06/26/13 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, our guest today is our friend Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com/Larrison.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, you're very welcome.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And, boy, you sure write a lot of interesting stuff.
I like reading your blog.
Mostly, I guess what I want, first of all, from you, if you could, would be your opinion or your assessment about the inner workings of Republican politics on the Syria intervention issue.
It seems to me like, at least at the top, there's a consensus that Obama has just not intervened enough and soon enough.
Is that about right?
You're certainly getting that from a lot of the main conservative publications.
You're getting that from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, something like Jennifer Rubin writing at the Washington Post.
So there is this sort of steady drumbeat saying that Obama has dragged his feet, hasn't gotten into the war quickly enough or in a big enough way.
And they certainly are driving the Syria debate in Republican ranks.
What you also find that I think is interesting is that there are quite a few conservatives, both writers and politicians, that are dissenting from that and are taking a very different view, thinking that arming rebels in Syria doesn't make any sense and doesn't advance U.S. security at all.
For instance, there was just a story today that Michelle Bachmann came out against arming rebels in Syria.
And of course, her concerns, like the concerns of many opponents of this measure, is that these weapons will end up in the hands of jihadists, groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra that's allied with al-Qaeda.
So there's definitely more of a split on this issue, sort of like the split that you saw over the Libyan war, where there's simply not the same unanimity about the wisdom of getting involved in this conflict that you might have seen, say, 10 years ago over Iraq, or near unanimity.
Right.
It seems like the – well, it's always hard to break down and categorize the different parts of the right and whatever.
But it seems like the center-right, the mainstream Republican Party right, they're pretty much just for whatever war.
And of course, everybody's already not liked Assad for a long, long time, and so there's a villain, let's go get him.
Sort of the same as Gaddafi kind of thing.
There doesn't seem to be much thought behind it.
But then what's interesting is you have, if I may say, the American conservative magazine, more libertarian-leaning, or I would say more reasonable-leaning conservatives.
But then when you cite Michelle Bachmann, she's more a complete right-wing wingnut, sort of a goofball, Frank Gaffney type.
And it seems like their bigotry in this case is actually what's saving them from being pro-war, where they're just so afraid of everything Muslim that they're actually willing and hateful toward everything Muslim.
They're actually willing to look deeper than just the surface narrative at the question, well, just who are these rebels?
And so it really takes somebody horrible like Gaffney or Bachmann, outside of the paleo group on the right, to actually be good on this.
Whereas still the conventional wisdom is, well, we just need to create a no-fly zone or whatever.
We just need to find three new ways to escalate this thing.
Yeah, I think you see two different sets of motivations, like you're saying, where you have the anti-jihadist crowd, the people that are unduly afraid of the threat from jihadism, seeing it everywhere.
And so, of course, they will see it in Syria, where it does exist.
But they're also likely to see it in places where it isn't.
But they end up getting to the right answer in the sense that they don't see a U.S. interest in getting involved in the conflict, even though they're coming from a very different way of looking at it.
Right.
And as you say, just like in Libya, right, where Frank Gaffney and some of the more, if you looked at Wolfowitz or Pearl, the center of the neoconservative movement, they were all for it.
But if you looked at Gaffney and some of the more wing-nutty types among the neocons, they were actually against the horrible decision to intervene there.
Sure.
But another thing that is influencing the way that people are responding to Libya and to Syria on the right is that at the grassroots level, at the rank-and-file level, there's no appetite for any more of this sort of stuff.
And so many of these folks are responding to what they're hearing from constituents or from readers, and they understand that there's no interest in continued U.S. warfare in these countries.
And so to some extent, they're playing to the crowd or they're playing to their audiences.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's fine as far as it goes in that it reflects a growing skepticism about this constant warfare among conservatives and libertarians throughout the country.
And you see that reflected in opinion polls on what to do about Syria, where overwhelmingly, by three to one margins, regardless of party, regardless of political affiliation, people want us to stay away from Syria.
And I think that's a sane and sober response to a conflict that people don't understand and that they don't want to belong to.
Right.
Yeah, and as you say, that was reflected also in the election results last fall, where Romney had nothing to say about foreign policy except, I'll be worse somehow.
And the American people, including the right, just rejected that.
And I read somewhere that 10 million Obama voters stayed home, but it was more like 20 million McCain voters stayed home on the other side.
Right.
Well, and on top of the foreign policy message, Romney wasn't really giving people much reason to show up either on other issues.
