Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, time to welcome Stephen Zunes back to the show.
It's been a little while, but I sure like this headline.
You guys will too.
It's at the progressive, progressive.org.
The other reason Biden shouldn't run and by other, I guess you mean opposed to all the pictures of him feeling up children and stuff like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
That was the progressive's idea for a headline.
It wasn't mine, but that was in the news the week that the article came out.
That's how they chose to present it.
Whatever transgressions he may have made in that area pale in comparison to his instrumental role in getting the Democratic controlled Senate to approve the authorization of military force against Iraq back in 2002.
I'll tell you what, and you know what too, it is sort of a limited hangout that he's got a rope in Ashton Carter's wife who says that don't worry about it.
She didn't mind when actually it's the kids.
There's one where he grabs this little girl's chest and she like elbows him and moves forward to move out of the way.
I mean, that's really bad, but you're right.
That's nothing compared to what happened in 2002 when Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Tell me stories about that.
Yeah, well, we're facing, so take us back to 2002.
Bush and Cheney and his gang are pushing for this idea of invading Iraq.
I would say, and actually in writing this article I emailed a number of colleagues in these areas, that I'd say close to 80% or more, 90% probably, of Middle East scholars, people who really know the region a lot like I do, oppose the war.
I talked to a retired Foreign Service officer.
He said 80% of Foreign Service people who had experience in the Middle East, they oppose the war.
And pretty much anybody who knew about Iraq knew this was going to be a total disaster.
And most of us who really knew about arms control issues recognized that all the claims about the weapons of mass destruction were utter nonsense.
And so, you know, it would make sense if the, here, if the U.S. Senate is about to make the most important foreign policy decision of a generation, you know, they would have hearings and bring people like us to talk about such things.
Indeed, Barbara Boxer, who's a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, specifically requested that me and Phyllis Bennis of the Institute of Policy Studies and Scott Ritter and the former chief inspector from UNSCOM testify.
But instead, what Biden did was he allowed for only a day and a half of hearings.
I mean, think about that.
Again, the most important foreign policy decision in a generation, he allowed for only a day and a half of hearings, and he stacked the committee with supporters of the invasion, including these dubious, well-coached Iraqi exiles who claimed, oh, I saw stacks of chemical weapons with my own eyes, and, of course, you'll be treated as liberators and that kind of thing.
And so in this article, I look at that whole episode, along with other statements he did before and during and after the war, which indicate that this was not a, quote, mistake, in quote, as his defenders keep trying to say, but a very calculated policy, which raised some serious concerns about what kind of president he'd end up being.
Yeah, you know what?
Well, I was going to say this keeps coming up, but I'm the one who keeps bringing it up.
When we're talking about Russiagate is the narrative about Iraq's weapons.
But so we can take the analogy back the other way now, since the topic is really 2002, where it's the same thing we see now, where even post-report, all decent, reasonable, and serious adults accept the fact that, of course, Russia did the hack, gave this stuff to WikiLeaks, and that that amounts to an attack on our democracy.
So, OK, fine, maybe Trump and his people weren't in on it the whole time, but still, and it's just, there's no proof anywhere.
There's no evidence even demonstrated for this story.
But the CIA says so, and we all believe it, and we say that you're a kook if you don't.
And that's exactly what happened here, where, as you describe it, you and these other experts, as well as me and every other idiot, knew that this wasn't true.
Half the population of the country was opposed to the war.
50% was opposed to the war up until it was absolutely going to happen and everybody started supporting the troops and then the numbers went up.
But for a year and a half before the war, the support wasn't there, because people saw through it, the people who weren't, you know, the people who were essentially either total rejects, you know, cab drivers and bartenders and, you know, people on the outside of society in that sense, and alternative media types like yourself, right, people sort of on the fringe.
And yet the entire establishment center was in on this thing and you have to believe in it or you're kicked out of the party.
It really is straight kind of out of 1984.
You know, Scott Ritter is a nut.
