieve its interests, created this story, which, again, anticipated the bounty gate story and the furor that it would create of the secret annexes to the peace agreement with the Taliban, quote unquote, secret annexes, quote unquote, because the Times was completely buying into the idea that there were somehow secret understandings between the U.S. military and the Taliban over what would the expectation be.
Obviously, they were, you know, hoping that this would be applied to this whole question of what what the Taliban would be expected to do or not do.
And, you know, if you read the story carefully, what you find is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any secret understanding between the two sides about the Taliban and what they would be expected to do militarily.
On the contrary, the only thing that they talk about is, you know, what the Taliban would do during the during the seven day reduction of violence.
And so so there's and there's simply no evidence whatsoever in the story itself to support the idea.
But the headline, the lead and the story itself managed somehow to support that theme that the military wanted to introduce to further confuse the public.
Yeah.
And now it's it's interesting to me that you say that the accusations of the Taliban are still palling around with al-Qaeda guys is actually a minimal part of this.
It seems like that would be the biggest part of the propaganda campaign.
Not that I'm saying it's true.
I don't see any evidence at all that it is.
I think that they are making very little effort on that score.
And of course, you know, the the agreement has wording that is essentially that the I don't have the words precisely in my in my head, but but the wording is that the Taliban will require what will will not have any will not allow any terrorists or foreign.
No, not terrorists, foreign foreign troops or foreign personnel to remain in Afghanistan or to be part to be allowed to be within territory that they control.
Now, the Taliban, as you probably know, have in fact, just in recent weeks, issued an order to their troops that and this is mentioned in the story that that they are not allowed to harbor any foreign troops or militants.
I can't remember the exact wording, but it's very clear that this is their way of making sure that that nobody in the Taliban is going to do anything that could be construed as allowing al-Qaeda to stay in the territory that Taliban controls.
And so it would be difficult for the military to make a case at this point that they're violating the agreement.
It may not be what they would like.
They may want to have something more than that.
I know they would like to have more than that, but it's going to be difficult for them to make that case.
And I think that's could be behind the fact they haven't done more about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember back in 2009, Bruce Rydell, who is sometimes good on things and like Yemen, for example, but he did one of the reviews on Afghanistan for the Obama government there.
And he was saying, yeah, well, I mean, geez, you know, you got Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is a Pakistani group focused on focused on Kashmir.
And you've got, you know, I forgot a couple other ones, but essentially no one who has ever met Ayman al-Zawahiri at all.
And essentially it was the mission was, can you write a paragraph attempting to implicate the Taliban in international terrorism at all?
See if you can do it.
But is there really something to write about there?
No, there's really not.
Scott, you know, this is something, as you know, I've written about in the past.
And in fact, I did do a couple of stories back in 2009, 2010, one of which detailed the evidence that the West Point, what was the specialist on terrorism?
Oh, yeah.
The Counterterrorism Center.
The Counterterrorism Center.
That's what I was trying to fish for.
Counterterrorism Center gathered evidence to show that the Taliban had not been really close to Al-Qaeda.
They had allowed them obviously to train their own troops during the war and before they were defeated.
But they had never been really close to or friendly to Osama bin Laden.
And in fact, you know, he, the Mullah Omar never got along with bin Laden at all.
It was a very fraught relationship from beginning to end.
Absolutely.
And furthermore, in the aftermath in 2009, I think it was, the Taliban had very big differences on policy with Al-Qaeda about Al-Qaeda's making war against the Pakistani government, which, of course, was an ally of the Taliban.
Right.
So they were not getting along at all.
And there's much more to that story.
But in effect, I think you're quite right in saying that there's simply no basis for saying that the Taliban are in league with or have been in league with Al-Qaeda.
Well, you know what they do?
They say that the Al-Qaeda guys are now embedded in the Haqqani network and the Haqqanis are indistinguishable from Al-Qaeda, from the Taliban.
Simply not true.
