All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today, I guess our only guest today, is our friend Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's also the editor of the Freeman, the Journal of the Foundation for Economic Education, and you can find many things that he writes at fff.org, and also at his blog, SheldonRichman.com, Free Association is the blog.
The latest piece for FFF is Obama Administration Brainwashes Public on Afghanistan.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
I'm doing fine, Scott, and always glad to be with you.
Thanks.
Good.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, yeah, tell us about this.
You start out talking about Governor George Romney talking about Vietnam.
Well, that's right, and that's why I used the word brainwashes in quotations.
Quotation marks in the title.
Back in 1967, George Romney, who was the governor of Michigan at the time, and was the father of Mitt Romney, was going to run for president.
He hadn't officially announced, but he changed his mind about Vietnam.
He had earlier been a supporter of the war in Vietnam.
He called it a morally right and necessary mission.
But then, as he was getting ready to run for president in 1967, he let it be known that he had changed his position.
So he was asked by a reporter, a Detroit radio reporter, why did you change your position?
And he referred back to a trip he had made to Vietnam with a bunch of other governors in 1965, where he said, and so he said to the reporter, when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.
Now this became quite a story.
In fact, it was regarded as a gaffe.
His fellow governors on the trip said they didn't know what he was talking about, what's the matter with the guy.
It just wasn't a very good time to be, as a Republican, I guess, to be changing, or as a warmonger.
Well, in the way he phrased it, he was calling himself weak enough to be manipulated by someone else.
So even in any other context, he's still making himself sound bad.
Instead of saying, boy, did they lie to me a lot, he's saying, boy, did I believe it a lot.
Well, and people have parted in with the fact that the Maturian Candidate movie had been out, and so that was about brainwashing.
So you're right, it didn't play well.
He did get into the race anyway, but he pulled out of the race in the New Hampshire primary about two weeks before the election.
So that was his short-lived presidential campaign.
So I don't want to ask the question.
Of course, we know that the government was lying about Vietnam.
It came to be known very shortly after that as the credibility gap.
In fact, at Dan Ellsberg, we have the Pentagon Papers, and we know how much they were lying.
Well, you know, my dad told me actually years and years ago that, boy, you think you're mad now.
Imagine what it would have been like if you were alive in 1967, 1968, where because of the way the media was then, some of those guys, they would be standing there in the middle of a battle going, yeah, thousands of Americans are dying all around me.
And then our next clip is of the Pentagon spokesman saying, yeah, they got a few dozen of us, but we got thousands of them.
And it was like, no, man, we were just watching on the other feed what really happened, what's happening right now in Vietnam.
So don't tell us that.
And it was apparently much more outrageous because it was much more blatant, at least with the Iraq thing.
If you wanted to get into it and believe in it, you could get away with it without too much dissonance somehow.
I don't know.
Yeah, well, of course, let's keep in mind it was the pre-Internet days, and we just didn't have the access to information the way we do.
We were totally in the pocket of the three major networks, and the three major networks were in the pocket of the administration, and they were going to see very little dissent.
It was a big deal when Waller Cronkite came out against the Warfare, what year that was.
That was a big deal.
Waller Cronkite, most of your listeners may not know who he is.
He was the most trusted man in America.
He was the guy on the CBS evening news every night, and most people thought he was next to God or Jesus in terms of virtue.
And when he decided that the war in Vietnam was wrong, it really was considered a big turning point to have somebody like that, of that stature, did that at a totally different time now.
But I use that story to go on to ask the question, would a politician suffer the same fate today?
If George Romney's son were to say, you know what?
We're being lied to about Afghanistan.
I've been brainwashed in a sense by the generals and by the statements by Obama and by Panetta and by Petraeus and by Clinton, and I've decided this is all a big lie.
What would happen to him?
Now, the Republicans, the Republican Party, of course, except for Ron Paul would be appalled by this because they're hawks, and they think they want to portray Obama as being an appeaser too weak.
He's even told us when the combat troops may be coming out, or at least Panetta let it slip when they would like to take them out.
As far as Gingrich is concerned, that makes Obama the most dangerous president in modern times, which, of course, is hoot.
So it probably wouldn't bode well for a Republican, a non-Ron Paul Republican, to say we've been lied to about Afghanistan.
However, we now know that.
I mean, we already knew this, but now we have it.
You know, we have the documentation that we've been systematically lied to, and the reason is, and your listeners know this, because you've had Gareth Porter on who's talked about this, I think, last week and maybe some others, but we have a report from Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis who has written an 84-page report, both a classified version and an unclassified version, and also a shorter article for Armed Forces Journal, I think it is, pointing out that after, and he spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, has been all over the country where the NATO and U.S. forces are and other places, and he says we're being totally lied to.
The public statements bear no relationship to what's going on there on any count.
