All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
All right, our next guest on the show today is the war nerd, Gary Bretscher, from exiled.ru.
That's the old stuff.
And The Exiled, which is exiledonline.com.
Mark Ames' site over there.
Welcome to the show.
Gary, how are you doing?
I'm okay.
I'm not too thrilled because my alter ego, John Dolan, got fired from his university teaching job in Kurdistan.
They paid me a lot of money.
My wife and I had been very poor before that job came up, and it was sad to lose that job, especially because they fired me for an article that had been sitting online for five years opposing the war in Iraq.
You say what now?
They found your articles?
Yeah, they found an article from five years ago and fired me.
It was a very bizarre place.
I think in the larger sense of things, what you see is the same people who spent their whole lives destroying the universities.
Because you've got to remember, I've had a lifetime of Ronald Reagan, literally, and I remember that his first election as governor was on the platform, and get those damn hippie students.
They did a good job of doing that.
Now they've destroyed most of the universities, and they have a few enclaves like this one in Iraq where I finally got a job through some fast talking and outright lies.
Then they found out that I wasn't one of their little, tame, conservative academics, and they fired me.
Am I right that this is the first time that you told people what your real name was?
Yeah, you have the dubious honor of hearing me admit that two souls inhabit this unsightly body, one of them calling himself Gary Brecher, and one of them calling himself John Dolan.
But since I'm now speaking in my fussy John Dolan academic voice, I refuse to give the John Dolan one any primacy other than a chronological one, because I think in many ways Gary Brecher is a more honest version of who I am.
That's cool.
I've got to say for a long time I've really enjoyed your writing.
You're very interested in a lot of the things that I would like to be interested in, but haven't really had the time to delve into.
You're a really great writer, and I know it's been a big mystery online, and people have argued about who this Gary Brecher guy really is.
I think I've seen people get it right before.
I've seen other people are convinced it's Mark Ames that's the war nerd.
I guess everybody will be set straight now.
What I heard him about is that I was writing columns for The Exile, and Mark knew that I'd been a war nerd all my life.
He said, why don't you start a persona like this?
I came up with one that was based on my early self and people I knew.
The nerd part was primary.
The reason you probably haven't been able to find the time to do this is you probably had a life.
The reason that I was able to become a war nerd is that I didn't have a life when I was young.
You might be surprised I have that same problem.
To a great degree, that's why this show is so well put together every day.
What is it about that, the war nerd?
That really is a big part of your persona over there.
All I know is that every American boy I ever knew went through a stage of admiring war.
I guess then puberty hit.
Those who pass puberty get to think about other happier topics.
Those who fail puberty end up stuck with war, although that's kind of a facile explanation.
Unfortunately, in a lot of other cultures, you can do both.
You can have a life, which is sort of a euphemism for sex.
You can be a war nerd, too.
That was the full-time occupation of most aristocratic cliques around the world.
Those two things, raping the servant girls and practicing for war.
Maybe like a lot of middle American habits, it's just an affectation we borrowed from the aristocrats.
I don't know.
But what ended up happening was you mastered the entire history of warfare.
To what degree?
The East and the West, too?
Well, in stages.
I think my early education in war was pretty typical for an American kid.
I started with the Civil War and then worked backward to the American Revolution.
Then worked forward to the Korean War, which was a really satisfying, insufficiently appreciated war.
Militarily, anyway.
Then kind of skipped Vietnam because it was a really depressing war.
I'm old enough, as John Dolan anyway, to remember Vietnam.
One of the great ironies of my life is that when it was on, nobody, especially the generally war-loving right-wingers, wanted to hear about it.
It depressed the hell out of them.
It wasn't until Deer Hunter came out with all that baffos about ennobled, working-class guys going to war that people started to think, Oh, lovely Vietnam.
So I kind of ignored that.
But in the meantime, there was another strain of the family that I think contributed a huge part to my ability to understand wars like Iraq.
Both sides of my family are Irish, but the Dolan one was recent immigrant Irish with a record of fighting the black and tans and a fierce nationalist consciousness.
