Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/4/24 Matthew Hoh on the Lessons of Obama’s Afghanistan Betrayal

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Matthew Hoh joined Scott on Antiwar Radio this week. They discussed Hoh’s experience waking up to the true nature of war while serving in the military. And they talk about his attempt to get Obama and the Democrats to end the wars in the Middle East just as they had promised to. Discussed on the show: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam A Bright Shining Lie by David Halberstam  Matthew Hoh is associate director at the Eisenhower Media Network and formerly worked for the U.S. State Department. Hoh received the Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling in 2010. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter @MatthewPHoh  This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; 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, January the 4th, 2024. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, you'll welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director at 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, and I mean almost, 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show and the rest of the pod catchers and video sites and things. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, I'm very happy to welcome this week's guest,

Genuine American hero, Matthew Ho, he was a Marine in Iraq War II, where he won medals for saving guys' lives. Then he went to work for the U.S. State Department, where he quit in disgust very publicly in the summer of 2009 and said Barack Obama do not double down on this war in Afghanistan. it ain't going to work don't do it here's all the cover you need to not do it and then what happened was the ambassador Ikenberry

who had been the general in charge he backed up Matthew Ho and he said you know what this guy is right don't do it Barack Obama hide behind me buddy I used to be the general in charge of this war and you know what Barack Obama did he threw Matthew Ho

and General Ambassador Ikembery under the bus and he tripled the war anyway because he's a moral and other kind of coward, too. And so that was how the Afghan surge happened, despite Matthew Ho's best efforts to stop it. And, of course, as you guys know, we regularly talk with Daniel L. Davis,

and he's the one who came out three years later and blew the whistle and said, yeah, it didn't work. Stop saying it did. We got to get out now. And if we pretend that we won the war, we're going to have worse consequences, which is, of course,

what we all saw play out right in front of our eyes in 2021. Just like Matthew Ho told you was going to happen. So anyway, welcome back to the show, Matthew. How are you doing, dude? Good, Scott. It's good to be back on with you. Just a quick correction in your very generous bio for me, but I never saved anyone's life or got any medals for anything like that. Wait, I thought their guys, their truck flipped over into the river and you jumped in and saved them and all that.

Well, no, we were in a helicopter crash. Went into the reservoir and nobody survived. no one survived unfortunately i'm sorry about that dude i had a whole thing in my head about what happened there that was wrong i mean i got cited for you know and we did we went in to try and save them but no you know no one that no one was was was saved you know and the the crazy thing was was that thank god it was our helicopter that crashed because the other crap helicopter was full of a rocky detainees and those guys were all hoods over their heads hands flex cups behind their backs they would have all died kind of thing those guys weren't surviving that you know so you know but yeah it was a

terrible terrible thing and that was one of the things that really stars propelling me in one my own moral injury but also to uh the why am i going along with this you know having one of them was a friend of mine who died and so having to go and see trains kids you know and his little boy asked me how come you didn't do more to save my dad you know things like that like just like you'd see in a movie like that type of experience and you know that's where it starts to really it had already been there but now it's it's where it's pinpricks for me at that point now it's starting to be you know full on uh slashes you know uh on my on me so yeah it was it was a pretty defining experience that that one experience a lot of them were but uh yeah damn i'm sorry for bringing that up dude

no it's okay no that's okay you know it also too what it does is it gets to the idea that so much of this stuff is mythologized, right? So much of this is, you know, haography, you know, about the war, you know, about how many you walk in the Barnes & Noble and how many books are critical about the war and how many are these just catalogs of triumph of what, you know, American heroes did in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at the end, it's what, oh, we actually lost that war, you know? So it's important, I think, to discuss what really happened and how.

