Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, 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 Mark Perry, again, writing for the American Conservative Magazine.
And this is a doozy for you here.
1984, the year America didn't go to war.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you?
It's great to be here.
Thank you.
I'm doing fine.
Hope you are, too.
I am.
I'm doing great.
And I really appreciate you joining me here on the show today, and especially to talk about this very interesting thing.
You know, this comes up all the time, because essentially it's really difficult to come up with anything Iran ever did to us to justify us attacking them.
And there are people who want to justify attacking them all the time.
And so they have to go back to 1983, when I was in second grade, when Return of the Jedi came out.
1983, there was a giant bombing at a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
Killed 241 Marines.
And this is invoked, essentially, in place of any other examples of their aggression against us.
And so, I guess, can we just start with you telling the basic story, the outline of what the troops were doing there, and what happened with the attack itself?
Sure.
This was a big moment for those of us who lived through it.
This was a big moment in American history.
It defined a lot.
And it defined a lot for the U.S. Marine Corps.
It was 1983, the Reagan administration, and Lebanon was unraveling.
There was a civil war going on.
The Israelis had come in to take advantage of that.
The Palestinians were on the ground.
People were getting shot up.
I mean, it was a nightmare.
And there was a real concern on the international community that the unraveling in Lebanon could unravel elsewhere in the region.
And so, we put together an international peacekeeping force with our allies in Europe, particularly the French, and deployed soldiers to kind of—deployed Marines to south Beirut as kind of a presence to bring stability.
And for a time, it did.
But this is the Middle East, and people like to sort through their own problems, don't want us there.
And we had been going back and forth with the Iranians since the revolution.
Remember, they had taken hostages.
And relations between Iran and the United States were quite bad.
And so, their proxies in Lebanon were intent to teach us a lesson, teach the imperial power a lesson.
It was a different time.
We had just gotten out of Vietnam just eight years before.
People were very skeptical.
The military was very skeptical that we should ever use troops as part of a peacekeeping mission.
And in October of 1983, a suicide truck bomber with ties to the Iranians, and probably ordered by the Iranians, brought down our four-story Marine barracks near the Beirut International Airport, killed 241 Marines.
It was a terrible tragedy, unbelievable explosion, shocking to the United States.
And it set off a debate inside the Reagan administration of whether and how and against who we should retaliate.
All right, let me stop right there for a second.
It always just sort of goes without saying, I guess, and sometimes with saying that Hezbollah did it.
And yet, I saw Pat Buchanan years ago, and he was a speechwriter for Reagan, not exactly the highest-ranking guy.
But he said, well, no, it was the Amal militia.
And by the way, that doesn't acquit Iran at all, because in fact, the Amal militia was even closer to Iran at the time than Hezbollah was.
But just as a point of fact, what about that?
Well, it's a very good point.
I did a deep dive on this.
It's not clear that Hezbollah existed as such at the time.
Certainly, a lot of Shia cells allied with Iran did.
People shrug when you say it was Hezbollah.
They go, yeah, maybe it was Hezbollah.
I think it was Amal.
They were tied to Iran.
I think Amal had a lot to do with the hostage-taking in Lebanon and not Hezbollah.
I have strong reason to believe this.
So do a lot of people.
But, you know, six of one, half dozen of the other.
These were Iranian proxies.
I think you could walk this right to the door of the government in Tehran.
But on the other hand, you know, and we've been going at it with Iran.
I mean, let's be honest.
We've been going at it with Iran in the region for 40 years.
But it began, I think, with the Marine barracks bombing and the taking of the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
We've been going back and forth with them.
Well, in fact, it's been going on for 60 years, right?
Ever since America overthrew their democratically elected prime minister and reinstalled their monarch in 1953, which is what led to that Revolution of 79 and that hostage crisis, right?
Yeah, I think you can connect the dots that way.
I don't deny that at all.
And you're right, it's a very ugly history.
I mean, 26 years is not that long to me now that I'm 40-something.
Jimmy Carter was asked then, well, hey, didn't we overthrow their government in 1953?
And he goes, oh, come on, that was ancient history.
But actually, it not only happened in 1953, but the guy that we installed in power had ruled that whole time up until the revolution.
So it was current history.
I mean, 26 years ago, Bill Clinton was our president.
