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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it 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 on the line.
I got Mark Perry writing again for the American Conservative magazine, theamericanconservative.com.
The military officials who knew Saudi Arabia would fail in Yemen.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mark?
It's great to be here, and I'm doing fine.
Good to talk to you again.
Happy to have you on, and especially on this topic.
People can check the archives.
It's right there in March of 2015.
You on this show telling me that the generals were telling you that, man, we don't want to do this.
That's right.
That was the month and the year that Saudi Arabia decided to launch an intervention in Yemen against the Houthi rebels.
I can remember when it happened.
My phone rang off the hook from American military officers, senior officers, saying this was crazy.
They didn't see it coming, and it was a bad idea, and the Saudis were going to regret that they ever did it.
Sure enough, four years later, that's exactly where we are.
The Saudis are back on their heels fighting in their own country against the Houthis, whom they've shoved into the arms of the Iranians.
This was just a bad idea.
There's so many things to talk about, but let's talk about the single most important thing first, which is your great quote from Michael Horton, no relation to me, a real Yemen expert, who told you then that, yeah, John McCain is complaining that right now we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq, which was true.
McCain still preferred ISIS to the Iranians that he had put in power in Baghdad just a few years before.
But anyway, he says McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq right now, but we're flying as al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen, and he was implying that that was worse.
Well, your listeners might wonder how that can be, but back in March of 2015, our special operations command in the Pentagon was considering a closer alliance with the Houthis because they were a very robust military force against al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And when the Saudis intervened in Yemen to fight the Houthis, that ended.
So the result was that al-Qaeda in Yemen got stronger.
So actually, if you think about this properly, and you kind of follow the chronology out, which I have very carefully, what's happening is that we're losing the war on terrorism because we've had to pivot towards the Saudis in Yemen and allow al-Qaeda to grow stronger.
Listen, this just doesn't make any sense.
And it's, you know, here we are once again being undermined by one of our allies, in this case, the Saudis.
Yeah.
Now, there was this Wall Street Journal article from January of 2015, from I'm almost certain January the 28th, that talked just about this and about how the guys over at CENTCOM, their idea was, hey, the Houthis like killing al-Qaeda guys, fine with us, and was sharing some intel with them.
And then there's also a report by Barbara Slavin at Al-Monitor that I found recently, where what had happened was, because she also is at the Atlantic Council, and they had hosted the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
And he gave a presentation where he talked all about how, yeah, we're working with the Houthis now to pass them intelligence to use to kill these al-Qaeda guys.
And it's working out great.
And so I'm not saying that that was great.
I'm just saying that's what they thought.
And that, at least, all other things being equal, makes sense.
The war supposedly was the war on terrorism.
And in Yemen, that was one of the wars.
You know, you got Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad, and all these other bait-and-switch wars.
The Yemen war, up until then, had actually been against AQAP, the guys that tried to sink the coal and blow up the plane over Detroit.
So I'm not saying it was a great war, but I'm saying at least it was targeted against people who actually had threatened and acted that way against the Americans, instead of turning around and, again, taking their side.
And so that's really the question, right, is how much they have gained from this whole war against their bitter enemies, the Houthis, their most deadly enemies in the country.
Well, it's turned out to be quite counterproductive.
The people that I've been talking to recently on the Saudi war in Yemen say that actually what's happened is the Saudis have accomplished destabilizing their own regime, not the Houthis.
The Houthis have proven to be quite adept on the battlefield.
They've actually fought the Saudis and their erstwhile allies, the United Emirates, to a standstill.
Let's not forget, and I know you won't, that this war in Yemen started a famine that affected 10 million Yemenis, a cholera epidemic, malnutrition.
Entire cities burned down.
It's been a humanitarian disaster from one end to the other.
The Saudis are not winning.
I'm reminded of that old American cliche with friends like these who needs enemies.
The Saudis are our friends, but they've really botched this operation.
They've stained their reputation.
They've destabilized their own Saudi royal family.
They're losing the war, and now they're looking for a way out.
Guess who they're depending on to find it?
The United States.
Well, so the theme of so many interviews today on the show have been same as always, really.
