Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Kelly Blaho.
She's a regular at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's American Conservative Magazine, or no, it's theamericanconservative.com.
And also antiwar.com, of course.
She's got a brand new one on antiwar.com today.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Good to talk to you again.
Thanks for having me.
Okay, so let's see, where's the domestic jihad is the one that's on antiwar.com today, but the one that I wanted to talk with you about is from the American Conservative Magazine.
Oh, it's called eating soup with a spoon.
Who ever heard of such a ridiculous thing?
Learning to eat soup with a spoon.
Tell us, first of all, what's the title about there?
Well, the title is about, it's a riff off of a book written by Lieutenant Colonel John Nagel, who's retired from the Army now, but he wrote this book in 2002, basically comparing the counterinsurgency strategies by the British in Malaya to the Vietnam experience, our counterinsurgency attempts in Vietnam.
And he had written this book, published in 2002, impeccably timed, so that to suggest that a new strategy was necessary for Iraq, which was, well, the book had come out in 2002 as a dissertation.
So let me just pedal back for a second.
He had done this for his Oxford dissertation, had served in Iraq, had come back and was working on the counterinsurgency manual with David Petraeus when the dissertation was released as a book.
So this all sort of coalesced around the new movement that I know you and I have talked about many times, the new counterinsurgency movement, which was supposed to be the magic formula for getting us out of the morass that Iraq had become, the failure peaking at about 2005.
So fast forward to a failed strategy of COIN, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and I write about how all of these crusaders, as Andrew Bacevich had called them, and in a great article for the Atlantic several years ago, these crusaders who had been so popular and had been at the forefront of changing our strategy in Afghanistan, based on their supposed victory in Iraq, are now fading from the scene.
And I say that, you know, Lieutenant Colonel Nagel is the best example of this fadeout, in that he is now leaving his perch at a quite reputable Democratic interventionist think tank in Washington to go be the headmaster at a rich boys school in Pennsylvania.
So I was using him as sort of the symbol of how this strategy has failed, you know, it failed in Afghanistan, and it has basically stunted the thinking for the last three years or so, and the military community from really adapting to what's been going on the ground and moving things forward.
So that was the long story about the title.
In his book, and I don't know if I got to this, his book was called How to Learn to Eat Soup with a Knife.
Basically he was saying how to adapt to insurgencies effectively, and so this book was very wildly popular in counterinsurgency circles for years as sort of a playbook.
And he really benefited personally and professionally from it.
The title on my story is How to Eat Soup with a Spoon, basically saying, you know, when all is said and done, we realize that it's really better to eat soup with a spoon.
So knock it off.
Yeah, you might cut your lip.
So that's where that came from.
Now here's my thing, and we've talked about this before on the show too, Kelly, and that is that I think that the surge is a great success because I think it never was anything but a bunch of propaganda, and that its purpose was, as David Petraeus said in the case of Iraq back in 2007, this is all about adding time to the Washington clock, convincing, well the only people that really need convincing are the congressmen, that give us a couple of more years and we'll make it work rather than stop paying for it now.
And so can we prolong the thing and lose slower, later?
Yes, hooray, success.
And that was basically all it ever was.
And so did the surge work in Iraq?
Yeah, because it was supposed to work on Americans.
I mean, it didn't change the fact that the war was fought for Iran in the first place because the guys that got us into it are a bunch of stupid idiots.
They couldn't undo that, you know what I mean?
Right.
So yeah, they bribed the Sunni insurgents for a little while, whatever.
And then the whole meme that the surge worked and that the counterinsurgency doctrine was really, really smart and achieved all its benchmarks, that was nothing but a bunch of hype.
It was never anything but words.
And so really my question is, did John Nagel and the rest of these Center for a New American Security Types actually believe this?
Did they not see that this was all just propaganda for the rubes?
That even in 2007, Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarich in East Baghdad, the book was covered in dust.
No one was reading the counterinsurgency book.
Their mission was go out there and kill people.
And so they did it the same way they always did.
You know, it was the doctrine was junk.
Yeah, Scott, I think you're asking a really important and maybe even an existential question here, because I can't get into the real heart and soul of John Nagel, nor do I want to.
I think you have a real combustible combination here of ego, professional ambition, the desire to come up with a solution, like an honest desire to come up with a solution, politics, and probably just cynicism all combined.
