11/25/09 – Jeff Huber – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our next guest is retired U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber.
Writes for us pretty much every damn day at Antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Huber.
And he has his own blog, Pen and Sword.
And he's the author of the novel, Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you?
I'm getting over the swine flu.
Oh no, are you serious?
Huh?
Are you serious?
Oh yeah, no, it sucks.
Oh, I thought you meant just reading about McChrystal in the paper or something.
Oh, no, well that's, yeah, that's been depressing too, but...
Geez, well drink lots of water, that's what my mom would say.
Well, your mom would be right.
Alright, well, geez, I don't know how you continue to write so much great stuff while you have the swine flu, but...
Well, I'm glad that you do.
I go from my bed in the office to the computer.
He's a driven man, ladies and gentlemen.
It's my only activity now.
I'm unhappy that I don't get more physical activity, but it's at least, I suppose it's mentally stimulating to read and write about that stuff.
It looks like, from what I see, and I haven't checked in the last four hours, that we're going to escalate this war in Afghanistan, which I think is, you know, just a natural disaster.
Yeah, well, the news is that McClatchy yesterday said they're going to send 34,000 troops.
CBS had reported, I guess about a week and a half ago, that it was going to be 40,000.
But anyway, we're going to see some kind of escalation or another.
34 is the number I've seen the most of.
Yeah.
Well, and that was Strobel and Nancy Youssef, and I forgot the other one, but three great McClatchy reporters together wrote that one, so I'll put my books there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, McClatchy usually gets it right.
All right, now, well, let me start with a bigger, dumber question, and then we'll work toward the smaller, smarter ones.
But, you know, I was talking with my friend Gareth Porter on the show yesterday, and he's my favorite.
And my friend, too.
Yeah, yeah, he's the guy that knows everything about everything to me.
Yeah, yeah, he really does.
And he debunks everything that the war party says that's not true, which is everything that they say, and so he's very useful also on the show.
But so when it comes to the big question of why, he says there is no why.
It's all just stupid, and that's what you say in your article here today, too.
And Gareth said on the show yesterday, from the smallest detail about tactics to a step above that to some sort of strategy, however you define those things, you crazy military people, that they have no idea.
Gareth really understands about this stuff.
From tactics to strategy to, you know, political objectives, we stick guys in these outposts and put them in vulnerable positions, which we shouldn't do.
You know, it's like, oh, go up in the mountains and, you know, send a platoon or something up there and go get yourself shot up.
For what reason?
I don't know.
Go up in the mountains so high that the helicopters can't come up there to support you because they can't fly that high.
We're propping up a regime that we know is so crooked.
I mean, Karzai just stole two elections in a row.
Our counterinsurgency strategy is based on a basic lie, which is that there's a partner government, a host nation government that's worth backing up, which we don't have there.
We don't have it in Iraq either.
And, I don't know, I'm just really disgusted that you can't read minds, but Obama made a really critical mistake as a candidate, talking about Afghanistan being the war of necessity and wanting to get the job done there.
What job?
At this point, our best thing we can read is that there are maybe 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and maybe 300 in Pakistan.
And for that, we're going to send another 34,000 troops in there?
What on earth?
Here's the thing, too.
Everybody has their theory, right, where they emphasize this or that.
Some people say, well, you know, the Israelis are worried that Pakistani nukes will continue to exist.
Somebody's got to take their nukes away, and so our interest is staying there until the crisis is bad enough.
We can take those nukes, man.
That's who's running the policy.
And other people say, no, no, it's all about selling airplanes, man.
It's all about selling F-22s or 35s, whichever politically connected contract wins out in that argument.
And then other people say, no, dummy, it's all about the pipelines, because Houston wants that oil.
And then other people say, no, no, it's all just strategy and expanding the footprint in order to check the power of Russia and China, don't you see?
And basically what Gareth is saying, I think, if I can paraphrase him, is that ultimately all of those things just amount to conspiracy theories.
They all amount to ignorant people stabbing in the dark looking for a reasonable explanation that they can hang their hat on when, in fact, there is not one.
It's just generals killing people because that's their thing that they do.
Gareth is exactly right.
Let's run through some numbers.
It's hard to nail these down real accurately, but let's look militarily.
We spend more, let's see, what's our budget now?
$680 million, that's what we claim to be spending on defense.
Oh, well, it's a trillion a year if you count all the VA and the maintenance of the nukes and the Department of Energy and all that.
We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined.
China and Russia each spend about 10% as much on defense as we do.
Japan spends about 1% or less than 1% than we do.
We have no peer competitors.
According to FAS, which stands for Federation of American Scientists, we and our Western allies account for more than 90% of the world's arms sales.
