05/15/07 – Patrick Foy – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and introducing my first guest today, Patrick Foy.
He is the author of the book, The Unauthorized World Situation Report, which is very interesting, and has written a few very good articles for Taki's Top Drawer, the new web-zine, including one called The Kissinger Connection, which was very interesting to me.
Welcome to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
I'm very happy to be on the show.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, I can hear you just fine.
Okay, great.
As I said, I think I wrote you last week.
The last time I had been interviewed on the radio was by Larry King, but that was face-to-face, and it was back in the 1970s at some point, so I'm not used to being interviewed over the phone, but this is great, if it works.
Well, you just keep writing good stuff, and this is the kind of thing that will happen to you more and more, I hope.
Okay.
And, you know, this article, well, I guess we can start with the fact that 600-something thousand Iraqi people are dead, and that there is a debate going on right now, I guess, among anti-war forces, as to whether the complete and total destruction of Iraq is really mission accomplished.
So I guess I'll just start with asking you, what's your gut feeling there?
You think that this was all on purpose?
Well, as for Bush, I'm not sure if he himself even knows what his goal was, or what he had in mind.
I don't think he wanted to deliberately destroy Iraq the way it has ended up, but he has, I think as Pat Buchanan put it some time ago, that the Bush administration had outsourced their foreign policy in the Middle East to Ariel Sharon.
I don't think that was a far-fetched comment, and I think that the invasion of Iraq was totally gratuitous, unnecessary.
We can see that now.
And what makes it very sad is that means that every dollar spent there, and every life lost, both of our soldiers on the other side, was unnecessary, to no purpose.
Well, and it's especially dying in vain when you think you're dying to create a stable central state, and your mission is actually to tear the country apart.
Well, that's kind of a theory that you might have.
How could all these smart people go about their business and create such chaos if they're so smart?
If they're so smart, maybe what the result is has been deliberate.
So, I mean, we're obviously speculating you can't prove anything like that.
But I think in that article that you mentioned, the Kissinger connection, or it's maybe another article, I quote David Wormser, who is, I don't quote him, but another writer quotes him in another magazine.
And he's now Cheney's Middle East advisor, Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor.
And it looks like they're getting ready to attack Iran next.
And he wrote very openly that the Iraq would implode and be ripped apart by civil war.
This is before we invaded.
But hey, we should go ahead and do it anyway.
And this is a good thing.
And we'll try to make something good out of it later.
But they were very interested, the so-called Neocons, in starting this war and getting in there and what the hell happened later in terms of the chaos and destruction.
That was very much a second consideration.
But we see now what happened.
And Wormser was right.
And they didn't care.
They just went ahead.
Well, in the summer of 2002, I was actually quite amazed.
I figured that George Bush was going to, you know, act just like George Bush's son.
And yet, Henry Kissinger, although he was probably the most hawkish of them, but I think he could be lumped in with the rest.
Kissinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, all wrote op-eds in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, et cetera, saying, hey, what are you doing?
Iraq's not next.
Or if it is, you're not supposed to do it this way.
What the hell's going on here is basically what they were all getting at.
Kissinger wrote such an article?
Yeah.
Now, he was saying he didn't want to directly confront Bush.
But you could tell in the article he was discouraging it and was saying, well, at least you've got to go through the U.N. and get as many allies as possible, you know, get a U.N. resolution to make it OK.
I think what they were doing, Scott, it seems to me, is pulling around around what were the best tactics to do it.
I don't think they were against the project in itself.
It's how do we get the U.N. behind it?
How do we get the Congress behind it?
How do we go about it?
The general plan or goal was, hey, this is a good idea.
After all, don't forget the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which was passed in the Senate by unanimous declaration and by extremely lopsided vote in the Congress.
So this was kind of there in the foreign policy establishment.
Let's go get Iraq.
And so I doubt that Kissinger was against invading.
He was just forgetting it.
You know, let's get our ducks in a row and do it right.
And as it happened, the U.N. did not authorize war.
And not that we need the U.N. to authorize anything, but from an international legal standpoint, they did not authorize it.
The Senate and the Congress voted to authorize Bush to do whatever he wanted to do.
They didn't declare war.
So he went ahead and did what he wanted to do.
And, you know, now the Congress hasn't worked out like they didn't we didn't get away with it or the United States government didn't get away with it.
So now they're using Bush as a punching bag.
But they enabled Bush.
They made it all possible, the Democratic establishment.
Remember the two leaders at that time, Gephardt and this other senator, they wanted to get out and campaign for the 2002 midterm elections in November 2002.
