All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Dan Lazar.
He writes for us regularly at antiwar.com, and this one is called Madman Modly, the Secretary of the Navy gets the boot.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Boy, they got a coronavirus crisis inside the U.S. Navy right now.
I read this morning that they got a case or two on the Ronald Reagan and the Eisenhower, both aircraft carriers, and here yours is about the USS Theodore Roosevelt that's been at the center of so much controversy over the last couple of weeks here.
First of all, do you know, is it battleships and submarines and everybody spreading throughout the Navy?
Or what is the deal?
Well, it has to be.
I don't know.
I don't know exactly.
But it has to be the case.
And it's the military in general.
In fact, the military infection rate now exceeds that of civilian U.S. society.
And it stands to reason because in the military, you're in very close quarters.
If you're in the infantry, you sleep in bunks with 60 or 100 other people, you know, in a room.
And if you're on an aircraft carrier, you sleep in triple bunks with incredibly confined space.
You know, tiny little corridors you've got to squeeze past, you know, other sailors, narrow ladders, you know, instead of staircases, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's a perfect environment for the nurturing of the virus, which is why the rate is now higher than it was previously.
And it creates a huge political problem because you have a military, which is a liability rather than an asset in any sense of the word.
Well, as it always has been, but now that's becoming clearer to more and more people, I think.
I read a thing, too, about, you know, it's as you say, it's clustering around military bases inside this country.
I'm sure that's true at overseas bases, too, or, you know, it soon will be true if not at each and every one of them.
But then especially at the bases here in America, then that means the surrounding communities as well have higher incidences of this thing and it's spreading from them.
Yes.
And actually a Pentagon consulting firm predicted that the disease will spread from the bases into the outlying communities, across the entire heartland, into the Southwest, California, et cetera.
I mean, so the military is now a vector for the disease, which is very ironic because, you know, because like, you know, you have like, you know, people like Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate, who was talking about using the military to sort of bring this whole thing under control.
But it can't be done because the military is now an agent for the virus.
And it just goes to show where his head is at, too, that he thinks, what is the U.S. Army going to do about a germ anyway?
Shoot it?
Or shoot us for going outside?
Schumer, Schumer is a sad character.
He actually was pleading to to place a military man in control of the of the entire society during the state of emergency.
So it goes to show the kind of authoritarian thinking he gravitates to.
This is the minority leader of the U.S. Senate.
Yes.
Man.
So, yeah, well, and that is kind of a saving grace.
You know, this is something that I talked about on the show with William Arkin a few weeks ago when he'd written this piece about the military's plans for what to do, depending on how bad this thing gets.
And that was one of the points that he was making, was that the military is not immune to this thing either.
And they're worried about their wives and their kids and everything just as well as everybody else is.
And it doesn't really make much sense to put them in charge of this because they'll be as sick as everybody else.
And it comes down to it.
So if not sicker.
Yeah.
And now, you know, I read a thing, too, where the Russians apparently had a whole submarine full of guys and the Roosevelt here, for context, I'm sorry, I kind of skipped this.
The Roosevelt is docked right now.
It is out of commission.
And something like, what, 1,500 or something of their people are infected.
And I think I read one had died.
No?
I believe.
I believe so.
Yes.
I think the numbers, the number of the total number of infected is a bit lower than that.
But the thing is that the virus is hyper contagious.
So once you know, once a once a few a few cases crop on board, you know, crop up on a ship, it tends to race through the entire ship.
And it's almost almost impossible to defend against because social distancing obviously is just completely unsuitable to a dense warren like, you know, aircraft carrier where, you know, where everybody works, you know, inside, not on deck.
Yeah.
I mean, they call aircraft carrier like a small city, three thousand something people living in that ship altogether, actually more like more like five thousand.
Oh, and it's a great big city.
But it's an underground city because, you know, because because the flight deck is off limits to most of the crew most of the time.
So they spend their entire time, you know, you know, inside the ship, you know, breathing each other's air, rubbing shoulders, et cetera, et cetera.
