All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, guys, on the line, I've got the great Doug Bondo from the Cato Institute and now writing regularly for us again at antiwar.com as well.
And here's his great piece at the American Conservative Magazine, despite military resistance, our footprint in Iraq is finally shrinking.
I'm not sure.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Doug?
Doing okay.
How about yourself?
I'm all right.
Shrinking is better than growing, but I'm not sure whether they'll ever get all the way out or whether that's the plan or anything like that.
But you've got a really great piece here about who all is who and what all is happening on the ground there.
But it begins with this great indictment of Iraq war two at the hands of George W. Bush and all the results, especially this second paragraph here.
You just nail it.
So would you tell the people what it is that they don't know about Iraq war two or what it is that they need to understand about Iraq war two?
Oh, the Iraq war two, the George W. Bush invasion genuinely was a catastrophe.
I mean, this is something where you talk to foreign policy analysts, you know, if they're honest, almost all of them acknowledge that this is one of the most, the worst mistakes the U.S. government has made on foreign policy, certainly going back to World War two.
And you look at the cost, I mean, what it was, it was supposed to be a cakewalk, as we were told.
And the imagination was, you know, we would install in, you know, in place this expatriate who hadn't lived there since 1957, that they would follow American dictates, we would have bases there.
I mean, all these fantasies, you know, of course, the result is that thousands of American died.
Tens of thousands were wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died.
Millions were displaced.
You know, religious communities were destroyed.
ISIS arose.
I mean, it came out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
All of that's out of the invasion.
And the Iranian influence that this administration is so focused on came about because we got rid of Saddam Hussein.
So you look at all of these consequences, especially living on with ISIS and the damage they've done, all of this goes back to the Bush invasion.
And what's striking is I'm not aware of a single architect of that invasion who has indicated any remorse at all for what's happened.
Now, there are a few people out there who kind of look back and say, well, yeah, maybe that didn't work out so well.
But in terms of policymakers, there's just nothing.
I mean, it's extraordinary to me how one could ignore the fact that policy caused mass hardship, mass death and destruction.
And doesn't bother us.
Just we'll move on now.
Now we have a great new idea.
It'll be Libya.
It'll be Yemen.
It'll be Syria or Iran.
No problem.
And we'll do it better this time.
Trust us.
It's the attitude in Washington.
Right.
And, you know, the most amazing part of that bit of it, to me, the no lessons part is the way they just moved right on to Libya when if there was one thing about Iraq, war two was it was the danger of bin Laden nights having an open space to wage an insurgency like this.
There was no ordinary guerrilla insurgency with the suicide attacks and the head shoppings and all of the Zarqawi madness.
And then here they turn right around and they put Al Qaeda in Iraq, in Libya, in the driver's seat in a regime change against Gaddafi, who they just made a deal with, what, seven years before or something like that, to turn around, betray him and wage that war.
And it was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia.
And they all brag that, yeah, we fought in Iraq, war two with Zarqawi against the Americans.
And so I could see how, look, we're talking about especially these ridiculous Democrat policy Mandarin types like Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and I totally believe the narrative that they go, oh, yeah, this is just like Rwanda.
Only now we can make a difference in time and, you know, inhaling their own smoke on that garbage.
But without considering at all that, geez, the lesson of the W. Bush years was watch out for Zarqawiites.
Don't create room for Zarqawiite type bin Ladenite militias, you know, these radical Sunni militias to fight and grow when, you know, bin Laden and Zarqawiite ideology is the fad right now among Sunni insurgencies.
You know, it's this incredibly chauvinist and almost nihilistic and destructive approach, you know, like the way that they wage war against Shiite civilians in Iraq, for example, this kind of thing.
I mean, for them to play with that kind of fire, we still had troops fighting what was left of AQI, which was calling itself then the Islamic State of Iraq in 2011 until the end of that year.
But Obama's taken their side in Libya and in Syria from the beginning of that year.
He's already switched.
