11/19/07 – Aaron Glantz – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92795.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
And our next guest today is Aaron Glantz from KPFA and antiwar.com and Pacifica Radio, is that right?
And we just set up the new website, warcomeshome.org, to put all that content together.
Right.
We're looking at warcomeshome.org right now, this article, and I'm so glad that we can start this with some good news here, Aaron, today, before we get to the worst.
Aaron Watata, a federal judge, has intervened in the military's attempt to persecute and prosecute Lieutenant Aaron Watata.
Can you please fill us in, I guess, real quick, who he is and what the victory is here?
Well, Lieutenant Aaron Watata was the first commissioned officer to refuse to go to Iraq, or I should say publicly refused to go.
He stood up about a year and a half ago and he said that the war in Iraq is an illegal and an unjust war, and that by going to fight in Iraq, and indeed, since he was a lieutenant leading his troops to fight there, that he would be becoming a war criminal, according to the principles outlined at Nuremberg after World War II.
You remember, at Nuremberg, all the Nazis got up there and they said they were just following orders, and at Nuremberg, it was decided that I was just following orders was not an excuse for your actions during a war, that people participating in a war are expected to have their own morality, and that they are liable for the acts that they commit.
So Lieutenant Watata was attempting to object service in Iraq on those grounds.
He was court-martialed, he was put on trial at Fort Lewis in Washington in February.
I was there at that trial, and it was very interesting that when the trial opened, it was a very hostile judge, it was a very hostile jury of his peers, other officers at Fort Lewis, and as the trial was progressing, you could tell that the members of the jury were becoming quite sympathetic to him.
But when Lieutenant Watata was about to take the stand in his own defense, the judge, Colonel Head, declared a mistrial on technicality, but those of us who were sitting in the courtroom understood that he was declaring a mistrial because he was worried that Lieutenant Watata, being an articulate young man, would put the war on trial, and Colonel Head didnít want that, and so he declared a mistrial, and then the military went and tried to put him on trial again, and thatís against the Constitution, said this U.S. District Court judge who said, you know, the Constitution says you canít put somebody on trial twice for the same crime, itís against the law.
And now, the reason why they said that, because you could have a mistrial and then have the trial held again and again, Iíve seen it happen here in Austin, Texas, over and over, but I guess what the judge is saying is, heís basically agreeing with your interpretation that the mistrial was declared in order to prevent an acquittal.
Well, the judge said that Colonel Head, the military judge who oversaw the court-martial, abused his discretion in the way he ran the trial.
There was nothing wrong with the trial.
I was sitting there, and the only problem was that Lieutenant Watata was putting on a good defense.
For example, the prosecution called a West Point ethics instructor, and what they wanted to show through this ethics instructor was that members of the army, when they go to West Point to become officers, are taught to follow orders and to deploy and to lead their men into battle regardless.
But actually, what the man, his name is Lieutenant Swain, Iím sorry, Colonel Swain testified, an instructor at West Point, was that he expects the people that he teaches to have their own ethics and to look to their conscience and not only blindly follow orders, because thatís how atrocities get committed.
You could tell that he wasnít necessarily sympathetic to Lieutenant Watata, but he also said that he expects every officer individually to look at their conscience, and it was in that backdrop that the judge declared a mistrial.
Ever since then, itís popped up in the news from time to time that the military is expected to see him in court.
Having witnessed the trial myself, I frankly never expected there to be a second trial.
Iím surprised that the army is still pursuing this, because every time thereís another court decision, another twist in the wind, you and I get together and we get to talk about Lieutenant Watata and what he stands for, and the fact of the matter is, they could just let Lieutenant Watata leave the military because heís been in there more than five years.
Oh, they could just let him go with a regular honorable discharge at this point and try to sweep it under the rug, is what youíre saying.
Absolutely, when he refused to deploy to Iraq, that was almost two years ago, and at that time, he was under orders to deploy and he missed movement and they are prosecuting him.
