8/14/18 Peter Van Buren on Iraq Wars II and III, Twitter, and More

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All right, you guys.
Introducing Peter Van Buren.
He recently got thrown off Twitter.
Regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine and antiwar.com and lots of places.
And his latest book is called Hooper's War.
It's a novel about post-World War II Japan, but it's really about you and me.
But actually, I haven't read that one yet.
But guess what, Peter?
I actually read your first book, We Meant Well, which I've been meaning to read for, you know, I don't know, 10 years or whatever it is.
We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
You were there toward the end of Iraq War II.
Yes, I was.
It seems, you know, when you invited me to come on and talk about this, I had to do some soul searching because, first, the Iraq War II, which ended around 2011, I guess, for lack of a better date, you know, it just seems so long ago.
I mean, it was physically seven years ago, but it might as well have been 100 years ago.
And when I think back on being there, it's like, did that happen to me?
Or did I dream that or read that somewhere?
The fact that there's absolutely nothing in the media.
Somewhere along the way, I wrote my last article about Iraq.
It simply has fallen down the memory hole.
So I'm glad that we're going to talk about it today because it's important history.
And especially for people who came of age sort of as it was winding down or afterwards, I think it's very important to look back at what happened there because I'm afraid it's the template that we're following in Syria.
It's certainly the template we followed through the Obama Wars, Libya and whatever.
And it's going to be waiting for, whether it's President Trump or President whoever, when the next one starts, I think they're going to pull their books off the shelf and look at what happened in Iraq.
So we might as well pull ours off and take a look as well.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny if people are in a hurry to just forget Iraq ever happened and all that kind of thing.
And it really has, the whole story really has gone away to a great degree.
Think about Iraq War 3 where people don't even know that happened.
Or they kind of maybe have heard of it.
Yeah, ISIS, we were bombing ISIS or something.
But that story was never even told at all.
I mean, at least with Iraq War 2, they told it wrong.
But Iraq War 3, people don't even know that that happened.
We're at Iraq War 3 and a half now.
The Islamic State insurgents are still fighting all over the place.
I was just reading a thing about them blowing up electric power line gantries and whatever down in these things, waging guerrilla war.
And the U.S. is helping Iraqi forces against them, Baghdad forces against them still to this day.
But it's all so far away and forgotten and left over.
It was the American entry into, speaking of being banned from places, it was the Iraqi entry, it was the American entry into Iraq War 3 under Obama that got me blacklisted, banned from CNN.
I was brought on for a tape segment with Chris Cuomo and some, one of their several hundred retired general commentators.
And at that time, Iraq War 3 was being presented to the American people as a bundle of lies and simply a short-term humanitarian intervention.
And I got on there and said, gee, Chris, you bag of pus.
That's not true.
We're starting a new war here.
This is a bombing campaign, not a human intervention.
And they edited my segment out and only aired the general who explained how they were, we were dropping freedom bombs, so it was actually okay.
God, man.
You know, even Reason Magazine supported that.
We've got to go save the Yazidis.
A day later, Barbara Starr of all people, CNN, was like, well, I don't know.
All of my sources are saying they got to the mountain and everybody there wanted to stay, and everybody who wanted to flee had already been rescued by the YPG in Syria had come down and got them out of there.
So anyway, thanks anyway.
Nice little costus belly there over the weekend.
Yeah, it was kind of, it was great.
Because he wasn't willing to come out and say, look, we screwed up.
We're going back and fighting the end of this war.
So he had to make up a lie.
But he kind of did it with that spunky little wink glimmer in his eye that says, I know this is BS.
You know this is BS.
But we're going to go with it, right?
And the media just jumped right in and played along.
We're going to save the Yazidi people.
We're going to protect their freedom.
And they had the New York Times did this wonderful expose.
I think it was Nick Kristof again.
He always goes out there for these things, who found out that ISIS was kidnapping all these young Yazidi girls and selling them into slavery.
And suddenly all these amazing sources popped up out of nowhere.
The New York Times ran its warmongering article.
CNN did its part.
And then when it was apparent that the majority of American people could care less whether we were reengaged in Iraq, the whole thing just disappeared off the news, and America just went off and did its fight.
I mean, right now, there is no accurate public sourced information on how many American combat troops, boots on the ground, are in Iraq right now.
The Pentagon has stopped answering the question.
You're left kind of guesstimating from bits and pieces here and there.
The answer is probably several thousand.
But it doesn't even matter.
I suspect if we did your show a man on the street style, I doubt that nine out of ten Americans would even know we're engaged in war in Iraq at this point.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you even kind of referred to it there.
I'm not sure if sarcastically or what, but it is one way or the other, this narrative has triumphed that this was the end of the last war, that somehow America left too soon.
And yet I love this anecdote because it's such a great and instructive anecdote.
It's about Donald Trump during the campaign.
He drove him wild when he said Obama's the founder of ISIS.
Yeah, him and Hillary Clinton, they founded the thing.
And everybody just freaked out.
What could he possibly be talking about?
And then he explained himself, and I think at least twice, he got it right.
And he goes, well, he supported the jihadists in Libya.
And then he supported them in Syria.
And that's what led to the rise of ISIS.
And because he pulled the troops out of Iraq, there was no one there to stop them when they came into Iraq.
So he had really nailed it, right?
All three parts of that.
And then later he dropped the first two parts about Obama supported the jihadists and the Sunni-based insurgency in Syria, and that's what really led to the rise of the Islamic State that ended up conquering.
And he ended up conquering western Iraq.
And that's when he just changed it to, well, he pulled the troops out of Iraq.
And so then the lesson there is you can never pull your troops out of anywhere, because then look what, you know, if anything happens after they leave, it's all your fault for leaving.
And, you know, the thing is about that, it's just such a comedown after having a presidential candidate, in fact, the one that won, willing to explain that part of the narrative absolutely correctly about what had happened.
And, you know, on this show, I cover this stuff every day.
So I had Patrick Coburn on a full year before the fall of Mosul, saying that the Iraqi generals are telling him that our support for the jihadists in Syria is re-energizing the insurgency here.
Please knock it off.
And me and Jason Ditz were on the show, and maybe you, I don't know, joking about how we're using drones to kill al-Qaeda in Iraq still to help Maliki.
This would have been in 2012 and 2013, to chase the jihadists across the border into Syria, where they're the moderate rebels that we support against Assad.
We've talked about that many, many times.
We're actually now approaching the 18th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, which means that sometime this fall, the first soldier is eligible to deploy to Afghanistan who was born before that war started.
17th, right?
Or I'm just bad at math.
Well, it's 2001, so it'll be starting into the 18th year since the attacks.
The 17th anniversary, starting into the 18th year, which means that sometime in the fall, some soldier in the coming months will be the first one to have been born before that war started that is now deploying to Afghanistan.
And I don't know who he or she will be, but it'd be an interesting little news bit if Barbara Starr wanted to cover that.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
But let's talk about where ISIS really came from.
I mean, America's actions in Syria certainly empowered them, but that wasn't really the genesis story.
The back story, I guess.
The back story started really when I was in Iraq.
And if you want to kind of lead us into that, I'd be happy to kind of share some thoughts on exactly where ISIS came from, because the genesis goes back to about 2006, 2008, somewhere in there.
Well, you know, and in fact, that's one thing that I learned from your story, the way it's told there is, you know, and I think obviously you had a lot better handle on this than a lot of people around you.
