Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Andrew Coburn, Washington editor, I think it is, at Harper's Magazine.
Of course, the author of the book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, which is actually an understatement, catastrophic.
And then also Kill Chain, which is an extremely important book about the terror wars and the drone wars and all kinds of things.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Hey, great to be with you again.
Great to have you on.
You know, lately I've been quoting you a lot because you had that great report.
And we had a great conversation as soon as the Russians seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in the aftermath of the American-backed coup in February of 2014.
And how all of the arms merchants were celebrating that the Russians had seized the Crimean Peninsula.
Maybe they wanted the Crimean Peninsula, but even better than that, they wanted to fight with the Russians.
And so what a bunch of fun.
And what a great way to set the tone for this discussion of your brand new piece here at Harper's Magazine, The Pentagon Syndrome or the Military Industrial Virus.
It's called.
It was the spotlight on Antiwar.com yesterday.
Great thing.
So essentially what you're saying here, I think, to sum it up, something like the entire Pentagon, the entire military of the United States of America is itself a self-licking ice cream cone.
That's right.
Or I yeah, I call it I call it a virus or, you know, parasite.
I mean, it exists.
It's like some sort of primordial creature that exists only to feed itself and grow.
You know, it's nothing to do with defense or any of that nonsense.
You know, it's it just, you know, uses whatever the you know, it attracts its food is, of course, our money, which it needs and gets in ever increasing quantities.
And interesting, you know, statistics I quote in the piece show that whenever the rate of increase in its, you know, its food intake gets down to a certain level, it almost never goes below.
It's like it's a constant rate of five percent growth.
Whenever it gets down to that level, immediately it sets up its defenses, which are come in the form of threat inflation, like the Russians are coming, the Chinese are coming, the Iranians are coming or, you know, somebody is coming and we need much more money now.
And that invariably works.
It's worked since, you know, 1960 and before.
So now, first of all, just, you know, for any right wingers listening or libertarians or, well, libertarians, I don't know anybody listening liberals to who thinks, yeah, but are you talking bad about our infantrymen and, you know, my nephew who's over there risking his life where this is not that this is about the economics of politics.
This is about the officer corps and the military industrial complex, which, after all, it was Ike Eisenhower, the five star general, commander of United Nations forces in Europe in World War Two, turned president of the United States, who said on his last day in office, sorry for helping to solidify this massive military regime in this country, but be careful and don't let it ever get too much power.
Bye.
And then but there never was a reckoning after that.
They've done nothing but grow after that.
And that's what as you're talking about with the five percent thing here, people might think that, oh, yeah, well, after Eisenhower said that, there was some kind of correction or something.
But no, there never was.
No.
And of course, he waited till he was halfway out the door before he said that.
But I should say, you know, you mentioned that the people whose, you know, sons and nephews and husbands and so forth are in the infantry are over there, you know, getting getting shot at.
This is absolutely, as you say, this is not a criticism of them.
In fact, this is on their behalf because they're the ones who get the shorthand.
They're the ones who get sent to war with shoddy, shoddy weapons and, you know, equipment that keeps breaking down.
You know, they're the ones who, you know, and who get blamed, of course, when things go wrong.
I mean, I quote, I cite in the piece, you know, the this this disastrous situation with the Navy in the Pacific, where, you know, in 2017, you had these two deadly collisions when U.S. ships were rammed or collided with merchant ships.
And that was really due to, you know, there you had crews who are badly trained, you know, short of sleep, overworked.
Given equipment that was broken down that they didn't know, no one had taught them how to repair.
And they're the ones who get the shorthand on all this.
And meanwhile, as you say, the officer corps, especially the senior officer corps, who increasingly are really, you know, looking forward to a very, very fat retirement when they go off to work for a defense contractor.
They're the ones who should be held accountable and never are.
I'm reminded of David Hackworth, who was the most decorated officer in the Vietnam War, who spent his later career, you know, certainly in the 1990s.
Anyway, I would hear him on right wing talk radio.
And essentially, he was fighting a class war on behalf of the people, the infantry, the enlisted men, as he saw it.
And he was there to protect them against the ruling class.
The officer corps who hate them and despise them and will use their lives and throw them away on ridiculous missions where they are in places where they do not belong.
