4/3/20 Doug Bandow on the Fake North Korean Threat and America’s Role in Yemen

by | Apr 6, 2020 | Interviews

Scott interviews Doug Bandow about his recent article for the National Interest, which discusses the effects of the coronavirus on U.S. relations with North Korea. Bandow explains how after years of hand-wringing over the imminent threat posed by Kim Jong-un’s aggressive nuclear posturing, and the need for America to respond strongly, everyone forgets all about it as soon as an actual emergency like the current pandemic emerges. If North Korea really posed an existential threat to the United States, we would probably still be concerned. Scott and Bandow also discuss America’s role in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen. The onset of the rainy season there threatens to bring another outbreak of cholera, an easily preventable disease that thousands have already died from thanks to intentional targeting of critical civilian infrastructure. Saudi Arabia would not be able to wage this war without explicit U.S. approval.

Discussed on the show:

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a regular contributor at Forbes Magazine, the National Interest, and elsewhere. He’s on Twitter @Doug_Bandow.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/ScottListen and Think AudioTheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through PatreonPayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.

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For Pacifica Radio, April 5th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right guys, on the line, I've got the great Doug Bondo from the Cato Institute, and he writes so much great stuff, including this very important one, which I linked to in my, and referred to in my latest piece for Anti-War.com.
It's at the national interest, how the coronavirus shows North Korea doesn't matter that much to America.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Happy to be on.
Very happy to have you here.
And I really like this.
We don't even need a new deal.
Forget going over there and shaking hands and PR stunts.
Let's just forget North Korea even exists, because what difference does it really make, Doug?
Well, that's the point, that after spending a couple of years being fixated on what North Korea does, North Korea is now shooting off missiles and nobody notices.
And it really tells you, frankly, that it doesn't matter much to the United States.
It shows how the U.S. is constantly worried about everything, even though most of that has virtually no impact on America.
Yeah.
It really is just kind of by stark relief with this crisis going on, which is a worldwide crisis.
But here, we're worried about what's going on in our own country.
And all of a sudden, it just seems silly to be concerned about whether DAWA or SCIRI rules in Baghdad, or whether Kim is firing short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan.
That must be somebody else's problem.
Exactly.
And almost everybody recognizes that.
Maybe not Mike Pompeo.
I mean, he's got a new plan on Venezuela, and you keep thinking, well, the other one didn't work.
I don't think anybody cares about this one.
Then he wanders off to Europe, which is facing a disaster, thousands of people dying, trying to get them to go after China and put in an official communique, Wuhan virus.
You think, this guy is really out to lunch.
I mean, he has no sense in terms of what matters to Americans today.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't want to get too diverted off on the Venezuela thing, but the fact that they invoke the war on drugs in cracking down on Venezuela, I admit, I fell off the wagon.
I've been looking a little bit at Twitter, where people are pointing out that the vast majority of cocaine imports into this country come from our ally, Colombia.
This is, of all the thinnest pretexts, really, we're going to invoke the drug war like it's Noriega 89?
Sure.
I mean, look at Afghanistan.
I mean, another one of our allies that's the largest producer of opium.
I mean, the reality is, it's our friends who are the problems in this case.
Yeah.
Well, and on the heroin, the greatest importer of heroin to the United States, or exporter to the United States, is Mexico.
Yep.
Yep.
But, hopefully, we're not going to invade them.
Oh, geez, no, please don't suggest that, though.
They might take up the idea.
You know, there was an anecdote one time about Colonel Bacevich, back, would have been 2009, error or so, when they were all pushing us into the surge.
We got to do the big coin counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
It worked so well in Iraq.
Don't ask for any specifics there, please, but it worked so well in Iraq that we got to do it in Afghanistan.
And Bacevich gave a speech where they let him be the dissenting voice at one of these think tank conferences.
He set the whole thing up that, yeah, what we're going to do is what we definitely should do.
We have this country that has these terrible drug cartels, and they don't speak the same language as us, but we're going to work really hard on taking care of that, and we're going to send in all our troops, and we're going to clear hold and build and recreate this society to make it that much better.
And, of course, I'm talking about Mexico.
We're going to invade Mexico.
We're going to do your counterinsurgency strategy in Mexico, and it's going to make everything fine, right?
And this is a country that's right on our southern border.
And the whole place just rolls their eyes like, oh, my God, can you imagine the nightmare of America trying to go down to Mexico and remake society and teach them to elect good men and all these things?
