For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, now to our first guest on the show today, Commander Jeff Huber.
U.S. Navy, retired, writes a pen and sword, and is the author of the novel Bathtub Admirals.
He writes for us at Antiwar.com.
You can find the articles at Original.
Antiwar.com slash Huber.
And today we're featuring the general who would be king.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a topic on a subject that's of interest to me.
And I won't fight with you about it because I couldn't possibly come up with the MP3 or anything.
But I think they heard it here first that General Petraeus would be running for president of the United States.
Although I read it in some news report where a fawning right winger like maybe Jonah Goldberg or somebody asked him, gee, you think you'll run for president one day?
And he said, well, not in no way.
Tell us all about General David Petraeus.
He is the commander of CENTCOM. What the hell is a CENTCOM, Jeff?
Central Command is the four-star command.
It's the unified command.
It used to be called a CINC, commander in chief.
They got rid of that word in the Bush administration.
I don't know if it ever came back.
We have, now I forget how many CINCs we have now.
The regional CINCs I think are, I want to say seven.
Seven, I haven't counted lately, but there's a new one called AFRICOM.
Now, Africa is part of a military, U.S. Global Military Command.
NORTHCOM, for example, is the bunch that actually an old boss of mine, Admiral Tim Keating, ran.
The one guy who seemed to come out smelling pretty good with Katrina.
They were ready to go.
They just couldn't get the thumbs up.
Well, and that's the new one that was created at the end of the Clinton administration.
Bush was really the first guy to put into motion, right?
Or not put into motion.
Well, I mean, actually, staff though, make something of it.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm perfectly happy to hear that it's empty.
Last I heard that they had a brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division now.
Yeah, well, what's going on with them now is all very interesting.
And I'm trying to, I'll get to the bottom of that eventually.
But, you know, it's this encasting about for a mission for a military.
It appears to me now that they are really, NORTHCOM is going to be in charge of suppressing internal resurrection.
Internal insurrection.
And, you know, you're basically taking the Posse Commissar's active whenever it was and throwing it out the door and saying that active duty that the regular military folks would do.
Yeah.
Did you just step out in a windstorm or something?
Yeah, I just did.
Sorry.
There was a helicopter flew by.
Oh, I see.
I'm sorry about that.
I should have said something.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no problem.
Let's see.
So, yeah, Northern Command.
Well, that's a whole other thing.
So tell me about CENTCOM.
That's what, from Morocco at the northwestern end of Africa all the way to India?
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
And CENTRAL COMMAND, if you remember Tommy Franks, when we started this whole round of fiascos, Tommy Franks was the CENTRAL COMMAND commander.
And he also acted as the operational commander.
Basically, Tommy Franks was both Ike and Omar Bradley in that he was the theater commander plus he was the operational commander of the operation in Afghanistan.
And then he turned around and was also the operational commander of the OIF invasion of Iraq.
All right.
So now, okay, so you're saying Tommy Franks ran the original Afghan war under Bush and the Iraq war.
And then what happened to him?
He got out while the getting was good, I guess.
He got out while the getting was good.
And this sort of, I think, starts a pattern of guys do something that looks good and then run away before it all goes to heck in a handbag again.
Now, jump ahead.
As we come to this election, here's the problem.
What we have is there was an article recently by one of the, again, I don't, you get to the point where I don't use the term right wing.
I'm kind of talking about nutty people, not conservatives.
So, you know, when I talk about lefties, I'm not talking about progressives.
I'm talking also about nutty people.
So, pardon my use of terminology is not always the best.
Okay.
The Politico, the journal that Glenn Greenwald so long once called a cesspool, a right wing cesspool, which is pretty strong words, wrote an article on September 4th talking that now GOP icon Bob Dole says he'd like to see Petraeus run in 2012 as a latter day Ike.
Okay.
Now, I go, okay, this is guys like that who they've got a problem with their, you know, inability to make good analogies.
Ike was, you know, he led an actual coalition in an actual war and actually won, which, you know, Petraeus hasn't checked in those blocks yet.
But he, I think, is, a lot of people believe that he was a miracle worker who saved the Iraq situation.
Now, as we've seen in a recent memo from a Colonel Tim Reese, who was part of the Iraq advisory group, he says, just declare victory and go home because nothing's working.
We've just got, you know, the Iraqi government and the security forces.
They're incompetent.
They're corrupt.
The current situation is no progress has been made, on and on and on.
And the funny part was, Ray Odierno, who's now the general in charge of Iraq, turns around and says, oh, these are merely tactical problems.
And, you know, I just want to jump up and scream.
I was like, dude, those are the most strategic problems you've got.
And he's dismissing them as, you know.
Yeah, well, and look, this is the thing, and for any of us who've been watching this all along, I know it's in your articles all along, it's certainly something we've talked about on this show all along, the benchmarks that were supposed to be accomplished by August of 2007, I mean October 2007, once they revised that, were never met at all.