just horrific at all is that the personal costs of it, but how for like in my case, as we talk about these things, and if I talk about my life, my experience, well, that was 06 when that happened, December of 06. And I still went along with it for almost three more years. Like, that's how willing I was to lie to myself about it. That's how much I have been conditioned by whether it was like, you know, the military or was our society, how much I want to be like a loyal servant of the empire, how much I have my own ambitions, how much I was afraid to break away from it, afraid to grapple with the truth that all these lies were actually real. All these things I had heard about the, and I read in my own cognitive dissonance, it was real. And then everything I

told myself about how, well, this is separate from what American history was that there's not a continuous line of history or an arc of history. So all those books I have read about, say, the Vietnam War and Halberston's the best and the brightest and she hands a bright shining lie. Well, that was then. It doesn't apply now. Right. So all of that I had to grapple with and that was a large part of the moral injury I was enduring and it was so bad that I wanted to kill myself. You know, I mean, so yeah, if you want to keep this stuff in, happy to, because it's all part of what you all have been doing for your entire adult lives in the anti-war community because you've known this stuff. And it took people like me to have these experiences to get, to face it and to find

the strength and the courage to say, okay, I'm not going to go along with us anymore, even though for a whole host of reasons it would be better for me to go along with it. So is part of your story then that you wanted to go ahead and leave the Marine Corps, go to the State Department and go to Afghanistan because maybe that'll be different. We'll give it another shot there. Is that kind of what's going on there? Absolutely. So actually when I'm at, still in Iraq at that point, my, and I was a, I was a reservist. I had voluntarily mobilized to take this company over to Iraq. You know, I had been to Iraq before on a state department team. And I was still in the Marine Corps reserves and here's a chance for me. And you just lie to yourself, right? So the reasons why I've been in Iraq for a year,

I was in the Secretary of Navy's office at the Pentagon, then I went to Iraq, was on a state department team for a year in Iraq, came back, went to the state department, was on the Iraq desk, And I just didn't believe in the war. I knew it was unwinnable. I knew it was a huge mistake. It was making things worse. But, you know, you lie to yourself. So the first lies you tell yourself was, well, I can be, I can have a good presence.

In the zone around me and the things that I am personally connecting with, I can be a moral actor, which is just an obscene folly because, you know, the war will make you its agent. You will be an agent of the war's immorality no matter what you think, you know, of you. yourself no matter what you think you will do uh you know but then you start doing things like when i was like the state department um you know and i get this this email from uh fourth marine division which is the reserve division in the marine corps saying hey we're looking for these people to volunteer for the upcoming iraq uh rotation and you know seeing what they wanted with someone just like me uh you know you say well you know i'm a pretty good officer if i go over there i'll bring back guys alive while these other guys I know won't. I mean, so you start, you know, again, it's one lie,

one excuse upon another. And when those fall apart, you fall onto another one. So I actually, by the time I'm leaving Iraq, my second time, my regiment had, I was supposed to go to following Iraq. I was supposed to go to the U.S. Senate and be a Marine Corps liaison in the U.S. Senate. And I decided I'm not doing it. I'm not going to the U.S. Senate and lie for the Marine Corps about this war. I'm not going to do it. And One thing after another, I end up back working on counter IED stuff as a contractor. You know, I was all set to go into commercial construction and I get a phone call from like a recruiter. And he says, yeah, I'm looking at your background, you're experiencing.

You can save a lot of lives with this experience. If you come work with us at GIDO, it was called the Joint IED Defeat Organization. So the Counter IED organization, IED is improvised explosive devices, roadside bombs, suicide bombers, was car bombs, et cetera. You can come save a lot of lives with us. And so, you know, they pull on your heartstrings and you're back in it, right? You're like Michael Corleone and the guy, they were bringing you back in, you know. And but yeah, I mean, my thoughts go into the State Department, though, were that, yeah, this war was going to be different, that the war in Afghanistan was a war that had at least some strategic purpose. There was some real value to the national interests of the