We all agree that everybody knows he's got the weapons and you're a kook if you won't The only question is whether we're going to do nothing about it or whether we're going to do the brave thing and do something about it.
That's all.
Yeah.
And I should mention, there's actually a fair amount of divisions within the establishment on a lot of these claims.
And the, I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders in the House was challenging it like crazy.
You know, Barbara Boxer, who I've taken some strong disagreements with on a number of things, actually in Israel-Palestine, she was raising skepticism.
She was actually on the committee.
But it was Biden, you know, who was the one who really, you know, bulldozed the thing through.
And, of course, he had an agenda for quite a while.
I mean, even way back in 1998, he was calling for, you know, getting boots on the ground to throw out Saddam Hussein, even pushing this thing for many years before Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and those guys even came to office.
And he would totally, he totally would diss, you know, people like Scott Ritter, you know, who knew more about the whole, the weapon situation than anybody.
And to, I mean, it was still a classic when Scott Ritter was before the Foreign Relations Committee back in 98, and he said, hey, look, if this planned bombing attack that Clinton is trying to push through happens, it's going to throw out, it's going to throw all the inspectors out, and Iraq will go from 98% compliance to 0% compliance, and Biden dismisses the thing.
That's above your pay grade.
You shouldn't be commenting on that.
Well, sure enough, when Obama, Clinton did go ahead with the bombing, then Biden turns around, and of course, and Clinton orders the inspectors to be removed prior to the bombing, and Saddam doesn't let them back in, then Biden turns around and says, oh, Saddam kicked out the inspectors, and he's doing so because he's hiding these, you know, all these weapons of mass destruction that he has, you know, despite being warned by Ritter that bombing would result in the removal of the inspectors, and Saddam wouldn't let him back, and, you know, he rewrites the history, and the other thing that really gets me upset about this is that, you know, he goes on the Senate floor and in the committees and talks about, oh, they have all these chemical weapons, and they have anthrax, they may have a strain of smallpox, you know, despite the inspectors reporting that they didn't have any of those things, and despite the International Atomic Energy Agency reporting as far back as 1997 that there was no evidence whatsoever, Iraq had an ongoing nuclear program, he insists that Saddam was seeking nuclear weapons, and he said, one thing is clear, these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam, or Saddam must be dislodged from power.
If we wait for the danger of Saddam to become clear, it'll be too late.
You know, in other words, he was taking this, you know, really extreme position.
You know, I mean, some of your listeners may remember Barry Goldwater back in 1964, when he was talking about preventive war, you know, like this, and everybody said, you know, this guy is a kook, you know, bang, bang, Barry.
It was very mainstream to critique those who advocate preventive war, like Barry Goldwater.
But now, when we critique preventive war, when it's advocated by Democrats, suddenly, oh, you're being a purist, you know, or you're being far left, or you're being, you know, whatever, and it's amazing what, you know, what used to be a mainstream position saying, hey, the UN Charter, you know, basic principle, basic common sense means you don't go around invading, you know, countries on the far side of the world that aren't a threat to you, but you think maybe they might be a threat someday.
You know, that, that, that, that, that critique of that kind of view has gone from mainstream to now, suddenly, it's ultra-left.
Right.
And which just goes to show the blatant dishonesty of the whole situation, when, you were sort of working up to this point before you changed the subject a second ago, that in the House of Representatives, a majority of the Democrats voted against this thing.
Pelosi's pretty centered, dude.
She ain't far left.
So it's not a far left position.
I mean, hell, and, you know, it is a confirmation bias kind of thing, but in this case, she really was on the right side.
If Nancy Pelosi is better than you on anything, you're a bad person.
Simple as that.
Exactly.
And, you know, the, again, Biden's rewriting history.
I mean, meet the press in 2007.
He said everyone in the world thought he had weapons of mass destruction.
The weapons inspector said he had them.
No, they didn't.
Scott Ritter was the head weapons inspector, you know.