And everybody just dropped the word benchmark from their, you know, Washington, D.C. vocabulary, and that's something we just don't talk about anymore.
But, in fact, and I think you kind of mentioned this in your article, the political wins in Iraq go this way and that, you know, all the time.
The more the Shiites and the Sunnis get along, the more problem they have with the Kurds, and all these different things.
And so they haven't really done anything except, as you say in here, they bribed the Sunni insurgency, which had just lost in a pretty bad way a civil war against the Shiite militias, backed by the United States.
We bribed them to stop fighting us for a while.
That's it.
That's the surge work.
Here's some money.
It had nothing to do even with the troop increase.
You know, maybe intimidating Sauder a bit into quitting.
I don't know.
Yeah, and who really knows?
You know, Iran had a part of it.
Iran, I've also written about there.
They've been so demonized beyond all recognition, you know, accused of things that have never been proven.
It's so difficult to say what's really going on right now.
And I feel, you know, I obviously, that's what I do full time now, and I have done that for a couple years, is look at this and try to look for trends and say, okay, this guy's doing this.
We were seeing the same thing we saw three years ago, four years ago, five years ago.
But, yeah, essentially, Petraeus' MO, his pal Tom Ricks of the Washington Post, started to beat his drum with his first book, Fiasco, and basically where he said, you know, that Petraeus is the only guy doing anything right when he was a commander in Mosul after the staging of Saddam Hussein's statue being pulled down.
But it turns out, you know, all he really did was pass out a lot of bribes.
And a couple months after he was gone, I think it was the chief of police defected and the whole place went to heck, and it's still a big trouble spot in Iraq.
So then he came back for a second tour.
He was put in charge of training the security forces, and while he's there, he loses track of 190,000 pieces of AK-47 rifles and pistols.
Hey, 190,000 rifles and pistols isn't that many?
And AK-47 in every part.
Somebody else made that.
I read that somewhere else today, but it's pretty good.
And, you know, where those wind up in the hands of Shia militias.
But then he comes back and he's getting credit for having written the book on counterinsurgency, which means the new field manual.
As a matter of fact, the only part of that field manual he wrote was his signature on the endorsing letter because guys at the Army War College were writing that, and it's really just a rewrite of an older manual, while Petraeus was giving away weapons to the Shiites.
So then he comes back a third time, and he's going up to the Sunnis and making these awakening groups, and he's arming them and giving them bribes.
So that's his basic MO, his arming and bribing.
Isn't it the case that General Casey and, ah, why is the name escaping me here, Abizaid and Casey, they were the head of CENTCOM and the head of the Iraqi war.
One or the other was there for a while.
And this is right at the time Bush said, hey, I'm a commander guy, I go by what the generals say, because he's working directly against the whole myth about, well, partly true myth about the guys in Vietnam fighting with one arm tied behind their back and all that.
So he's saying, no, no, I let the generals decide how to fight the war.
I just decide where and where.
Then he fired those two and replaced them with Petraeus and Odierno, and this is coinciding right with the adopting of Fat Net Fred Kagan's surge plan and the take in Jim Baker's report that would have had us out a year ago and thrown that out the window and instead doubling down at the beginning of 2007, right?
And I guess this is the story that Ricks tells only with the narrative that Petraeus is this hero who got this wonderful extension of the war accomplished.
Yeah, and now, strangely enough, artlessly in his next book, Odierno goes from being Desert Ox to Desert Fox because in his first book, Odierno was probably the hoof-fisted guy who almost single-handedly caused the insurgency by just being bad news.
Meaning sending people on house-to-house raids and rounding people up and all the worst things that provoked the resistance.
Yeah, all the worst things.
By the second book, it turns out that, well, he had a quote-unquote transformation and he came back and he was really the guy who was pushing for the surge plan.
So, you know, this is how many people are taking credit for the surge plan or what he wants to say was really working.
Ricks also turns around and admits that Petraeus, who at the time, now Petraeus was in charge of Iraq and Odierno was his three-star assistant.
They call it running the day-to-day operations.
I don't know what that means.
I've been around the military long enough and in it to know that it doesn't mean a whole lot.
It's like everything Petraeus doesn't want to do, he sticks Odierno with.
You know, that's the kind of thing it is.
But now Ricks turned around and admitted that, and this is about the time his second book came out, The Gamble.
And Petraeus, he kind of let on to Congress and everybody else like he was trying to create conditions that allowed the troops to come home.
But, in fact, he was just trying to make, you know, a good-looking result so that people would calm down and go along with it a little bit longer.
Right.
I mean, and they said that specifically, right?
I mean, Rick said that, I think, on The Daily Show.
Rick says that right out front.
And, you know, you can find the articles in The Washington Post where he just comes out and says it.
And I'm just saying, you know, I don't know.
I think what you wind up with is that, you know, I've been saying lately that anybody who goes into the puzzle palace before very long becomes as puzzled as the puzzle masters.
And if you look at some of their behavior and the things that they say, you know, it's like their cognitive skills have just gone out the window.