United States, as well as that there was the possibility, though I didn't really agree with it, but I was giving it the benefit of the doubt, that of the safe haven argument that you do have to go into these homelands, if you will, to not allow these spaces for terror groups to thrive or to at least plant their flag and say we own this, which is just all complete BS. I know you've talked about this a lot, Scott, the whole myth of the terrorist safe haven. And once on in Afghanistan, it's completely disabused of all that. I saw that the war in Afghanistan was fundamentally no different than the war in Iraq, that the people in the Obama administration were no different than the people in the Bush administration,

that the only thing that matter, if you're going to compare and contrast Iraq and Afghanistan, the only thing that mattered was that the U.S. was occupying those countries. That's it. Nothing else mattered. You could spend all day comparing and contrasting what the Iraqis and the Afghans eat for lunch, you know, the colors of their uniforms, their recent history, how the religions are alike, but different. You could spend all day doing that, but none of that matters because the only thing that mattered was that the U.S. was occupying these people. They were utilizing a divide

and conquer strategy, and that they were only making the war worse. And as long as we were there, that's how it was going to continue to proceed. So, yeah, after being there for five months, seeing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, knowing that it was going, not just the war, as it's unwinnable, that the war was going to get worse with the escalation. Yeah, I resigned in protest. Yeah. And look, the timing is everything there for people who were too young or not paying attention or were on the wrong side of it back then. In 2009, Obama, of course, was sworn in in January and then began a massive campaign by David Petraeus, John McCain, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen and Secretary of Defense Gates, along with General

McChrystal as well, and the entire War Party PR machine, especially led by the Center for New American Security, which was sort of the Democrats PNACAC, to push so hard. They called them the Coindinistas, pushing this counterinsurgency doctrine and the absolute necessity of Barack Obama sending 70,000 more troops. They always call it 30, but there was the 30 after he already sent 40. And so the big argument

by November was the final 30. And Obama rolled over on what we know, and as I show in both of my books, what he knew could not possibly succeed. When you came out and blew the whistle in, it was August, right, of 09?

It was September. It was September. Yeah, it was September when I resigned. It was October by the time it was in the paper. All right. Well, still, he had a good, you know, 35 days or more, you know, to... Oh, my letter, my resignation letter. And he must have known that you were right.

He, because we already know from all the reporting what he knew and said about the whole thing. So it's easy to infer that when you came forward and he read what you had to say in the Washington Post and all of these things. that he knew you were right. There's no room for the argument that Obama disagreed with Ho. No, he just thought it would be better for my political skin if I go along with John McCain rather than fight him on this. That was what it came down to, not the right or wrong or the war, because he knew you were right. Yeah, President Obama would have read my letter around September 15, September 16th, because Richard Holbrook gave it to him personally. And Holbrook would agree with 95% of what he said, of what I wrote, according to Holbrook.

Also, too, Sherrod Kopper Coles, who was Holbrook's British counterpart. I met them both and, you know, it's a surreal thing. You're coming out of those types of experience and you're there in Afghanistan. And a few days later, you're in a walled off Astoria, you know, in New York City talking with Richard Holbrook and Sherrod Kopper Coles, you know, and they're both telling you that they agree with you about this war, you know, and they're telling you the, you know, but I know President Obama did read the letter. And it would have been around September 15, September 16th.

And I also know that he was asked about it several times. So he was aware of all this. And he just didn't have the courage. And I'll tell another story, Scott, if you want. So John Murtha, who was the former House Democrat, who was one of the first deterrent against the Iraq war of those Democrats who had supported the war, Mertha was a Marine in Vietnam. He was very powerful in the Democratic Party and the Democratic House caucus. he uh for reasons that's another story a week i could tell tell um he brought me in in

november and how many speak to the whole uh house caucus the whole democratic house caucus so you know here i'm in november uh you know very forest gump like experiences like how did i get myself into this and i'm sitting i'm standing there uh with mirtha along with ike skelton and And Jessica Tookman from, I think she was at Brookings or Corning at a time, who's a daughter of Barbara Tookman, who wrote such great books as The Guns of August and things. But it was a debate, John Murtha and myself versus Ikeleton, Barbara Tookman, in front of the entire House Democratic Caucus. You know, and the House Democratic Caucus erupted in response to what Murtha and I were saying. This was mid-November of 2009 and stacked up nine, ten, ten,

all people deep behind a couple of microphones to all make their comments and all the comments where we can't go along with this. It was this is, this is what Bush did. This is what we did in Vietnam. And this goes on for 15, 20 minutes of these members of Congress. Oh, I thought you were saying that they were browbeating you. No, they all got up to agree with you. They got all got to agree with us. And then what happens is you see this hand shoot up out of the crowd. And it's Speaker Pelosi and the speaker's privilege. So she gets to talk before, you know, over everybody else, basically. And what she says is, I agree with you. Yes, and I'm going to paraphrase here, this is wrong. However, this is not the president's priority. The president's priority is the Affordable