America's supposed terror war against al-Qaeda has ended up instead being a war to try to limit Iran's influence and instead has only empowered Iran more and more and more.
In Iraq, in Syria, and in Yemen most especially.
And so now what are we going to do?
From our government's point of view, they can only double down.
They can only make things worse.
At this point, it would be like asking them to surrender.
I'm not trying to give them excuses, but I'm just saying this is the reality I'm stuck with too, is that these guys essentially have made things so bad for themselves that there's no way for them to fix it in anything that you could even call a decent interval before everything goes to hell when they leave.
I mean, everything is screwed up everywhere.
Well, we are 20 years into the war on terrorism.
And the conclusion that I come to is maybe it's time for the American people to take a step back and rethink it.
It's just not going well.
We're not winning.
Large portions of the Middle East have been destabilized.
Every time we intervene, it backfires.
People in this country are tired of these wars, and for good reason.
It's bankrupting our country.
You talk to military officers.
If you talk to four military officers, you get four different points of view on the war on terrorism.
There's not an overall strategy.
And I know that your listeners have noted that our own political system is quite unstable at the time.
I really think it's time to just say enough of this.
We have to get out of Afghanistan, get out of Syria, get out of Iraq.
Everything that we touch turns to crap on the war on terrorism.
And it's really time to rethink it.
And I'm surprised, actually, that it's taken this country this long to kind of get the clue.
And a lot of people have the clue that it's just not going well.
It's not working.
Man, you know what?
That's just what I think.
And see, I want to call the book Enough Already and Enough of This.
I like that.
Enough of this.
I don't know.
Everyone hates my book titles, but that just jumps out at me.
It's perfect.
That's exactly the deal.
20 years of what all now?
You know what?
Horton wants me to keep track of the names of all the different Sunni and Shia factions in all these countries.
I got a better idea.
Let's just stop bombing them.
Let's just forget it.
It's not working.
I agree with you.
And I think it's a perfectly good book title.
Enough Already is exactly right.
That's the name of the folder still, because I don't know what else to do with it.
I keep trying these other things, but they're not good enough.
Oh, and by the way, I found the Barbara Slavin article.
Google wouldn't fetch it for me, but I found it anyway in the archives at Almonitor.
It's U.S. Maintains Intelligence Relationship with Houthis, January 22nd, 2015.
So you think about that, and then just two months later, Barack Obama turning around and stabbing them in the back and taking al-Qaeda's side.
I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing that some ridiculous right-wing crank would make up, because he doesn't quite understand what's going on.
But no, that's what happened.
That's what happened.
And I can remember at the time, and by the way, Barbara Slavin really knows her stuff.
She knows the Middle East well.
Yeah, well, she's quoting the primary source here live.
Michael Vickers, you know, was saying this in a presentation at the Atlanta Council right there for you.
Interesting guy.
You know, I think that I can remember at the time the real discomfort.
This is March 2015 when I wrote my piece on what the U.S. military really thought of Saudi Arabia's intervention.
And I can remember at the time the real disquiet inside the Pentagon and inside the Obama administration, taken by surprise by the Saudi move and wondering what the hell they were going to do now.
And real anger that they weren't notified this was going to happen, and then that it actually happened.
You know what, though?
I would have appreciated a lot more negative leaks other than just talking to you every couple of years, because— I hear you.
But, you know, it's there between the lines, but I agree with you.
It is between the lines.
In The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Main Street Media, there are a lot of people who understand this.
And are, you know, very uncomfortable with it.
But you have to read between the lines to get the real anger, to get the real understanding of the anger that kind of infects our military about the path that we've had to go down.
That they feel that we've had to go down in supporting the Saudis because they're the Saudis.
You get the same kind of anger, I think, when it comes to Israel.
I mean, there's a lot of support for Israel in our military.
There's no question about that.
And there's a lot of admiration for our Israeli allies inside the military.
But there's also this kind of deep, bubbling, simmering, I would say, kind of doubts and skepticism about what the Israelis are doing and whether they're actually making things worse for us than better.
I've always maintained that they make them worse, that there's got to be another way.