And the officers don't have the courage to protect their men like that's supposed to be.
And that was essentially Hackworth's entire mission in life was to protect the enlisted men against the officers, essentially the real enemy.
Yeah, he's absolutely right.
You know, and in recent wars, as again, as I mentioned in the piece, you know, you've had, you know, families, I know some, you know, who've gone into debt, you know, to get their sons who are serving in the in the military, in the in the Army or the Marines, to get them the proper equipment.
I mean, there's a horrendous case.
Not many people know about, which is the army helmet.
You know, basically the Army Helmet Bureaucracy, which is a powerful institution, they they've been sending soldiers off to war with them with a helmet, which actually enhanced the effects of bomb blasts on the brain.
So that's why you have hundreds of thousands of veterans from the recent wars who've come home with, you know, with traumatic brain injuries, which really rolls over into PTSD.
And so, you know, there was a cure for this.
There was an extra padding you can get for your helmet, which they were sending people where, you know, families were having to buy to send to their sons in the Marines.
The same, you know, families were having to, you know, save up or, you know, going to debt to buy bulletproof vests for their for their for their, you know, men, folk, family members fighting overseas because the bulletproof vests, the armor they were being issued was inadequate.
And so that's, you know, it's a shocking part of the whole story.
Yeah, that's where Rumsfeld said, Oh, you're finding scrap iron to reinforce the doors of your aluminum Humvees I sent you off to war in?
That was the question.
Yeah, you go to war with the army that you have not the one that you wish you had.
Exactly.
Just write that off.
Who cares about that?
We don't need to talk about Rumsfeld.
I will say he was just plain stupid.
A really stupid guy.
Yeah, I hope he hears that.
Yeah, don't get me started on the story in that book.
People can check the archives for that.
I'll tell you what.
Okay, so now, this is cliche and silly, maybe, but I think it's worth talking about, because there's a real story behind this.
We always hear about the, you know, $1,000 wrench and the $600 toilet seat, and all these kinds of things.
So, I guess nowhere in private business, do you have one company willing to pay $600 for a toilet seat from another company, unless they're both government contractors?
But so what is it in the economics of military spending that make that really incentivize this?
Not only does it, are they not prevented from doing stuff like this?
It seems like the more expensive, ultra expensive toilet seats they buy, the better.
Well, that's right.
And that's basically because, you know, you have this whole culture, really, you know, there's one customer, which is, you know, the Defense Department in one of its manifestations, Army, Air Force, whatever.
And they have, you know, their view is the more money they shovel out to the vendors, the better.
That's the objective.
I mean, the very telling, I mean, move over $600 toilet seat.
Let's hear it for the $10,000 toilet seat cover, which was revealed recently.
And a sign of the times, nobody made much fuss about it.
But it turned out that, you know, there was a toilet seat cover being bought by the Air Force for $10,000 a pop.
And the assistant secretary of the Air Force, when he was queried about this, they said, well, what do you think you're doing paying this?
He said, oh, yeah, it did seem like a high price, but he had to had to be paid to ensure revenue and profit for the manufacturer.
So the whole aim is to make sure the manufacturer makes money, which is, as you say, in private business, that was not the way things work.
And of course, you know, the added incentive is, I don't know, I wouldn't say it was true in this necessarily true in this case.
But generally speaking, the military official, defense official making that decision will then, you know, will then might be looking to get a comfy job once he retires on a very fat pension, which they get, you know, with the with the relevant company.
Well, this does go back to your book on Rumsfeld, where you talk about, or at least our previous conversation, but I think this is in the book, too, where you really define the neoconservative movement as the place where the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex meet.
In other words, the bankers and the oil men, they are always had the Council on Foreign Relations and their other think tanks there.
But the Israel lobby, they really needed to create their own think tanks, right?
Like Jacob Halperin talks about, and they knew they were right where they just created 15 of their own little CFRs.
And then, as you talk about, it was Lockheed and Northrop Grumman who came through and said, you know what, we could use some intellectuals to justify our policy here.
So what a nice confluence of interests.
You guys write our studies.
And that's really, you know, the story of PNAC.
And I guess, as you put it here, even the grand strategy, whatever Wolfowitz or any of these guys think, that really it's Lockheed's grand strategy for cashing in on our tax dollars that reign supreme behind all of this stuff.