Care Act. It's, you know, Obamacare. And if we put him into a box, if we paint him into a corner on this, we are jeopardizing the president's agenda. We just cannot do this. We do not have the political space to do this right now. The political calculus was that, yes, this war's wrong. A lot of young American kids are going to get killed over there for no reason. We're going to make the circuit situation worse. It's going to hurt American security. But however, the president's priority is not this. So we have to put this on the back burner. And what then happens, what you see happening then is certain members of Congress, certain members of the House caucus, Democratic caucus, are allowed to bang the drum on this, right? Because they have enough votes where it's not

going to cause enough of a disruption. And I witnessed this for the next year and a half, almost two years, because as we get, so what happens in Obama goes to West Point, as you were talking about, does his big escalation speech, big surge speech at West Point. December 09. And he also says, we're going to pull out, though. We're going to start pulling out. We're going to start widen this down in 18 months. And you can see the White House managing this among members of both the House and the Senate in terms of authorizing them, giving them the okay to now stand up against this war. As they get closer to that July 2011, we're going to start widen this war down date. More members of the Democratic Party are allowed to say, yes, this is the

right thing to do. And it wasn't just the Democrats that knew this. It was the Republicans that knew this as well because, and they did the same thing. You know, they allowed thousands of American kids to get killed and maimed, tens of thousands of Afghans to just be lost to history, killed without any recognition of who they are, a destruction of an entire country, on and on and on. I was met one time with Michael Steele, who, if people remember Michael Steele, he was the former chair of the Republican National committee. And Steele was always putting his foot in his mouth. And he said to me, you know what's the biggest flack I ever got into? The biggest thing I ever did that caused me problems was saying in the summer of 2011 that President Obama was right and we should begin getting out of Afghanistan.

He said, I have members of Republican members of the House and the Senate calling me up saying, Steele, you know, you're right about this. This war is wrong. We need to get out, but you can't say that. And that's the reality of our political system, you know. And so if anyone's surprised at how we can go along, how not just go along, we can fully fund and support and make sure and, you know, an unwinnable war in Ukraine's sacrificing how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as pawns or, you know, fully enabling and supporting a genocide in Palestine, this is who we are. This is our system.

And this is the people that run the system. Yep. Hey, y'all, Scott here. let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some, at least, into precious metals.

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It's Scott Horton's show.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart.

Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. And it is essentially public choice theory, right? It's a clunky name for the idea that government employees are individuals and they serve their own interests. And nobody knows what the national interest is. Maybe you and your friends at the bar know what the national interest is because you're thinking about somebody other than yourself. You don't have a direct connection to, you know, what happens only just you want to live in a free country at peace or something crazy like that, you know. But when you're in charge, you have all these.

other things like the Affordable Care Act that dictates that you triple a war and kill a few hundred thousand people and you go well yeah but political calculation on a piece of paper something something in a way that is quite frankly psychopathic but makes perfect political sense you know what I mean it is what is and Barack Obama made the calculation if he escalated the war the liberals were going to forgive him at least he promised to get us out of of Iraq, and they were going to not care, whereas whatever political capital he gained from getting us out of the war, he would have to deal with McCain and Graham. And by the way, and as I know you understand, I guess it's important, too, that in Iraq War II, they fought

for the supermajority who told them, thanks for helping us win, now get the hell out. That regime still stands. I mean, that parliament is still the parliament of Iraq, not that America has much influence there, but still, in Afghanistan, there was no such thing. We saw what happened when America left Afghanistan. The army and the government completely fell apart, and it was an absolute catastrophe. And that's what would have happened if Obama had ended that war too back then. And so the political capital, Biden took the hit because what the hell it was the 2020s by the time Biden cried uncle. And so he was able to take the hit and he still took a lot of criticism for it. And people have some idea that there was a proper way to leave.