So what are we doing?
And the people we're fighting now, the quote-unquote Taliban, they have no defense budgets whatsoever.
Yeah, they have AK-47s, and they still are winning.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, so, I mean, I don't get it.
I mean, look, people created the empire for a reason, and there's an empire.
But I guess you're just saying that the sharp edge of the empire is the heaviest part of it and leads it all, and there's the rest of those things.
Houston doesn't matter, and Russia and China aren't part of it, really.
It all just comes down to there are people fighting us, and so we have to fight them and just continue on.
Yeah, and people are fighting us because we're in their backyard.
Yeah, yeah, but never mind that.
They're fighting us, so we just have to fight them.
That's it?
I mean, come on.
There's got to be a reasonable explanation in here somewhere.
I mean, not one that any of us would agree with, but one that is some sort of explanation other than just generals like having their job and using it or whatever.
I don't know.
Well, no, I think that generals like having their job and using it is about 90% of the problem.
I've always said I've never met a guy with stars on his collar that I wanted to meet again.
Well, tell us about that.
You were the commander of what, when, and things like that.
What do you know about how these guys operate?
I don't like to get into it because that was no big deal.
I did 20 years and changed in the Navy, and I flew E-2 Hawkeyes, and I had command of a squadron.
Oh, right.
We talked about Hawkeyes once, I think.
Yeah, the Hawkeyes are the, well, guys don't like to hear me say this, but they're the mini AWACS planes.
Flew from aircraft carriers, studied at the Naval War College, and in my time in the Navy, again, I did not have a spectacular military career, but in my time in the Navy, I experienced and studied a lot of stuff.
And I know that it's one of the biggest groupthink outfits that ever existed.
And I know from my experience, I know that.
And I know from my studies that it has way too much influence on American policy.
Well, yeah, this is the story, right, since World War II.
They built up, in fact, Justin Armando in his recent article, I think, quotes John T. Flynn saying, see, this is what happens.
You get into World War II, and there is no undoing it after that.
It's too big of a war.
After World War I, they were able to disarm and tear things down a bit, but after World War II, there's just no going back.
Yeah, I think that's partly true.
There was a certain amount of they had to ramp up, back up.
They had to get the Army back in shape to fight Korea.
At least that's according to people like W.E.
B.
Griffin.
But, no, I think you're right.
After World War II, we've been in a wartime economy ever since then.
And that, some people will argue, and I think there's a certain legitimacy to it that World War II pulled us out of the Depression.
Pulled the world out of the Depression.
Well, you should read Bob Higgs about that, but that's a different story.
I'll send you a link.
Oh, okay, great.
Please do, please do, please do.
I'd love to see what he has to say about it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't want to get too far down into that road.
I guess, so the strategy for the long war amounts to mostly just a dirty snowball rolling downhill.
That is, there is no real worry.
As you said, the Russian and Chinese military budgets have nothing to do with any sort of offensive capability against us.
No, and they're not going to do anything.
I mean, China's not going to invade Taiwan.
Russia's not going to come through the flow of the past.
It just isn't going to happen.
And they have no interest.
They've all, well, they, they're, you know, actually they're two different entities.
But the Russians already know what happened to them when they tried to get into an arms race with us.
I'm becoming an isolationist.
Just to say, hey, you know, nobody cares.
Nobody's going to do anything.
Yeah, you know, somebody pointed out that there was a recent football game.
And they said, this, this program is dedicated to the American military forces serving our country in 177 countries around the world.
Yeah.
Well, isn't there only like 192?
Yeah, why is that happening?
And two of them, the two that they're in, are two of the most corrupt countries in the world.
And let's talk about that for a minute here.
This Karzai government, you mentioned that they stole two elections.
Why don't you explain a little bit about that for people who maybe don't know the story.
Karzai is the guy that they stole the election for in the first place back in 2004.
And then this was his big chance to stand the test of George and Laura Bush's new democracy for women's rights over there.
Sorry.
I just love that picture of Laura Bush looking all just ridiculous with this big stupid grin on her face.
And she's got women on either side of her that are wearing a completely black burka covering their entire body from head to toe.
And she's got her little headscarf on and she looks so lost.
It's the funniest thing in the world.
They actually put George Bush's wife out there to say that this was about women's rights.
I wonder which general's idea that was.
Yeah, well, gosh.
First of all, the guy's as crooked as the Missouri River.
Karzai, I mean, so was Bush.
He assigned all the electors.
There were two separate sets of election monitors.
One is, I can't think offhand of the exact right name for it.
Independent Election Commission, I think, is what the...
Yeah, I think that's right.
That was the Afghani bunch.
But Karzai appointed all those guys.