If the Iranians had overthrown him and installed Ayatollah, would we be over it by now?
Probably not, you know?
Yeah, you know, it's hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of other people, but it's often very useful to do so if we can.
You know, we were all poised to go into Iran to save the Iranians from the Soviets, who we thought, after Afghanistan, were going to come south through Iran and grab a port on the Persian Gulf.
And we were prepared to deploy troops to stop that on behalf of the Iranian people.
But, you know, here we go again.
This would be like, you know, greeted as liberators and parades for us.
And people here who know Iran and people who understand the U.S.'s reputation around the world knew damn well we weren't going to be greeted as liberators.
So those plans were scrapped.
And that was really the basis of the Carter Doctrine, right?
Was after the Afghan invasion that they said, oh, they might come in and seize all of Persia, too.
And then where will we be?
Right.
Well, you know, there were a lot of us in town.
I mean, I was very young, so I certainly wasn't a part of this debate.
But there were a lot of people in town who said, listen, if the Russians want to invade Iran, good luck to them.
You know, it is a complicated history.
There's a lot of blame to go around.
But there's no question that Iran was behind the barracks bombing.
And if you talk to U.S. Marine Corps senior military officers, they don't forget this kind of thing.
And they're anxious to exact their pound of flesh from the Iranians when and if they can.
And that's what's kind of been motivating a lot of the talk around Iran lately here in the Trump years is, you know, memories of this very terrible incident.
Okay, y'all, I'm doing a fun drive to raise money for an advance on my new book.
I published my last book, Fool's Errand, through the Libertarian Institute, and it worked out great.
There was no one to boss me around about it, and I was able to publish within a few days after dotting and crossing the last I's and T's.
This time, I'm going to do the same thing, only instead of starving and borrowing money from friends to try to get it done, I'm coming to you loyal listeners first.
I'm trying to raise $20,000 by September to help me get the book done, edited, and out the door in time for Christmas and the 2020 campaign season.
You liked Fool's Errand?
Well, this is like that, only for all the terror wars.
I want what you want, for us to have a voice in this upcoming presidential election debate.
Hey, there's a new book out that says it doesn't have to be this way, finally.
Frankly, I need your help to get it done.
Simple as that.
Check out ScottHorton.org slash donate for all the details about all the kickbacks, including signed copies of the book when it comes out.
That's ScottHorton.org slash donate.
And thanks, y'all.
Well, and yeah, it's certainly a thing.
And this is part of your story when we talked before about General Mattis, that this is part of his grudge against Iran, that he can never get over it.
You know, I'm told by, I think it was Wayne White from the State Department that, oh, over there in the State Department, they hate Iran more than the Marines do for the hostage thing that they just can't get over.
It's all very personal.
It might have been you who quoted Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton's secretary of state, saying, get along with Iran and make peace with them.
Yeah, right.
Forget it.
Never.
Kind of attitude.
You know, it's understandable, I guess, from their point of view, but not very professional when it comes to really taking care of business here.
You know, I'm as much a progressive as anybody else, frankly.
And I decry the Eisenhower decision.
And frankly, Eisenhower didn't, in the wake of the decision to overthrow Mossadegh, he really was kind of haunted by it.
Thought it was a bad, probably a bad decision.
But there it is.
We did it.
And there's a lot of blame, a lot of finger pointing at the United States, and for good reason.
But, you know, we're dealing here with a revolutionary regime in Tehran.
I think, you know, I think the Iranian people have a right to choose their own government.
And we ought to leave them alone and we don't need a war with them.
But we don't need to kid ourselves about them either.
I mean, these are not, you know, your normal Saturday night dance partners.
These are tough minded, clear eyed, focused people who are interested in their national interest.
And sometimes it doesn't clash with ours.
You know, if you're sitting in Iran, if you're sitting in Tehran and you look across your border, you see American troops.
So, you know, they have every right to be paranoid.
On the other hand, you know, this is going to be when we decide to repair relations with Iran.
It's going to it's going to take a long time because there's a lot of blood on the floor here.
Yeah, well, it seems like in all of these, we are in such a position of strength to them that we really have nothing to lose.
If Nixon can make peace with Mao Zedong, then anybody can make peace with anybody should be the rule.
That's it.
You know, I don't disagree with that.
I think that's right.
But so here's the deal, though.
