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, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing retired U.S. Army Major and Empire dissenter, Danny Sherson.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Hey, thanks, Scott.
Glad to be here and glad to be retired and not beginning the interview with my usual disclaimer from the Department of Defense.
Yeah, we all know that you don't speak for the Department of Defense because you don't work for the Department of Defense anymore.
But I mentioned that you wrote Ghost Riders of Baghdad and also that you write for Truthdig and for Antiwar.com because I meant to, I should, I just did.
Yep, I've got my weekly columns at both Truthdig and Antiwar as well as a variety of other outlets.
And I'm out there speaking and speaking truth to power as much as possible.
Well, and you're a combat veteran from both, well, the two biggest of the terror wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So actually, let's just go ahead and start with your retirement here, too.
When was it that you decided you're going to leave the Army and and I guess what was it like staying in, you know, between then and now?
Well, you know, the Army sort of decided that it was done with me and, you know, I knew it was coming.
You know, I'd been in treatment for PTSD over such a lengthy period of time, you know, wasn't really getting better.
And they sort of said, well, you know, you have this option, we can we can retire you two years early.
And quite frankly, I jumped at it.
I don't think I had another move in me, even domestically.
You know, I had moved 11 times in 18 years, you know, didn't have another deployment in me, wasn't ready to fight for the empire again.
So I was I was ready to go and I was happy to go.
What it was like staying on active duty, as I've written before, was like being an atheist, but still living in the monastery.
I mean, it was a very difficult period in my life.
You know, quite frankly, I was this is this is shameful.
This is this is the part I'm embarrassed about.
I was anti war by the middle of my first tour in Iraq in 2007.
I mean, the fact that I stayed is when did the book come out?
I wrote the book in 2014 and it published at the end of 2015.
So that was my first public dissent.
But it took me almost 10 years to write about it because I was such a mess about so many of these events, you know, and in my head, you know, I had already formulated this sort of anti war, anti interventionist platform.
Why didn't you quit back in 07 then?
Well, I thought I came up with a lot of really bad excuses.
You know, I let myself get talked into staying by officers I respected who would tell me things like, you know, well, if all the good people leave, what's going to be left?
And the soldiers need you and, you know, they need people who are going to try to keep them alive and realize the nonsense.
What that all is, of course, is someone building up your esteem and making you feel like you're too important to leave an organization.
And the reality is it's a fallacy.
I stayed for cowardice.
I mean, I stayed for all those reasons.
I stayed because I was self important enough to think I could change the organization from the inside.
I stayed eventually because of health care and salary.
I mean, all the wrong reasons.
Quite frankly, not leaving was one of the least courageous things I ever did.
And and I have a lot of I have a lot of hard self reflection to do about that.
But it was very difficult staying in.
And, you know, it got easier, believe it or not, when I was speaking out.
Because even though I was constantly under investigation and getting flack here and there, I at least I felt like I was doing something when I was dissenting on active duty, especially because there are so few of us who do.
I mean, you can count them on one hand.
Yeah, I mean, for what it's worth from here, it sure seemed really important that you had an active duty major who was being as critical as you were being.
And especially I didn't mention in your bio there, but you taught history at West Point and all this kind of thing.
So you're a force to be reckoned with inside the Army when it comes to that.
Not just I don't like this anymore, but, you know, really able to explain it in a way far beyond probably what your officers could ever have argued to the contrary.
Well, yeah.
You know, on paper, I was, you know, a star officer.
You know, I'd done everything I was supposed to do.
I wasn't like the greatest officer in the Army, but, you know, I had been selected for tough combat units and then was very selective to go back and teach at West Point.
They paid for my grad school and yada, yada, yada.
So on paper, I looked like, you know, just like your average, you know, great American soldier, you know, the over-adulated military officer.
I was the epitome of that.
So, you know, for better or worse, it gave me the platform that allowed me to start writing, allowed me to start speaking and gave me just enough credibility with, you know, the right or with, you know, even the mainstream left that I could, you know, that I could get through the door.
And someone would listen to the first paragraph I wrote, you know.
I mean, at this point, I'm kind of a known quantity, so I'm going to probably be persona non grata in certain areas.
But, you know, at least for the longest time, just having that major after your name and U.S. Army after your name, you know, kept me afloat, quite frankly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I often boil it down to attack the right from the right and the left from the left and that kind of thing.
But there's also the attack the patriot from the even more patriotic, in a sense, too, where, as we can see with Tulsi Gabbard right now, they want to say, oh, you're an Assad apologist or something because they don't know how to attack her really for being anti-war.
When her answer, as she's already stated clearly, is she's anti-war on behalf of her friends, the other veterans like her who agree with her.
That's pretty hard to go up against.
So they have to try to smear her or whatever.
But anyway, the point being is you see the power just inherent in that.
She went to Iraq twice, to Anbar province.
Where were you?
OK, so therefore she can now say anything anti-war she wants.
And they're just desperate, running like rats before her.
Oh, yeah.
She's frightening.
I mean, she scares the military industrial complex.
She scares the congressional military alliance because she has that status as a veteran.
I mean, because she's an officer, and she was enlisted before that, and she's done what she's supposed to do in order to be a great patriot.
And so she's got enough credibility that they have to find some other way to attack her.
And, look, I don't agree with everything she said or every interview she's ever given.
But I'll tell you what.
She is somewhat unique in the sense that she's been there, she's done that, and she's unashamedly anti-war.
Right.
On some wars.
I'm still curious about where – how exactly that's going to shake out because, of course, when Obama is fighting a war directly on behalf of a bunch of Zawahiri-obeying suicide bombers, then that's pretty easy for anyone to oppose as long as they are not just hell-bent on their own – their own American-slash-Israeli jihad against Iran.
Somebody like her, who fought against or was involved in the war against the Sunni-based insurgency in western Iraq, she can at least tell this group from that group.