And I can't pretend that I can single out what was motivating each player, whether it be Petraeus, McChrystal, Nagel, David Kilcullen, all these other Coindonistas.
I don't know.
Everybody had their own personal motivation.
What I'm seeing here is what you're saying is correct.
The surge was to buy time.
Somewhere along the line, in the bubble, in the echo chamber of the Washington military community, people like Nagel and the rest of the Coindonistas bought into that as a credible, verifiable strategy for which to apply to Afghanistan.
And so whatever was motivating them to push it, they did.
Yeah, and I'm sorry about that.
I didn't mean to phrase the question in such an unfair way.
You can take it at face value that they mean what they say.
You know, it just seemed to me that since, you know, Gareth and I were sitting here before they even got started on the coin in Afghanistan, calling it nothing but a propaganda campaign in the first place, how could it have ever been more than that?
But apparently it was.
Right.
But I think you're getting to the nub of the issue.
And what maybe is the root of all of Washington's problems is that the players begin to buy into their own, into the hype, into the propaganda.
And it may be for honest reasons.
It could be for venal reasons, but it happened.
But what happened was it all, it all occurred in this bubble, which what also occurred is there was no room and no oxygen for any alternative strategy or narrative or ideas.
So people like Andrew Bacevich, all the people that write for anti-war.com, people that were writing in academic circles who were saying this strategy isn't going to work.
Here's the history as to why it's not going to work.
This is nothing but another way, a nice way of putting it, a foreign smiley face on a foreign occupation.
It's not going to work.
Those people are all marginalized.
All that was marginalized.
Gian Gentile, a guy that I wrote about for the last, you know, four years as being one of the active duty people who are trying to ram, ram against coin for all these years.
Again, marginalized.
So, you know, whatever were the motivations and who was coming at it from what direction, the outcome was that for four years, coin has been the only show in town.
So we've wasted all this time pumping up a strategy that turns out was a bunch of hoo-ha.
So yeah, we can probably laugh and snicker at the fact that Nagel now has to be the headmaster at a boys' school and that a lot of these coin the nieces hit, like what I said, with a brass ceiling and I'm going no further in their careers because it's the strategy did not work.
But we've, we've lost a lot of guys since then.
Right.
You know, there's a lot of main people out there that maybe could have, might've been home.
Well, that's one small thing is the, the proximate accountability of Michelle Flournoy having to retire instead of get promoted and John Nagel going to be the headmaster instead of, you know, the Flournoy's replacement and the policy shop or whatever like that.
That's the closest thing we could ever get to accountability in DC, it seems like.
Right.
And that, and I've, I've, I've been following with great interest, all the comments that have come in on my story.
And I have to say, I'm, I'm rather pleased that they run half and half.
Cause I thought it was going to be a lot worse.
I thought I was going to get a lot of military guys coming down on me, like a ton of bricks.
Oh, who is she?
She doesn't know what she's talking about.
She's never been in the military, but I've had a lot of people from the, from military backgrounds weighing in saying, where's the accountability?
Because this all we're going to get, you know, and not just military people, but you know, just from the public saying, is this all we're going to get?
Will these people ever be held accountable?
Um, you know, I, I think you and I got no Washington at this point enough to know that.
And like I say, accountability is not on the menu and we can only keep, you know, talking about it and writing about, you know, it is in hopes that we don't make the same mistakes, but I do feel heartened that so many people from the military have weighed in on this and that I know it's getting a lot of traction on military websites and on military mailing lists, which is kind of different for my stories, especially at, you know, whether it be antiwar.com or American conservative, because people think because me and others are, you know, anti-militarism, you know, anti-war that somehow we don't have a, you know, can't really engage on that level, but I'm really hitting a real nerve with people, you know, enough for them to come out and, and comment and enough for them to say, to pass it along and say, you know, we've been talking about this, the military circles that, you know, this, this is a, this is a real issue.
So that's, that's the one heartening thing.
And I know that I've talked about this before, but I think when inside the military, when they're complaining and they know something's wrong and they know this coin, this coin was a bill of goods sold to them, that, that, that means something, because that means that internal dissension, that somehow, you know, that, that, that, that things might change, you know, and you and I would rather not see any war.
You probably want to see the military reduced to like, you know, whatnot, you know, pre-World War II levels, but any change, I think at this point is good.