Now, on this story, I mean, one might ask, right, sort of like with the Pompeo claims about Iran killing American soldiers in Iraq War Two.
Well, if it wasn't good enough for Cheney to convince Bush to bomb Iran in 2007, then how's that supposed to be a justification for war now?
Well, same thing here.
If this wasn't I mean, according to your article here, I don't think it's they even entertain the idea of actually bombing Iran at all.
They were talking about bombing Iran's allies in Syria and Lebanon.
And then you tell the story about how that didn't really play out, which is very interesting.
But it seems like it didn't even occur to Reagan that, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to send a B-52 over Tehran and see how they like that.
Not for a moment.
Yeah, no, that you know, it's.
No, you're exactly right.
We were going to we were going to retaliate against Iranian assets in in Lebanon, in Syria.
But easier said than done.
You know, people have surface to air missiles.
They can bring down American aircraft.
American aircraft was brought down in Syria at the time.
Jesse Jackson went to Syria to get the pilot out.
And there is a price to pay for retaliation.
And sometimes the price is too big.
I mean, John Vesey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who I knew and talked to at the time and who I really admired.
I mean, I really admired, but he's about as conservative as you can get.
And he wasn't willing to engage in this kind of retaliation.
He thought it was beneath the dignity of the United States to, as I think he said very quietly to some of his colleagues, you know, what are we going to do?
What are we doing?
We're deploying F-16s to to kill bearded guys and pickup trucks.
Give me a break.
That's not why we have the military.
Well, let's not do it.
And we just got out of a war in which we didn't have clear goals.
That was highly questionable.
That seemed to go on forever.
And that was very expensive.
That was called Vietnam.
Let's not do this.
And I think that, you know, his counsel and Weinberger's counsel to, you know, terrible as this event was at the Marine barracks, it's it's not worth going going in with both feet and then trying to figure out why at the end of it.
Let's just not do it.
That was and it was a hell.
As you see my article, that was it was a hell of a debate.
It was a knockdown drag out Donnybrook of a debate inside the administration at the time and inside the Reagan administration.
Well, I want to hear all that.
But to skip ahead, Ronald Reagan famously wrote in his diary, Ron Pollock's bringing this up all the time that he realized that, man, he should just get out of there.
And that, as he put it, the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics was just create a situation was too complicated to expect for the Americans to have, you know, a positive role in any real way.
And so people criticize him for cutting and running and this kind of thing.
But he said it was simply the smart thing to do.
There were no intelligent options for how to intervene here at all.
What were they even doing?
They're parked there other than waiting to get bombed.
Well, you know, this was this was General Vesey's point of view and the military's point.
Every single member of the Joint Chiefs staff thought it was a bad idea.
We don't do peacekeeping.
You know, you don't have a military.
You don't deploy a military to put countries together.
You deploy a military to bring countries down.
And people just kind of rolled their eyes and said, you know, we're going to have a peacekeeping mission.
By the way, we had a replay of this in Somalia in the Clinton years, where, you know, we, out of the best of intentions, deployed peacekeeping forces to Mogadishu.
And we ended up with, what, 16 dead and not accomplishing a mission with people arguing, let's go get them, let's go get them, let's go get them.
And Clinton made the same decision Reagan did.
It's not worth it.
You know, it's one thing to, you know, to protect tankers, I think, in the Persian Gulf.
And it's another thing to, you know, send shells flying at Shia militias in Lebanon or Syria or Somalia.
You know, we have to pick and choose our national security interests very carefully.
And I think Reagan made the right decision, what he called a redeployment.
Other people say, well, he cut and run.
But, you know, what were the other options?
The other option was get mired into a conflict with an uncertain but dedicated enemy over a long period of time that will cost a lot of lives and that won't end.
Who wants that?
We've had that.
It doesn't work.
Hey, guys, a quick programming note for you.
If you signed up for the Just the Interviews feed at the Libertarian Institute, you're probably going to need to go over and sign up at ScottHorton.org instead, or at least if you're on iTunes there.iTunes has canceled the Just the Interviews feed from the Institute, I guess, just because it's redundant with the ScottHorton.org feed.
So either go over to ScottHorton.org and sign up for Just the Interviews there or stay at the Institute and sign up for the other podcast feed.