And the absurdity of Obama and Brennan and etc.'s policy of backing the jihadists there, that doesn't necessarily mean she knows better than the war against the terrorists, just because she knows better than the war directly for them.
But I haven't really seen her say yet – I don't think this whole time I've heard her say that the war, say the drone war against AQAP in Yemen or against al-Shabaab or that kind of thing, or even the continuing counterinsurgency in western Iraq, that that is counterproductive and that we should just call that off and that just makes the terrorism problem worse too.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's just completely absurd.
But it turns out fighting against them really is not much better as far as how it's worked out so far.
Yeah, to me that's the graduate level of anti-war sentiment, right?
So, it's easy.
I mean, not enough people are, but it should be easy to be anti-Iraq war, right?
Like anti-2003 invasion.
I mean, it should be somewhat easy to be against counterproductive Syria war that ends up having us back basically al-Qaeda, the Nusra Front.
But to me, the graduate level, the advanced level of being anti-war is what you just said, which is even when it's supposedly directed against al-Qaeda, the worst of the worst, or ISIS, it can in many ways, like with the drones, be itself counterproductive and actually empower the movement.
So, I mean, I do think that that's the next level.
And are we going to get a candidate who's willing to say that?
Well, I hope that Tulsi does.
But I'm not holding my breath either.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
I guess I would settle for she at least knows who's who over there.
That's a start.
You know, anyway, the real point about bringing her up is that the same thing applies to you.
That you're a major and a combat vet for an ex-major, retired major, and a combat vet from both of these wars.
So you have, it's not really fair to the rest of us, frankly, but it's the truth that you have the right to speak first on this and everybody else.
Certainly, we'd all have to shut up and listen to you if you were warmongering.
So it seems like we owe you the respect to listen to why this guy says that we don't need to do this anymore.
And he really knows.
He's not just saying from Texas like Scott Horton.
He's been there and back, and that's how he knows.
Yeah, and I agree with you that it's not fair to the rest of you because I've said many times.
First of all, how about a little humility from our military veterans?
That's what I'm waiting for.
It's one thing to say, look, I've been there and I've done that, and then give your opinion.
Especially if it's skeptical, I appreciate it.
But the notion that only the veteran has the right to speak out on the war is rather ludicrous in the sense that even me, even as an officer, what did I really see of the war on terror?
OK, I saw it through a straw at 10,000 feet.
I saw little snapshots of the war in individual provinces at individual moments.
And sometimes being that sucked into it at the ground level can actually distort the view of the war taken in the grand sense, in the macrocosm.
And sometimes you're a civilian policymaker, which is why we're supposed to have control of the military, is actually the better entity to observe and to analyze it.
So I'm not saying veterans shouldn't speak out.
Please do.
I do.
Use your platform if you got it, especially if it's for a good cause.
But yeah, I think I would like to hear more veterans demonstrate some humility and not be know-it-alls and not seem to imply, right, passive-aggressively that, well, because I was there, I'm right.
Yeah.
Well, and of course I'm willing to look the other way a little bit when they're on my side of the argument.
But yeah, it's just like when the Republicans are like, we must negotiate with North Korea on Fox News.
I'm saying, OK, you guys are the most ridiculous hypocrites in the world, but I'll take it.
Welcome to this side of the story.
And for all the Democrats taking the opposite view, shame on you.
What's right is right, but one hypocrisy is worse than the other in that case.
You understand what I mean?
But yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, you're dead on.
It's a shame, but we need to take all the help we can get anywhere because, quite frankly, like we've talked about a million times on this show and on other platforms, like there isn't really an anti-war movement, so to speak, that's broadly powerful like when there was a draft.
I mean most people are focused on kitchen table issues and health care and yada, yada, yada.
Getting people to even care about foreign policy is in and of itself difficult.
So, look, when someone who's a veteran is on our side, like definitely we'll take that platform and we'll take that credibility because we need it.
Sorry, just one second.
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Hey, Danny, have you ever heard the George Carlin bit about the euphemisms for shell shock and post-traumatic stress?
I love George Carlin.
I know the exact skit.
And it's brilliant.
And as always, he's just speaking truth in his unabashed way.
All right.
Well, so it's too long for me to put in your interview here.
But I'll just say real quick.
It starts out as shell shock.
And then through the years and the different wars, it turns to battle fatigue and operational exhaustion.
And then finally, as he says, post-traumatic stress disorder, eight syllables and a hyphen.
And now the pain is buried all under jargon.
And no one really understands what they're dealing with.
And as he put it in that, which is from 1992, or was that from?
No, no, no.
That was from 1990, I guess.
He's saying, you know, if we'd been honest about it and still called it shell shock, then maybe a lot of those Vietnam veterans who were suffering from it might have gotten the attention that they needed at the time instead of being told, oh, you have a little bit of PTSD.
Why don't you drink a beer and quit whining about it?
And that would have made a difference for them.
And he got a big applause line out of that because people understood the reality of that, of just how important that really is.
You really can bury the truth of something under just turns of phrase in that way, especially medical terminology, this kind of thing.
But so I was wondering, then, could you tell me what does it really mean then, post-traumatic stress disorder?
And I don't mean people who remember that time someone was mean to them in high school or whatever, but I mean the kind that you got.
You know, I totally agree with George Carlin.
So often we take the life out of a word when we make it sound like medical and when we make it sound sophisticated.
But look, this is the way I would describe PTSD.
And everyone manifests their PTSD differently.
But what I do know is the silent wounded would be a good way to put them.
OK, the emotional wounded.
And some people look at that and say, oh, that's just some weak sauce stuff.
But the reality is what we're dealing with right now is a veteran population that is dealing with, you know, not just the flashbacks and the dreams that everyone associates with PTSD.
But we're talking serious major depressive disorders, serious major anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug abuse in order to self-medicate.
Look, these people's brains, as I learned during my 30-day inpatient stay in Arizona, have been rewired in unhealthy ways.