Yeah.
Well, any dissension is good.
To me, it's such an interesting case study in, you know, consensus and group think and all that, like you're talking about where it's the only show in town in DC, what's the future of Afghanistan?
There's really one organized group with a coherent narrative to sell, whether it's all that coherent or actually a plausible way to occupy Afghanistan is sort of, besides the point, they're the jocks and the cheerleaders that everybody wants to be like, or be seen having a drink with or whatever kind of crap.
And so they rule the town.
And then, so what's their policy here?
We're talking about coin this and coin that their policy is make the Afghans love us as we burn them to death.
Yeah, that's, and you know what, if you just turn the Phillips head and tune it just right, then it'll work out perfect.
And they'll love being burnt to death by us because we're the Americans and we love them and whatever.
But meanwhile, if you have a counter insurgency doctrine, that implies you're an empire in the first place, right?
You know, according to our mythology, we're the insurgents.
Why, how could anyone insurge against us unless we are dominating them in the first place?
You know, what in the hell are we doing there?
Copying the French and Algeria, copying any empire in any of their colonies, other than acting like we're not supposed to act like we all know we're not supposed to do, you know, build an empire like the British in Central Asia of all places.
Right, exactly.
And if we really wanted to do it right, and we want to, you know, the sad fact of it is that we'd have to really start rounding up people and killing them full scale.
And we've talked about this years ago, Scott, on the radio.
You know, we were trying to have it both ways.
We were trying to pacify, pacify the Afghan, the Pashtuns, but at the same time, you know, blow kisses and hand candy off.
And it's just, it's not work.
You cannot have it both ways.
Either you have an effective counterinsurgency, you know, strategy, which involves like putting people in concentration camps, separating them from, you know, separating the people from the insurgency, you know, just rounding up all, you know, boys over the age of 12, and just slaughtering them.
Or you don't have, you can't have a successful counterinsurgency, just get out of there.
And we wanted to have it both ways.
And now we're seeing, we're seeing the fruits of that now, in Afghanistan, where we're in a serious, we're in a serious quagmire.
I mean, we won't even be able to get out inexpensively or unscathed.
I mean, the stories that were coming up yesterday, last week, about how we're going to have to put more troops in just to get everything out of there.
You know, and the fact that they've suspended all the training that supposedly their exit plan, right, we're going to train up an army, they'll stand up, we'll stand down and all that.
And yet now they're afraid to train their sock puppets because their sock puppets keep shooting our guys in the head.
Right.
And some people had the nerve to comment on my story saying, you don't know what you're talking about.
Things are going great.
Why don't you and you, you journalists who've never served in the military come to Afghanistan and see how great things are going.
I mean, they still have, they still have mouthpieces in the military that are still hawking this stuff.
And it's just embarrassing because the minute they say that I get some Twitter blast about just what you said, how everything's been suspended in training because we can't trust the Afghans and we haven't been vetting them properly.
And so, or I read this great story I recommend by Spencer Ackerman from Wired who is saying that of all the top 10 violent districts in Afghanistan, the majority of them are in Helmand and Kandahar, which was the focus of this 2009 surge.
Right.
So the very place that we surged into is the place that's giving us the biggest headache right now.
Right.
Well, and it was Nagel that said, what we're going to do here is we're going to change entire societies.
Right.
We've got to change entire societies.
So it's like, you know, like Andrew Bacevich says, it's not just counterinsurgency, it's social engineering.
We're supposed to change societies the way people think.
Well, and the only thing you can really do with society is make sure that it hates yours.
That's the only change you can really make in somebody else's entire country's way of life.
I mean, come on.
Right.
And another thing, maybe they have more AIDS now from all the Western brothels in their capital city.
Well, another thing that I've been getting flack for is that I'm not, and I'm blamed, you know, all of a sudden I'm blaming mid-level officers for everything that's gone wrong.
Now, I want to say this right here and right now, if you're John Nagel and you're going out and you're on the Daily Show in your uniform with your shiny medals, pumping up coin, like it's the magic formula for saving Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then you're in every major magazine.
You have a 9,000 word piece in the New York Times Magazine about yourself.
And now you are the reincarnated T. Lawrence of Arabia.
Somehow that it kind of sets you apart.
You're not just a mid-level officer.
You're a guy who is actually selling the strategy to the public, to the rest of the media.