And then that way you'll get my show, plus the great Kyle Anzalone, Pete Raymond, and of course, Patrick McFarlane and Keith Knight as well.
That's all at ScottHorton.org or LibertarianInstitute.org.
All right.
So please talk about the fight between George Shultz and Cap Weinberger here.
In fact, tell us a little bit about these guys first, if you could, because you sure do a great job of it in this piece.
Well, thanks.
I met Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense.
This guy was, I mean, you know, he seemed old.
He would kind of fall forward on the balls of his feet when he walked and he was kind of stooped over, craggy faced.
But he was tough as nails and he knew how to run the Defense Department and he could be exasperating.
And he had a way of just getting his way.
And he was against this deployment in Lebanon, thought it was an overextension and not going to work.
And he was against the retaliation.
And he and George Shultz, who'd gone back 30 years, they'd both been executives at Bechtel, worked in previous administrations.
George Shultz wanted absolute retaliation.
George Shultz, kind of professorial, wide eyed guy, very articulate, but slow speaking.
But behind the scenes, just as tough as nails, had a withering stare, could write an evaluation that would end careers and had no hesitation to do so.
Very outspoken.
And he thought there ought to be retaliation.
Weinberger didn't think there should be retaliation and they crossed swords over a period of six months or so.
And it was really ugly.
I think the difference here was that, you know, Weinberger just basically slow rolled, as it's called.
He kind of just dragged his feet and dragged on the debate and finally ended up exasperating George Shultz, who just kind of after a while threw up his arms and said, I just can't, I can't get, I can't get this done.
And Reagan, who hated personal confrontations, would oversee this and at times almost walk out of the room.
Well, this is an unusual Secretary of Defense versus Secretary of State.
This is not unusual in American history.
It goes back to the founding of the republic.
And we can see it.
I mean, we've seen it in administration after administration.
Donald Rumsfeld was not at war in Iraq.
He was at war against Rice.
So, you know, this is this is part of almost part of American political tradition.
But the Weinberger-Shultz fight, which Weinberger eventually won against intervention after the Marine barracks bombing, was really one of the, you know, great bureaucratic fights in American presidential history.
And Weinberger won it.
I think that, you know, one of the things that I mentioned in my article that I think is true is that Weinberger was a soldier in World War II.
Entered as a private that went to officer candidate school, then became a lieutenant and fought at the Battle of Buna, which was one of the ugliest battles of World War II against the Japanese in New Guinea.
And he survived it.
But it was a searing experience.
And he never talked about it.
But this was jungle warfare at its worst.
The Japanese involved in cannibalism and stacking the dead in front of their bunkers.
And this was a combat nightmare.
And Weinberger survived.
And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Vesey, survived Anzio.
He was a private on the beach at Anzio in Italy in World War II.
And was made an officer on site because of his leadership and became chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
These were guys who understood and knew about war.
And they were really unwilling, you know, they were willing to take on the Japanese and the Germans because America's existence was at, and democracy's existence was at issue.
But in Lebanon, America's interests were not an issue and democracy was not an issue.
So they were very hesitant.
Anyway, it's frankly, it's a hell of a story to read about it.
And it's a hell of a story to write about.
I enjoyed writing the piece and kind of revisiting those times.
I think that they do have lessons for us now.
Well, yeah, it's especially interesting to hear you write about Weinberger and Vesey both essentially saying that bombing weak powers, as you put it before, guys with beards and pickup trucks, in other words, militia men in their own country, is beneath the dignity of a great power.
We don't do stuff like that.
We fight other great powers if we have to only.
We don't, you know, we don't do nation building and we don't do peacekeeping.
You have a military to destroy things, not to build things.
These, you know, these were classic guys who, you know, they understood what a military was there for and they were willing to use it in some circumstances.
But they weren't going to use it against guys, you know, bearded guys in pickup trucks in Lebanon.
They just, they rolled their eyes when George Shultz would say, we need to go get them.
And they'd say, well, who, where, how?
Well, and you say in here, though, that at one point Reagan finally said, yes, hit them and gave explicit orders to Weinberger to go ahead and do an attack.
And Weinberger just refused to give the order and let the French go on without us.
It's a very controversial incident.
And I think that's the kind of insubordination I'm into.
It's very ironic, though, when you have the you and I are into that kind of insubordination, except in certain circumstances.