OK, there are actually physical manifestations of these emotional wounds.
And so, look, what we have is 40,000 guys who are physically wounded, who got shot, who took shrapnel in the eyes.
And everyone's comfortable with identifying those people as wounded warriors.
But we've got a few hundred thousand, most undiagnosed, quite frankly, even now, people who are dealing with serious emotional trauma.
These people are—and I don't mean this as a negative—are a drain and a cost on our system.
OK, so even if you're just like a fiscal conservative, like you should still give a shit, you know what I mean?
Even if you write off PTSD, this is a generational problem.
These veterans are 25 years old, some of them.
OK, we got 50 to 60 more years of dealing with their disability.
And we're talking in the hundreds of thousands.
Look, it is a life-altering experience to be truly diagnosed with true PTSD.
I met so many men and women from age 21 to 61 who were suffering.
And, look, it's real.
It is real.
And it's always existed.
We've just changed the names.
And at different points, society wasn't ready to deal with it.
And now it's kind of coming home to roost.
OK, but still, what does it mean, though?
Emotionally wounded means that you're sad, you've got regret, you have flashbacks, you have cold sweats, or—what does it mean?
Tell me more about the actual—and I know you say it's different for different people, but OK, so tell me what it's like for other people, too, then.
Yeah, it could mean all those things, and it often does.
I mean, friends of mine can't be in a crowded room, have to have their back to the wall of the bar, can't sleep, literally can't sleep, relive the same horror every night to the extent that they have insomnia.
Depression, where individuals who used to walk patrols full of IEDs now can't even work up the energy to get out of bed.
Big, hulking dudes—and I hate to make it about gender, but big, hulking, stereotypical dudes who cannot get out of bed, right, who literally can't stop their legs from shaking 23 hours a day.
This is real.
I mean, it's a real thing.
And I wasn't always a believer, quite frankly.
I think if you would have asked Lieutenant Danny whether PTSD was real, I might have said, eh, maybe for some people, a lot of people are making shit up.
But I'll tell you, man, the dozens of people that I spent a month in Arizona with, they ain't making it up.
And the guys that served in my unit who I've stayed in touch with for 10 and 15 years, they're not making it up either.
It manifests itself in a number of ways.
This is what it does.
It makes life, civilian, average daily life, like going to the market, almost unbearable each day.
You know, I had a teacher in college, when I was in college for a short time there, who had been in Vietnam and who had been a combat veteran, you know, in Vietnam, and said, you know what, a lot of us went to Vietnam and came home and were not bums on the side of the road and did not turn into John Rambo, you know, out running crazy and this and that and the other thing.
And, you know, it's a war.
People fight in wars.
That's part of human life.
And even, I think, politically speaking, at this point, he was looking back on it and saying they shouldn't have done it.
It was a stupid thing to do and whatever.
But for his part in it, he was OK with it because it was what it was.
And I guess he kind of resented the way Vietnam veterans sort of had a reputation of being these broken men who couldn't, you know, hold their own after they came home when, you know, that was true for some, but not all.
And I guess it did have that taint of weakness to it, you know, that he kind of resented being put on him or something like that.
And there must be veterans who feel that way, too, where they actually lost part of their arm, but they're not crying about it.
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
And who the hell am I to speak about that?
But I'm remembering this one guy for one.
Well, I agree with that to a certain extent.
Like, I don't think – look, every Iraq war veteran is not living under a bridge.
And it kind of – I resent when all we hear about are the ones who commit suicide or all the ones we – you know what I mean?
Or the only ones we hear about are the homeless vets that, like, every single TV show seems like intent on finding.
Look, the reality is most of the people who are suffering from crippling PTSD are holding jobs, functioning.
Even a lot of the addicts are functioning.
Just – you know, their suffering doesn't mean that they're broke forever.
And it doesn't mean that, like, they should only be considered some sort of drain on society.
When I use that word, I meant in a real financial sense, really, you know, from the perspective of the American economy.
But absolutely I resent some of the characterization of all of us as victims.
And, look, many of us knew what we were getting into.
It doesn't excuse what happened to us.
It doesn't mean that we don't deserve the care that we're getting now.
But, you know, I think we have to be honest with ourselves.
And in all volunteer military – look, I signed up to fight.
And I was nervous, I'm embarrassed to say, that I might miss the war in Iraq.
I mean that's how I felt as a 19-year-old cadet.
But you know what?
My brain wasn't even fully developed yet.
So am I responsible?
Absolutely I am.
But, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that what happens after is all your fault and you shouldn't get help.
But it does mean we should be honest with ourselves about who we were when we went into the military because I think that's important.
Yeah.
Well, and, of course, you watch any documentary about guys in Afghanistan or Iraq, there's always at least some of them who are itching to get in the fight.
They didn't join the Marines to not fight.
I remember Michael Hastings telling me that during the Afghan surge.
These guys didn't join the Marines to not fight.
And then to tell them they're traffic cops now or something like that is driving them crazy.
And it's just – it makes it where the situation isn't going to be sustainable in any kind of real way was his point.
But I guess the context, what I'm curious about, you know, when I was growing up, Vietnam was, you know, it was there in the shadow and whatever.
But mostly all war propaganda in America is about World War II and fighting Adolf Hitler.
And where every German army, you know, Wehrmacht soldier was also a German Nazi, Hitler himself.
And where those were the only people who died in the war.
It was essentially guys in green uniforms fighting for this country versus guys in gray uniforms fighting for that country.
Everyone was a combatant.
Everyone deserved it and everything was fair and everything was cool.
And so – and was pure evil, personified in Nazism, Nazi totalitarianism there.
And then everything that the U.S. government would ever do ever since then also is wrapped up in all of that morality tied up in the Second World War.
And to question any intervention at all.
And one of the first things that anyone will automatically go to is, well, what about Adolf Hitler?
You wouldn't go stop Adolf Hitler?
And that's just the way people think about it.