Yeah.
Well, I think that has been the narrative of this whole thing.
I mean, not just are they doing evil things like starting aggressive invasions of other people's countries, but it's the most ridiculous way that you could possibly think of trying to be an imperialist.
You know, as far as I can tell, I mean, it's tragic.
I'm not saying it's not tragic.
I'm just saying it's retarded.
It really is.
It's like George Bush was actually the one coming up with all the plans himself or something.
You know?
His own self, yeah.
Might as well have been anyway.
Well, check this out, because, see, now, Barack Obama, when he went and did that reverse bizarro Cindy Sheehan photo op the other week while on his vacation there, that kid had died after volunteering to go to Afghanistan.
I mean, he was already in the military, but he volunteered to go to Afghanistan, I guess, earlier or whatever, after being so inspired by Barack Obama's speech at Camp Lejeune where he said, we're going to be out of there by December 31, 2011, just like in the Status of Forces Agreement, and we're going to go and win the, speaking of Iraq, and we're going to go and win the Afghan war and all that.
But still on the Iraq thing, I guess we'd get to that kid in Afghanistan in a minute, but on the Iraq question, I remember distinctly that Jim Michalczewski at NBC News reported live on TV as they were waiting for Obama to take the podium, that, well, gee, all my sources in the Pentagon say we're staying 25 years, and whatever the President says in his speech basically doesn't mean anything compared to that.
We're staying forever.
Now I'm looking at a headline that says, The U.S. pullout from Iraq remains in doubt amid rising violence.
It's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com, and he's got links here to, let's see, we've got the Washington Post and a couple others, New York Times, saying, geez, I don't know, guys, trial balloons.
Boy, we haven't, Scott Horton and Jeff Huber are right, we have not met those benchmarks.
We've got to meet them before we leave.
Well, it's the strategies that they're good at, and I, you know, every time I hear Mullen, the Admiral Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, start talking about things like centers of gravity and so forth, I just shake my head and go, none of these guys know what any of that stuff means.
I mean, what you've got, in a nutshell, and this is the Jeff Huber school of it, the center of gravity is, that's a Clausewitzian concept, and he defined it as the thing against which we must concentrate all our efforts, meaning this is the thing that will win for us if we can defeat it, do whatever it is that we need to do to get around the obstacle.
It's the obstacle between you and the object when we're talking about the enemy's center of gravity.
But then Milan Vago, who I studied with at the Naval War College, said something real interesting.
Centers of gravity, you know, the centers, the gravity can be, can be, you know, concentrated or it can be dispersed, and when it gets dispersed enough that you really can't say it has a center, then you've got a real problem on your hands, because you can't really fight something like that.
And what we have at all levels of war, you know, in the whole situation, global war on terror, etc., you don't have a thing that you can go conquer and win the war.
The political power and the military force, which is so dispersed you can hardly call it military force, it's, you know, guerrillas here and there, there's really nothing.
It's, you're herding a stampede, it's a cat stampede, and you're never going to get it herded.
Well, they like that just fine, is kind of the point.
I mean, it really does seem like from the Pentagon's point of view, they're waging war just to have a war at this point.
I mean, it really is like 1984, like, you know, we just like it better if we have a war all the time, okay?
Yes, and there's a lot of...
Yeah, I mean, herding cats, what a great project.
You can keep funding that thing forever.
Forever, and it keeps, there's a lot of power, and eventually you wind up with things like, and I'm getting a little bit into conspiracy theory, but, like I always say, don't think that, I don't think that we're going, the war is ever going to die out for lack of funds.
Because when it comes to the federal budget at this point, wars like Jell-O, there's always room for it, and we can always borrow stuff from the Chinese, and they'll always say, sure, go ahead.
Well, and they can also just print up a new bond, and then print up some currency and buy the bond.
Yeah, yeah, which is essentially what they do.
Or, yeah, you just call the Fed and say, hey, release another $800 billion into the system.
We don't want to go through Congress, okay?
All right, well, so now let's talk about Petraeus again here for the last few minutes.
This guy is responsible for the so-called success in Iraq, which I guess means we have to stay forever.
Right.
And he's in charge in Afghanistan, too.
Well, we have to stay forever, which is the key right now to winning in Iraq is staying forever, because we have to get, to gain the credibility of the Afghan people, we have to tell them we're going to stay forever and protect them, and then we have to do it, even though the act of protecting them usually involves blowing up a lot of civilians and not getting the guy we're going after.
Right.
And this is insane rhetoric, but it's going to work.
Well, so this guy Petraeus, as a complete failure, would be the perfect candidate for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 2012 to run against his current commander-in-chief.
Okay, because Obama put himself in this bind of saying, I'm going to blow off the Iraq War to fight Afghanistan, he really can't back down from Afghanistan now.
And they're going to pressure him.
And, like you said, this whole thing of Al-Maliki, you know, my hat's off to him.
He's turned out to be a far more astute political figure than a lot of people thought he'd be, but he dances on whatever lap gives him what he needs today to consolidate his power.