I mean, they recently bombed Shia bases in Iraq.
And I thought, well, you know, that doesn't happen unless they notify us.
But there's got to be, I sense also in our military, some real disquiet about the kind of offensive against Iranian proxies that the Israelis are conducting.
Here we are, how many years now after 9-11?
Almost 20 years after 9-11.
And here we are engaged in what is basically a region-wide war in the Middle East against al-Qaeda and, by the way, against Iran that is taking place in Syria, the Golan, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, that is really burning the entire region.
It's one of these head-shaking moments where you think, you know, what do we have to do to get out of this mess?
And it's a mess that, frankly, we caused.
Well, and we're on both sides of it all over the place.
I mean, think about the Americans embedded, of course, with the Iraqi-Shiite side that they created in Iraq War II, standing by watching the Israelis bomb, which they did, by the way, in large part on behalf of the Israelis.
And not just Ariel Sharon, but really Netanyahu's faction of Likud was really after Iraq, and therefore so were the neocons in America pushing for that war.
Those things are very strongly correlated, let me say.
But anyway, the Americans, we used to joke back in 2012 and 2013 that the CIA is still helping the Shiite forces in Iraq fight this drone war against what's barely left of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But what they're doing is they're just chasing them across the Syrian border, where now they're the moderate rebels, and the CIA backs them in their attempt to get rid of Assad, which is sort of a booby prize after giving Baghdad to Tehran, will try to take Damascus from him, which only empowered Iran and Syria, too.
I mean, these guys, I don't know, man.
It seems like here's what we need.
We need a general, maybe I guess it would have to be a retired one, but an extremely prominent one, to give a really big speech about how, ah, hell, you know what, we really don't mind the Ayatollah that much.
Sure, they're independent from us, and we'll never get the 1970s era relationship back, but who cares?
And at least they're not al-Qaeda guys.
And so that's, you know, this sectarian war, this whole thing that keeps bubbling, it's because we keep pushing it back and forth, back and forth, and escalating it for the al-Qaeda side and the Iranian side.
And I'm not saying we should ally with Iran or work with them against al-Qaeda or anything like that, but it seems like we could just acknowledge that, you know what, the Persians, their power in the region, more than ever because of Bush and Obama and Trump, too.
So, hey, maybe now we can just leave and try not to mind so much the consequences of our actions there, you know, and then sit back and let the Shiites clean up what's left of al-Qaeda in the region, which they have plenty of motive to do.
Well, you know, I think that's right, but good luck finding a general who will come out and say something like that.
I think maybe we, you know, I'm always trying to be an optimist, even though I write about these things.
And I think that we're kind of at a point now where there's a sense in the political environment in Washington that the American people are really turning hard against these wars and starting to deeply question them.
Of course, if you watch the Democratic debates, foreign policy is an afterthought behind everything else, health care, education, the environment.
So, I know it's an afterthought, but there is a real tendency in the political environment in Washington to acknowledge that these wars are going nowhere and that the American people are turning hard against them.
So, I think we have an opportunity.
I hope that we have an opportunity in the next year or so in the midst of these Democratic debates and getting this guy in 1600 Pennsylvania out of the residence and back to New York or wherever he's going to go, that there will be a real deep rethink.
I think there's certainly a yearning for that in Washington.
Even the neocons are scratching their heads wondering, you know, tell me how this ends and wondering if we can continue it and continue to break the bank doing it.
And so, I think that we are in the midst of what will be a necessary reset in our foreign policy in which we'll rethink the premises of the war on terrorism and start to bring young women in uniform home.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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The thing is, obviously you and all the generals you're talking to are under the control of the Russians.
And how dare you sell us out like this, Perry, and all of your military sources that you've been talking with about this.
Everyone knows that now is a time that we must escalate everything and everywhere.
I find it.
I do find it.
I spent a lot of time, I must admit, I spent a lot of time thinking about the coarseness of the language that we've kind of subjected ourselves to on Twitter and Facebook.
And, you know, I have desperately tried not to be a part of that.
But there's a lot of name calling and a lot of anger in this country.
And I understand it.
