Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our names, been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Larry Wilkerson, formerly an army colonel and chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was the Secretary of State in the first George W. Bush term, and famously helped prepare the UN speech when Colin Powell lied America into war, and has been repentant and doing anti-war work ever since, and I think teaching college at William & Mary.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Larry?
I'm doing fine.
I hope you are, too.
I'm doing great, and I owe you a big thanks for endorsing my book.
I like to cite that, see?
I got legit army colonels that say it ain't too bad for an anti-war book, so take a look.
People like that, so, appreciate that.
Hey, listen, you wrote this really important article.
It's at Loeblog, Jim Loeb's, the great Jim Loeb's blog, Loeblog, The Neoconservative Comeback.
And, as I was saying, you have experience in the first George W. Bush term, which means you know all about these neocons from firsthand experience there, representing the not-neocons faction, at least somewhat, I think, at the time.
So now you're writing this article about if Trump is gone, or simply just marginalized, the more marginalized he is, and particularly if he's replaced with his Vice President Pence, then all these neocons are organizing and preparing to come back and steal the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for coming up with lies about somebody, probably Iran and their friends, and that they're raring to go.
Is that right?
That's right.
I think the declarations that were made by their intelligentsia, so to speak, in the beginning of the Trump administration, never Trump, Eliot Cohen and others wrote, don't go to work for this guy, he'll contaminate you, and so forth, have been put aside now because they see how imperiled he is, and they see how he focuses on everything but what they want to focus on, which is security and foreign policy, and so they see a very, they see an excellent opportunity to come back into government and wreak havoc, just as they did in 2001, 2, and 3.
Well, it seems like, I mean, I don't know, I think how rogue Donald Trump is, is pretty much overblown in most cases, but especially on Israel and Iran and, you know, Palestine issues.
He's as bad as any of them.
I guess he's a little bit less worse on regime change against Assad, but that game was already up before he even got in there.
I don't think he reignited the, when we get these people back in the government, if they come back into the quantities that I'm envisioning, one of the first things they'll do is reignite the war with Syria.
You see John Bolton, who's not a card-carrying neocon, but he finds their company very, very comfortable because they want what he wants, and they bring Israel with them, especially the right-wing government in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu, Lieberman, and others.
So what Bolton has said about warning Assad that if he uses chemical weapons and so forth, the United States will weigh in again and weigh in much more seriously than it did with the cruise missiles before.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Bolton wants this, the neocons want this, they want to reignite the war in Syria, they want the United States seriously engaged in that war, and they want to follow up with Iran.
So this is the same script they were operating off of in 2001 and 2002.
So can't they just say, listen, sorry Trump for calling you bad names, but hey, at least we agree about Iran and Palestine and Netanyahu, and so let's all just be friends and you give us jobs and we'll shut up and stop attacking you?
Seems like a pretty obvious deal to be made here, not that I'm trying to encourage it.
That's part of it.
I'm sure that's part of the mantra that they bring back in with them, don't worry about us, we agree with you, we'll take care of things for you.
You go ahead and focus on these other things, domestic things.
And from him, hey, Sheldon Adelson says I'm cool, so back off.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
God.
Plenty of money behind them, that's for sure.
Yeah.
All right, so tell us about what they're doing.
I mean, already some of them have been hired, and as we learned in the George W. Bush years, it really matters who's the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and who is in charge of the planning staff on the National Security Council.
So who are these people?
What is going on here?
Teach us some names.
And we also have, we mustn't forget, the number one neocon already in the administration, been there for some time, Nikki Haley at the United Nations, and her dream is 2020.
So we're looking at the prospect of not only the neocons returning to the Trump administration, but also her running for president in 2020.
So we're looking at a neocon walking into the Oval Office, if you will, and taking over from the very top U.S. foreign and security policy.
Underneath that, you have others who are coming back, this latest one that I pointed out in the piece for Loblog, Samantha Ravitch, who managed two of the catastrophic areas.
This is why I can't believe we're allowing them to come back.
For Dick Cheney, she was in charge of, among other things, Middle East and Northeast Asia policy at a time when Kim Jong-un, of course, went, or Kim Jong-il before him, and then Kim Jong-un went from not having nuclear weapons to having several nuclear weapons, if not tens of nuclear weapons.
And she was also in charge of the policy we had with respect to Iran, where Iran went from having almost no centrifuges spinning uranium to having over 9,000.
So we bring Samantha Ravitch back and make her deputy on the Intelligence Advisory Board.
And this is accompanied by a gentleman who has taken over the Syria envoy position, who was a former Washington Institute for Near East Policy member.