And at the end of the day, we're going to offer him something to say, sure, hey, we'll renegotiate that Status of Forces Agreement, because at the end of the day, what the, I call it the warmongering now, because I can't really just say the neocons, it's not just the Pentagon, it's not just the military-industrial complex, it's not just the sort of, you know, the fringy right that always loves a war, and you're un-American if you don't back it.
It's, you know, a huge combination of those things.
The problem becomes is, if Obama doesn't go along with whatever they want to do, it's his fault that they lost the wars after putting so much sacrifice into it.
And that makes David Petraeus the man to bring back, because people believe he's a genius.
Well, and then the question is, if he's so unlike Ike Eisenhower, do you think that, unlike Ike Eisenhower, he'll leave his general's uniform on and he'll go ahead and take the presidency with a chest full of medals and be our military ruler?
I mean, what's stopping him at this point if he wants to cross the Potomac with his army?
I think, you know, I hadn't really thought about that possibility, but it would be, I can't rule it out, and I have to say, you know, two words, Sarah Palin.
Yeah, in other words, anything is possible at this point.
Anything is possible, yeah.
So, you know, that's where I think we're at, and I don't know that...
I mean, I know that's hyperbole, you know, it's just my imagination, but here's this guy.
He seems like, I remember David Hackworth used to call Wesley Clark a perfumed prince.
He's one of these guys who's never got his hands dirty in his life, and he's nothing but a suck-up, and that's why he's so successful as a general, and I don't know much about this Petraeus, but I have a feeling if Hackworth were here, he'd be denouncing this guy.
Yeah, and I think, and I'll tell you something else, that's why Petraeus and Gates and Mullen get along so well, because they're peas in a pod.
I mean, you know, these guys, you know, Mullen, you know, Gareth Porter told me the other day that he had escaped me.
Mullen, his father was a Hollywood publicist, and I mean, he had clients like Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller.
Oh.
So if you don't think, and I watch Mullen pretty closely now.
That's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff we're talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
If you watch him, he'll say something, he'll say one thing, and it'll sound all well and good until you get to the real core of his message, like this thing yesterday.
He said, well, we have to turn around and fix our propaganda, because we're not doing what we say.
And the key to doing it, what we have to do is, and he's the one who brought it up, but we have to tell them that we're going to stay there forever, and then we have to do it.
And, you know, that's, but you keep watching.
That is going to be one of the key messages, that we're betraying them if we leave.
And that's where you have to stay.
Well, and listen, they have this whole narrative left over from Charlie Wilson's war that, geez, you know, Afghanistan would have been great if we had stayed and built their nation after the 1980s when the Russians left, and instead we left them high and dry.
And I put that to Eric Margulies one time, and he just laughed and said that was preposterous, and said that Britain and France and the United States and whoever else spent the entire first half of the 1990s trying to install a government in Afghanistan, and they finally gave up, and the Pakistanis said, well, we'll go ahead and put in the Taliban, and they said, okay, fine.
So give me a break, like we left them high and dry.
It's American intervention that caused all this, you know?
Yeah, well, you know, when you get, you know, we have a lot of corruption around here, and it's a shame, but it's nothing like what you see in a place like that.
And here's the sad part.
You know, the other thing about this is what, you know, the Taliban guys, tactically they're good fighters.
And when I say good fighters, I mean they're smart fighters.
They know when not to fight.
And when they do fight, it's like, hey, you know, they're Sun Tzu, and when they fight, they've got things suitcased before they go into battle.
It's like we're going to go in, we're going to clock them, and we're going to be gone.
So as we're crying about, you know, we need to bring more civilians in to build up infrastructure, we're just making more.
Everything you build becomes a target.
Every civilian you bring there becomes a target.
And guess what you need to protect them?
More bloody troops.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
At least all the people who voted for Barack Obama can proudly say that they knew that this is exactly what he was going to do, because he said so over and over again throughout 2007 and 2008.
We're going to have wars in Afghanistan.
That's where the terrorists are, and we're going to be just like George Bush, only somewhere else.
Yeah, and, you know, the funny part of it is, I always like to get this whole thing, well, that's where the 9-11 attack sprang from.
Okay, Sheikh Mohammed was, when he cooked it up, he was operating out of the Philippines.
The guys who flew the planes trained in America.
And the FAA knew it.
I mean, we can go on and on about how.
And then the muscle hijackers, the guys who did the thug stuff, were from Saudi Arabia and UAE.
So it's just like, okay, how much did Afghanistan really play in the 9-11 attacks?
And I'm at the point now where I go, was Osama bin Laden even there?
Yeah, well, it's worth wondering about.
I saw a video one time where Ayman al-Zawahiri was, and I can't find it, so I've actually tried to find it since then, but it was on YouTube, of Ayman al-Zawahiri saying, we were all there at Tora Bora, one square mile, and you couldn't catch us because you're such cowards that you wouldn't put your guys on the ground to do it.