You know, it's still possible to kind of retrieve this situation and to, I'm going to sound like a peacenik here, and I'm not, but to kind of retrieve this situation and set the country back on the right course.
And I hope that that's the moment that we're starting to become a part of.
Well, you know, you mentioned the election and the whole political season and all that.
And it looks like, you know, probably more and more Republicans are going to start jumping into the primary race here, you know, sense and blood and all that kind of thing.
There's plenty of opportunity for someone to really exploit this issue.
And I mean it right for their own selfish political gain.
They need to understand that there's a huge underserved market in America.
There's this giant group of people who are just waiting to buy a really good anti-war line.
You see a lot of sort of half-hearted praise for Tulsi Gabbard, like, hey, she's as good as far as she goes, but she doesn't go far enough.
We want to see a real strident anti-war campaign for president in either party.
In fact, in the Republican Party would be even better for shaking things up and making it, you know, not just kind of Trumpian, you know, sort of declamations every once in a while about the peace he'll never deliver, but somebody who has a real coherent campaign for non-interventionism in the very near future could take great advantage of this opportunity if they would only be wise enough to do so.
Well, I must say, you know, I'm impressed by Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war message, but she brings a lot of baggage and we have to be, you know, let's be adults here.
She's not going to win the nomination.
So of the frontrunners out there, I keep waiting for Elizabeth Warren, who I think is an impressive campaigner, to actually have a foreign policy.
And so far as I can tell, she doesn't.
Joe Biden, you know, the kind of the switch off for me when is when he said, well, I'm a Zionist.
Well, we need somebody who's a little bit more reflective on foreign policy than Vice President Biden.
And, you know, Bernie Sanders is slowly eliminating himself from the race.
So I think that you're right.
It's time for somebody to catch fire on the war issue.
And I think it would be a good bet for a candidate to do that.
They're scared to death to do it, I think.
But I think that there's a there's a real community, political community rising in the United States that questions our overseas interventions and that community is ripe for harvesting.
And I keep waiting for it to happen, but it hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny about Gabbard, because she seems like her plan is to stay in for a while anyway, while a lot of these others are quickly dropping out.
And it seems like she actually has a lot of qualities.
From my point of view, and I know I'm biased and everything, but it seems to me like her sort of hedging on her anti-war position is what's hurting her.
So anybody who's a hawk in any way, they dismiss her.
The TV hates her and calls her Assad's puppet or whatever garbage, right?
But if she would really run on, I'm going to end all the wars, I swear to God, you know, Tulsi 2020, and get out there and really hit them with it like that, that's the kind of thing that would catch fire.
Instead, she says, well, listen, we shouldn't be backing Al-Qaeda against Assad.
And people go, why do you love Assad so much?
And then it doesn't go anywhere, because she's not taking a strident enough position.
But it seems like even for her, the opportunity is still there, if she wanted to really make it a strident thing, you know?
Well, we'll see if she's able to do it.
I mean, she, you know, as I said, I wrote a piece for a low blog on her.
And I don't think I read that.
I'll send it to you.
In any event, you know, she does come with some baggage.
She's pro-Israeli.
She has definite opinions about Kashmir and India that are, I think, disquieting.
I mean, I'm not part of the crew that criticizes her for being pro-Assad, although he's really a nasty piece of work, and she should know better than to praise him.
But her anti-war stance, as you've noted, quite correctly, is very attractive.
That's why she's in the race.
She didn't really praise him, right?
She just said, look, man, he's up against Abu Muhammad al-Jilani from the Al-Nusra Front.
So what do you want me to do?
I'm trying to end a war here.
Well, and the other thing is, though Washington is slow to acknowledge it, he won.
He's not going anywhere.
And we just kind of have to face that reality and also understand and embrace a little of our own history here.
We, in the Obama administration, we, the United States of America, were dealing with him and negotiating with him all the time and sending George Mitchell to talk to him.
And we were slow to condemn him for his reaction to the rioting and uprising in his country in 2011, because we thought he could handle it and we still needed him as a negotiator.
And we wanted to bring home a big fat peace agreement between Syria and Israel.