But in the meantime, while all of this litigation has been going on, if he were not being court-martialed and going through the military justice system, he would have in fact been discharged from the military already for end of time served, and in fact, ironically, because heís had good conduct and he hasnít actually been found guilty of anything in these court-martials, if he wasnít facing this legal proceeding, he would have indeed been promoted to captain by now.
So here they are, theyíre trying to make an example out of them, and they are all right, but not in the way they intended.
Yeah, I mean, they are making it so that you and I get to keep talking about Lieutenant Watata.
I mean, since weíre having this opportunity to talk all this, let you know what Lieutenant Watata said moments before the first mis-trial was declared back in February.
He said, ìYour Honor, I have always believed that I have a legal and moral defense.
I realize that the government can make arguments and that you can make rulings contrary to that, but that does not negate my belief that I have defense to me.
To lead my soldiers into battle in Iraq means to participate in a war that I believe to be illegal.
î You know, you and I wouldnít be having this conversation if the military would just leave Lieutenant Watata alone, and at this point, the military is going to stay in court.
He has won what most observers believe to be a victory.
I mean, heís now got this federal judge who was appointed by Bush.
The judge settled the rule twice in his favor.
Itís only a preliminary injunction.
Thereís no final ruling.
The wording of the injunction is so strong, itís hard to imagine the judge reversing himself, but the military does say that they want to present additional evidence and they will go back at it shortly.
So the door is not entirely closed.
Something bad could happen to Lieutenant Watata, but I find it very unlikely.
Yeah, well, I guess weíll take this as half a victory and hold our breath and hope it all works out.
But, you know, itís something that you keep bringing up here, and it must be because itís something that Lieutenant Watata keeps bringing up, is this really isnít just about him.
This is about him leading others into battle, being an officer and being responsible for the men below him who are, you know, regular enlisted men who the presumption is, they donít know, theyíre doing what he tells them to do, heís the one who knows, and heís saying, ìI canít do that.
I canít be responsible for these other menís lives when none of us are supposed to be there at all.
Iím not leading men into a battle like this.
î Yeah, and he is the first officer to take that stand, but itís worth noting that there have been tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and enlisted personnel mostly who have simply deserted rather than go fight in this war.
You have 37,000 members of the armed forces who have deserted since September 11, 2001.
You know, a couple hundred have gone to Canada, but mostly folks are just back in their communities, you know, hoping they donít get flagged by the police for a parking ticket that will show them, you know, in some computer database to be AWOL, and they just donít want to go fight in this war.
I mean, there was a poll that was done in February 2006 by John Zogby.
He polled the U.S. soldiers who were in Iraq at that time, and 72 percent said the U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year, and 29 percent said they should withdraw immediately.
You know, that was a year and a half ago.
And so, in a very quiet rebellion thatís going on within the ranks of the military.
Actually, Aaron, that was, what, December 2005, wasnít it?
That was almost two years ago now.
Well, no, that was in February of 2006 that that poll was conducted.
Oh, okay.
I was thinking of the one from December 2005, where they said they wanted the war to be over by the end of í06, and that was the same poll that had 85 percent of them believing that Saddam had done 9-11.
They still wanted to go home.
Yeah, well, see, you have consistent polling then, because you and I are mentioning two different polls that basically show the same result.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Yeah, and just think about that, 37,000 AWOL, huh?
And itís a number thatís gone up 80 percent since during the í90s when we werenít fighting quite so many of these ridiculous wars that caused so many casualties.
Right, there were a lot of them, but they didnít have that high a casualty rate, right?
Yeah, they didnít put the same strain on the military.
I mean, as somebody whoís covering a lot of these stories, and you can find a lot of them on warcomeshome.org, what you see again and again is soldiers who were deployed to Iraq, and then they came back, and they thought, ìGod, Iím glad thatís over.
î And then, you know, through the stop-loss program, through the multiple deployments, the Bush administration orders them back to Iraq again.
Well, now theyíve seen it themselves, they know that itís wrong, they know that itís not worth dying for, and so thatís when they go AWOL.