There was a whole green shelf of books at home that were devoted to that struggle.
I studied those very carefully.
I think I came to understand and be able to predict how an urban guerrilla campaign in Iraq would turn out, because I had studied the way that Michael Collins basically invented guerrilla war on the streets of Dublin in the early 20th century.
I'm glad that you brought up the Korean War, because basically I don't know anything about it other than that it's the Forgotten War and a bunch of episodes of MASH that I saw.
I read one article by a guy about the use of napalm, and of course there were the recent revelations by the Toledo Blade about some of the massacres and things like that.
I'd really like to do a full kind of historical treatment of not so much two bogged down in Truman and MacArthur and all that, but the war itself.
Maybe some other time on the show we can focus on that.
Would that be cool?
That would be wonderful.
It was certainly one of the few wars where American troops went in outgunned, an experience which many of them actively disliked, not surprisingly.
Yeah, that was one of the complaints of the soldiers in Michael Hastings' famous Rolling Stone piece that got McChrystal fired, was that, hey man, these guys are being forced into fair fights out there, and they hate it.
Yeah, we're supposed to call in some help.
We're supposed to go out there as bait and then lie down under a rock and call in some help.
It's a nice way to make war, but it does give you a belated appreciation of armies like the Wehrmacht who fought with air inferiority for most of the war and still held some scary people to a draw.
Before we get into the actual topic for this, I wanted to discuss the Gary Brecher point of view and how this has to be written.
It's all very amoral.
It's all very much, yeah, go whoop their ass in a way, just nations versus nations.
Like you would say, I think that young perspective, that almost childish perspective where we're not talking about, oh boo hoo this or that.
Just, wow, and then this division moved there and then these political leaders made this terrible decision and that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, I generally don't get into the morality of war because I don't know any way of talking about it honestly.
It's something that is sort of a luxury for people who don't find their existence at stake.
And at the point where someone sees their existence as being at stake, that whole question tends to vanish.
I think the idea that there is a morally stable code for the world that we can apply to war is based on one of the things I try to talk about a lot as Brecher, which is you don't know how many genocides there have been.
Because most of the time, for obvious reasons, the genocided tribes are completely forgotten because they're fucking wiped out.
Occasionally, something like the Alamo happens where a few members of a dominant tribe get wiped out.
The British, for example, were very good at that.
They'd have some little outpost in the empire get wiped out and they'd make it into a big sad story, but it didn't matter.
Hold it there, Gary.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Gary Brecher, the war nerd from the Exiled online.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Sorry, my levels are all screwed up.
I'm trying to fix it.
I'm failing, but I'm trying.
All right, so I'm talking with the war nerd, Gary Brecher, John Dolan from exile.ru.
That's the paper back in the days in Russia.
Now, it's theexiledonline.com, and you can see right there in the top section there's a link to the war nerd.
And now, the one that I've really wanted to interview you about this whole time, speaking of genocides, the war nobody watched by Gary Brecher.
This was from November 13, 2003, and it's about the Iran-Iraq war.
And now, I just want to read this first little bit here, because I just love the way this thing starts.
Imagine a war that went on for eight years, caused more than a million casualties, and went through five distinct phases, with every kind of combat you could ask for, from huge tank battles, human wave offensives, artillery duels, and amphibious assaults, to exotic stuff like naval battles and dogfights with squadrons of MiGs and Sukhois up against American F-14s and F-4s.
Sounds pretty great, right?
Well, if you're old enough to remember 1980, it happened right in front of your eyes.
And if you were like most Americans, you probably weren't interested.
The Iran-Iraq war is the war in question.
So let me start with that.
How come nobody was interested in such an exciting war, Gary?
Well, I remember that really well.
And to me, this is one of the most important moments in recent American history.
It has a lot of implications for us, as well as for studying war.
Nobody was interested because this came right after that humiliating hostage crisis in Tehran, where the Iranian student revolutionaries took American diplomats hostage, and nobody could seem to do anything about it.
