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, you guys on the line.
I've got Danny Sherson.
He is regular writer for antiwar.com, of course, was a major in the US Army and was in both the surges in Iraq War II and Afghanistan, and he wrote the book Ghost Riders of Baghdad about his time in Iraq War II, and he's written about 10 million articles about everything under the sun, all of them were through time, including for antiwar.com, and he's got a brand new book out.
It's out right now on your local favorite book buying website, Patriotic Dissent, America in the Age of Endless War.
How you doing, Danny?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I'm very happy to have you back on the show here, and listen, I'm so sorry we have such limited time here.
In about 25 minutes, I hope we can fit in a pretty good take about what this book is, and well, to sum it up, right, it's who you are now and how you got here, and it's a hell of a story, so why don't you go ahead and talk to me, man?
Yeah.
The book's interesting.
It's a lot different, as you know and a lot of readers do, from what I traditionally do.
I have a penchant for the verbose and tangents, and I like to indulge and pontificate and go off on a million areas.
This is why you and I see eye to eye so much.
Right.
That's why I'm on your show and with your organizations.
It's why I try to keep my mic off so I don't talk over your whole talking.
Right.
Yeah, I do the same thing on my pod.
This was interesting because it's a short book, and we're talking about 160 pages.
It was pitched to me, so in that sense, it's kind of backwards from a traditional publishing where you have to write the book proposal, go through an agent.
I was out in L.A. with Bob Sheer, who used to be with Truthdig, a famous old school journalist, and he and the guys from Hay Day Books in Berkeley kind of were ...
We were just pontificating out in L.A. on the nature of ending these wars and what it's going to take.
It was kind of a dark talk a little bit, like one of those ones where you start to feel like there's a lot of futility.
Anyway, one of us, all of us to some extent, made the comment that if the culture and the philosophy and the very conceptualization of what it means to sort of be a patriot doesn't change, like if there's no underlying cultural change, a lot of this might not go down.
A lot of these changes we want, which we already think are long shots, are just never going to happen.
And then Bob Sheer asked, is patriotism itself toxic?
I was like, well, maybe.
I wasn't really sure how to answer, and so we went back and forth a bit, and it ended with the group agreeing, well, you need to write an extended essay in book form.
That's like a philosophical take on this, since it's been the kind of project of your late military and then post-military life.
So that's the back story, right?
And in the end, that's sort of what it is.
I guess the best way to describe it before turning it back over for more specific questions is that like much that I do, it goes in a lot of directions, for better or worse, but it's essentially three things.
It's a little bit of memoir in the sense that I talk about my own development, probably less so than Ghost Riders, my first book, but a little bit of memoir, a good bit of history on the thread of sort of dissenters within the military, but also just in a general sense towards American foreign policy down through the ages, especially since the Mexican American War, which is one of my key star points.
And then finally, and I think most importantly, it's kind of a philosophical analysis and then reframing of the different types of patriotism with me, of course, coming down on the side of what I call participatory principled patriotism, or another way of putting that, when your country has become imperial or has poor strategy and aggressive overseas, that participatory principled patriotism does not roll off the tongue so well.
So I define it as the title, patriotic dissent.
Yeah.
Well, there's so much there.
It's great.
The way it's all tied together and twisted around the narratives there is, you know, your development in terms of your own ideas and looking at these things had a lot to do with what you were learning about history at the time.
And as you said, they're leading dissenters and especially from within the military establishment.
In other words, people who are acceptable for you to listen to their wild and radical ideas at first there.
And then, so talk a little bit about that.
What was it?
Because, you know, the same things that you were learning that, you know, got you smarter from where you'd been.
These are the same things that can help everybody else too.
Right.
So.
Well, yeah, I used to have this almost like silly, indulgent idea that if, well, if only people knew, you know, if people only knew the truth, if they only, you know, read the backstory and the history and the policy work on all these issues, they'd realize that, you know, American foreign policy and militarism is utterly absurd.