But certainly his foreign policy message was simply rehashed Bush-era talking points.
And then that, fortunately, that was rejected because I think the public remembers, or at least remembers in part, how badly that period in our history went.
All right, now, on the center and their imperviousness to facts, John McCain went over there.
I forget now whether we talked about this on the radio already or not, but it's worth going back over again either way.
He went over there, he met with the Northern Storm Brigades, which if you had only Googled, and I don't know whether if it was ever settled whether exactly the guy in the picture with him was a kidnapper or not, but that same group had kidnapped some Shiite pilgrims from Lebanon.
And if you just Googled them, there's an interview with Time Magazine where one of these guys at least is on video saying, yeah, I'm a veteran of the Iraq War where I fought in the Sunni-based insurgency against the Americans.
And these are the guys that McCain is over there saying, you know, trust me, I know how, and believe me, if I can differentiate between the good and the bad rebels, then the CIA can with ease.
It'll be fine.
And then he came home, and there was a whole kind of scandal about the kidnappers and the Northern Storm and whatever, but he didn't change his tune one bit, and nobody seems to be following up.
No one's really calling him on it.
It seems like the knowledge that you and I have been talking about for two years, that everybody who's been critical about this has been aware of for two years, that the so-called good guys in this are the mujahideen.
They're the guys who were the Sunni-based insurgency from the Iraq War last, and what the hell would we be doing backing them?
And yet that part of the argument just does not seem to get through on, say, the Sunday morning news show or whatever.
The follow-up question, yeah, but who are these rebels?
They just talk as though it doesn't matter who they are, or they're just some imaginary rebels who will be pawns and operate on the chessboard just exactly like we want them, but all you need to know is we've got to stop the killing.
We've got to help the rebels against that terrible guy Assad, but they don't ever want to get into detail.
No one ever asks that follow-up, and that part of it is kind of amazing to me just in and of itself, that they really can exclude the single most important part of the discussion from the entire discussion, you know?
No, sure, and of course there's always an impulse, or we've often seen an impulse in the last 10, 15 years when there's an insurgency, that the people who want the U.S. to support that insurgency will portray them or will pretend that they are fighting for, say, a pluralistic or democratic cause that the fighters themselves don't actually believe in, and so there's a bit of salesmanship on the part of the interventionists here where they're trying to emphasize how much in common we have with these insurgents when they very well might know that we don't have very much in common with them, but their concern is simply to get us into the fight, and then once we're into it, there's no longer any time to debate who it is that we're helping.
The other confusion on the part of the interventionists, I think, is the idea that by helping the rebels, this is actually going to somehow stem the killing or reduce the level of violence in the country, when in fact by providing aid to them, it's going to keep the war going on longer.
It's going to result in more casualties.
One of the things that's interesting, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights just came out with a new report talking about the level of casualties in the conflict, and they say that now 100,000 people have been killed in it, but if you look deeper into the report, you find that nearly half of those are people who have been fighting on the government side.
And so usually when you hear these casualty reports, there's this impression that the regime is responsible for 80, 90, 100% of the deaths, when of course it is a civil war in which one side is taking actually heavier casualties than the other, and then according to the report, government casualties are higher than rebel casualties.
Well, and even there, there's a real discrepancy about just what percentage of this rebellion is a Syrian rebellion at all, and how many of these are just, you know, I don't know, lumpenproletariats or something from Saudi Arabia, who their government has decided they need something better to do than to sit around doing nothing getting in trouble all day.
As you were saying about the connection to the insurgency in Iraq, there is this sort of bleed over that just as people from Syria came into Iraq to fight the U.S. while U.S. forces were there, it would not be surprising if people from western Iraq were also moving into Syria to fight on the side of their fellow Sunnis.
And you have this effort on the part of interventionists to try to have it both ways, where on the one hand they'll say we should go after Assad because he supported the insurgency against us, but in so doing it will require us to arm people that were actually shooting at us.
It's an attempt to try to paper over these real contradictions and problems with what it is that they're recommending.
Boy, someone in the chat room said he saw a McCain quote yesterday where he said he wants to spit and poo his face and start a conflict over Snowden.
Did you hear that?
Yeah, I think I did see that.
Of course McCain hates the Russians and everything they do regardless of the situation, but yes, he's definitely been getting riled up both by Syria and the Snowden situation.
Unreal.
Yeah, I mean this is what I've always said.