So then I wonder, though, I'm off on too much of a tangent.
What I wonder, though, is when you sign up, when you did sign up, is that kind of your impression that essentially George Bush isn't going to have you kill anyone who doesn't deserve it?
So yeah, you want to fight and you're going to go and be a combat vet tough guy for your country and this and that.
But was part of the deal that you know that you're going to be patrolling neighborhoods and killing men in their living rooms in front of their wives and all this crazy stuff?
Or were you one of the same kind of illusion that they tried to push on me?
Because I'm just a little bit older than you.
You know, not much.
I was definitely a believer in American exceptionalism and the whole myth that America only fights for benevolent causes.
I mean, I was very wrapped up in the World War II mythology, the sanitization of that war that went on.
In many ways, what we did as a society is we took the exception, which is fighting true evil and Adolf Hitler, and turned it into, you know, the norm in the sense of, hey, you know, every war is just like this.
And America in any situation is fighting the new Nazis.
That's why Saddam Hussein got compared to Hitler.
That's why everything gets compared to the Munich crisis.
The reality was the Second World War was a singular thing.
And the thing is it wasn't even that great of a war.
There's a book called The Good War all about World War II.
But the whole point of the book is to break down that mythology.
I mean, look, we terror bombed civilians from the sky and killed over a million of them in Germany and in Tokyo.
We boiled alive 95,000 people in March 1945 in Tokyo.
If we would have lost the war, you know, Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command and his assistant, a guy named George, you know, Robert McNamara, OK, who becomes secretary of defense, they would have been tried as war criminals, quite frankly.
So, like, I'm sick of the World War II lie.
I'm sick of everything being, you know, compared to Hitler, compared to the Munich crisis and the, you know, the appeasement involved and all that.
Like, let's just – let's be honest about what war is about because, look, they sold me that bill of goods.
And you know what?
Some people say this in the comments below my articles.
Maybe I should have known better even at 17 when I went to West Point.
And you know what?
I probably should have.
I probably should have.
I mean that's why they call it serving your country instead of serving your government because if they put it like that for a second, you might think, well, wait a minute.
My government is a bunch of lawyers.
They're a bunch – government, you mean the U.S. Congress and Bill Clinton or George Bush or whoever is the president right now, that's who I'm serving?
I'm not so sure about that.
Serving your country, I mean that's a pretty thin excuse really for serving the interests and decisions of whoever happens to be in charge of the federal government at any particular point, which is an entirely different question.
Yeah, absolutely.
Totally agree.
I mean we swear allegiance to the Constitution, but we really do fight for individual governments.
I mean we do.
We fight at the whims of an imperial president who doesn't even go to Congress anymore.
And I don't mean Trump.
I mean like every president since Truman.
And the reality is we do fight for partisan governments that are in power for a limited amount of time and the executive non-elected officials who drag us into the next policy, which is almost always war.
I mean look, that's not quite as romantic as the lie, but it's true.
It's the reality.
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Hey man, let's talk about your recent article at antiwar.com.
Empire of Absurdity.
Recycled neocons.
Recycled enemies.
And you got all kinds of good stuff in here, but I want to focus, I guess, on this thing at the end about how the American empire, boy, is that unipolar moment just over.
And America, quote unquote, presently in the form of Donald Trump, but not just him.
The American establishment, the military, the State Department, the country's word on the way things are to go around the world is just amounting to, you know, empty hollering.
No one's listening.
Like, say, for example, with the Iran deal, where America wants out of the deal, but wants Europe out of the deal, and wants the Europeans to at least go along with boycotting all of Iran, if that's our policy.
And the Europeans aren't going for that.
They have gone ahead and created their special purpose vehicle to allow trade.
That's probably one of the biggest examples, but you have quite a few in here, where the American empire is just stamping its feet and crying, and everybody else is just shrugging their shoulders and ignoring us now.
Yeah.
I think I end the article by saying the opposite of love isn't hate.
It's indifference.
And I think that's true for those of us who have been wronged by a woman we loved, and it's just as wrong in foreign affairs.
I mean, it's just as true in foreign affairs.
Like, let's list out every American hope, every American policy or mission over the last 20 years, and let's just figure out how many of them have gone our way.
I mean, the article's not in front of me, but, like, Iran won in Iraq.
Bashar al-Assad, Russia and Iran won in Syria.
The Houthis won't quit in Yemen.
Russia took Crimea.
The South China Sea is, whether we like it or not, going to continue to be more like China's Caribbean over the course of the next 50 years.
Taliban in Afghanistan.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
Yeah.
They won.
They won.
It's a question – and you wrote the book on Afghanistan.
You wrote, like, the definitive book on Afghanistan.
It's reality.
Pakistan and the Taliban have won.
We just haven't admitted it yet.
I mean, every single American goal has floundered, no matter how much money, no matter how much pressure, no matter how much blood we wasted.
It's like we can't seem to get anything right.
I mean, the emperor has no clothes.
I mean, it's ludicrous.
You're right.
On the Iran deal, for example, Europe's like, well, no, we're staying in the deal.
And we look like the idiots because we are, quite frankly.
Well, thank goodness.
I mean, that's the thing of it.
It's – the American government's position on virtually everything is horrible.
So wherever it's being ignored, it's almost without exception to the good.
It seems like – I'm trying to think of an example where, uh-oh, this is going to really be bad now that we're – the U.S. is losing influence in X geographical region.
I'm trying to come up with one.
I can't.
I can't either.
I'm literally OK with saying that America failing in its goals.
I'm pretty much OK with it.
I mean for the most part because so – none of those things that I just listed are some sort of existential threat to the United States.
Like talk to me when there's a real worry that the United States is going to be invaded or that there's going to be a first strike nuclear attack on the United States.
Like talk to me when that's really a problem or really something we can do anything about.
I mean we're always going to live under a nuclear threat just as long as these weapons exist.