The vote was taken in October.
And they didn't want to get tarred with being felt unpatriotic or something and not fighting terrorism because often terrorism.
So they said they knew that Iraq had been decimated by these sanctions under Clinton.
Its armed forces had been reduced by two thirds.
It had people were dying of malnutrition.
And because of lack of medicine and stuff.
So this was a predatory decision on the part of Cheney and Bush.
And the Congress went along with it and enabled it.
Thought it'd be easy.
Get away with it.
We're in, we're out.
No big deal.
It hasn't worked out that way.
Well, I guess what I'm trying to get at there is that consensus, whether it appears to me, perhaps, you know, I'm wrong about this, but it appears to me that really it was George Bush and Dick Cheney who were really leading this thing, that many other people were counseling caution, but basically decided to go along because what are you going to do?
And you know, that kind of thing.
But well, for example, I have a quote here from Zbigniew Brzezinski who to my mind has always been basically indistinguishable from Henry Kissinger.
Both of them, you know, are found and promoted by the Rockefeller brothers back in the, in the sixties and seventies.
And, and here's Zbigniew Brzezinski in his new book says that the only saving grace I'm reading from the antiwar.com blog here.
Zbigniew Brzezinski said the Iraq wars quote only saving grace is that it made Iraq the cemetery of neocon dreams.
Here's Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Hey, I don't think the neocon should have been taken seriously to begin with.
And they certainly shouldn't have been put in places of power that Cheney and Bush and Rove put them in.
And I'm talking about Wobblewitz, Douglas Fyfe, Elliott Abrams.
They don't have any independent, Pearl, they didn't have any independent power, but Cheney and Rove put them there.
And they were able to carry out their agenda.
And it's caused the United States this debacle.
And they should be held accountable.
Well, what do you think that Cheney put them in there?
Was it they're leading him or he just wanted to set them up, make them take all the blame for?
No, I don't think he wanted to take them to take all the blame.
That's a very good question.
That's a that's a very good question.
And, you know, I'm reminded in Greg Palast's book, he talks about, of course, from his point of view, everything's about the oil, what's going to happen to the oil?
And he chases he traces the two different chains of command, basically, the neocon plan and the oil company plan, and their men, you know, the chain of command in each project, and they both lead back to Dick Cheney.
He's the one who Yeah, that's kind of interesting.
He's, he's right at the center of it.
So it's very true.
Somebody has to sit Dick Cheney down and ask him a few questions, maybe under oath.
I do not think I understand I've come across his writings, Greg, Greg Palast.
Yeah, Palast.
And, you know, it's not credible to think that big oil to use that term, caused this war.
You know, we're not getting any oil out of Iraq.
And I don't think we're going to start getting oil out of Iran if we start attacking Iran.
So you've got the second and third largest oil reserves in the world, these countries, and somehow, they're our worst enemies, and we're going off attacking them.
I think that big oil is simply big business.
And big business does not like chaos and uncertainty.
They like, they want to make their profits, they want to do business, and they don't care who they do business with.
So I don't see big oil as the prime motivator of invading Iraq.
I really don't.
Well, you know, Palast, what, the point that Palast is making there, actually, is that the, that the oil men wanted to keep that oil off the market, that that's been their policy since the 1920s, is to develop as little of that oil as possible in the Iraqi-Iranian region, and to keep Saudi Arabia the dominant force in OPEC.
And that their original plan was just to, basically the Colin Powell-James Baker plan, was to try to do what he called a coup d'etat disguised, or an invasion disguised as a coup d'etat, but basically replace Saddam with the next Baathist general in line, and leave everything else as is.
And it was the NEOCOM plan that said, no, you have to completely destroy everything, and fire all the Baathists, and fire the Iraqi army, and turn the whole place upside down.
Well, the reason the NEOCOMs would say that, it makes sense, because obviously, they don't want the country reconstructed, because it is sitting upon an ocean of oil, and oil means money.
So, you know, the whole country could be rebuilt again, and in theory, re-militarized.
And down the road, if you have another leader who is going to take an interest in the Palestinians, and try to do something for them, or use that as a propaganda vehicle, you have a potential adversary for Tel Aviv and Israel.
And they don't want any adversaries.
They want total dominance over that area.
And now they certainly have it.
They've got 300 atomic bombs, they've got German, most advanced German submarines, from which they can launch cruise missiles with atomic warheads.
They have all sorts of advanced aircraft.
They now are going to get the stealth aircraft from this country.