It kind of always has been.
If people just knew, I guess the project of my life is in some ways the belief that persuasion remains possible.
However, that being said, clearly, I think there are limits to that and it can get, it can get kind of dark, right?
It can get to the point where you start to wonder if you're making any difference.
So that idea that if people knew was important and just, for example, when I was teaching at West Point, so really 2014, 15, 16, I used to like to poke at my students, of course, these freshmen cadets.
And so I would take figures that they implicitly trusted and had been told by the institution really like inculcated to believe were their heroes.
And I would like to choose the people who literally had statues around the campus that they would walk past in the way of my class.
And maybe they even lived in barracks named after these guys.
And so I would reframe guys like Eisenhower, guys like Grant, Ulysses S. Grant, and I would show that these were complex figures that were more than the Normandy invasion, were more than the automatic surrender.
And so I would do things like describe how Grant's, you know, great sort of regret in life was not, you know, resigning over the Mexican war, which he thought was wicked.
And, you know, that Eisenhower had his doubts despite an imperfect presidential foreign policy.
And so, of course, he coins military industrial complex and, you know, the Atoms for Peace speech and talking about the defense industry spending and, you know, even saying that the 1958 intervention into Lebanon, which was our first major military intervention in the region since the Barbary Wars, you know, talking about how that opened the Pandora's box, you know, a lot of these predictions.
And also his doubts about the Bonus Army suppression of MacArthur.
And so I would talk about these things and try to poke at them and challenge them.
And of course, this is going on rather subversively in one classroom at West Point, where a lot of people wouldn't expect it.
My point is that in the book, I kind of take that thread.
And so some of the folks I write about you've heard of, some of them you haven't, you know, most readers.
But in many cases, I take figures that are very famous, but for other things and sort of show you another side, the doubtful side, the skeptical side of these same folks, in the interest of showing that this isn't just some random dude deciding that we should all start being dissenters, but rather showing that there is a long, historic and powerful thread that runs through American foreign policy of maybe not the majority feeling these ways, but some significant, vocal, powerful and often credible militarily doubters and dissenters about these issues.
So we're in good company is sort of the point, right?
That's the hypothesis in the book.
Yeah.
Well, so now if I remember right, you were already skeptical about Iraq War II.
And I guess, you know, we're able to differentiate between who's who over there a little bit before you ever even went to your first surge, before your second one, right?
So explain how that is.
You went to both of these wars after you already knew better in the first place.
I guess you didn't know better before you signed up for the Army, but you knew better before you even deployed to Iraq War II.
Is that right?
I knew better than most.
I mean, in some ways, that's the that's that's the problem with my story in a way, right?
That's the that's the problematic nature.
That's what I have to sort of grapple with is, you know, why did I stay so long?
You know, and you come up with a number of reasons, you know, oh, I'm going to change the system from the inside.
Is that really possible?
Do you really believe that?
Or do you really just like getting gold stars when some of the guys that you do respect in your leadership, because there are some, tell you that you have to stay because the good ones have to stay?
But then if you're honest with yourself, a lot of it comes down to the beautiful military socialism, the increasing benefits and promotions, and also just the identity of being a soldier.
So there's a lot of reasons I stayed, most of them bad.
But in answer to the question specifically, I went to Iraq, 2006, October, doubtful about victory, doubtful about whether we could win anything or or what was possible.
I was also by that point, I had read enough on the lead up to war to realize it had been a lie.
And I think at that point, I wasn't really critiquing systemic militarism and imperialism in American foreign policy so much as looking at Iraq as a discrete problem.
So my intellectual development wasn't far enough.
Yeah, by 06, even the real story of how we got into that war had become pretty popularized.
So you must have understood by then, you know, who the neocons were, and how cynical it all was the way they manipulated the people into supporting the war.
That's right.