And so, you know, it's it's a it's a it's a happy hunting ground for the for the coronavirus.
Well, you know, I'm sorry, I did not get a chance to read past the headline the other day, but I did see a headline where it was proposed, I think, in at military dot com.
Maybe it was the secretary of some forget who it was.
Somebody Rankin, somebody was suggesting that, you know what, the military, these men are young and strong and the probably the best thing to do would be to go ahead and let them get sick and build up herd immunity and get back to work since so few of them are going to die of it.
Might as well.
And maybe for the rest of us, that's a good controlled experiment for, you know, how to move forward from here.
What do you think of that?
Well, you know, it's like, yeah, it's a it's a young population.
So the infection rate may not be any higher than, you know, than the or the or the death rate may not be any higher than, say, two percent.
But they have they have no they have no ventilators.
They have no ICUs.
So they'll they'll consign those the infectees to their deathbed.
You know, and it's one thing to ask a soldier or a sailor, you know, to to die in combat, but to ask them to die because of a stupid virus that could be controlled very easily through social distancing and quarantining.
Well, no one has ever signed up for that.
And not only have the sailors and soldiers not signed up for that, but their families, wives, kids, parents, et cetera, never agreed to that either.
So so it's, you know, so so really and it's to the credit of the United States, it seems to be quite impossible for the U.S. to adopt that policy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Although I wonder for how long.
I mean, now we're skipping from the Navy to society overall.
But and this is a huge controversy, right?
How long you can keep things locked down.
It seems like the idea originally was, well, we're going to flatten this curve out.
But once we get to the backside of the curve and we start getting closer towards zero, then we'll be all right again.
But because there is no herd immunity because everybody's staying home, then the fear, I guess, as the bureaucrats say on TV, is that, well, then you'll just get another spike again.
So we're just going to have to stay like this for 18 months.
Some of them are saying it's going to be like this for a year and a half until we get a vaccine.
Well, you can't print enough money to to keep people from fighting, you know, for 18 months locked up like this.
You know, I don't know.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think it's a I think I think they're right.
I mean, I think if you if you end the quarantine prematurely, you'll have a second spike and it'll be in some ways even worse than the first spike.
So therefore, all the good work of the first quarantine will be undone and and the economic damage will be will be all the deeper in the long run as a consequence.
I mean, look, if the if the U.S. had had responded in a in a quick, efficient, concerted way to this crisis back in January, you know, had done all the things that were necessary, had had had moved with resolution and single mindedness, they would have been able to get a handle on this problem much more quickly and have, you know, beaten the beaten the virus back with far less economic damage.
But by but the fact that the Trump administration, that Trump refused to admit that anything was, you know, it was serious, was afoot until like until mid-March, that they refused to take the measures needed to to stop this epidemic.
The fact that 12 states are still not on lockdown for reasons I just really can't fathom, except some kind of primitive, you know, individualistic, you know, constitutional prejudice against federal authority.
But the fact that 12 states are still not on lockdown, I really can't understand why this is.
And the longer this nonsense goes on, the longer the problem will go on and the longer the economic disruption will go on.
I mean, it really is kind of a perfect storm because there really is no way out of this, no shortcut out of this.
And talk about getting the, you know, getting the economy back up and moving as of May 1st.
I mean, that's just that's just bonkers that will accomplish a damn thing.
But then again, and you know, I mean, this is a matter of pretty big controversy and we got a few different views on the show today about this, too, about how, you know, in these states that don't have the lockdown, that they're not anywhere near New York where they do have the lockdown and they're not, you know, out of control.
And the idea is that possibly because there are so many people who get it and don't get sick at all, that in fact, herd immunity is protecting those populations as well or better than the lockdowns are protecting the others.
And we really don't know.
Right.
You got so much data coming in from all directions and in so much interpretive bias in what it all means that essentially it's just a giant pile of numbers that nobody really understands, I don't think.
Whenever I hear certainty, I start doubting.