So short of that, I'm not sure which American policy since 2001 or maybe even earlier was truly vital, was truly in our national interest.
I'm at a loss to name one.
And you know what?
I mean never mind the loss of influence of the empire because of course the real argument is we're not supposed to be an empire in the first place.
We're supposed to roll this thing back because we don't want to have an empire rather than because we're forced to, because we're bankrupt, because our wars have all failed, because our government and our recent history are a global laughingstock.
But either way, it's got to come to an end.
But it's just so funny because the counterfactual is so obvious, right?
When you think especially about cross-eyed, cruel, premeditated murder slash idiot George W. Bush taking the reins of the empire at the dawn of the century here.
That it could have – I mean I hate to say this.
I really capital H, bold my talents, hate to say it, but even Al Gore, even anyone other than him in that chair and it would not have come to this.
It would have been so much better in so many ways.
Right now it's the anniversary again of the start of Iraq War II and just such an absolutely massive unforced error even from the point of view of the American empire and what they were trying to accomplish with that thing in establishing their permanent hegemony over there and all that.
And instead they just completely blew America's wad and empowered, as you said, everyone that they were trying to impress and limit the power of, particularly the Iranians.
And in second place, I guess, Al-Qaeda, they only made them more and more powerful all this time.
Only blew up everything.
Only just ruined everything.
I mean man, I don't know.
It's hard to imagine exactly how it would have been, but it's not hard to see just how bad it has been so unnecessarily instead.
I mean look at Bush hiring the Ethiopians to invade Somalia at Christmas 2006.
I mean you got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dead people since then.
Accomplished nothing.
Not that Americans care about that or anything like that, but that's an Iraq War II level catastrophe right there too.
Never had to happen at all.
Just like Obama in Libya and in Syria.
Never had to happen at all.
Obama could have told all the allies, no, no, no, no, no.
You might hate Assad, but I hate Osama more, so your intervention is canceled.
He could have said that, but he didn't.
He went along with it.
All of this stuff just didn't have to be whatsoever.
The Bush administration was like one own goal after another, and you brought up the Iraq invasion, but I'm glad you brought up the Ethiopian or our backing of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
Because how many people do you think even remember that?
I would guess less than 10% of Americans even remember that happened.
Far less than 10.
Maybe 1.
I mean maybe 1% ever even knew it happened.
And that just shows how much of the empire kind of – or how much of the empire's actions really happens to the oblivience of the American people.
So when people say to me, oh, America can't be an empire.
We're not an empire.
We're just a – we're a benevolent brooding giant.
That's all we are.
We're a general giant.
I get mad, but then I'm like they don't even know.
So much of what the empire does and what the empire is happens in the shadows or happens right on the inside pages of the New York Times if anyone cared to read about it.
But they don't.
And what's funny is all they're doing is projecting their fantasy about how it's supposed to be, right?
Is that America is supposed to be so strong that it could be the world empire but would never try to do such a thing because who the hell do we think we are?
England?
No, we're not trying to be England.
We're those who rebelled against that empire.
And the whole legend of George Washington – I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, people, but god dang it.
The legend of George Washington is that he could have been the king and instead he retired back home to Mount Vernon and later he helped with the military coup over the Articles of Confederation.
That's true.
But still, he only wanted to be called Mr. President, the administrator of the federal departments, not royalty, not a dictator, when he presumably could have been.
And I know you're the historian.
Maybe he couldn't have been and so then he just dressed it up like morality.
But anyway, that's the legend of America, right, is that we don't really want to fight.
We'll fight if you make us.
And that should go for, obviously, the perfect reaction after September 11th.
Even if you think that you couldn't deal with the Taliban, you absolutely had to send in a group of Rangers and Delta guys to hunt down Al-Qaeda.
You could have called off the whole thing by Christmas and then said to the whole world, see?
We're cool, man.
Nobody – why would anyone attack us?
We never meant anyone any harm and played the cool guy the whole time.
That would have been the perfect reaction.
I mean the real perfect reaction would have been negotiation, but I'm just saying it could have been that limited.
And that would have really made the case that I think the American people really believe in.
The people like you're talking about who say, oh, we're this gentle giant.
We're supposed to be.
Yeah, exactly.
But that's what we're kind of arguing about is that it's not so gentle.
Look at this pile of skulls.
It's pretty impressive.
Yeah, I am the historian, and there's a lot of better historians out there.
But I know this.
America has started essentially every war it's been in besides the Second World War.
I mean we have started.
We have taken the aggressive action.
We've made the decision to go to war even when we didn't have to like in World War I in almost every single case.
But that's not the memory, and it's like when the myth becomes more powerful than the truth, then print the myth.
That's someone's quote from the media world, and it's been true for American history.
Why do I bother writing a biweekly essay on sequential events in American history for Truthdig?
I do it out of frustration to some extent, but because academics have known that American history is just laden with a litany of just horror.
But because no one reads academics except other academics, I felt like, you know what?
Someone's got to like translate American history the way Zinn did to something that amounts to something close to truth.
And that's not to say that everything Zinn said was correct, but just some notion of like correcting the record on American history because you're right.
There's so much of it is shrouded in myth.
And I'm really glad that you brought that up, this series that you do.
It's every two weeks at Truthdig where you're – it's mostly concerning around revolutionary era stuff so far, right?
Well, it's all the way up to the Cold War now.
Oh, OK.
We're on the 27th volume that will come out on this Saturday, and I'll be writing about the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
I've read your great World War II piece, but you need to get into some Pearl Harbor revisionism, man.
Have you ever read Robert Stinnett?
I haven't, but I'm somewhat familiar with the theories around the Pearl Harbor invasion.
I think that there's a lot of questions and there's a lot of smoke.
I didn't delve into it so much in the piece, probably out of a degree of conservatism, to be frank.
But it's something that needs to be looked into very carefully.
Fair enough, yeah.
