03/04/16 – Dan Simpson – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee.
Lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at darrenscoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren'scoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
Darren'scoffee.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And on the line, I've got Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador and associate editor of the Post Gazette.
Wait, which Post Gazette is that?
Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette at post-gazette.com.
And this essay is entitled Vietnam Redux.
Welcome to the show.
Dan, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Thanks for asking.
And I really appreciate this article, especially because it's kind of a cry in the wilderness here.
Who's even writing about Afghanistan at all these days?
If our surge ain't working, nobody's interested.
So, you know, why don't you go ahead and state your case?
You start out here with a pretty compelling story about Vietnam.
Well, my basic feeling is that we should have been out of Afghanistan years ago.
That, you know, in the beginning I could have seen it.
You know, we had to do something to them for 9-11.
But then after we basically drove the Taliban out of power and al-Qaeda more or less out of the country, we should have withdrawn our troops and gone home.
But we didn't.
And here we are now, 15 years later, still with combat troops in there, still hammering the Afghans, killing Afghans and patiently killing even Americans as well.
That Warren Weinstein, you know, who was killed by a drone attack.
I mean, he was a friend of mine, an old friend of mine.
The hostage who was killed, you're saying?
Yeah, the American hostage who was killed.
You know, my feeling is that we're wasting our money and wasting our troops and killing Afghans and occasionally Americans for no good reason.
I have the same feeling, by the way, about Iraq.
Libya, I don't think we should have overthrown Gaddafi because we didn't know what was going to come afterward and what has come afterward has been catastrophic.
I don't think we should be signed on with the Saudis in fighting the Shia in Yemen.
And Syria, I mean, it's just turning into a greater and greater tragedy with the humanitarian as well as political costs of what's happening in Syria but also what's happening in Europe as a result of the migrants.
So I just see our foreign policy as, you know, stupid and motivated by I'm not quite sure what.
I could be kind and say fear except that puts the blame on the people who stir up the fear.
But I'm afraid also a certain amount of it is military industrial complex stuff, you know, with people making money out of the whole thing, out of the arms sales and providing the consultants and the omniscient analysts who appear on television and radio, you know, bloviating on the subject.
The whole thing just drives me nuts, I have to tell you.
All right, well, so quite a few things there.
So that's basically it.
Yeah, sure.
Now, there's a few things to go back over there.
First of all, do you think that there's a real danger of a fall of Saigon type moment there since they've withdrawn so many troops but left enough to have their goose cooked?
Yes, I do think so.
And I think it's less of a threat but I think also a real threat in Iraq.
But in Afghanistan, if you look at it, I mean, the Taliban are gobbling up more and more territory and the Ashraf Ghani government is hanging on more and more by the skin of its teeth.
And, of course, the whole thing is a narco state anyway, depending on opium for money.
So, yeah, and, of course, I think I mentioned in the article that my wife and I just came back from Southeast Asia and we were in Saigon, or it's now called Ho Chi Minh City, which, by the way, seems to be going pretty well.
But I'm old enough to remember the end of that war and to see the signs of a situation that is deteriorating from the point of view of American presence to the point where, in Afghanistan, we are close to the point where the only way out is by helicopters from the roof.
So, yes.
Well, and you say in here, too, that the Russians are backing off their cooperation with the Americans but at the same time they're doubling down their support for, was it, building up the Tajik army instead?
That's right.
I mean, as we all know, the Russians have a concern, too, about militant Islamic incursions into their backyard.
And, you know, for them the primary threat is in the Caucasus, but it's also the case that, you know, they're bound to worry about these stands, which, you know, all are Muslim majority and so on.
But, and for a while, you know, they saw what we were doing in Afghanistan as something that was worthy of their support.
But I think, I honestly think, they see that ship sinking.
And so their response to that is to build up, I hate to use the word wall because it has such an unfortunate connotation in American politics now, but building up the strength and their relationships with the stands, you know, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, et cetera, et cetera, around Afghanistan rather than continuing to support our effort in Afghanistan.
In other words, I think it's ships leaving a sinking rat.
Yeah.
All right.
So now, and I also want to get back to, you mentioned, I would ask you, but you mentioned the why of it.
And I think the most important part of your answer really is that no one really knows.