And after that, the most anyone was willing to do was to say, fuck them both, I hope they all die.
I remember wandering around, walking my dog on the schoolyard of my old elementary school and carved into one of the kickball walls was, fuck Iran.
And that was about what everybody could do.
They could just say, fuck Iran, or bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.
But nobody could seem to do anything about it.
And there were fads in war.
And those fads get mixed up with the styles of the leaders of the parties and yield some pretty disastrous results.
Our leader was Jimmy Carter, who was more concerned about the state of his own worthless southern Baptist soul than he was about maintaining the relatively ferocious image of the Democratic Party.
So he refused to do anything effectual.
Instead, because the American army was infatuated with the Israeli army, they did an Entebbe-style raid with eight helicopters that was supposed to rescue 50-odd hostages, utterly impossible, in the middle of a crowded, hostile city.
It failed disastrously when a sandstorm ruined the whole project.
Richard Nixon, for once, had an elegant comment.
Eight helicopters?
Why not 8,000?
It's not like we don't have them.
So that failed completely.
There were pictures of mullahs holding up the charred arms of American pilots and servicemen.
No one wanted to think about anything involving Iraq or Iran again.
So in a spiteful sort of Austro-Hungarian way, we fed information to Saddam's intelligence service and managed to get a lot of Iranians killed, knowing that because they were the braver and more numerous party, they would also kill lots of Iraqis.
And we just sort of...
It was a nasty moment in American history.
There are many, but it's one of the nastiest.
Just sat back and encouraged the carnage.
Yeah, it's not like the State Department wasn't paying attention.
No, they were paying attention, but they were just trying to keep the bloodletting going.
All right, so it's the war nerd, Gary Bretscher, John Dolan, from ExiledOnline.com.
We're talking about his article from 2003, The War Nobody Watched, the Iran-Iraq War.
And we're not talking about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush's war for Iran and Iraq.
We're talking about Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.'s war for Iraq and Iran, basically, right?
Yeah, that's about right, yeah.
We were using Iraq virtually as a proxy in that war because Iran was considered the bigger threat, bigger population, braver soldiers, and a clear, direct, and honest dislike of America rather than whatever weird attitude Saddam had towards us.
You know, I interviewed this guy Wayne White from the State Department one time.
I guess he just left the State Department.
This was in 2007 when the fears of strikes against Iran were at their highest, I guess.
And he talked about the idea that the Iranian people want to be liberated by us.
And he said, well, let me tell you a story about that.
There was this guy, Saddam Hussein, and he says to Jimmy Carter something like, hey, man, I'm going to start a war with Iran, and don't worry, it'll be a cakewalk.
They'll greet us as liberators, and it'll be fine.
And Jimmy Carter said, go ahead, man.
And they had this big war, and it turned out that the Iranian people did not want to be liberated by Saddam Hussein at all.
He was surprised to find out.
Virtually nobody wants to be liberated by a bunch of foreigners.
That was one of the classic elementary school mistakes of the George W. Iraq War, that people are going to be grateful to have foreign troops walking on their streets.
It just doesn't happen.
Every disastrous plan in history, in fact, has a last line, and then the people will rise up and join us.
Never happens.
If you can't do it on your own, don't plan to do it.
All right.
So now tell us a bit about this war, because I guess I hear people say, yeah, a million people were killed like Shrug, but I don't even know.
And, of course, you've got the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and I know Barzani and Talabani were kind of playing both sides of this thing.
Tell us some crazy stories about the Iran-Iraq War.
Well, the crazy stories go back way before the Iran-Iraq War.
By the way, let me go ahead and ask you now, is it okay if I keep you one extra segment here so we have some time to delve into this?
Sure, absolutely.
Great.
Sure.
I mean, I've been in Kurdistan for nine months recently, and the stories I heard there were really incredible.
I mean, for example, you mentioned Barzani.
Saddam was perfectly willing to make deals with the Barzani clan, who ruled half of Kurdistan, until, you know, this is part of the terror of being a Kurd.
You never have your own people to represent.