So what's interesting about Robert Stinnett and his book is Day of Deceit is he was in the Pacific in the war, and he was told all along exactly what codes had been cracked and how – that was how they didn't know the attack was coming.
But then he learned that that wasn't true, that all these other codes had been cracked as well, and they sure as hell knew it was coming and kept that information from Kimmel and Short and so forth.
But then – and importantly, although this isn't completely conclusive or anything necessarily, but I think it's important – he thinks it's OK.
He thinks that the threat of Hitler in Europe was so grave that if FDR had to sacrifice 3,000 boys to the depths of the Pacific for – to get us into a war with Japan in order to get us into a war with Germany, then that was just worth it.
Because incoherently he argued on this show that, well, the thing is he couldn't get Hitler to attack.
And so – but if he hadn't have done this, then Hitler would have taken over America and the rest of the Americas, too, which is a little bit of a contradiction.
But anyway, this was – and so in other words, he's not some crusty old right-winger going, rah, rah, rah, I hate FDR.
He thinks it's perfectly fine.
FDR is still the great president that he loved back from his wartime service days, and that part never changed.
He's just saying, hey, I'm a historian, and the truth is the truth, and you need to read this McCollum memo, the eight-point plan to provoke Japan into attacking us first that they implemented step by step in order to deliberately make it so.
So anyway, take a look, good old Stinnett.
He's still around, barely.
Let me just say a quick bit on that.
Even if you admit – even if you believe that FDR didn't know what was exactly coming when it did, even if you don't think that they were directly provoked, here's what's certain is every U.S. military war plan – coded orange, plan orange was the big one for Japan.
We always have war plans for every country in the world.
Predicted, just as you said, exactly what the Japanese would do.
In fact, what it said was the Philippines are indefensible and going to fall to Japan.
No one wanted to tell the American people that we were about to sacrifice 10,000 of our boys, which is what we did.
But look, they knew that by cutting off oil supplies, by cutting off rubber to the Japanese, they knew precisely what was going to happen.
It wasn't a question of if.
It was a question of when.
And that's if you don't buy the conspiracy, which to me we don't know for sure yet.
Yeah, I mean part of that story was that Arthur McCollum, who was – I forgot his rank, but he was a naval officer, that he had been stationed in Japan for 20 years previously back in the previous regime or whatever in those days.
So he was considered to be an expert in Japanese culture and all that, and he knew precisely how to put them in a box and make them feel like they had no other choice but to go ahead and get it over with and hopefully get one good strike in first.
And then as the Secretary of War wrote in his diary, Stimson said the whole trick was maneuvering them into firing the first shot so we could pretend to be on the defensive essentially.
And mission accomplished.
So yeah, that's all of them.
I got a blog entry like that somewhere.
They lied us into war every single time.
They lied us into every war America ever fought.
There are no exceptions to that.
I mean including that Mexico was invading Texas when the border was the San Jacinto, not the Rio Grande.
They knew that.
They were just bluffing.
They didn't care.
Absolutely, and that's of course one of our more egregious aggressive wars in our history, which you're absolutely right that every single one was formulated around some sort of lie, and every single one except for World War II maybe we started.
And that's just the reality we have to deal with.
That's part of what comes with the territory of being a continental empire, which is what we were from the minute we landed on these shores, and that's it.
Bottom line.
It's true enough.
Noam Chomsky says it's the saltwater fallacy that your republic only becomes an empire once it starts seizing overseas colonies and that kind of thing.
So why should that be?
What was Colorado other than somebody else's territory that was seized and conquered and settled or any of the rest of this land?
Well, one last point on that.
Here's what people say.
Here's what like the Dinesh D'Souza's of the world will argue against.
They'll say, well, no, no.
America is not an empire because when we took all of those territories in the west, we made them into states, and we brought them into the fold of our wonderful democracy.
So it's not the same as like England's empire.
But here's the deal.
That's true, except for Puerto Rico and Guam, et cetera, which still can't vote for president.
But that's true of the 50 or the 48 continental states.
Right.
But here's the deal.
We only let them come in as actual states once they had a certain population number and once a certain percentage of that population was white.
That's why Oklahoma remains a federal territory ruled by an appointed governor until for over 100 years.
That's why Arizona is in a state until 1921, even though it was conquered in 1848 because there were just too many brown folks there.
And until enough white people moved in, until it looked the way we wanted America to look, it stayed under essentially military jurisdiction until then, ruled by federal marshals and federal law.
American Zionism essentially.
Settler colonialism.
I'm sorry?
Settler colonialism, just like Israel.
Yeah.
So speaking of which, I heard that you did real well in a debate this last week over Israel in New York there.
You want to talk about that at all?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I debated on— First of all, I'm sorry.
What's the name of this Gene Epstein's thing?
It's called what?
It's called the Soho Forum down on Bleecker Street is the theater they use in New York City.
I debated Ilan Jornot, a British-Israeli academic who really dedicates his life.
I mean he dedicates his life to his cause, to what he argued, which was an extraordinarily Israeli-biased Zionism.
And they brought me in, and this is kind of like a side gig for me, not to brag, but I don't write about Israel every day.
I don't have a book on Israel.
He has several.
But look, I just went up there and took like a relatively reasonable ground.
I probably am more Palestinian than I even sounded in the speech because he was so far out there that all I had to do was poke holes in his conception, and I was able to win the debate.
And he wasn't too happy.
He didn't really want to shake my hand.
I sort of made him at the end, which was interesting.
I love it when that happens.
I was only in a debate once, and the guy refused to shake my hand at the end, and then everybody really laughed and applauded, and that was like my extra victory on top was that I stomped him so bad.
So congratulations for that.
Well, thanks.
I definitely enjoyed it, and it got a little heated.
I thought I had kind of a hostile audience in the front, at least in the front sections.
I had some heckling that went on.
One woman yelled out when I said that Palestinians don't have a country.
She yelled out, yes, they do.
It's called Jordan, just to give you an idea of the kind of thinking, the kind of Zionist thinking that's still out there in New York.