Or no one really knows because it's a lot of little reasons, none of them good enough.
Well, a lot of people make money out of this.
You know, one of the things we have done is loaned the Afghans money to buy arms from us, you know, helicopters and so on.
And then, of course, American contractors supply them the know-how to use these weapons.
American companies sell them the weapons.
American companies sell them the spare parts for the weapons.
And, you know, and then there are whatever American economic aid is still going into Afghanistan.
You know, that's all American companies as well.
So which is to say that, you know, whether, you know, whatever one feels about the economic role of the United States in the world, the fact of the matter is that we make a certain amount.
I mean, America collectively makes a certain amount of money out of its involvement in Afghanistan.
And that's one of the reasons why we're still there.
Plus, of course, you know, there are going to be X number of generals who get their third and fourth star from this and so on.
Right.
Yeah, you know, and it's funny too, though, because if you listen to Zbigniew Brzezinski, it's all about containing the Slavic civilization and ruling the world island and all this.
But when I talk with Daniel Davis, who is a lieutenant colonel over there during the surge, or I guess right after it, talking with all the generals and all that, they never heard of any of that.
They don't know anything about all this global strategy and hemming in Russia or anything like that.
They're more likely to give the same answer that you just gave.
They want another star and another ribbon for their shirt and a little bit more money on their check when they retire.
But I'm sorry.
We got to take this break.
Damn, if you'll hang on through this break, we'll be right back.
Everybody with Dan Simpson, former U.S. ambassador and now at the Philadelphia.
No, sorry.
No, no.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Pittsburgh.
I know that's different.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
I'm a Texan.
Think Steelers.
Steelers, of course.
All right.
Right back after this, guys.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian empire, police, state founders, quote, central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I spent that whole break worrying about how many Pennsylvanians I made mad at me for that.
I'm on the line with Dan Simpson.
He's at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Boy, all these names start with P's.
What's a Texan supposed to do with that?
Not much.
I'm familiar with Carlisle, but that's it.
Oh, you knew Carlisle?
Yeah, the Army War College is there.
Yeah, I used to have family that lived there back when.
Oh, yeah.
Nice town.
All right, so Vietnam Redux is the article here at PostGazette.com, Dan Simpson, about Afghanistan.
And so I guess I wanted to ask you about what Trump said last night.
They found a quote of him saying that – well, basically what you're saying.
We never should have gone.
We never should have stayed.
We should just get out of there and forget about it.
And he said, oh, no, I never said that.
And they said, well, here's the proof.
And he said, well, I was confused and thought we were talking about Iraq.
Afghanistan, we definitely have to stay forever because Pakistan is next door and they have nukes.
And so something, something, bad guys could get nukes if we leave.
What do you think of that?
I think it's nonsense.
I mean, if the only way to watch Pakistan is through Afghanistan, we're really in trouble.
You know, as far as one can tell, we are all over Pakistan anyway.
And, you know, with satellite coverage and other overhead coverage and drones and, you know, who knows what else.
So the idea that we stay, we keep troops in Afghanistan to watch Pakistan.
I mean, I just think that shows marvelous ignorance of the situation in South Asia.
Now, you know, Trump in general and that that so-called debate last night.
I mean, that that was really distressing.
I mean, they didn't do substance when you get yelling at each other about the relative length of their penises.
You know, you know, you're really in trouble.
You know, America is really in trouble.
Yeah, well, the most substantive thing said about foreign policy was Kasich agreeing with Hillary Clinton that we have to invade and occupy North Africa forever.
Yeah, that's a nice thought, isn't it?
I mean, because that Libya thing.
He's the adult.
He's the very reasonable adult in the room who says, you know, everybody, we should stop yelling at each other and just occupy Libya.
And if he's the adult, then it's even perhaps it's even scarier.
I lived in Libya for almost two years.
Oh, yeah.
And, yeah.
You were the ambassador to Libya or State Department?
No, no.
No, I was teaching English on the staff of the Libyan Army Military College.
And Gaddafi was one of my students.
Now, this was way back before the dawn of time.
Gaddafi was one of your students.
This is how far back before the dawn of time?
In the 1960s.
But anyway, you know, everyone would agree that Gaddafi was was a monster.