I mean it to the media and to, to Washington.
Yeah.
You do hold some responsibility and I fixate on him because he did act in that capacity and I'm sorry.
And people said, Oh, this was a vicious man.
I don't think so.
I wasn't ad hominem either.
I told the facts.
The guy was out there selling the strategy.
It's failed.
The fact that he is leaving, you know, Washington out of the military community altogether, that, that does say something about the state of affairs.
And I, and I don't take away the responsibility for Petraeus or McChrystal, but see Nagel was an essence, a creature of Petraeus.
You remember Petraeus having all of his little acolytes around his little advisors, helping them write the counter-insurgents.
Right.
Nagel is really nothing but another Tom Ricks, just another PR guy and another warm body in the room, making it look like there's a consensus of dunces here who know that this is right.
Right.
So yeah, there's really no difference than an AEI conference in 2002.
You know, all smart people know we have to do a rack and said, maybe you, but you're a coward, but everyone who knows anything knows this must be done.
Exactly.
And everybody else with a dissenting view was pushed away as some sort of loony, kook, dissenter, defeatist.
I mean, you name it, you know, and then it turns out people like Ron Paul don't, don't sound so crazy after all this, but because they now they're interested in protecting their own reputations, they still will not admit that he was right.
Right.
And that the people like Gian Gentile and Andrew Bacevich were right.
So they'll go down in flames into every boy school, you know, headmastering everywhere before they'll admit it.
But we know.
Right.
And that's what, you know, writing these stories is all about.
I mean, we have to, I mean, how are we going to learn from our mistakes if we don't, you know, just hammer away at the fact that you were wrong and, you know, you're going to, this is, this is, we have to burst the bubble somewhere.
But, you know, before you let me go, I wanted to mention, I, you know, I came across, you know, another coin, Denise, uh, Andrew Exum announced on his blog, you know, this weekend that he's not going to be blogging anymore for a year because he got a fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations and he's going to be working in the government for the next year.
And I was like, well, what's that all about?
So I Googled up, you know, the link that he provided to CFR.
And it turns out they have these international fellowships where they take people from policy think tanks and put them into government.
So basically they're selected policy, you know, think tanks and organizations that, you know, obviously jive with their own agenda.
They will find you a little place in government to, to promote and for, you know, forward that agenda.
Hey, that's what the Council on Foreign Relations has been about since 1921.
I know, but I, I...
We'll find you a job.
You just got to push our doctrines.
Facilitate, you know, basically the HR for the government.
And I, and I, I guess I kind of knew that stuff was going on, but I, and I, and I just hadn't really looked into it before, but you know, and then they take people in government and they put them and they have them working outside of government in some policy shop somewhere.
And they, they do this sort of switching around.
You know what it is to me?
It's like the way they homogenize milk, they take it and they just shake the hell out of it until it's all the exact same consistency all the way through.
And that's sort of what you do.
You take all your different, you know, Ivy league grads, and you put them in all the different positions where they have a pretty much equally divided loyalty to all of them.
So you never have like a partisanship that these people favor a think tank more than actual government work or something like that.
That's never a split.
It's always, you know, rapidly moving around and you'll get a board of directors spot at Lockheed for a little while too, if you play your cards right, cash in.
It's amazing.
And I, and I think that I'm just, I'm just astounded by the fact that it, that it is so bald, you know, um, that you could take somebody from a think tank that has a particular foreign policy view, which is, you know, is what they call, you know, a humane or, you know, uh, what do you call liberal interventionism, you know, all that smarmy, you know, language and semantics and, and put them into a government job.
And you can stay in that job for a year and then go back to your, your think tank.
And I'm thinking, I don't know if that's, to me, that's not what government is all about.
You know, government is not finding places for people.
I mean, I realize it's a naive point of view, but after everything that's happened, you know, I realized down deep that nothing's going to change.
The people that are getting something like Exum fail up instead of down, like Nagel got what was coming to him.
So, yeah, exactly.
We're, we're, we're still not there yet on the accountability menu.
That's for sure.
Although now, you know, to really put, um, an exclamation point on your point as to why it is that Michelle Flournoy had to go spend time with her family and why it is that John Nagel had to go be the principal of a bunch of little third graders.
Um, it is because of the failure of their pathetic failure of a doctrine.