You know, that's the problem with it.
And it's not clear now.
And I think Weinberger is responsible for muddying the water on this.
But the jury is still out 30 years later about whether the order was actually given by Reagan.
Certainly Bob McFarland, Bud McFarland, the national security advisor, thought that the order was given.
But, you know, Caspar Weinberger, being Caspar Weinberger, kind of showed up at the office, had his coffee and talked to his secretary and got his schedule together.
And the phone rang and McFarland said, well, why aren't our fighters bombing positions in Lebanon?
Why don't you implement that order?
And Weinberger said very calmly, gee, Bud, what order?
So, you know, and it denied ever after an order was given.
But there was an understanding that Reagan wanted this done.
And I think if Reagan had called Weinberger and said, God damn it, get it done, Cap, it would have been done.
But Reagan never made that call.
And Weinberger always claimed afterwards that the call had never been made and the director had never given.
And that he implemented and he decided not to implement an order that had not been given.
But it's very controversial.
But I think it's very clear.
Cap, Caspar Weinberger, Cap as they called him, dragged his feet and slow rolled the president of the United States, the national security advisor and the secretary of state, just wasn't going to do it.
And finally and eventually, I think that Reagan threw his hands in the air.
The oven shows that Reagan kind of said, OK, well, the hell with it.
Let's get our troops out of there and redeploy on naval ships offshore, which was kind of saying to Weinberger, you win.
And Schultz, you lose.
Sit down, be quiet.
It's over.
The debate's over.
Let's go on.
Isn't that funny when it's the secretary of defense?
This happened over Libya, right?
We shouldn't do this.
And the secretary of state says we have to when it's supposed to be.
You know, they're supposed to be playing those roles the other way around.
I'm all for restraint on behalf of the SEC.
But the secretary of state is supposed to be seeking diplomatic options for whatever the problem is.
It seems to be, you know, that's a really precise point.
You would think that the secretary of defense would be banging the table for intervention.
But in American history, just the opposite has happened.
The military and the secretary of defense have shown real hesitation about this.
And it's been the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, being an example, pounding the table saying, let's go, let's go, let's go.
I remember Madeleine Albright saying to Colin Powell, what do we have a military for?
And Powell was just enraged by that.
Well, you don't have a military to use them, according to Caspar Weinberg.
You have a military, you have a strong military and increased defense budget so that you don't have to use them.
He really didn't want to use American troops in almost any situation, except he did approve the invasion of Grenada.
Well, he approved the invasion of Grenada because it was easy in our hemisphere.
It could be done.
You know, it's totally, you know, you're not hunting for bearded guys on pickup trucks.
I know that sounds offensive.
I apologize.
But and, you know, there were American hostages involved and he could do it.
But in Lebanon, not so much.
Yeah.
Well, the thing about the pickup trucks means essentially stateless militia guys, as opposed to even in Grenada.
You have the semblance of a state.
I don't know.
I'm not justifying.
But there's a difference in I understand from his point of view or what he was willing to do on that.
I have to mention here, Mark, that because it's just so great.
If anybody will have a look at the foreign policy of pardon me, a foreign policy of freedom by Ron Paul.
It's foreign policy speeches dating back to the very late 70s.
I'm pretty sure maybe 1980.
But he was in Congress back before he came back in 1997.
And most of us know him from then.
He was in the Congress back then.
And there's a series of speeches that he gave that can be summed up as Reagan.
Don't go to Lebanon.
Don't put guys in Lebanon.
And then Reagan, now that you got guys in Lebanon, please get them out of there before it's too late and something bad happens.
And then, see, I told you something bad was going to happen.
Now we got 241 dead guys.
And you should do the right thing now and go ahead and quit while we're already behind before it gets worse.
And then the last speech is congratulations, Mr. President.
Thank goodness you've finally done the right thing and got the troops out.
Too bad you had to learn the hard way instead of listening the first time kind of thing.
There it is.
Just, you know, five speeches in a row just laying out the whole history of this attack as it played out from Ron's point of view in the House, you know.
Well, that's right.
I mean, that's right.
But, you know, you and I, there are forces in Washington who politely but very adamantly disagree with us.
And they argue the other side of the of the road here that we are showing weakness.
And that, you know, basically we're.
Oh, what would what would the word for it be?