They want to keep that paramancy over the region.
And that's why it's not in their interest for anybody in Iraq, or the nation state of Iraq, to resurrect itself.
So that's why they might take that position.
As far as this oil, I don't know, just invading a country to keep their oil off the market?
I read what he said about that.
I don't know if that really is credible.
I think it is true that this country has enormous amounts of oil reserves.
So this idea that we've got to stop buying foreign oil, we don't need foreign oil.
We've got Alaska, we've got Texas, we've got the Gulf Coast, we've got oil all over the place.
So we don't need to go off invading countries and doing this and that.
It's none of our business to begin with.
So I don't think these oil executives are quite that Machiavellian to do that, or to get Cheney, single-handedly, or Bush to do that.
I think it's more a question of domestic politics, certainly the Israel lobby so-called, that establishment, and feeling that somehow, you know, Saddam's a dictator, and we're Democrats, and we've got to go do this.
Well, if we go off invading all these other countries, we're going to be bankrupt.
And that seems to be where we're headed.
Are the U.S. dollars certainly going to be worthless?
Well now, if keeping the oil off the market is part of the plan, then Kissinger's role in this makes sense, right?
If he's traditionally considered to be a Rockefeller guy, doesn't Kissinger's role and Paul Bremer, his deputy's role in helping implement the neocon plan, doesn't that kind of show the consensus there between these two factions?
Well, but they're trying to do two different things, according to this theory.
On one hand, they're trying to keep the oil off the market.
Oh, I see.
Keep it off the market.
Hey, as long as everybody's killing each other, that's working.
Destroy the country.
I see.
I see.
Destroy the country and keep the oil off the market.
And, well, I guess they do converge.
Yeah, so they're Houston, and the neocons are seeing eye to eye.
And this brings me back, actually, to you mentioned earlier, the first Gulf War and the sanctions and all that.
Well, actually, there's a couple places I could go there, but I'll tell you, I read in the book Neocond, an article by, I forget the guy's name, but it was about a conversation that he claimed to have had with Edward Lutwack on the eve of Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
Right.
I'd be interested what they said, what he said.
Well, apparently, what he said was, Iraq is a giant Arab state.
They could be wealthy if they're allowed to pay off their debts, and they could be a threat to Israel.
So our game is to smash them into a million pieces.
And this was a conversation that had taken place back in 1990.
Well, that's entirely credible.
And that's, you know, both wars.
I mean, we talk about regime change.
I think the first war was just as much about regime change as the second war.
We didn't go into Baghdad, but what did we follow it by?
We followed it by these sanctions, and no matter what Saddam and Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, did, it wasn't enough.
And this went on for 10 years, and it's been documented in that book, The Scourging of Iraq.
I forget the author's name, I have it in the next room, but there was enormous death and devastation caused by those embargoes of medicine and food and other such things.
And so this is like a giant softening up process with the hope that it would lead to an uprising against Saddam, and he'd be thrown out.
Well, it didn't.
That was the purpose of it.
It didn't.
So finally, after this 10-year softening up period, I think finally they realized, well, at some point these sanctions have to come off because he has in fact complied.
He has complied, and the UN inspectors were finding that.
They're saying, we don't see any weapons.
This man, in effect, has complied.
Aziz naturally said, you know, we've got to get these sanctions lifted.
We have met the requirements.
And of course, that's the last thing Washington wanted are certain people in Washington.
It would have been a good thing if the sanctions had been taken off, and all you had was a military embargo of military supplies.
But that wasn't good enough.
They wanted to take out the whole regime.
So when they finally got in there, they did take it out, root and branch.
And you remember that original guy, then their general...
Garner.
Garner.
He was trying to, you know, he was an honest guy thinking, well, I'm here to try and do some good.
I'm not here to wreck the country and destroy people's lives.
But again, he didn't realize what was going on, immediately replaced by Bremer.
And Bremer goes ahead and does all these things that make no sense except have created the, like deliberately, the insurgency.
And where's Bremer?
Why aren't we having congressional hearings if everybody's so upset about the aftermath of the war or the occupation?
Let's have congressional hearings.
Let's call Bremer.
Let's call Kissinger.
Let's call Douglas Fife.
Let's have some investigation, some accountability.
They don't want to go there.
People in Congress, Democrats don't want to go there.
Why not?
Well, it must be because they're cowards, because, of course, it's a terribly interesting set of questions that need to be answered, beginning with how come Kissinger, who's identified as, you know, Mr. Realist school, is how come his deputy Bremer, his lackey from Kissinger Associates, while in power, did nothing but implement the neocon plan for Iraq rather than the Council on Foreign Relations' Colin Powell plan?