The rest is all essentially ideological window dressing and humanitarian democratic arguments and God knows what to justify, essentially, this self-licking ice cream cone here.
Right.
Keep the money flow.
That is the strategy.
People say we don't have a strategy.
We do have a strategy, which is the money flow.
Keep the money flowing.
Actually, I mean, on the story, I mean, it was we should give credit where credit is due.
The the notion of uniting the Israel lobby with the defense lobby that was really well, it was put into action by Paul Netzer, who was the guy who really kicked off the Cold War with NSC, you know, back in 1950 with NSC 68.
And, you know, the problem had always been that the Israel lobby, except when it came to Israel, was otherwise dovish.
They'd been very anti-Vietnam.
And, you know, the rabbis were always, you know, lobbying for peace.
Couldn't have that.
And so Netzer had the brilliant idea of explaining to them that, you know, 10 cents in every defense dollar was 10 cents for Israel or, you know, that and if they join forces, this will be very good for their interests.
So that's what happened.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Interesting.
You know, Phil Weiss is always quoting Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, both Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, both saying that's why we need the American empire to be strong, whether in the Far East or in South America or anywhere else.
We have to keep America engaged so that it's available for use by Israel in an emergency, essentially.
So it is the perfect confluence of interests there, right?
Right, right, right.
Absolutely.
You know, as Israel gets ever more militaristic, I mean, they sort of feed off each other in this way.
You know, Israel is a military industrial complex.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that is a huge part of it, right?
They get the billions of dollars of foreign aid every year.
But by contract, they have to spend at least a lion's share of that money on American weapon systems and that kind of thing.
Well, that's right.
They evade that as much as possible.
But yeah, that's the aim.
Hang on just one second.
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Well, and here we are.
As we're discussing this, we have all this new ratcheted up tension against the Iranians, too.
I don't know if it's a real threat of war or not.
There's certainly nothing to really fight about.
But I don't know if that ever stopped them before, Andrew.
Well, right.
I mean, it's actually it's interesting, as I sort of suggested in the piece, Trump, you know, Trump ran for office against foreign wars.
Right.
I mean, with great success was an important part of his plank.
And, you know, in a way, I mean, he said he was going to increase the military budget.
But the only time Trump has generally been pretty successful in achieving, you know, what he said he would do, except when it comes to foreign adventures and the military.
And, you know, he said he wanted to pull out of Afghanistan.
We're still there.
He said he wants to pull out of Syria.
Well, that got nixed.
He said, actually, his projected budget for 20 defense budget for 2020 was a cut down to a mere 700 billion dollars.
And there was an immediate scream of rage from the you know, the military, the military's, you know, very large caucus in in Congress and from the Pentagon.
And hey, presto, suddenly the amount gets put up to, you know, they get an increase instead to 750.
So, you know, Trump himself, I really don't think wants to go to war with Iran, but he's an idiot.
And so therefore he can't, you know, when, you know, the people around him, you know, the spokesman for the neocons like Bolton and for the military industrial complex who think a nice little war would be good for them.
I mean, good for the good for the budget.
He doesn't seem to know how to stop it.
Well, we'll see.
But that's my read.
You're exactly right.
Of course.
And this is exactly as I predicted, right?
He has some, as people say, instincts against this, but he doesn't know anything, which means he can't win an argument with anyone on his staff.
Right, right.
You got it exactly right.
He's an idiot.
It's really too bad, too, because, I mean, the whole thing with being kind of an anti-government sort of populist right winger is you have that whole Jacksonian let's go kick butt thing, but then you also have, you know, essentially a rejection or a refusal to kind of really assent to this whole doctrine of liberal hegemony in the post-World War II order of peace and friendship or whatever they call the American Empire.
It's a load of garbage and it's pretty hard to believe in if you're not really on the inside of the party, you know, in power.
And so somebody like him can really disbelieve in the whole thing.
But then, as you say, he just ain't read enough to stand up for his own view there.
And so the kick butt part, you know, ends up kicking in instead.
And John Bolton talks tough and I like a guy who talks tough.
And so there you go.
That's right.
That's right.
Anyways, yeah, the money.