And yet, somehow, this makes perfect sense as long as it's in Afghanistan, in other words, so far away that the American people won't be able to see the direct results of the failure in front of their eyes.
Yep, yep, exactly.
But, you know, talking about bringing that to Mexico, they're like, oh, yeah, right.
We're going to try that as though that could be anything but counterproductive there.
But yeah.
Anyway, so back to North Korea.
But, Kim, he's crazy and he's got nukes, Doug, and so it's a real problem, man.
And, of course, he hasn't done anything.
I mean, that's the amazing thing is that, you know, you look at this guy, there's some weird reason that we seem to assume just because somebody's kind of a nasty guy that he's nuts.
But, of course, they aren't.
I mean, you look at the behavior of his father and grandfather, you know, they played a very weak hand very well.
They got the entire world to pay attention to them.
Why?
Otherwise, why would anyone care?
I mean, who really gives a flip?
I mean, this is a country that's poor, about 23 million people, wouldn't matter at all.
And what it does is it kind of goes out every once in a while, says, look at me, look at me, and everybody freaks out.
But they're not suicidal.
I'd love to see some evidence why we think they're suicidal.
I tell people, you know, the North Korean leaders, they like their virgins in this world, not the next.
Yeah.
He doesn't want to go out in a radioactive funeral pyre in Pyongyang.
That's not this guy's objective.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right that people conflate ruthless and crazy all the time, but there are different kinds of crazy.
And a sociopath isn't necessarily irrational, just really mean.
Exactly.
That's right.
I mean, he's not a nice guy.
I wouldn't have him over for dinner, but that doesn't mean we have to fear him.
Yeah.
Now, OK, so everybody knows that it's George W.
Bush's fault that North Korea even has nukes at all because they were members in good standing of the nonproliferation treaty and had a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and had the agreed framework deal with Bill Clinton, which they were still within, even though the Americans never lived up to our side of the deal with them.
But then Bush abrogated that deal based on an accusation that they were enriching uranium, which was never proven and wasn't a violation of the deal anyway.
And then he announced new sanctions and the proliferation security initiative, and then he put them in the nuclear posture review, threatening a nuclear first strike.
And only then did North Korea announce that they were leaving the NPT and kicking the IAEA out of their country.
And then they started making nukes out of plutonium, not enriched uranium, out of plutonium that they were harvesting from their Soviet era reactor that they restarted.
And so none of this would have happened if it hadn't been for Bush pushing them that way.
And I guess the idea was we'll attack them before they get their first nuke together.
But then they got so bogged down in Iraq, they never got around to that.
So now they're sitting on some nukes.
But, you know, nukes are a big deal, right?
What if these guys attacked Seoul?
Well, I think this is one of those points where we should ask, well, if we're really worried about them attacking Seoul with nukes and maybe South Korea needs nukes, you know, proliferation isn't a good thing.
But the question is compared to what?
So we've got this weird situation where the U.S. is supposed to defend everybody on Earth from everybody who has nukes.
Presumably we're supposed to protect the Europeans from Russia.
We're supposed to protect Japan, maybe Taiwan, Australia.
I mean, you start thinking about it.
I mean, this is an extraordinary burden to take on where, you know, if you get it wrong, guess what?
Los Angeles goes up, Seattle, Chicago, who knows where.
So I think what we have to do is recognize the U.S. has helped create an incentive to create this.
That is, from the standpoint of most of these small countries, they are vulnerable to the United States, which wanders around doing regime change.
And especially look at Libya.
And Muammar Gaddafi was dumb enough to give up his nuclear weapons.
And look what happens to him.
Unfortunately, you know, that is a it's a very bad incentive.
No doubt the North Koreans have looked at that.
I mean, do you think Kim Jong Un is stupid enough to give up his nukes and trust America?
I mean, we've made that basically impossible.
And you look at what we did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, countries realize that they're vulnerable.
So we have to step back and realize we've helped create this world, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, in Libya, I mean, all he had was some old junk he bought from AQ Khan sitting in a warehouse.
He didn't even have anything.
But even then, that's, I guess, a latent deterrent like Iran has, you know, the ability to someday make a nuke if push comes to shove.
And that was enough of a deterrent to keep America from attacking him for all those years.
But then once he gave all that up, they murder him.