Has it occurred to you that possibly Kissinger is a secret neocon?
It has.
It has.
Well, and I mean, this is really the question.
This is why I loved your article so much, because it really all can come back to Henry Kissinger himself.
And whether he's working for anybody other than himself at this point or what?
Well, he does have a very lucrative firm there, Kissinger Associates.
I'm sure he's making a ton of money and so forth.
But what was interesting is that once this was reported, this was deliberately kept very, very quiet, you know, his connection.
And it only came out in Bob Woodward's book.
And, you know, at the time, I said, God, this is a bombshell.
Are they going to ask Bush about this?
Is somebody going to camp, some reporters camp outside Kissinger's apartment and follow up on this?
Absolutely nothing.
No follow up.
Nobody asked the president anything about it.
And Bob Woodward was on television.
He said he was speaking to Cheney.
Cheney called him up, had a terrible conversation with him, and Cheney ends up hanging up on him.
So they wanted to keep this very quiet Kissinger's connection here.
Now, you know, why?
Why would that be?
I mean, if we're engaged in a legitimate enterprise here to benefit the world, we're fighting terror, whatever we're doing.
Why couldn't Kissinger go in the front door of the White House and come out and make a statement?
This is what I advise the president, et cetera, et cetera.
But no, everything's very behind the scenes, closed doors.
So, you know, Woodward quotes Cheney saying, I probably talked to Henry Kissinger more than I talked to anybody else.
He just comes by, I guess, at least once a month.
Scooter Libby and I sit down with him.
That's on page 406.
Woodward goes on to state, the president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making the former secretary the most regular and frequent outside advisor to Bush on foreign affairs.
Boy, nobody knew anything about this until Woodward wrote about it.
So I think that's a real interesting nugget of information.
It wasn't followed up on, you know, what was Kissinger advising him?
Was he the man that said to disband the army, throw out all the Baathists, you know, do a shock treatment for Iraq?
If so, he's responsible for the mess rent.
But whatever his motivation, maybe he just has colossally bad judgment.
Maybe he's not the genius that we all think he is.
That's another possibility.
Yeah, I think that may be the most likely one there.
There's so many things here that are mind-boggling and we don't know which way to turn.
And you know what one of the problems is?
We sort of keep, the people in the anti-war movement, we keep going over this and exposing these people and pointing it out.
It doesn't seem to make any difference.
In other words, the emperor has no clothes.
It doesn't matter.
The parade continues.
Right.
And it just shows how powerful the, whatever you want to call it, the foreign policy establishment, who's ever running the show here, the exposure doesn't seem to matter to them.
They're just so powerful, they just keep moving forward.
Bush is continuing to sound like he's going to attack Iran.
I mean, just today, I was reading about this guy, this Christian fundamentalist character, James Dobson.
He met, he goes and meets with Bush, and he says, he says, I wish the American people could have sat in at that meeting we had with the president.
And Dobson went on to enumerate a series of meetings convened by the Christian right leaders in Washington to discuss the supposedly existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran.
You know, I don't think Iran is any more a threat to the United States than Iraq was.
I'm speaking now.
So I mean, it's starting all over again with Iran.
I mean, I think they obviously have a nuclear energy program to produce electricity.
I think their mullahs have given a fatwa saying nuclear bombs are against our religion.
We are not going to develop nuclear weapons.
I think we could negotiate that point, talk to them, and get firm guarantees of that.
But it seems that that's not enough.
Cheney and Bush, I mean, Cheney's on that aircraft carrier threatening them.
How do we feel that we had a country sitting off the coast of, an aircraft carrier of some country sitting off the coast of New York, you know, threatening us?
So it's no wonder that Iran feels threatened and some of their leaders might become irrational.
We've got to talk with these people.
And Dobson goes on, he says, many people in position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear biological or chemical attack.
Again, it's the same scare tactics as we had with Iraq.
I mean, it's just totally insane.
Iran is no threat to us.
We've got to learn to live with them.
And it's, you know, it's an area of the world that we should not be so warlike involved in.
We can be involved in a peaceful way.
I mean, after all, this situation with taking our hostages, I mean, that was back in Jimmy Carter's day.
I mean, that's over.
We don't need to continue this for the next hundred years.
And again, what's the motivation?
Is it big oil that's motivating us to bomb Iran?
Well, James Baker's against it.