You have to guess which alien power is going to win, and you have to back that power.
Well, the Barzanis guessed the Iranians were going to win the Iran-Iraq War, but it didn't happen fast enough to save them, because Saddam got angry about that and took the whole village of Barzani, every man and boy over the age of 12, from Kurdistan down into the Iraqi desert, killed them all, and dumped them in pits.
I mean, that's something I think Americans have a real hard time understanding.
I mean, they've seen Red Dawn, and that's about it.
They don't understand that it's not so cool to be a guerrilla, because it means crossing off everyone you love and assuming they're going to die in a horrible way and probably get raped before they die.
That's what happened to the village of Barzani, because they guessed wrong.
And that's what it's like to live in the old world.
And that's one reason I'm reluctant to talk about the morality of war, because in that situation, there's no morality.
All right.
The article in question is The War Nobody Watched.
It's at exile.ru.
We'll be right back with Gary Brecher.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
All right, so we're on the phone with Gary Brecher, John Dolan, the war nerd.
All three of those things are the same guy.
Yep.
It's exile.ru for The War Nobody Watched.
You can find it in a couple different places.
I think I originally read this on some old email list archive or something.
Good stuff.
And then there's a bunch of more recent columns at exiledonline.com.
You know, it was a really strange experience writing those columns.
There were moments that really touched me.
I wrote about Haiti, and I said Haiti doesn't need to be ashamed of anything except the fact that it's not Ohio.
And if you see it in ancient world terms, it's a heroic story.
And this Haitian guy wrote to me and said it was the first time he'd ever felt proud of his country in his life.
Then on the other hand, I had a lot of rich Nepalese tell me they were going to kill me, because I said there was a reason there was a Maoist insurrection in Nepal, which is people were inheriting debt for ten generations and having to sell their kids for malaria medication.
That got them.
You wouldn't believe how mad Nepalese can get.
Don't believe this peacenik rep they've got.
Yeah, well, and I think, you know, for the audience, that's a little bit of a taste of this.
I mean, well, you know, I don't want to say this in front of you or whatever, but it's really brilliant stuff.
I always learn a ton of things, every article.
And also I laugh my ass off, too, because it's all really funny and very well written.
So, you know, I really highly recommend that people go check out the War Nerd archives at Exile and Exiled online.
Can I say one more thing?
I don't think I answered your question about the morality of war well enough.
I think the most basic thing for me is who owned the land you're on 400 years ago?
Every American has to face the fact that we live on land that we took from somebody else and we killed them all to get it.
And I don't mean we should go around being a bunch of mealy-mouthed West Germans in John Lennon glasses, because what's the point?
But it is a fact, and it does seem to suggest that conventional morality won't cover this, that you end up doing a sort of bloody shrug.
Well, you know, I guess I always am pessimistic but hopeful or something like that.
I mean, after all, at least major parts of the world became convinced that human beings have natural rights.
Slavery was abolished, at least in the West, at least legally.
They nationalized it, maybe, but they abolished private chattel slavery.
And more and more it just doesn't make sense to people anymore to rank people as superior to others based on race, these kinds of things.
I mean, it's possible for human beings to be better, and if we can get rid of slavery, at least in the West and most of the world, from the way things used to be, maybe there's a way to get around having all this genocide, all this mass murder.
I agree.
If you take the long view, you can be cautiously optimistic.
In the short view, there's all this irritating stuff that gets in the way, like...
The one right now that gets me is American exceptionalism.
Like, okay, I thought the Nazis were exceptionalists.
I thought they were the ones who said, we operate by a different set of rules and nothing that applies to any other nation on Earth applies to us.
There's all sorts of ostensibly sane people going around my neighborhood saying that right now about this country.
You know, to me, it's just a matter of conflation.
You know, like the Democrats do with assault rifle.
You know, assault rifle used to mean fully automatic rifle, but then they changed it to mean scary-looking guns that Charles Schumer doesn't like or whatever, and they get to just, you know, warp the definition to fit what they want.