And the proof of that is that they're rewriting it right now.
Correct.
They have officially thrown John Nagel's pathetic, stupid, wrong ideas, which did in fact get a lot of people killed in the garbage can where they belong because they don't work.
Yeah.
And you know, and he, of course he's not responsible for the entire, you know, counterinsurgency manual, because in fact it was written by a committee of people.
I mean, everybody, you know, they had any bragged about this.
We have a Harvard sociologist and we have, we have an economics guy from Yale and this one, and they all poured into it.
I mean, that's the cool thing about responsibility is the mathematics don't have to really add up correctly.
They can all be a hundred percent responsible as far as I'm concerned.
Well, right.
But I'm saying that it was doomed to fail to begin with now.
Yeah.
Now they're rewriting it.
And of course the people who, you know, the, the sympathetic types are saying, well, you know, we've had five years of war since that came out.
And, you know, we we've learned lessons and we have to just imbue this with the lessons that we've learned, you know, whatever, you know, the fact that it was a flawed, it was a flawed strategy, a flawed book, you know, and now they're trying to tweak it, you know, and the fact that people for the last few years have been talking about what, what a piece of crap it was, right.
Well, you know, and the thing is, I know I'm rude and I know I say like, I make it personal and talk about, you know, the people Nagel helped get killed and all that kind of thing.
But, and in fact, I had a good friend of mine criticize me for that and saying, you know, Hey, maybe, uh, you know, Samantha power just really means well for the poor people of Libya.
And so you shouldn't attack her for it.
But you know what, if, if, uh, if John Nagel and Samantha power all have only the, uh, highest, most loving humanitarian rate reasons for deploying the American empire, that's so much the worst that makes them even worse people because the empire is a murderous machine.
It is not a loving, caring thing.
And so if, you know, all of their best intentions be damned, if they serve to simply be public relations for what is in essence, a bunch of murderers on a rampage.
And the fact too, that there, there, there, you know, there's a difference between, you know, putting all of your energy into selling and defending a concept rather than debating it.
And I make that point in my column, there were alternative views there.
And I am tired of hearing people, whether it be in the comment field for my story saying they were doing their best with the little they had, how could they possibly known this was going to happen or that was going to happen.
That's bull.
We know that there are people from the beginning who were giving alternative views to Joe Biden.
Yeah.
And so all that out purposefully.
So yeah, they might've had the best intentions, but when it came, when people actually confronted them with another reality, they said, get out.
You don't belong.
You're not of the body.
You know, you're not one of us.
Like you said, boys club, girls club, cheerleaders and football players, whatever.
Right.
They, they push those people aside.
So whatever best intentions they might've had, uh, they, they, they lost any sympathy for me because I know how those other people were treated.
The, the naysayers were treated and quite brutally.
And I mean, I know plenty of people whose professional careers were thwarted and sidelined or stunted because they didn't tow the line.
And that's how it's been in Washington for the, since then, you know, an entirety of the war.
Yeah.
They have no mercy for their detractors, but you're supposed to have ultimate mercy for them, even though, you know, nobody's perfect, but Kelly, I've never heard you make a bunch of arguments that got a bunch of innocent people killed, you know, and that's the same thing for me too.
I screw up a lot, but I don't sit around promoting, you know, excuses for prolonging mass violent conflicts, you know, putting more troops into harm's way.
Right.
Because that's, you know, that's what this surge in Afghanistan was all about.
I mean, I remember Nagel saying, well, you'd need a hundred thousand more troops or more, more than that if you really wanted to do coin, right.
So, I mean, if these guys had their way, there would have been double the number.
And I remember the result would have been twice as bad.
Yeah.
And you remember the debate, McChrystal wanted this many and Obama only gave them this many and all the right-wingers are up in arms.
Why are they listening to his generals on the ground?
And, you know, they had their way.
They put more, more cannon fodder out there.
Yep.
And, you know, their test cases specifically, and you mentioned Kandahar, there was also Marja.
These were their specific test cases where they said, look, we are going to change their society.
We are going to give them a government in a box.
We are going to show them that our way of understanding their way of doing things is the best way to do things, and they are going to go along and it's going to work and it's going to be great.
And as of right now, that is all just proven factually to not be true.
Kandahar is no more under the control of the American, you know, will to power or whatever you call it over there than it ever was.