I mean, and never mind the fact that a lot of them are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that the military refuses to treat, which makes them pretty useless on the battlefield in any case.
Letís focus on that here.
Do you have numbers for that?
Well, post-traumatic stress disorder, the study show, Walter Reedís study showed about 15 percent of soldiers who have been to Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed 50 percent are suffering from PTSD, depression, or some other, you know, mental issue related to the fact that theyíve had to serve in the war zone, and so, you know, somewhere in there between 16 and 50 percent, which is somewhere between, you know, 300,000 and 800,000 people who have put on the uniform and served this country are now suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.
I mean, think about this.
This is that Walter Reedís study I was mentioning to you.
Ninety-five percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq reported seeing dead bodies and remains when they were over there.
Ninety-five percent have been shot at.
Eighty-nine percent have been ambushed or attacked.
Sixty-nine percent had seen an injured woman or child and felt they could not provide assistance.
You donít come back from those kinds of experiences the same.
We have a story up on warcomeshome.org, which I hope people take a listen to, which says how post-traumatic stress disorder affects a marriage, and itís about specialist Patrick Resta and his experience, and you can see a picture of him up on the website.
You see him standing there in uniform holding his machine gun in a marketplace.
He asked his buddy to take a picture of him with these Iraqi kids, and he thought that it was going to be this picture that he was going to hold on to and, you know, remember his service by, ìWell, who should he see in this picture?
î But these kids, one of them, the one right in front of him, is giving the Hitler salute, ìSee, Kyle,î and another one, itís kind of hard to tell when you look at the picture, but heís holding up a big image of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, and so you are experiencing all of these ambushes and attacks and dead bodies, and then you realize that even the children that are around you really donít want you there, and thatís not an easy thing to process.
Right, and, you know, little kids are pretty easy to bribe with some sweets or whatever.
I mean, we see footage of that all the time, right?
The kids gather around because they get some foreign food or something.
Well, you know, kids are really not, you know, theyíre just kids, theyíre just kids, and so they show the way they think in a very raw way, and theyíre naturally nice, and they continue to be naturally nice to him.
You know, they came around him to have him take a picture in the marketplace, but look what they did when it came time to pose.
It tells you something.
Yeah.
Well, I talked to a guy one time who told me that, well, he made the comparison between the people of Dresden and some American soldiers from Vietnam.
He said the people in Dresden, even though they got just completely firebombed to hell, they basically knew their country had started it, that, you know, I guess theyíd rather be conquered by America and Britain than the Russians anyway, and they donít really mean any harm.
Theyíre just doing what they think they have to do to end the war, and anyway, itís not that they justified their own firebombing necessarily, but that they understood that it wasnít hatred.
It wasnít that the American people just wanted to exterminate all Germans and hated them, and so basically they lived through, you know, hell on earth and lived through it pretty much intact, whereas the PTSD that affected the shell shock, letís call it what it is, shell shock, that affected the American soldiers in Vietnam, for example, the reason that it was so traumatic for them oftentimes was because of the hatred that they felt.
The guy shooting at them wasnít just shooting at them as, you know, a professional soldier on a battlefield or something.
He was, you know, screaming, ìI hate you, and Iím going to kill you,î in Vietnamese as loud as he could as he was pulling that AKís trigger, and that that was what really, you know, shocks and warps the human mind, is that feeling of being so hated, and I can understand how, you know, American soldiers in Iraq, when itís our side that started this war, weíre occupying these other peopleís countries, it canít be easy to, as you say, even the kids donít want you there.
Imagine how their older brothers and uncles and fathers feel.
Yeah, but you have to consider something else, which is the way in which this war is being fought.
I mean, this is the first war that the United States military has fought where thereís literally no front line, and where people are literally always at risk of being attacked.
I mean, yeah, thereís a few people who are lucky enough to be stationed in Kurdistan, which is kind of outside of the immediate war zone.
Maybe, you know, of the 175,000 American soldiers over there, maybe 5,000 people, tops, but the rest of them are in the thick of it.
