Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys on the line.
I've got David Stockman.
Of course, he wrote The Great Deformation and Peak Trump, The Undrainable Swamp and The Fantasy of MAGA.
And he has this piece here that we ran at Antiwar.com last week, locked and loaded on behalf of Empire First.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Happy to be with you.
So big war in Yemen and just got off the line with Nasser Arabi, a reporter out of Sana'a, talking about the airstrikes in the capital city by the Saudis in retaliation for the drone attack and missile attack on their facilities last week.
And I really like this piece you wrote because you remind us how this war started or this major phase of the war started back in 2015, right during when Obama was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.
He's supporting al-Qaeda against them in Syria and supporting al-Qaeda against them, or at least against their friends, the Houthis in Yemen.
What gives?
Well, it's just part of this neocon philosophy that the Iranians are the, you know, devil incarnate, that they are some kind of existential threat to the peace of the planet.
And it's just damn nonsense, you know.
It's basically the political line of Bibi Netanyahu, who fortunately maybe is finally heading to a place where he belongs and not leading Israel.
And so, you know, we've engaged in a policy that makes absolutely no sense for years and years.
I point out in my article in 2015, when the deal with the Iranians was finally made and it was a very solid, serviceable, enforceable, constructive deal, it should have been made clear to the Saudis if they wanted to continue to receive 20, 30 billion a year in arms sales from the United States, that those arms could not be used as, you know, a backdoor way of prosecuting the war against the Iranians, you know, which we were trying to tamp down.
And, you know, unfortunately, Obama didn't do that.
The Saudis opened this southern front, got in the middle of this.
We got in the middle of this conflict because, you know, we arm them.
We supply all the spare parts.
We help them do their targeting and so forth.
And by, you know, a policy of looking the other way or negligence, we ended up in the middle of what is truly a modern genocide.
There have been something like 100,000 civilians, mainly women and children, killed in Yemen.
The economy of northern and western Yemen has been totally decimated.
The country is, you know, plagued with cholera, starvation, other diseases that are just, you know, despicable.
And we're, you know, we're complicit in the whole thing.
So it's not surprising that we reached the point where the Houthis, with the help from their allies in Tehran, have had to fight back.
I mean, their very survival depends on it.
And so they have, and they've made the point that they're not entirely impotent, defenseless, and that, you know, the golden goose of Saudi Arabia, which is their oil fields over in a tiny corner of the desert along the Persian Gulf, can be, you know, have enormous damage inflicted upon them.
This is kind of a crazy situation where now Washington and Pompeo in particular, even though Bolton is gone, has turned the tables upside down and is blaming the Iranians for, you know, the circumstance that now exists.
It's like the arsonist blaming the building owner for the fire.
You know, Washington and Trump was the arsonist.
He walked away from the nuke deal and put these horrific sanctions on the Iranian economy and the Iranian people.
And things are now getting very bad there.
And why not?
Their primary resource is oil exports.
And, you know, we have gone to every port in the world attempting to threaten any country or company that wants to buy Iranian oil with the imposition of secondary sanctions and other sort of economic penalties.
And so they're desperate.
They have to fight back both the Houthis in northern Yemen and the Iranians themselves.
And it's obvious where all this started.
It started right in Washington, D.C., in behalf of what I call a policy of empire first.
Well, you know, it's at least we're lucky that it is somewhat a common refrain that, you know, in fact, Business Insider had a piece quoting Pompeo, I think, inadvertently admitting that all of the crisis that we're in right now is a, quote, direct result of withdrawing from the JCPOA.
But even then, it doesn't always it goes without saying, because everybody knows, but then not so much.
It gets left out that that means the re-institution of this massive economic war against Iran.
That's what leaving the deal meant.
Going back to the status quo of crippling sanctions.
Yeah, well, that's the point I would make is leaving the deal was one thing that was kind of stupid and counterproductive, but then actually reverting to sanctions of the most horrendous intensity of anything we've done, I think, since the embargo on Japan in 1940, the oil embargo.
I can't think of anything that's been this all-encompassing, this severe.
Well, Iraq in the 90s, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And we see how well that worked.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's the point.
You know, somehow they think in Washington that sanctions are some antiseptic thing that shows their restraint.
But, you know, they're just warfare by another means.
And it's actually even a worse kind of warfare because it targets the civilian population, the entire 80 million or 83 million population of Iran.
And it actually backfires because it gives the government there, which is, you know, not some kind of noble democracy by any means, but it gives the government there a ability to mobilize the people against the external enemy.
