Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/24/23 Kelley Vlahos on Those Most Responsible for Iraq War II

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Kelley Vlahos returns to the show to talk about some of the writers, pundits and government advisors most responsible for the invasion of Iraq twenty years ago. Vlahos wrote an article highlighting three awful reflections about the war written recently by some of its biggest cheerleaders—David Frum, Eli Lake and Max Boot. They also discussed a symposium organized by Responsible Statecraft which asked a range of historians, journalists and authors to name the most underrated player responsible for bringing about the war and explain why.  Discussed on the show: “Setting the record straight on the teeming media swamp that supported Iraq” (Responsible Statecraft) “Symposium: Aside from Bush & Cheney who is at fault for the Iraq War?” (Responsible Statecraft) Bad News: How the Media Marched Us to War in Iraq and Beyond “What the Neocons Got Wrong” (Foreign Affairs) “The Iraq War Reconsidered” (The Atlantic) “The Iraq War, 20 Years Later” (Commentary) “REVOLT AGAINST THE NEOCONS” (Antiwar.com) “The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA” (The American Prospect) Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. Follow her on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.  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, Pools 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.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got kelly bocar vlejos and she is the editor of responsible statecraft the website of the quincy institute for responsible statecraft and she is the editor of responsible statecraft and

She writes lots of great stuff as well as editing lots of great stuff over there. Welcome back. Kelly, how are you? Oh, it's great to be here, Scott. I'm doing fine. Thank you. Great. Great to have you back on the show. And you got a bunch of stuff here. But primarily I want to talk about the Iraq War 20 years ago and the neocons. And you've got some great stuff on the neocons here. First of all, beating up some of the neocons who are writing excuses for themselves in the media.

A lot of substance there to. go over and then also the symposium which i'm very grateful that you included me in aside from bush and cheney who's at fault for the iraq war and you asked us all to pick someone who was involved in the war party to focus on there and by the way i'll never forgive you for that 150 word limit oh my oh my goodness that must have been torture for you sc oh it's like locking me in a coffin or something Jeez, this stuff that I had, I say at first I thought it was 160 words, and then I was already pulling what was left of my hair out, and then I reread the email, and I, oh my goodness, I don't even have the word clean break in there.

Anyway, it was a great opportunity to practice pairing it down, which is something I need to do more often. Anyway, but first, let's make fun of Max Boot and David from. and Eli Lake. Boy, are they horrible and didn't they help get more than a million people killed, huh? Those three guys. Oh, my goodness. What bothers me most about it, I think, you know, I, you know, you go through these different stages when you see a piece by Max Abu where he talks about how he was wrong about Iraq and, you know, and how he has come to the conclusion that it really was a failed war policy and we should have never been in, yada, and there's this initial anger and then there's people around you who are saying well it's a first step when you hear some of

these neocons acting in contrition and then i start absorbing and then thinking you read to the end of the piece and you realize that it's all a setup so that he could say but we shouldn't hear what happened in iraq to ukraine right and it's a set up so that we don't get in the frame of mind that perhaps we shouldn't support an aggressive militaristic war policy and Ukraine. Please don't compare the two. And I find that is what is most insidious. I don't believe anything that Max Boo says. Yeah, maybe he has some contrition because he knows he's on the wrong side of history

and it's very self-serving that he comes out with this article to talk about this 20 years later. And of course, the Washington Post gives him a platform, a platform that most people who are right about the war, for 20 years do not get. Right. But it's all conveniently to make sure that we, that, that the United States or Americans maintain support for Ukraine. And that's what I find most egregious about that. I mean, it really is something else.