And during Vietnam, for example, even when you had a half a million American troops in Vietnam, you know, you had bars and clubs that American soldiers would go to, you had venereal diseases spreading all over the place, which was a result of the fact that American soldiers could go out and blow off steam.
And thatís impossible.
I mean, just imagine, there are 100,000 babies born of Vietnamese women and American soldiers.
Can you imagine that happening in Iraq today?
Itís impossible.
And that kind of stress is one of the reasons why we are seeing, you know, really unprecedented statistics coming out of this war in Iraq.
And now, this isnít just Iraq veterans, but I guess this is veterans overall.
There was this news report that came out that more veterans have killed themselves since the start of this war than have died in the Iraqi war zone, Aaron.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, this is one of the things that you have to know about our government, under the Bush administration, but under previous presidents as well.
If thereís a piece of information that will be embarrassing to them, they just tend to not go look for it.
And thatís true of suicides of veterans.
So the Bush administration was saying they couldnít estimate how many veterans had killed themselves, you know, since the start of the Iraq war.
So CBS News went and they went to every single state in this country and they got suicide records and then they compared them to the records of military service.
And they found that over 6,000 veterans had to commit suicide every year in America.
And itís incredible.
I mean, there was a study that came out recently from Portland State University that showed that veterans are twice as likely to commit suicide as non-veterans.
And you know, I find that, I mean, as somebody whoís seen war firsthand myself, itís not entirely surprising to me.
What is surprising and very unnerving is that the Bush administration isnít doing a lick of anything to try to do anything about this.
I met a veteran of the Iraq war who told me that he was getting good medical care for his PTSD and he attributed that to the fact that he told, he filled out the proper forms while he was still in Iraq that said, ìIím having nightmares, Iím shaking, Iím freaking out, I need help.
î And they sent him home, heís getting help.
But he said, anyone who was in Iraq and filled out the forms and said, ìNah, Iím fine, send me home, Iím alright.
î And they come home and then, you know, maybe a week or a month or half a year later, they start having, you know, flashbacks and nightmares and start freaking out, that at that point, the military is using this loophole and saying, ìAh, come on, you said you were fine, go drink a beer and be a tough guy and no medical care for you.
î Is that, do you, have you heard anything like that?
Can you confirm that thatís how this is operating now?
You know, letís talk about paperwork.
First of all, if you can get something documented when youíre in the service, you are much better off than if you canít get it documented, and thatís very important.
So, you know, if thereís anybody listening whoís in the service and over there in Iraq, if you get in some kind of humvee crash or thereís some kind of explosion that youíre nearby, you make sure that at that time, itís documented.
Because if you donít document it, then the military is going to deny later on that it happened.
And I know, you know, if youíre in the war zone, the last thing you want to do is be filling out paperwork, but if you donít, they could really come back and haunt you later.
Yeah, I mean, and you think about that, I mean, Iím no psychologist or anything, but I guess Iíve read a little bit about this PTSD, and thatís the kind of thing that would happen often, right?
That it would take a while until it started kicking in, you know, a couple of months after coming home, all of a sudden the guy starts having nightmares, that kind of thing?
Yeah, even a few years sometimes.
Yeah.
And the thing is about this PTSD is itís very treatable, right?
Well, you can make it, thereís no cure for it.
So the thing is that if you are, you know, staying up all night, if you canít sleep, if youíre agitated, if you have feelings of numbness, if youíre having flashbacks, unfortunately thereís no cure.
But if you donít go in and get therapy, if you donít see if thereís maybe a medication that might be helpful, if you donít try to get this kind of help, then itís really going to go downhill.
And itís important, thereís no cure, but itís something that you can manage.
And the Bush administration has refused to hire psychiatrists and psychologists both at the VA and at the Department of Defense to help people manage these symptoms.
You might be surprised to know that when the U.S. military did a survey, they found that there are actually fewer psychiatrists and psychologists working for them now than they did when the war started.
Are you serious?