I mean, it shows the bankruptcy of U.S. foreign policy, you know, that we're told al-Qaida is the great enemy.
And in fact, they attacked in 2003 or 2001 and, you know, I mean, you want to take them out.
I understand that.
But then you decide that suddenly, well, Assad is more dangerous than al-Qaida, so we'll help by.
That's where you just wonder, you know, I mean, what's what's going on here?
And especially, I mean, Obama, you know, opposed the Iraq war.
So give him credit.
Well, then why do you do this other stuff?
Well, you know, what's the vision here?
And I assume it's this.
Well, if we lead from behind, you see, it won't I don't know.
Somehow it'll turn out better.
And so they go into this without any endgame, any any plan, just an assumption that, well, we're smarter than the other guys, so we'll do it a little bit different.
And then they seem shocked when everything blows up badly.
And as you mentioned, the whole question of Gaddafi, look, this isn't a nice guy.
I mean, look, most of the third world's ruled by a lot of pretty nasty guys.
But Gaddafi gave up his nukes and missiles, and the deal was we would treat him nicely if he gave them up.
And so, you know, you can go online and see how he died.
I mean, it was very unpleasant.
He got pulled from a culvert by guerrillas or by, you know, insurgents in Sirte.
And he had a very, very, very bad ending, you know, on anybody.
I mean, Kim Jong Un or anybody else can look at that and think, so the Americans want me to give up my weapons and I'm supposed to trust them this.
And that apparently never occurred to anybody in Washington that maybe this wasn't the right thing to do.
But I have I have trouble imagining any third world regime will ever give up its nukes in the future.
Why would they trust anyone in the West?
I mean, they'd be fools to.
Yeah.
And in fact, this keeps coming up.
But hey, why not?
It's just perfect.
Right.
You couldn't make this up, Doug, when when John Bolton trying to sabotage negotiations with North Korea said we're looking to seek a deal very much along the lines of the Libyan model.
No, that's brilliant, because John is very intelligent.
I mean, I know, John, we actually were on TV together on Fox News years ago on North Korea.
It's still floating around somewhere online.
And yeah, this is a guy who knew exactly what he was doing.
Oh, I just meant kind of how they turn over the nukes.
Well, come on.
You know, I mean, we know if North Korea thinks of the Libya deal, we know what they think of the Libya deal.
They think about the ending, you know, and John wanted to make sure they didn't negotiate.
This is a perfect even Trump seemed to get that point that complaining about, you know, why would he mention Libya?
Well, it's because he knows what he's doing, you know, Mr. President, and frankly, you don't.
But that that that is the you know, if you want to cause a war, I mean, I mean, the policies they followed are perfect for causing wars.
That's why I don't think they all want to cause wars.
I don't think Obama wanted to have additional wars, but their policies make it much more likely.
It's the same thing going on in Iraq, which article you mentioned, is that, you know, we want to turn Iraq into a battleground between us and Iran.
I mean, oh, that makes the Iraqis very happy.
You know, we've liberated them.
And now good news is, you know, we want to start with I mean, on their soil, we take on a top Iranian government official and we act as if, well, of course we do that.
I mean, what's what's the big deal?
Right.
Amazing.
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And, you know, I'm sorry, I was googling and I couldn't find the the piece right now.
There's the my keywords keep pulling up too much extraneous stuff.
But it was just earlier this year after the strikes against Soleimani, I guess it must have been in March that the general in charge of the war in Iraq wrote a letter to Trump and Pompeo, essentially explaining to them the facts of life that, look, we're allied with these Shiite groups fighting what's left of ISIS.
We can't fight these Shiite groups.
We don't have enough men to stand against our allies in a fight.
So just to make sure that you guys understand who's who here, which side faces east and which side faces west and what matters and what's going on, because it was a fair bet that Trump and Pompeo, they still don't understand the difference between the Shia east and the Sunni west in Iraq right now or why it matters or what.