Well, I don't see any reason to believe it, that's for sure.
And you're right about Mullah Omar hating bin Laden.
As we know, Arnaud de Bourghrave went and met with Omar bin Laden in the summer of 2001.
He said, this guy's like a chicken bone stuck in my throat.
I can neither swallow him nor spit him out.
Exactly.
And we know also that Milt Bearden, who had run the CIA's war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, told the Washington Post that the Taliban tried to give him up over and over again.
They would say, oh, he's out falconing and we can't find him, which was not very subtle code for he's outside of our protection.
Go ahead and drop a bomb on his head.
And then we'll say that, jeez, we would have protected him if he hadn't been out in the countryside somewhere where we couldn't find him.
Yes, that's right.
That's a good point.
The Americans wouldn't take him up on that.
In fact, Michael Schwerer said Bill Clinton turned down 10 different chances to kill bin Laden.
And I'm sure some great proportion of those were at the invitation of the Taliban.
And there's a great book about this by Kuhn and Lynn Schotten called An Enemy We Created, which goes to show the depths of the split between these two groups and their ideologies and strategy and tactics and everything.
Right.
But the other side of this picture, which I haven't mentioned and didn't get to very briefly, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen and Gates got together with other Confederates there who were pushing for the big increase in U.S. troop strength in 2009, 2010, and basically pressured Obama by making it clear that if he didn't go along with this, they would accuse him of being soft on terrorism.
And of course, they leaked an article to McClatchy that made the case that the entire U.S. government was in agreement that if he didn't agree to this, there was going to be a terrible danger of terrorism being given a chance to gain a foothold in Afghanistan again.
So that was a key to their whole strategy to get the 40,000 men in addition to what they already had.
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Okay, so we got to talk about the other half of this article here.
But first, we got to talk about the near term future.
Biden looks like it's almost certain is going to break the deal.
And what do you expect the Taliban to do, Gareth?
Well, I think they'll up the pressure and, you know, we'll be back to I think we've been over the over the months, there's been a retrogression back towards the situation before the agreement was reached.
And they've been bombing them over the last two, three days here, I should mention.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So, so I think, I think we'll see continued pressure, military pressure by the Taliban.
There'll be some new efforts to make their case in a very symbolic and basically a spectacular way, which they're very good at.
They know how to play that game of making an impact through specific operations.
And so I wouldn't be surprised if we have one of those in the near future.
You know, I've interviewed so many people today, I lost track of who said this, it was either Dave DeCamp or Danny Davis, I think, said that, you know, this was Dave, that if there's one thing that could really work in our favor, for Biden deciding to go ahead and get the hell out, is that we made it 365 days without a USGI getting killed over there.
Not a Marine, not Green Beret, not anybody.
And Biden's really ready to reverse that now, start this war again, against these guys, we've had essentially a ceasefire with these, you know, some exceptions, but essentially, we've had a ceasefire with these guys for more than a year now.
And he's gonna what, send another 40,000 troops to back up the five?
I'm not expecting the Taliban to go after US troops specifically at this moment.
I mean, I would be surprised if they did that.
I think that- In other words, they can persuade him to leave by attacking Afghan forces and a latent threat there.
I think that they will, you know, continue to make their point that this war is unwinnable.
And, you know, they will expect that there's going to be repercussions in the United States, which I think they're probably right about.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I hope they're sophisticated enough to think about it like that, right?
That you know what we could do, we could do a big offensive against the locals, but not against the Americans.
And hopefully that'll persuade them to get out the door there.
But they might not, right?
They might just say, you know what, you guys are breaking the deal, it's on and go right back to war against our guys.
Well, it's possible they could do that.
But look, I think the Taliban are about as sophisticated a group of strategists as you're going to find.
They have lots of nuances in their strategies.
And they're capable of meshing their military strategy, military operations and their diplomacy.
I think they've shown that.
So I would not take it for granted that they would simply react somehow in a fashion that would not reflect very careful strategic thinking.
