Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/10/23 Daniel Larison on Biden’s Iran Policy, the Saudi-Iran Agreement and the House Vote on Syria

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Scott interviews Daniel Larison about Iran and Syria. They start with a column Larison recently wrote which highlights how the Biden Administration’s Iran policy makes no sense. Scott and Larison examine some of the frustrating contradictions in Biden’s approach which keep the economic war on the Iranian people in place while making a kinetic war in the region more likely. However, to what Scott says should be the embarrassment of the Administration, the Iranians and Saudis did just agree to reestablish diplomatic ties in talks brokered by Beijing. Scott and Larison discuss this major development before finishing with the House vote to end the war in Syria which failed last Wednesday.  Discussed on the show: “Biden’s Iran policy makes no sense” (Responsible Statecraft) 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: 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey you guys daniel larrison has a substack and he also writes at responsible statecraft this one is called the biden's iran policy makes no sense it's alec's mine welcome to the show dan How are you doing, bud? I'm doing all right, Scott. Thanks for having me back on.

Very happy to have you here. So, well, Biden, Iran, and policy, I don't like where this is going at all. I guess the deal is that Obama had made the Iran deal, the JCPOA, the extra layer of inspections and reassurances on Iran's civilian nuclear program. Then Trump got us out of it in 2018. Then Biden became president in 2021. And the idea was that maybe he would get it. us back into the deal that, after all, his staff had signed. It was, you know, Blinken and Sullivan

and both helped with the Iran deal back when it was the Iran deal. But then now here we are in March of 2023, and that has not been done. And you seem to think things are getting even worse here. Is that right? Well, it's not looking good right now. We keep hearing, especially from the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, a lot of talk about backing Israel to the hilt, essentially green lighting, whatever it is they want to do about Iran's nuclear program, and basically giving it very strong indications

that we're not going to do anything to get in their way if they decide they want to go off and start bombing Iranian facilities. And he said at one time, last month and that was worrisome enough and then he repeated it again at another event I think just last week

and then he he also paired that with remarks that he made and this is what I was talking about in the column that basically there's no point in negotiating with Iran or there's simply not going to be any negotiations with Iran while they're doing

other things that the U.S. disapproves of so whether it's cracking down on protesters or providing weapons to the Russians or what have you. And so that it's essentially linking the fate of these negotiations to other things that Iran may be doing in the world that have nothing to do with the nuclear program, nothing to do with the nuclear issue at all, but which are, I guess, politically embarrassing or potentially embarrassing for the administration if they go ahead with diplomacy with Iran

while those other things are going on. And so I was saying that the policy doesn't make any sense because, for one thing, I think a diplomatic path is the best and really only way to constrain the nuclear program in Iran. If that is, in fact, what you want to do, you have to keep pressing ahead with diplomatic path because all of the other alternatives can't work. And indeed, we've already seen how sanctions and sabotage actually backfire and produce more of what people say they don't want, as Iran's nuclear program has only expanded in response to those things. So if Biden and his people really do want to get the U.S. back into the deal,

and they do want to keep Iran's nuclear program under limits, and presumably they don't really want a new war, you would think they wouldn't want a new war. That can't be very popular if they were to get us into a war in the Middle East. Then it stands to reason that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing, which is constantly reoccurring the Israelis and giving them green lights and encouraging them to take whatever action they see effect.

And so I was, in the poem, I was spelling this out and trying to urge the administration, not that anybody in the administration is listening to me, but to say that we need to be going in the opposite direction of where we're going. We need to be actively discouraging the Israelis from taking any actions and we need to be moving away from this talk of military options,

options because we know that those options are bankrupt. We know those options are going to backfire just like all of the other hawkish often have backfired. So I'm concerned about this, this drift that we're seeing towards conflict and the failure to rein in the Israelis when that's what needs to be happening. Yeah. Well, so get back to the Israelis in just a second, but it really is, you know, a huge part of this, as you say, is just domestic politics. Like even on the surface level kind of TV politics, the embarrassment of making a deal when America's so powerful and the Ayatollah is so evil. And our Israeli friends hate them so much.