And they wonder why we, you know, the Ayatollah calls Washington the great Satan.
Well, just look at what's being done to them.
And maybe that's hyperbole, but it's not entirely unwarranted.
So, you know, this is just the way the empire rolls.
There's two different standards.
Everybody else is held to one standard.
But when we're, you know, implementing policies of the empire, you know, anything goes because it's being done allegedly for the noble purpose of peace and security and stability and so forth in the world.
And that's a lot of damn nonsense.
Hang on just one second.
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But here's some real American history and some real economics, the kind of stuff that you've been missing.
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Well, now, so this attack, exactly.
I mean, I'm certain that it's exactly as Nasser Arabi was saying, that it was the Houthis that did it.
And they say with the cooperation of local Saudi Shiites that they were working with who happen to live right where all the oil is in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and that they are the ones who helped them do it, which explains the range of the attack and all of that.
But it seems like whether it was the Houthis or whether it was Iran from bases in Iraq or whatever Pompeo's pretending today, whatever Bellingcat is coming up with today, it seems like the point is still made that we can blow up your oil refinery for $1.75.
And that's a huge thing.
In fact, Patrick Coburn has a thing where he says this is like when the British took out the Italian Navy with torpedoes.
1940, right?
Yeah, and that was the end of an era.
And battleships were obsolete after that.
And the Japanese, he says, right after that, they made their biggest one, the Yamato.
He said it fired its guns a total of one time before the Americans sank it with torpedo planes.
And he's saying, hey, look, and you know what?
The Americans have been at the forefront.killing women and children and little old grandmas all day long around here.
And so did they really think that this technology will belong only to the North Americans forever and that locals won't figure out how to use the same kind of thing to fight in an asymmetric way like this?
Yeah, that's exactly the point.
We were the initiator, the pioneer of drone warfare.
And it was done because it was so antiseptic, people could sit at councils out in Utah or Nevada somewhere and, you know, stay out of harm's way while prosecuting the war on terror and all that.
But the technology, obviously, we have no monopoly on.
It's spread around the world.
And now we see how impotent really the empire is.
We're supposedly the enforcer, the policemen of the Middle East for reasons that make no sense whatsoever from a homeland security point of view.
But they postulated that.
And now they've sold tens of billions of Patriot missile batteries and all kinds of sophisticated surveillance and monitoring capabilities.
And yet these cheap drones and cruise missiles probably came in from behind and crippled the largest oil processing facility in the world.
And that, I think, is not the end of the story in itself.
That's a warning of how far this could go unless something basically changes.
And I don't see any propensity to do that right now because the Trump himself, and he's tried to do some decent things in, you know, with North Korea.
He's been right from the very beginning about Russia.
It's not an existential threat to America.
We should be trying to have rapprochement, not Cold War 2.0 and all that.
But when it comes to the Iranians and the nuke deal, I mean, he is just totally blind to what the facts are.
And he's boxed himself into a corner.
And maybe we'll find some way out of the current tension.
But we could also easily have an accident, misunderstandings that could lead to escalation very easily.
In fact, there have been a lot of stories out over the last couple of days about how close we came in June when the U.S. drone was shot down and that, you know, inexplicably, Trump made a last-minute decision to call off the attack.
And fortunately he did.
But, you know, it was probably because he woke up on the right side of bed that day.
What happens when he wakes up and starts tweeting from the wrong side?
So I think, you know, this is a very tenuous moment that we're at right now.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when everyone in D.C. is so bad on Iran and it doesn't have to make sense.
They just know this is, you know, like Russia and Putin.
This is just the go-to enemy at all times.
And so they can, you know, there's CNN reporters calling out Trump for flinching.
How can he balk?
How can he let this happen and not do anything about it?
And, you know, famously, I guess now, Trump had this fight with Lindsey Graham on Twitter where Trump said, no, it's strength to not act.
And this kind of thing, throwing Lindsey Graham for a loop.
But, you know, as you're pointing out, all these kinds of arguments can be flipped around really quickly.
Trump could decide that politics dictate he bomb and he could start bombing tomorrow or today.
Yeah, well, I recently actually talked to someone very close to the White House and I said, OK, if you have to do something, find a facility, abandoned facility way out in the middle of the Iranian desert somewhere, drop a couple of bombs and call it a day.
And the answer was, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
This is much more serious.
We have to do something far more consequential.
Now, whether they'll persuade the Donald to do that or not remains to be seen.
