Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/30/21 Daniel Larison: US Militarism Should Have Died With the Soviet Union

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Scott is joined by Antiwar.com contributing editor Daniel Larison to discuss his most recent piece. Larison argues that the period following the peaceful breakup of the USSR was the best moment for the U.S. to shed the militaristic blob it had built up in the name of fighting communism. Instead, the military-industrial-congressional complex scrambled to find a new enemy. And the next thirty years of meddling in the Middle East and Eastern Europe have resulted in today’s messy geopolitical status quo.  Discussed on the show: “US Militarism Should Have Died With the Soviet Union” (Antiwar.com) “The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran” (The New Yorker) Daniel Larison is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com, contributor at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison or on his blog, Eunomia. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show all right you guys on the line i've got the great daniel larrison regular contributor contributing editor something cool like that at antiwar dot com and his latest is title U.S. militarism should have died with the Soviet Union. Excellent title, excellent article. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Daniel? I'm doing well, Scott. Thanks. Thanks for having me on again.

Happy to have you here. You know, I'm kind of disappointed with the world because it seemed to me like everybody should have made such a big deal about the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union. I was checking my wristwatch. Do I have the right year here? 91? 21, right? Yeah. the final end of the USSR. I mean, the wall came down

in late 88. It took a little while for the whole Cold War thing and whatever, but there was virtually no violence except in Romania where the leader and his wife were taken out back and shot,

but essentially this was an absolute miracle that the USSR absolutely just ceased to exist. And here's the 30th anniversary, and I love the way you phrase the article because I know that there's a history that you're kind of calling back to there that there were a bunch of guys

and including on the right who said okay confronting Soviet communism was worth it but now that that's over this is a phrase from

Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the UN Jean Kirkpatrick at the time before she changed her mind that now we can be a normal country in a normal time and Pat Buchanan the right wing

anti-communist hawk said give up nato come home america forget the whole thing it's not so dangerous a world out there and and we don't have to prevent it from hurting us or any of these things and there was a real big fight about that and i have to tell you i was young but i was very interested in politics and that kind of thing at the time but boy did i never get informed by tv about anything about this paleo conservative movement as it was at the time as they fashioned themselves at the time, these anti-war conservatives who demanded the abolition of NATO

and the end of the empire at the end of the Cold War there. So I was hoping that we could start with that. If you could, you know, tell us about your memory of that time and a little bit of the history of who those men were at that time. You quote George Kennan here,

hawk of all hawks from the days of the Cold War who turned right around as soon as it ended. So the floor is yours, sir. Sorry for that. Extra long introduction this subject, but I'm dying to hear what you have to say about it all.

Sure, no, that's fine. Yeah, in the early 90s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, as it dismantled itself, really, you did have a significant number of people on the right who looked around the world and realized that the main, the great struggle, the twilight struggle of the Cold War, that they had organized themselves around politically that they had dedicated themselves to for all those decades, had finally come to an end. and it had come to an end in a generally good way. Communism collapsed across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Many new countries either reclaimed or established their independence for the first time. And as you were saying, it was luckily, mostly nonviolent. There, of course, were some armed conflicts around the periphery of the Soviet Union. And there were some conflicts later in the 90s that came out of that. But it was remarkable for how peaceful it was, considering what a large empire the Soviet Union was and how many nations were subject to it. And so there was a hope, I think, among paleo-conservatives and traditional conservatives more generally that now that struggle was over, the U.S. could now return to minding its own business

more and that it didn't have to bear this enormous burden that it had taken up because they, you know, at the time in the late 40s, early 50s, many Americans, in both parties believed that it was necessary for the security of Western Europe and Asia to take up that burden, but that that burden was no longer necessary. And the militaristic policies that went with that were no longer necessary. I remember Joe Soberin writing somewhere in the mid-late 90s about the Pentagon budget, which at that time was much lower than it is today, saying you don't need to have a budget this large for the actual defense of the United States.

