Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/5/23 Connor Freeman on Mark Milley’s Legacy

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

Connor Freeman joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the legacy of Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They start with some bad reasons people hate Milley before getting into all the terrible foreign policy that he oversaw. Discussed on the show: Peril by Bob Woodward “Washington Wants War with China Served Hot, Not Cold” (Libertarian Institute) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October the 5th, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough Already.

Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org, and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, and at all the video sites slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare,

at Scott Horton Show. All right, first up on the show today is Connor Freeman. He is my right-hand man, an assistant editor at the Institute, and he is an assistant news editor and sometimes columnists also at anti-war.com. Welcome back to the show. Connor, how you doing?

I'm doing great, Scott. How are you? Thanks for having me on. I'm doing great. Appreciate you joining us here. So Mark Millie, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, is out. And I just can't help but talk about this, because it is, for some reason, such a big deal, at least on the American right, but everybody should know about this. The story is that Millie committed some kind of treason and backstabbed Donald Trump by going over his helmet and talking to the Chinese. But they never really say what the supposed scandal is.

And I just want to break it down a little bit because I actually read Woodward's book about what was going on. And what was going on was all the ladies on MSNBC were hysterically predicting that Donald Trump was going to start a war with China in order to stay in office. And Millie, knowing that the Chinese would be hearing those rumors, called up his counterpart in the Chinese military. and said, I want you to know, that's complete nonsense. We are not going to surprise attack you for Donald Trump's politics. You can rest as sure if we ever go to war, it will have been as a result of weeks and weeks of failed diplomacy in a real crisis. It's not going to be some crazy thing like this, you know, over domestic politics. It didn't never happen.

And which, of course, was true. Donald Trump was not planning a surprise attack on China so you could stay in office. The whole thing was crazy. So all he did was help tamp down the possibility that the Chinese would take this threat seriously, maybe escalate their forces and their version of DefCon to a higher status of alert. And he was simply telling them, don't worry about that. And we're supposed to be mad at him for that? I don't know, Connor.

Can you think of anything else that Mark Millie did in his career as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? That was a bit more of a letdown? Yeah, I can. And, you know, the most interesting thing to me about that, too, is according to the Washington Post, one of the reasons why U.S. intelligence was indicating that Beijing believed an attack could be imminent was that the U.S. was carrying out dual aircraft carrier strike group military exercises in the South China Sea. And they were also concerned by Trump's, as they put a belligerent rhetoric towards China. And so Millie said my task at the time was to de-escalate. But he's done

nothing to change the trajectory of U.S. policy in the Asia Pacific since then. I mean, he's overseen these massive escalations in Barack Obama's Asia Pivot, you know, the largest military buildup since the Second World War and circling China for a future war in the region under Trump and Biden. And, you know, he's been the top military officer this whole time for the last four years. And so just as an example, in last year, the U.S. was flying spy planes. They did a thousand sorties in the South China Sea, sometimes just over a dozen miles in the baseline of China's mainland territorial waters. We had U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and amphibious alert groups, making eight deployments to the region as well with extended

durations. And the U.S. sent nuclear power to attack submarines in the South China Sea 12 times. The U.S. is carrying out right now, I mean, the largest iteration of these annual naval exercises that they do with the Philippines in the South China Sea, but also with Australia and Britain participating, Canada, France. Earlier, they carried out the largest military exercises they've ever carried out with the Philippines, the Balakatan exercises earlier this year. And so, you know, this just continues.

I mean, we've been setting the theater for war as, you know, the leaders in the U.S. military discuss our policy in China. They compare it to NATO policy in Ukraine following the coup in Kiev in 2014, or excuse me, policy in Eastern Europe following the coup in Kiev. And we're doing the same, you know, we're securing bases near Taiwan and China, building up military access in the Pacific Island nations, as Kenneth, Will Spatch, the commander of Pacific Air Forces, as explicitly stated, one of the reasons why they do that is because they want to overwhelm the Chinese target bank for one of war starts.