But then again, right, we are up at the point where their power compared to the power of the regime America has installed in Kabul is essentially irresistible.
So they have the advantage.
They have the advantage and they're going to press it.
I think that's that's what we're really talking about here is that they will continue to take advantage of the ways in which they can put pressure on the United States through their operations against the Kabul government.
Who's Douglas MacGregor?
Doug MacGregor is, by every count that I am aware of, the most brilliant military analyst and strategist in the United States and has been for many years.
And a really incredibly capable speaker, a very persuasive speaker as well.
And of course, he was hired by Trump in the aftermath of the election, several days after the election, when he fired Esper and named this guy Miller to replace him as the acting secretary.
He immediately had Doug called and invited him to become the senior advisor to Miller for the specific purpose of primarily, first of all, more than anything else, of getting out of Afghanistan, because he didn't know how to do it.
And so Doug immediately, and this is the other story that we were talking about, of course, Doug drafted a presidential order, told the White House staff to get a presidential decision memorandum out of the file so that they would have the correct format for this.
And it was typed up and put before the president.
He immediately signed it.
Doug told me that he loved it, that Trump loved it, although I didn't mention that, didn't quote that in the story, signed it.
And then the day after that, met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Miley, General Miley.
And we don't have all the details, but we do know that Miley told him, you can't do this, Mr. President, and gave various reasons, including the fact that it, that, you know, continuing to keep a presence there has bipartisan support in the Congress.
And so, you know, however, whatever was in his mind, we don't know exactly, but Trump caved in once again and agreed to pull out only half of the 4,500 troops or 5,000 troops remaining.
God dang it.
But this all happened while he's got his guy who he knows agrees with him as secretary of defense.
And not just that, but also McGregor, the smartest and toughest guy on the East Coast.
I know, I know.
And it's just another, it's another light on the, you know, a glaring light being shed on the character of Donald Trump.
I mean, the guy was just a hopeless mess.
What can you say?
I mean, you know, he's, he, he doesn't have the strength of character to, to be able to carry out a plan.
It would be better almost if he didn't even try to get us out of anywhere.
He got, he tried to get us out of Syria twice and the Pentagon just told him, no.
Oh, and the Israelis told him, no, you're not leaving Syria.
And he goes, okay.
What a mess.
What a mess.
I mean, that's all you can say.
I mean, you otherwise speechless.
Man, that's really something.
And then, and this guy Miller was a green beret who'd fought in the initial war.
You know, when he should have been trying to catch bin Laden, he was up there with Colonel Mulholland fighting the Taliban up near Mazar, Mazar-e-Sharif and whatever, while bin Laden was getting away.
But anyway, if you need a couple of guys to stand and protect your right flank, when you end a war, it's Miller and McGregor.
That's as good as you're ever going to get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You think so?
It's a good, it's a good basis for saying no more.
And, and very, very clearly he could have gotten away with it.
There's no doubt about it.
He would not have been impeached.
Or he would have been impeached anyway.
Or he would have been impeached anyway.
Yeah.
That was not in the cards anyway.
So yeah, it's just another remarkable feat of weakness on the part of Donald Trump.
Yeah.
And, and seriously, you know, for anybody not familiar, just wait a few days ago this week, I forget if it was Monday or Tuesday night, McGregor was on the Tucker Carlson show and Tucker Carlson said, hawkish, hawkish, hawkish on China.
And McGregor said, nah, we can talk with China, Tucker.
We don't have to worry about China.
Yeah.
They might be selling their boats in the Bahamas, but we've been sailing up and down the South China sea.
And you know, the thing of it is really, yeah, we don't have to do this, man.
We can be friends.
And Tucker Carlson says, you know what, man, if you say so McGregor, I don't know.
Every time you come on this show, I learned.
And, and you can see, you know, his eyebrows go up and whatever, but you know, and Carlson say what you will about him.
He's one of the more intelligent TV hosts and he respects this guy McGregor.