They just know who they're mad at.
I'll save all hawk or something.
Let's bomb that.
Well, I'm sure that Trump has no idea.
I mean, that's sophistication well beyond his ability.
Pompeo may very well understand it, but not care.
I mean, look, these are people who you wouldn't surprise me.
Pompeo wouldn't mind having a war with Iran.
I mean, John Bolton wanted one.
I mean, John Bolton wrote articles demanding that we attack both Iraq, both Iran and North Korea.
You know, Pompeo has always been very hawkish towards Iran.
I don't know if he'd actually care if we had a war with them.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's one of the problems here is that people like that, you know, is it because they're ignorant or is it because they actually do have this different agenda?
You know, the only you know, I mean, the idea here was we're going to get a better deal.
We use maximum pressure.
They'll come crawling to us and concede everything.
Well, that hasn't happened.
Well, you know, if that hasn't happened with questions, then what?
You know, well, war is the obvious answer.
So that's the sort of thing that worries me about Pompeo.
It always worried me about Bolton.
These are smart maneuver, you know, kind of bureaucratic operatives.
They know how to start something, even if the president is kind of off in La La Land imagining that he's promoting peace.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think there was part of the narrative there was we seek regime change, but not by war and not even by CIA, you know, 53 style coup.
We just want to cripple the Iranian regime through sanctions and maximum pressure to such a degree that the people of Iran will rise up and overthrow it for us.
They'll be so miserable under the sanctions.
They'll blame the Ayatollah for getting them into this crisis.
And then we'll have whoever the new regime is.
We'll be able to work with them.
But of course, that's a ridiculous fantasy, too.
That's, you know, even more fanciful than the Ayatollah is going to come crawling to Trump, begging to sign the deal with all its new added terms.
I mean, it's completely crazy.
And so but then same conclusion, though, that, well, so now what?
After that didn't work, the Americans won't back down and go, OK, well, actually, the nuclear deal wasn't that bad.
Yeah, so I mean, it is amazing to me that American policymakers never ask how would Americans respond if somebody did this to us?
So if another so assume a world in which China has much greater economic strength than us and they use maximum economic pressure, would Americans say, oh, I guess we got to give in?
I mean, I think the answer is absolutely not.
Americans would say, if you build weapons, you know, if we have to fight these people, we will.
And so we just we make these assumptions that, of course, all these other people are going to concede.
I mean, Venezuela will give up, Cuba will give up, Iran will give up, North Korea will give up.
I mean, everybody's supposed to surrender to us and nobody ever does.
And it doesn't ever seem to occur to anybody in Washington that maybe this strategy isn't working.
There's always one more.
Sanction we can put on and this one will finally do it and then everything will be wonderful.
And we don't learn anything.
I mean, they had multiple maximum pressure campaigns.
Every one so far has failed.
I mean, I'm I can maybe one will eventually work.
But what I found is rarely overseas do I find people who are happy if we're trying to starve them.
I mean, their reaction tends not to be pro-American because of the ideas.
If we put all of our pressure on the people, they will blame us.
And then they will elect, you know, Democrats who will create a liberal state that will not join us.
I mean, this is just it's a fantasy world.
Yeah, well, and especially with Iraq just sitting right there burning.
And as you said, everybody knows the entire consensus.
Very few ever said sorry, but everybody knows that boy shouldn't have done that.
And everybody knows that.
No, they're not better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein.
Thank you very much.
And all this kind of thing.
And so you have and the war continues, right?
And there's still low level civil war in Iraq, essentially unending.
If you look at, you know, the atrocities being committed against Sunnis in their camps, you know, the the the wives and rape babies of the ISIS fighters in their camps and this kind of thing.
I mean, the situation there has not been resolved.
You know, and and and so it's there for everyone to see.
But as you say, they'll just continue to ignore it anyway.
Well, what's really frustrating is 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, maybe we will have a stable democratic Iraq.
And then, of course, what will happen is somebody will say, see, the plan worked.