And the reason for that is that psychologists and psychiatrists donít want to join the military right now because they might get sent to Iraq.
And you know you graduate from graduate school or medical school and the last thing you want to do is go to Iraq.
You want to have your family and have your children and live your life and get a job and do something useful.
So before the war broke out, psychologists would join the military and do psychiatric services on bases in the U.S. or maybe Germany.
But now if signing up means having to go to Iraq, the military is having trouble meeting that recruiting goal as they are for all of the educated classes that theyíre looking for.
Yeah, you know Iíve read stories too about guys saying that they have PTSD and that theyíre really doing much, much better after getting some mental health care.
And itís just a shame to think that in this country where they spend a trillion dollars a year on foreign policy one way or another, maybe more than that if you count the State Department and everything, they canít figure out a way to pay psychiatrists and psychologists enough to help these guys out.
I mean I guess if I was a psychologist, Iíd be afraid theyíd send me to Guantanamo to help torture people or something.
Yeah, I mean thatís the problem, but then you have another problem with the V.A. lady.
They just donít want to hire people.
Theyíre just too cheap.
And then you have this other problem that, you know I donít know if you remember after the Walter Reed scandal, they set up these things called ìwounded warrior transition centersî around the country like special places where if youíre a wounded soldier including mental wounds, including brain injuries from IEDs that instead of just discharging you from the service or sending you back to Iraq, they would send you to a specific wounded warrior care center inside the United States.
And the GAO did a study on this and you can find it on the website www.warcomeshome.org that it found that half of these wounded warrior transition units are short staffed by 50 percent in doctors, nurses, and squad leaders.
And then we have this case and we have it up on the www.warcomeshome.org of Harold Cassidy who was an Indiana National Guardsman who came back from Iraq and ended up dying for Knox in Kentucky because he got inferior medical treatment and that is a disaster and a Senate hearing recently in Washington, D.C., Evan Bayh who represents Indiana said to the secretary of the army, ìYou know the enemy couldnít kill him, but our medical care system did.
î Yeah, wasnít there a story too about the kid who shot himself in the head and they found him and he had the piece of paper laying on his bed next to him that was basically rejecting him, telling him, ìYeah, come back and weíll see you in a couple of monthsî or something?
I mean thereís been a lot of cases like that.
One of the things that happened is the U.S. government is so cheap that when soldiers started to come home with PTSD from Iraq and Afghanistan, the VA started to think, ìHey, how can we purge our roles of people with PTSD from Vietnam?
î They started to try to kick the Vietnam vets out of the VA to make room for the Iraq war vets instead of trying to make room for both of them at the same time.
So there were some cases where people who had been receiving benefits for years for their post-traumatic stress disorder from Vietnam, about 70,000 of them got letters saying they were being audited by the Institute of Medicine and some of them killed themselves.
And there was one who killed himself in Colorado and next to him was the letter from the Institute of Medicine informing him that there was going to be an audit.
Absolutely sickening.
I guess thatís rationing for you, right?
And also, I guess thereís the PR thing too.
They donít want to have to admit that theyíve needed to double or triple their PTSD wards.
Yeah, but itís just like you said about the money.
I mean, right now George Bush is asking for $50 billion to continue fighting this war for just a few months, and $50 billion, he could double the budget of the VA for the entire year.
So itís all about priorities, I think, itís not really about money, and it is, like you said.
But one of the things that Iíve run across in my research is that during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson was approached about improving the GI Bill, because as people may know, the GI Bill isnít nearly as good as it was after World War II.
You have to pay into it and it only gives you about $1,000 a month, which is nothing when it comes to college tuition in this day and age.
And Vietnam veterans went to Lyndon Johnson, and this is while the war was still going on, and asked him to improve the GI Bill, and he said no.
And the reason that he gave was that if he improved the GI Bill, then he would need to admit that there was a war going on, and he wanted everyone to keep shopping.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, sounds about right.
Weíll just keep running that money out of nothing.