And then John Bolton, working for Donald Trump, says, yeah, what we're looking for in North Korea is disarmament along the Libyan model.
Like, that was a pretty subtle implication there that Kim was sure to miss, right?
That, yeah, eventually we're going to shoot you in the back of the head.
He knew exactly what he was doing on that.
Yeah, I just meant kind of how we did it, as opposed to what we know the North Koreans would look at.
Oh, yeah, no, that was very, very calculated.
Yeah.
And now, OK, so there's a couple of things here.
I mean, it seems like they could be deterred, one, with kindness.
Right.
If, as you suggest in your article, if America just makes it clear to South Korea, we're lifting sanctions and encouraging you guys to work out your own peace.
That could be a good way to prevent an attack or even deter an attack, if you want to put it that way.
But also, I wonder, does the South even need nukes?
I mean, don't they have enough firepower with conventional weapons to level Pyongyang if they really had to and deter even a nuclear attack, which is conventional weapons?
Certainly should win a war.
I mean, they have qualitatively a much better force.
The critical thing is that they've configured their force based on the presumption the U.S. would defend them.
So they need some time.
And my reaction is, you know, you phase it out and you tell them it's going to be your job and you do what you think you need to.
But ultimately, the point is, we run around the world demanding our allies do certain things.
Oh, that's really a dumb way to do it.
I mean, why should we tell Europe?
Why should we tell Japan or South Korea how much to spend?
The point is, they should know it's up to them and they make the decision.
You know, that makes no sense for us to take over responsibility and then try to dictate.
To me, that's what you do with the Koreans is you guys in the South try rapprochement, try making a deal.
If it works, that's fabulous.
Both sides can disarm.
If it doesn't work, well, then you decide what you need.
But we're not going to be providing it.
It's going to be up to you.
Yeah, I forgot if it was something that you'd written or what it was that I read about a year ago saying, look at the South is making a blue water navy.
Now they're building an aircraft carrier.
I guess I have one.
And they're working on more battleships.
Were they planning on sailing if they need it?
They want to be a belt marked in the region.
They want to be accounted for.
And that means, well, America can take care of us at home.
So we have to do this stuff overseas.
It's ridiculous.
It is completely nuts.
And now so our two greatest allies over there are South Korea and Japan.
But they have their own problems and hard feelings dating back to the Second World War and before that.
So how close can they get to working together to deter North Korea and or China or whatever without us?
Oh, yeah.
They're in basically an economic war with each other at the moment.
The problem is it's easy for them to do this when we're we protect them.
That is, at some level, it's cost free.
Politically, they gain.
Each side goes to its domestic people and says, we're taking on these other terrible people.
But they don't pay a cost because they figure U.S. will defend them if they realize that they face North Korea and China.
I mean, both of them have concerns in various ways of China that it's going to be up to them to deal with that.
They have a very different incentive structure.
And then suddenly they'd have to say, well, maybe this is a really dumb idea.
Maybe we shouldn't be fighting each other.
Maybe we should work together.
They don't have to now.
It strikes me as one of the stupidities here in America.
People say, why doesn't the U.S. make them make up?
And it's like, well, they're in their sovereign countries.
What do you mean, make them make up?
This is politically directed at home.
What we do is we get out of it, let them deal with it and tell them it's their, they pay the price.
Back during George W.
Bush, after he pushed them to start making nukes in the first place, there was a press conference with President Roh of South Korea at the time where the translation got mixed up.
And President Roh said, I'm sorry, Mr.
President, did you just say that we could open up negotiations on other issues before denuclearization?
And Bush got all mad.
No, that's not what I said.
It has to be denuclearization first.
So that was 15 years ago now or something.
And they have more nukes than ever before.
That's been Obama's position.
And despite Trump, sometimes that's been his government's position is that we will not negotiate with them, even with when Trump's crossing the DMZ and shaking hands and doing photo ops.
They still have to get rid of their nukes before we concede anything else, before we can work together on any other thing when that seems so clearly designed to fail, to prevent peace from breaking out.
But I wonder and believe me, I agree with you that just forget it and just ignore the whole thing, because who cares anyway?
But do you think that if it was you and me in charge that and we just went and said, listen, here's a legit 100 percent no fool and security guarantee, we're not going to attack you.
We're dropping our sanctions.
We're encouraging peace with the South.
And, you know, let's work together on on being friends first and maybe we'll get to denuclearization last and that kind of thing.