that would have left that government intact just because they don't know anything about it. But that was what Obama was facing. He was facing either triple the war or lose it in a way that he wasn't going to have to face like total humiliation upon leaving Iraq, not until he backed al-Qaeda in Syria next door until it blew up into the caliphate a couple years later. But that's a separate story, right? And, you know, and we have with Obama, you had people like David Axarad and Rahman Manuel, his senior political advisor, Emmanuel was his chief of staff, who are telling him things like

the drone strikes, this extrajudicial execution program, assassination program, will make you look tough. This will be good for you politically. And on the same thing, you have the same conversations occurring. You can see us because there's no reference. You know, Woodward's books are really important to read, right? I mean, they, and what's always amazing, like, particularly in Woodward's book about Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan is there's no reference at all to any type of domestic political calculations. And I have witnessed it firsthand. I had seen it, right, right in front of me, and all that's absent. And so you're telling me that Emmanuel and Axelrod weren't saying to the president, look, Mr. President, if you pull these troops out

of Afghanistan and then a bomb goes off, some guy tries to blow up a propane tank in Times Square, right? You know, you are going to be blamed for it. And this will, and what they were able to do. And this is what, you know, I think really informs, shows the success of the anti-war movement, although it was a very fleeting success because the way the United States, the empire fights its wars, they simply evolved. But you go to the point whereby 2010, even though we have a quarter million man army in Afghanistan that's losing and is going to lose. We have 100,000 American troops, 100,000, contractors, 40,000 NATO troops, we're spending $100 billion a year on that war, and it's going to make no difference, it's only going to make things worse. In 2010, I just looked this up the other day, in 2010 midterm elections, Afghanistan was the top issue for 3% of American voters. Meanwhile, in 2006, the Iraq war was the top issue by far, and the Iraq war was dominant in the 2008 elections. That's how arguably Barack Obama becomes president. That's how he beats Hillary Clinton and arguably how he beats John McCain as well. But by 2010, the White House is

so good at managing its narrative, managing the political, the media circus, if you will, for lack of a better term, that they are able to get only. But also, too, you've got to remember circumstances like you're talking about before, Scott, as they were. 2010, what was also happening? You had the Great Recession. 10 million Americans were in a process of losing their homes. You know what I mean? So, you know, that allows Obama to escalate this war, you know, make things worse, kill a lot of people.

And then as well, too, just ensure the Americans are stuck. We're stuck in Afghanistan for another 10 years. Don't get out, as you said, until 2021. And even then, my belief on that is why Biden went along with it was, I really believe that the idea was that we were going to transition in Afghanistan to a CIA special operations war. We'd have our proxies there, of course, and that determination that made that we can do, like what we're doing all throughout Africa, we can do in Afghanistan. And this relieves the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, of all their requirements and the Army can focus on Europe and Navy and Air Force can focus on China, et cetera. But, I mean, you see how this all evolves.

And so even though we had that success, the anti-war movement had that success, the ability of the administrations, whether they be a republic or Democrat, and of course, then the larger empire to stay one step ahead or evolve is something that we have to keep in mind. Because now, after all those wars, we're still seeing, what, almost a trillion dollars in defense spending, more like, what, a trillion three, trillion four, when you count in veterans care and other things like that, you know, as well as these proxy wars. And we're witnessing this horror occurring in Eastern Europe that has made us all tremendously unsafe, you know, brought us to the brink of World War III, basically. And then, of course, we are witnessing

this genocide occurring in Palestine. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, in Afghanistan, I called it in Fools Air and the least supported and least opposed war in American history. history, because that was what the polls showed. Nobody supported the war at all support for the war was like 13% or was it 30 or whatever. It was less than that. But it wasn't even on the list of issues that concern you at all anywhere. And that was like the list was like the top 35 answers or something. And it wasn't even on there at all.