As much as I dislike our current president, I think McCain would have gotten us all killed in a thermonuclear war by now.
That guy's got no restraint whatsoever.
Well, he would have been very dangerous, yes.
And he certainly would have been antagonizing the Russians a lot more.
And I think you see that here.
And that's one of the things that I find most worrisome about this constant push that's involved more in the conflict, because it's being sold now not just as a humanitarian intervention or as a fight against a particular regime, but it's being sold as this sort of regional proxy war or even a global proxy war where we're supposed to be sticking it to Iran and Russia for reasons that escape me, but this is apparently important to some people.
And that in turn is going to jeopardize potentially U.S. and allied interests elsewhere in the world.
If we become more antagonistic to Russia over this issue, then there's nothing to stop them from becoming more antagonistic to us and to other European countries that are friendly to us.
It just seems like there's no consideration of longer-term consequences of these sorts of feuds.
And we certainly saw over the last 10, 15 years that relations with Russia were made very poor by the constant agitation on our part to expand our influence into what they considered to be their sphere of influence.
And so for them I think Syria is sort of the last straw where we keep pushing for regime change in all of these countries and we keep pushing for greater influence in places that they have influence, and finally they're just not going to put up with it.
Right.
Well, I mean, never mind long-term.
They can't even think two weeks ahead or anything it doesn't look like.
And so you see that with the decision to send some weapons to the rebels in Syria.
There appears to be no plan for what this is going to accomplish.
There's no consideration of how this could eventually lead us into a greater involvement in the conflict down the road.
It's just something that's being done to get people to stop criticizing the administration right now.
Of course it backfired because everybody realized that this decision didn't make sense.
Yeah, and of course they've got to lie, right?
They can't just say, well, you know what?
Hezbollah helped Assad take back the city of Qusayr and we're afraid that Aleppo will be next and so we've had to draw this ridiculous arbitrary line that we just want the rebels to still hold on to Aleppo.
Okay, that's the cause of spelling here.
They can't say that so they've got to pretend it's about sarin gas, which is apparently a lie because they keep saying it even though others are saying that it's not proven yet.
If they're pretending to be sure that it is proven then they're being dishonest.
It seems like best I can tell anyway.
Well, the thing is that even if the evidence of the use of sarin gas is valid, even if the evidence is true, it still doesn't determine who used it, when it was used, why it was used, and why it isn't being used now.
For instance, if it was indeed used by the government in small doses earlier in the year, it seems significant that we're not seeing reports of continued use of it.
So if we're trying to discourage chemical weapons use on general principle, it seems to have worked already so what are we doing getting into the war more deeply?
Right.
That's the real puzzle.
It seems like using the chemical weapons use is basically just a way of covering for Obama's mistake in making that into a red line in the first place and saying, oh, yes, we take it very seriously, so we're going to pretend that this new decision has something to do with that.
It's certainly not helping make the administration's approach seem any more credible or serious.
Okay.
Now, in one of your blog entries, Dan, you referenced the Libya trap.
I forget if that's exactly what you call it.
That's just my notes, but it was kind of the theory that the proof that the Libya war was a good thing was that it was not in America's interest at all.on our part because we love Libyans so much and that actually what that's done now is created a situation where we're being terribly unfair to the Syrians that we're not intervening to help them there.
And, in fact, we're being really cruel if we have to cite our interests as a reason why not to intervene.
And I just thought, I don't know, it's worth letting you explain it your way, but that does kind of seem to be the rhetorical trick that the Democrats have used here with their responsibility to protect.
I guess if I was to really try to phrase it in the form of a question, I could ask you whether you think that this escalation of sending arms and financing to the rebels amounts to the same as declaring that no-fly zone in Libya, where, in effect, they were accepting responsibility for the security of the people of Libya, and then from that point it was just one domino to, well, we've got to go to Tripoli, right?
Well, I mean, there's certainly a similar sort of thinking behind both moves, I think, where the main difference is that because Libya had a relatively weaker government, a weaker military, and had fewer international patrons, that it was safer to escalate more quickly there, whereas in Syria it's not that secure to do that.
But what I was saying about the relationship between Libya and Syria was that the reason that the Syria policy we have today seems to be a sort of hafala that satisfies neither interventionists nor the vast majority of Americans that want to stay out of it is that they're trying to maintain this balance between, on the one hand, following through on the rhetoric surrounding the Libyan war about humanitarian intervention and responsibility to protect civilians, and on the other, saying that the Libyan war was a unique one-time event that met all of these elaborate conditions that will never be repeated.