And I was just looking over, again, the report, the unclassified report, which is online, where he says the general theme of the U.S. military leaders are basically three things.
The Afghan government will be at least minimally capable by 2014, and it's trending in that direction, at least minimally capable.
That's not a huge claim, but that's the claim.
Number two, the violence is waning in Afghanistan as a result of the surge that was the 30,000 troops added by Obama in 2010.
And third, that the people in Afghanistan recognize that the way of the Taliban is a dead end.
Davis says to this, none of those characterizations are accurate, close quote.
And his report just shows case after case how every claim, every glowing claim, everything even minimally positive is all false.
There's no good news.
Violence is up.
Civilian deaths are up.
Use of suicide bombing is up.
IEDs are up.
Everything's up.
And so it's one big lie.
And wouldn't it be very nice if some Republican who wasn't Ron Paul stood up and said, you know what?
We're being lied to, you and me, and that's enough of this crap.
Right.
Well, you know, Romney actually, of all of them, he was the one who dipped his toe in, you know, maybe we could find an end to this mission someday or something.
And he got attacked by the neocons quickly, and he took it back quickly.
And it's been nothing but hawkish since then.
Well, you know, my point is that what his father did, you know, even if the phrasing wasn't very good, was amazingly courageous compared to anything that Mitt Romney said.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it stands out.
I don't think anybody ever said Mitt did anything courageous at all.
It's one of the most courageous statements in politics, you know, judged by the standard of politics in America, that I can think of except for, you know, all of Ron Paul.
Well, at the same time, George Romney's son, Mitt, was young, fighting-age male, as they call, you know, any civilian enemy that they want to annihilate in Vietnam or Afghanistan or anywhere else, and he was out there protesting for the draft that he was evading by going on a mission to Europe, you know, not even to a dangerous place to convert new Mormons, but a mission to Europe.
And then he now has five fighting-age male sons, and he somehow has completely and utterly failed to convince any of them that all of these wars are so necessary that they need to help.
I'm sure he's doing some good for the country.
Yeah.
Well, he said in 08 that they're sacrificing for their country by traveling around in an RV trying to help get me elected.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the thing.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, and check out his blog, Free Association.
We're talking a little bit about Afghanistan and Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis's report, Dereliction of Duty to Senior Military Leaders, Loss of Integrity, Wounds, Afghan War Effort, about the war and about the lies that the Pentagon leadership tells to justify continuing this war.
And now the thing is about it, you know, you talked about, Sheldon, the thresholds that they were supposed to accomplish, you know, where people no longer think that the Taliban has a future and where, I forget, what were the others, to clear a hole and build one government in a box in one city somewhere, something like that, what was it?
Yeah, the government will be at least minimally capable by 2014 and it's trending in that direction.
And the second one is the violence is waning, specifically as a result of the surge.
And the third one, as you say, is that, you know, the Taliban is a dead end.
Right.
Okay, so none of these things have been accomplished or anything like it.
Boy, you're talking about, you know, setting up your own gold posts and then still failing.
It's really pretty bad when they ought to be able to at least prove the most kind of minimal improvement along these lines at all, but apparently it's just not the case.
They never can.
And I think if people are just honest with themselves, they will notice that all the pro-war statements, say like Newt Gingrich starts talking about Afghanistan or something, he doesn't have an actual case to make.
He doesn't ever say, like, look, we did a great job.
We, our CoinDinista guys succeeded in creating their government in a box in Kandahar.
It's working great so far and we can prove that and it's a great model for the rest of the country.
You don't hear them saying that.
It sure as hell isn't true.
They don't have any actual details that they can say.
They don't have any good news they can cite.
All they can do is just say, well, we can't give up now because we're making progress because just from being there, that means progress is being made.
But meanwhile, anybody who's talking details, they're the, well, maybe that's not the way to say it.
Anybody who's talking about how the war isn't going anywhere, they're like you.
They sit here and say, well, these are the things that aren't happening, at least these are the things that they say are the goals and it's not coming true.
You're not coming at me on anti-war radio today, Sheldon Richman, with a bunch of slogans about how the war is lost.
You're just describing in detail how the war is lost.
People have got to be able to notice that, that nobody ever really makes a compelling case about this war whatsoever.
Well, and don't forget, this is a report.
This is not Gareth Porter who's going to dig up this stuff, although I would highly respect that.
This is a lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army.
So we supposedly venerate the military in this country and the officers, of course.
And so here's a guy who has spent a year there, going all over the place, talking to all kinds of people, and who documents the lies.
So I don't understand why isn't he given a hearing and why isn't he being talked about by the candidates?
They'll just dismiss him.
And he makes this very serious charge that it's lying.
He's not saying that they've even spun it a little bit to their benefit.
He makes it so clear about the lies that, you know, he says senior-ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.
That's a quote.
I mean, this guy's got 84 pages of not just saying those things, but he puts the flesh on the bones.