And then you had whatever the U.N. bunch was.
So election results come in and he has, you know, 57% of the votes in it.
A million votes get thrown out by the U.N. bunch.
I like that.
And then a million votes get thrown out.
A million votes.
A million votes, yeah.
And then...
Well, you had that guy Peter Galbraith, who's the rapist of Kurdistan up there, you know, making all his money there.
He was the election manager guy.
And even Peter Galbraith in his lowest depths of corruption could not countenance the cover-up of the stolen election in Afghanistan.
I think that's one of the greatest morality tales of our time, Jeff.
No, the Galbraiths would sit there and say, this is disgusting.
It's kind of like, you know, Satan's thing.
I know.
It's great.
I love all the great ironies of our age.
They're fun.
Yeah.
So he quits and then you got, what's his name?
What's his first name?
David?
Or Matthew.
I forget.
Matthew.
You're right.
Matthew Hope.
Saying, this is screwed up.
I got to quit.
Right.
He was the highest level State Department guy there or something, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And?
And then, well, and here's the fun part too, right, is then they pick this guy, the CIA or whoever picked this guy, Abdullah Abdullah, and they said, well, and I guess they had picked him before, but they said, we want to do a runoff.
We really want to get rid of Karzai because he keeps criticizing us for murdering women and children with our robots.
And we're tired of that.
So we want this new guy in there.
But then they realized they, they even said like, oh yeah, we're going to have an election.
And they even leaped to the New York times that Karzai's brother is a drug dealer and a CIA agent.
Like it wasn't the CIA that put that in a times and trying to discredit him in the run up to the runoff.
And then they realized, man, we can't even hold a runoff.
This isn't even going to worry.
And they had to call off the whole damn thing.
Go ahead and let cars.
I'd be the dictator anyway.
And then, and then, and then everybody can't even control their own quizlings.
Everybody from, from Hillary to Obama jumps in the bathroom and says, well, now he's the legitimate.
Yeah.
He's getting better and better every day.
Good God.
It's just, it's just awful.
And this is, we really, uh, we need to, uh, we need to just leave.
Now that the thing that I love is that somehow after all this manipulation and I've seen enough of this garbage and know what went on.
Um, that we're, we're going to send 34,000 more troops in there, but only because we have an exit plan.
I say, dude, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't exit by putting more people in.
Well, and you know, well, let me ask you though, cause I, I'm only playing stupid advocate here or something, but I'm trying very hard to think that maybe there's a possibility somehow that at the same time that, you know, Mr pragmatism up there is figured out this compromise with the generals where maybe, okay, we'll put in 40,000 more and then we'll just kill the shit out of a bunch of people for good nine months or another year or two.
And then, but we'll, we'll, we'll narrow the definition of victory to, eh, forget about cars.
I and forget about Helmand province and whatever.
We're just trying to find Arabs and kill them.
And whoever happens to die near that, uh, you know, if they're Saudis or Egyptians, there are only real targets and, uh, that kind of thing.
And then, uh, by limiting the definition of victory, then maybe actually they could get out sooner.
Eh, no, no.
Uh, I think you might be right.
I think you might be right, but that's certainly very bad thinking.
Um, you're talking about face saving and, and Obama, Obama did this to himself as a candidate.
And I'm, I'm real sorry about that.
Um, in whatever case he's, he's, he's fallen into the LBJ trap.
He's letting the joint chiefs push him around and it's just bad news.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, speaking of that, um, I saw in the news this morning that Ronald Reagan's friend, uh, poll pots, uh, torture head torture is on trial.
And that, yeah, and, uh, it's the trials wrapping up there.
And, uh, in fact, there's a great piece in GQ magazine, uh, about the trial of these, uh, Khmer Rouge torturers.
Um, and anyway, uh, so that brings up the whole thing about how the Cambodian thing happened.
And it was basically that America bombed Cambodia for so long that the government fell in the Khmer Rouge, took it over and brought hell to earth.
And then of course, uh, poll pot became a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan's ally, just because it was the Vietnamese communists who defeated us, who came in and probably the only honest regime change for human rights in the history of the world or something.
Um, but anyway, so that brings me to the whole thing about tearing Pakistan apart and who's going to end up ruling Pakistan after Mr. 10%.
And that means his bribe and his poll numbers, uh, falls.
And that, I mean, it seems like we're tearing Pakistan apart.
And, uh, you know, you mentioned Michael Hanlon, Michael O Hanlon, the, uh, cruise missile liberal, as Jeremy Scahill would call him, uh, uh, in your article today, dumb and dumber wars, which is about right. but he's the guy who back in November of 2007 co-wrote that thing with, uh, Robert Kagan in the Washington, no in the New York times saying we have to invade Pakistan and take their
We have to actually put boots on the ground in Pakistan and that, you know, we don't have to invade them to take their nukes.