You think that could work or maybe not?
Well, it strikes me that what you need to do is improve the relationship.
I mean, it may very well be they want them no matter what.
I mean, I could certainly believe that could be the case.
But we don't know that.
The only way you know it is actually if you take them at their word when they say we want a better relationship and we want a better regional environment, because if they were willing to give up their nukes, that's what they would want.
I mean, they look at Libya and it tells them, you know, you don't want to walk into that.
Well, the only way you can convince them they won't walk into that is to build a relationship that suggests you don't plan on bombing them.
So my reaction is you do kind of arms control.
You try to find things that you can agree on and get them to step back from things.
You improve the relationship, give diplomatic relations, allow people to travel, these kinds of things.
And you hope you get to denuclearization.
But look, if we could get some of their conventional forces to move back, if we could get they and the South Koreans to back down on stuff, if we could get them to cap the nuclear program, any number of these things would be good.
So I would take those as major victories, even if you never get to denuclearization.
You hope to get there, but you don't worry about it.
You try to do other things first.
It's funny because it's so obvious.
But at the same time, I guess it's obvious that they don't really want peace, that they would rather.
And I don't know about Trump, but Trump doesn't know about Trump either.
But the permanent government here in America, they refuse to do what you say, which is obviously the only path that could possibly work.
And that guy, Stephen Biegun, who is in charge of the negotiations for a while, he gave one big speech, I think at Brookings or something, where he said, yeah, we could put denuclearization last and some other things first to try to make some progress here.
But that was the last we ever heard of that.
They know they're sabotaging this deal, right?
Well, I think what's going on is they want peace, but they want it on our terms.
You know, Biegun, at least at that time, you know, was dealing with John Bolton.
I mean, and I think he's still dealing with Pompeo.
I mean, the challenge here is, you know, the people who kind of know what they're doing typically have been cut out of things.
I mean, with the Iraq war, you know, the Bush administration consciously cut out anybody actually who knew anything about Iraq, because everything was ideological.
We must transform the place.
We need regime change.
So they'd be happy to kind of have peace.
But, you know, it's their peace.
It's not a negotiated peace.
It's not something of any compromise.
I think Biegun gets it.
I mean, I think that he's one who understands.
But you look at Pompeo on almost every issue.
You look at him on Venezuela, on Iran, on the Koreas.
It's all the same.
I mean, he's the guy who wants victory at every cost.
And it doesn't matter if war happens along the way.
You know, victory is more important, however he gets it.
Yeah, man, we would be much better off without him.
There's just no question.
Exactly.
Um, although trade him out for the average Republican in the House or the Senate, and you're probably going to be stuck with just about the same thing here.
But or Democrat, for that matter.
I don't know.
The Obama years.
That's the sad thing.
There aren't very many good options out there.
Yeah.
I mean, Obama made no progress on Korea at all for eight years.
That's right.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, now let's talk about the very worst thing in the world.
Your piece at TAC is about here, theamericanconservative.com.
Yemen is shattered and the U.S. helped the Saudis break it.
Do tell, please, sir.
Oh, this is one of the great tragedies.
I mean, this is a country where, you know, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed.
I mean, there are a million people, the cholera epidemic.
Tens of millions in need of food and aid.
I mean, Yemen is a place that's kind of been at war since its birth.
I mean, it started out as two different Yemen's back like 60 years ago.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought a different way, actually, in the first civil war between royalists and socialists.
I mean, this is a place that even when it unified, it had conflict within.
It's a tragic, awful place.
But there is no reason for them to get involved.
This is all very complicated Yemeni politics.
It was all Yemen, you know, where basically one guy gets forced out and then he works with the guys who forced to who he once fought to get rid of the other guy.
Oh, this is all stuff that no American and frankly, no Saudi should have the slightest interest in.
But Saudi Arabia, one of the puppet regiments, they decided to intervene.
And the Obama administration, knowing that the Saudis were all upset because we talked to the Iranians, you imagine that decided to help the Saudis out.
So for years we helped refuel their planes.
We finally stopped that.
But we sell them the planes.
We sell them the munitions and we provide them with intelligence support as they bomb and kill Yemen, Yemenis.
And, you know, basically the bombing has been of civilian targets.
It's been constant and it's almost certainly intentional.
I mean, in my view, this is the entire war is a war crime.
I mean, you know, the Yemeni side are no friends of America.