I mean it was absolutely wild.
I mean I had to cut her off and tell her she was being rude.
But that wasn't the only time, but in the end I was able to sway more of the audience luckily.
That's funny.
I mean at that point, if it's Jordan, then why not Kuwait or why not Romania?
Why not just pick a country at random where the Palestinians have to move to at that point as though they are from the other side of the river?
Let's just pretend.
Yeah, it really – it's wild.
I mean just the messianic sort of view of Israel and the Jewish people that you have to have to deny the existence of a Palestinian people is to me staggering.
But you know what?
All the first prime ministers of Israel, Golda Meir and all these folks, they said that.
They essentially said – I mean I got quotes from Golda Meir in the late 60s saying there's no such thing as Palestinian people.
They don't exist.
I mean and that kind of lie, that kind of framing of the problem, it's still out there in the Netanyahu government and some of his appointed officials.
I mean this is something that I've heard from I guess somewhat more kooky Zionist types is that the Palestinians actually all like made Aliyah and they all came to try to suck off of wonderful Israel that was making the desert bloom over there.
But they weren't even from there at all.
They were from Syria and from all over the place.
It's wild.
Which actually by the way, now that I mention that, I think it was – there's a book.
I'm sorry I forget the name of it where the lady made that case and it was Norman Finkelstein debunked that for his PhD thesis back in the 1980s.
He went through and showed how her – all of her census numbers were fraudulent and that it was completely essentially made up.
But that was sort of the base of that.
But then it doesn't matter because it's just something that people have heard said before and so if they're on that side, they'll run with it.
Absolutely.
When the myth is more powerful than the truth, print the myth and they're still printing it over there.
And they've got – in fact the Israeli opposition press, the Israeli left for lack of a better word, is more critical of Israeli policy and more pro-Palestinian than almost anything you hear in the United States, which is staggering when you think about it.
Right.
Well, I don't know anything but certainly anything that you'd read in the Post or the Times or anything like that most of the time, I guess with some few exceptions.
But you know what?
Even in the Israeli press, you have Amir Hass and Gideon Levy and a couple of others but there's not really that many not who are featured prominently anywhere.
No.
In the 1990s, there was a pretty powerful pro-peace movement and opposition in Israel.
But that country, like the United States, on these sort of issues has really drifted further and further to – again, I hate to use this terminology – but to the right I suppose or to the more militarist end.
It's come to the point where Israeli dissenters, whether they're in the media or in academia, are becoming more and more outcasted within Israeli society, which is a really dangerous thing.
Yeah.
All right.
One more thing here, man.
I've seen some reports about deployments kind of changing or training missions being adjusted and this and that kind of thing, and I wonder whether you think that there's a real threat of military action against Venezuela.
I wish that that was as far-fetched as it should be.
So I don't have any inside information on this.
I've got all the same open source stuff that you and everybody else does.
But look, I think it's unlikely there will be a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela.
But the fact that it's even on the table, the fact that we have an administration that would even consider it, that would consider sort of bringing out the old specter of global socialism as some sort of existential threat to the United States coming from a relatively small Latin American country is in and of itself – here's what I'll say.
The fact that it's on the table tells a lot.
It's very instructive.
Yeah.
But I hope it won't happen.
Well, I think where I learned the phrase that the army, they fight like they train was in the context of Panama and how they had bases in Panama.
So they would just kind of drum up all their training exercises, but they changed their training exercises a little bit from this is what we would do if we were attacking the government of Panama.
And they practiced it for a few weeks, and then they did it.
And so it was sort of for people who had the eyes to see, they could see exactly what was coming right there in front of their faces.
So I'm afraid that it's going to be something like that, but that I don't understand exactly which clues to recognize as the real signpost to an attack of some kind.
I mean, they really – they failed in their stupid coup, right?
So now what are they going to do?
Back down or something?
I don't know.
Yeah.
It appears that the military in Venezuela is staying loyal to Maduro.
Well, the whole government.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I mean, it's a fail.
It's a perfect example of that list we gave at the beginning of the show where I listed out all the things that America has failed at since 2001 and just throw Venezuela on the pile because Maduro is not necessarily going anywhere yet and Guaido isn't taking over the government just because we said so.
Even though we've convinced like a quarter of the countries in the world to back Guaido, which is staggering in and of itself.
But he's not taking over, not anytime soon from what I can tell.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, assuming nobody kills the current guy or something like that, which is maybe a big assumption, that could be part of it to do something other than invasion where they – I don't know.
See, the neocons always have these silly plans like, well, we'll just put 5,000 guys in there and carve out a safe zone and this and that kind of thing.
Paul Wolfowitz used to talk like that, right?
That was why Tommy Frank said that Douglas Fyfe was the stupidest effing guy on the face of the earth.
It's because he was saying, oh, we can invade with just a few thousand guys and this and that.
They really kind of think that.
And Elliott Abrams is there.
And John Bolton.
And Bolton's not really a neocon, but close enough.
He's certainly best friends with all of those guys and runs with them on all these same issues.
And so when I heard, like, they have 5,000 guys in Colombia, I'm like – or on the notepad.
I guess they have some troops in Colombia and then they have on the notepad 5,000.
I'm going, what's 5,000 going to do?
But then I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.
Just because I know that's stupid doesn't mean that the Doug Fyfes of the Trump administration don't actually think that maybe that's an option to do.
I mean although the military would have to push back in the same way they did back in 03, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean I wouldn't put almost anything past them at this point.
I mean the civilian policymakers, whether it's the neocons or the neocon fellow travelers, I mean they're obsessed with the idea of what you said, safe zones, no fly zones.
I mean look, this whole – it's the whole Rumsfeldian idea that like with two divisions we could take down any country as long as we have enough air support.
I mean it's ludicrous.
The whole thing is.
I mean has anyone thought through like phase four operations in Venezuela if we were to intervene?