And if anybody's going to be able to talk a right winger out of being a hawk on China, it's somebody who's tougher and possibly more conservative than them.
Somebody like the hero of the great tank battle of 1991.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a remarkable story.
That's for sure.
So yeah, the damage that could be done by this guy in a good way, if he'd been used properly and you know, this goes to show to Donald Trump would be the president right now.
If he had just hired Miller and McGregor last summer, as soon as Esper started screwing him on the terms of getting out of Afghanistan, he could have fired him in.
I mean, hell, he never had to fire all these generals.
He never had to hire these generals in the first place, but certainly he could have brought these guys in last summer, ended a war or two or three and been reelected.
It's possible, but I would, you know, I wouldn't bet on that one because of COVID-19.
I think we had a bigger issue here that was flying.
I mean, the thing, the politics of it would have been that Biden and all of them would have had to attack Trump for being irresponsible and hasty and precipitous for getting us out of wars that are extremely unpopular.
And that would have been not just good politics for the American people in general who agree, but it would have been devilishly Machiavellian, hilariously evil politics for throwing a nuclear hand grenade into the Democratic Party while Joe Biden is attacking Trump from the right for ending a war and the entire left two thirds of the party stay home and protest.
I bow to no one in my low esteem and regard for the intelligence of Joe Biden, but I'm not sure he's so stupid as to do what you were suggesting.
We'll see.
No, we won't see.
Well, I mean, he kind of did.
I mean, I think it would have been essentially along the lines of the same thing that, you know, Trump's an isolationist to Trump, you know, America has a sacred duty to our alliance structure that we're here to, I mean, in fact, Biden is the first president in, you know, since what, Bill Clinton in 96 or something who did not run on ending wars and on, you know, restraint.
Not that Bush meant it or anything like that.
Not that any of them meant it, but Biden didn't even pretend.
He like mumbled once about ending forever wars or something, but I think it's because he had a much more powerful issue.
But anyway, well, no, that's true.
But I mean, you hear him all the time, hasty and precipitous, hasty and precipitous.
You can't do this.
It's dangerous.
It's reckless.
And what did Biden say yesterday?
Or to Stephanopoulos on Monday or whatever?
Gee, yeah.
Leaving by the day of the deadline is going to be really difficult.
I don't think we're going to be able to do it.
So, you know, I don't know.
And you know what?
Things could have been worse.
Maybe he would have maybe Trump would have beat Biden and then we'd be in a war with China by now.
I don't know.
But I'm just saying.
Not yet, but it's time is coming.
Yeah, apparently so.
All right.
Well, let me tell you what, Garrett.
Go ahead.
What?
We don't need we didn't need Trump for that.
We're going to have Biden for that, I think.
Yeah, exactly.
I was going to say with these headlines about our ships in the Taiwan Strait and all of this now has cause for real concern.
By the way, I'll just mention this.
I just interviewed Daniel Davis, the great hero, whistleblower of the Afghan war.
And I didn't have time to talk with him about his new piece on China.
We're talking about Iraq or three and a half over there.
But he's got a new piece about, OK, let's say that China attacks Taiwan.
What are our options?
And the answer is we have none.
So shut up and back off.
Yeah, I know this is what I'm going to be focusing on from now on, mainly.
Yeah, it seems like there is a real threat of a war breaking out.
It would be not over the Senkaku Islands or something.
It would be over Taiwan.
It's over Taiwan.
And this is the most serious threat of war this country has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Absolutely.
Well, good thing we have a bunch of psychopaths and mass murderers and lunatics and complete dumb dumbs in charge of our government.
I'm sure everything will work out fine.
Thank God for that.
Yeah.
All right.
That's Garrett the Great.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott, as always.
All right, you guys.
He's at the grayzone.com.
And of course, we reprint every bit of it at antiwar.com as well.
Trump administration insider reveals how the U.S. military sabotaged a peace agreement to prolong war in Afghanistan.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