You know what, Gareth Porter writes this in his book, Perils of Dominance, and some of it, he actually had a new article about this, what, half a year ago or something in Truthout about how, maybe less than that, about how the Vietnam War, it was all about the military and the Navy.
I think it was the Navy he was citing where they were saying that, oh yeah, no, there's a threat to the budget.
We've got to figure out, we have to get some guys on the ground in Vietnam immediately.
I might be confusing my services.
I thought that was what it was.
But anyway, that essentially, that was the root of the Vietnam War was, again, the departments of the military themselves saying we have to find something to do here right now before they take our money away.
Exactly right.
I mean, Gareth's work has been tremendous on that.
And it actually ties in with what I say in this Harper's piece, because just before they went to, you know, they started to build up in Vietnam was when the rate of growth in defense spending was dipping perilously toward that 5% line.
And, you know, hey, presto.
Suddenly, you know, we faced an awesome communist threat in Vietnam and off they went.
It's exactly the system reacting.
And it's sort of uncanny.
That's why I say- And again, wait, clarify again, that 5% signifies what again?
Well, since if you look at if you draw a line of the defense budget from the end of the Korean War to now, you know, if you calculate the amount we have now is at or just slightly actually is pretty much on, but a little tick maybe below, which has been corrected.
The rate of what it would have been if the rate of the budget, it's simply grown at 5% a year ever since 1954.
Since the rate of growth has to stay at 5% or better.
And when it dips below or gets anywhere near that, up comes an emergency.
Exactly.
So I just want to make that clear that we're not talking about ever a 5% cut of anything.
We're only talking about if the rate of growth slows down sufficiently, they panic.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Okay.
I'm sorry, because I interrupted.
You're going to make another point there.
Still remember?
Well, no, I'm just saying that that was it.
You know, the did I say it?
I mean, the rate of growth.
Yeah, I said it.
I mean, the rate of the line was dipping down towards the 5% just just before the Vietnam buildup.
And that's one of the things.
And then we've seen it ever since.
And now, you know, it's even, you know, 1991, 1991, 1992, the Cold War's over, the Soviet Union's collapsed, the threat has gone away.
You know what happened?
Suddenly, we started to hear a lot about the Chinese as peer competitors.
I remember even for a minute, they said, maybe Japan and Germany are going to be our rivals again.
Right.
There was a little note of panic, you know, Oh, my God, what are we going to do?
But, um, but, you know, things were put to rights fairly soon.
And then they ensured by, you know, by, you know, promoting the expansion of NATO.
It didn't just provide a market for, you know, for Lockheed, for F-16s in Poland or wherever.
It ensured that we'd have bad relations with Russia for forever, you know, by moving, you know, moving, breaking our promise not to expand NATO eastwards.
And by, you know, arming, you know, setting up bases closer, close to the Russian border, we ensure that the Russians would always be in a sort of prickly mood from then on.
And that's what's happened.
Hang on just one sec for me.
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And I'm sorry, because we get back to NATO, but I just remembered this part and I want to mention it before I forget again.
You have this really interesting part about the perverse economics of the military industrial system.
Not only do they divert all of these resources to destruction, instead of providing goods and services and distributing them to people and stuff like that.
But they also, they sort of kind of build in this perverse obsolescence where, you know, you talk about machine tools and how the Americans were always at the forefront of the, of, you know, inventing new and better machine tools for making other things with these high order capital goods.
But that because of the military industrial complex incentive systems, they were kind of disincentivized to continue improving.
And they've ended up seeding that market to the Japanese, the Chinese, the Germans, and whoever else, to make all the products.
Right, because they, you know, before in the years of dominance, which, you know, as I say, you know, in the 50s, you know, post post World War Two, the American, as you say, the American machine tool industry led the world, because they were continually improving and continually, you know, because they were competing, it was a very competitive industry.
And thus, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to, you know, they were able to bring down, you know, because machine tools are what you need to make all the other things, all the other tools you need to make things.
So they're the sort of core of any manufacturing system.
And the, you know, because they were continually getting better, and thus lowering the cost of production, thus increasing productivity, they were able to pay workers more.
So that's why the American worker was, you know, quite highly paid in the 50s and 60s.
But then, as they discovered, there was an easier way rather than competing fiercely in the marketplace, you could go to for military orders.