American exceptionalism, to me, only ever meant, this is the place where what we all have in common is that we agree on liberty and trying to have justice and fairness as the goal of our actual political process and judicial system and whatever.
You know, the basic kind of principles.
We want to be the land where people can feel safe to flee their crappy country and come here and have a decent life because we value individual rights and humanity most.
That's what makes us exceptional.
I mean, so now we have a right to deny the individual humanity of everybody else in the world and drop nuclear weapons on them if we feel like it, which seems to be the modern interpretation of that very same kind of premise, you know?
Yeah, well, that's actually something I've been interested in lately.
The great silence over nukes.
There are two great silences, one over world population and one over nukes, and they're obviously brutally closely related silences.
I mean, the nukes went off in 1945, and they've been silent for a long time.
You'd look a long time in world military history before you found an example of a weapon being silent, an effective weapon, for that long, and certainly there's not much doubt about their effectiveness.
So what's the future of nukes?
That's one of the most important questions, and one of the things that makes it important is that what we have now everywhere is sort of small-time stalemates.
Bush and his people, they talked big, but they fought very small.
They had genocidal feelings, but their tactics were petty.
Petty meanness, like Tharman and the Shire.
And I don't know.
Eventually, I think we'll get somebody who's got their same bloody-mindedness without their pettiness, and then something really bad will happen.
Yeah, well, and there are thousands of nukes.
7,000, 8,000 just in the hands of American Russia alone, and those are thermonuclear weapons we're talking about, the big kind.
Yeah, in fact, we'll be talking about a little bit of that with Dan Ellsberg on the show later.
He likes to say that the Nagasaki bomb is just the blasting cap for the kinds of bombs that our government uses now.
Yeah, well, the Russians still hold the record, as far as I know, with the Thar bomb, which could annihilate entire metropolitan Paris, including the suburbs.
Just absolutely annihilate it.
They dialed that down from 50 megatons, I think, to 50 megatons from 100, because 100 would cause too much fallout, and it would have devastated the Russian population as well.
But you can build them as big as you want.
You can probably put some of them in the Marianas Trench and crack the Earth's crust, if you really wanted to.
Yeah, well, and when you talk about human population, a lot of that is at the root of the interests of these different nation-states, or they think, anyway.
I don't know if this is really true, but it seems plausible enough to me that Buckminster Fuller said that there's enough wealth and enough, basically, free energy on this planet where every person could live like a billionaire, at least a 1950s billionaire or whatever, forever.
That there's plenty for everyone, it's only a matter of distribution, and mostly that's a problem of state governments in the way of people figuring out avenues of trade.
But it's sort of like we spend three times as much killing people to, quote-unquote, secure the oil in the Middle East than it costs to just buy it, you know?
Well, what you really end up doing, and this is one of the bizarre paradoxes of, I suppose you could call it the Republican mindset, one thing that you can absolutely count on is that when you push a country into war, the birth rate will zoom.
You look at a list of birth rates in the world right now, most of them are in Afghanistan, but at number four is, sorry, are in Africa, but at number four is Afghanistan, at number seven is Somalia, at number 12 is Yemen.
Those are all countries that are either at war or very, very close to war.
People seem to have this reaction to procreate when, you know, the death rate goes up by war.
So really, the Iraq War did, among other things, send the Iraqi birth rate zooming.
So the same people who call in on the radio and say there's too many Muslims in the world are the ones who are pushing Muslim birth rates up all over these places.
Yeah, well, and putting the Ayatollahs in charge of Iraq, as we discussed earlier.
Let's talk a little bit about the specifics of the Iran-Iraq War that nobody paid attention to.
Five distinct phases, you said, and I won't ask you to go through all of them, but if you could just describe a little bit of the history of this and what everybody missed.
Okay.
I mean, hell, we were paying for both sides of it and arming both sides of the dang thing.
You'd think it was our business.
Yeah.
Basically, you know, Saddam Hussein is in charge of Iraq.
He's a gambler.
He sees that Iraq has been weakened.
Homani is in power now.