I saw people on Twitter going, wow, good old Max Boots saying he's sorry. I said, I didn't see an apology in there anywhere. I didn't see an apology. Yeah, he says, I was wrong, but as far as we know, he was, what, just our Uncle Bobbitt the dinner table was wrong, not one of the most important people in, you know, determining the supposed consensus on the American right at that time. And he does link to his piece, the case for American Empire, where he says, we need hard Wilsonianism. Can you imagine the nerve of this guy? And then, as you said, he goes, well, I was wrong about this. I was

wrong about that but he doesn't delineate how it mattered to anyone other than you know he just had an opinion not that it affected anything but then as you say it's all just a cynical scam so he can say that's why you should trust me now when i say here's who we should be killing now the russians yeah because that's way more rational than picking on iraq for the in fact sole reason almost that he couldn't possibly fight back and they knew it when this is the entire other way around, you know. He could fight back so badly that he wouldn't dare so we can do whatever we want. Yeah, and I almost find it's actually worse than the two pieces by Eli Lake and David Frum because I feel like they're just doubling down on their support for the war. And so

they're just staying true to form. And they also get their licks in. I think I know Brum does on Ukraine as well because he's he's afraid that American support for that. where policy is slipping. But at least, at least they're sticking to their whatever warped principles they had to keep them in support for the war in the first place. Yeah, David Frum. So for the young kids listening, who is David From that we need to know about anyway? Well, David Frum was an official in the Bush White House.

He was a speechwriter. And funny that he was a speechwriter all the way up to the actual invasion of Iraq. And so he was responsible for the Axis of Evil addition to one of Bush's speeches on the war post-9-11, on the war in Afghanistan, in which he identified North Korea, Iraq, and Iran as members of the Axis of Evil, basically launching the global war on terror, expanding U.S. response to 9-11. as a response to those who actually committed the attacks on 9-11, the al-Qaeda terrorists, and expanding that to pick your own enemy. Pick your enemy. So for all the neocons who had wished to go to war with Iraq and Iran, all those years, finally found the impetus.

And so he was able to include three more nations into this grand scope of retaliation for the attacks on 9-11. And then he leaves the Bush administration, and then he goes on to writing books, glowing books about George Bush and supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq and being pretty much part of this really swampy ecosystem of neoconservatives who kept the support for Iraq in the war, the insurgency, the counterinsurgency, the reconstruction alive for 10 years. And then he slinked back into his hole in Canada. And then when President Trump, when Trump became president, he decided to write a series of books about how awful President Trump was and did some sort of twisted Mayo Copa in these books basically saying, oh, well, you know, the war in Iraq failed and it failed the American people.

And that created the foment for somebody like President Trump. So he ends up blaming the war on. Iraq for how we got President Trump. And now he's back out of his whole to be both a never-Trumper and now a pro-Ukrainian cheerleader. Yeah, that's so funny. Surely America's credibility is really being reinforced now at this war in Ukraine. Everybody in D.C. agrees. All the same people who agreed we needed to do this last time. Yeah, it's really something else. And now, Eli late, too, man. I got a grudge against him from a long time ago still.

And he wrote for this newspaper's not even around anymore, the New York Sun. But, boy, was he supposedly the source for a ton of false claims back in those days? And am I remembering that right, Kelly? Yeah, and he's a particularly odious person. And I say that from personal experience, I was at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. And we had to go, you know, when you go to these conventions as a member of the media, they have all of these little different side events and press conferences all day, all these stage setups. And I had gone to one of these things to cover, you know, outside of the

encampment, because these turned into serious encampments after 9-11. And I was getting a cab to come back. And he ended up, I don't know how it happened, but we ended up sharing the cab on the way home and he introduced himself and I knew exactly who he was and I introduced myself as Kelly Blahos. I'm here. I, you know, I said I was working, I think I was covering it both for Fox News and the American conservative at the time. And when I said, American conservative said, oh, you work for that, for that racist. I don't know if he said racist or Nazi or something like that, but it was either racist or Nazi Pap Buchanan. And I could feel. You know those moments when you can actually feel the blood draining from your face?