And same for Marja.
The last I looked at Marja, they don't even have roofs on their buildings.
Marja looks like just mud walls to me, as best I can see on Google Earth there.
Well, this goes back to what we were talking about before, about how they bought into their own, their own propaganda and hype.
Because right about the time that this Marja government in a box was like, that was at the beginning of the Obama administration.
And it was like during this period of this bad marriage between these, you know, war mongering Republican outgoing administration and the incoming touchy-feely humanitarian interventionists of Samantha Powers and others coming in.
And basically what Betrayus is trying to do is sell this war, incorporating all of this, and basically selling it as, oh, this is coin.
We're all of government.
We're whole of government.
We're going to offer schools.
We're going to offer, you know, good governance.
We're going to, you know, offer, you know, lessons in democracy and building up their judiciary.
And, you know, in addition to securing these populations, we can do it.
And, you know, that's the way it was sold.
And the Democrats are like, yes, this is our war.
This is, this is the way we want.
This is the way to fight war is to do this whole of government thing.
It's so touchy feely.
It's so wonderful, you know, and the Republicans couldn't complain because we were still bombing the hell out of them.
And it was a big mess.
And that's what you said.
What do you have to show for it?
Those districts are the most violent right now.
Yeah.
And Karzai is still in power.
He's still corrupt.
You know, the place is still a powder keg.
You know, Pakistan, God knows what's going on over there.
And then our presidential candidates don't even want to talk about it when they get to their convention.
Yeah.
Hey, you know what?
In fact, as long as we're over time, can you stay for another few minutes?
Sure.
Because I want to focus on that point about Hamid Karzai, because here in 2009, right around the same time that Obama announced the surge, of course, they orchestrated this whole thing to try to get rid of Karzai.
They tried to rig the election for that guy, Abdullah Abdullah.
And the CIA put it in the New York Times that Karzai can't be trusted because his brother is a CIA tied heroin dealer.
And that was supposed to undermine him, which, you know, it did to me.
But anyway, and then, you know, Michael Hastings reported that he's a junkie.
And I think, right, it was, um, you said his name earlier, the ambassador's name started with a K, the former military guy.
Oh, Kilcullen, David Kilcullen.
Yeah, wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
He one of those guys wrote a very high level guy wrote a thing about how Karzai was a junkie, right?
Yeah, I got to look that up.
Because I can't remember who exactly put that out there.
And I know McChrystal's guys, if not McChrystal himself said that to Michael Hastings, that he's not even the mayor of Kabul, he's the mayor of his palace where he sits around shooting junk all day.
This guy, this is our sock puppet dictator of Afghanistan.
He's supposed to ever be able to control that whole country, or be the administrator of a government that controls that whole country.
The whole thing.
It's not just ridiculous.
It's, it's cruel that you would send Americans to go out there killing and dying for what could never possibly be.
And I don't care if you had, you know, the actual perfect counterinsurgency strategy, you still could never really create a government out of Hamid Karzai and his men.
Right?
Which, which begs the question, why?
You know, and I'm sure there's a simple, you know, answer that's eluding me at this very moment.
But it's a simple question.
Why have we been propping him up?
Why couldn't?
And I think one explanation is that there is no alternative.
The alternative is, is disaster.
Right.
He's the closest thing they've got to somebody who even could be a sock puppet dictator there.
Yeah, exactly.
There's no alternative.
And the thing is, you know, I understand that people get mad and say, well, you know, you just don't understand.
And what they're doing over there is the right thing and whatever.
But I would just like to see all that same indignation turned around to the people who really deserve it.
That like, wait a minute.
What do you mean that you're sending our guys over there to play the IED lottery for something that everyone understands and agrees cannot be one.
In fact, this was going to be more of my questions earlier where you were shocked as me.
I really was shocked when I read in the Washington Post that excerpt from the book, little America, where it says that Obama refused to read a CIA report that he had already heard said in it that this won't work.
And so he just refused to read the thing rather than read it and say, well, I disagree with it.
He just, you know, put his fingers in his ears and started singing.
Mary had a little lamb and ordered his surge anyway.
Yeah, well, that sounds about right.
I mean, that that that was the entire atmosphere of Washington at that time, too.
I mean, so good for the CIA that they even bothered to tell the truth on.
Yeah.
You know, we're never going to know, Scott.