So they've set themselves up, in a sense, for failure by setting criteria for intervention that Syria will never meet.
For instance, there will be no UN authorization for the use of force.
But they've backed themselves into a corner with all of this rhetoric about the responsibility to protect, and of course the human losses in Syria are 10, maybe 15 times as great as they were in Libya.
And so the idea that we went into Libya to prevent atrocities but we won't go into Syria for the same reason makes their earlier justification for Libya seem rather hollow or opportunistic, which in fact I think it was.
Yeah, clearly I think it was, too.
But it's hard.
I mean, this is always the perennial problem, is you have to argue the argument on its face and then you've got to argue about what's really going on here, too.
And those are always different things.
It seems like a lot of the time, yeah.
Well, so what do you think is really going on here?
Because Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, and Brzezinski, he's the Democrats' Kissinger, and Kissinger, well, he's the Republicans' Kissinger.
And these guys are saying, don't do this, knock it off right now, and America's going ahead anyway over the objections of their leading warmongers.
I mean, come on, what is this?
No, well, it's very puzzling to them, I'm sure, because even when, for example, Kissinger, even when he was behind some pretty awful policies when he was in government, he was attempting to execute some sort of larger strategy.
He was trying, as he saw it, he was trying to advance the U.S. position in the world relative to China and the Soviet Union and so on.
And so he acted with those things in mind.
Here, I think there's not really much of a clear strategy.
It's sort of a default, let's do whatever hurts Iran, because we hate Iran or we're obsessed with this Iranian threat that we perceive.
But this isn't really connected to anything that would make that threat less worrisome or less formidable.
Now, of course, I don't think the Iranian threat is nearly as great as most of these folks do, but the obsession with Iran seems to be driving a lot of these decision-making.
And it doesn't make sense in large part because Iran is already suffering losses, Hezbollah is already suffering losses, simply by being drawn into this conflict in Syria.
We don't need to imitate what they're doing in order for them to lose ground.
And so even if you want to hurt Iran, getting in the middle of it is probably going to backfire on you.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I mean, they're doing to the Iranians what they did to us, which is trick us into intervening too much and spending too much money and making ourselves look real bad, et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
It's the same thing.
And Nasrallah, what, a year and a half ago or two, Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, he was the most popular Arab leader.
And even though he was a Shiite and represents a very small, well, I don't know, very small, but a relatively small minority of Muslims in the world and a small minority of Arabs, for sure.
And he was still the most popular just for facing down Israel back in 2006, I guess, and for whatever other reasons.
And he's completely blown every bit of that political capital, taking the side of Iran and Assad against the Sunni Arab uprising, no doubt about that.
And Iran, whatever points Iran had gained in respect from Sunni Arabs region-wide, their leadership and their populations, too, for standing up to America all this time, that's certainly all evaporated now, even though they're standing up to America there.
No, that's right, because now, as the conflict becomes one that's more sectarian in character, where people perceive it as a sectarian fight, those governments and those movements, such as Hezbollah, that represent the minority sect, as you say, are going to be at a huge disadvantage.
And they are essentially shooting themselves in the foot in order to try to keep Assad propped up.
And to the extent that they can make this into a fight against us, or to the extent that we help them make this a fight against us, that actually mitigates some of that damage that they're suffering, I think.
Yeah.
Well, and as you pointed out here, too, the only rise of any Shiite crescent, any anti-Sunni conglomerate power in the Middle East that you could point to, would have to be America's war in Iraq and the regime change, not just the regime change, but the change in population of who resides in Baghdad and controls it.
That was us, did that.
Well, that's right.
Hussein, for all his many crimes, was the bulwark against Iranian influence in Iraq.
And once you get a majoritarian government in Iraq, you're going to have a more pro-Iranian government.
And this was something that opponents of the invasion pointed out before the invasion, after the invasion, and every year since then.
And so there's a lot of revisionism going on on the part of interventionists who want to ignore that part of the U.S. role in the region, and then say the real failing that the U.S. had was that we left Iraq.
If we stayed in Iraq, Iran wouldn't be able to do any of these things.
And I think that's just completely misinformed.
Instead of being outside these conflicts, sending weapons in maybe, we would still be having U.S. soldiers coming under fire and being attacked on a daily or weekly basis if they were still in Iraq.