And hey, hey, that was a lot better, because you didn't have to try so hard, you got, you know, overpaid, you got a huge overhead, you know, you guaranteed profit cost plus all those nice things.
And so they became less competitive, the, you know, the developments became, you know, their improvements sort of started to taper away.
And as you say, the Germans and the Japanese, you know, zoomed ahead.
And what I argue in the piece, and this is really the maybe the most important thing that's in the piece is that, you know, defense manufacturing, the defense industry isn't just a sort of, you know, a sort of corrupt thing in itself.
I mean, not saying everyone is corrupt, but it, you know, it's basically, it's a waste of money, because it doesn't, you know, improve the rest of the economy in any way.
And we call them very occasional innovations, which are overstated.
But it has a what I'm saying is has a corrupting effect on the civilian economy, because, you know, it's basically a lazy way of doing all the incentives are different.
And the prime example is Boeing, you know, a once great company that made, you know, all the world's civilian aircraft or most of them great, great planes produced by a highly paid workforce with, you know, great productivity, it was wonderful.
And of course, they had a defense side.
But the people who used to run Boeing had a very important rule, which was no one who no manager, no executive who'd been on the defense side should ever be moved over to the civilian side, because he'd bring all the habits of, you know, cost plus and, you know, all the Reno not, not being competitive with them.
But that changed in the 90s, late 90s, when Boeing was taken over by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, which was a purely military firm.
And now you started to have a new pad since then Boeing, almost all the time since the merger, I think maybe one exception was a guy from General Electric, but otherwise, it's been run by military CEOs.
And the you know, the, you know, with your seeing civilian products, civilian planes, civilian programs, bearing all the hallmarks of a defense program, like late, rushed, untested, seven, you know, with the disaster with the 737, you know, sort of technological fixes that really create more problems, see the 737.
You know, innovative technologies that bring problems with them see the Dreamliner, which was the first big program of the new Boeing team, which, you know, was made of plastic, had all sorts of problems with the electrics and got grounded after the battery caught fire.
And, you know, that's, you know, it's a prime example.
And I think that's happened in lots of firms.
It's like a spreading virus, again, to use that analogy, you know, corrupting the rest of our what's left of our manufacturing industry.
Well, you know, it kind of says it all, doesn't it?
That they used to have that rule, that if you're working on military, if you're an executive, in charge of running the military side of the company, we don't want your perverse way of thinking affecting the rest of the firm.
Exactly.
Wow.
Exactly.
They were happy to, you know, such self-awareness on their part at that point, you know, smart people in those days.
But like the guy who's overseen this, you know, yeah, I mean, deadly fiasco with the 737 Max, Mr. Muhlenberg, the CEO of Boeing, he came out of the military side of Boeing.
And I noticed one of his previous big, previous big thing he'd run was a thing called Future Combat Systems, which was an army program.
And it was a very grandiose idea that you could sort of have a whole armored army all sort of wired together, you know, communicating electronically that would, you know, they wouldn't even need armor on the tanks because the guns would be so precise and everything, all parts of the system, every other part was doing.
And it was a completely stupid idea.
And it was going to cost, if they'd really gone ahead with it, something like 160 billion dollars, maybe more.
260, actually, I think.
And they'd spent 20 billion dollars when the Secretary of Defense at the time, Gates, killed it in 2009.
So this is a fiasco.
It's going nowhere.
So they got for 20 billion dollars spent under the oversight of Mr. under the oversight of Mr. Muhlenberg, now boss of Boeing.
We had absolutely nothing but zero to show for it.
And that's that's a real defense program.
And that's the guy who gave us the 737 max, which is, you know, so far killed 346 people.
Well, and so now we have Patrick Shanahan is has been nominated the acting Secretary of Defense, but Trump has gone ahead and said he's going to make him officially the Secretary of Defense now.
I saw one thing criticizing him, saying that he was against the F-35 and was pushing the F-15.
And I was saying, you know, I mean, he might be the most corrupt S.O.B. in D.C.
I'm not saying that.
But by all means, throw all the F-35s in the garbage.
And if you have to have jets, make F-15s.
At least I know they were turkeys back in the 70s, but they got good enough at making those now at, what, one sixth the price or something like that.