And, you know, that was his characterization of why they didn't send them there.
I would think it wasn't cowardice.
I would think it would be a strategy to go ahead and let them escape so they can have more wars.
But maybe that's just my cynicism there.
Well, I think what you get into is, again, I'm going back to this, you know, the insanity that goes on in the five-sided phony farm, and the people who, you know, the people who, like I say, the second you get there, you become as puzzled as the puzzle master.
But by the time you become a puzzle master, all your craziness makes sense to you.
So, well, you know, we were building a coalition, and we wanted to let the Afghans, who, you know you can't trust those people.
You know you can't trust those people.
And, you know, the problem, like, for example, why are we whacking so many civilians?
Well, first of all, what is an Afghan civilian?
Is there anybody in Afghanistan who isn't connected in some way to somebody who's in that collection of militias that we call the Taliban that really isn't a single thing?
You know, I mean, these guys have been around for a long time.
This is a culture we don't know.
These guys, I think when these guys talk this crazy stuff, I think they really believe it, and I think it really makes sense to them.
What's your take on the whole AP publishes a photograph of a dying Marine?
I mean, that could have been one of the kids on your boat, right, back when you were in the Navy.
How do you feel about that?
You know, that's a tough one to say, because part of the problem I think we have, when I say we, I mean the anti-war movement.
And the anti-war movement, not just people who don't like war, but people who go, no, these wars we're in are not good, okay, is that people aren't seeing enough of those things.
And one of the big things that you'd hear in the Bush administration, this was to cow the mainstream media who, you know, any time it comes up, it's like, it's their fault we lost Vietnam, which is silly, you know.
Ten years, half a million men, you couldn't win a war, and Walter Cronkite lost it?
Please.
And it went on for another five or six years after he said it was lost, and LBJ admitted it.
But that I have to go back to, I get torn in between.
People need to see more of those things to realize that, hey, this is what you're really doing over there.
Okay.
The big networks are afraid to run pictures like that.
However, I think that we could find things to show other than that.
This is, you know, at the end of the day, I was an okay military officer, but I was always a trooper kind of guy, and that's, you know, so it's tough.
We need to see the brutal realities of it.
We know not the John Wayne version where, you know, everybody who dies takes a clean bullet through the heart and drops and, you know, flies to heaven.
That's not what it's like.
My feelings are split, you know.
Yeah, it seems odd that it would be left to the Secretary of Defense, as they call him, to be the one to do the denouncing here.
It seems like don't they have more expensive PR people than that who could, like, come up with just, you know, some kind of private veterans group or something to denounce it for them?
Because we can all look at this and say, hey, you know, you can complain about the photographer all day, but you're the one who got that kid killed, Bob.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And for what?
For a war that, you know, to get the – we go to Afghanistan to get the job done, and it's like – or to finish the job, and it's like we don't have an idea what an end state looks like.
How can you finish a job if you don't know what it's going to look like when it's finished?
Well, Richard Holbrook, the special envoy, said we'll know it when we see it.
We'll know it when we see it.
We'll never actually see it.
And this is part of – and, you know, I get to a point where I have to back off and say don't try to think too much like them because this is what happens to the people who go nuts in the Puzzle Palace.
It starts to make sense.
Where, you know, we always get fuzzy objectives, and they tend to change, but I think they're – you know, after they've imploded the new strategy that I think we want – now apparently McChrystal wants to have a new new strategy because the old one isn't working, plus he needs more troops.
And we don't even have measures of effectiveness written up for the old strategy.
Everything gets done backwards here.
We lead off at this point with, okay, let's throw more kids at it, and then we'll figure out what to do with them.
Yeah, well, you know, this is what happened to George Will.
You know, now that it's Democrats in power, it's okay for him to think, you know, rationally about stuff.
And if you read his article, and especially if you watch the clip of him talking about this with George Snefalofagus there on this week, he says, look, they say that the strategy's got to be this, but the number of troops we have is that, and the number of troops we would need for the strategy they say they have would be that, and we can't do that, so therefore we should not do that.
And that, you know, it seemed like a pretty reasonable syllogism, and I think Snefalofagus didn't know what to say about it, and that was the end of the clip, at least as far as I saw it.
But, you know, I guess what you're saying is they figure, they announce one strategy, they get a little bit of a surge, then they change the strategy on us, then they can, I guess, draft 18 million kids to go over there and occupy the place or something.
Well, you know, think about it.
500,000 men in Vietnam, and I'm looking at my world map, but you can't really tell.
I don't know square mileage.
I don't have square mileage and population figures at my fingertips, but half a million dudes in Vietnam didn't work.
Yeah, well, my handy reference for Afghanistan is Texas.
I forgot which interview it was, but somebody calculated square mileage, and then I had commenters in the chat room and everything who came up with the square miles in kilometers, and it's roughly the size of Texas, and I'm not sure if you've ever driven or flown across Texas, Jeff, but it's pretty big.