And he said that Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament, you know, meaning, you know, yeah, yeah, it's possible he has a few discarded, you know, prescribed material and dumped somewhere.
But in terms of actually actionable weapons or anything like that, no way.
And a lot of us were saying it back then.
And, in fact, Ritter himself accused Biden of having, in his words, a preordained conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein of power regardless of the facts and is using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.
And this is before the actual authorization vote.
He was recognizing exactly what Biden was doing.
Yeah, boy.
And as always, you know, he put it perfectly as well.
And just to go back to reinforce your point about how transparent this all was at the time that it happened, no critics were allowed.
As you said, you would expect, and if this was like the movie version, that, of course, the Senate would hold hearings and they would talk.
They were the ones who ordered the national intelligence estimate and this kind of thing.
And yet, oh, yeah, no, they didn't at all.
They held these very narrow hearings, as you said, excluding everyone.
Just a Raimondo's article at antiwar.com then in September of 2002 was called The Fix Is In.
And it was all about how Joe Biden is working for Dick Cheney here and is essentially exactly what Scott Ritter said, running interference, providing political cover, you know.
And, you know, something important here, I think, is that Kerry and Biden and Hillary Clinton, they all had been burned by their opposition to Iraq War One.
And they weren't going to let that happen again.
Even though this time, Junior, even dumber than Senior, was never that bright, was clearly deliberately trying to bite off far more than he could chew, as opposed to the very limited set of goal, well, not very limited, somewhat limited, comparatively limited set of goals in Iraq War One.
This is what I don't get.
I mean, I oppose both the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.
And, of course, there are plenty of people who supported both.
And there are also a lot of people who supported the Gulf War, seeing it as an act of collective security against aggression on Kuwait, but recognized that invading Iraq was illegal, unnecessary, and reckless and everything like that.
So three of the four combinations make logical sense.
The one that doesn't make sense is opposing the Gulf War and then supporting the invasion of Iraq, which was the position of Kerry and Biden.
Right.
You know, that, you know, I really...
And essentially Hillary, too.
I've never been able to figure that one out.
Bill had opposed Iraq War One as governor, which he wasn't, you know, in charge of the decision.
But he and Hillary had taken that position publicly then.
And that was something he had to live down in the 92 campaign, in fact, you know.
Yeah.
Actually, I recall him supporting it.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
I think he supported it.
I mean, in fact, Ross Perot was the only one who opposed it.
Okay.
Well, you know what?
I could have that wrong because I am just going from memory there.
Yeah, yeah.
I was only a kid at the time.
The thing is, is that it was, I mean, that Biden's, he's been pretty, I mean, on one hand, and by certain measures, he was somewhat of the more moderate people within the Obama administration.
I mean, you had Secretary...
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Let's stick with Bush years for a second here, too, because we got on to the surge and stuff, because, you know, he was always, from the get-go, maybe from before the war, an advocate for the plan of deliberately dividing Iraq into three separate states.
Yeah, yeah.
That was very dangerous thing.
I addressed that, and your listeners can also look up a debate I had with Steve Clemons of the New American Foundation on Democracy Now, back in 2008, when Obama first tapped Biden to be his running mate.
And, you know, I talk in some detail about the dangers that come from dividing Iraq.
I also mentioned briefly in the article the link to my critique there.
But, yeah, this is a crazy idea that Biden was championed, that we should, you know, classic, you know, colonialist divide and rule kind of attitude of splitting Iraq into a Kurdish state, a Sunni Arab state, and a Shia Arab state.
And not only does that, you know, ignore the fact that the divisions in the country are not along straight lines, not only does it ignore the fact that there are, you know, there are Assyrian Christians, there are Yazidis, there are, you know, a whole bunch, there are Turkmen, there are all sorts of other minorities in Iraq that don't fit into any of these particular categories.
And especially that the capital city of 25 million was an extremely mixed city at the time the war started.
