James Bradley, author of the bestseller Flags of Our Fathers, discusses why Americans don’t understand Orlando shooter Omar Mateen’s motive, and still can’t comprehend the lessons of terrorism blowback 15 years after 9/11.
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Introducing James Bradley.
He is the author of several bestsellers, including Flyboys, Flags of Our Fathers, and The Imperial Cruise.
A Secret History of Empire and War.
Welcome to the show, James.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Absolutely loved the Clint Eastwood movies based on your book here.
Haven't read the book, but certainly a very important part of cinema history and World War history and everything in this country and in our culture.
So very important work there.
Very happy to have you on the show to talk about it.
Or not that, but other things.
But to talk to you.
And also I should say, I have Imperial Cruise on the shelf.
And I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
But I really want to.
And I hope that someday I'll get a chance to dig through that thing and interview you all about Imperial Cruise.
A Secret History of Empire and War.
Doesn't that sound great, everybody?
Yeah.
Alright, now this one is called Omar's Motive.
Well, it's because he believes in religion and that makes him hate good things.
Everybody knows that.
What's your beef?
My beef is that we're not looking at the whole world.
I mean, there's a cause and effect here.
I think if we started bombing Australia, we'd have Australian terrorism in the United States.
It's as simple as that.
I remember traveling around Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
And I was in a Laotian valley.
And I was talking to a gorilla who back in the 60s was trying to say to these illiterate peasants, Hey, there's an America that you got to worry about.
And there's a war over the hills.
And they didn't know what he was talking about.
And they wouldn't get organized.
Then a U.S. warplane came over the valley, dropped a bomb on someone's home.
And he said, wow.
He said, just in that second, they all became radicalized.
And they wanted to fight.
So bombing is very, very emotional.
And we're secretly drone bombing around the world.
But the secret is only kept from Americans.
If you drop a bomb on someone's house in some valley out in Pakistan, everybody in the valley immediately knows what happened.
They can see it.
They see the bomb fall.
They know who did it.
But Americans, we're not allowed to see this stuff.
It's secret.
Let's not talk about it.
CIA.
What we are experiencing with this terrorism in the United States is blowback.
Blowback for what we're doing overseas.
Well, so there's a lot there.
But first of all, I think one of the real problems that we're facing was illustrated in an interview a couple weeks ago.
I saw the clip of Jeremy Scahill on the Bill Maher show on HBO.
And Scahill is going, no, man, look.
And he wrote the book on it.
Look, we're assassinating these people.
We're killing innocent people.
And to Bill Maher, who I hate to say I think really represents a lot of New York, D.C. conventional wisdom on these kinds of things, says, yeah, but compared to marching the entire Army and Marine Corps into Iraq like George W. Bush did.
And so it's sort of like nuking Hiroshima, right?
Anything less than that is perfectly permissible now.
And regardless of the consequences, because they couldn't possibly be as bad as the consequences of that big thing.
Well, you know, they're just debating theory almost.
I'm just talking on the ground.
The Boston Marathon bomber, when he was huddled in that boat where they eventually found him, he scrawled in the boat.
Here, let me get the exact words.
He scrawled in the side of the boat, stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.
A Yemeni testified in front of the Senate.
He said, what radicals have previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant.
There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.
So Omar Mateen, with the Orlando shooting, he got on the cell phone and he said, stop bombing my country, which was Afghanistan.
And that was not reported.
The first report was that NBC News said that he pledged to ISIS.
Now, he said many, many contradictory things and he did say something about ISIS.
But his real beef, who eyewitnesses talked about this, was stop bombing my country.
Bombing is very emotional.
Again, I think if we start bombing New Zealand, we're going to have New Zealand terrorism in the United States.
Yeah.
Well, a nice reminder of the Giuliani moment there with Ron Paul in 2007 when he said, look, we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
12 or whatever it was at that point.
We've been bombing them for 15.
We've been bombing them a lot longer than they've been bombing us.
And Giuliani said, that's absurd.
He said, of all the absurd explanations for 9-11 I've ever heard, that's the craziest one of all.
That the attack was waged to avenge Iraqis we had killed?
Who ever heard of such nonsense?
Well, Winston Churchill was bombing Iraq in the late 1920s.
So, they've had some experience with Anglo-American bombing.
Hey, you know what though?
So, let me play devil's advocate for a second here.
Some right-winger listening will say, oh yeah, well, the Laotians never came here and did suicide attacks.