But the point is, we have no reason to go in there and kill them.
This is awful.
This is the Saudi regime is one of the worst on earth.
And basically we allow our policy to be set in Riyadh.
It's a shock.
It's outrage.
I mean, to me, this is one of the worst things we've been doing for years.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is the thing about it, right, is they get to hide behind the Saudis.
They call it the Saudi led coalition and all that.
But we're the superpower and they're the client state and they're flying our planes and dropping our bombs and using our Navy to enforce the blockade.
And they came to Barack Obama and asked permission in the first place and he gave it to them with our full cooperation.
So that's right.
I mean, our Pentagon has tried to say, well, we're not really fighting.
And the point is, look, we're enabling the guys who are doing the fighting.
We're enabling the people who are bombing civilians.
They're bombing school buses, they're bombing weddings and funerals.
I mean, this is hideous stuff.
I mean, people are starving and dying there for you only because, you know, the crown prince in Riyadh, you know, wants more power.
I mean, it's a shock.
And to have the U.S. involved in that and supporting it is just outrageous.
Yeah.
You know, there's this great Patrick Coburn piece from when the war started back in the spring of 2015, now five years ago, as you point out, where he said, listen, this is all about internal politics inside Saudi Arabia.
You see, there's this brand new deputy crown prince and brand new defense minister, 29 year old Mohammed bin Salman.
And he's trying to make a name for himself inside the Saudi government.
So it's right.
It's public choice theory.
There's no Saudi national interest.
There's just the interest of this thug who then immediately went and arrested his cousin, the crown prince, and replaced him and moved up inside Saudi Royal Society and is in place to replace his father and become the king of Saudi Arabia now.
And because of this, on the backs of these dead Yemenis.
So that's exactly right.
I mean, he he's a real piece of work.
I mean, this is a guy who kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon and who has just supported jihadists in Syria and is currently involved in the Libyan civil war.
I mean, this is a guy who sliced and diced Shamal Khashoggi, who is a kind of a dissident, a dissident, more or less journalist who is living in America.
It's actually somebody who I knew I had lunch with and was on a panel with.
I mean, he's allowing some more freedom for women.
And then he arrested the women who are advocating that they be able to drive.
I mean, this is a guy who kidnapped Saudis from overseas.
This is this is a real outrageous character.
And it's all about personal ambition.
Yeah, it's just sick.
And I guess, I mean, the part of the biggest part of this story almost is the total lack of American knowledge that it's even happening, right?
The ratio between the pain and the ignorance is at an all time high.
And so this is the history of the world being written that this is the USA, the most powerful nation ever, ever picking on the weakest country in the world, just like Somalia across the Red Sea.
They're killing these people by the hundreds of thousands.
And the American people don't even know.
No, that's exactly right.
It's one of those things where, again, the Congress has tried to stop it.
The administration just ignores them and vetoes any legislation they pass.
Most Americans aren't aware the administration says, oh, we're not at war.
Nothing's going on.
Nothing to see here.
Move along.
Move along, please.
And they've gotten away with it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I talked with Scott Paul from Oxfam a couple of weeks ago, and he says, you know, we're right at the start of the rainy season now.
And so even before covid really hit, they have no clean water to wash their hands with whatsoever, because America and Saudi have bombed all their sewage and water works and electricity and hospitals and everything else.
And so, you know, even the most basic things like, hey, wash your hands all the time.
They can't do that.
They'd be washing their hands in cholera water.
And they've already had the two biggest cholera outbreaks in modern history in the last few years here in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen.
I don't know what happened last year, but they're anticipating another one really bad this time where we'll have at least thousands of people dying of cholera, which is an easily treatable disease.
I mean, you don't even need antibiotics.
You just need clean water to survive it.
And they're dying of it.
And we're about to do this to them again.
Right now, it's really shocking.
I mean, it is I mean, to me, this really is a war crime in which the U.S. is directly implicated.
I just and I just don't understand how American policymakers can just close their eyes.
And, you know, basically they all have their lips on the MBS is the crown prince's derriere.
I mean, they're all just sucking up to him for reasons that are impossible to understand.
I mean, we don't need the Saudis.
The Saudis want us.
They treat our soldiers, you know, as basic bodyguards.
They're buying them.
I mean, this is an outrageous regime that we don't.
They have to sell the oil.
The notion that somehow, you know, that if we didn't protect them, they wouldn't sell the oil.