Exactly.
And the fact that the biggest division in Iraq is not between Sunnis and Shias, but between the sectarians and nationalists within both communities.
Most Iraqis want to be one country.
And this idea that the American politician can say, oh, we don't care what you think, we're going to divide you up because we think we can control you that way better.
I mean, that is so, I mean, that's what you'd expect out of 19th century Britain, you know.
You know, not what you want from a 21st century United States, especially a guy who wants to become president.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey, everybody, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
And it's available all over the place in EPUB format and of course in paperback and Kindle at Amazon.com.
And you can also get the audiobook version at audible.com.
If you want a signed copy, check out scotthorton.org slash donate and help arrange that for you there.
It's Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
Find out all about it at foolserrand.us.
All right.
So now the Afghan, or I don't know what you're going to say about Obama years.
Go ahead.
There's a lot more in Afghanistan.
And I mean, when he was vice president, he was a more moderate voice compared to people like Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Gates and some of the more hawkish voices there.
So I don't want to stereotype him too much.
But still, I think that the whole Iraq thing is one that he's going to have a hard time living down.
I'm just giving you an idea about the hearings that he did.
Among the witnesses he called in, again, he refused to call me or other Middle East experts or a slew of foreign service people who knew it, but he did bring in former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who Biden insists was a credible witness, despite his multiple perjury indictments for lying before Congress, which Bush Sr. ended up pardoning him for before he could stand trial, and his history of grossly exaggerating the military capabilities of Nicaragua, Cuba, Soviet Union, other designated enemies of the United States.
I mean, and this raises questions about what kind of people would Biden get around him to advise him on foreign policy, and what kind of stuff would he believe?
This is what really concerns me, that he seems to want to hear people who reinforce his position and is not willing to listen to dissenting views.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I guess he had the reputation as being relatively dovish in the Obama years, I guess, especially on Afghanistan.
But what was his position, do you know, on Libya and Syria?
Yeah, I'm not clear on Libya and Syria.
Again, he was fairly dovish on Afghanistan.
Comparatively to the hawks who wanted an extra 60,000 men.
Right, right.
And he did support trying to get some agreement with Iran and the like.
But he did question intervention in Libya.
I do recall that now.
But at the same time, I mean, it's interesting.
He was first elected to the Senate way back in 1972.
He was only 29 years old when he was elected.
In fact, his 30th birthday came just before January 3rd when he was sworn into the Senate.
You have to be a minimum age of 30 to become a senator.
And he was in there back in sort of the McGovern days.
And he kind of put himself as a liberal in foreign policy.
But he's kind of swung back and forth, you know, over the years.
And, you know, so I don't want to make a caricature of him, you know, in terms of his hawkishness.
But the main thing I was pushing for this article is that I'm just really, really, really, really getting disgusted about these Democrats who downplay it, who just think it was a mistake as if he pushed the I button when he meant to push the nay button.
This is not like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 where Johnson kind of, okay, vote on this now.
It was on an evening in August, no debate, no questioning, you know, whatever.
And he got almost everybody to vote for it.
This, we had month and month and month to debate this.
Months and months of hearings.
But Biden, who again, you know, held a gavel in the Foreign Relations Committee that had the hearings, he didn't want to have months and months of hearings.
He only squeezed it in a day and a half, because I think he knew if there was actual debate, if he actually brought in actual experts, there would be the broad consensus to be, no, this is crazy.
You guys have to stop this.
And so, in other words, I am, what I'm arguing in this piece is that to challenge these Democrats who say, oh, it was just a mistake, or that was a long time ago, or, oh, he, you know, this kind of thing.
Because it was far more deliberate and calculated than I think people are recognizing.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, there's this other thing too, I'm sorry, we don't really have time to get into this.
Oh, in fact, I'm sorry I'm late.
But, you know, he was involved, according to the leaked phone call, leaked by Russia, Russia, Russia, phone call of Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Piatt plotting the coup d'etat in Kiev in 2014 there, that she says, we're going to get Biden to intervene here.