We're kind of fellow travelers.
We're we're not as patriotic.
Yeah, we're Neville Chamberlain and every enemy of America on Earth is Hitler, except it's nonsense.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
I think that they're wrong.
I'm as much of a patriot as they are.
I just I think that the less we use, the fewer times we use our military, the more potent we can we can be.
I mean, we live, frankly, in an era of almost no diplomacy in this administration.
And every time we you know, we bang the table and we rattle our sabers, we're going to do this and we're going to do that.
And after a while, the people in the world kind of say, geez, you know, get over it.
Leave us alone.
Stop bombing people you think are your enemies and start acting creatively.
I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but I think that our reliance on the military in the last 15 years has kind of painted us as a paper tiger.
It's been very expensive and has actually harmed our standing in the world.
It's better to be known as a tough guy than to act it out and be proven wrong.
And, you know, militias have taken us on in Iraq and really stymied us.
And that has not been good for our reputation.
I'm not sure we scare anybody anymore.
And it's because we've already used our military and it certainly harmed our economy.
And let's not forget, it's taken the lives of young Americans.
And it hasn't worked.
And I think that, you know, Reagan and Weinberg is kind of intuitions on this and their instincts turned out to be right.
Well, and especially since the only actual enemies the American people have in the world are stateless militia guys.
And very few of those actual transnational terrorists who would come here to hit the United States of America.
And, you know, anything you can count as a threat, the closest thing you have to a threat is something like Iran, which they're only a threat because they're capable of maintaining independence from American domination in their part of the world.
You know, even when they talk about Russia and China and all the war plans, air-sea battle this.
And what are the, we talked about McGregor versus McMaster and what the army should do in Eastern Europe in the event of a war with Russia.
No one ever contemplates anyone attacking the United States of America, bringing a war here.
Air-sea battle is for how to attack China in China.
You know, it goes without saying that, of course, America is completely and totally impregnable.
And we have no enemies in the world other than those that our government goes and hunts down and picks fights with.
I do.
I do agree with you.
I think that we have to act a little bit more seriously and maturely than we have.
I hope that there are voices in this administration, certainly you won't find them in the White House, among the coterie of people surrounding John Bolton.
But I do have some hope for Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper now at Defense Department.
What can you tell us about him?
Well, you know, it's very interesting.
I've been doing a little bit of work on it for an article.
I hope it'll be in Politico.
I haven't actually pitched them yet, but I think they'll accept it.
This is, you know, it's very, very interesting.
What we have in Washington is the class of 86 at West Point.
Mike Pompeo graduated first in that class.
Mark Esper graduated in that class.
Dave Urban, who's a well-known influencer in the world of Donald Trump, was in that class.
This is the West Point class that fought in Desert Storm.
And then got out.
They'd seen the elephant.
They'd done their service.
They did a good job.
And they got out.
And they're now basically running the foreign policy establishment of the United States.
Mark Esper, you know, is not Patrick Shanahan.
He's not really a...
But wait, so your point there, you're saying that these are guys who were in Iraq War I and are not stained with the failure of Iraq War II.
That was somebody else's problem.
And so now here they are wrapping up Iraq War III.
And maybe they're in a better position to do something positive rather than somebody left over from the W. Bush years.
Is that what you're saying?
That's kind of it.
I'm still kind of playing around with it.
But I think it's worth noting that despite Pompeo's kind of Christian evangelical constant pounding, that, you know, he's a fairly smart, serious, sophisticated thinker.
And he does not get along with John Bolton.
And he's from a class that has seen war.
And so is Mark Esper.
You talk about Esper as being kind of in the pocket of the military-industrial complex and the revolving door.
He's not really.
These are, you know, these are West Pointers.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal from two highly respected journalists yesterday who said, well, the generals are gone.
We've had a sea change in the Trump administration.
The generals, Kelly and Mattis, and these guys are no longer in charge.
So maybe there's a chance that this will be a demilitarized foreign policy.
But, you know, they're right.
That's true.
The article was very good.
And they're right to recognize that.
The generals are not in charge anymore, but the West Pointers are.
And it'll be interesting to see what their advice to this president will be and whether they can stand up to the likes of John Bolton and the question of war and peace.
And my hunch is they'll probably be able to do it.
These are not amateurs.
They're pretty good thinkers.