We have these $2 billion freaking bombers that the guys who fly them can have breakfast with their families.
They can fly out there, blow the bejesus out of all their nukes and be home in time for dinner.
Yeah.
Well, but I mean, I mean that takes using nukes to blow the hell out of all their nukes, right?
Or you're just talking about the bunker buster thing.
We've got, we've got, we've got, uh, we've got some, uh, we've got some pretty good penetrators now.

wouldn't that be interesting if all that,
hype about making those bombs for use against Iran ended up being used on Pakistan?
Well, the, the newest bomb, I just looked this up.
It's a, it's a really big bomb.
It's a big ass bomb.
It's like, I don't know, 30,000 pounds, but it fits inside of a B2.
Yeah.
Well, and it's made to detonate, to penetrate deep in the earth and then explode pointed downward more.
And that kind of, yeah.
Yeah.
So you, so what you don't get, uh, part now, I'm not a, I'm not a physicist, but what you, you, you gotta be careful a little bit about when you go after, uh, nuclear weapons is that we do have physical material.
Uh, you're not going to set it off.
And you're going to pollute the place like crazy.
It makes me think those things are probably designed for Russian silos in the first place.
Right.
Right.
Oh, that's an interesting point.
Um, no, I think anyway, anyway, Pakistan though, I mean, these guys are tearing Pakistan apart.
They forced the diary to have this civil war.
He got millions of refugees.
And now this is the excuse for what if the nukes fall into the hands of the crazies when we're the ones making everybody crazy?
Well, you're exactly right.
We, the part of the bad part, of interventionalism, you know, you, you can look back at what did it do for the Brits?
Um, I, I tend to think of English speaking peoples because we tend to be the ones who create a lot of, you know, we're the worst of everybody.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Even worse than the Germans really.
Cause the Germans really only cared about the French and the Russians, you know, they were the, you know, the central, the central Europeans, those guys were worried about border wars.
Oh yeah.
I don't know if anybody's counted up the millions of people dead from America's wars and proxy wars just since the end of world war two, but it's a hell of a lot.
It's more than a few million.
More than a few.
Yeah.
Uh, I, I, that's, and that's where I come back to.
Um, I just saw, you know, Ron Paul gave a really nice speech in front of about two guys in the house.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I saw that.
And if you go to facebook.com slash, uh, I think it's anti-war radio or anti-war Scott or some, find me on Facebook and it's posted on the front page there.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's okay.
You're right.
It really is a great speech.
Beautiful speech.
And I, you know, it's taken me a long time to come around to him, but he just, he just nailed it.
And he says, what we're doing is just stupid.
And we're, we're so strong that we don't need to be playing bully like this.
Yeah.
Well, now do you see those parallels?
Is that kind of overly simplistic to say that, you know, Pakistan is Vietnam is Afghanistan's Cambodia kind of thing like that.
We're just sort of playing out the same thing where the bad guys have a safe Haven in the country next door.
So we have to bomb them even though there are allies and all that kind of thing.
Uh, I think that, um, well, I think that that's dumb.
I think that, uh, we have gotten to the point where we should get to the point.
I mean, you know, you, you talk about Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda has been pushed up as this, you know, the nation, then they're, they're the Nazis.
They're the commies.
They're the, they're, they're knuckleheads.
Yeah.
And there, what, maybe a couple of dozen knuckleheads at this point, as far as, I mean, they may have followers all over who knows where, who would agree with them about blowing up Americans.
But as far as actual bin Laden and Zawahiri and their pals, I mean, we're getting down to the, and the fact is, as you know, Bob Dreyfuss from the nation wrote a great article about this called the bogus war on terrorism, where he describes in detail how the CIA with their laser pointers and the U S air force with their J dams bomb the hell out of Al Qaeda.
They said, if you wanted to find these guys, you'd have to bring Q tips for what they left of them.
It was about 80 guys with Osama that escaped.
That was all they had back in 2001.
What a joke.
They're the new Moscow going to conquer the whole earth if we don't stop them.
Yeah.
And there's, yeah.
And it's, it's, it's just, we need to get back to a point where now I'm a Navy guy and I'm a, I'm an air power guy.
So, um, you, you kind of take that in mind, but this, this whole idea of invading and occupying countries with, with kids with boots is dumb.
Yeah.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
And, uh, I think you're right.
It is dumb.
The whole thing is stupid.
It's like murder, suicide or something.
It's a, the article is dumb and dumb or wars, uh, antiwar.com slash Hubert.
Thanks again.
All right.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Oh yeah.