But the difference between when the strategy is to back this team versus that team and in what way, it's, you know, it seems like you have your thumb on what's happening in the change of policies at the time, but it doesn't seem the way you write it that you guys are really understanding what it means that, you know, that our support for the Bata Brigade between this time and this time led to this, which led to that, which led to this, and then the awakening.
The cause and effect isn't there.
The narrative isn't there.
It's like the CNN narrative of, well, some things happened and then some other things happened.
And if you're reading Bob Dreyfuss, you get it.
But if not, you don't.
Well, let me walk you through it.
I was working for the State Department and I was assigned to the reconstruction project in Iraq the years 2009 to 2010.
Essentially, the Iraq War started in 2003 when George Bush invaded under wholly false pretexts, claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction well supported by the media.and Paul went to the United Nations and flat out lied about all that.
And Americans supported it nearly to the person.
The plan was in 2003 for a very quick victory.
The Iraqi army, everyone knew they didn't have massive weapons, and everyone knew that they were a ragtag third world army that was going to collapse instantly in front of us.
So the plan was for a very quick military campaign, push into Baghdad, install a few puppets, Iraqi puppets, and then kind of back out.
There's a branch in the road at that point where many authoritative sources suggest that that backing out meant turning the massive American military machine either to the west into Syria in 2003 or to the east into Iraq, maybe both, or Iran, I should say, maybe both.
That there was a very bold plan inside the White House to basically remake the Middle East over the course of six months of military interventionism.
We'll never really know, or at least probably not in our lifetimes, will that information become fully public, but I can tell you that I spoke with Marine colonels who were issued maps of Syria back in the day.
You never really trusted GPS fully.
You still had backup paper maps.
I spoke to Marine colonels who were issued maps of Syria so that they knew what to do once they crossed the border.
But that's neither here nor there.
The main idea was that in 2003, the military campaign was going to be short, brutalist, and swift.
Saddam Hussein was gone.
A puppet government was installed.
Somewhere in there, there was a hiccup that, again, we don't have fully explained about what happened to that puppet government, where they were when they were needed, because they didn't show up in Baghdad on time.
And very quickly, events began to spin out of control, and as the military likes to say, they lost the initiative.
When you destroy the civil infrastructure of a country, and by infrastructure, I mean everything from pipes and water systems to the post office, when you take away all those pieces, the whole thing falls apart.
Suddenly, there's no police force, so that means people can commit crimes.
Suddenly, there's no one at the electrical plant, which means there's no electricity, which means people can go out and do more naughty things.
Suddenly, all those old scores can be settled, and when you do that inside a country like Iraq that had so many internal tensions, Sunni, Shia, Kurd, rich, poor, right and left, all the different schism lines that were in there, you just unleash chaos.
And that's what happened, and the United States from 2003 never ever was able to get a handle on that chaos quick enough and decisively enough.
And essentially, things just spun out of control until around, when was the official announcement of the surge?
Was it 2008?
No, it was the beginning of 2007.
Seven, okay, forgive me.
And so in 2007, a decision was made in conjunction with the White House and a guy named General David Petraeus that the United States was going to surge into Iraq.
And that's, of course, a term that comes from online porn, surge.
And what it means is to inject a large number of virile men and a few studly women into Iraq.
It's essentially an expansion of the war, but expansion of the war sounded bad, so surge sounded good.
And essentially, the United States dramatically increased the size of its military footprint there, and the idea was to bash down all of the bad things that were going on.
The surge then dovetailed into something that I ended up getting involved in, and that was the idea of trying to figure out why the Sunnis and Shias were fighting each other and simultaneously fighting us, and why Al Qaeda was able to hang on inside of Iraq.
And David Petraeus came up with an idea that we could buy off the Sunnis.
The Sunnis were the large groups within, and again, for your sophisticated listeners, I'm using terms like Sunni and Shia very, very broadly.
I'm well aware that there are multiple subgroups and subgroups of subgroups and all that, but we're going to keep it kind of broad brush here.
The fact that the American army probably was not fully aware of all those subtleties is a big part of this story.
But nonetheless, the idea is that David Petraeus said, look, we can buy off the Sunnis.
We can pay them not to fight us, the Americans, and that was a program called The Awakening, where essentially we paid money to the Sunni militias to do something other than kill us.
And so instead of shooting Americans, we paid them lots of money to guard bridges or stand at crossroads or something other than shooting at Americans.
And as long as they didn't shoot at Americans, we gave them money.
The other thing we did is we offered the Sunni militia leaders, the so-called sheikhs, the local government leaders, because there was no central government.
We offered them the services of the American military to, quote, get rid of al-Qaeda, unquote.
Now, these are folks who have been living in a barter economies for 5000 years.
And there's an Iraqi slogan that says the rug is never really sold.
There's always another deal to be made, a better price to be had.
And when they found out that the entire American army was going to be put at their disposal to conduct raids, make night hits, basically kill people for them, these guys went to town.
And so for every couple of actual al-Qaeda operatives that they fingered for the United States, they fingered a guy who owed them money, a guy whose land they wanted to take control of, somebody who stole their goats two centuries ago, what have you.
And they basically enlisted the United States army as their muscle in order to get themselves more power and things like that.
And as long as the money flowed and the hits took place, they didn't kill Americans.
And it created the impression that progress was taking place.
It was actually simply one of those situations where the barrel is leaking from the bottom, but you're pouring in just enough water as it leaks out to keep the barrel looking full, when in fact any closer observation would tell you this was unsustainable.
My part was helping to buy off the Sunnis, because in addition to simply giving them literal bags of cash, the United States also was embarked on this reconstruction program where we were building schools and roads and setting up little businesses.
And there's a whole range, and we can talk about those in more detail if you like.
It's really the focus of my book, We Meant Well, that is allegedly the focus of this conversation.
And my job through the State Department was to spend money and to do all those things.
In my sense, I was embedded with the military, so I did them in conjunction with the American army and with the guidance of the State Department.
Other State Department people were doing it almost entirely on their own.
Their security came from Blackwater, and we've all known that story.
Other army units were doing it on their own, and they were proceeding without any coordination or guidance with the State Department.
And the plan was to buy all this stuff off.
Meanwhile, the Shias were off consolidating power with the help of the Iranians, and the United States basically turned our back to all that to focus on the Sunnis, because we were focused so entirely on getting rid of Al Qaeda that we allowed a new beast to arise, the powerful Shia centralized government.
When the United States pulled the troops out in 2011, the Shias decided it was payback time.
They went to war with the Sunnis.
The Sunnis, needing a protector, realizing the Americans had dumped them, reached out in the parlance of the day to what became ISIS.
It started out as Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, I think.
It had different names.
But essentially, it morphed into ISIS to protect the Sunnis from the Shias in the mess that we left behind in Iraq.
And we watched this unfold.
But as you said, while I was able, in my book to a limited extent and others have, to kind of catalog the events as they were happening, I don't know that I was prescient enough to see it in its big picture, and I certainly haven't read anyone else who did.
The one thing I claim credit for in being prescient was A, seeing that the American plan was failing, and B, noticing the arrival of the Iranians in bulk in Iraq, and the Iranian-Shia partnership that I knew was going to work out poorly for the Sunnis, though I don't think I was smart enough to kind of figure how it would actually spend its way into ISIS.
You know, so there's a lot of things here I want to talk about, about what you said.
But I guess the first thing is, I want to reflect on how lucky I am that at the time I was talking to Juan Cole, who is always in the doghouse with me because he always supports these wars.
He supported the invasion of Iraq and then Libya after that.
I never forgave him for that.
But at the same time, he had so much good perspective on who was who and what they were doing, and Robert Dreyfuss also, who wrote for Rolling Stone and TomPain.com and a lot of other places.