He was one of those cases where, you know, absolute power corrupts and absolute power corrupts.
Absolutely.
Well, he was certainly in that category.
But what our geniuses in Washington didn't do was try to figure out, have some understanding of what would come next.
You know, if they got rid of Gaddafi, then what?
But they didn't think that far.
I don't know whether they could have and didn't or whether they just flat don't think that far ahead.
But what happened, of course, is the place has turned into chaos.
Part of the coast is now controlled by the Islamic State.
There are at least two governments in Libya and many other patches of territory that are controlled by tribal militias.
And on top of that, Libya can serve as the springboard for all the migrants in sub-Saharan Africa who want to go into Europe.
And that's out of control, too.
So, you know, they just they didn't they didn't think it through.
I mean, that's not to say that there was anything good to say about Muammar Gaddafi.
There wasn't, you know, by that time.
But anyway, well, and no, I mean, it's important.
I follow all the neocons on Twitter and they're universal in agreement that the pure state of nature is American aggressive invasion, occupation and regime change everywhere.
And to oppose that is to support dictators.
So Ronald Reagan giving chemical weapons to Saddam, that's not supporting dictators.
Supporting dictators is opposing a neocon effort to overthrow him.
And so when Trump says we shouldn't have overthrown Gaddafi, we shouldn't have overthrown Saddam, he never said we should have given them billions of dollars in chemical weapons like Reagan did.
He just said we should not have overthrown them.
And Max Boot and every other neocon clone says, you know, oh, no, it's terrible.
They want us to support dictators, even though, of course, they support Sisi in Egypt and they support the dictatorship over the Palestinians in the West Bank, et cetera, et cetera.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, sure.
No, what I what I find truly depressing as someone who's followed foreign affairs pretty much throughout my professional career is that they don't think ahead.
You know, they don't think if we do this, then what?
And so which is another way of saying that we don't have a coherent, farsighted foreign policy.
Well, you know, here's the problem that I have with that.
I hear that a lot, Dan.
We didn't have one under Hillary either.
Yeah, well, you know, I hear that a lot.
And from State Department guys, Peter Van Buren's former State Department guy I talk with a lot.
And it's totally believable to me in a lot of ways, except for the fact that we have these discussions on this show all the time.
Yeah, but then what?
And, you know, it's even in The New York Times.
There's the great Washington Times series a year ago.
But there's the new two parter in The New York Times about the Libya war, where they even quote the generals warned Obama that that this so-called rebellion has at least has Al Qaeda guys in it, meaning veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The guys who had just finished killing Americans in Iraq were to these are the guys fighting Gaddafi.
It wasn't just Gaddafi's claims.
It was the Pentagon and the CIA told the president of the United States that.
And he went ahead and took their side anyway.
So it's hard to imagine that he said, well, gee, I'm just not going to think about what might happen if I do this when he knows he's taken the side of Osama's guys.
So help me with my cognitive dissonance, please.
Ambassador.
I agree with you that it's puzzling.
But the people he listened to on that one were Hillary, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, who's now, you know, Nash, thanks a lot.
National Security Advisor and Gail Smith, who's now the head of the Agency for International Development.
Those are the ones he listened to.
And they said, you know, you you can't you.
This is a good chance to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi.
So get rid of Muammar Gaddafi.
And whether they didn't know enough to realize what would happen next or whether they got it wrong, I mean, one doesn't know.
But, you know, he listened to one group rather than another group.
And that's his affair if he is the president.
But then there's no walking away from the from the results, you know, of of what was, in fact, a major mistake.
All right.
Well, I do.
That's my view of it.
I'm sure with you now.
We don't even really have time.
But you mentioned it and it goes unreported and unmentioned so much.
I'd like to give you a minute, if you could, to sum up your point about Yemen that you brought up earlier.
Well, Yemen, because we dearly love the Saudis and we don't care what they do as long as they keep buying weapons.
You know, we have signed on to the Sunni side in what is essentially a Sunni Shiite battle in the Middle East.
You know, and I have not seen anyone say it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't American pilots or American co-pilots with Saudi pilots in the Saudi American supplied aircraft that are bombing Yemen back prior to the Stone Age.
And I don't understand.