He's working, the vice president's working real hard on this, et cetera, et cetera.
And then we know that his son was involved in getting this position at a gas company, a natural gas company there.
And then he was under investigation, the son was, and then Biden bragged on camera that he got that prosecutor fired.
I mean, this is huge.
Never even mind, I skipped the part about the Nazis who were used to overthrow that government and remain a terrible problem in Ukraine now, since then.
Yeah, I mean, my only view is that that was more a role of kind of manipulating the outcome than the uprising itself, which I think did have a fair amount of broad popular support.
But there's no question about the manipulation and getting good deals for American companies and trying to, and the makeup of the post-Yeroshiko government and that kind of thing.
No broad popular support except for the people who had voted for the guy that they were overthrown.
Yeah, but his, and just to go back to Iraq, I mean, what would also bug me is not just making the authorization vote possible, but, you know, he now gives this line, oh, just to get the inspectors back in or whatever.
That was baloney.
The inspectors were in for three months having unfettered inspections when the U.S. invaded, and he said nothing in opposition.
In fact, in August of that year, when it was clear that there weren't really weapons of mass destruction, he said, I supported bringing troops into Iraq, and I would support it today.
I mean, so he's essentially admitting, he admitted afterwards that it really wasn't about weapons inspectors, it really wasn't about weapons of mass destruction.
So for him to go back and rewrite history and saying, oh, I didn't know that Bush was going to actually invade, I just wanted to, you know, get the inspectors back in, it's contradicted by his own record.
Right, and you know what?
This is something that applies to all these guys that they always get off the hook for.
It's not just that they supported the war.
It's that they supported staying the whole time, no matter what.
Exactly.
They refused to say, okay, it's time to call this thing off, even when it was clear they were fighting a whole war for the bottom brigade, and then it turned around, they were fighting for their enemies on the Sunnis.
The whole thing was crazy all along.
And as soon as they didn't find the weapons, everybody just said, okay, or something, but no.
They just kept on.
All of these guys, Kerry, too.
Yeah, and the thing is that, and this is, again, I've had all these quotes from Meet the Press and from other places where Biden says, you know, he did not regret giving the President the authority to use force in Iraq.
I still believe my vote was just, and again, and he opposed bringing troops home.
He opposed to even setting a timetable for a withdrawal.
I mean, these are the guys, and so please, you have these Biden supporters who say, oh, he just made a mistake in a vote.
It was just to get the inspectors back in.
That is not true.
His own record makes it very, very clear.
And the only, and he didn't ever apologize.
He'll say he apologized.
He didn't apologize.
He said it was a mistake.
It was a mistake because he realizes now that it's hurt him politically.
Right.
He doesn't give a damn about the Iraqis.
He doesn't give a damn about the 4,500 Americans we've lost, the thousands of wounded warriors whose lives have been destroyed because of this kind of thing.
I mean, this is, we really need to set this record straight here about a Biden- You know, there's a real opportunity here, right?
I mean, your article shows this.
It's sort of, I'm kind of grateful he's sticking his neck out right now so that the likes of you can lop it right off with articles like this.
Thanks for bringing back up the Iraq war.
We really do need to have a fight about this that we never got to have back then.
And so let, let Biden be the scapegoat.
He deserves as bad as any of these guys.
Again, chairman of the foreign intelligence, foreign relations committee at the time.
So, so good work and stay at it.
Keep at him on this.
Cause this is huge and he's making a big show of himself for at least the next year.
So, uh, hell yeah.
Good for you, Stephen.
And thank you.
And I'm sorry to cut you off.
I'm late and can be, but- No problem.
Really appreciate talking to you again.
Great work here.
Same.
Bye-bye.
Okay, guys, that's Stephen Zunis.
He's at The Progressive.
The other reason Biden shouldn't run.
And it's about, yeah, all those dead bodies.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