Everything worked out well, you know, as if like the previous 30 years didn't have.
Right.
And then they'll say, but now we have to overthrow it because they elected some some bunch of people who are even more loyal to Iran.
Yeah, they'll vote for the wrong people.
And that's what I mean.
We demand that there be an election in the occupied territories.
Hamas wins, at which point we won't recognize the election.
Right.
And you're thinking, well, there is a problem with this.
You know, you say you're in favor of elections, but it turns out you're only in favor of election.
I mean, we complain about Russia, you know, mucking around in our election.
And look what we do.
I mean, we pretend to be in favor of elections, except if they don't elect the right people, at which point we suddenly find out what we've kind of lost our taste for.
And, you know, the world notices that.
I mean, it's not as if these other people are stupid and don't figure out that the U.S. is completely hypocritical on these issues.
Yeah.
All right.
So but then there's stupid D.C. politics and D.C. politics say that.
There's this safe haven myth, we can never leave anywhere because then things will get bad again.
In fact, Donald Trump, a couple of times he got this really right.
He said it a few different times.
But, you know, in his national interest speech, the one that Zalmay Khalilzad introduced him, he said exactly right.
And it must have been, you know, under Mike Flynn's influence, I think, where they came up with this, where he says Obama created ISIS, but then he puts meat on the bone.
It sounds like just some stupid slur.
But then he goes, yeah, because he backed the jihadists in Libya and then he sent him on and backed the jihadists in Syria.
And that's what led to the rise of the Islamic State in Syria, which then eventually invaded Iraq.
But he pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So the troops weren't there to prevent the fall of Western Iraq.
And that's all his big, stupid fault.
So he's absolutely right about that.
All three of those things going together.
But then, of course, what happened is he dropped the first two parts of the story and instead he just stuck with the James Mattis.
And ever since then, the Mattis and McMaster type consensus answer that, well, if he made a mistake at all, never mind all that stuff about high treason on behalf of Bin Ladenites in Libya and Syria, the mistake was pulling out of Iraq.
Lesson, you can never pull out of anywhere once you're there.
And then Trump himself invoked that exact narrative when he escalated in Afghanistan that we saw what happened when Obama pulled out of Iraq, ISIS.
And so that means we've got to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
So let's go.
That was August 2017.
So this narrative is still so dominant.
And I noticed that all Trump is ever doing is drawing numbers down a bit, but he's never actually getting anybody out of anywhere.
And he's not even sworn to get our guys out of Afghanistan until next May, which is plenty of time to ruin that.
And it just seems like this safe haven myth is the ultimate Trump card that the military and the CIA and The New York Times will use to say that if you leave anywhere, you're giving ground to terrorists and or Putin and or whoever.
Well, I think that's the critical thing is that, again, Trump Trump's level of knowledge is not very high.
So other people know how to use that.
So, you know, he wants to blame everything on Obama.
So you construct your argument to, you know, if we leave, you know, we will be kind of playing up to Obama's failure.
So obviously we can't leave.
I mean, McChrystal, I mean, all these guys, when they portray us and they portray us written on Afghanistan, we can't leave it.
It's all this bizarre safe haven myth.
And of course, you know, when we I mean, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, our ally.
I mean, he was in the city where the military has its headquarters and we're acting as if you can't.
I mean, terrorists can only show up if, you know, like nobody's really in charge.
No, they can operate anywhere.
I mean, in Yemen, you know, the most active national chapter was Yemen was, you know, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
And of course, what we did there is the people who didn't like Al Qaeda were the Houthis, the Yemenis.
So we, of course, back the Saudis and the Emiratis as they attack the Houthis.
And of course, the Emiratis and the Saudis are arming Al Qaeda there.
I mean, so we have the notion that we have to stay in Afghanistan because otherwise all these terrorists would show up.
Look, we support these terrorists all over.
I mean, this is this is simply an argument to maintain a commitment they want to maintain that has nothing to do with reality.