One of his was Bata versus Sadr.
And he was always breaking down, and I would interview him and Patrick Coburn, of course, breaking down who all is who inside the United Iraqi alliance of the Shiite powers and what it is the Sunnis are fighting for in their lost dominant position.
And they have no oil.
All the oil is under the control of the Shia and the Kurds.
And they're the ones frozen out now that they don't own the national government anymore.
I had all that perspective from the very beginning of the war.
And so back to kind of the media narrative about it, and we were talking about how they're kind of trying to make us forget this whole thing ever happened.
Back at the time, it was always just the U.S.
And I think this probably was, you could probably confirm, this was really reflected in what you guys were hearing in your orders on the ground.
And this kind of thing was, it's us and the people of Iraq who are building a democracy versus the terrorists who would try to thwart us.
And so in that sense, it was completely lost, at least on major media, that the kind of detail that Robert Dreyfuss was talking about, where Rumsfeld is hiring the Bata Brigade to lead the fight against the Sunni resistance and therefore pushing them into the arms of Zarqawi and the al-Qaeda guys and causing this, basically precipitating this whole thing.
And then, of course, the importance of Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric on the planet, saying, hey, if you believe in God, I want you to insist on one man, one vote.
That was in January 2004.
And the whole Shiite population of the country, which is 60% supermajority, said, yeah, what he said, one man, one vote.
You said democracy.
We're holding you to it.
And then they wrote the Constitution in the fall of 2004.
They held the election in January of 2005.
And that was just the start of the Civil War right there, as they were taking ultimate power and kicking the old guys out.
And the old guys, like what, they're going to give up without a fight?
I mean, come on.
The whole thing is crazy.
But no, the point being, though, that only if you really were reading Robert Dreyfuss and talking with Juan Cole, reading Patrick Coburn and the very best guys on this stuff, would be the only way that you would know that.
Apparently, you'd be in the State Department and you'd be a colonel in the Army and you'd not really know.
You know, it's interesting about what we knew and what we didn't know, because inside the… Understand, I guess, is really the point.
I think understand is maybe a better word, because the people at the mid-levels in the… Again, I was embedded in the Army.
The State Department, I didn't know what was going on at all, because the State Department was buckled down inside the fortress embassy in Baghdad.
Those people literally never left the embassy.
And the only Iraqis they ever talked to were sort of appointed spokespeople from the Iraqi… Different Iraqi organizations who were chosen for their oiliness and their ability to get money out of the State Department.
And so the State Department truly was ignorant and clueless.
Now, a lot of the Army units that I worked with, and I was embedded with them, so I wasn't just sort of dipping in for a briefing.
I was living with these people, actually were remarkably well-informed, but missed the big picture, if you will.
Every intel office had a wall covered with photos, just like you see on Law & Order, where they have the pictures of the victims.
And they put pieces of string between the victims to connect the dots, if you will.
And every wall was covered with pictures of all these bearded jihadis and politicians and Iraqis and what have you.
And strings were crisscrossed everywhere, showing all the connections.
And they got all that.
What they failed, we failed, to do was kind of zoom out far enough and see what this all meant.
And so there was a hyper-focus, for example, on getting Zaqawi.
We got to blow up Zaqawi, and then that's going to change everything.
And there was a failure to see that those strings were not connecting Zaqawi to a bunch of lieutenants.
They were connecting an organization that was organic and was going to be there when you took Zaqawi out.
And they also failed to extend the strings off the board, if you will, because on the Shia side, the United States didn't want to know about what Iran was doing.
The army didn't want to know very much about it because that would have encouraged them to want to fight the Iranians.
Now, the Iranians were on the ground in bulk in 2009 and 2010.
Iranian special forces, in particular, were there working with the Shia militias, teaching them, training them, supplying them with some of the only weapons that could actually cause real harm to us, the Americans.
A particular type of IED that was one of the few things that could penetrate the armor on our armored vehicles.
And the Iranians were there in bulk.
And the more you found out about them, the more you realized we need to start killing these guys because they're killing us.
And, of course, there was no way in the world at that point in the war the United States wanted to expand to killing Iranians, certainly not overtly.
Whether anything happened special forces wise or not is outside of my brief.
So the United States didn't really want to know that.
The State Department didn't want to know about Iran politically, of course, because that meant that we really blew this war.
Not only did we mess up Iraq, but we handed it to the Iranians.
They also didn't want to extend those strings off the board on the other side of the equation, the Sunni side, because those strings would have extended into the growing organic body that we now call ISIS.
And that would have disturbed the narrative that the surge and the awakening was actually doing its job and getting al-Qaeda out of Iraq and, in fact, destroying it piece by piece, essentially decimating it one guy at a time.
And so the strings were never really allowed to go off the edges of the board.
And there was a hyper focus on detail without an understanding of the bigger picture.
Some of it was, like I said, willful ignorance.
Some of it, maybe a lot of it, had to do with the way that authority was all divided up.
The military chopped up Iraq into districts, and one unit had control over here, another unit had control over there, and they didn't really necessarily communicate horizontally as well as they should.
And the State Department was just missing in action entirely.
They were mostly concerned about some kind of PR victories here and there and, like I said, keeping themselves undercover in the embassy.
They were hardly even participants in any of this.
Well, I just got to make one note there that all that stuff about Iran supplying the EFPs is a bunch of garbage.
And we all debunked that back at the time.
All our best friends, Gareth Porter and Phil Giraldi and everybody have gone through and shown.
Patrick Cockburn and many other great sources have proven those were all made in Iraq by Iraqis, and actually they got taught how to make them by Hezbollah and not Iran.
I will partially disagree with you.
Based on personal information that I'm not going to talk about in detail and listeners can make up their own minds, I would never say that Hezbollah was not involved in it.
The stuff was made mostly in Iraq, I absolutely agree with you.
But I think the role of the Iranians is greater than you give them credit for.
And I have a reason to know that, and we'll just leave it there for historians to eventually parse out fully.
Well, I would give them great credit in training up all the forces that we now call the Iraqi Army, the same forces that the Americans trained up.
The Bata Brigade is the core of the Iraqi Army, and that's the whole joke, right?
They demonized and persecuted Muqtada al-Sadr, who was the nationalist, and accused him of being the Iranian cat's paw, when no, it was Abdulaziz al-Hakim and the Supreme Islamic Council and Jafari and Maliki and the guys from the Dawah Party who were the ones who'd been living in Iran for 30 years ever since.
They were the Iraqi traitors.
When Jimmy Carter hired Saddam to invade Iran, they picked Iran's side, and only came back when George Bush invaded in 2003 and took over.
And so it was the most Iranian factions were the ones that we supported.
So what you're talking about is sort of the microcosm contest in the end of who's going to have more sway over them, which of course the Iranians won.
But they won what, the sway over who?
Maliki and the government that the Americans installed there.
It was a joint condominium between the Ayatollah and George W. Bush the whole time.
Again, I was there for the 2010 elections, and I was able to monitor the embassy's traffic then, and I filled in some blanks when Wikileaks came out.
And the U.S. basically was done at that point.
Our role, the ambassador at that time was – shoot, what's the guy's name?
I've drawn a blank on it.
He's now the head of the School of Diplomacy at the University of Colorado, and he shows up on TV a lot of times.
Burns?
No, no, no, after him.
It'll come to me.
Crocker?
No, no, no.
It's quite a rogues gallery of them.
Those are Bush guys.
I'm sorry.