If all you're trying to do is defend our security against physical threats, you can stand to have a much smaller military budget than what we have. But, of course, as we know, none of those burdens were laid down. In fact, the burdens just kept increasing and growing, and along with the military budget. And so it's really one of the great missed opportunities in modern U.S. history where we could have chosen, a less costly, a less destructive path going forward, but we simply continued on the path that we were on and failed to realize the danger of imperial overstretch that that represented. And so that was the warning that people like Buchanan were sounding when he ran for the first time for president in 1992, and then again when he ran in 96 and then again in 2000.

And it was actually the 2000 campaign where I really became more fully aware of his ideas or his arguments when he wrote his book, Republican United Empire, talking about U.S. history and how U.S. foreign policy had grown into the imperial policy that we've seen over the last 120 years. And that's the foreign policy that I realized was leading us astray, was leading us to the ruinous wars that we've. we ended up in the first part of this century. Of course, we didn't know that those were coming at the time that that book came out, but it kind of, there was kind of a warning that it was going to happen. Yeah. And that's the thing of it, right, is to go back and read all the people who got this right in real time, you know, there's a great video of the Committee to Prevent a Mid-East Holocaust.

And it's Pat and Sobran and Sheldon, Richmond. my Padna at the Institute and I forget who else one more and they're all there trying to stop Iraq War I and you know one of the things that I remember from that time is all the scaremongering about

Japan and Germany again that we know with the end of the cold war who's going to be our enemy next and you know the Japanese are making these cars cheaper than American companies can make them so we might have to go to war with them I guess and who knows what's going to happen with Germany now and I guess the idea

that people really do believe this don't they Dana that if the USA is not holding the whole world down it's all just going to spring up and go after us you know anything less than that is appeasing Hitler man and so we got to stay out there on guard at all times against all really

yeah I mean that is the idea that gets put out there and I mean I do remember when I was young there was this great fear that Japan was going to dominate us and was going to start dictating terms to us, and that, you know, that ended up obviously not taking place at all. And so, you know, one of the things to take away from the last 30 years of threat inflation and fearmongering is that pretty much every major threat coming down the pike that the fearmongers have tried to build up as the next great, as the next Hitler, as the next great menace to our security, has either

proven to be ridiculously weak and inconsequential or simply hasn't existed at all. I mean, of course, we saw that with the Iraq War especially, but it's been true of pretty much every threat that people have tried to hype since the Soviet Union went away, and they've been trying to hype all these threats because you need something on that scale to justify the scale of our militaristic policies. And there's simply nothing that does the job. They're really working hard to try to make China fit into that slot now to make China into the new superpower adversary. But I'm not sure that the Chinese are actually going to play ball and fill that role. I don't think they're interested in doing the things that the China Hawks imagine

that they want to do. And so it's a real problem for them when the new enemy doesn't want to actually be the next Soviet Union. Right. Yeah, I love it when I forgot what year, was, but I mean, this has happened a few times, but it seems like this is a specific tactic of Putin's that right when the Americans are hawking it up the most, he'll cut $10 billion from the defense budget and just be like, look, he's doing everything he can to not play the game, you know? Right. Well, and one of the things we see, uh, looking back to the 90s, you had people presciently warning about how provocative NATO expansion was and how dangerous it was long term, and that it would eventually make Russia react, you had Kennan making these

arguments against the first round of expansion. And I think he's been completely vindicated by the events of the last 20, 25 years. Of course, he passed away at the start of the century, so he didn't see that vindication, but he clearly has been vindicated in that he had a much better sense of what Russia was prepared to tolerate and what Russia would react against. But what we also see with the way that Russia is behaving right now is that they're almost always reacting to things that we're doing. So we funnel weapons into Ukraine. We engage in lots of military exercises on their borders in their region. And so then they respond to that. And then when they respond, everybody freaks

out and treats it as though it's come out of the blue as though there's no rational explanation for why it happened. When, in fact, you can follow the timeline quite clearly just over the last year of why these buildups have happened when they happened. And so one of the important things people need to take away from what we're seeing now with Russia is that Russia has actually not been some kind of hyper-aggressive adventurists state in terms of its foreign policy. It tends to be fairly risk-averse. It tends to be fairly conservative in a sense that it doesn't like to take risks and will only resort to