Well, they'll wait for it.
They'll run up the price of the F-15s.
Don't worry about that.
Yeah, well, at least those things don't just fall right out of the sky like the F-35s do.
Well, right.
That's true.
I mean, you know, I should point out that the F-15 is a Boeing product.
So Shanahan, I mean, he he's he's survived an ethics investigation for pushing, you know, as a Boeing executive pushing a Boeing product.
I'm sure that wasn't too difficult.
But yeah, exactly.
But yeah, I mean, it's I guess this is preferable to to an F-35.
You're right.
Well, if you wanted to be fair, then F-16s, those are Lockheed still.
Yeah, much cheaper and known to work, actually, which is important.
Right.
But essentially, we're going to have, you know, the naturally Lockheed is fit to be tied over this.
They're really angry that the the F-35 buy is being slightly cut.
In favor of these F-15s.
So you're going to have an almighty battle in Congress between the Boeing, the Boeing party and the Lockheed party.
Interesting to watch, which is, you know, basically what that's the real parties we have in Congress is, you know, the Boeing party, the you know, the maybe a few oil company parties, too.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I guess it's kind of an old joke and a cliche or what have you that they should have to wear their sponsors all over their clothes like NASCAR drivers.
Yeah, I absolutely like that.
I love that.
I love that idea.
Yeah.
I mean, you think of Dianne Feinstein, he's married to this arms manufacturer, defense contractor.
I forgot.
You know, I guess he does like services, building overpriced tents or whatever it is.
I always think of Dick, but I don't know if he owns the company anymore.
But years and years ago, I'm talking about years and years ago when you went through an airport and you needed a luggage cart, you just took a luggage cart.
Then suddenly you start to have to pay pay for a luggage cart, five dollars.
And every time I've rented a five, I've been forced to rent because my cases are too heavy.
I've got five dollars, this stupid little cart.
I think that's going to Dick Blum, husband of Dianne Feinstein.
That's funny.
I wonder if they made that a federal law that you have to use that service or something.
I wouldn't be surprised.
They have because there's no find me another luggage cart.
So they have.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, they did.
I don't know everything about that company.
I guess I should learn more.
But I mean, they had huge military contracts as well.
That was just another little thing to tickle my rage.
Yeah, I hear you.
Yeah, they're rent seekers.
They're congressional members.
But yeah, I mean, it's funny because on one hand, you might think of Dianne Feinstein as a person or something like that.
But if you think of her as simply a functionary of this corporation that she represents, that happens to be owned by her husband and her actions in the Senate make a lot more sense.
And in fact, the Senate as an institution makes a lot more sense in that same context.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's exactly right.
No, I love that idea of people wearing the, you know, like NASCAR drivers or whatever, wearing the costumes.
Hey, tell me about the BDM Corporation.
Oh, yeah, that's an interesting that's an interesting story, which I end up it's in the piece in this office piece, which is that's a big it's been bought by someone else now, but it's been a big, a very big sort of consultancy.
I've actually done some interesting studies over the years.
So in 1991, 91, 92, 91, the BDM Corporation was commissioned on a Pentagon contract to go to Russia to send people to Russia to interview all the sort of, you know, various high ranking former Soviet military and civilian defense officials, because this was a chance to really find out what had been going on on the other side, you know, about what their defense plans had been, what their policy had been.
And the idea was that they what the the required answer or the expected answer.
This was the guy, the person who commissioned the contract was Andrew Marshall, who was, you know, the spent the great guru, the defense thinking, who was really a corporate shill.
But he the answer he wanted was that, oh, my God, we tried to compete when you put up the defense budget in under Reagan so much that we tried to compete.
And that's what broke our system.
So the you know, these interviewers went over and talked to a whole lot of very interesting former senior Soviet guys who all said, no, no, that wasn't it at all.
You know, we did it for internal reasons.
We needed to keep up employment or, you know, the defense industry was got so powerful that it was producing all these weapons that, you know, didn't work and we didn't need, but we couldn't stop them.
And, you know, that the the minute the you know, the taller the the big chiefs, the Brezhnev and people didn't have the will or the political clout even then people at the top to stop this.
So that's what broke us.
We just had this military industrial contracts completely out of control.