And that goes for all sides, you know?
Well, I mean, that's a healthy instinct.
But the fact is, you know, as we don't have certainty, but we do have a steady accretion of data, which tells us that this virus is hyper contagious and that it will spread.
I mean, obviously, New York is a perfect environment because it's extremely densely populated and the virus can race through the ranks really rapidly, which is different than, say, a Wyoming or the Dakotas.
But still, it'll eventually reach out there.
And when it does reach out there and when the population starts falling sick, you'll see the same panic, the same demands, you know, for for, you know, for face masks and emergency equipment and ventilators, etc.
And the same the same overwhelming of the of the health facilities.
I think that very well could be true.
And especially as you're saying, we've got all these military bases where it's incubating inside the bases and then spreading out.
And these are, you know, bases are spread hither and yon all throughout the countryside.
And you know, the middle part of the keynote, you know, by basic fact of American geography, is that the is that states like North and South Dakota or Wyoming are actually more urbanized than states like like Vermont or New Hampshire.
In other words, more of their population actually lives in urban centers than than in the in the small, crowded states in the east.
So, you know, so so whether it's Cheyenne, Wyoming or Bismarck, North Dakota, once the virus, you know, takes root, it'll race through and the local hospitals will be will be overwhelmed.
Well, now, so part of the problem in New York was that the and this has been written up in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and everywhere was they were in such denial for so long and telling people, you don't need to wear masks, you shouldn't wear masks and don't worry about riding on the subway and hanging on to the metal poles and all of these things.
And they were just spreading it and spreading it and spreading it.
They refused to close the bars and restaurants and all that.
But I wonder, you know, it's hypothetical kind of thing.
But if they lift the clamp down, but now everybody knows wear gloves, wear masks, wash your hands all the time, keep your social distance, maybe, you know, I heard a suggestion that you could have, you know, companies stay open 24 hours and have three or four shifts instead of two and spread work out and people keep distance.
Because of course, a total lockdown forever.
We can only go into so deep of a depression, virus or no virus before we have real violence breakout.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
That's absolutely true.
I mean, but also, you know, remember, I was I was in New Orleans in the week of March 14th and 15th.
And Bourbon Street was crowded.
You know, they were the bars were full, you know, the sidewalks were overflowing.
They should wait way too long to close things down there.
And in fact, and in fact, that Saturday night of March 14th, they sent the cops onto Bourbon Street and sort of closing bars and restaurants and telling people to go home.
And they empty the streets.
It was actually that night.
If they had taken action a month earlier or two months earlier, then the story would be very different now.
And now New Orleans is a major epicenter for the virus.
You know what the problem is, is all of us are amateur epidemiologists and the real ones are completely full of it and tell outright lies right to our faces, like you shouldn't wear masks and a million people are going to die and all these things.
And so instead, it's up to you and me to figure out what the answer is here somehow, you know, when we don't know.
Well, first of all, I mean, epidemiologists are M.D. s and public health specialists.
And there are there are a lot of great people working in that field using the best science that they can, that they can.
But those guys aren't on TV and those guys aren't writing the policies.
Well, fine.
That's a that's a that's a different story.
Yeah.
But the but the but the epidemiologists themselves are scientists doing, you know, doing great work and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Yeah.
But and and all they know is that the is that the the virus is is is super contagious.
Because it has a lower mortality rate than previous viruses.
That's a good thing in a sense.
But that means it tends to it won't burn itself out the way the way SARS or Ebola did.
But we'll race through the population all the more rapidly, infecting more people and causing in total more deaths.
But in any case, the the point is, you know, this is a this is a huge problem and it's not going to be easily solved.
And yeah, the economy we're seeing the economy crumble before our very eyes.
Yeah.
And then.
Well, so back to the military here, I mean, in the larger sense, it seems like everybody's got to be wondering if they're thinking about it at all.
Do we really have to keep occupying Germany and Japan and the entire Middle East and anywhere there's a Sunni or a Shia with a rifle?
We got to send our special ops.