force when there is a sort of quick and easy win in it for them. And that's not the new Russian imperialism that the Russia Hawks want us to think is happening. It's something much more restrained than that and so the good news is I think that that means that Russia isn't about to invade in a full-scale invasion but it also means that

a lot of the people that are working on Russia policy right now don't understand the first thing about what Russia's doing or why and that can create dangerous situations right yeah I mean this keeps coming up that there's a real danger in there that they believe their own BS you and I sit here and talk about

what Canon mourned in the 90s they don't even know about that. You and I talk about the coup in 2014. I think a lot of them, they were either in on it and want to downplay it, or it hasn't been in their interest as a flunky at the State Department to have been read into that loop. And they certainly didn't read it at consortium news or anti-war.com. And so they don't even know that actually, guess who helped to precipitate this crisis in the first place? You can't just, but yeah, I mean, that's my biggest worry. If they're lying, then I'm a bit relieved. The degree to which they believe that the Russians truly are the aggressors and that they are desperately trying to defend Europe from them is,

to me, the scariest thing in the world, you know? Right. And you see some of that in the rhetoric you hear from people like Michael McFowell, who was ambassador to Russia under Obama. And this was even during the relatively good period or better period of relations at the beginning of Obama's first term when McFowell served there. But McFowell is really, I think, living in his own bubble, imagining that there's no way that Russia could perceive NATO as a threat when NATO has been taking actions that I think almost any other state would find provocative or dangerous in their vicinity if it were happening to that state. So it's, I do think, that there are a lot of people in Washington who have basically bought into their own propaganda

to such an extent that they really can't see things the way that the Russians see them. And so that does create a dangerous situation, as I was saying, where we end up for plowing ahead, thinking that we're, or claiming that we're supposedly deterring them from acting, and they interpret that simply as more aggressive posturing on our part, and so they react against it. And that's where you get collisions that didn't have to happen, but end up being very dangerous and costly for all parties. My hope is that the Biden administration isn't completely drinking the Kool-Aid on this stuff. They do seem to at least be willing to engage in negotiations, whether they're willing to actually offer any concessions or make any

compromises, I don't know. My guess is they probably won't be, but at least they're willing to explore the possibility of finding an off-ramp here, because there are a lot of people in D.C. who don't want de-escalation in this situation. They want to use Ukraine as sort of a trap to try to lure the Russians in and try to hurt the Russians by daring them to take military action. And I just wrote about this in a separate piece, not in this recent column, but in a new piece that I just published on my side, where it reminded me of how all these hawkish types wanted to use Syria to bleed Iran. And so let's stoke the civil war in Syria to bleed Iran and hurt Iran that way. And all that it did was kill a bunch of Syrians. The Iranians are fine as far as that is concerned.

It didn't do very much harm to them, but it did do a lot of harm. to people in Syria. And I think Ukraine is being set up for the same kind of fall if hardliners get their way. And so my hope is that on this, the hardliners are going to be rebuffed and we're going to get at least

some kind of compromise approach coming from Biden, which I honestly be a nice surprise given his overall record. Yeah. Okay, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott here for easy. ship.com. Man, who wants to use stamps.com? They're terrible. Their website is a disaster. I've been

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Happy hunting. Well, I got to tell you, I mean, I think that if it came down to the Russians conquering the eastern part of Ukraine, I don't think they'd have much of an insurgency. You know, they stop at the river, give or take Odessa. I don't know. But I saw some of those demographic maps recently in one of those, David Stockman piece is when it comes down to breaking down the language separation and the nationality. I don't know really ethnic. I'm confused about that. They're all Slavs, aren't they?