Zbigniew Brzezinski's against it.
Okay.
So I doubt that it's big oil.
So, you know, we can't be let down the path again by our friends in the White House.
And I don't know where Dick Cheney's coming from or what he's thinking, but I think he should resign as soon as possible and get off the screen, get off the radar screen, because he has caused a lot of problems for this country.
And I think, you know, you go back to the Baker report, you keep bringing up James Baker, and I think he's a pretty key person here with the Baker-Hamilton report.
Yeah.
Well, his law firm, Baker Bots, represents every oil company in the world.
Okay.
Well, that may well be true.
Including Halliburton.
Including Cheney's company, Halliburton.
Okay.
But at least he realizes this is a debacle.
And again, our people are getting killed on the ground there in asymmetrical urban guerrilla warfare, which we cannot win, which we have already lost.
We lost the moment we stepped foot in there in that country and got involved on the ground in an urban guerrilla warfare.
But here's why I call it a Cheney Regency.
Cheney is in charge.
He's the chief executive officer of this government, not George Bush.
George Bush now has always been more or less a spokesperson.
He's a very good spokesperson.
But Cheney is the brains behind it.
And so you've got two people.
You've got Cheney, and you've got James Baker.
Okay.
James Baker comes up with the Baker report.
This was a perfect opportunity for Bush to get out, to say to Cheney, listen, things have not worked out.
I followed your advice.
This is a mess here.
Now, I'm going to turn to James Baker.
After all, James Baker is former secretary of state.
He's the guy that went to Florida, took care of that problem down there in 2000.
Obviously a very savvy, smart guy.
Bush should have, I wrote this at the time, sent it out to some friends.
I sent out these little newsletters once in a while.
He should have brought Baker in and made him secretary of state.
He should have fired Condoleezza Rice, who's another waste of time.
He should have said, okay, Jim, you're in charge of this.
Get your people.
Do what you want to do.
Let's try and make the best of it.
And Cheney, they could have confronted Cheney and said, listen, you've got a heart condition.
This is a lot of stress.
We'd like you to take it easy, resign.
And you'd have James Baker as secretary of state, and then you could pick somebody like, this sounds pretty far-fetched, I know, but why not Senator Chuck Hagel for vice president?
And between Chuck Hagel, Vietnam veteran, and Robert Gates over at the Defense Department, and James Baker at state, and just have Bush take it easy and let them try and handle this and undo all the damage that Cheney and Bush and the Neocons had done.
This was a way out.
But it didn't work.
So this proves to me Cheney won, Baker lost.
You haven't heard a peep out of Baker since then.
And Cheney is continuing on his one-track path.
And it looks like the next stop is Iran.
Yeah, it's just like how America got out of Vietnam by bombing the hell out of Cambodia and Laos.
And then leaving.
But we're not making any friends, that's for sure.
And it's costing a lot of money, it's costing a lot of lives.
I don't see the point.
And I know that this is one of the things my friend Taki feels as well, he's outraged at the country being taken advantage of and being used like this.
And that's what's happening.
We're being used for some private agenda, whatever it is.
It obviously doesn't make sense on its face.
And so naturally I think we should resent that.
Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that American interests as a whole are not being served here.
But merely the interests of very small special interest groups.
Well, it's not the interests of humanity in general.
I mean, not just us.
I mean, those people over there, you know, look at Lebanon, what happened there.
This is all under Bush and Cheney, the invasion of Lebanon last summer.
That was looked upon by Cheney as a warm-up for Iran.
Let's see what the Israelis can give us in the way of practical experience in terms of going after Iran.
It's like all part of the same ball of wax and the same program.
And where it's going to lead, I don't know where they think it's going to lead or why they're doing it or what's going on behind the scenes.
You know, I think we're all sort of innocent bystanders looking at this and trying to scratch our heads and figure, well, this doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I feel like, a bystander.
Exactly.
Now, this is a little bit off topic, but you mentioned it earlier, and I just hate to miss the opportunity to play this soundbite for you.
So hang on just one second.
Listen to this.
Okay.
We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, that we think the price is worth it.
That's former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speaking with Leslie Stahl.
I mean, you know, they talk about, you know, everybody's ganging up on Bush, but this is a consistent policy through at least two administrations and then going back to Bush one.
And they're following this same playbook, destroy Iraq at all costs, or they call it regime change.
But in the process, they don't care how many people get killed, apparently.
Yeah.
Well, and we're going on almost two million people killed by the United States since 1991 at this point.