Well, it is pretty big, and, you know, you get to a point where, oh, I'm just about to go off on another rant about McChrystal changing what he's doing every 30 seconds.
You do that.
Well, you know, first of all, he says the measure of effectiveness will not be the number of enemies killed, it will be the number of Afghans we protect.
So he goes over there, and the first thing he does is start a major offensive to kill bad guys who don't stick around to fight, and he continues to do things, and he winds up killing a lot of civilians, and then he shows up, just recently he showed up at the site of this latest airstrike that, oh, gosh, we missed the guy and killed a lot of civilians?
Gee.
And he says, we are doing everything we can to protect Afghans, and it's sort of like, dude, it's so freaking obvious you're not.
And the fact of the matter is, like I said before, there is no center of gravity that you can attack, and we have been pulling this try to assassinate bad guys.
In fact, that's what McChrystal, as the head of JSTOC, that was his job, was basically take direct orders from either Cheney or Rumsfeld, I'm not sure which.
The Joint Special Operations Command.
Yeah, Joint Special Operations Command, thanks.
And go out and whack guys either through these drone strikes or direct ground action or what have you.
So when they sold him as a counterinsurgency expert when he was going through his hearings, he didn't know a whole lot about counterinsurgency.
Actually, nobody really does, and I guess that's a point I'd like to stop on there, which is this whole thing, oh, we've got a new counterinsurgency manual, and we've got a new counterinsurgency strip.
There's no such thing as good counterinsurgency.
You know, the people who win those things own the gene pool, and to even get a tie as the away team, you have to stick around long enough until you've got a share of that gene pool, you know?
And that takes a long, long, long, long time.
Yeah, that's real imperialism right there.
That's how the British rule India.
That's right.
You've got generations of people who are India hands, some of whom are married to locals, you know?
And that's the way that goes.
But then again...
Well, you know, the whole premise of counterinsurgency implies that you're an empire occupying somebody else's country, and how do you get them to finally lay down and submit to your authority?
What the hell is that?
Well, you know, you never do.
I think you spend a whole lot of time messing around.
The British learn this in, well, Afghanistan and India.
At the end of the day, it's like, no, they're never going to kowtow to us.
They never are.
Yeah, look what happened to the British.
They ended up losing it all.
Yeah, and there are other strategies we can come up with, but the notion that we are fighting terrorism or we are doing something about 9-11 by this second permanent occupation, and like I say, I'm with you.
I don't think...
I think that those guys will maneuver an indefinite stay of about 30,000 troops in Iraq because that's the number that comes up so often.
It's what Desert Ox Odierno wants, and, you know, that's going to be the...
Well, if Obama doesn't give us that, then it's his fault we lost the war, and he's going to have to back down because...
Well, if he goes along...
Well, oh, wait, you're going to say he's going to have to back down?
I think that he is.
As in he'll do the will of the generals, not of us?
Yeah, he'll do the will of the generals.
That's what I think will happen, and I...
Well, so what's the ceiling on that, do you think?
I mean, what do you think they're really going to go for, transfer the whole war over there or actually possibly move toward conscription to make it fair?
Like, no, because what they'll do is there are a couple of things.
This is why they're so outraged, and this is why I go back to the picture of the Marine.
It bothers me because I care about the Marine and his family, okay?
But what doesn't bother me is that they do not want people to see kids getting killed because they want to keep the American people good and pacified and feeling guilty if they don't support the troops in whatever cockamamie war they've got them in.
So, you know, the number one...
The one strategy that they're good at is this propaganda strategy, and I'm talking about propaganda overseas.
I'm talking about propaganda in the United States.
And this is where we get into the Petraeus versus Obama in 2012 thing or, you know, any other Democrat in 2016, which is, you know, it's time to, you know, do the Bob Dolson...
If you like Bob Dolson, bring back Ike.
What you're really doing is bringing back, you know...
Petraeus is like a vainglorious dude, MacArthur, who, you know, hid out in Australia for most of the war and then in the Pacific War and then at the end stepped in and took the credit for winning that should have gone to Chester Nimitz's forces.
But, you know, that's the kind of guy he got with Petraeus.
And the whole...
You know, someone on my Facebook asked me, what's so bad about having generals as presidents?
And I was thinking, and I guess, you know, this is because I'm such a radical or whatever, but it seems to me that if America was a limited constitutional republic that generals would be extremely marginal figures in our society.
And then why would you want to have a general as a president?
Well, you know, you have to, I think, take a look at...
In most other countries of most other history of the world...
This is my nickel-dime sketch of it.
And let's start with...
In Western civilization, let's start with mighty Athens.
That finally, you know, it went down after the war with the Persians and then two Peloponnesian wars with the Spartans.
You know, it just got itself into this thing of decades and decades of war and went down.
Okay, go from there and march through history and take a look at any nation that was once a superpower tended to get where it was through military force.
Or in the case of the UK, probably more its naval forces, which, you know, way back in the day those two things were viewed separately.