But they call them ethnic Russians, but at least, you know, nationalistically, there are, you know, many, and it's very divided geographically east and west there. It seems like, of course, the far east of the country voted in a plebiscite to join Russia in 2015, and Putin told them no. and at that point in the middle of the war he could have just pulled out a black magic marker and changed the border of Russia the same way he did with Crimea he could have just said okay fine

the Don Bass is part of Russia now and nobody could have done anything about it at that point he didn't do that but if they think they're going to provoke a war so they can bleed the Russians in some Afghan war type scenario then boy like you said

yeah they'll get a lot of people killed but they won't accomplish that any more than they accomplish that in Syria. They're not bleeding in Syria. It's the Syrians who are. Well, that's right. So it's going to be, Ukrainians are going to be the ones paying the price

for all of this supposedly pro-Ukraine posturing. There's a, this often happens in our foreign policy debates where the hardliners in D.C. are very eager to sacrifice the lives of people in other countries, you know, much like they're willing to sacrifice the lives of America. troops for dubious causes. They have no problem putting those people at risk because for them it's kind of like a glorified risk game. And so they treat it as a game where they'll use one country to try to undermine another

and somehow they think that that's going to advance their agenda, whatever that may be. One thing that we can say is that, None of this, absolutely none of this has anything to do with making the United States or even its allies more secure or better off. All of this is extraneous, it's peripheral, it's really irrelevant to our core interests. And so it's more proof that we have far too many commitments in the world. We're reaching into places that we have no business being. and honestly if we had not been mucking around in eastern Europe as much as we have been

there probably wouldn't be a Ukraine crisis today yeah and you know I really love this quote that you have from Kenan from 92 talking about how we could have ended the Cold War a long time ago and that all the threats and all that everything just prolonged the whole thing and not just the Cold War but maybe even Soviet communism as well, this whole process could have been sped up. In fact, you know, notably it was, at least in the official history here, I think there's a lot to this, right, that it was when they stopped containing them and started encouraging them into over-expansion, like in Afghanistan and in Latin America and in Africa in the late 70s and early 80s,

that that was really what helped to bring the Soviet Union down. The containment was helping to kind of sustain them. And then once they bought into these obligations, they realized they couldn't afford them. But, you know, I always quote this great Kenan interview with Thomas Friedman in the New York Times from, and everybody, there's a link in here to the one that Daniel's talking about. It's called the GOP won the Cold War, ridiculous in the New York Times from 92.

But there's the one from 98 where he's just beside, himself about the NATO expansion and saying, you know, again, what you're talking about, that you know, if we do this and all the people, the Russians will react and all the people

now saying, don't worry, the Russians won't react because this isn't against them and it'll be fine and maybe we'll even bring them into NATO and who knows, but it'll be no problem and Dick Cheney'll never be the vice president or anything, so who's worried about it? And, you know, those same people as soon as the Russians do react,

expanding the military lines then those same people will say see that's how the russians are and that's why they're so aggressive and we have to contain them again and defend europe from them again and then i think the quote from canon is but that's just not right you know we're the ones doing this to them and you know what that's kind of the end of the argument in it daniel you think that well george canon said so who could argue with that he's the american most in the position to say and the fact that magnamara and people like that agreed with him at the time. It should be just absolutely the end of the argument, you know?

Yeah, well, I mean, you would think so. I mean, Kenan, of course, knew Russia very well. He knew the Soviet Union very well. He had served in Moscow as a diplomat, and he and his family had extensive experience in understanding Russian history. So, yes,

he should have a lot of authority in these matters. But unfortunately, it's sort of a measure of how U.S. foreign policy devolved, if you want to say, over the course of the Cold War, that, you know, Kenan was at the very beginning taken very seriously and his views were given a lot of weight. As he continued to apply his analysis to our policies and found those policies wanting, people stopped wanting to listen to

Kenan because he wasn't giving them the answers that they wanted. And so he opposed the Vietnam War quite vociferously and said that it was a horrible mistake. He was a huge opponent of the arms buildup and the arms race, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. And so he saw militarism as a real bane and a danger for this country, and he was railing against it for decades as he went into the later years of his life. And so people might interview him and quote from him because he had this status as a sort of great elder statesman, but then when it came to actually implementing policies, they went with the confrontational policies that they wanted.