But I do know that he's smart enough to realize that if he doesn't win in 2020, he's going to be hounded by the Democrats for the rest of his life.
He may end up in a facility that's a lot less commodious than Trump Tower if he isn't careful and therefore doesn't want to do anything to jeopardize his reelection.
That's the only thing we have going for us right now that's, you know, bringing about this relative restraint.
But who knows what the next phase and sequence of this confrontation might be and how long he can hold off the dogs because he's surrounded by people that want to take the fight directly to the Iranian homeland.
Yeah, well, I mean, it seems like and I've been counting on this one thing for way too long in a row now.
It's got to expire at some point, I know.
But it seems like the Army and the Marine Corps have got to be telling him that we don't want to hit Persia, man.
I mean, because, you know, the Air Force and the Navy, they can talk tough from over the horizon and all that kind of thing.
But it's the Army and the Marines got to do all the dying in a war with these guys.
And in fact, even the Air Force and the Navy have major assets at risk in Qatar and Bahrain there.
And, you know, all throughout the Middle East, really within missile range.
And that's why our hawks are so mad all the time is because they know they can't attack Iran.
They can just sit here and sputter about it and empower their allies by trying to fight them.
Yeah, I agree with that.
You know, in this exact circumstance, the military has been a force of restraint.
And that really tells you why the problem is even greater than you might imagine in what I call the imperial city.
Where all of this hawkishness is coming from is all these so-called think tanks.
And, you know, the phalanx of neocon, so-called intellectuals and foreign policy professionals and advisors.
That's where all this is coming from.
And it's totally somehow contaminated thought on both sides of the aisle.
And Lindsey Graham is only the most extreme case.
Or Ted Cruz has said something totally idiotic the other day.
That the nuclear deal was so bad because it gave the Iranians all this money to do things like the attack last week.
Actually, it was their money to begin with that had been sitting there, sequestered for decades and decades.
And they got that money back by confirming what had been a true condition, according to even the CIA, for a decade and a half.
And that is that they abandoned even their research program on weaponization, nuclear weaponization, in 2003.
So when you really look at it, it shows you how threadbare the whole neocomposition is.
The deal that they've identified as the worst one in history was actually a case of the Iranians giving up a program they didn't have in order to get back money that was theirs.
You know, it's crazy.
All right.
Now, say Trump was convinced that, boy, he better figure out a way to get back in the deal or a deal or something before this thing gets out of hand and he loses an election.
Because I think he must know that a war would not help him win reelection at this point.
It would be absolutely fatal.
But so how can he possibly go back to the JCPOA and save any face at all?
Dan McAdams has a point that, well, maybe he could make a bilateral agreement so he doesn't have to go back to that one exactly, but can essentially go back to the deal, but just call it a one-on-one deal between us and Iran.
Something like that.
But if you were working for him, what would your advice be on how to handle this politically?
Because he totally screwed everything up.
Everybody knows that.
The only thing you can say, the one hopeful note here, is that he's very creative at redesigning or redefining nothing burgers as a great accomplishment.
I mean, let's go to something like the revised NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico.
There wasn't anything revised about it.
It's the same old regime with a couple of bells and whistles that actually only benefit wage rates in Mexico.
It doesn't do anything for the so-called harmed industries in the United States.
But he's been touting that for months now as an example of the art of the deal.
So don't underestimate his capacity to basically find a backdoor way into somehow getting a side agreement that would effectively reinstate the status quo and allow the sanctions to be worked around.
Now, I don't hold out great hope for that, but I think it's a slim possibility that something like that could happen.
We'll just have to see.
All right.
Now, so let's talk about this great deformation for a second here, because we can see when Trump wants to talk to Kim, well, Trump or Obama or anybody, they want to do anything right at all.
I mean, even when Nixon went and made the deal with Mao Zedong, it was a top secret maneuver until it was a done deal.
And I don't know exactly how bad it was, and I know the Democrats supported his effort on that, after the fact, at least.
But I know he was really worried that it would be sabotaged if people knew what was going on.
And our current day, Trump tries to talk to Kim or any of this, and all of D.C. is in uproar.
The whole narrative is that, oh, the crafty Kim is playing him as a fool.
If he was to deal with the ayatollah, they'd say the same thing.
He's surrendering to America's enemies, the rogue states, he just loves dictators so much, and all of this kind of stuff.
And we can just see, you mentioned already where all this comes from.
It's the think tanks, and the think tanks are just a bunch of eggheads paid zillions of dollars by the arms industry to write papers justifying all this stuff.