I mean, the fact that we've been talking about this and I've been talking about this privately with people for years, people that are in government, in the military, in, you know, who have pretty readily admitted that this was a failure from the get go.
And the fact that that that never bubbled up into any to any any real dissension.
We'll never know.
I don't think we'll ever know that the depth of of how we were manipulated.
Well, and because, like you said, it's not a matter of controversy between the political parties in the election.
It doesn't matter at all.
It might as well be a debate about angels on the head of a pin, even though it's about a war that's going on right now during a presidential election.
Right.
Because there's nothing at issue there.
Right.
I don't know.
It's it's it's a pretty scary scene.
And I don't think it's you know, in terms of, you know, moving forward, whether it be in Iran or Syria, I don't think that that the people operating, you know, at the level of Congress or the White House, I really know.
I just don't think that they have the wherewithal to lead us in any better direction right now.
I mean, when I was watching Fox, I was watching Fox News the other night and they had their little commentary about the convention.
And here's Michael or Stephen Hayes from, you know, Weekly Standard, you know, and they had to admit that the Ron Paul people were making a real, you know, causing a lot of buzz in the hall that day, you know, and they admit that he had, you know, really influenced that, whether it be the platform, but also the mood and of the Republican Party politics at that moment.
But he goes, but I'll never agree with him on his foreign policy.
He's just a kook.
He's too much of an extremist.
I'm thinking extremist.
I would say if you pulled most of the people in this country, they would agree at least the basic level with Ron Paul about our foreign policy and the wars.
Well, and especially coming from Hayes, who's been for everything that got a million people killed over the last decade, to call someone who's reluctant to commit such violence extreme is pretty hilarious.
Right.
But the sad, the even sadder thing is that they turn to Mara Eliasson, who is like the Democratic voice on the Fox News, you know, special report, what do they call them, all stars or whatever, saying basically the same thing.
You know, all those Ron Paul people never get anywhere.
They're just they're just too far on the extreme, you know, especially in the foreign policy.
And I'm thinking, how can you say that after all the years?
But if that is the if that represents the mainstream thinking of politics in Washington, from the left and the right, Stephen Hayes and Mara Eliasson, that we're in trouble.
Because there's just no room for me and you.
And there's no room for most of Americans who are tired of the war.
They're tired of the militarism.
But that's just it's not part of that.
That's not that's not part of the platform.
Well, you know, I think this is the lesson that comes through and you're writing more than anything else.
You're sort of, you know, the real Americans mole in the imperial capital saying, hey, everybody, I went to the big meet today and here's what they were telling each other.
And it's always some, you know, facepalming, just ridiculous, horrible thing that these people believe and convince each other and slap each other on the back and congratulate each other for figuring out, too.
And I mean, their consensus is just horrible.
And I've actually learned as much about it from you as anyone else in my life.
I think reading your articles about what they talk about at their conference, here's what these people really believe.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think what's important is to hold it just squaring the circle here is to hold these people who have dominated, you know, our thinking, or at least the or tried to dominate the thinking about war for the last five years or so.
We need to hold them accountable.
And when they fail, or when they have to leave town with their tail between their legs, we need to point it out as to why and what's going on.
Because I, you know, I've been talking about this for years about this coin bubble.
You know, and the fact that, you know, it's all burst and everybody knows it.
Now, that's not enough.
We need to talk about it.
Because like you said, it's got many people killed.
And it's not just our people look at what the you know, people around you know, the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, you know, what's going on in Yemen now another more civilians killed in a drone attack, you know, to me, the most important lesson is just regardless of what a ridiculous doctrine it is, and what a failure of a doctrine is, what again, what a success the propaganda has been.
And you think about just like George Bush always did, he'd have the three word, usually three syllable slogan behind him on the wall when he was talking, and the surge worked.
Well, first, the surge is working for about two thirds of a year or so.
And then the surge worked ever since that it's such a powerful slogan, it's so easy to memorize.
And, and, again, hey, Mara liason, and goofball from the National Review agree.
And so apparently, no reasonable person disagrees with that the surge worked, everybody knows it.
So nobody even has to have an argument for it.
The slogan wins.
And so, like you're saying, you can just go right on into Yemen and Somalia, based on a slogan and a fake history that, you know, has never really been taken apart.