Not an overt neocon, but certainly his views and ideologies seem to track very well with them, a member of that camp, if you will.
And he's going to take over Syria policy.
And the way this is happening even prevents what is mostly a cowardly Congress from exercising the little restraint it might have by not approving their confirmation, not confirming them in office, because what they're doing is skirting that.
Special envoys, for example, like the one to Syria, they don't have to be approved by the Congress.
So all you have to do is appoint them and say, go to it.
Do your job.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this is already kind of playing out.
I guess you don't really need the actual card-carrying members of these think tanks if you have Donald Trump appointing his bankruptcy lawyer to be the guy running.
I forgot which one is the ambassador.
Was it the bankruptcy lawyer that got named to be the ambassador?
That was his friend, and the other guy was a special envoy.
Yeah, but most of this is either a part of or focused on domestic policy or on the domestic situation for the president, which is becoming more imperiled every day.
Well, I mean, they're talking now about they're going to strip, and it's just a legal terminology, but it sounds all important, the refugee status from all the Palestinians, the true diaspora of Palestine there in Syria and Jordan and wherever they're spread throughout the world, in the Gaza Strip, of their refugee status.
And they'll just be, they're supposed to be, what, the citizens of Gaza now?
So they're passing around the world as waifs and orphans.
I mean, this is, it's hand-in-glove with our own immigration policy, though.
I have military officers who tell me that they had Iraqis or Afghans who worked their fingers to the bone for them in Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars there.
And they can't even get them now that their lives are in danger, as the U.S. presence in both countries has been reduced.
They can't get them immigration rights into the United States.
This is insanity.
After every war the United States has fought, one of the detrituses of those wars, whether it's Vietnam or whatever, is people flocking to the United States from the country where we stirred all the things up with the war.
And now we're saying we've taken a pittance of the Iraqis who work for us, of the Afghans who work for us.
In fact, if you look at it beside a country like Germany or a country like France or almost any other country and you compare populations, we're miserly in terms of the people we've allowed into this country, people who helped us, people who risked their lives for us.
We won't even let in.
This is crazy.
The whole immigration picture is crazy.
Yeah, well, and although you can see why they'd be scared of and don't trust the people that they work with overseas, you've got green on blue attacks all the time in Afghanistan.
You want to bring that stuff here?
Well, it's not that, though.
You've got military people who have been working with these people for six, seven years, and they are tested people.
They're not the ones who turned on anyone.
No, you know what I mean, though.
They don't want to bring back somebody who threw a grenade into a group of American soldiers or anything.
They're asking for people to have the right to come to this country for the same reason we let Vietnamese come to this country after the Vietnam War, for the same reason we let Koreans come to this country after the Korean War, because they were faithful, able-bodied, hard-working people on our side in their country, and because when we leave, their lives are in danger.
Yeah, no, I got it.
I'm not saying hang them out to dry.
I'm just kind of mocking the Trump administration's understanding of the situation.
They have an understanding?
Well, I mean, that's something that Trump has made a big deal about before.
Why are we training up an army that's shooting our guys in the back over there?
Well, that's how irrational the mission really is.
Well, it is an irrational mission.
So what do you expect Donald Trump's reaction to that to be?
You know, it's going to be something twisted.
Donald Trump doesn't even know why we're in Afghanistan.
He turned Afghanistan over to the Pentagon completely.
And we're in Afghanistan for reasons the American people don't even realize.
Well, tell us more about that, because I like what you say about this.
I think you're right.
Well, we're there for three prominent reasons.
One, because it's such a difficult country to get into.
Ask Donald Rumsfeld.
He found out how difficult it is to get into.
It's landlocked.
You've got to go over to other countries.
You can't just fly in there.
We're there when we're not leaving, because it is the only place along the Chinese Belt Road Initiative through Central Asia where we have military hard power.
And we're not about to leave that geographic location, because if we ever wanted to check that initiative with military power, that's from where we would do it.
Second reason we're there is because it's cheek and jowl with the potentially most unstable nuclear situation in the world, Pakistan.
So we want to be able to leave on those weapons if, in fact, they become unstable and start falling into terrorist's hands or whatever.
And the third reason we're there is because it's right next to Xinjiang Province, the westernmost and largest province in China.
In that province are 20 million Uyghurs who do not necessarily like the Han Chinese, who, of course, are the predominant number in China.
So if the CIA had to conduct operations to use those Uyghurs to try to destabilize Beijing, that's from where they would operate.
So those are the three reasons.
And we're not leaving Afghanistan for the next 50 years for those three reasons.from Listen and Think Audio.
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Well, Trump himself has cited one of those that we need to be there in order to seize Pakistan's nukes if they ever get it.