The point is that the United States gave up at the 2010 elections and essentially made it clear to the Iraqis and quietly to the Iranians that anything that installed a government that the U.S. could say, yep, that's legitimate democracy, box checked, we're gone, anything that would allow the United States to get out of Iraq and call it victory long enough to shut the door behind us was an acceptable outcome.
And so that election that installed Maliki in 2010, the U.S. was barely a participant in that process.
It was about an 80% Iranian show, 10% Iraqis, and then a few U.S. people trying desperately to get in on it.
Man, I'm so glad you brought that up, too, because that's such an important story, and it's one that's so overlooked.
The whole media, everybody giving up on that story except for Jason Ditz and Antiwar.com.
At that time, no one was paying attention at all, but we covered that.
And I interviewed him about that at the time, and the deal was, too, ironically, that it was Alawi, who was the former CIA agent, who was the first sock puppet dictator after Paul Bremer in 2004, and he was the Shiite former Baathist.
So he had friends on all sides, and if anyone could have possibly actually been able to prevent the downhill spiral everything took from there in terms of sectarianism getting that much worse, if anyone had a prayer of healing over it as the prime minister, it would have been him.
But instead, no, they went back, as you say, they just called defeat a defeat.
After all, George Bush fought the whole war for the Dawa Party.
Now he's supposed to try to deny them their victory.
Actually, the ambassador I was referring to was Christopher Hill.
He was the one that was in Baghdad and basically gave up trying to influence the results of the 2010 election and handed the business of settling that election for the Iraqis over to the Iranians.
Christopher Hill previously was one of our ambassadors in Korea, and he's been ambassador.
He was one of those guys who just kind of, you know, one of those lovely white guys who looks good in a suit who just bounced from ambassadorship to ambassadorship, leaving chaos in his path, but never sticking to him.
So, you know, I'm sorry, go ahead, please.
He actually was the best thing the Bush administration ever did on North Korea, though.
Right.
And when, you know, we broke the ice for a little while to Bush, put him back on the terrorist list and ruined it.
But they had turned off the Pyongyang reactor and all that.
Yeah, he was I mean, he didn't do any of that.
I was I was partially in Korea for that time in 2000.
And, you know, another interview.
But that's interesting.
Yeah.
Chris Hill didn't have a whole lot to do with any of that.
He was taking his orders from Washington and the on the ground stuff was being driven by his deputy chief of mission, who was an extraordinary guy on Korea who was forced out by Obama under some differences of opinion on how best to proceed.
So I'm sorry, forced out by by George Bush.
Forgive me.
So anyway, that's another story for another time.
But let's not give Chris Hill any credit for really much of anything other than looking damn good.
Damn good in a suit.
Nobody knows what he looks like.
Nobody wears a blue blazer like that guy.
Anyway, let's go back to Iraq and see what we can come up with.
All right.
Yeah, go ahead.
So listen, yeah.
Now, back to your book here, because and you touched on this a bit that, you know, not and see, I hate it when it sounds like, oh, these guys are just the three stooges bumbling idiots over there and this is the best they can do.
We meant well, and that's it.
But at the same time, I mean, because the whole war was a premeditated murder plot.
You know, let's not pretend it was some mistake to start this war.
And yet it didn't work out the way it was supposed to work out.
No question about that.
And a big part of why.
I don't know all the reasons why some of it is deliberately supporting the bottom.
But other part of why is because, as you describe, and we meant well, this is a government program and you guys incentive structures are all screwed up, man.
You bureaucrats, you don't know what the hell to do when you're trying.
And you got so many great examples in here.
You just kind of made an offhand comment about, well, I set up some little businesses.
But these are like epic stories of setting up a milk production facility and a new way of milking your cows and all these things that you try to do.
So please tell us some some fun memories of your time as a State Department guy, as you said, embedded with the military at a forward operating base.
Not comfy in the green zone there.
I mean, getting work done out there.
Peter, tell us some of these stories.
Great stuff.
Great book.
Normally, to hear these stories, you'd have to either buy the book.
We meant, well, it's on these on Amazon or you'd have to be my therapist.
So this is kind of new ground for me.
Just think of me as your cab driver.
So tell me what it was like over there.
So.
So the idea that that what I tried to do in my book was was offer you a look over my shoulder as I did my work for the year.
And my book is a documentary, if you will, about what I did on on on the ground level.
It's not a discussion of grand policy.
It's not a sweeping look at broad decisions.
It's a very much an on the ground version of what happened that I think readers can, with with the fullness of history, extrapolate into why things went wrong at the at the at the big level.
So essentially, my little piece of all this was way out in the rural areas east of Baghdad, kind of between Baghdad and the Iranian border.
We were myself in the 10th Mountain Division and later the 2nd Infantry Division were supposed to spend lots of money to solve problems for Iraqis with an eye towards creating a civil society, democracy and an economy, all of which was supposed to prevent them from being terrorists.
Now, that's a big job.
If anyone in the listening audience has ever tried to open a small business, if they've ever tried to get the city council in their town to change their mind on on where a road should be or whether a park should be built.
These things are big tasks inside of America where where things work and you can order stuff and it shows up and people don't disassemble construction sites overnight and stuff like that to try to do these things in the middle of the desert while we're being shot at in a foreign language with amateur translators when none of us actually knew what we were doing.
It was bound to fail and it did.
But at the same time, we were we were like a very large person that unfortunately suffers from some type of mental disability.
You know, the idea would be that I don't mean this in an insulting way, but a mentally disabled child.
But when he grows up to be six foot nine and 300 pounds, suddenly there's a big problem here.
This person can't be let loose.
And that's what we were.
We were let loose.
We were given all the money we could possibly spend.
When we spend it all, they gave us more.
And we were given conflicting order.
So the basic theme was create employment.
All these young people hanging around unemployed can't be good.
So we lurched from idea to idea about how to do this.
And we were given little help.
Basically, the whole expert side of this were people whose hobbies or interests were sort of converted into expertise.
And so God saved the couple of soldiers who grew up on farms because they were suddenly large scale agricultural experts.
And so we looked around, for example, with milk and said, well, how do the Iraqis do milk?
And it turns out that the Iraqis had evolved a system over about 5,000 years where local farmers kept one or two cows and supplied milk to a small circle of families in their immediate area.
And gosh golly, it seemed to work.
They didn't have refrigeration.
They had poor transportation.
And so it made sense to have this all very, very localized.
And if something went wrong at one farm, another farmer could kind of pick up the slack until the first farmer replaced his cow or what have you.
And it was a system that absolutely worked for them.
Rather than see if there was a way we could make that better, what we did is say, well, look, if we build a centralized milk processing plant, we can potentially employ lots and lots of people.
And if we do away with this idea of the families walking to the farm every morning for milk and instead get trucks and deliver the milk to stores, well, then we can hire truck drivers and we can have stores and we can do this and we can do that.
And very quickly in the confines of a room, this type of thing spirals into something very, very big.
And then the colonel will come in and say, look, the metric that we're being judged on is how much we spend.
The more we spend, the more democracy we're creating.
So we need to find a way to spend more.
So what's this?
You're going to buy five trucks?
Let's make it 50.
And then colonel walks out and that's what happens.
And so in our case, what we did is we then you try to take that idea and translate it into Iraq.
Well, everything is controlled by a series of militia leaders.
They call themselves sheikhs and we call them sheikhs because it sounded better and we didn't want to call them militia leaders.
And it also didn't sound good that we were giving lots of money to militia leaders since their allegiances were often very flexible.
And some of these people had recently been shooting at us or may in fact have been the people who were launching mortar attacks on us at night.