We killed so many Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians.
We occupied their land for more than a decade and in a lot more violent way than we've occupied the Middle East.
If that's even possible.
And yet, we didn't have people come in here, help Ben on revenge and all this kind of thing.
Is it what?
Isn't the difference because they're Buddhists and our current terrorist enemies are Muslims?
No, it's totally different geography.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest physical barrier in the world.
Ho Chi Minh had a domestic plan that he knew would reverberate into the streets of America.
There's a lot of reasons.
I mean, that was back in the 1960s.
But, you know, now I think if we start bombing Laos, we're going to have Laotian terrorism in the United States.
It's the only way they can respond.
But my point is that this is not being debated and it's not being shown.
And the American public doesn't get it.
As evidence, Attorney General Lynch went down to Orlando and she said the key here is we have to love each other more.
That's the key against terrorism, love each other more.
Well, you know, just a few days before, Obama had droned some people to death.
I mean, we have to love more than just ourselves.
But her ability to say that and not get laughed at means that we Americans are not looking at the whole world context of what's going on.
We're only looking at the effect, the blowback.
We're not examining the cause.
Well, James, we've got a real problem.
Because even if the American people finally start catching on to this, that, you know, I do remember that there was a 1990s and a no-fly zone and a blockade and some al-Qaeda attacks, even back then, the Africa embassies and these kinds of things, that maybe history didn't begin on September 11th.
How could we ever get the Republicans and the Democrats to admit it?
Because they're the ones who dug this grave for us.
And they're the only ones who can knock it off.
But in order to knock it off, they'd have to admit your basic truth here as their premise that really they started it.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Check out Jacob Hornberger's great new book, The CIA Terrorism and the Cold War, the Evil of the National Security State.
They swear we need him, but the Future Freedom Foundation's Hornberger is having none of it.
Hornberger shows how from the beginning, Empire has diminished Americans' freedom far more than our enemies ever could.
And all while undermining everything we profess to believe in and dealing with other nations.
The CIA Terrorism and the Cold War, the Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger.
Get it on Kindle for just a dollar at Amazon.com You know, I don't want to get into who started what, because then you really have to go back a long way.
My point is that we control the cycle of violence.
We are doing something that's being kept from the American people.
We're killing Muslims and then we're surprised when they want to kill us.
But time after time after time, they mention a word bombing.
It's the bombing of Yemen, it's the bombing of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.
That is highly emotional to people.
And I know I'm repeating myself, but you're down there in Texas and I'm in Connecticut and I think if the Connecticut National Guard starts bombing Texas, I'll bet we're going to have some Texans in Connecticut causing problems.
Yeah, one way or the other, you can bet that for sure.
Yeah, no, and I really appreciate the reference to Australia here.
Just pick another country at random that we don't have beef with.
You really think that we could just slaughter them unendingly and they wouldn't do something about it?
But, you know, here's the thing though, James, isn't who started it all important here?
Because if I'm a hawk and you say that, look, when you bomb Al-Qaeda in Yemen with drones, you just make more of them, my answer to that is, yeah, but they started it.
What are we supposed to do?
Not kill our enemies?
We got to at least try because those guys are Al-Qaeda guys and they're still trying to kill us.
And so, you know, hey, but if you say actually, no, it was because George H.W. Bush took advantage of having the USSR out of the way and invaded and occupied Saudi Arabia for more than a decade, in order to bomb Iraq and Bill Clinton kept the policy up and that's what caused the terrorist war against us, simple, plain truth, 100% scientific fact, indisputable, then you got the Trump.
No, it was our side that started it.
The whole thing of terrorism against America was always a reaction, never the reason for the empire, always a reaction against it.
Well, I guess my point is that we could talk about who started it and then different sides could argue.
I'm interested in how we can stop it.
I don't want people machine gun in nightclubs.
I don't want people so emotional about American bombing that they'll do anything within this country.
So instead of debating who started it, I'd like to have us stop it.
Yeah, no, I'm with you.
I mean, well, but the point being we got to change the narrative of what people think is going on around here.
So if history began on September 11th and we're still fighting a defensive war and people are going to support that.
I know, but you and I are just using words here and there's a lot of euphemisms and then various sides can argue.
What I'm talking about is opening up the aperture, seeing the facts that, wow, here's Orlando and four days before the president droned some people to death and got them upset.
We're not seeing that connection.
We're seeing one half of the picture.