And like a lot of revolutionary regimes, Homani's regime had led a lot of the army officer and especially air force officers out up to the local pockmarked walls and had them shot.
And Saddam basically overestimated the impact that would have on Iran's ability to fight back.
And so September 1980, he launches a huge classic attack into Iran in the style he'd learned from the Russians who had learned it from the Germans in World War II, basically a blitzkrieg attack led by tank columns.
The Iraqis were considered to be pretty good tank fighters.
And at first it went pretty well, but he just didn't think about morale sufficiently.
Morale and population size, those things have a lot to do with the war.
His own army was very good at killing but not very good at dying.
They loved shooting people down, but when somebody was shooting at them, it was like Brock Lesnar getting hit in the face.
They found they didn't like it all of a sudden.
And the Iranians, it's a Shia culture.
They value martyrdom.
Martyrdom can be very valuable.
As I said, I learned this stuff from studying the Irish stuff, and the whole Catholic martyrdom thing is a very powerful weapon.
The Iranians, like the Soviets, were willing to take huge losses just to slow the advance down.
And then, again, just like Stalin did when he was attacked by Hitler, Khomeini went to the death cells where he had all these Air Force officers and said, Hi guys, look, we kind of need you now.
Would you mind getting back into the cockpit for us?
And just like the Russian officers, they did.
It's surprising what people will do.
I mean, that's one thing you find out as a Warner.
People are creatures of habit.
If you're an Air Force officer, you'll get back into the cockpit, even though you know the regime that wants you there is likely to have you shot the minute you're not useful anymore.
And they did.
And they blasted the Iranian columns, came down to a stalemate.
The Iraqi columns came down to a stalemate.
Meanwhile, Saddam, like every other bad planner in the history of the world, had the, and then the people will rise up and join us component.
Because there are huge Arab ethnic areas in western Iraq.
And he thought, our fellow Arabs will rise up and join us.
Well, they didn't.
I mean, Saddam never had a good rep with other Arabs anyway.
They hated his guts.
And the Iranians hadn't been any harder on the Arabs than they were on their own people.
So there was no uprising.
That whole part completely failed.
So you've got a stalemate.
Then Saddam goes out and buys all the Warsaw Pact weapons he can and starts attacking Iranian oil installations.
And that's when you get the big dogfights.
You mentioned Red Dawn earlier.
Isn't that the giant Soviet helicopter that comes over the hill and shoots the kids when they take the bait?
Isn't that the kind of helicopter we're talking about here?
Yeah, the MI-24 attack helicopter.
Yeah, that decimated the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Yeah, because Red Dawn, it's a classic war nerd movie, even though it's goofy.
I don't think they had a real MI-24, but they mocked up something that looked like one.
And it blasted away at Thompson right off that Denver hillside.
Yeah.
So they bought tons of those.
And the Iranians, again, were making up for their unprepared state with human wave attacks.
And if you can imagine an attack helicopter versus a human wave attack, it's a slaughter.
The Iranians also used adolescents who were basically worthless as soldiers as human mind clearance.
I think I've read before that those human wave assaults that the ayatollahs sent out there, a lot of them didn't even have rifles.
They were just running and going, ah!
Yeah, well, in the view of the Revolutionary Guard who were to follow them, they were mind clearance devices, human mind clearance devices.
They would set off the mines because the Iraqis had the kind of army that, as I said, loved killing and didn't like being killed.
So they were very good at preparing defensive lines.
And they'd send all these 13-year-olds running through the minefield, blow up all the mines.
Then the Revolutionary Guard would follow and, with any luck, take Iraqi positions.
And the Iranians had a bigger population to work with.
I guess that's another reason I have trouble talking about the morality of war.
Because if you try to introduce a moral component, you can't talk about certain things because they're too horrible.
But the fact is, the Iranians had a huge birth rate around that time.
And they had a population that was bigger than Iraq's.
And they were willing to use them.
And that made a difference.
And the Iraqis started to get really spooked.
It's a scary thing to face people who are ready to die when you're just out there because Saddam's men came and grabbed you and put you in uniform.