And I think that when I- Wait, but were you already reading the old guys at that time, or like going back and reading cynical takes on Ulysses S. Grant, or that came while you were deployed?
And I'm sorry, I interrupted you, you're saying something else.
So answer my question later.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, that's important.
I was reading some of this.
I mean, I was a bookish kid.
I had read a lot of the wrong books for a long time.
But by 2006, I was starting to dig into these dissenting paths and pasts.
And so, but I think overall, the issue was one of like a sort of military white savior complex, as people might call it.
So the idea was for us training.
This is what I told myself.
And I think that most of us who were a little skeptical did, including my colonel, right, who was skeptical, who read Fiasco by Tom Ricks, like right before the deployment told us all about it.
So the idea was, this was a mess we maybe shouldn't have gotten into.
It may or may not be winnable, but we're going to go over there and try to make the best of it, right?
We're going to make our little sector better.
We're going to see if we can't pick up some of the pieces.
That was the delusion.
And it was quickly deflated, right, as I talk about in the book, when I just saw the outcome of, you know, a multifaceted civil war, as well as us being attacked by like two sides of an insurgency, which was really more like 12 sides.
But so that's where I was.
By the time I left Iraq, I read, you know, 100 books, you know, maybe I mean, wildly, you know, radical stuff, but also just intense Middle Eastern Iraqi history.
I left Iraq a much more intellectually radical, if that's even the right word, skeptic of foreign policy in a general sense.
And so then by the time I get to Afghanistan, 2011, for the second surge, I mean, the obscene fact, and it destroyed me emotionally, quite frankly, but the obscene fact was I was against all of it.
I mean, I was against militarism, right?
Anti-Semitic militarism and the American empire.
And I was calling it that.
And yet here I go to a war in Afghanistan.
At that point, I was a mercenary, really just trying to, like, keep as many soldiers alive as possible.
And at that point, I believe myself a martyr of sorts.
And this I don't like telling this, but it's real.
And I think I have to be honest, I the martyrdom was that, like, I shall be the good officer who protects his soldiers and if need be lies to his colonels to do so.
But in the end, that's a that's a double life.
That's really dangerous.
So my development was was gradual, but it was a lot earlier than people might think, which is the like sick part in a way, because, of course, I don't leave officially until February 2019.
Well, you know, that's the science of soldiering, too, where they figured out if you just put a bunch of soldiers together, that doesn't really work.
But if you keep the same few soldiers together for years and make them beyond blood brothers, then it doesn't matter where you send them, because the only thing they care about is fighting for each other and they'll do whatever they're told in whichever circumstances you put them.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's a big part of it, I think, is that they've done all these studies on like small unit leadership and loyalty bonds.
I mean, there's even been studies, quite frankly, I know it's a weird analogy, but of the Nazi army in Russia.
And, you know, one of the reasons it kind of falls apart and then like turns to ideology is because these these bonds are broken by the casualty rates.
But if you can keep a team together, you know, it's a cliche at this point.
Oh, we don't fight for a cause.
We fight for each other.
I'm sort of sick of that because I think we should also fight for a cause and only for a cause.
But in the in the breach, that's true.
And so one of the values of moving away from the individual replacement system of Vietnam, right, bringing guys in for one year at a time individually, is that when you train up as a unit for a year and you like party and drink and go to each other's, you know, like weddings and stuff, and then you deploy for a year, it can hold together a failing effort.
And I think that the Iraq surge proved the resilience of the all volunteer force because it buckled, but it did not break.
And I actually, frankly, wish it would have in a way.
But it showed us that you can maintain endless war at a certain threshold, you know, maybe not above it, but at a certain threshold and even stretch it a bit with that surge, which was significant.
And it will go on and on.
And that's that to me was proof that that salvation is not coming from, you know, the top or from Congress or or the Pentagon, that the system itself is sort of corrupted to create this.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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All right.
So now, as a person with the identity that you carry, a guy who led men in combat in both the surges, that means that you have built in this default respect from the broad spectrum of American political thought and just the population.