Well, it didn't work out.
It was a miscalculation, I think, the Obama administration, and they did do some miscalculating, Libya being another example.
But they miscalculated Assad's strength in Syria.
And here he is, how many years later now, eight years later, and he's going to stay in Damascus and probably die in his sleep.
So, you know, there is that reality and we need to acknowledge it.
Yeah.
Well, and he's gone from a friend of Iran to a dependent on Iran.
So they have more influence there than ever before.
So not only was the whole thing for nothing, but it was all counterproductive from the strategic goals of the Obama administration at the time, who, by the way, just like with Yemen, they do this, the war in Syria and the war in Yemen to please Saudi mostly.
While at the same time, they're working on writing up a nuclear deal with Iran and breaking that ice and taking the threat of war off the table through the JCPOA.
So it's like this is a sop to Saudi Arabia is they get a couple of genocides to make them feel better about the fact that we're making peace with the nation across the strait there.
Well, the, you know, the current kind of talking point from neoconservatives and hawks is that, and I, you know, I shake my head at this, even as I say it, is that Trump was right about the JCPOA.
And you'll see, Mark, people say, you'll see, Mark, the Iranians will come back to the table.
And, you know, I point out to them what we all know, which is that Trump didn't like the JCPOA, not because it was a bad agreement.
I think it was a good agreement.
But because Obama did it.
And we can't, you know, we can't have a foreign policy whose foundation is that you didn't like the guy who preceded you in office.
It's very destructive.
It shows the world that, you know, we're not a nation that is able to keep treaties that even we negotiate.
It has roiled the region.
And the kind of calculation that Iran will be back at the table any minute because they're scared of the United States of America is wrongheaded.
They're not afraid of the United States of America.
As I pointed out in my recent article on Yemen, the Iranians are, you know, have built a robust defensive system all across the region at our expense and at the expense of Saudi Arabia.
And the fact that they're able to launch, if they did in fact do it, drones and missiles at Riyadh should not come as a surprise to us.
We've, you know, we've, we, the Saudis, our erstwhile allies have actually empowered them.
And withdrawing from the JCPOA was a strategic miscalculation on the part of this administration on the part of our country.
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Well, so it's actually amazing to me that the Iranians have still been as polite as they have been this whole time.
And they have gone ahead and withdrawn from some of the limits of it, if not the whole deal in a couple of places.
But I'm sure you saw this where earlier this week, Zarif said, listen, I'll tell you what, we will go ahead and re-enter negotiations toward adding, what was it?
I think it was lifting some sunset provisions on the restrictions against their centrifuges.
And also they said, and we'll enshrine it in the law, you know, in the domestic law in Iran, that nuclear weapons are banned.
How about that?
And it seemed like, man, there, just take that.
That's actually, hey, you actually got them to climb down a little bit.
They didn't offer to cut off Hezbollah in all attempts to manufacture medium range missiles.
Eh, what are you going to do?
But they're giving them enough to save face, but nah, the Americans act like they didn't even hear it.
Well, that's because the real strategy on the part of the United States of America and the people surrounding Trump is regime change in Tehran, as we all know.
And as you've noted many times, this is the kind of trick bag that we're now involved with.
So that, you know, the Trump administration says, well, you do this X, Y, and Z, we'll lift sanctions.
And Iran says, that sounds great.
You go first.
You lift the sanctions.
And we're not going to do it.
So we're caught in kind of a trap of our own making here where, you know, any kind of miscalculation tomorrow or the day after or next week could lead to a shooting war that neither side wants.
And yet we're going to trip, we're going to trip into it.
I know it's an overused metaphor.
But when you, when you get into situations like this, where nobody wants a warrant reminds us of August 1914, where kind of people fall into these traps of their own making.
And that's, I think, a real fear.
And every time that there's an attack on the Middle East and Trump, you know, says we're locked and loaded, military officers go to the White House and they say, yes, we are locked and loaded, but maybe we should rethink this.
Maybe we can come up with a different kind of a response.
A lot of people are going to die and Trump, you know, to back, you know, Trump wants to back Iran down.
But what we need to do is to kind of back Trump down.