So the BDM Corporation reports this back and that contract is abruptly pulled because they're coming up with the wrong answer, which I say is, you know, that's the system looking out for itself.
You know, if if something calls the whole rationale into into into question, then they get shot down immediately.
Right.
But, you know, it's funny because even the official story of that is, you know, if you take it the way the Reaganites portray it is that, yeah, we force them to try to compete with our missile production and so forth with our MX missiles and our this and that.
So that's what bankrupted them, is that our economy was up to the challenge and theirs wasn't.
But even then, they're buying your premise a hundred percent that military spending can bankrupt your country.
It was just right.
Reagan figured that there was enough of a cushion on the balance sheet.
He could run up a four trillion dollar debt.
Right.
But what I'm saying is it didn't what we did, did what wasn't that they didn't do what they did because of what we did.
Right.
No, no, no.
I understand.
But I'm just saying even if you take the Reaganites argument at face value, they're still admitting that you're right, that this is national suicide.
Just the Soviets blew their own brains out before we had a chance to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I see your point.
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
And, you know, look at the way we're heading.
We have this if you care about deficits.
If you care about deficits, we are certainly in the whole hole.
It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
All the best economists I know say that at some point the dollar will no longer be believed in.
And at that point, they all come floating home and we have hyperinflation makes Venezuela look like the gold standard, which is, I think, quite possible because it all is just a question of confidence.
And that confidence can be broken.
And when you're dealing with a 22 trillion dollar debt and when you're dealing with what you describe in this article, this Pentagon virus, this thing would, if left unchecked, Andrew, which would consume our entire society to protect itself.
Right.
And, you know, and then the process that, you know, part of their protective efforts are to sort of militarize the society.
You know, it's, you know, like all this absurd threat inflation about Iran right now.
I mean, they all you know, have you seen anyone sort of I mean, any the mainstream media, of course, is cheering, cheering it on, you know, every kind of ridiculous lying claim that comes out of Saudi Arabia about the Iranians get, you know, unblocked, you know, completely immediately unquestioningly is unquestioned and reprinted by the papers here.
You know, it's a very it turns I think it turns you into a sick society, not just a sort of bankrupt one of sick and then bankrupt.
Right.
And then, you know, it is just exactly like George Washington said, when you make alliances with these countries, then you make enemies out of all your enemies and these kinds of things.
So, you know, part of being allies with Israel is or part of the consequences of it is that that was, you know, the major motivation of the actual 9-11 hijackers, that Hamburg cell, Mohammed Atta and his friends.
That's what they were most pissed off about.
And that's why they wanted to join up with bin Laden was because of what Israel was doing on America's dime in Lebanon and in Palestine.
And so that gets us attacked by the Sunni, you know, bin Laden night extremists.
And yet, who's Israel's enemy over there?
Not the bin Laden nights, they prefer the bin Laden nights, they're on the record, their intelligence people, their ambassadors, everyone over and over and over again, saying we like ISIS better than we like the Shia.
Iran is our problem.
And so here we are America picking on the Ayatollah and no one seems to ever point out that, you know, who hates the Ayatollah at least as much as Benjamin Netanyahu does.
I'm in Al Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
And this is the agenda of the enemies of the actual American people who shed the blood of the American people is Al Qaeda, not Iran, not Hezbollah, and Syria, you know.
And so here we are, we got the bait and switch so backwards, we're fighting on the side of our enemies in Syria, Yemen, and now they're threatening to take the war to Tehran itself.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nobody ever says that.
You notice that?
Like, hey, Zawahiri hates the Ayatollah too.
You notice?
Yeah.
Or what?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, their plan is working great.
Yeah, exactly.
Still following the script they wrote.
For cynical purposes on this side, of course, but it sure is incidental and coincidental, ain't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll let you go, but I sure do appreciate your time on the show again, as always, Andrew, and great work here.
Great.
Great to be with you, Scott.
I always enjoy myself.
So any time.
Good deal.
Talk soon.
Okay.
All right, you guys, that is Andrew Coburn, one third of the great Coburn brothers, the late Alexander Coburn from Counterpunch, and of course, Patrick Coburn, his brother at The Independent, great Middle East reporter.
Andrew is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
He wrote the book Kill Chain, and this one at Harper's is called The Pentagon Virus.
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