And so it's, you know, I guess one of the tragedies of U.S. foreign policy, to borrow a phrase, is that people like Kennan stopped having influence over our foreign policy, because I think he had a much better sense of what was possible and what was desirable in our foreign policy. and we really lost track of that even starting in the very first decade of the Cold War we kind of lost the plot right you know it's funny we can do a lot of what ifs and I think

for a lot of people you know in my libertarian movement that I'm part of kind of the beginning of wisdom is realizing that man the whole Cold War too really was bogus we shouldn't have done that either in that in fact America's involvement in the world wars are questionable, certainly World War I, and if you're really daring into World War II, even maybe, and then you start going back and find out none of these things are really worthwhile. It never should have been this way, never had to be this way. It's essentially been, you know, a long line of George W. Bush's getting us into these wars and creating these horrible policies that it becomes almost impossible or, or,

it becomes possible, I guess, once you start realizing it then it finally does become possible to begin to imagine the way it could have been instead. And in fact, forget the world wars and any of that. What if we just had the last 30 years back? And we had Ron Paul had

won the election of 88 instead at H.W. Bush. He ran in that election. And would have Harry Brown had taken over 96 to build our bridge to the 21st century instead of Bill Clinton? And what they had succeeded in just completely demilitarizing this country and insisting that America

be a normal country in a normal time. Even better. A limited constitutional republic dedicated the principles of the Declaration of Independence and things like that. We could have really done that. And just the never mind the opportunity cost in terms of economics, which are just unimaginable, but just the opportunity costs in happiness and in, uh, you know all the grief all the chaos all the suffering uh that these people have caused for no good reason that they just didn't have to at all this whole time uh what a different world we would be living in right now if it hadn't have been for the americans in charge making the decisions that they clearly did not have to make when they made them you know right well and i think that

one thing to take away from the the end of the cold war and the the decision that was made to keep all of the alliances intact, to keep all of the power projection intact, is that when you embark on something like a multi-decade struggle or rivalry against another major power, that creates all kinds of entrenched interests, and that creates lots of constituencies for maintaining that status quo once it's created. And so when we see people agitating now for a new rivalry with China or or even more rivalry with Russia again, or both at the same time. We have to understand that once they start down that path, it's going to be even harder to dismantle those new entrenched interests

once they get their clause in. And so the time to shut these things down is now before they really get going. And I'm already worried with the rivalry with China that it may already be too late in the sense that there's very, little dissent against this idea that we need to, quote-unquote, compete with China. No one ever says what we're competing for explicitly, but it's really, it's a contest for domination, right? I mean, that's the implied meaning of it, that we're trying to dominate them and that if we

don't, then somehow or other, we're supposed to be afraid that they will dominate us. And so this inevitably becomes a very zero-sum militarized competition that leads to less liberty, more expenses, and more conflict. And it's just, it's a dead end. And we've already seen where it leads. We don't, we don't have to imagine where it leads. We know what these policies lead to. Right. And you know, if I sound too utopian there, I mean, my counter to that would be that just spin the globe. There's not that many continents or countries to choose from to be your enemy. You know, there are no powers in Latin America. No powers. No power. in Africa. Egypt's the most important

country in Africa, and we control it. You know, all of Europe are our friends, including the Russians, I insist. You know, there are rivals or something at absolute worst, but they're not our enemies. And the same for China, and what's India got

to bring to bear? Nothing. And then that's it, right? Who's next? The lost colony of Atlantis out there under the ocean? There's nobody left to be, to pretend to be a of. The Japanese are going to rise back up and reconquer East Asia. I mean, when they made that movie, they made a remake of Red Dawn and the Chinese objected to them making it about China. So instead they made about North Korea taking over America. Well, first, they took over South Korea. Then they took over China. And then they just got all that loot for free once they did that. And then they just spent that invading North America. The North Koreans did. Because who else are they going to blame it on at this point? Singapore is next?

Australia? Those guys are looking at you, funny, Daniel, the Australians. Right. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what they've had to do with every new target around the world.

They have to make these ridiculous claims about how dangerous they are in order to make it seem plausible that we should be afraid of them. And so, I mean, I don't know if you happen to read this New Yorker article about Iran, but it was basically glorified,

press release from SendCom that just came out in the last week or two, trying to build up and exaggerate how dangerous Iran is now. And certainly Iran has some missile capabilities that we've seen demonstrated, but they're very limited and they're limited to their own region. The idea that Iran poses a serious threat to U.S. security or even allied security is nonsense. But it's essential for maintaining funding and troop level. at CENTCOM that we believe that Iran is this great menace, and they're simply not. And so it gets pumped into, or pumped out of media outlets every day, where we're supposed to be terrified of these countries that are far, far weaker than ours, and that don't actually

even want to do us any harm if we would mind our own business. Yep, got that right. And especially on Iran. I mean, I skip them because they hardly even come to mind when I'm trying to scare up a pretended rival. At least India's got a billion people. You know, what's Iran got? India at least has nuclear weapons.