Yeah, he has mentioned that.
Yeah, but but yeah, it's funny too, because I think most Americans just wouldn't anticipate in a million years that we really that the middle part of North America has to dominate the middle part of Eurasia forever to keep the what?
To keep the Chinese from building a road through there.
Is that what he said?
It doesn't sound right.
The great game is back on.
The great game lasted for years, decades, between Russia, India, China, the United States, France.
Now the great game is essentially between Russia, China, and the United States, with Europe kind of watching with a fever while it watches, because Europe on the one hand wants what China has to offer.
It takes some of their dependency on Russia away.
It wants Chinese pump gas and oil.
It wants Chinese production.
In another way, it doesn't want it because it doesn't want to be dominated.
So you're looking at Europe wealthier than the United States, wealthier than China, certainly wealthier than Russia, but it can't get its political act together so that that wealth in Germany and France and the U.K. and Belgium and elsewhere can be merged into a political unity that would be powerful enough to stand up to Russia and China.
So you're looking at a mess over there right now, not unlike the mess that sort of developed as we walked into World War I.
Well, it's interesting that you mention the possible use of Uyghurs against the Chinese.
My friend Eric Margulies, the great war correspondent, he talked about seeing CIA training camps where Uyghurs were training in Afghanistan in 2001.
I don't doubt it.
Look at what Erdogan did.
And you would not have to convince me the CIA didn't have a hand in this.
Erdogan invited 20,000 of those Uyghurs out of Xinjiang province into Turkey, gave them a little bit of training and put them into Syria.
They were supposed to help him fight the Kurds, who, of course, he detests because of their capability to destabilize his own country of Turkey.
So now where are most of those Uyghurs?
Well, they're hanging out in Idlib, which is about to be attacked.
It's the last bastion of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Kurds, you name it, in Syria.
All the enemies of Assad in Syria, not all of them, not every single one of them, but many of them, are now in the only place in Syria where they can be without being killed, and that's in Idlib province.
And Assad, with Russian air support and Iranian help, is getting ready to mount a major offensive and eradicate them.
Well, and as you said, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, has quite clumsily, I think, deployed the foundation for a false flag attack.
Hey, al-Qaeda, get ready with some chlorine so we have an excuse to take al-Qaeda's side again, because as long as they're against Iran and Russia.
If I were Bashar al-Assad, I would issue a public invitation to General Votel and Secretary of Defense Mattis right now.
I'd make it public, and I'd say, you were invited, Votel is the central commander, you were invited to my ground commander's camp.
Come.
You will be provided safe passage.
Come and sit in my ground commander's camp as he wages this last offensive against Idlib province.
And then you will see I don't use and don't have chemical weapons.
That's what I'd do if I were Assad.
I'd embarrass the shit out of the United States.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know if anyone would buy it this time.
We've been through this before three times already.
I mean, I know Jake Tapper would buy it, but...
We buy Kim Kardashian's ass every day.
We'll buy anything.
Well, it depends how broadly you define we, but I get you.
Well, no, I didn't mean you.
No, I got you.
No, listen, so now what about this guy James Jeffrey?
I want to start memorizing all the new Doug Fythes here.
I should have already had my handle on this.
I'm not sure Jim is a neocon.
I'll have to reserve opinion on him.
I don't know what his ideology is.
Well, you've got a list of some staffers in here that you're telling us to be concerned about as they come into power.
I mean, you say he's from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was created by AIPAC.
Yeah, but you look at Bolton.
He's not really a neocon.
No.
Bolton is scarier to me because he's more like Cheney.
I would call Bolton an ultra-nationalist.
He'll fall into any ideological camp.
He doesn't have any ideology.
Neither does Cheney.
They're amoral.
They don't have any character.
They don't have any ethics.
All they care about is their own personal ambition, their own personal power.
And in the case of Cheney, I think he actually did have a serious interest in the security of the United States.
But it was security in which he could make $40 billion, you know, or whatever the hell the Halliburton last deal was off Afghan and Iraq.
So, I mean, these people are perhaps not quite as puritanical, not as Trotsky-like as the neoconservatives, especially the ones that are the leaders of that group.
But they're just as dangerous because, as I said, they don't have any morals.
The end justifies the means for them.
Cheney had no problem with torture because Cheney would torture anybody himself personally if he had to.
He doesn't give a damn.
He admitted that time and time again.
If it's not an American citizen, it's vermin.
It's subhuman.
That's why I can torture it.
Yeah.
Well, I guess they're bad enough.
They may not be Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, but Elliot Abrams is celebrating that they're all being appointed.