Oh man, so I guess I should remind the folks, Iím talking with Aaron Glantz from KPFA, The War Comes Home, itís actually warcomeshome, not the warcomeshome.org, and also antiwar.com/glantz, you can find all his articles there as well.
I wanted to ask you if you know anything about this Fort Benning trial of, I guess, protesters from the School of the Americas?
You know, I do not, Iím sorry, but itís very interesting, you know, that we continue to arm and train people who do not so nice things in Central and South America, but Iím not so familiar with what just happened down at Fort Benning.
Yeah, well, I just know thereís this trial going on, but yeah, I guess whoever ends up replacing Hugo Chavez will have graduated from that place, huh?
Yeah.
And, by the way, Iím so rude, I forgot to tell everybody ten times that youíre the guy that wrote How America Lost Iraq, which is such a great book, and is full of absolutely hair-raising adventures and so forth that you had while in the war zone over there, and I know youíve written pretty extensively about Kurdistan, and really years back, Aaron, you were telling us, keep your eye on Kurdistan, itís peaceful now, but it ainít over yet, and of course thereís been all kinds of media attention about PKK attacks inside Turkey and the Turks threatening to, and I guess in some cases, actually bombing areas in Kurdistan, and I was just wondering if you can kind of fill people in on whatís going on there, maybe what to expect.
Well, I think that people should not expect anything dramatic to happen soon.
Thank you.
I visited the PKK camps in Kurdistan where we have, you know, the Turkish military buildup on the other side of the border, and I just want to let people know that those are pretty deep in the mountains.
I mean, I live here in California, and you know, we have like Half Dome, and itís snowy and wintery in the middle of the winter, and itís almost impossible to go up there.
Well, thatís the kind of mountains you have along the border between Turkey and Iraq, and itís impossible, I think, for Turkey to get any kind of military solution out of this, and I think theyíre moving troops around their country to try to intimidate some kind of political settlement out of the Bush administration and the Iraqi government, but you know, itís funny, when we have this recent raising of tensions and the thousands of Turkish troops going to the border, I went back and I read one of the articles that I had written in 2004, and it read almost exactly the same as some of the articles that you see in the media today about the border between Turkey and Iraq, and it made me think that maybe a lot of this is just a PR spin and not necessarily about the beginning of a full-scale war.
On the other hand, the place I would watch is the southern end of Kurdistan, where you have the tremendous ethnic tensions between the Arabs and the Kurds in Kirkuk, which is, of course, the second largest oil city in Iraq after Basra, and you have today a member of the Kurdish regional government starting to give out their own oil contract separate from the central government, and thatís something they call Kirkuk to explode, and thatís where the huge oil fields are, and if we went to Iraq to secure the oil, you know, there it is.
Well, and this is a real complicated thing going back, I donít know which came first, the chicken or the egg or anything, but I know that at least at one point Saddam Hussein back in, I guess, the 70s had done a forced relocation, basically, and just exported a bunch of Arabs from the Baghdad area to all settle in Kirkuk and make it an Arab-majority city or at least a significant minority, and then now, after this war, the Kurds are trying to reverse that process, basically, right?
Yeah, thatís right.
I mean, you have basically reverse ethnic cleansing.
Itís just great.
Itís like double the ethnic cleansing, right?
I mean, this is what weíve unleashed.
Itís like, yes, Saddam was bad.
Yes, Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds.
Now, we are sitting there supporting the Kurds to go kill the other people, and thatís not a way to improve peace in the world, to, you know, just help feed into a never-ending cycle of revenge.
Yeah.
It seems more and more like invading Iraq was a bad idea, Aaron Glantz, do you think?
Surprise, surprise, right?
But I will say that it does continue to get worse, and this is having an effect on our military, and the military doesnít want to fight this war anymore.
The military is increasingly seeing that the war was a bad idea.
The military brats are having increasing difficulty meeting their recruiting goals.
People are opting out rather than re-enlisting.
You know, Iím looking for that as the thing that hopefully will be the straw that breaks the camelís back, because I donít see the Democrats coming through for us.