And so the idea that withdrawing from Iraq was some terrible strategic blunder, but that invading it wasn't, is something that drives a lot of the thinking of, especially neoconservatives that want to get us into Syria.
Yeah.
Well, and they just can't deal honestly with the facts at all.
It wasn't our enemies that threw us out of Iraq, it was our friends.
It was the guys that we helped them write the Constitution, we helped them win the election, we helped them form the United Iraqi Alliance of the Shiite parties, of the Supreme Islamic Council, the Dawah Party, and Muqtada al-Sadr's group.
And we put them in power, and we surged to help them finish off the Sunnis in Baghdad in the civil war and make it an 85% Shiite city, and then they said, now get the hell out.
And in fact, in the height of the surge was when the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Forces snuck into the country and made the compromise deal between Sadr and Hakeem, Abdulaziz al-Hakeem, and the compromise to replace Jafari with Nuri al-Maliki.
Rice didn't want Jafari anymore, so Iran said, okay, we'll do Maliki instead.
It was up to them at the height of the surge, at the height of America's escalation in 2007.
Right, and I think that exposes the lie that it is, the idea that if we just had a military presence there that we could wield some sort of political clout.
The fact is that our presence there was deeply resented, understandably so, and it wasn't going to certainly bring any goodwill by continuing it up until now.
And so I guess one of the most curious things about this whole debate is the extent to which people that want to get us into Syria still can't let go of the myth that they have about the Iraq war.
And I suppose they would have to be attached to those myths in order to think that getting into a war in Syria makes sense.
Right.
Well, and again, back to the unreality where they're not even willing to admit at all, even though Obama and his State Department have officially listed the al-Nusra Front as al-Qaeda guys and off the list, and all day long they refer to them as, we want to support the moderate rebels so as to marginalize these guys or whatever, but then they still can't tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth that, yeah, these are the bad guys from our last war, the guys we're intervening on the side of now.
And whether that was because this is a strategic blunder or that was, you know, but they can't talk honestly about that, the people with this agenda, so they just have to go right on.
Well, and the idea that there's a sufficiently large, quote-unquote, moderate faction that even could be supported and that could be used to marginalize these groups is a huge exaggeration of their strength within the opposition.
I think there was some recent report saying seven of nine opposition groups identified as Islamist groups.
The vast majority of these opposition groups would not fit our definition, certainly, of what a moderate group would be.
And so the idea that there's a good, moderate opposition looking within the larger Syrian opposition, I think it's part of this con just to get us into the conflict.
It's not a realistic option.
Right.
Yeah, it certainly isn't the Northern Storm Brigade if it's not the Al-Nusra Front.
And it certainly isn't the Al-Farooq Brigade, even though they're on the record saying they want elections.
They're also the one guy on video eating the guy's heart and lungs, the cannibal.
He's from the Al-Farooq Pro-Election Democracy Brigade, as opposed to those extremists in the Al-Nusra Front, you know.
Right.
And to some extent, the idea that you can back an insurgency that's involved in a brutal civil war, but also require them to live up to a certain set of political ideals that they've never held is itself a sort of an absurdity.
It's an admission that we want to have it both ways.
We want to get into the conflict, but we don't want to be implicated in any of the wrongdoing that these insurgents will inevitably engage in.
And I think it's just it's crazy.
All right.
Well, so I'm sorry.
We're already a little over time.
But let me ask you one last thing about, you know, how you judge the politics here.
Are we just the slow kind of waltz down the slippery slope here sooner or later?
It's just going to be a no fly zone and then it'll be an invasion and we'll have some carpet bombing and then we'll switch sides and start bombing the jihadists.
And then we'll be there for 20 years.
Or is there is there a way that I don't know, the Marine Corps might stop the Air Force from getting us into this or something that could that could obstruct the path we're on.
The only thing that gives me any confidence that we're not going to escalate beyond the current level of involvement is that the Pentagon is dead set against it.
And and, of course, that's that's not entirely reassuring, because, of course, if the president decides that we're going to escalate the conflict, they will do what they're told.
And that we saw that in Libya.
Robert Gates wanted no part of the Libyan war, but Obama decided we were going to go in.
And so he did what he was told.
My my hope is that the military objections to getting involved in the Syrian war directly will be enough to provide a rationale for Obama to stay out.
And we'll give him or we'll give him the excuse if he needs one to avoid the pressure that's already started building on him to do more.