You use whatever arguments out there.
And, you know, I mean, the idea is if we don't have troops in Kandahar, you know, Al Qaeda will show up in Kansas City.
I mean, this is the most moronic argument one could make, but they go and they make this seriously.
They put it in articles and publications like Foreign Affairs.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, that's the thing, you know, I think we're even narrowed, zoomed in too far here.
I mean, if you even even as broad as the conversation has been, the different war zones we're talking about that, you know, ultimately the lessons of Iraq really aren't just don't knock off Qaddafi or that kind of thing, but even just that the entire doctrine of America as the world army, the U.S. army is the world army to enforce the world law and the so-called liberal world order, which is the I guess the PR campaign for the American world empire that that makes all these things necessary, that the mission's not over until we have a good and successful coup in Russia and China and any country that would dare to be independent from us.
America must rule the whole world, even though I you know what and the libertarians called it back in 2003, there were libertarians saying this is the high watermark of the American empire right here.
It's all downhill from here.
And that has proved to be completely true in terms of American credibility to push other countries around and push our resolutions through the Security Council and every other thing.
And but they won't accept that.
Right.
I mean, as you say, you read Foreign Affairs and it's like, hey, we can't give up Kandahar City, which if you could give up anywhere, it's Kandahar City, man.
But nope, not even there.
No, look, that's right.
I mean, look, I haven't been to Kandahar, but I went to Lashkar Ghar and I've been to Herat and I've been to, you know, Kabul and elsewhere.
You know, it's been a decade.
But, you know, these are places we should happily give up.
Now, I mean, there are good people who live in Afghanistan who want a liberal society, but we can't give it to them.
I mean, you know, we've been there 17 years and you just sit there and think, for what?
I mean, this is longer than World War One, World War Two, the Civil War combined in Central Asia.
And I just say, look at a map, show me a spot on earth that really isn't important for America and I'll show you Central Asia.
And people say, we know it's surrounded by Iran and China and India and Pakistan.
It's like, well, that's a very good reason for us not to be there.
I mean, again, it's just weird.
We can control the world.
So here, even in a place far distant from us where we have no interests at all, surrounded by major states that have a lot of interest there, where we can we can kind of run the place.
I mean, a normal, you go back in American history.
This is a fairly recent phenomenon that anyone in America, even the military, would think we should have a permanent commitment to Afghanistan.
I mean, why?
What conceivable?
It's American empire.
I mean, simply our job is to run the world.
I mean, I love Madeleine Albright because she said so many things that were true that you know, I mean, kind of explain it, which she says, you know, we stand taller, we see further.
I mean, you know that we, you know, we get to, you know, the price is worth it.
I mean, you know, Iraqi babies being killed.
And there's so many of these things that inform the kind of foreign policy ruling class today.
They really, really do believe America understands the world.
America speaks for the world.
America, you know, is the the one, the essential power.
I mean, all of these things they believe, which gets us into all of these stupid wars for no good reason.
Yeah.
You know, I was just reading this thing.
I was trying to get the guy in the show on that, but about, you know, the rise of the civilizational state now where China is out from under 100 years of colonialism and communism and they are reestablishing their independence and on a civilizational basis, the Russians are doing the same thing.
The Indians are doing the same thing.
And, you know, the West still has this fantasy of enforcing the Western experience on everyone else and and forcing them to adapt to our ways.
But it seems like, you know, if we had had, say, Ron Paul and Harry Brown and good real libertarians who really not just believe in but understand the Declaration of Independence and really understand freedom and they had beat the whole world over the head, think of Harry Brown in his Statue of Liberty speech where what if he had not murdered anyone at all, but had just, you know, gone on a campaign of saying as we're perfecting our union and the application of our Bill of Rights here that we've got to say to the rest of the world that y'all's Bill of Rights aren't good enough yet and y'all need to do it more like us and these kinds of things that we could have probably really made a lot of success in getting even Chinese civilization and and whoever else to feel a lot more, you know, open toward adopting really the highest of our values.