I certainly donít see the Bush administration, the Republicans coming through for us.
But I have increasing faith in the men and women of the armed forces itself as having a good head on their shoulders, having experienced this themselves, and being less and less willing to go fight in a politicianís war.
Yeah.
Well, I hope thatís right.
Of course, we all saw Admiral Fallon in the Financial Times re-interating leaks to Gareth Porter and so forth, that he is just adamantly opposed to a war with Iran.
That would be a good example, I guess, of the military standing up.
And in fact, further, I saw Colonel Larry Wilkerson on the Colbert Report, and he said that the war is coming to an end right around this time next year, because at that point the army will be just broken.
There are short 25,000 captains, this, that, and the other statistic, and the military just will not be able to continue the war after a year from now, he said.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I wouldnít be surprised.
Well, itís interesting how somebody like yourself, Aaron, who, you know, youíre a hell of a reporter, but itís obvious that you have a bit of an anti-invade the Middle East and remake it point of view, and youíre the kind of guy that they would say has a real problem in not supporting the troops, and yet when I look for troop support, itís all coming from you, man.
Youíre the one whoís sticking up for the average grunt over there, now that Hackworthís dead.
Well, you know, Scott, one of the things that I think a lot of politicians in Washington, they donít support anyone.
You know, they support themselves.
They get big campaign contributions from big fat cat people, and they go about supporting themselves in their own interests, and, you know, itís funny.
When I was over there, and I was meeting Iraqi people, and a lot of them had been killed by American soldiers, at first I was really angry at the American soldiers for doing that, but then I realized that, you know, the way to save our society, the way to bring peace is to really embrace the fact that everyone is a human being, and nobody should have to go participate in this crap, and then everyone who participates in it, be they on the Iraqi side or the American side, should get medical treatment, and we should do what we can, you know, to bring the peace, and then to make people hope after the peace comes.
Well, thereís a certain responsibility there, no doubt about it.
I wonder kind of how that would even work, though, really.
I mean, if we get our troops out of there, we canít just, I donít know, we can try to just cut a check to every Iraqi or something, rather than handing it over to their government to divvy up.
You know what I mean?
How do you bring healing to a place when they just want you gone?
Well, the first thing is to leave, and then weíll figure out the rest, you know what Iím saying?
Yeah.
I mean, and also to listen to them, I mean, after Vietnam, the Vietnamese government has still today asking for reparations for the Agent Orange that we use, and this caused massive cancer.
And we now recognize that that Agent Orange that we sprayed in Vietnam caused an epidemic of cancer in American veterans.
We now compensate those American veterans.
We should compensate the Vietnamese people who suffer.
But we donít necessarily need to give up that compensation right away in the case of Iraq.
All we need to do is get the hell out of there and let peace be restored, and then after that we can worry about reparations and stuff like that.
Yeah.
I like Ron Paulís idea.
He said what he really liked to do is make the people who are actually responsible for this policy, make them go clean up the depleted uranium, but I guess thatís not very practical.
No, because if I had these munitions manufacturers come into my neighborhood in Iraq, I would blow their head off.
Yeah.
And so I donít think that thatís the best way to bring peace to the region.
And I think that this is one area where Dr. Paul is really on point.
Heís the only presidential candidate who understands this very basic idea that if thereís somebody in your neighborhood with a gun, then it makes you want to have a gun and shoot him.
And itís very basic, and I donít really understand why the other presidential candidates donít get that.
Well, theyíre pretending as hard as they can that they donít get that, because they donít want us to realize the cause and effect of the blowback.
Thatís the big thing about blowback, right?
Blowback is not just another word for consequences.
Blowback means consequences of covert action that the American people donít understand why itís happening, and so therefore their heads can be filled with mush.
Oh, God bless you, Scott.
Iíve got to run.
Thanks a lot for your time.
Hey, thank you very much for coming on the show today, Aaron.
Okay, bye.
All right, everybody.
Iím K.P.
F.A.