But at the end of the day, they overextend, and even though they have a preponderance of military power at the time, they just go down because it gets to the point where their military power is ineffective.
I submit that, for the most part, our military power, at least the way we're using it now, is ineffective.
And there's been a history since the end of World War II where we essentially built a force in being to influence the Soviets to say, you can't move because, you know, we cannot spin you, blah, blah, blah.
So we had a big force, and it was probably, I'm going to say, it was probably effective at containing the Soviets from doing the big move through the folder gap, okay, and trying to go into Europe.
Although, how much threat of that was there?
The Russians don't really have a big history of doing that kind of invasion into Europe.
They've always really been defenders.
And I still don't quite understand why guys like Hitler were so afraid of them.
Because, you know, unless there was just a sort of, you know, European racial mindset that says, ah, Asia is where the barbarians came from, and we always have to be worried about Asia.
That's my best guess.
But anyway, we're at that point now where, you know, we're the first real global hegemon, and it's pretty obvious from the fact that we can't get out of any of these nickel-dime wars, either of these nickel-dime wars, and we really haven't made the world safe for terrorism.
And, you know, my only answer to the question of, well, you know, this is the Dick Cheney thing.
You know, there hasn't been an attack since 9-11.
Well, there should never have been a 9-11 in the first place.
I mean, that was just sheer unbelievable incompetence.
If another attack like that ever happens again, people at, you know, the alphabet soup, FBI, CIA, NCA, now NORTHCOM, FAA, NORAD, heads will roll.
Heads will roll.
Well, maybe they'll be ours.
Maybe they'll just declare a red alert.
Nobody knows what that really means, right?
No, nobody knows.
I don't know.
To a certain extent, too, this is another danger, Scott.
America is getting desensitized to this stuff that they just put up with.
It's just so much the erosion of the constitutional rights and the privacy.
Well, you know, I saw one the other day about end-of-summer festival where the old men, they were doing a parade down Main Street in this small town, and the old man was leading the tractors over toward the tractor pull event, the same way they always do.
And one of the new local cops, which I guess, I think, if I'm not confusing two different stories, this was the place where they had always just had local sheriffs and everything had been basically copacetic, but now they had a federal grant to hire a local town police force, and these guys, of course, are jackbooted thugs, and they tase this old man for going off the parade route, and he's in his 70s, this guy.
And according to the press that I read about it, the local town, all of the people, because it was a parade, and everybody rushed the cops, and there was, in their words, there was about to be a riot, and they didn't dare arrest him because they feared for their lives from the crowd who had about had it.
They were ready to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town.
I think more and more of the way, because people mostly, they don't interact with these wars, they interact with their local cops, and I think people more and more are starting to realize that this is power out of control now.
Our government sees us as the enemy.
That's why they hire all these thugs to keep us under control.
Well, I will tell you, seeing the American people as the enemy, that's an ominous sounding thing, but what we just talked about, the real strategy that they're really working hard on is the one to keep us pacified so that we'll go along with the war, or at least we won't make enough of a stink about it to end it.
Yeah, and we won't connect our local police state with our permanent state of warfare, even though they're completely entwined.
Yeah, and because it all comes back to 9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11.
Yeah, well, and even in the 90s, it was terrorism, homeland security, here's a bunch of armored personnel carriers and M-16s for any police agency in America that wants them.
Come and get a tank, they're free.
Yeah, and this whole business of, and let's scare people with, what, suitcase nukes.
I mean, I've researched that.
The idea that terrorists can make suitcase nukes is that they'll make those about the time they spend time traveling.
It's just, folks, this started from, like, what was this colonel's name, Lewton?
Soviet colonel somehow tells them to scare them, says, oh yeah, we've got suitcase nukes sitting all over your country, ready to blow them up.
I remember hearing about this as a kid, right?
But they've never actually seen a suitcase nuke the Soviets built.
We haven't built one.
It takes, I think the number is 130 pounds of high-grade uranium to make a bomb of any, you know, that would be worth putting together a nuke, you know.
Yeah, Gordon Pray, there are nuclear scientists, and Antiwar.com has debunked this repeatedly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here's the smallest nuke we ever made, and, you know, maybe you could fit it in the trunk of a Lincoln.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's at least a two-man job, maybe three, and that's battlefield artillery, you know.
Yeah, and you're not going to hide it in the trunk of a Lincoln.
You've got to bring it over here.
You hide it in the trunk of a Lincoln.
Those things need, actually I'll go back and read some of Gordon's stuff.
This is not my specialty, but, I mean, there's just all kinds of stuff that, you know, these things need to be maintained like B-2 bombers, you know, so that the stuff doesn't fry the electronics.
And it's just kind of like that's really just too bloody hard for not, there's just not enough bang for the buck.
Yeah, well, and, of course, it's always in the war party's interest to never really educate us about how nukes work.
Even, you know, I'm not saying secrets, but just the basic tenets of, you know, what an A-bomb does, what an H-bomb does, how it works, what it takes to be able to do it.