I mean, I know why, but I certainly do not see in terms of U.S. interests why we are in the middle of a Sunni Shiite war over Yemen.
I don't I don't get it.
Well, isn't it just kind of a payoff?
It's a payoff to them for securing their interests through the Iran deal, right?
Well, there's that, but also it's because they buy all this, all these weapons from us.
You know, we we sell them enormous amounts of weapons.
And of course, if you sell weapons to somebody, then you have to give them the technical support to support the weapons.
You have to teach them how to use them.
You have to then you get the resale of ammunition and spare parts.
And, you know, it's a very profitable thing.
And again, you know, you know that there are lots of different ways of looking at problems.
But one of the ways always to look at them is who makes money out of this?
You know, follow the money and you'll understand it.
That's frequently true right now.
I mean, there's a million things to say about American intervention in Yemen leading up to the Arab Spring.
But what if hypothetically America had just butted out at that point instead of Hillary easing Saleh out in favor of Hadi, which is what led to this war?
What if because because they sure had a hell of a riot going on, pretty much permanent tire square type of thing going on in sauna demanding regime change.
Was that going to last or what do you think?
You know, there's a fundamental or there used to be a fundamental American belief in what was called self-determination, which is to say the right of people to determine their own destiny, their own form of government, et cetera.
And somewhere along the line, we got the idea that, oh, no, no, no, no.
They can't be left to do that by themselves.
We get to have a say in whom they have as a government.
And then also it's especially nice if they buy weapons from us.
Now, you know, that's to my mind, that's the core of the problem.
All right.
Well, so then can anything be done about it?
Because it's pretty clear when you see the reports and sometimes the journalists will even be aghast.
Oh, my God, the defense industry spent as much as a couple of ten million dollars on lobbying this year when we all know that they cashed in in the tens and tens and hundreds of billions of dollars.
And so how do little guys break that?
How can we?
Well, last time I checked, we still have the right to vote.
That's it.
Well, in my own in my own case, I still write a daily editorial in a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette or whatever.
Regular reader here.
I got you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, you know, for whatever that's worth, you know, the whole one can do is when one has the opportunity to press one's point of view or one's analysis.
To do it.
And I don't know what else to do.
I mean, I'm I'm attracted by the French Revolution and guillotines and things like that.
But it tends to be that tends to be a rather destructive approach to change.
As long as you can guarantee that I'm the one who inherits the throne, then it'll be all right, probably.
Well, I want to make up the list.
You know, I think the French had a list of 293 people whose heads they were going to chop off.
As long as I get to work on the list, I'll be making sure you're not on it, at least.
Yeah, that's a bad joke.
It's a very bad joke.
And my wife will be awful.
I will inevitably get even with me for having said that.
But whatever.
Yeah.
Now, I listen.
Thank you very much for your time, Dan.
I hope it's got nice to talk with you.
And, you know, I'm glad that you saw my column.
We ran it as the spotlight yesterday on Antiwar.com.
Oh, did you?
Yeah.
Good.
OK.
Good times.
All right.
Have a good one.
Appreciate it.
Bye bye.
All right, y'all.
That is Dan Simpson.
He is a former ambassador and he's the associate editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette at PostGazette.com.
This one is called Vietnam Redux.
All about Afghanistan.
A really good one on Afghanistan.
Show it to your dad or whatever.
We'll be right back.
Hey, Al.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
I love Bitcoin, but there's just something incredibly satisfying about having real fine silver in your pocket.
That's why commodity disks are so neat.
They're one-ounce rounds of fine silver with a QR code on the back.
Just grab your smartphone's QR reader, scan the coin, and you'll instantly get the silver spot price in Federal Reserve notes and Bitcoin.
And if you donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show, he'll send you one.
Learn more at facebook.com slash commodity disks, commodity disks.com.
Hey, Al Scott here.
The Ciceronian Society is an interdisciplinary group devoted to the timeless themes of place, tradition, and things divine.
You are invited to their sixth annual conference to hear two days of papers on important thinkers from Plato and Saint Benedict to John Locke, Hayek, and Henry David Thoreau.
The conference is March 10th through 12th in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, less than two hours from D.C. and Baltimore.
Register at ciceroniansociety.com.