But instead, free markets means the most corrupt crony capitalism looks, in fact, just like American capitalism looks almost just like Chinese capitalism.
It's completely political in every way.
It's completely corrupt in every way and everybody knows it.
And that's your free markets and your democracy is we carpet bomb you.
But then, you know, and then if you elect the wrong guy, as you were saying in Gaza Strip or anywhere else, we'll nullify your election results, Algeria or any other place.
They don't mean what they say at all.
And so it completely discredits the ideas that they exploit as their public relations.
They make free markets and democracy look bad when they're bad.
That's what it is.
It ain't free markets.
It's bad.
It's them and what they do.
No, that's right.
I mean, other countries, I mean, hypocrisy is a constant of diplomacy and every country does it.
But I think American officials really add on an extraordinary amount of sanctimony.
Many know the question about intervening in other countries elections.
I mean, there's a Carnegie Mellon study that I think is between 1945 and 2000.
The US intervened in 81 foreign elections and and we were pushing candidates.
This wasn't just, oh, we want a democracy.
I mean, I have a friend who had worked for the Republican Institute, which, of course, is funded by the government, not the Republican Party.
And I mean, he he operated under the control of the ambassador who wouldn't even let him meet with the largest party in the country in the Balkans that he was operating in because it was a nationalist party.
It was democratically elected, but that didn't matter.
We didn't like them because they won't work pro-EU.
And on election day, we talked and he said, you can't believe what I'm doing.
I mean, he was out there ordered to basically promote the parties they liked.
So we get all upset.
Can you imagine, you know, China or Russia or somebody is doing something?
It's like we've done all that.
But we don't even I mean, we don't even acknowledge it.
We just kind of feel as if it's well, it's our right to do that.
Nobody else can do it, but we can do it.
Yep.
It's again, it's funny that this persists even after everything, you know, it's sort of like it's childish in a way, right?
It's like the way I don't know if they still do this as much.
Well, I guess plane crashes don't happen as much.
But I remember when I was a kid thinking how strange it always was that whenever they reported a plane crash somewhere in the world, they would always just say the number of dead Americans.
And a lot of times wouldn't even say the total dead.
It would only say the dead Americans.
It really is the Uber mentioned kind of weird mentality that exactly the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, that everybody's born free.
That's just between Canada and Mexico.
That doesn't count for anybody else.
We can kill anybody else we want.
Or our government certainly can.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, it's strange.
I don't know.
I guess it made sense to me in a way, or I was it was easier to understand when I was a child and couldn't understand around it.
You know what I mean?
But as an adult, it's pretty strange to think that that's how the rest of the adults of the society basically still conceive it.
That's who I was listening to then.
That's who was producing the news shows I was watching in the 80s.
Right.
They were grownups.
And this is how many Americans died in the plane crash.
And screw everybody else.
Yep.
Yep.
No.
Well, I mean, look, the thing about the American people is, for the most part, they don't worry about the world.
They're not anti foreign.
But America is a big country and people are busy.
And, you know, like ultimately, I mean, there's something good in it.
I mean, who cares what goes on in Greece?
I mean, most Americans don't actually think it's America's business.
Right.
Really is the difference between most Americans and folks in Washington, D.C., is people in Washington, D.C. really do believe it is America's business.
So, of course, the Treasury secretary or the foreign minister or whoever, you know, somebody should go over there and tell them what to do.
You know, and they think it's quite natural for the U.S. to show up and lecture the Europeans on the budget, you know, and tell India how to run its elections or something.
I mean, I think that's where that's so the media kind of understands if we're going to do a story on wherever we've got to have some America angle.
But at some level, that's actually very healthy because most Americans aren't worried about it's like, you know, let them live their lives.
That's no big deal.
It's fine.
I mean, no big deal.