And, you know, it's a bad situation.
Yeah.
Well, it looked like, and I'm not sure if he and the generals were eye to eye on this part or not, but it seemed like when he ordered troops to Saudi, not that I'm justifying this in any way, but it seemed pretty obvious that in a, like on the Simpsons movie where they give them three choices and you have to pick the middle one kind of thing, it seems like this was the lesser choice.
That we can either bomb them, we could carpet bomb them, or we could just send some troops to Saudi and actually not really do anything.
And he chose that option.
That was my interpretation of it.
Of course, I'm speculating about that, but it seems like he took the least option there.
And I'm not sure if they were talking him out of anything or if he was talking them out of anything or if they both really didn't want to do anything because they're terrified what happened.
But, you know, I was just talking with Patrick Coburn and he was saying, and this is what we're talking about right there, the military essentially recognizes that any war with Iran would be enormously costly for American forces in the region and our allies and all the rest of it.
And so they just don't want to do it.
They recognize how dangerous it is.
But then just like you're saying, Patrick Coburn said, you know, you have one more big incident and it's big enough.
Very well could have the Americans feeling like they just can't take that lying down.
Everyone on Fox News will call him a wimp or something.
They have to do something.
The Democrats will call him a wimp.
No, that's right.
I mean, I think that we've been lucky so far.
These attacks, these recent attacks inside of Saudi Arabia, the drone and missile attacks on the Aramco refinery, it very easily could have been that a couple of Americans would have been killed.
And faced with that situation, Mr. Trump might have thought that he didn't have a choice.
He had to launch.
What the military calls a punitive operation.
I argue with the people I talk to, I said, there won't be anything punitive about it.
You know, we'll hit them and they will not lie still for it.
It won't be like what Israel does in Syria, where they do a bombing and there's no response.
There'll be a response.
And the problem with the response is we have no idea where it's going to come from.
It could be Iraq, it could be Syria, it could be Yemen, could be in the Persian Gulf.
And you can't defend everything at once because you end up defending nothing.
And that's a very real problem.
And it could happen.
Nor do I think that it's necessarily the case that Iran has full control over their proxies.
There are certainly elements inside of both Saudi Arabia and in Iran that would think it would be in their interest to have a shooting war with the United States.
And they could trigger it, they could provoke it.
It's not out of the question that, you know, after all, Saudi Arabia went into Yemen without even telling us that they were going to do it.
It's possible for proxies like that to act in the future, kill a couple of Americans.
And when that happens, Trump is going to feel that he really doesn't have a choice.
And then we have a problem, a big problem.
Well, and so, I mean, here's the thing too, right, is there's no way out of the Yemen war other than just admitting that the Houthis won, which from the point of view of the Americans and the Saudis, at least they claim to believe that that means Iran won and they just cannot, absolutely cannot have that.
So I wonder if that means that their only choice then would be for America to enter the war in Yemen and try to send some special ops guys to Sana'a or whatever the problem is.
And make this thing worse in order to try to undo what they've been unable to undo, which is the Houthis power grab in the capital city there that America claims amounts to a complete victory for the Iranians.
Well, I, you know, I've been nosing around.
It's an insightful comment on your part.
I've been, and in fact, I've been nosing around on this issue for six months.
And so far as I can tell, but I haven't nailed it down completely, is that about a year after the Saudi intervention in 2015, and about early 2016, we began making outreach efforts to the Houthis to get them out of Yemen.
To get them to talk to us about ending this stupidity.
You know, you're not, that is to say, we didn't send a special emissary to Riyadh, talk to them about ending this stupidity.
We went to the Houthis, and they understand full well.
You know, we're, we're trying to save the Saudis from themselves here.
And, and so we're kind of, it's almost as if we're enlisting them in that project.
That's still three years ago though, right?would end.
And I don't know what the Houthi position is, but I'll bet it's pretty tough.
After all, they're the winners in this conflict, they're going to have to get something.
But they don't want it to go on forever.
And the Saudis are looking for a way out.
So maybe we can do that as for, you know, us intervening on behalf of the Saudis to kind of save them from themselves.