That's always part of it. And so someone is going to call them a wimp for making a deal with a guy who's a bad guy who, after all, did that other bad thing that we're upset about. And they're not willing to take that hit in terms of just political capital on the most crass sense the way that Obama was willing to fight for it back then, right? Seems to be the case. One of the things I've been banging this drum now for over two years is that Biden seems very wary of provoking hawkish backlash.

He will go out of his way not to invite that kind of opposition. position. He caters to domestic hawks, both within his party and outside it. And we've seen this on other issues, too. It's not just the Iranian one. He'll keep Trump-era policies in place that he campaigned against, that he said were failures, but he won't change them because he thinks that the cost at home in terms of the coverage that he gets or the attacks that come from the other side, too damaging, but it's not worth it to try to make these changes to policies, even though he knows full well that the current policies aren't working and have, in fact, done real harm, both to our interests and to the people in those other countries. So it's, it's this old

defensive crouch that we see so often, especially from Democratic presidents, who, you know, paranoid about being accused of weakness and who will do anything they can not to appear weak which of course actually makes them seem much weaker than they ever would have if they had just stuck by their guns and tried to get their own agenda enacted seriously and apparently no one ever tells them that you know it's so funny yeah it seems yeah it seems like they they don't think about it through to the next step they're they don't want to be labeled as weak so they they end up powering in front of their domestic opponents and let those people dictate their agenda for them.

Absolutely right. So it's no wonder we end up with such a bunch of lousy policies when so many of the people know that they don't work still feel compelled to keep those policies in place just because they're afraid. Yep. Man. And then, you know, it's really frustrating to me. too, the mechanism of sabotage here, Daniel, is just, oh, well, what about Hezbollah or some kind of lazy

thing, you just tack extra sentence or paragraph on that says that, well, other issues, besides the nuclear issue, have to be part of the negotiations. And that then just prevents them from happening at all. That's just it. It's like, you know, putting sugar in the gas tank. Hold things over. Right. And there, and it's, and it's, It's pretty clear that that's always what's behind it, the desire to add these poison pills to the talks to create, to include demands that you already know in advance, the other side won't, can't possibly accept,

and that are really irrelevant to the issue at hand. It's a way of trying to derail things before they even get started. And to the credit of the Obama administration, They understood that when they negotiated the agreement in the first place, which is why they kept it so narrowly focused on just the nuclear issue and they refused to let anything else get included because once you start including those other things, then you're opening up a huge mess for yourself because it's hard enough to resolve even one issue with a government that doesn't trust you and that you don't trust and to try to fix everything all at once when. when even that one issue is extremely difficult is you're setting yourself up for failure which is of course what what the hardliners always want in the situations they want to set the bar for success so high that no one can ever get over it because they they see their interests the hardliners interests as being tied up in conflict anything that makes conflict

less likely is therefore undesirable for them and meanwhile the subject matter here is are they or are they not going to enrich up to weapons grade and put together some atom bombs and possibly threaten Israel with them supposedly? And you would think that they would just say, man, we really should get a deal and lock that program down the way that they did. And in fact, if you took the JCPOA, it had some sunset provisions and things like that. But if you just took like all other things equal, all lobbying and weird disincentives out of it, and just say you had a decent president in there, he might have said,

hey, Ayatollah, I really would like if we could retire these sunsets and go ahead and make some of these provisions permanent. And you know what? Maybe we could make a deal on missile range. Maybe we could make a deal on support for Hezbollah and you give them maybe only these kinds of weapons, but not those. Maybe we could have actually pursued further diplomacy

if they had just stuck with the dang nuclear deal in the first place as the basis of it and actually taking care of their concern. Because if you follow the logic, Daniel, if the whole thing breaks down, and the Ayatollah does what apparently they want him to do, which is move towards a nuke so that they can attack, well, what do they think is going to happen? They're going to get a perfect regime change in a loyal client state? Or the next Ayatollah, or maybe even still this one, is finally going to then make a nuke.