Like has anyone ever thought through like where that ends as Petraeus famously – oh, tell me how this ends and his whole drama.
But like really, has anyone even thought that through?
Like we're talking about how military force is on the table, but like I want to know, and I wish I was in the Pentagon.
I want to be on the team if there's a team that's planning for like day 30 after an American intervention in Venezuela because I'll tell you.
It'll be an ugly couple of months, years, fucking decades, man.
Yeah.
Well, I mean that's the deal is you just got to get in there.
We'll worry about that later because if we worry about that now, then we won't be able to get in there.
So hush up then.
Right, yeah.
That's like that's future Danny's problem.
That's future America's problem.
That's exactly right.
You know what I worry about?
And I guess I always thought this way, but even more so lately that like, man, what if everything I've done in my life to try to help to bolster this consensus against all this intervention in the Middle East ends up just helping lead to a war with China?
Because everybody in the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps and all this, they're tired of killing Muslims in their own neighborhoods and all this kind of garbage and getting sniped at from rooftops and blown up by IEDs.
You can't even find the guy that did it to you.
That's frustrating.
You tell me about frustrating that is.
So you have before I've read your articles about it.
So, but, you know, it'd be better to be like, hey, let's have a nice set piece tank battle with the Russians.
And, and, you know, I talked about this with Chas Freeman.
So it's not just, you know, I'm kind of a kook because he sort of agreed with me about this.
On one hand, it seems like, I mean, it obviously goes without saying that everybody knows that USA, China, Russia all have nuclear weapons, of course, H-bombs and all different means of delivering them.
And that's not a secret.
And everybody knows that.
But it seems like because that goes without saying, they sort of act as though it's really not part of the equation at all.
And that somehow we could get in a conventional war with Russia, like a fun one, like a good one with planes and tanks and subs and cool stuff.
Maybe with the Chinese, we'll have a air-sea battle, but that it won't come to losing San Francisco and L.A. and Denver and D.C.
And we might be better off without D.C., but the rest of those cities, that would be sad.
And, and I really wonder, like, wow, if, if the American people finally say enough is enough, we want out of the Middle East.
Aren't we just helping free up divisions to escalate in Europe or to escalate in, in the East?
Well, you know, I really like what you're saying there.
Well, I hate what you're saying, but I agree with it.
I fear, and I've done some work with a couple of think tanks where when I would write certain op-eds, they would always tell me, well, can you add one more thing to your anti-interventionism thing?
Can you say that we need to rebalance and get ready to fight Russia?
You know, because that sells, that sells on the Hill.
You know, you can, there's a, there's a portion of the, you know, the policymakers that are amenable to that argument.
Like, oh, yeah, coin is the bad fight, so we need to do less of that.
But what we really need to do is then, like, take all those assets and that energy and, like, prepare for this, like, good war.
Like you said, like a fun war that, you know, that's actually going to end with someone taking someone's capital against China and Russia.
You know, not realizing, of course, that those wars truly would be catastrophic on a level that we can't even fathom and that they don't need to be fought in the first place.
You know, so I agree with you.
I mean, that is a fear of mine is that someone will misunderstand me saying, look, coin doesn't work.
Coin's not smart.
You know, trying to pacify all these countries and remake societies through nation building isn't smart.
I'm afraid they're going to take the lesson of that to be, but dot, dot, dot, real war against the good old Soviet Russians should come back in vogue because, like, that is not my point by a long shot.
Yeah, we just need to make sure that for every article we write about Iraq and Iran, that we get back to our America's position in Poland and our ships in the Pacific and the rest of this, you know, in somewhat equal measure.
That air sea battle where justice against that as we are another invasion of the Helmand province, you know, got to be.
Absolutely.
We need to know.
Yeah, we we definitely need to caveat what we're saying in each of these articles because they will twist our words to make it sound like we're somehow against one kind of war, but in favor of another.
And I'm pretty much against all of them.
Yeah.
I mean, you know what?
This is Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, the boss.
He says, hey, what if we just had a moratorium where like no wars for 50 years and then we look at it again and see about maybe.
But let's just start with that.
You know, it's like those it's like those T-shirts I've seen that say, like, I'm already against the next war.
You know, like I'm I'm confident enough to buy and wear that T-shirt for the rest of my life.
That's how sure I am that there won't be a necessary war, that there won't be a war that needs to be fought in my lifetime.
Really.
I mean, that's that's how confident I am.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Just take a globe and spin it.
There's no power to oppose us.
There's nobody to fight with and there's nothing to fight about.
I mean, hell, it's a small world after all.
I mean, literally speaking, not figuratively, literally, it's not that big.
There are only so many continents and so many countries and so many military forces and they really don't amount to much.
Not compared to what they would need to attack us.
Never mind compared to what we have to repel them with.
Totally agree.
And, you know, that scares a lot of people on the hill and it scares a lot of people in the behemoth of the mill industrial complex.
Even though I'm kind of tired of that word, because like the notion that we have no existential threats or at least no likely existential threats, that's like terrifying to them.
Because, I mean, it puts so many people out of a job.
It puts our whole like, you know, defense spending, you know, fiscal state into jeopardy.
And look, people are scared of that.
Careers are built on ostensible threats from afar.
I mean, careers are built on that.
Entire governments hold together on that.
And that's not just an American problem.
That's a world historical problem.
Thank you for coming back on the show, Danny.
Hey, Scott, always glad to do it.
And, you know, I'll keep cranking out those pieces weekly at any war and truth dig and anywhere else that will have me.
And we'll talk again, I'm sure.
Absolutely.
You do that.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, you guys, that's Danny Sherson.
Full stop.
Danny Sherson.
No longer a government employee title.
How do you like that?
But he is a writer at truthdig and at antiwar.com.
And he wrote Ghosts of Baghdad.
Nope.
Ghost Riders of Baghdad.
That's what I meant to say.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Thanks, Danny.