Pompeo seems pretty hawkish out here, man.
You know, like on Iran, building up all the narrative about Iran preparing to attack us throughout the Gulf.
Yeah, I know.
Certainly I'm as disturbed as you are.
And a week ago- I'm heartened by the reports that he and Bolton don't get along personally, but I don't know what's their division on policy.
Do they really have one that I'm missing?
I'm not sure there's a policy in this administration on anything.
Well, OK, but say for like a week there's a policy that we want to- a couple of weeks we want to drum up this crisis with Iran.
They seem to be working hand in hand on that, right?
I'm as worried as you are about a war with Iran.
And if I would have to guess, I would put the odds at 50-50.
But, you know- That's pretty high.
That's very high.
But if you're going to hang your hat on any hope at all, you're not going to do it on John Bolton.
We're going to have to rely on a guy like Pompeo and a guy like Esper to kind of walk into the Oval Office and say, you know, Mr. President, this is a bad idea.
And I think that they're capable of doing that.
I don't like their politics.
I'm not as conservative as they are.
And I don't agree with their defense buildup.
And I don't like their language on Israel and the Middle East.
But on the questions of war and peace, I mean, let's be honest.
There aren't many voices out there for peace.
And there aren't any voices for peace inside the administration, except that when the chips are down, you know, we have not yet gone to war with Iran.
And the reason we haven't gone to war with Iran is because the president's instincts are not to do it.
We have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is capable of bureaucratic infighting and clear thinking as anybody in the history of that institution.
And I think that Mike Pompeo understands what a disaster that would be.
So Pompeo is not the George Shultz in this hawking it up.
No, he's not.
He's on the side with Dunford saying we should not overreact here.
That's my sense.
Overreact.
We're the ones picking the fight.
I don't want to put it like that.
Your listeners are going to call in and say, well, Perry's, you guys are wrong.
Perry's wrong because Pompeo wanted to retaliate, which is technically true.
But I think Pompeo took a step back and he let Dunford wait.
My information is that Dunford was the guy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the guy who kind of weighed in and said, you know, well, here are the facts, Mr. President.
He didn't make a personal recommendation.
He didn't say let's not do this.
Here are the facts.
This is what it's going to cost.
It's how many airplanes it's going to take.
Here's how many lives are going to be lost.
We don't know what the results are going to be.
You know, he flooded the zone with facts and figures.
And Trump kind of blinked and said, well, let's not do it.
Which is what Dunford wanted.
But you're saying and you're told from from your sources that Pompeo at that point shut his mouth and stepped back and let Dunford have the floor and essentially didn't concede the point or didn't continue to argue the point after that.
Yeah, that's right.
And and not only that, but Dunford winning means that Bolton lost and Pompeo can't stand Bolton.
That's good that.
Yeah, again, that personal conflict is as few people get along with Bolton, the better.
Hey, what about this?
Although you told me Bolton wasn't going to get the job and he got it.
But now I got to ask you about Fred flights.
Is it true that he's really in line to get the DNI spot?
Well, he's being considered.
And.
I mean, I was out at dinner with my family on Saturday night and I saw an old friend of mine from who's long retired from the agency and came over to say hello to me and to meet my family and shook hands.
And I whispered is here.
I hear Fred flights is going to be DNI.
And he looked at me like I had three heads.
And he he said, oh, no, couldn't believe it.
Now, you know, I've heard it on good authority that his name is being considered, whether it will be put forward or not.
I don't know.
But he's a.
I don't think he's qualified for the job.
He's quite a reactionary, not a conservative, a reactionary, an uber hawk.
Well, he's just John Bolton's right hand man from the FDD, right?
Yes, he's John Bolton's right hand man, and he's a good friend of Frank Gaffney.
And the fact that he might be the head of American intelligence is shocking to me.
But it's it's being considered.
And I hate to say, you know, I hate to say it's going to happen or not going to happen.
I think it would be a mistake.
But, you know, we live in an era and with an administration that makes these kinds of mistakes all all the time.
Got that right, man.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks so much for your time on the show.
This has really been great.
It's been great for me, too.
I love doing this.
We'll do it again.
All right.
Good times.
Appreciate it, Mark.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Mark Perry.
He's over here writing again at the American Conservative magazine.
This one is called 1984, the year America didn't go to war.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