Nonetheless, we would give them money.
And the plan was to create this milk distribution center.
And we were going to have farmers, instead of selling their milk directly to families, bring their milk to the center.
It was going to be put in big, shiny metal tanks.
Trucks would come and then haul it off to stores, which basically didn't exist.
Well, it didn't work.
I know listeners are surprised.
We were cheated at every step of the way.
When I was finally sent out to take pictures of our successful milk distribution center, I found that there were holes in the milk tanks that I could put my finger in.
The stainless steel had rust on it, which means it wasn't really stainless steel that we paid for.
The things that were supposed to be there on our list that we paid for just physically weren't there.
The sheikh who was supposed to be in charge of it, nobody could find him.
And when we did find him, it turns out that he never set aside any money to purchase milk, never made any connections with the farmers.
That milk process at least failed gently in that it simply was a waste of money.
It didn't actually harm anything in the larger picture.
The harm came from other projects when, for example, we were told that we could help the farmers in our area by supplying veterinary medicine.
What that translated into is not bringing veterinary medicine in, but buying up veterinary medicine locally because that was supposed to help the local economy.
We were required to spend as much money as possible in the country.
Once the Iraqis heard that the Americans were out there with bags of money buying cow serum, the price of cow serum went up 300%.
When Washington changed the emphasis from veterinary to women's empowerment and we just stopped buying things, suddenly no one could afford veterinary medicine in the area because the vendors kept the prices high, fully hoping the Americans would show up one day and animals died and the quality of veterinary care actually declined.
We did the same thing with some childhood vaccinations as well, though that was a project that I absolutely put a stop to.
The military started importing vaccinations, so at least we didn't run up the prices locally.
We consistently failed to positively impact anything, and the goal was not to cause more harm than necessary.
We were, for example, in the sector where I was working, told at one point to repair a water treatment plant.
Good idea.
Water is really important out there in the desert, but water flows downhill.
We kind of all know this.
And so while we were supposedly working on the water treatment plant at point B, the group who had the sewer treatment plant upstream of us at point A wasn't doing anything there, and the water distribution facility at point C downstream from us, well, nobody was working on that.
And so our minor successes on the water treatment plant were absolutely pointless because the sewage plant wasn't being fixed to supply us with more dirty water to process, and the distribution plant wasn't being fixed to do something with any clean water we managed to produce.
And essentially, the whole thing was wasted.
It was a gigantic failure.
And the fact that Washington would change its mind, change its emphasis every time somebody got into a new position of being the boss, we would flip-flop from water to electricity to cows to chickens to whatever.
As election times came around, either in Iraq or in the United States, everything would focus on some kind of extremely short-term look-good, feel-good project.
At one point, Washington appointed a women's empowerment special ambassador to Baghdad, and so we suddenly had to root around to find something to do to allow her to have photo opportunities.
We were in a rural area where women's empowerment was approximately rooted in the 8th century, and just getting permission for women to show up at meetings for photo ops was a massive project.
Never mind actually do anything beyond that.
The whole thing was a waste, and I came to understand it was a waste, and that's what led me to become a whistleblower and eventually write this book.
But this story has never really been told in a bigger picture.
I've got my little piece of it, which is largely an on-the-ground view that you can extrapolate out.
But the media lost interest in this.
Historians lost interest in this.
The Iraqis have no business telling the story.
They don't care.
And this is just left to be forgotten as we stumble ahead making identical mistakes in Afghanistan.
It appears that we've changed gears again in Syria, so we're not going to be doing this in Syria.
It appears that the United States has at some level decided that Assad and the Syrian government are going to take control over most of their country again, and so we're not going to get deeply involved in this reconstruction and democracy building and what have you.
So maybe this thing will just be a footnote of history at some point, and that will be my legacy as well.
But to watch it in action, to see the imperial war machine stumble and fall in front of my eyes, was a rare experience, and I'm glad I had a chance to write it down.
Yeah.
Well, I'm really glad that you did, too.
And it does have kind of a Joseph Heller feel to it, where the story can only be told through kind of a sarcastic and ironic kind of way of telling it.
Otherwise it's just doom and gloom.
No, I mean, you get mortared the night before on your way to a meeting at the embassy about how to increase tourism in Iraq.
And, you know, you're sitting there with a straight face, you know, saying, you know, we just got mortared last night where I was staying.
And here in the embassy, you guys are in an air-conditioned room talking about tourism to Iraq.
Catch-22 is the only thing other than heroin that could actually get you through all that.
Yeah, exactly.
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Well, it's funny, you know, I mean, it sounds like something out of Why Government Doesn't Work by Harry Brown.
It's just the basic economics of the situation.
You know, you guys aren't spending your own money or even the boss's money.
And the more you spend, the better instead of the less.
And you have no real long-term interest in any one thing at all.
And so everything is just a joke because it has to be almost.
So I'm interested in that because, you know, and it does come through in the book that, you know, you really, I don't know, tell me, How much of a real true believer were you in the efficacy of State Department power to come in and help these people in any real way?
And what really turned you very cynical about it?
It wasn't just the way you were living on the base.
It was which project made you finally say, this is so absurd, I can't stand it.
You know, I was never, the 24 years I was in the State Department, I don't think I was ever a true believer because what I was supposed to believe was so variable.
You know, Ronald Reagan was president when I was sworn in, and Barack Obama was president when I was kicked out.
And that covers a pretty broad span of true belief.
And I don't think anybody is flexible enough to buy the whole thing.
So I never was a true believer, but I was a true bureaucrat, meaning that you kind of went along with what was happening at the time.
And that was my initial plan in Iraq was to sort of get there, go, I didn't want to go there.
I was sort of forced to go there under the way the State Department worked.
And my whole plan was to kind of keep my head down and stay out of trouble and just kind of limp along doing whatever the person before me had been doing.
And that was how I started.
But I don't think there was an epiphany moment, you know, where I said, this is it.
I've stepped over a line.
I think it was a series of lines, and they just kind of built.
It's kind of like a slow blizzard that takes all night to finally pile up enough snow that you've got to cancel school the next day.
You know, if I had to pick out individual moments, the thing about realizing that we drove up the price of vaccines and were actually harming people, I think, was an important moment.
I think the moment where I realized that I was risking my life for all of this.
I mean, I was outside in Iraq driving around with soldiers.
I was risking my life.
I was risking their lives in order to keep up this propaganda show.
It wasn't even a good propaganda show.
The show that was part of a line being crossed.
I mean, it was fun enough sitting inside a secure area and saying, well, let's buy 50 trucks instead of five.
But when I realized that I might not get home to see my family and the soldiers around me might not get home to see the family because of this, it changed me.
And in the end, we had three soldiers commit suicide during the year I was there.
The bad guys didn't kill any of us.
Three of us killed ourselves.
And I felt not directly, but I think indirectly some responsibility for that.
That I was part of a charade that brought all these people together to do this.
And that was another kind of important series of events.
But at the end of it all, it was just an accumulation.
It was a growing sense that something's wrong.
A hope that the next project was going to convince me that I had misunderstood all this.
One of the people I worked with, who was not a State Department person, he was a civilian, a contractor that was hired to help me, did arrive as a true believer.
And I think the point where he realized this was all a bunch of BS was also a turning point for me.
He and I used to argue about this all the time.
And he was a solid neocon kind of guy, a Bush supporter.
And he had a pet project involving teaching computer skills to Iraqis.
And he was insistent that this was a real project.
It was a real thing.
It was doing real good.
And so finally, I challenged him and I said, let's show up unannounced.