I just don't think that's in the cards.
And, and I think that any attempt to do that would get real pushback from the US military, to the point where they would say, you know, why, why would we save the Saudis from themselves?
If they're going to go down, they're going to go, it's not in our interest to see the House of Saud fall.
But it's certainly not our interest to engage in yet another shooting war on the ground in the Middle East.
I just don't think there'd be any support for that at all.
Well, I mean, it kind of sounds too like what you're saying is the military doesn't really see the Houthis as a Hezbollah proxy for Iran.
And they really don't give a damn if the Houthis rule Sana'a now any more than they did back in January 2015.
I think that their view on the Houthis has not changed.
And you're exactly right.
You know, there are still people in the military I know who would love to recruit the Houthis once again, almost officially, to fight al Qaeda in Yemen.
After all, that's the enemy, right?
And, you know, when there was a time in the war on terrorism, when we enlisted and recruited the help of Iran against al Qaeda.
Look, and the reality is the war against AQAP, the drone war in the early Obama years, was terribly counterproductive.
You know, it's like watering a terrorist garden with blood, man.
All you do, you kill civilians and drive more and more people into their group.
And of course, the bribery to Saleh to let us do it was you get to have all these guns and all this money, which then he promptly used to attack the Houthis over and over again, which was counterproductive for him, too, and just led to their rise.
And so by the time Obama actually took al Qaeda's side, they were probably already two or three times the size of what they were when he started bombing them.
It's just now they're 100 times that size after taking their side outright.
But the war against them was always a travesty and left dead grandmothers and little babies all over the ground.
I mean, the problem, the other problem here is, you're right, that, you know, if you walk the streets of Peoria, or Oklahoma City, or Arlington, Virginia, or Denver, or wherever, and you ask, you know, an American citizen, or anyone, who are we lined up with in Yemen, they'll look at you like you have three heads, they've never heard of it.
And, and it's kind of, you know, it's unlike the Cold War, foreign policy is on the back burner for most of the American people, and I suppose for good reason, but it's not on the back burner of the military.
And they weigh in pretty heavily on this.
And when they said to Barack Obama, this is just a bad idea, it's going to hurt the House of Saud, he listened.
But you pivot towards, you know, we have a strategic ally in Saudi Arabia, and that means we got to kind of put up with the friends we have.
But I think that, I think that things have changed significantly.
Even under Trump, they realized with some discomfort, that, you know, they're allied with a family that murders journalists.
And that, you know, extorts money from other members of the Saudi family that has played a screwy game in Syria, that has not always been on our side in the war on terrorism, and has screwed us over with the Houthis.
So there's a growing skepticism that we're getting this right.
And I just, you know, I end up reiterating these points, but time to take a step back and rethink the war on terror.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what, hearing it from you, it's just like I try to do essentially on the show all the time is the bottom line, essentially, here's just trying to explain who's who.
If you're only realistic about who's on whose side, and what are the real motivations for the things that the Americans are doing here, it all becomes pretty bankrupt and pretty hopeless.
And as you're, you know, we're concluding earlier, it's time to just forget this whole thing.
It's never going to work out.
There's no way to tie up loose ends and make this thing okay.
It's not okay.
It's not okay.
That's right.
Yeah, and they've already done it.
So yeah, but you know what, it is, it is somewhat reassuring, though, to hear that you have generals saying, Nah, I don't care if the Houthis, you know, rule Sana'a, we can deal with them, which of course, is the real truth.
And it's so counter to the narrative, that the reason we have to do this is because of Tehran's influence in Sana'a.
It's just not true.
It's not true.
No, it's not true.
I agree.
All right, good deal.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time again on the show.
Mark, it's great to talk to you as always.
It's always a pleasure.
And I appreciate talking to you.
Best to you.
All right, you guys, that's Mark Perry, contributing editor at the American Conservative.
I didn't know that.
And author of the Pentagon's Wars.
There's a couple different Mark Perry's, but he's Mark Perry DC on Twitter, Mark Perry DC.
And this one is at TAC.
It's called the military official who knew Saudi Arabia would fail in Yemen.
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.