You got something to say.
They're willing to hear it from you.
They have to be, especially after all that crap I had to hear about how I was supposed to support the war in deference to your spirit or whatever this whole time seems like everybody, you know, maybe you got one good shot to convince somebody that, yeah, no, actually, we shouldn't have done this at all.
This is what I learned that made me understand that, no, the whole war on terrorism, to whatever degree you think, should not have been done.
What is it that you say to convince somebody?
Yeah, I think, you know, you have to have an elevator pitch, you know.
To me, it's that, you know, these wars were built on lies.
They have been counterproductive and they dishonor veterans by creating a broken generation that didn't need to be.
And so, well, what does that mean?
It's a paltry pitch, but it attempts to hit three types of people.
You know, there's the folks who are maybe inclined to hearing that these wars are based on some sort of false pretenses, but that doesn't get everybody.
Some people are implicitly trust the government more, right, or trust their military.
And so, if I can show you it's counterproductive, right, it hasn't made us safer, it's created more terrorism, that might hopefully get the practical minded.
And then, if you speak to this culture of adulation of veterans and hopefully reframe it to show that, you know, if you want to honor veterans, create less of them, because, you know, if you have, if our elevator gets stuck and you have 12 extra minutes, I can tell you what the life of my soldiers today, those who survived either wounded or mentally just struggling, are actually like.
Because it's a dark story and my point would be, if we're going to do that, if we're going to do that, if we're going to create those sort of hurt veterans and we're going to put them in those situations, well, God damn it better be for good reason, right?
And I don't know.
I mean, that's the three angles that I come at it from.
And you notice I kind of keep out some of the humanitarian and ethical stuff that resonates with me and it does with certain people.
But I don't think Yemeni babies, unfortunately, resonates with like most of the voting American public, right?
I mean, it's, it's not the primary concern.
And I don't think it's persuasive.
And in fact, it could be alienating for some allies we need, if that makes any sense at all.
Yeah.
And here's the thing about it, right?
Is that, you know, somebody's dad sending their kid off to sign up for the army now and fight all this.
They're not taking any of those things into account, right?
This is, you love your country, you believe in your country, you serve your country.
And then, so that's it.
And it doesn't matter, even if it's a right wing Republican who hates and fears Barack Obama, by all means, son, go join up his army because it's still all of green and red, white and blue, the same force that defeated the Nazis.
And so it's still always right.
Even if they don't really believe in the war, it's still just doing the right thing anyway.
It's like two completely different conversations.
You know, whether you agree with any of what's going on or even the forces and motives behind it all, and whether you go and sign up for the infantry or not, which is always still perfectly honorable and right and goes without saying.
And it is, it's the conflation of country with government, with whichever particular politicians and think tankers happen to be running things right now, right?
Yeah, that is, that's the kind of motive for the book.
And I don't pretend that it's going to change that conversation overnight or that it's even up to par.
But the reason that we discussed and that I believe that unless there's a conceptual and cultural reframe of this, that will just go on forever because you point out, it doesn't matter as president, military service is the highest form of human activity for most Americans, right?
The most, the most respected and like just pure thing you can do.
And I mean, that's a little obscene in a republic.
You know, I don't know that that is healthy saying that outright alienates some folks, but maybe, you know, reframing the conversation around what it means to actually love your country and who should be adulated and how to adulate soldiers so that if you're stuck on the idea that we should fetishize soldiers or just, you know, I hate to say that or some people do do that, but you know, honor support soldiers, maybe how, how is it best to do that?
Because clearly something is awry.
I mean, you talk about the mothers and the fathers, right?
They send their kids off.
I recently wrote for any word I'll come about sort of the madness in Syria, for example.
I mean, I just cannot imagine that most of America's mothers to use the old framing, sent their sons off to war and thought, you know, their mission, right?