And they'll never run out of talking heads.
The media will never stop interviewing all of their chosen spokesmen about what is the truth and the consensus about what's going on and what must be done.
And so how's a bunch of regular flyover country types supposed to ever stop this thing?
It seems like such a locomotive out of control.
Well, first of all, you just have to keep talking about it and keep exposing it and, you know, knocking holes in the complete illogic of much of what happens.
But you're right about the point in that the military industrial surveillance complex now has become almost self-perpetuating because it's so huge.
You know, really, when you add everything up, it's far more than $750 billion for defense.
You know, I can get $850 or $900 billion counting all the different homeland security operations.
There's $25 billion hidden in the energy department, for crying out loud, for nuclear weapons research and a lot of other things.
Now, the point is, out of all that money, it only takes a few billion dollars spread among these think tanks, paying people half a million a year or more to spend their time coming up with reasons for the kind of stupidity we see, and then become go-to experts and resources for the lazy people in the mainstream media who have to report on these things.
It's insidious.
I call CNN the war channel, and it's fed by, you know, the pro-war think tanks.
And, you know, that's really what we're up against.
And the worst thing is that the funding for all that is coming from the taxpayers, who, you know, are going to end up on the short end of the stick of this whole warfare state machine that we have going today.
Yeah.
I mean, you just see it from their point of view for a minute from inside that bubble.
The idea that America could ever withdraw from the world, that we would fail to lead the rest of mankind is just unthinkable.
It's the highest treason to think that America's role in the world should be anything less than, you know, the boss, the superpower, as Bush Sr. said, what we say goes, and all this kind of thing.
It's just, it'd be like saying America's going to go full red communist.
Like, no, we're not.
Yeah, we're also not ever going to bring our troops home either.
Right.
Well, that's why you have to use the metaphor of the empire.
That's what it is.
Empires don't withdraw until they're finally defeated and, you know, driven off the stage.
And that's the story here.
Trump wanted to get out of Syria.
There's still, as far as I know, 2,000 or more U.S. forces there, and probably far more than that if you take all the covert action or, you know, mercenaries that we hire or fund one way or another.
Afghanistan, we've all talked about that.
You wrote a great, terrific book about it.
And here we are, 18 years or 19 years, I guess, going on 19 years.
It's longer, as you pointed out, than the duration of conflict in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.
And yet, you know, Trump wants to get out of that, and he gets sabotaged by Bolton, you know, as the guy was finally heaved out the front door of the White House.
You know, this tells you how, you know, deeply embedded the whole regime of empire is and, you know, how difficult it's going to be to change anything, unfortunately, going forward.
Well, you know, Ron Paul has always said, well, look, I mean, it's never going to stop because they listen to me or you or us.
What it is, is eventually the dollar will break.
You think that's sooner or later?
Well, I don't—I think he's right.
The economy will break sooner or later because, you know, we have a fiscal equation that's now utterly out of control.
It has been for a long time.
But this is a worse circumstance because we're now in year 10 of the longest expansion in history, month 121.
There will be a recession one of these days, and the trillion that we have at the top of the cycle, where you're supposed to be in reasonable balance, even by the lights of a Keynesian, Keynesians, is now 5 percent of GDP and will go to 8 or 10 percent the next time we hit the skids in recession, which could be, you know, just around the corner or certainly in the next year or two.
Now, why is that problematic?
Well, the answer is because in the 2020s, the entire damn baby boom generation will be retiring.
Well, you know, the roles of Social Security and Medicare will hit $80 million by the end of the decade, the 2020s, compared to, you know, less than $60 million today.
So, you know, the welfare state is going to just balloon in terms of the cost.
And if you have that and massive debts that have to be financed, you know, you will be in a equation that is so difficult that, you know, there is some hope, I would think, in the middle of all that, a few years down the road, that this whole country will turn against this whole massive economy.
It's the trillion dollar warfare state budget, because push comes to shove, and it becomes a choice of cutting Social Security benefits 30 percent or rolling back the empire.
I think, finally, the empire will get rolled back.
But who knows how long that will take and how much damage and irreversible evil, you know, will be done in the interim.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's David Stockman, his website.
I'm sorry, I forgot to say this in the intro.
It's the Contra Corner.
And the books are Pete Trump and the Great Deformation.
And you can find them at least from time to time at antiwar.com.
This one is called Locked and Loaded on Behalf of Empire First.
Thanks, David.
Okay, great to be with you.
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.