Maybe this money could be spent somewhere more efficiently in terms of protecting the lives of the American people here.
And then also, as you're saying, this is a real problem, quite literally for the members of the military themselves.
And so I guess, you know, the real question is whether something is going to change in terms of America's policy of global military hegemony here, Dan.
Well, I agree fully.
I mean, the the and I think that I think the country which is which is pointing the way, ironically, is Saudi Arabia, which essentially has just sort of sued for peace in Yemen because covid-19 is racing through the Saudi royal family.
You think they really mean it this time because they say that a lot and then they carpet bomb Sinai anyway.
But but they're but the family itself is sick, literally 150 top top members of the royal family have come down with the with the coronavirus, the the best hospitals in Riyadh are now being cleared to make a make way for all the all the princes, you know, to or who are now coughing and hacking and running, running temperatures.
And and they and they don't have the will to to to to to run this war in Yemen anymore.
So they're actually suing for peace.
I sure hope that's right.
So one good thing of the coronavirus is it actually it actually may lead to peace in Yemen and it actually may lead to a Saudi surrender or a Saudi withdrawal.
Well, you know, they they got their first case of coronavirus among civilians in Yemen yesterday, which, yes, could be the beginning of a whole new.
I mean, we saw how bad cholera has hit them when the cure for cholera is clean water in a few days time.
Right.
You don't even need good antibiotics or anything.
You just got to survive it and have clean water to drink.
And yet we kill thousands of them every year with cholera because they don't have clean water to drink at all.
They've got essentially not even the bare necessities for survival.
And now they're just starting to get hit by this thing.
Yes.
And the health system in Yemen, which is which at best was rudimentary, has been devastated by this war, which has been going on for now is in its sixth year.
It's a horror.
And and it's your tax dollars at work.
It never would be possible if the U.S. and the British didn't make it possible because it wasn't for U.S. technical assistance.
The Saudis couldn't fly one sortie over over that country.
But now the Saudis, though, are suing for peace, which is, you know, the U.N.
I don't know if it was the secretary general or somebody proposed a global ceasefire.
And since what, nine tenths of the wars on Earth are America's wars, seems like it would just take one decision to make that happen.
Well, yes, which which brings us back to this guy, Tom Mobley, Mobley, the former secretary of the Navy, who's now the most despised man in America.
So he's the one when this when Brett Crozier, the the skipper of the of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, wrote this four page memo to his higher ups, pleading with them to empty the ship, to to quarantine the sailors in order to stop the virus in its tracks.
I mean, Mobley was so taken aback by what that applied for the implied for the U.S. war machine that he flew 5000 miles to Guam on a on a private jet that cost a quarter million dollars and then gave this 15 minute unhinged rant over the intercom in which he called Brett Crozier an idiot and naive, accused him of blabbing to the press.
But underlying that entire crazy speech was the panic of this of this Navy secretary who realizes that this huge, you know, fantastically expensive war machine is now useless.
It's been laid low.
Yes, if there was an emergency, some kind of military attack, they could they could go into battle with, you know, with a covid-19 or no covid-19 and sailors would get sick.
But the but the ships would keep firing away until the until the battle was won.
But short of that, short of that emergency situation, which, of course, will never arise in the foreseeable future, the Navy is dead in the water.
It can't move.
Without making it sad, sailors sicker and sicker, and that goes for the military as well.
So the U.S. has no military for all intents and purposes at this moment.
Yeah, I even read where they're afraid to the troops who were supposed to be withdrawing from Afghanistan, they're staying longer because they can't come home and then troops that were supposed to deploy, you know, because they rotate out.
And even though they're drawing down, they're still deploying new guys there that they're being held up to.
And so they've also stopped basic training.
And and but then you have the troops in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and that's one of the most infected regions in the world.
And they are suffering from the disease.
And in mid-March, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, tried to push through this crazy plan for a military offensive against Shiite militias, which are closely allied with the with the Baghdad government.