It might as well not have even been happening. In 2013, it becomes the most unpopular war in American history. So in public opinion polling, Vietnam, Iraq. never had high as high unapproval ratings as the Afghan war did. But again, with no urgency whatsoever behind that opposition. Right. That's exactly right. This is the craziest thing.

But that was all, I think that, again, that's an important thing to understand. This is how they fight the wars now. So it's too politically costly to have American forces on the ground taking casualties. So use secret forces, CIA, special operations, drones, use contractors because contractors don't count. Bin Laden, a suicide bomber brigades, too. Yeah, right, then proxy forces. But most people don't realize that more contractors, so these are men and women who would have been doing, wearing a uniform, doing jobs that in previous wars American military personnel

have been doing but had now been outsourced. You have more contractors killed in Iraq and Afghanistan than you did American service members, right? So the true number of KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan is not 7,000. It's really about 15,000 when you include the contractors, but those don't count. And then, of course, the proxy forces, right? You know, as long as ground people are killing brown people, black people killing black people, eh, it doesn't really matter, doesn't really count.

Not for the American media anyway, and it's true. I mean, the terror wars never ended. And it seemed like there was a little bit of a lull there, but, you know, we're just out of time to talk about the current wars. They came up a couple times in this conversation, but instead we talked about Afghanistan, which I'm glad we did because it's such an important deal. And it's almost unbelievably wonderfully true that that war is over and American forces are out of there. If there's any kind of deniable forces there in some sort of agreement with the Taliban or something, that would be news to me. I mean, I think we are really gone.

And the last thing they did there was they claimed a drone strike against Iman al-Zawahiri. That was the last thing we heard about out of there. And I don't know if that was ever confirmed. And I also don't know where that drone strike was launched from, but it doesn't seem like, you know, they talked about over the horizon force. Well, Afghanistan is over a few horizons from anywhere. And unless the Pakistanis are, you know, going ahead and giving up bases that they had refused before, then they don't really have a flight path into Afghanistan unless Putin's going to give them one, which I think is often. for now, Matt. I don't know if they can reach it from the Gulf with the drones. I really,

I'll stop my head have to look up and see how far they could reach with them from like, you know, from, um, cutter or something like that. But isn't it funny though, Scott, isn't it funny how um, we have to occupy, have this war in Afghanistan for 20 years because of al-Qaeda? And a, within a year of us leaving, we kill Zahrir, right? Isn't it funny how that worked out, you know? And now if you look at how the Taliban have been. doing against the Islamic State and just really, really going after and putting a, really limiting the Islamic State, killing a lot of them, really limiting their ability to operate. You know, this, why couldn't this have been the path forward against these groups?

Yeah, exactly right. I mean, they claimed that they were replicating the surge in the counterinsurgency doctrine from Iraq War II. But if that was the case, they would have allied with the Taliban against any Arabs in the country, that would have been replicating the strategy of the Sunni awakening and all that, but they didn't do that whatsoever. So the whole thing, of course, was completely bunk. I made that argument. I've made those arguments all throughout the brief time I was there from spring, summer of 09, and that's one of the reasons why resigned because they refused to do that.

They just refuse to talk to the other side because they wanted military victory because that was best for their own egos, for their own individual careers, for the institutions, and most especially for, you know, we want the, we want, you know, we want to show that a Democrat can be a better commander in chief than a Republican can. They always do that. It's, you know, the incentive structure there is so bad. And of course, the great American fraud, David Petraeus, who somehow is still turned to as some sort of expert after losing Iraq War II, losing Afghanistan, supporting al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria, and leaking above-top-secret classified documents to his mistress.