He's got stories.
He witnesses the incompetence of the Afghan forces.
He's witnessed them, he says, even colluding with the insurgents.
Maybe they should be colluding with the insurgents.
Maybe if we got out of there, people would sit down and start talking about how they should bring an end to all this.
So I'm not faulting anybody for talking to anybody over there.
But for Petraeus and for Obama to be telling the American people we're winning this war, and therefore we can begin to get out in 2013.
I do hope we do get out in 2013.
I hope we get out tomorrow.
But don't lie to the American people about how a mission accomplished.
That's what they're saying.
Mission accomplished, or certainly on its way to being accomplished, when that's a total falsehood.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if it's treason, really.
I mean, we could argue, of course, that all along the war party's plans, you know, since September 12th, have been against America's interests and for the interests of our enemies.
But at least there's a very personal betrayal going on here.
And you talk about it, and, oh, I wanted to mention, as you say, he's got anecdotes.
His job was traveling around to all the different divisions in the country, making sure that they're well equipped and whatever, basically taking their orders for what kind of weapons they need and armor they need and whatever.
So he had opportunity to be all over the country talking to everybody and seeing all these different, you know, having a lot of experience in Afghanistan just from the job that he had.
You quote him talking about these commanders, basically these officers, or at least non-commissioned officers, talking about sending their men out to die for nothing.
And how am I supposed to, you know, Johnny died yesterday, and now I've got to tell Billy, get out there, and yet I don't have a convincing case for Billy, right?
This is where the rubber meets the road here.
The specialists going out on patrol don't know why they're there or what they're meant to accomplish or what's it all for anyway, why, you know, five of their guys died in the last month or whatever.
That is a pretty harsh stab in the back, especially after building all these guys up to be our demigods in this society, our idols we're supposed to stop and clap for at all times or whatever, when really you treat them like garbage.
He quotes a unit senior officer who asked him, how do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions?
What's harder, how do I look at my soldier's wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful?
How do I do that?
It's almost hard to read those words without feeling, you know, something welling up.
I mean, think of what's happening there.
Who's still joining the Army every day on the basis of, I'm going to join this great crusade, the successful, you know, noble mission, when it's nothing like that.
It's not noble.
It's a losing cause.
It's making enemies against the American people.
And it's a crime from the top all the way down to, you know, the lowest decision maker in this process.
These are criminals.
Yeah, well, and also, you know, and it gets back to the original point about George Romney and his son Mitt, about the cowardice here where no one on the national level, certainly not in the presidential race, is willing to talk like this, except for Ron, and he's really just, I don't know, there to reveal in stark relief just how, you know, horrible these other people are.
Where, you know, I guess as far as Romney and Gingrich and Santorum and Obama are concerned, you can just keep sending people's kids out there on ridiculous, you know, IED lottery missions in Central Asia from here on.
Why not?
Just from now on.
And the level of betrayal, it doesn't even get calculated in their decision making process whatsoever.
They don't care whether these non-commissioned officers can tell their enlisted men what they're dying for or not.
They don't care.
Why should they care?
All they need is for the commercial on TV to make it seem like you'll have creases in your pants and a neat sword to play with and you'll be real honorable-like, and that's all you need to know.
Look, in the geopolitical game, what does it matter?
What does one life matter?
I mean, it doesn't.
And one life added up to where it's thousands and thousands of lives, it still doesn't matter, because the geopolitics is too important for these guys, and they can't be bothered by little details like this.
I hope there's a debate tonight.
I would love to have Ron Paul have this report in his hand and wave it, and every chance he gets say, well, what about this?
Ask him about this.
Ask the other guys here about this.
I mean, the media is tired of a multi-man race.
They desperately want it to come down to Romney and now Santorum is the new favorite, and they don't want to talk about Ron Paul or the issues he's uniquely raising because no one else is talking about this stuff.
Well, and you know, most people in America, I think, maybe the super majority of people in America, they don't care about politics at all, certainly not foreign policy, except maybe during a presidential election.
And there are people, like you say, who join up the service because as far as they know, it's something called the service, where you're doing the right thing for your country, and if the consensus in the democracy is that this and that ought to be happening and that we need these guys to defend us, then this is the job for the brave.
I'm brave.
I'll go do the right thing and sacrifice for my country, whatever.
They're going in with the best of motives, really, you know, as wrongheaded as it all is, and they don't ever get exposure to the kinds of things that, you know, he's saying, Davis, or you, or Ron Paul is saying this time, except on such rare occasions as really they have Ron Paul to say it.
And where are the rest of the leadership and the media on this?
Yeah, they're out for lunch.
All right, FFM.org is still there and has been.
Sheldon Richman, everybody, Free Association, thanks so much, Sheldon.
Thanks, Scott, anytime.
Bye-bye.