The Iranians were out there because they wanted to be.
And they were absolutely willing to die.
And the Iraqi army was starting to get very badly rattled in spite of all their weapons.
But they spent just too much blood.
And Saddam was effectively attacking their oil installations, which were their only source of foreign exchange.
So both sides, at some point, started to realize, this is just not working out for us.
What about poison gas?
The Saddam regime was a big fan of poison gas.
They used it on the Iranians.
They used it on the Kurds.
A lot of the war was fought down in the Shatal Arab, the southern marsh area where a lot of the Iranian and Iraqi oil is.
And it was a particularly effective weapon there because you didn't need to send troops on sort of impassable, boggy ground.
You could just saturate the place with poison gas.
I mentioned I was in Kurdistan recently.
I went to a museum that was devoted to the gassing of Halabja, this Kurdish town that they still remember.
It's the kind of museum you probably should visit, but you definitely don't want to visit more than once.
Because it's pretty fucking awful.
Yeah, I think I remember Colin Powell giving a big Halabja speech.
And it kind of fell flat because everybody knew he was the U.S. National Security Advisor at the time that that happened.
Yeah, yeah.
Again, I guess that's part of the difficulty.
Which they blamed it on Iran at the time, didn't they?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
The U.S. record in this whole thing is filthy.
It can't be called anything else.
As I said, what was particularly filthy about it from a Warner perspective is that it was such a cowardly way of doing things.
We weren't willing or able to commit any of our own troops, but we were whispering in both sides' ears trying to get them to kill more of their own people.
And doing more than that, of course, sending them money, sending them weapons.
Now, I guess mine is only the conventional wisdom on this, but it would be that we really supported Saddam and, yeah, sold some weapons to the Ayatollahs in order to get the hostages out and make some money and pay off the death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Yeah, yeah.
Is that pretty much right?
Yeah, to pay off more people who were no good for real fighting but great at killing villagers.
You know, when I was more of a – when I, as John Dolan, was more of a Gary Brecher type, it was the Reagan administration that sort of turned me away.
Because I started out as an American nationalist, you know.
And I kept thinking, how can it be patriotic to send weapons to Iran, the country that is our self-declared most bitter enemy in the world?
And how are they going to help defend them to the Contras who have shown that they can't fight and are a bunch of throat-slitting cowards?
I was a true believer in those days, but even then it was starting to get to me.
He wouldn't send weapons to the Afghans who would fight and were, if nothing else, brave.
But he would send weapons to the Contras and the Iranians who hated our guts.
I didn't understand that.
I mean, I think there are a lot of Americans like that, especially young males.
Very trusting, but they start to think, this doesn't add up.
Yeah, and that's Ronald Reagan, man.
That's not Bill Clinton or something.
That's the guy who ought to be on Mount Rushmore because he was so great.
Yeah, yeah.
And then when he did fund weapons, again, I'm talking about what I was like in the 80s when I really was Gary Bresher.
When he did fund weapons, it was weapons that didn't work, like Star Wars and the B-1.
I was a weapons fan.
I've since realized weapons are not the main thing about war.
Well, and he blew the Reykjavik deal that would have got rid of the entire nuclear arsenal, us and the Soviets, based on his belief in that ridiculous Star Wars thing.
Isn't that right?
Well, and also because, as I slowly realized, he was talking about generating funds for his friends in the defense industry.
It didn't matter that the B-1 didn't work as a weapon.
It was very expensive, and the money was all funneled to his friends.
Same thing with Star Wars.
It was never going to work, and they knew that.
But it funneled a lot of money to his buddies.
Well, and there's one more important point here, which I'm sorry I'm not going to have a chance to ask you about, but I'll have to go ahead and mention that.
Saddam needed money to pay back the Kuwaitis and the Saudis for helping protect them from Iran, which is what led to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
And this story rolls on from there.
But anyway, everyone, please go read The War Nerd, Gary Bretscher, John Dolan.
He's at exile.ru and exiledonline.com.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you.