Let's not tell anybody we're going to be there.
Let's just roll in one day, invade basically where this school is supposed to be happening.
And the military was willing to go along with it.
And we showed up and, you know, it wasn't there.
It was all a hoax.
It was a joke, the whole thing.
And he sort of had a little breakdown at that point because he realized that it was all wrong.
And that was another turning point for me.
But at the end of the day, it was an accumulation.
I should point out that while this was going on in my head, across the hall from me was a young Army private, then named Bradley Manning, who was stationed at the first forward operating base I was.
Manning and I overlapped for about four or five months.
I was in Manning's workspace regularly.
I don't recall meeting her.
But the idea was I wasn't the only one there sort of thinking through this and realizing that an awful lot of harm was being done without any good.
It's a tough thing to come across, and it's a tough realization to make, acknowledging conscience.
But it's something that in the long run hopefully was for the better.
Yeah.
You know, I want to go back to something that you said at the start of the Iraq War II narrative there about how almost to a man the American people bought it.
I mean, that wasn't really true.
It was 50-50 until the war was definitely on.
And then they said, you're a traitor if you don't cheer for the troops while they're waging this very short war.
And so support went up to like 70% then.
But that's still a lot of people who knew better for whatever different reasons.
And a lot of people who said don't do it.
But so there's another point, though.
I mean, not just that like, hey, a correction and stick up for those people, which it's true.
But so, you know, not just to say, yeah, I told you so or that kind of thing.
But it's interesting to me that, you know, late in the war, people, you know, that late in the war, I get it that, you know, you kind of already were cynical enough going into a degree.
But, you know, that people really believed in this thing at all anymore.
It's almost like in George Orwell, where all the propaganda and all the threat of Big Brother, you know, forcing you to get in line and go along is really all for the party members.
And, you know, it doesn't matter whether the proles buy it or not, because they don't really have any power.
So that's me.
But you're the party member.
And this stuff is still working on you, at least to some degree, that you would get on a plane and go over there as late as 2009.
And it's funny, right, about that, because it's important that consensus and the ability for people to be so wrong for so long, when, I mean, again, not that it was an innocent mistake or anything, but there's a lot of just regular people going along with this long after they shouldn't be, you know?
Well, I'm afraid that continues to 2018.
Somehow David Petraeus is still in the modern parlance, has still offered platforms to discuss the surge and how successful it was.
CNN has an ongoing documentary series where they do a thing on the 60s and then the 70s and the 80s.
They just did a thing on the late 2000s where David Petraeus and a number of other of the bad actors from the Bush administration were on explaining how successful this all was, that it just didn't get carried through all the way or it's misunderstood.
And there's been a number of books that have held that line.
I haven't really read anything that's been fully critical of what happened in the surge and onward.
I think there are still, I know for a fact that it's still taught in the military educational system and offered as an example of how the U.S. fights a counterinsurgency.
Unbelievable, man.
These guys.
So it's very hard to kind of...
It's a certain kind of courage in a way.
It was maybe better than courage.
You know, and I sort of get it in the sense, I mean, I think back to the guy who showed up in Iraq, my helper, my deputy, my assistant, whatever, you know, who was a true believer.
And it was crushing to him that day we went out to his pet project, and he was forced to confront the fact that he was wrong, that he had been suckered in by all this.
You know, to admit you're wrong is difficult for anybody.
Anybody out there who's been in a relationship knows it's difficult to admit you're wrong about silly things, about whose turn it was to walk the dog.
But to admit you're wrong at this level, it takes a lot of effort, because you're not only admitting you're wrong, you're admitting all the people that you worked with, all the people that you admired, the politicians, the generals, all these people who you thought knew this, that they were all wrong too, and that you have dedicated a portion of your life at risk to something that's wrong.
And to say, you know, hey, I risked my life, but I saved that little baby from the fire, that's great.
To say I risked my life for some photo ops, for people that aren't even around anymore in the political sphere, I mean, what did I risk my life for?
Never mind, of course, the million Iraqis who died alongside of, you know, my conscience searching here.
You know, these things are very difficult to sort of just simply turn around and say, yep, I guess we did kill a million people over there, damn.
You know, it's not easy for people to admit that.
I think some of them could just shut the hell up, which is what I'd like to have David Petraeus do.
If he doesn't want to have a moment of clarity, a McNamara moment where he comes clean and admits he was wrong, he could at least just shut up.
But I think that may be too much to ask for.
Well, and the thing is, and we said this at the time, that, yeah, the surge is working as a great slogan to convince you of something.
All they have to do is just say it over and over again, and that'll be good enough for you.
But then even according to them, I mean, this is no, you don't have to be a foreign policy wonk.
All you have to do is just be paying, just watching the news, not even reading it, just watching the news.
And you'd have known that when they introduced the surge, they said there were these things called benchmarks that were supposed to be met.
And then after the surge, they just forgot about the benchmarks, and they never talked about the benchmarks ever again, because the benchmarks were going to be the Sunni dominated government now hiring all these Sunni militiamen into the armed services and the police forces for their patronage jobs and to heal over their old wounds, sharing police power there in the country.
And the Shia had no intention of following up on David Petraeus' promises there.
It didn't happen.
That reconciliation didn't happen.
And then as we talked about, the election of 2010, and then the rise of Islamic State in the place of the compromise that never took place.
So, you know, come on, benchmarks, didn't anybody notice when they stopped using that word?
We want to give some credit or discredit in this case to the Democrats as well, because in the United States, the Democrats were the ones, and President Obama was the head of that committee there, that should have made all this clear to the American people.
That should have been part of the concluding the Iraq war was to say, you know, here's the mistakes we made because we don't want to do that again.
But the fact that most Democrats supported the war, including Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the fact that she had supported the war so aggressively meant that she was not in a position to admit she was wrong.
Obama may or may not have just weaseled out of it because he didn't like to talk about, you know, complicated things.
But when he realized that he was going to reenter the Iraq war to fight ISIS in 2014, he lost any chance then of saying, here's what we did wrong in Iraq.
Here's what the surge really was about, and it was a failure.
He could no longer talk objectively about the Bush years in Iraq because he was reinserting the United States into the continuation, the final second to last final act of all that.
And so essentially there was no one who had an interest in exposing and talking about the events of Iraq.
The media, I think, was part of that problem as well.
The media wrote these, you know, wonderful, cheerful, saving private Ryan like books all along with a few exceptions.
But generally the media was in favor of the war and the media reported the success narrative of the surge and all the other stuff.
And again, for them to come back and say, gosh, we were really wrong about this.
That's not what people do in America.
And they take advantage of the very short memories of the American public to get away with these mistakes.
And I think that's a big part of this.
There are very few people who are willing to openly admit, as I did, that I helped lose the war.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, I think really as far as you doing your best job over there and meaning well and with great resources at your disposal and how badly it failed for your part in it, that there really should be a lesson.
Never mind the whole thing of the Wolfowitz doctrine and all these other things and Sunni and Shia.
But just the idea that a provincial reconstruction team of U.S. State Department and Army resources going around and building nations in other people's nations and screwing around with their local markets and systems and everything else is just absolutely, you know, it's crazy.
It's it's stupid and ridiculous and should never be taken seriously in any way.
After the lesson of this right here, if if you weren't already satisfied with Vietnam here again, look, you can't do this to people.
They won't take it and it won't work.
Well, see, you beat me to the punch, because if only there had been some historic precedent that we could have looked at and realized we were making a mistake.
And, of course, there was during the Vietnam War.
There was a program called Cords, C-O-R-D-S.