Unfortunately, as we saw in the Libyan case, when events on the ground reach a certain point and it would seem to be too embarrassing to stay out because, let's say the regime is about to win, then there's going to be this moment where Obama flips just like he did in Libya.
That's my fear.
And when he does that, I think it would be a disastrous mistake.
And then we will end up owning the situation.
We will end up being stuck there for a long time if we get involved in the fight directly.
Yeah, well, so then when they leak is a Jeffrey Goldberg piece that says the Pentagon shoots down Kerry's Syria airstrike plan.
It really does sound like the civilians are out ahead of the Pentagon on this, or at least according to the way this was leaked.
Anyway, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff loudly contradicting the secretary of state, John Kerry, at a at a meeting and saying, you know, hey, listen, a no fly zone means a lot more than just a no fly zone.
And I object and all that kind of thing.
But so it doesn't sound like the point I'm getting to.
It doesn't sound like the Obama administration has doesn't sound like Obama has ordered Kerry, for example, to hide behind the Pentagon's reluctance.
Unless, of course, that's where this article came from.
Is the administration kind of hiding behind the military's reluctance and Kerry's just playing the fool in this one?
Or I don't know.
How do you read that?
Right.
Well, my my impression is that that leak came.
I mean, the Goldberg got that information from Kerry's people because of the attempt to try to, I think, to try to embarrass military officers into refraining from making their objections to involvement in serious conflict.
But whatever the source of that leak, I think as long as there is strong opposition to these more aggressive military measures from the military leadership, it offers a small chance that we're going to stay out of it or at least not get more involved in it than we already are.
But then that's what I thought prior to the decision to arm the opposition.
And they ended up caving in on that as well.
So it's it's very worrisome.
But there doesn't seem to be any idea of where the U.S. is trying to go in dealing with this or what it is the U.S. is trying to accomplish.
All right.
Well, welcome to my world.
That's exactly what I think, too.
But bog them down, bog everybody down in a no win war forever.
That if if you if I tried to come up with a rational explanation, that would be the best I could do.
But I'm not sure I believe that that is the explanation.
All right.
Hey, thank you so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Daniel.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That's great.
Daniel Larrison.
He writes at the American Conservative magazine.
Their Web site is the American conservative dot com.
And his blog, you know, Mia, I'm probably saying that wrong.
I forgot.
It's not in front of me right now.
Is the American conservative.com/Larrison.
And you follow him on Twitter, too, at Daniel Larrison.
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The Journal of the Future Freedom Foundation.
Every month, Plum Line individualist editor Sheldon Richman brings you important news and opinions on policy by heroic FFF president Jacob Hornberger, hard hitting journalist columnist James Bovard and others from the best of the libertarian movement.
The future freedom tackles the most important issues facing our country from the bankrupt and insane welfare and regulatory states to foreign wars and empire, the dismal state of our economy and ongoing assaults on civil liberties.
This society needs peace and freedom for prosperity to prevail.
Subscribe to the future freedom in print for just twenty five dollars a year or online for fifteen dollars a year at FFF.org/subscribe and hurry up because this summer they'll be running my articles about the wars in Libya, Syria and Somalia in the future freedom to that's FFF.org/subscribe for the future freedom.
And tell him Scott sent you.
Admit it.
Our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Horton here for liberty stickers dot com.
I made up most of them and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun grabbers and status of all stripes, go to liberty stickers dot com and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Own a bookstore, sell guns at the show, get the wholesalers deal.
Buy any hundred stickers and they drop down in price to a dollar a piece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money too.
That's liberty stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Over at AIPAC, the leaders of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., they're constantly proclaiming unrivaled influence on Capitol Hill.
And they should be proud.
The NRA and AARP's efforts make them look like puppy dogs in comparison to the campaigns of intimidation regularly run by the neoconservatives and Israel firsters against their political enemies.
But the Israel lobby does not remain unopposed.
At the Council for the National Interest, they put America first, insisting on an end to the empire's unjustified support for Israel's aggression against its neighbors and those whose land it occupies, and pushing back against the lobby's determined campaign in favor of U.S. attacks against Israel's enemies.
CNI also does groundbreaking work on the trouble with evangelical Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia and drumming up support for this costly and counterproductive policy.
Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
Just go to councilforthenationalinterest.org and click donate under about us at the top of the page.
And thanks.
Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
But I'm happy to talk about just about anything else you've ever heard me cover on the show as well.
So check out youtube.com/scotthortonshow for some examples and email scott at scotthorton.org for more details.
See you there.