And that'll be, what, within six months or a year or two years of the attack? We'll end up getting them the nuke that the supposed to... thing is supposed to stop. So it's hard to take any of this seriously. You know what I mean? They must know what they're doing here. Well, yeah, I think so. I mean, I think the people that

talk about using sabotage operations or using military attacks to, quote unquote, stop Iran's progress, know that they're not going to stop it. They know that they're going to accelerate. And that's certainly what happened in the case of the Osirac

attack in the 80s against Iraq when they, when they attacked that reactor, that actually convinced the Iraqi government that they really needed to get serious about building nuclear weapons, excuse me, and that they needed to do it quickly. And so that military action very directly contributed to a growing danger of Iraq gaining nuclear weapons, which, you know, of course, then the post-Gulf War settlement and inspections and all of that ended up stopping. But that, but in terms of the Israeli action, the Israelis actually made the problem

far worse for themselves and for everybody by resorting these sorts of bankrupt tactics. And now they would, now we're talking about doing it on even larger scale with a much larger program, more sophisticated program. And it's simply nuts, as you say. It will, it will guarantee, or pretty much guarantee proliferation while pretending to prevent it. And so this is why I always marvel at people who talk about military options as somehow being a tolerable or even useful alternative to the diplomatic path because we can already see how it's going to go down based on what we've seen in the past

and based on what we understand about the nature of these programs in governments like this. Obviously, you have the North Korean example where they went ahead and did acquire nuclear weapons and have essentially bought themselves security by doing so. And the Iranians will probably conclude if they get attacked, they will conclude that the North Koreans were right to go the way that they did, and then we'll choose to imitate them.

And at this point, the Israelis and the U.S. government are giving them every incentive with all that conclusion when it's exactly what you don't want them to conclude. Yeah. And, you know, I've often compared the latent nuclear deterrent they had. here to having a gun in one pocket and some bullets in the other pocket. They're like, hey, you know, don't make me load my gun, man. We're getting along fine right now. There's no need to escalate toward actually arming up because we're not fighting, are we?

We've got a fight going on. That's essentially the posture here. And so, eh, keep an unloaded gun in one pocket and the bullets in the other. That sounds to me like a good place to call the status quo time out and let's lock that down. in an agreement. You guys keep your enrichment at less than weapons grade and we will stop attempting to starve your people in a submission. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think a deal is still reachable. I think that they could find a way to get back to the original compromise that they had. But to do that, there has to be a really concerted effort to deliver on

the benefits for the Iranian side. One of the reasons I think that the Iranian government has been dragging its feet a little bit, since the new president came in, is that they believe, and they have reason to believe that the U.S. can't be trusted to honor its promises. And if they get sanctions relief as part of a new agreement, how much of that sanctions relief is actually going to be delivered, how much are they actually going to get out of it, before the agreement is then canceled again by a future administration. And so they have a legitimate reason to be wary of jumping back into an agreement like this when they have been shafted in the past.

So I think there is still a chance to get that agreement, but the onus is on our side on the Biden administration to prove that to them. and I think one of the things that they would have to do to actually get the Iranians over the line and to recommit on their side is by offering them some sanctions relief up front as a goodwill gesture as a way of feeling that they're serious about actually delivering on their promises

and maybe that would break the impasse that they're currently in because as of right now I don't think the Iranian are going to make, to take the leap of faith, so to speak, to get things going again, when they see, all they see is the U.S. piling on more and more sanctions on their oil sector. They were even adding more in just the last few weeks. And what message does that send them? It sends them the message that they may as well get used to being under these sanctions

indefinitely because there's no flexibility on the U.S. side. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already. Time to End the War on Terrorism is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today.

Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The Audio Book Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute,

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Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom. Real history, real economics, real education. All right, so tell me what you thought of this headline. You must have seen it already today. Saudi Arabia and Iran agree to reestablish ties in talks hosted by China. Yeah, and it's an interesting story. The Saudis and the Iranians have been talking for some years now trying to work back

towards resuming normal relations after they broke down in 2016. The Saudis broke off relations. there was a riot in Iran that targeted the Saudi embassy in Tehran in response to the execution of a Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia by the Saudi government which of course angered a lot of people in Iran especially because the execution was for obvious reasons of persecution and to suppress Shiites in Saudi Arabia and that's where the breakdown started and the Saudi government eventually realized

that their policy of stoking animosity and hostility towards Iran wasn't having any benefits for them and gradually I started moving towards repairing these relations and so you had talks in Iraq, you had talks facilitated by Oman I think, and then the Chinese got in on it as well, and they're the ones that hosted these latest negotiations that took place this week, and they finally hammered out this new normalization agreement,

which is just a commitment to reopen their embassies and have normal relations like they had before the breakdown. So it's not one of these great diplomatic achievements. It's sort of the bare minimum of normal relations, but they hadn't had that for seven years, and now they will have it again. And so I think that's good news in terms of, of regional stability, it's good news for, possibly for Yemen, if this then leads to more flexibility from the Saudis and the Iranians on that front as well. And it should, if the U.S. handles it correctly, it should also provide an opening for us to try to resume our own

negotiations with Iran, because I think this shows that the Iranian government is open to some compromise, they are open to talks, provided that they're dealing with people that they can actually deal with, and that are willing to deal with them. So all around, I think it's a good development. I think the Chinese role here is probably going to be weaponized by people who don't like China, just trying to make it into something dangerous or scary to make people worried about it, but I'm not concerned about that at all. I think if the Chinese are able to facilitate something like this and our government isn't because we're so locked into these rivalries, that should tell us something about the folly of our current position and the folly of our

decision not to have normal relations with Iran for all these decades. When China can act as mediator and actually achieve something useful by having good relations with both countries. That's the sort of relationship that the U.S. should be aspiring to have with both countries. Not one where we play favorites, not one where we arm anyone to the teeth, but where we have a cordial working relationship. And as of right now, of course, we have no relationship with Iran and we have a far too close relationship with the Saudis. and so we should strive to rebalance that.

Man, I don't know. You're such a moderate and conservative type of a personality. I mean, to me, this is beyond the worst embarrassment. This is an absolute disgrace. I mean, United States of America's been helping Saudi explode babies to death in Yemen for seven years straight. Well, they finally stopped for the last year, more or less. But before that, for seven years straight, and killed hundreds of thousands of people just as the Obama government told the New York Times

to placate the Saudis because they were doing the Iran deal. Then Trump tears up the Iran deal keeps the genocide, kills all these people. So it's not just that, obviously, America's role in the world should be going around hosting peace conferences and trying to prevent violence from breaking out, not making promises, but hosting others to work out their differences at least. least, you know, and instead we got the chikoms doing it when we're on the side of the worst, most belligerent, bloody genocidal faction and all of this. And the Saudis even backed the Sunni insurgency against our guys in Iraq War II when

W. Bush had them on the side of the Shiites. And these guys are a menace. And I just don't know, you know, as the kids say these days, Daniel, cringe, right? I guess it's the cringiest thing in the whole damn world that Beijing is coming in and doing what the United States of America should be all about in the first place and none of the rest of this instead, you know? Well, right.

I mean, that's why, I mean, we ought to be getting out of the arrangement that we have with the Saudis. We should have been doing that years ago long before the opening for others to come in and do this sort of mediating work presented itself. But if this sort of embarrassment, if people want to think about it as an embarrassment, if this embarrassment is what it takes to wake us up to the stupidity and the cruelties of our policies in the Middle East, then maybe that can have a good effect in the end.

We should have realized a long time ago that our government, shouldn't be so deeply involved with the Saudis as it has been. But maybe this will finally forth us to realize that, you know, they're going to do whatever they're going to do. We don't have a hold on them. Despite all of the military assistance, all of the enabling, all of the coddling and protection that we provided them, they're not going to behave in the way that Washington wants them to necessarily.