I don't recall exactly what it stood for, but it was essentially a reconstruction program in Vietnam that was a joint State Department and U.S. military effort to do essentially the same thing in Vietnam.
Build schools and roads and hand out money and create reconciliation and beat the communists one dollar at a time.
It was literally the same thing we did wrong in Vietnam, which we don't talk about, which we never analyzed, which we never came to grips with.
We did.
In fact, they spin it the other way.
They say this is what we never tried to write when we started trying it.
Once Westmoreland was out and Abrams was in and now it was coin time.
But then the Democrats stabbed us in the back right when it was about to work, they say, which is just not true.
I mean, they'd really been trying coin the whole time.
Yep.
And we did exactly the same thing.
We ignored the historical precedent for Vietnam and plunged ahead in Iraq.
We ignored it in Iraq and are still doing it.
There are still they have better names now, but there are still the equivalent of the provincial reconstruction teams that I headed in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
They're almost entirely military run now because the State Department bailed on this program a while ago, though we still have State Department people sort of adjunctly deployed into these teams.
But basically, they're just there to take a seat.
But we're still doing it.
It's not like we learned the lesson on the third time around.
It's absolutely staggering to me.
It's absolutely the living embodiment of that classic definition of mental illness, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
Or just being satisfied with the status quo because it's better than leaving politically and saving face in front of the Chinese or whatever it is they're worried about.
We just don't know what else to do.
I think it's a political lesson that Obama internalized and Trump certainly has, which is anytime you change something, you get tagged with it.
But if you just let it continue, then it's somebody else's issue.
For example, with however many troops we still have in Iraq, whatever's going on in Afghanistan, Syria may be a little different.
But the idea would be that the Afghan military presence, American military presence in Afghanistan will be indefinite.
It will be there when our grandchildren are hosting, are interviewing on this show years from now.
Because as long as you just let it continue, nobody seems to pay any attention to it.
If Trump were to make some significant change in Afghanistan, more troops, less troops, what have you, then suddenly it becomes Trump's thing.
If he just keeps it bubbling along now, soon to enter its 18th year, then it's really not his problem.
And he never has to take any responsibility for it.
And I suspect that's what we're going to see continue to happen in Iraq in some form, Syria, who knows where.
But no one will take responsibility for it.
No one will stop it because, hey, then you're responsible.
Well, I mean, look, as we're recording this on Tuesday morning, Peter, we have a Tet Offensive-style action going on in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are taking not just Ghazni, the city, the provincial capital, but they've seized, according to the Long War Journal, seven or eight different districts in Ghazni province.
Now, so if history holds, the B-52s and B-2s will come out or B-1s will come out at some point and really bond these guys back into withdrawal.
But they're just, you know, making a significant point.
And yet, so in the legend of the Tet Offensive, what's important is everybody knows that they didn't win a single battle that day, but it didn't matter.
The fact that they even tried was enough to show how different the truth was compared to the narrative that people had been told.
And it was this huge PR win for the communist forces in the north and the south there.
And yet here, nobody's paying any attention.
Nobody really cares.
So here's what amounts to a Tet Offensive PR win.
Although, in fact, it looks like they're actually having, you know, quite a bit more victory on the ground against ANA forces.
And I guess Americans, too.
I think they said one or two Americans had been killed.
I don't know if it was in Ghazni or not, though.
But anyway.
So, yeah, I mean, you look at the contrast there where they're actually, you know, cutting Highway 1 to Kabul.
It says here the Americans are denying that, which makes me think it's probably true.
And yet is this, you know, so what does this mean?
It means the war's over.
It means the Taliban won a long time ago.
But does it mean that the Americans are going to leave?
No, no.
Does it mean it probably doesn't mean that that Kabul's going to fall.
But maybe I shouldn't make confident predictions of, you know, a lack of complete humiliating defeat here.
No, because the U.S. military did learn some lessons in Vietnam.
And one of the lessons we learned is that our technology and our massive firepower can create a stalemate.
It can't create victory, but it can freeze things in place.
And so as we saw with the chasing ISIS out of Iraq, it is possible to take those cities away from the Taliban, possibly to the extent of destroying the city completely from the air and reducing it to a pile of smoldering rubble.
But we can say at that point that the Taliban no longer control this village.
And they'll withdraw first and they'll withdraw first or what have you.
But I mean, our technology and our firepower can hold a stalemate in place.
What happened in Vietnam is we stopped defining that as victory.
In Afghanistan, we have accepted stalemate as sort of I don't want to call it victory, but as the way it's going to be.
And we've internalized that as not failure.
And I wouldn't want to say success, but not failure.
And that was a big mistake in Vietnam was constantly trying to talk about victory in Afghanistan.
We don't even bother to talk about victory.
There's no no more discussion of end state or how this is going to end or what a win looks like.
We've gotten rid of the figurehead Afghan leader.
You know, remember, what's his name?
Karzai, you know, with his wonderful, colorful outfits who show up in Washington for meetings and photo ops and stuff.
None of that exists anymore.
We don't care who's in charge.
Really, the presidents don't visit there.
Trump has not gone there for Thanksgiving with the troops.
It basically just kind of exists out on the periphery and will just keep the fire burning long enough that no one can claim it was Trump's fault that we lost.
Yeah, he should have gone ahead and quit immediately, blamed it all on Bush and Obama and just said, forget it right away.
I don't think it's too late for him to, you know, if he was another another politician, maybe.
But him being Donald Trump, I think he could just be like, you know what?
Bush and Obama blew it.
I gave the McMaster plan a year, but it's not going anywhere.
And forget this, man.
It's not my fault.
Troops are heroes.
I worship them.
But we're leaving.
Right.
That's the perfect Trump line.
And he could do it, which just makes me mad because I know he would have.
But, you know, so that's the deal, right?
Is what's going on at the at the White House today?
He's got Madison.
He's got Bolton standing there.
And what's he yelling at him?
Nothing.
Damn it.
Oh, no.
It's not like I ever had any hope in the guy, but it's I can't help but ignore that.
I know he knows better.
He said so for years and years that he doesn't like this war.
And as I point out in the book, he took Obama's side against the generals.
Obama, who he hated.
He took Obama's side against the generals when it was time to wind down the surge and said, don't you break your promise, military.
Do what you said you do.
Obama's right on this.
I mean, that's pretty damn good for Donald Trump.
You know, I'd like to see it.
It seems like there's a plausible narrative for him there to just blame it on dummy and weakling.
And then that's it, right?
Yep.
Anyway, sorry, we're off on this tangent now about Afghanistan.
But no, but it goes back to the question, you know, when they when they attack Libya, you know, nobody even cared.
Somebody said to me, I forgot who it was, but it was a grown ass adult said to me, there was a war in Libya.
You know?
Yeah.
In 2011, like the whole year took the whole year.
No, I don't know.
I guess maybe I heard of that Qaddafi, right?
Yeah, man.
So I don't know.
That's the thing like about this thing in Ghazni today is, is this even going to make the nightly news compared to the reality TV star gossip stuff?
No, it's not.
I mean, in an American context, it's not really news because these things come and go.
Where's Ghazni?
Are there any Americans involved?
Wow.
Two guys got killed.
Bless our troops.
It all just kind of gets folded into the big pile of what we don't pay attention to.
And oh, my God, did you see what Omarosa said today?
You know, that's that's what the news is, is whatever Omarosa is up to or what have you.
Speaking of which, you got to say you're a little bit happy to be off of Twitter, right?
I have to say that there is a spiritual side of me, a meditative side of me that has blossomed in the time that I've been banned from Twitter.