They basically want us to believe that you can, you know, like remember when they tortured Binyam Muhammad at pointing the finger at Jose Padilla.
He said, yeah, we learn in Rolling Stone how to cook up a nuclear bomb with ingredients in the kitchen and mixing them and swinging a bucket over our head like the centrifuge there.
They want us to believe that it's that easy to nuke us because then they get to keep us more scared and keep having more wars.
Yeah, well, and it's also, too, the, I mean, you can name that kind of talk, the lowest common denominator, and there's a lot of it out there.
And I think the, again, I'm not talking about people with conservative ideas.
I'm talking about that really, you know, there are nuts at the extremes of the left and the right, but the ones on the right tend to believe some dangerous stuff.
My cut on that is, you know, the nuts on the left, they care about whales or they care about trees or they care about, you know, whatever, but that's not a real organized thing, and they don't really have a, they don't have an organization like, you know, what I call the Big Brother Broadcast, which is the greater Rupert Murdoch hate radio, Fox News.
Yeah, which basically has it that, and this isn't just the kooks on the right or at least the, you know, official kooks, kooks by my and your definition maybe, but, you know, if you read National Review.
Oh, yeah.
Andy McCarthy had one the other day about how, oh, yeah, we never said war is a good way to spread democracy.
I don't know what you're talking about, and the reason why not is because Muslims are inherently evil, terroristic, totalitarian monsters, and so there's no way we could expect them to be democratic, and so even when they're finally getting it half right, now that their hero's not in power anymore, they still have, what are they frightened of over there at National Review?
They really think that all the Muslims all, I guess, can hear each other think, and they all agree like the Borg, one big Islamo-fascist vanguard of revolution coming to take over the world if we don't head them off at the pass right now.
Yeah, well, you know, this is, and this is where you get into make us believe the incredible.
Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supposedly came up with, it was a variation on we're fighting over there so we don't have to fight them over here, is if we come home, they will follow us.
And nobody questioned it and said, well, how are they going to get here?
Are they going to swim or jump because they don't have a navy or an air force?
In fact, nobody has a navy or an air force big enough to bring a sizable enough force to come over here and invade and occupy this country.
It simply can't be done.
You know, basic things like that.
Even Russia and Europe combined probably couldn't gain air superiority over this country for any period of time.
No, and what we're talking about at that point is a conventional force thing.
You know, and actually if you wanted to get rid of them all, when we talked about centers of gravity and there not being any kind of real military center, force center that you can attack, if you actually were able to get them to gather into a giant fleet and a giant air fleet, that would be great because you can just blow them to smithereens as they're coming across the ocean.
But nobody can possibly do that.
And I'm trying to remember, I've written about this so many times, we talked about the spending ratio.
I mean, the next closest peer competitor is China and Russia only spend about 10% of what we do on defense.
The numbers actually just came in again the other day.
Oh, did they?
It was the Veterans for Peace sent out a Twitter about it.
The U.S. this year is 48% of all world military spending is this country.
Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
And that's if you don't count big things like debt on former wars and Veterans Administration and all the money in Homeland Security.
Right, and in fact, the Independent Institute and Mother Jones agree that if you do add all those things up, it's a trillion dollars a year.
Oh yeah, yeah, easy.
I've seen as much as 1.27 and it's kind of like...
That's what I call bipartisan consensus right there.
Yeah, yeah, and that's upwards of half the federal budget.
So I forget what the federal budget is going to be.
I'm sure it's a 2.8.
Oh, I lost track.
You know, I decided I can't count as high as Barack Obama's budgets anymore.
Bush's were as high.
That's as high as numbers as my brain can get around.
Yeah, and this whole thing about what does it even mean when we just invent...
We're trying to get Congress to pass an $800,000 bill, but then we just turn around and just have the Fed just make it, just print it.
Crazy.
All right, well, yeah, and that's where we're at.
End the Fed, Jeff.
Well, you know, if you could at least restrict its powers, I mean...
Yeah, well, that's why we just got to end it, because you can't.
You know, most of my focus on the Constitution has to do with presidential powers and what does it actually say about the military and what does Congress control and what does the commander-in-chief control, but to create something like the Fed, that's another thing Congress just gave up.
Yeah, well, they're starting to fight back a little bit.
Now, I could keep interviewing you about all kinds of things, actually.
I've got a bunch more Afghanistan and Petraeus questions and all kinds of stuff, but now I'm out of time because I've got to play some Iron Maiden and get Jon Pfeffer on the phone to talk about the long and heroic history of American suicide bombing.
Groovy.
Okay, this has been a lot of fun.
Thanks a lot.
Well, thank you very much for joining me on the show, Jeff.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, yeah, it was much fun, and thanks for calling.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that's Jeff Huber.
You can find what he writes at original.antiwar.com slash Huber, and he writes at the blog Pen and Sword.
You can also find him over at Larissa Alexandrovna's blog at Largely, and the novel is called Bathtub Admirals.
I ought to read a novel someday.
Boy, has it been a long time.