We're only looking at one half of the reality here.
There's a tit for tat.
There's a cause and effect.
That's all I'm asking for is a worldview.
Yeah, well, there's certainly no doubt about it.
I mean, if you go back to the first World Trade Center bombing and every al-Qaeda attack against the U.S. since then, it's the same story every time.
Look at Faisal Shahzad.
That wasn't al-Qaeda.
That was the Pakistani Taliban.
Well, what beef did we ever have with them?
Except, oh, we were drone bombing them all the time.
And then when he went home to Pakistan to visit relatives, he saw the results of it and volunteered to do an attack in the U.S. and almost succeeded in blowing up Times Square.
Thank goodness his bomb didn't go off.
But he told the judge, oh, yeah, this is all about the drone strikes.
I saw them with my own eyes.
What's going on over there?
You know, I wrote a book called Flyboys about a decade ago, and it's about American bombing out in the Pacific, and it's about a lot of things.
But what was very interesting is that the Germans and the Japanese could tolerate an American ground combat.
They captured a soldier.
They put him in a POW camp.
He was a normal human being like them.
Flyboys, Americans who bombed Germany, Hitler decreed that these were devils from the sky.
You know, you could walk up to a house and fight war and shoot if you were an American soldier and you're thought to be a normal human being.
But guys who dropped bombs, these were devils that could be tortured and killed and just the worst of the worst.
And Emperor Hirohito, you know, reserved a place in hell for flyboys.
So that's my point.
Bombing is extremely emotional.
And if you'd like to create some different type of terrorism in the United States, just pick your country and bomb it.
People get upset.
Yeah, well, and as you point out here, that's what 9-11 represented, you know, in reality and in the American imagination, is this attack from above, you know, out of the sky that here we are 15 years later, you still have boys joining the Army.
They were toddlers at the time and they're joining up over that attack back then.
So not very hard to think that maybe someone over on the other side might feel the same sort of way.
That's a very good point is that when Americans were radicalized by the bombing of the World Trade Center, we call it patriotism.
And then when Muslims are radicalized by American bombing, we call it terrorism.
Well, and of course, you have guys from, you know, Texas and Kansas and California and all over the U.S. joining up to fight for people who died in New York and D.C. because they might as well be our next-door neighbor when it comes to that kind of thing, right?
Well, same thing in the Arab world, too.
Just because the Brits and the French drew some borders back when doesn't mean that Egyptians and Saudis don't care when Americans kill Iraqis.
Of course they do.
Yeah, cause and effect.
We better face it.
We better open the aperture.
All right, so here's the thing.
I think it's really important that you are saying this.
A lot of people have said this before, but you're the guy that wrote Flags of Our Fathers, which means that, you know, for good or ill or however exactly the science behind it works, you have that kind of red, white, and blue maybe Ronald Reagan-esque armor, defense of patriotism that you can say this and it's still okay.
We know how American you are.
We know how red, white, and blue you are.
And so when you're saying this, it's not because you're some horrible blame-America-firster communist or something.
It's because you love America.
You care about us.
You're trying to do the right thing and there are few people, really, who are in a position who can go into an argument about something like this with that kind of social-psychological context behind them.
Again, to bring up Ron Paul, Mr. Square, still married to the same girl he's been with since he was 16 years old and a Republican, a conservative, a Protestant from Texas and he says you can be more anti-war and you can't really call him a pinko because he's really not.
I hope that you'll do more like this.
I really appreciate this and I hope that you see the importance of your position there.
Maybe you can have your guys try and get you on CNN and some of these kind of things because you have the gravitas or whatever to be able to say this.
Oh boy, you give me much too much credit.
I'm just a storyteller.
In 1975, I was 20 years old and I hitchhiked all across Afghanistan with a 19-year-old Japanese girlfriend.
We weren't molested.
We were treated with respect.
I could go anywhere in Afghanistan.
You know, my son's out traveling the world right now.
He can't go to Afghanistan.
I wonder what happened.
Yeah.
Let's see.
July 3rd, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski sends a memo to Jimmy Carter.
Alright, well listen James, you did a great work and a great interview and thanks again for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me.
Alright y'all, that is James Bradley.
He wrote Flags of Our Fathers, which if you guys haven't seen the movie of that and then the sequel, the Iwo Jima one, from the Japanese point of view, man, you gotta see those films.
They're really great.
And he wrote The Imperial Cruise, and that's Scott Horton's show.
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