So that's, you know, a warning sign enough.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, and this is something that we come up against all the time here, is that all of this is their fault.
And so, and not just the neocons, but yeah, especially them.
And so they and their friends, you know, when they're in these positions, none of them ever whispered to each other like, OK, we all know that this is all our fault, that we've empowered Iran first in Iraq, and then by trying to hurt them in Syria, we actually empower them even more.
And then by waging this war against the Houthis, they at least made them look a lot more powerful in Yemen than they ever really were anyway.
And so maybe we're bad at this.
You know, they don't ever say that.
They just press on.
I guess we got to, as you're saying, maybe we got to double down support for al-Qaeda in the Idlib province and hope that goes somewhere.
I think you've struck something there when you describe it that way.
They see a 30-year, a 40-year, a 50-year horizon.
They don't see today, tomorrow, the next day.
They don't see the blood in the street.
They don't see the people crying.
They don't see the hungry people, the people with cholera and so forth.
All of that to them, within their ideological construct, is just the way life is.
And you move through that towards the higher plane where the utopia that they want is going to be brought to be.
And you've got to suffer all this pain.
You've got to lie, cheat, and steal if necessary, because, again, the end justifies the means.
They are, in many respects, and this is true from a very real standpoint in the United States, they are possessed of that ideology because many of them were once liberals.
And they became ultra-ideological neoconservatives because the liberal side of the House didn't seem to be working.
And so they took on this new approach to obviate the old self and energize the new self, the new self being willing to kill its way to utopia.
That's the reason I say they're more like Trotsky or even Lenin himself than they are the traditional kind of person we deal with in this country, either liberal, conservative, or whatever.
They're a new bunch.
That's why they call them neocon.
Yeah.
Well, and that's exactly the pedigree, right?
From Leon Trotsky through Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol and Max Schachmann and everyone who worked for William F. Buckley.
So not him, but the rest of the staff of the National Review.
I mean, these are the guys who created conservatism after World War II in the first place.
And then they really drove it nuts in the Reagan era with all of this.
All these Corridor Democrats coming over.
They're anything but conservative.
A conservative, if you look at Edmund Burke or someone that might be held up as a quintessential English-speaking conservative anyway, they believe simply that the best that's been thought and said and done in the world ought to be preserved and changed only with great circumspection.
That's a conservative.
These guys are radicals and gals.
They're radicals.
And they're really bad at it, too.
And their ideals are all ridiculous and crazy, if they have them at all.
Well, and a lot of them, and you've talked about this a great length, and it deserves at least some mention here.
A lot of them, their entire agenda, if not their identity, and their conception of what's patriotic American behavior is putting Israel first.
And in fact, you've talked about on the show that even among the Bush Jr. neocons, and we could name a dozen of them or more, something around there, that a few of those you really singled out as agents of influence for Israel at the time, lying us into war with Iraq.
Absolutely.
Colin Powell even told the President of the United States, or asked him a question.
It was a rhetorical question in the Oval Office.
He asked him if he knew he had, in the third position of power in the Pentagon, a card-carrying member of the Likud party.
Douglas Feith.
And the President actually looked back at Powell and said something to the effect of, you don't mean if I took his wallet out, I'd find a card, do you?
Really?
I like that one.
That's great.
These people are very much in the camp of, ideologically, that the only way to secure the Middle East, ultimately, is to have a greater Israel.
And to have that greater Israel be the hegemon of that region called the Middle East.
And that hegemony would be brought about through military power first, but then through territorial acquisition, acquisition of the water, all the other things that are critical for that region are going to become more critical because Southwest Asia is going to be hit by climate change first and foremost, probably worse than any other region.
It is already being hit.
The Marsh Arabs, for example, whom Saddam Hussein tried to get rid of, survived Saddam Hussein, only now to be withering away because the salinity of the marshes is increasing from the creeping seawater, and the Tigris and Euphrates river flow has almost ceased to the extent that it can sustain the marshes.
So we're getting rid of the Marsh Arabs.
So that's the future of that region, too.
But if Israel is the hegemon of that region, and situated as it is on the Mediterranean, it will be the last to be impacted by this changing climate.
Israel will be, for the future, it will be the securer of the region.
It will be the ruler of the region.
This is almost biblical, if you think about it.
Yeah.
Well, in the disaster they've caused so far, trying to create it, if that's what you mean, yeah.
That's the technique.
That's the method.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Larry.
It's good to talk to you.
Sure.
Take care.
All right.
Everybody, that's Larry Wilkerson.
He teaches at William & Mary and used to be chief of staff for Colin Powell.
And you got to read this one at Lowe Blog, The Neoconservative Comeback.
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.
All right.