And if the plan had gone through and it appears to have to have been stopped in its traces, but if it had gone through, you would have had, number one, a huge military explosion in Iraq, which would have very, very well have weakened an already desperately weak government in Baghdad.
You would have driven the country, you know, all the more into the arms of of of Iran, neighboring Iran.
And then more important, you would have spread the disease among U.S. troops, not only in Iraq, but in Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, et cetera.
So you would have cut her as well.
So you would have stirred the pot and, you know, and gotten the viruses, you know, all the more agitated.
And as a result, you would have had, you know, you would have had an even worse problem on your hands.
In this case, too, I mean, apparently it was this general, the actual general in charge in Iraq who stopped them, who wrote a letter and really sort of, I think, you know, portrayed or betrayed the fact that the secretary of defense doesn't know his Sunni from Shia any better than Pompeo does, that they thought, oh, yeah, we'll just go ahead and we'll start the war all over again against the people we've been fighting for for the last 17 years.
And that'll work fine because they don't even realize that that's what they're talking about doing.
They don't realize.
They're talking about taking on the government that they installed in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the US has actually vetoed a five billion dollar emergency IMF loan to Iran to with which to with which it wants to purchase medical equipment and pharmaceuticals to combat the corona virus.
And this is a form of germ warfare.
And it reminds me that back in the 1340s, during the bubonic plague, Mongol troops used catapults to hurl diseased cadavers over the walls into this into a Crimean city called Kaffa, which it was besieging.
Well, this is one of the most infamous war crimes in American history.
I think it only happened maybe once or twice, but it's legend that they gave smallpox blankets to the Indians, to the Lakota Sioux.
And this is we'll never live that down.
The whites did that to the Indians back in the 1900s.
And yeah, it was a primitive form of germ warfare.
But 19th century, I meant to say, sorry.
But what else is what else is blocking a, you know, an emergency IMF loan for ventilators and pharmaceuticals?
Yeah, it's absolutely unforgivable.
So that so that the disease can rage all the more widely.
And it's it's so self-destructive because the disease will then spread to Iraq and the other Persian Gulf states where the U.S. has tens of thousands of troops who will then be infected and then will go home and then will infect others.
So Trump, after after completely blowing the antivirus effort here in the U.S., is pushing policies internationally, you know, which will have the effect of exacerbating the disease, you know.
Throughout the world, and of course, it's a perfect opportunity to make peace, to kill them to death with kindness and just say, you know what, Ayatollah, forget all the old hard feelings.
Let's be friends.
Your people need help.
And I'm willing to give it my next interview in just one minute is with Christine on about what an opportunity we have to make peace with North Korea here as well as same thing, too.
And we're doing the exact opposite of that.
At least you're not bombing them.
But as you say, I mean, keeping the sanctions on, never mind adding new sanctions, which they've done and then intervening to prevent an IMF loan at this point.
Oh, yeah, it's all going to go to Hezbollah terrorists or some garbage excuse that they push for.
This is just.
I don't know, I guess that's often say about the war in Yemen, this is the history of the world being written here.
You can't ever undo it any more than you can undo the smallpox blanket.
You know, this is this is really who our government is and what they do.
Yes.
Killing innocent people quite deliberately, as Pompeo bragged when a North Korean fishing boat washed up on the shore in Japan with a dead old man in it.
And he bragged that, see, our sanctions are working.
The people of North Korea are desperate.
Those are the words of Mike Pompeo, who was, I think, then director of CIA.
But same guy.
It's quite a pretty picture, isn't it?
I'll tell you what, red, white and blue, man.
All right.
Listen, thank you so much for your time.
I'm sorry I got to go, but I really appreciate you joining me on the show as always, Dan.
No problem, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
OK, guys, that is Dan Lazar.
He is at original.antiwar.com slash Daniel underscore Lazar.
It should just be Daniel probably or maybe Lazar.
Fix that.
Anyway, this one is called Mad Man Modly.
The secretary of the Navy gets the boot.
The Scott Horton Show and antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