And so hey, you know, if this surges work so well, why don't we just go ahead and surge into Somalia, and that'll finally get rid of al shabab.
Right, exactly.
And if the surge works, so well, why isn't john noggle, like, like, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Undersecretary of Defense right now, right on his way up to maybe the highest level?
I mean, that that's what I was trying to get at.
I mean, I would love to see and I would love to write this book and go through and find out how many people whose whose careers had benefited, you know, from, you know, the coin enterprise.
Oh, you should write that book.
Yeah, because now we're not just talking about military careers, because, and you know, there's plenty of those people who rose up through the ranks.
And because of, you know, being within that inner circle of portrayal, or towing the line or promoting and write paper papers about coin, who've done that the coin studies and taught coin studies.
But how about the people who wrote the book, the civilian people, all the people who've sucked up to portray us and sucked up to the up to the whole cabal of, you know, coined Denise does over the years, I mean, we're talking a cottage in this industry here.
That was that was born out of war, born out of simple, what is basically a compendium of tactical, you know, attack attack, military tactics had become a strategy, which has become an enterprise.
And it would be great to see how many people really benefited.
I mean, it's like, we always talk about war is a business.
This was a business.
And, and I think, you know, I think people are starting to take the surge in Iraq apart.
And I and I think that by, you know, talking about coin and the failed enterprise there is is just one more step on finally dismantling that myth of the Iraq war search, because it all goes back to that.
You know, if it wasn't for what you said, the propaganda, the hype, buying the time and having it work, then there would have never been the coin Denise does.
So, yeah, it's all the piece.
And if we keep hammering at it, that's a good thing.
Yeah, well, and, you know, you're our leader, you're the best of all, and most consistent of all coin revisionism this whole time.
And so may they all follow you and your journalism.
That's what I say.
Well, I appreciate your very kind, but I have to say, you know, for others, I would say Gian Gentile, you know, who I have to say, was very generous, and very brave, and letting me interview him q&a for anti war.
Because, you know, most active duty people don't want to touch anti war with a 10 foot pole.
And here he is saying, Hey, sure, let's sit down for an interview.
And it really worked out well, because it worked out for anti war calm, because people were taking started to take us that at least on that issue a little more serious, because, hey, we got this interview, we talked to this guy's active duty professor at West Point, you know, he's not he's not your typical anti war subject.
But we were able to start making a foray into this story, you know, and he was like, hell, you know, he needed as many supporters, or at least allies in this fight as we did, you know, and he was out there, he met, you know, he's always responded to peak to criticisms, right outright, you know, I mean, they try to take me apart on small wars journal.com on this story.
And he was the first one to weigh in.
Because I did interview him for the story.
But he was the first one to wait in.
He said, You know what, I'm not posting on your website anymore.
Because he basically had enough.
Here was the guy a small wars journal saying that, you know, Kelly Blahos is full of crap.
You know, how dare she blamed john Nagel, who's been he's a real man for getting he said that a real man who went into the arena to do the job himself instead of standing back as a as an angry distractor.
I mean, the whole every trope you you could throw at me he did.
And john gentile said, Okay, you're right.
We should thank Nagel for getting us to work with this world.
We can barely get out of now and killing all these men and women.
You're being responsible for all these deaths.
You're right.
And I'm never posting on your on your website again.
And I was like, Whoa, yeah.
I mean, that is good.
He defended you.
Yeah, but he you know, he was like, enough tired of the of the bull.
You know, we've gone back and forth on this for five years. john has always been up there fighting with these guys on the military blog.
And who's teaching third grade now?
Yeah.
So I mean, I mean that if anybody he's he and people like you know, Andrew base of it.
I've mentioned, you know, these people have hung in there.
Sadly, they've been marginalized.
But, you know, that's, that's how it goes with the great, you know, great thinkers and people and independent thinkers throughout history.
They're often marginalized and died destitute, but they're, they're, they're often well remembered.
Right?
We write tales about them later on, right?
You said the Emperor wears no clothes.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Kelly.
It's been great.
Always love reading your work.
Well, thank you so much.
Let me spout off.
Yeah, no problem.
Anytime.
All right.
That's the great Kelly Vallejo.
She writes for anti war.com and the American conservative magazine, the American conservative.com.
That's where you can find this piece, learning to eat soup with a spoon.
You might've thought it was obvious, but not in DC.