Iran doesn't even have that, although, you know, as much as people would like you to believe that they do or that they're going to have them, they don't even have that. Right. And boy, if they were trying, you'd think they'd have one by now. And, well, that's right. I mean, considering how many decades have passed since we've been told that it's just a few years away, you'd think that they would have one or more than one if they were really determined to get one. And the fact that they keep choosing not to do that, I think it's significant. We really ought to take yes for an answer on this in that case and just let them be.

Yep. And in fact, as you mentioned there with, you know, the bleeding Iran and Syria strategy not working, of course, it just made Syria more dependent on Iran. than ever before. They were just friends. Now they're the tightest of allies. And Damascus, you know, depends heavily on Tehran's support. And so, just like Iraq War II, in a sense, was meant to spite Iran. We can't really invade Persia. But if we get rid of Saddam Hussein, then that'll give us leverage over the Iraqi Shiites and that'll give us leverage over Iran. Wrong. You know, and then the war against, and all the intervention, you know, bribing Sala so they could fight al-Qaeda in Yemen ended up empowering the Houthis, which they took as empowering Iran. So now, as long as they're bombing the Houthis, the Houthis are getting closer and closer to Iran all along. And they have more

influence in Iran. I mean, pardon me, in Yemen than they ever did. It took them years. I think you know this. I'm sure you do. It took till 2018 or 19. I think it was 18. I think it was 18. Still three years into the war before the Ayatollah invited the head Houthi to come to Tehran and officially recognized him as the government of that country. the first country to do so to three years into our war before the iranians even got that close to him now more influence than ever before so what are we going to do stop now oh also we fought for their friends the hussars in afghanistan for 20 years but that didn't work um well and with the the record of iran hawks the one thing you can be pretty much certain of is what whatever it is

that they want to do is going to redound to the benefit of the iranian government and the hardliners in that government one way or another. And so if you were interested in weakening that government and weakening the hardliners, you would pretty much consistently do the opposite of whatever Iran Hawks recommend. Yep. Yeah, the Ayatollah said, Ali Khamini, said,

we thank Allah that he rendered our enemy's imbecils. Yeah. Yep. That makes the thing's a little bit easier on you if you're trying to hold down Persia, right? Well, and this is, it's a consistent problem that you see with hawkish approaches to other countries, where when we have, and I talk about this a little bit in the column, when we have confrontational policies and put these countries under siege,

it actually works to the benefit of the authoritarian leaders in those countries in terms of their domestic standing and their ability to control their own country. because then they can point to the foreign threat and use that to distract their own people just the same way that our government here uses foreign threats to distract people from their failures here at home. And so it is a, our hawkish policies are a boon to these other governments. And so the worst thing that we could do, if you wanted to undermine those governments or you wanted to weaken these leaders, the best thing you could do would be to,

pull the plug on all of these confrontational policies and deprive them of their enemy. As you probably remember, there was a quote from a Soviet official at the end of the Cold War where he said, I think, to his American counterpart, we're going to do something terrible to you. We're going to deprive you of your enemy with the end of the Soviet Union. And sure enough, it was kind of a terrible thing that they did, because in depriving us of that enemy, they sent us on this hunt to find a new one. I think we would be much better off if we deprived all of these other states of their enemy by pulling back and stop antagonizing them on every front.

And then we might actually start to see some desirable political changes in those countries after all. As it is, we're just strengthening their grip over their own peoples. Yep. It works every time. all right well listen i can't tell you how much i appreciate you coming back on the show daniel great stuff as always my friend thanks a lot scott i appreciate it all right you guys that is daniel larison and boys he got it right u.s militarism should have died with the soviet union at antiwar dot com the scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a ps radio dot com antiwar com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.