Well, they wouldn't survive without oil revenues.
I mean, this whole thing should shock Americans.
Yeah.
So they're in the hypothetical.
We just cut them off.
Screw you, Saudi.
We're never helping you again.
You're not our friends.
You're not our allies.
We're never selling you another weapon.
And all the Raytheon lobbyists can all burn in hell.
And all that you say that that'll lead to no consequences.
How about this?
How about.
But then Iran will has already taken over Iraq with George W.
Bush's help.
And then they'll invade Saudi and conquer Saudi.
And then Iran will dominate the whole Middle East.
And what then, Doug?
We'll all die or something.
Of course, if Saudi Arabia or Iran is basically alone.
I mean, it has influence in Iraq.
But, you know, the Iraqis want their own country.
I mean, there's a lot of contact back and forth.
But they know that the Iranians don't run Iraq.
I mean, a lot of in the recent demonstrations they had in Iraq were a lot of them were Iraqis saying we want to run our own country.
And basically everybody else, I mean, all the Gulf states, you know, is against Iran.
I mean, the point is, the Saudis spent 80 billion dollars on the military a couple of years ago.
It made them the third highest military spender on earth after the U.S. and China.
I mean, the problem for them isn't that, you know, why would anyone in Saudi Arabia want to defend the regime?
Would you want to give up your life to help the royals?
I mean, the problem that the Saudis face is simply what what normal, sensible person would want to give up their life for the Saudi royal family.
I mean, this, frankly, the Iranians have shown no interest in conquering other countries.
They have their own problems.
I mean, their regular military isn't very good.
Their focus for defense is their missiles, which we criticize.
But the point is, missiles is the way they deter a country like, you know, Saudi Arabia from invading them.
I mean, Saudi Arabia is the aggressive country that is opposed to Iran.
Yeah, well, and that's the funny thing, right, is they just talk about Iran.
They're the biggest state sponsor of terror.
Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran.
And people just go with that narrative when they don't actually have any examples.
I mean, Ronald Reagan sold these guys missiles just a couple of years after the revolution.
But we still have to hate him 40 years later.
No, and you consider what we did to them.
I mean, you go back to 53, of course, the overthrow of their democratically elected government.
But in the 1980s, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran.
I mean, that's a war that killed a million people.
You know, the U.S. was supporting the aggressor in that case.
You know that, I mean, we've threatened to attack them many, many times.
I mean, it's a bad regime.
The world is filled with bad regimes, though.
I mean, we have to kind of recognize that we're limited in what we can do in the long term.
I think the regime disappears.
Young people, they're pro-Western.
They want freedom.
They want jobs.
You know, they don't like the clerical regime, but they're going to have to get rid of it themselves.
We try to take it out.
I mean, look what happened in Iraq.
Right.
And and of course, every time there's a massive protest movement in Iran or Iraq, anti-Iranian protests in Iraq, America comes and undercuts all of that by in Iraq killing, you know, the leaders of their Shiite militias and and all of that and turning all of that pressure against us instead of against Iran.
And then in Iran, where there's protests, of course, every time the regime just says everyone knows that this whole thing is a put on by the CIA and the MEK, which means then that even if it's not, all the protesters basically have to just go home discredited by association with us.
That's right.
Definitely.
And that keeps happening over and over again.
And Ayatollah is still sitting on his throne.
So, hey, well, administration policy basically is if the policy we tried doesn't work, we'll just do more of it.
And they never imagine that maybe the policy itself is flawed.
You always do more, do more, and it always fails.
And we really could just ignore Iran just as much as North Korea here.
And it really wouldn't make a difference to the people of Alabama one way or the other would exactly.
Iran is not going to attack us.
These people, again, they're not suicidal.
I don't care what their theology or ideology may sound like.
You know, the leadership there, I mean, a lot of these people have gotten rich while they've been in power in Iran.
I mean, these are people who think about the here and now.
Yeah.
All right.
I got to let you go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Doug.
Great stuff, as always.
Always happy to be on.
You keep safe and keep up the fight.
You too, man.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Doug Bondo.
He is over at the Cato Institute, first of all, here at The National Interest, how the coronavirus shows North Korea doesn't matter that much to America.
And this one, Yemen is shattered and the U.S. helped the Saudis break it.
All right, y'all.
And that has been anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Again, find my full interview archive.
More than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton dot org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.

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