You know, it's folks in Washington who are just horrified by the thought that somebody somewhere might vote for the wrong person.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing is they take advantage of that virtue that Americans just hey, we're the great grandsons of the people who fled somewhere to come here to be freer.
And so we just want to live our lives and be free and mind our own business and take care of our people and do what we can and ignore the world.
But then the problem is our government is the world empire and they make the rest of the world our business, because in a sense, sort of kind of we're responsible for its behavior.
And so even though we would just as soon ignore Greece, we owe it to the Greeks to do everything we can to discredit our government's efforts to intervene in their country.
It ain't right.
And them and everybody else, you know, because, again, what if they were doing that to us?
That's exactly right.
I like the one about the Iranians.
What if the Iranians somehow they were the superpower and the Persian Empire and and the Shiite ayatollahs and their secret police had arranged a coup d'etat to overthrow Bill Clinton 26 years ago and they had installed their sock puppet right wing fascist torture dictator and the Israelis came over and trained the secret police how to torture people to death.
And then after 26 years, would we be cool with that by now?
We'd be used to it by now or we'd be madder and madder and madder every day until it broke out in revolution.
And we hang these bastards from lampposts like the so many issues where if you flip them around that you don't have to like Vladimir Putin to understand why he might not want Ukraine and NATO.
And he might be a little upset at the idea.
We're helping push out an elected president who has at least some positive feelings for Russia.
I just say apply the same standard to Canada or Mexico.
The Russians will help stage a coup d'etat.
They demand to move trade away from the U.S. to their allies in South America.
And they also want to invite Mexico to join the Warsaw Pact.
I mean, people in Washington would have an utter freak out.
And, you know, you understand why.
But, you know, so if people in Washington would have a freak out, they don't even think about how the Russians might view what we're doing, because, of course, we're the good guys and everybody on Earth should know we're the good guys.
So nobody on Earth should feel bad.
I mean, really, I think that's the fundamental problem.
Why would anyone object to us running the world?
We're just so sweet and they don't get it.
Man, that just kills me because I know you live in that city and that you're not making this up.
That is exactly because it's easy for me to think, no, they're all just bribed and corrupt and they're all working.
It's all the military industrial complex.
It's all interests and all these things because there are so many interests at play, of course.
And but, man, ideology is such an important part of America as Christopher Reeves.
Superman, you know, is such a big part of it.
Right.
The total Boy Scout superpower.
And I think I mean, a lot of it they are.
I mean, I think a Samantha power really is horrified by the idea of genocide.
It's just she can't get it through her mind that, you know, us intervening.
Guess what?
You know how many hundreds of thousands did we kill in Iraq?
This isn't just an accident.
I mean, so they have trouble with the concept that their their ideas are flawed.
Right.
It's not just somebody did it badly.
We're going to and it's so easy to kind of mix where your interest, you know, you are convinced that what you are doing, which benefits you also benefits everybody else.
I think that's just a very natural.
You know, so it's not not even kind of an overt corruption, but it's self-reinforcing.
And look, most think tanks in Washington, look, the way you get invited to foreign conferences and all this other stuff is you every conference is how we should strengthen our alliance with so and so.
Right.
I mean, NATO does not invite me to their conferences because I don't say we should strengthen our alliance.
So, I mean, the point is, if you want to succeed at a major think tank, you know, you want to go out there and you promote I mean, you know, the Saudis and the Emiratis.
I mean, they they fund these think tanks.
You know, you obviously are not going to be on staff if you're criticizing them.
Right.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'm so over time.
I could sit here and talk with you about this stuff all day.
And I will again soon.
Thanks for your time, Doug.
Really appreciate a lot.
Great to talk with you always.
All right, you guys.
The great Doug Bondo.
He is at the Cato Institute, senior fellow there.
And he is writing here for TAC.
Despite military resistance, our footprint in Iraq is finally shrinking.
And of course, find all this stuff at Antiwar.com as well.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com.
Antiwar dot com.
Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