A good enough mission for them is guarding the oil concessions of a corrupt company that worked behind channels with the state department to make sure they had American soldiers guard their oil.
I mean, I just, it's not a lot of soldiers, but someone could die doing that, right?
Someone will.
And I just think if we don't lay that out and say, wait, what is this really about?
Okay.
That's a discreet mission.
But if we're willing to send our kids to do that and not question when, why and how they should be used, then I don't think we really are honoring them.
So if we can't start that conversation and oh, by the way, like we've said a million times, if that conversation doesn't speak to a family in Idaho, as well as it does a family in San Francisco or, you know, hipster Brooklyn, then we're doing wrong, right?
As a movement to the extent that we exist.
Right.
And look, I only know that this is true because I'm an expert on this because I'm an American, which means I have the exact same point of view on this that everybody has from all the TV and all the movies and all the mythology.
When America fights, we fight Hitler.
When the American infantry is in a tank battle or a machine gun battle, the enemy are at least the German army, if not Nazis themselves, servants of the Fuhrer, and we're meeting them on an open battlefield and every single one of their lives is forfeit and tough luck for them.
And it's on.
Except that hasn't been true since 1945.
But that's still every battle that we're going to fight.
We're Superman and we're going to save Western Europe from the Nazis.
And it doesn't matter that, no, as you just said, we're talking about guarding oil, a stolen oil concession in Syria, or we're talking about guarding a child rapist, criminal warlord in Afghanistan and his stolen fortune and heroin profits or whatever crazy thing.
But still, it's that mythology of World War Two, a broad, open, green, grassy field full of only enemies who are all fair game.
Isn't that what you signed up to fight?
Tell me that isn't what you had in your mind when you signed up for this thing.
That is completely what I signed up to fight.
Right.
I wanted to believe it even after I didn't believe it.
OK, that shows you how powerful it I think that it is right.
That's why I think that the history matters and that the reading matters.
And maybe that's naive, but if we can't show somehow that that's the big lie and the long con behind the entire project of America in the world post 1945, then then I think we fall flat.
That is a difficult force that we are fighting against because it is so it's three generations culturally infused.
Right.
My grandfather, the transit worker and my dad, you know, the house painting Chinese delivery man.
And now me.
You understand, like it is just deep and it's same in your family and everybody's I'm sure it is deep in there and fighting it with knowledge might not work, but it has to be tried.
And of course, passion helps as well.
But yes, this is the thing.
We have to get people to understand and believe and care that America has not won a war, not a real war since that surrender on the air, you know, on the battleship deck.
And that I mean, we have to be willing to say the provocative thing, but find a way to say it, that it can somehow resonate, which is that like all those hundreds of thousands right over 100000 American boys, mostly and some women who have been killed in those in every war since, you know, 1950.
They didn't die for a whole lot, OK, besides their brothers and OK, all that honor, whatever people believe and there's something to it and there's problems, but whatever.
But there that is obscene.
That is obscene in a republic, in a democracy, in a society to continue to believe the lie and let these corrupt folks at the top who are profiting from it feed us that nonsense and then just take it in.
I feel like that whether you're in, you know, no matter how different the cultures are, whether you're in Montana or in, you know, Adams Morgan, D.C., the idea of that kind of corruption and that kind of like lie being fed to working class folks to get them to fight is is disgusting.
And that to me is one of the rallying points.
And again, I understand the cliche and the naivety in it.
But what are we going to do except fight the darkness with whatever we have available?
That's right.
All right.
Well, one of the best of them.
And we sure are glad to have you.
And I'm sorry, I've got to cut this short because I've got Clive Stafford Smith on the Assange case next and I've got to run.
But I'm really proud of this book.
You did a great job on this thing.
It's of course, everybody, Danny Sherson of Antiwar.com and many other places.
And the book is Patriotic Dissent, America in the Age of Endless War.
Thanks very much for your time, bud.
Hey, thanks a lot.
It's great to be on.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