So just cut them off. Stop with the indulgence and the enabling behavior that has implicated the U.S. in so many terrible crimes. And so that's why I think we need to disentangle ourselves from them and get back to more normal relations with all states in the region, which would preclude us from taking sides, as the way. way we have done. Tell me, Daniel, what did you think of the vote in the House on the war powers resolution on Syria that day? Yeah, well, of course, it was a disappointing result. We saw, I think, about three quarters of the House voting against the resolution.

Slightly more Republicans voting against it, the Democrats, but you had, it was a bipartisan showing in the rejectionist camp, and it's a shame because the mission in Syria, the deployment in Syria that we have right now is the most clear-cut example of, well, one of the most clear-cut examples of an illegal war currently going on in the world, one that has not been authorized by Congress, it has no international mandate, has absolutely no justification whatsoever. And so it should be a layup for War Powers Resolution Challenge. It's exactly the kind of thing that War Powers Resolution was created to oppose, where the President sends troops into a war zone on his own without congressional approval and keeps them there for years

on end while they come under fire and while they engage with other forces, including groups that have absolutely nothing to do with threats to the United States. You know, pro-government forces aligned with the Syrian government, Iranian-backed militias, Russian mercenaries. None of these people has anything to do with our national security, and our people have no business being there. And so it is disappointing to see that such a huge block in the House simply doesn't care about that and doesn't care about their constitutional responsibilities.

I guess it's not really that surprising that so many of them have refused to do their duty. Since we know members of Congress are famously allergic to taking responsibility for these sorts of policies, but it is still discouraging to see how few people there were, in favor of what really should have been a slam dunk, both on the constitutional side and on the policy side, to get those troops out. Yeah. I'm sorry to see it.

And I would think, you know, it is a bit strange that there was so much more support for getting us out of the business of backing the war in Yemen. And, of course, it was absolutely right to do that, to try to end our involvement. But here where we actually have troops on the ground, we have troops occupying foreign territory in violation of international law and without congressional authorization, this for some reason, does not excite the same outrage. It does not seem to generate the same opposition as backing for the Saudis did. And so it's a little curious to me that that same coalition,

that has been fighting to get us out of the war in Yemen did not show up for this vote. And it would be interesting to dig into why that is. Well, I mean, part of it was we just didn't have time to build up a movement at all, right? Gates announced the thing, and then later that week they voted on it. So there had been a thing before where

I talked with Eric Spurling from Just Foreign Policy, and he talked about how they, it wasn't a war powers, resolution. They were trying to get an amendment in the National Defense Authorization Act and that they had put together quite a coalition of votes there. I think they did even better this time on short notice. So, but, you know, also in Yemen, you're talking, well, I mean, the worst of the Syrian war ended in at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, you know, but the Yemen war was still going on up until a year ago. And you had a situation where, you know, this total blockade on their seaports and their airports and starvation and babies dying a collar and all this stuff in a way. Syria was really bad in Obama's in his legions of suicide bombers and everything, but it wasn't quite the same dynamic there where people were just starving to death and stuff like the way

it was in Yemen, it's the way still is in Yemen. Well, yeah, I think that could explain part of it. There was and is a dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen. and that oh which by the way not that i'm telling you anything you don't know for people who don't know you know daniels you've been great on yemen it's good or better than anyone in this whole time so people who aren't familiar with that i would yeah i mean i i wish it had made more of a difference but um yeah thanks um yeah of course there has been a dire humanitarian crisis in yemen uh for all uh for now coming up on eight years uh and and and that crisis

has been severely exacerbated and really driven by the Saudi coalition intervention and the policies that they have instituted in pursuit of that war, both in terms of the blockade, as you say, and also the economic policies that they've instituted through the government that they prop up. So I can see how the humanitarian crisis would spur many people to action Whereas in the Syrian case, it's not, maybe there's not the same feeling of urgency in the Syrian case as there is in Yemen. But I think the legal case for getting the troops out is even more airtight in the Syrian case. And so if we're talking about it primarily in terms of war powers more than just in terms of the policy,