I didn't realize what an ugly sore it represented on me.
And just not to be exposed to this kind of thing constantly.
And, you know, I've developed a pretty thick skin over the years.
But, you know, day after day after day being called all the terrible things people call each other on Twitter.
And like that's not part of my day anymore.
And I have to say it's not necessarily the worst thing that's happened to me.
Yeah, man.
So I quit, but not because, you know, like I'm angry at them for suspending me and this is my revenge or any kind of, you know, that kind of thing.
I was trying to quit because I can't use it responsibly.
I've been abusing it.
I'm stuck is a giant time suck.
It's been way, way too much time there.
And I have too many other responsibilities, like taking care of antiwar.com and of the Libertarian Institute and trying to build those things up.
And getting books read like yours so I can interview authors about their books on the show.
We meant well, how I helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
What a great title.
And yeah, it's really good.
I liked it.
I got through it in a day there.
No problem.
Good.
Good.
Maybe people take a look at it.
It's on Amazon.
You can get it as a Kindle edition and all the other good stuff.
And it's often Amazon has somehow the, you know, the algorithms which otherwise control our lives have got it right.
Because it's often paired with your book, Fool's Errand about Afghanistan.
And by the way, I meant to ask you, I'm sorry.
I totally spaced out on this because there's so many different things we're talking about.
But I wanted you to tell a story of it was this book was cleared by the government censors for publication here in Oceania.
But then you got in trouble for publishing it.
Is that how the story went?
Sure.
That's part of the extended story.
Basically.
Go ahead and tell it.
We got all afternoon.
Basically.
No, I have all this Twitter free time now.
I'm devoting myself.
I'm going to join Antifa or something to fill in the extra hours.
But nonetheless, you know, the short version is that I tried very hard to bring my concerns about what was going on in Iraq to the attention of my bosses.
The State Department.
I couldn't get in to see the ambassador.
My meeting with the vice ambassador, the deputy chief of mission, was not a chance for me to discuss my thoughts, but actually a chance to get yelled at by him and told, you know, get with the program or we're going to ship you home.
And bad things will happen to you along the way.
So no one really was interested.
The media was not really looking for leaks and scoops back then.
The media was very interested in sort of just reporting out of Washington.
And so I wrote this book and the State Department had a procedure in place at that time that required all of its employees to clear our writing before publishing.
And this was a system that was designed to make sense, to keep you from inadvertently or accidentally revealing classified material.
It actually was a good idea.
Nobody, you know, I didn't want to reveal classified material and there isn't any in my book.
And the system in place at time was based on the concept that the only people to State Department who wrote books were ex-ambassadors who knew what to say, the nice words to say, or goofy Foreign Service officers who were writing sort of travel logs, you know, my adventures, collecting pottery in Southeast Asia or some silly stuff like that.
So they never really were prepared for a serious book, critical book like mine.
And so the rule was that you sent it in.
If you did not get a no or request for changes within 30 days, that was considered a pass, you were allowed to publish.
And I will never know what happened during those 30 days.
I'm guessing this job was assigned to low-level people, interns or whatever, who really were used to skimming, you know, the former Secretary of State's memoirs and just skimmed my book or didn't read it at all or who knows what happened.
We'll never know.
But basically it was approved.
Then when pre-publication copies started circulating, all hell broke loose inside the State Department and a few people really read it and kind of freaked out.
And one of the things they tried to do was to get the publisher to pull the book from the shelves, falsely claiming there was classified material in the book.
It wasn't classified.
It was nowhere near classified.
We actually had an intern at the publishing company.
We timed her, how long it took her to source all the material from places online that the State Department claimed was classified.
And this is pre-WikiLeaks.
I mean, this is just New York Times articles and things like that.
And so that kind of fell away.
And then they later claimed that a blog post of mine constituted revealing classified information because I linked to a WikiLeaks document.
It was all silly.
It was all fluffed up.
But at the time, it was a very serious attempt to do something about me that at the end of the day resulted in me retiring under pressure from the State Department, which was about the softest landing that was really possible under the circumstances.
It allowed me to not go to jail, which was a major goal of mine, and to leave with my head held relatively high, all things considered.
Given how badly things have gone for other whistleblowers under the Obama administration, John Kiriakou, Tom Drake, Bill Binney, all these other guys, I got off painlessly compared to them, never mind Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange or any of these other people.
So at the end of the day, it worked out about as well as it could have.
And in a sense, it's what led me to be here with you today, Scott.
If I had stayed with the State Department, I doubt I would have been on antiwar.com talking about the events in Iraq.
Yeah.
Well, and for years now, I've talked with you about all your great antiwar writing, because hey, when you're over it, you're over it, man, which is good for us.
Not all former government employees are useful to me, but you're one of them.
Well, I try to be a useful tool of the state.
One of the things that happens when you become a useful tool for the wrong side is that, and one of the reasons why an awful lot of ex-government people don't speak out is because you get cut off from some gravy.
The State Department, along with the Department of Defense and just about every other federal agency, hires a lot of retirees to pick up work when people are on vacation, when there's staffing gaps, when some big event is happening in Jakarta and they suddenly need 20 extra people.
They hire retired State Department people to go do that, and you get paid pretty well, and you get to go spend a couple of weeks in some foreign location, and you're busy, but you're not really in charge, so it's kind of fun.
Of course, none of those perks are available to people who violate OMORTA and speak out about the family, and that's something that I had to give up, and it's something that keeps a lot of State Department and some military people from speaking out even after they're retired.
If you're working at the high levels, if you're a former ambassador or senior official, well, then it's not just two weeks in Jakarta to help out with some conference.
It's an appointment to the Council of Foreign Relations.
It's a teaching job at Harvard.
It's a grant to study something where there's never any finished product expected.
It's a lot more money.
It's a lot of prestige.
It's a lot of high-status positions that are offered to you in return for your silence.
Me, I end up on antiwar.com with you.
Yeah.
Well, thank goodness for that, man.
Who would want to spend your life like that with those horrible people?
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
God, slumming around with the likes of old Garrison Horton.
Well, you know what?
I say it's a fitting punishment for doing the right thing.
All right.
You know, big metal.
You know, at the end of the day, as Daniel Ellsberg said on the show, also whose book I've now read finally, and I'm going to interview him all about his book, his latest book about nukes.
He's always said on this show that, you know, calling all whistleblowers, all government employees, if there's important information that the American people really deserve to know about these kind of emergency level crises, war and torture and murder and illegal spying and all of these things, then you owe it to us.
You know, supposedly the people of this country are sovereign and your oath is to tell the people the truth so that we can stop them from doing all the horrible things that they're doing.
And you're the people at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the CIA who are sending these 19-year-old kids out there to kill people and maybe die trying, lose their legs, lose their manhood, lose their life over a bunch of crap that you know better than, and they don't, or at least presumably.
So, what, you're not willing to go to prison?
You're not willing to lose your little perks when you're the ones demanding, you know, you're the ones in charge of putting these kids out there to do what's wrong and to risk everything doing it?
It's crazy.
So, you know, yeah.
Congratulations on doing the only right thing that you could have done, Peter, you know?
Well, if I gotta do it once, I might as well get it right the first time.
Scott, thank you very much, and I'm coming back again where there's more to be talked about here, and thank you for supporting me as I got bumped off of Twitter, and thank you for reading my book.
Yeah, man, definitely.
Very happy to, and happy to recommend it.
We Meant Well, and that's also the website, We Meant Well, used to be the Twitter handle.
Thanks again, Peter, appreciate it.
My pleasure.
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.