So they don't, as usual, I mean, they don't care how many people die as a result of these policies. It's just about really, I mean, deploy, I guess they hope that they can weaken China maybe by starting a war over Taiwan. And Millie's overseeing policies where now we have 200 troops deployed to the island. We're sailing warships of the Taiwan straight every month, and we've committed billions of dollars in military aid, and we're upgrading diplomatic ties with the island as well, and this is just constantly making war more likely and driving us closer to brinksmanship with China when we're already there with Russia. Give me just a minute here. At the Libertarian Institute, we publish books, real good ones. So far, we've got Will Griggs Snow Quarter. Sheldon Richmond's

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And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine.

And it's good for your eyes too. because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.caver's.cai to book your next eye exam, eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Imagine giving a war guarantee to a renegade province of a sovereign nation, right? We can't be an ally with them. They're not even a country. There's 7,000 miles from here. But let me ask you something because we do here. He hasn't stepped in to intervene in that at all.

The commander of Indo-Pacific command has said that his job, he's been given two jobs from Biden and Lloyd Austin's Secretary of Defense that, well, I want to prevent this war over Taiwan, but if it happens, oh, we're going to fight it and win it. And then, of course, April Haynes, Director of National Intelligence said that, you know, the policy is obvious to Beijing. They just all they have to do is look at what President Biden has said. And Biden has said about four times now that we have a defense commitment. And now the parallels with Ukraine are obvious. And obviously we have, especially more and more now, open statements by Western officials, NATO and American and Western European national government officials saying that they like the war and they think it's serving American and Western strategic interests by weakening Russia. We're bogging them down, giving them another Afghanistan, so to speak. And you kind of made reference there, but I wondered.

Do you have statements of American officials talk in the same way about China that actually, if they invaded Taiwan, that might be good for us in the end because they would have such a hard time, that kind of thing? Well, I think that's an example is what Will Spatch was saying. I mean, I wrote a piece about this for the Institute called Washington-Waunt's War with China served hot, not cold, and what you'll find there is mostly that, I mean, the top of the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Air Force, they're all talking about. about going to war with China, hot war with China, not just a proxy war. At the same time, there has been this idea that, you know, a good example of it, it's not as, you know, I haven't heard a comparison to Afghanistan the way we've seen like Hillary Clinton gleefully talk about and as soon as the Russians invaded Ukraine last year on Rachel Maddow's show. But an example would be Trump's former national security advisor. And there's a Massachusetts representative who

made this same point. But there was a U.S. Army War College paper about this as well, that one of the U.S. plans is to blow up the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing companies facilities as soon as the war starts over the island. And one of the reasons to do that is to basically make it so costly for China to take the island. And so they just, they don't care what the consequences are for the Taiwanese. They just want to hurt China. They just want to, you know, maybe bleed them in the war or just make this, you know, an insurmountable cost in order to, you know, reunify with the island after the U.S. has provoked this war by providing so much support. The other thing we've seen is, you know, they want to turn Taiwan into a giant weapons depot.

That was a headline in the New York Times last year. And so prepare them for this war. And it's one of the things that they were actually just talking about at the United States Taiwan Defense Industry Conference that was held in Virginia this week, actually. that basically the idea is that we need to we need to ramp up military readiness we've learned all these lessons in ukraine and we've got to do something about this backlog of 19 billion dollars allegedly in weapons that haven't been delivered that have been sold but haven't been delivered to taiwan and we've got to make sure they're prepared and ready to go you know and there is this comparison to ukraine we're seeing more and more and that's the other thing too you know lindsay graham is not a lone voice here there's uh several officials that are coming out now

saying, especially, you know, I actually just saw this Mark Thiessen last night on Twitter talking about this, where they say basically to the naysayers, the people that are now opposing the proxy war in Ukraine, this failed policy, they say, yeah, well, you're just saying we need to keep our powder dry for Taiwan, but I bet you won't even be here when we actually have to go to war with China to protect the island or, you know, and it's like, well, your nightmare is kind of what I'm hoping for here. and then vice versa. But yeah, it's the constant comparison

that if we stop in Ukraine, what message is that send to China? And the implication is that we're going to have a similar policy here too. Mark Thieson, the guy who made his name defending George Bush, torturing people to death. That's who decides consensus

in American public opinion, the lowest scum of our entire society. Okay, that's Connor Freeman from the Institute and Anti-War.com. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, Scott. All right, Sean, that is anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton.

I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and the author of Enough Already, time to end the war on terrorism. Find my full interview archive at scothorton.org. And follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. I am here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.