Well, you know, it's sickening to think about it because this has all been done in our name.
We've had no control over it.
It's been done by the government.
And what did Chalmers Johnson say about blowback?
American people don't realize what's being done around the globe in their name.
And we feel the consequences.
We will get the consequences.
Yeah.
And then because we don't understand why the consequences come, we let our government use those consequences as an excuse to go do some more.
Boy, did you hit the nail on the head there.
We don't understand what's happening or what has happened.
That's a very important point with respect to 9-11.
We had 9-11, and instead of commentators saying, well, what happened here?
All of a sudden, out of the blue, these terrorists from Saudi Arabia, Middle East, come over here and attack us.
Now, granted, they're insane, but why would they want to do this?
What is bothering them?
They're obviously disturbed.
And what was Bush's answer or Cheney's answer?
Well, they hate our democracy.
And so this was used as an excuse, I think.
Remember Pat Buchanan said, what did he say?
He said, they're over here because we're over there.
Well, this was just used by the White House as another excuse to go back over there and to make things worse.
And now they are worse.
I don't think we can take out every terrorist in the world when we're creating terrorists faster than we can take them out.
And that's probably what's happening.
Well, Henry Kissinger advises that we can't leave until we have victory.
I can't believe he would say that.
I don't know, Scott, you're probably taking that out of context because he knows there's no victory now.
That's ridiculous.
And actually, he said as much publicly since then.
That quote that I just said was from the Woodward book.
But you're right, he's actually come forward publicly and said that there will be no victory in Iraq since then.
Well, how would you define that?
I mean, at what price do you want to pay for this?
Look at these generals on television coming out against Bush.
They're saying quite openly something Murtha said a year ago.
The army is broken.
The Marine Corps is broken.
And when people have nothing to lose, we have everything to lose.
These guerrilla fighters, jihadists, they have nothing to lose.
In fact, losing their life is a good thing for them.
So we are very much at a disadvantage in fighting this war.
And I'll tell you something else.
Afghanistan was a template for what's going on in Iraq.
The Mujahideen, the jihadists with bin Laden there, getting aid from the CIA, as you know, and from our government.
And the holy war against the Soviets in the 1980s.
And the holy war against the Soviet Union.
And that brought down the Soviet Union.
That destabilized the Soviet Union, that situation with Afghanistan.
And that was one superpower out.
Now, actually, that was a good thing for the world.
Because we got rid of the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
But, you know, I think at that point, that should have been stopped.
And now, because our continued involvement in an unwise way, with respect to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with respect to the Middle East in general, now we're the target.
And I think bin Laden has said, we'll do the same thing with Iraq.
And, my God, what more does he have to do?
I mean, we're not going to implode like the Soviet Union, but the dollar could crash over this thing.
We're already, all around the world, people don't like us.
They don't like our government.
They like Americans, but they don't like what we're doing.
And how much more blood and treasure do you want to throw in there?
I don't think Iraq is worth the life of one American Marine, and we shouldn't be there in the first place to do anything like that.
So, it's nuts.
Yeah, what's funny is, that very last phrase there about it's not worth one more American Marine, that's basically directly paraphrasing Dick Cheney from 1991.
That going after Saddam Hussein isn't worth one more American soldier's life.
Well, I guess he changed his tune in the meantime.
I sometimes wonder if, Cheney, I'm sure you've seen the movie, I hope this isn't libelous, the movie The Manchurian Candidate.
Uh-huh.
No, you wonder, did someone get inside Dick Cheney's brain or something?
Yeah, Brent Scowcroft said, I've known Dick Cheney for 30 years, but I don't know him anymore, whoever this guy is.
So, somebody has gotten to him, and he's had a change of mind.
And, you know, I don't really care what his motivations are.
All we know is, it's a failure.
And he's wrong.
Yeah.
And we've got to get him out of there before he does any further harm to the country, I mean Bush as well.
But, I mean, they've got to step aside.
They both should resign.
That's the fact.
And even if it means putting Nancy Pelosi in there for a while.
I mean, they have failed, and they've done the country a lot of harm.
Not only that, they've misled the country with the whole lead-up to the war.
And, you know, I think a self-respecting person would say, okay, I botched it, I'm sorry, let somebody else try and do something else.
I don't see why that would be unprecedented, but, I mean, why not?
I mean, if they were honest, that's what they would do.
Patrick Foy, he's the author of the Unauthorized World Situation Report, and writes essays for Talkie's Top Drawer, which you can find at talkiemag.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Patrick.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.