the Syria one is the one that you would go to where you have the strongest argument I think because Congress never debated and never voted on sending these troops in it still hasn't all this time later and they've now been there in one capacity or another for coming up it'll be nine years I think

right this year yeah it's funny too because they act like in that debate they act like we've always been there and we always will be and of course america occupies syria but i remember a time when america did not occupy syria and invading and occupying syria would have been a really big deal and then staying forever like it's south korea and all of this like really at the when the government in damascus says beat it please and when you know as everybody knows it was america and our allies that built the isis caliphate that they had to go there to destroy but even then baroque obama had

to swear no boots on the ground. We're only going to use air power in Syria. We're going to leave it up to, you know, the Kurds. And even, I guess he was implying eventually Assad to reestablish his monopoly on force in that country. No boots on the ground. And then broke that promise. But that was how he had to make the promise in order to extend Iraq War III into Syria in the first place was, look, Daniel, we would never put boots on the ground there. Everybody knows that.

that would be crazy, right? Now, here we are, as you say, nine years later almost. And the idea is that we would remove our boots from the ground there? Are you insane? Don't you know we have that they literally, one of the congressmen, one of the Republicans said this. We have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them here. Right. And of course, it's useful that they don't ever really have to specify who the them is in that argument. Yeah, exactly. Because America backs all the terrorists. Lib province right now, the al-Qaeda danger to the world, us and our Turkish friends there, us being the U.S. government, not me, but you know what I mean. Right. And well, and a lot of the people

that are, that our troops are coming in contact with in Syria, are not involved in any of that. I mean, you have, when you have these, these drone attacks or rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Syria, it's usually coming from people that are there to fight on the side of the Syrian government. And so even the fig leaf excuse that they're there in some sort of anti-terrorist capacity doesn't actually tell you what they're really doing there. It doesn't, it doesn't, it's not an inaccurate or honest assessment of why they're still there.

basically they're there I mean as far as I can tell the guys especially the guys at 10 for just there to serve as target practice until we will eventually get some sort of shooting war with the Iranians going I don't really understand what anyone hopes I mean beyond that I don't know what anyone's hoping to accomplish it seems like it's it's just a a deployment for its own sake at this point and so the the the The logic of keeping them there is bizarre, in my mind. I don't, I really don't know what people could be thinking, unless it is just to keep creating pretext for more conflicts down the road. I don't know what else could be for. Well, I've heard them rationalized, Dana, that, well, by depriving them of their oil money, we make their reconstruction harder, and we just make, You know, times tougher for them. And sometimes they say, you know, even though the cause for this was Assad's alliance with Iran, now they've made, you know, Syria more dependent on Iran than ever before. And they go, oh, yeah, but see, that's what's good about it is because this is a drain on Iran's economy, that they have to support their Syrian friends. And so the negative effect, the opposite effect of what they were going for is now the rationalization that it's,

working. Right. Well, and you have this paired up with, of course, a horrendous sanctions policy that punishes people in Syria and in the government-controlled areas and does block their ability to rebuild and their ability to recover from the war. And it's quite deliberate to make those parts of Syria as unlivable as possible by threatening anybody that does business with them with secondary sanctions. It's another one of these maximum pressure economic wars, and the victims of those wars are the people that, the ordinary people that live in that country.

The people in the government and their cronies will do just fine, and they have been doing just fine this whole time. And that's the way it always goes with these things. and so even even if we think of it in terms of being a punitive policy the people being punished by that policy are not the war criminals or the people at the top it's always the people that are most vulnerable and weakest that get it in the neck yep absolutely all right well listen i've kept you long enough i'll let you go about to friday afternoon but i sure do appreciate your time again on the show daniel been great. Yeah, my pleasure, Scott. Thanks for having me on. All right, you guys. That is Daniel Larrison.

He's at Responsible Statecraft, and he's at Substack. His blog there is called Unomia. I think I said that right. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute. org.