They still go, geez, what do you think we should do? Great American fraud, worst generals since McClellan, absolute disgrace of an American whose entire family should have been exiled from here. What's your opinion, sir? And then he says, well, we've got to double down, whether we're talking about, you know, Eastern Europe or Asia, or support for Israel or anything else. It's amazing.

only is going to continue, Scott, right? Because what are the current generations of American officers learning that to get to that spot? To get to the point where, remember, there are members of Congress who wanted to give Petraeus a fifth star, right? To get to this point where you're going to be the guy who goes out and flips the coin at the Super Bowl like Petraeus has, right? You want an American general like that? You got to act like Petraeus, which means that you have to be a political general, a media general, a celebrity general, but you also have to lie. Look at John Kirby. I mean, look how much that, I mean, anyone who wants to rise at that level to represent the

President of the United States on foreign policy matters in front of the press, guess what they're learning from watching John Kirby, right? Be as much of a snake, be as a disingenuous as possible. Stand, go out and just practice pissing on people's legs and tell them it's raining. Go out and do that every day and you will get to be John Kirby. That's, you know, I mean, that's the lessons that people are learning. And when I was in Iraq, one last story, when I was in Iraq, my first time, and Petraeus was in charge of the training command, Minstickey, as we call it. I won't try and remember what the acronym stands for, multinational, something or other.

The, you know, famously lost several hundred thousand weapons, right, lost in quotes, right? To the Sunni insurgents in Mosul. Well, no, this is when he was in Baghdad. So he had been. Shiites. Yeah, to the Shia, right? So all those weapons have been transferred to the basis. the Bada Brigades and everything, right? And, well, when he was in Mosul, they were upset with him

because he had fudged the numbers. What happens in Mosul is Petraeus, this is the immediate aftermath of the invasion. He occupies Mosul with his division. And after a year there, and you're constantly sending reports these commanders how well things are going. And that then informs the Pentagon, who are you going to send next to replace these guys? And Petraeus had a full division up there. and basically he says things are going so well up there that you can replace us with less than the division. And what you have is you have basically a reinforced brigade go up to Mosul rather than the division go into Mosul. And then, of course, all hell breaks loose after that occurs because there's not enough troops, basically. But then Petraeus, of course, is rewarded because

remember by this time he had already been, I think he'd already been on the cover of Time magazine or newsweek or whatever with, is this the man who can save Iraq? And but when he was in Baghdad then running this training command, which complete catastrophe in a whole bunch of different ways, including arming all these militias, as we just discussed. The generals where I were at, the generals I would be around, they hated this guy. They absolutely hated them. All these infantry and armor, one star and two stars and three stars, they all hated him. Because, and they would say things like Appetraeus is coming, make sure he lands at the large LZs because he's going to have those two extra helicopters full of journalists, make sure there's three extra rows of seats for Petraeus's

entourage. They'd say stuff like this all the time. They hated the guy. And these were men who you never saw make comments like this. So you knew Petraeus was a special case. But what it was was Petraeus knew what he was doing. He was very, very calculated in his approach to this and knew that his personal success, you know, and I think he did believe that he could win the war by himself or that he was the next patent or MacArthur, Eisenhower, Grant, or whoever. He really, you know, you have all those different levels of warfare or generations of warfare, whatever we're in now, the fifth generation or sixth generation or whatever. He thought he was going to be the hero of that generation.

And I think he still does. Yeah. And he might get away with it, too, you know. Yeah. Oh, very like that. There's not enough of us lousy kids, I guess, you know? Yeah, no. I mean, I guarantee at some point you'll drive over a bridge some.

and there'll be the David Petraeus Bridge and then they'll have the David Petraeus Chow Hall at West Point or whatever, you know, and then, you know, so yeah, might as well. All right, you guys, that's the great Matthew Ho, Marine Corps State Department, and most importantly, heroic whistleblower of the Afghan war and great commentator about our current wars as well. We just got caught up talking history today, which was great. But you can read all about him in my book Fool's errand as well. thank you so much for your time matth you appreciate it hey thanks god happy new year man you too all right you guys that's anti-war radio for today i'm scott horton go to scothorton or follow me on twitter at scott horton's show and i'm here every thursday from two 30 to

three on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a see you next week