Like you read it in a book, but it actually happens. And that's why it's a cliche. It actually happened. And I could feel the blood draining from my face. And it was one of those moments, Scott, where you really didn't know what to say because it was so confrontational and nasty. And we're sitting like two feet from each other in a back of a cab. And so like I stammered some sort of like rebukes.

of what he said, but I spent the rest of the day thinking, I should have said this, I should have said that, but I was so taken aback that somebody could just be so freaking arrogant, cocky, and mean at the same time. And I said to myself, wow, he's exactly like his writing is. Yeah, seriously. And here's a guy, you know, my rejoinder might have been something like, yeah, but look at you soaking in blood right now as you accuse other people. I mean, this is a guy who lied us into war and lied us into staying in it and lied about terrorism and Iraq and all of these things for years. Yeah, exactly. So there's a real responsibility there, you know? It was partially I was kicking myself for not having a more effective rejoinder. It's just that

I'm a very, I consider myself a nice person. I kind of cue to the certain like courtesies. And when I meet people, I'm not immediately confrontational unless. unless, you know, unless I'm being pushed. And so it just took me by surprise that he was as much of an asshole as he was in his articles. Yeah. No. Yeah, no, I'm not surprised by that at all. And yeah, no, I wasn't saying that you should have said the worst thing I could think of.

But I should have. But yeah. Now, anyway, so look, I think it's important that, you know, as you're writing here, that none of these people were ever held accountable. And, you know, I read the Brett Stevens one in the New York Times where he said, Oh, no, it was all for a good cause and it all worked down. Leaves out all the details of which faction might have benefited and which faction didn't and what difference it made in the history of the last 20 years or any kind of thing. None of the, you know, the consequences for the people there.

And it's funny. It goes without saying, of course, he's writing this in the New York Times. Max Boot, you know, all these guys, they write, you know, Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of the Atlantic right now. And all of these guys still write for the Post and the Times and have access to the broadest American audience of, you know, those kinds of media organizations of anybody else. There's no accountability whatsoever, as you said, all the people who got it right for 20 years, they don't get to write in the Washington Post, you know? We got to suffer Brett Stevens. Why out of all the 330 million of us? they settle on these few people who really like whatever Netanyahu's doing

and whatever they think America should be doing violently and expansively in not just the Middle East, but in Europe and in Asia too. How come they're the only ones who get to speak? I mean, I know Raytheon, you know, advertises on the nightly news, but I guess CIA Bezos owns the post. I'm talking myself in a circle. You know the deal, but. Yeah. It's just crazy to think.

It's all a business. Yeah. You know, I was listening, and this has nothing to do with anything, but it is instructive. I was listening to some coverage about, you know, TikTok and the hearings yesterday on the Hill. And what was interesting to me is that the reporter who was, you know, who was obviously more on the right and against TikTok. But he did point out that TikTok had splashed. all of these advertisements on all of the major newspapers, you know, for two days on, you know, basically promoting itself in anticipation of these hearings in which they took a real

wamping. And so the reporting was obviously more sympathetic to TikTok. And I don't care what you think about TikTok or the Chinese or whatever. But that, I mean, that speaks to how influential money is. And when we're talking about the defense industry, when you have the defense companies are advertising on political, for example, on their national security bulletin that they have. And you have advertisements for Lockheed Martin. I mean, are you really going to expect that the reporting and the tone and the framing is going to be at all critical of the military industrial complex when these newspapers, these bulletins, newsletters, whatever you want to call them, are being funded in part by the defense industry.

And so, and we're all forced to rely on them. You know that Vezos gets all sorts of defense contracts to Amazon. So I, it's, it's unfortunate, but not surprising, I guess. Yeah. And we're all forced to rely on them because they're the ones who have access to government, officials making their claims and statements and for you know whatever it's worth we have to you know not take their word for it but we have to see what their word even is you got to read the post of times in the journal and right you know to even know what it is they're lying about uh or what

might be true in there the stark omissions of fact that they sometimes make and all the rest of it you know against interest uh or the things that they brag about that to us doesn't seem like the kind of thing you would boast about, but they do think it is. So they go ahead and admit it, you know, we're like stuck with them, you know, to a great degree. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's not just about looking at the past here. Like we were just talking about, this is informing how the conversation proceeds on Ukraine. And so if you have the same people, like you said, Jeff Goldberg at the Atlantic, the Atlantic has been four square for a more aggressive U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Every day you have something from Ann Applebaum or Elliot Cohen or anybody else there who's basically pushing and prodding and cajoling Americans to have stomach for the war. And this is where all the never-Trump or neocons of the past have found a little roost. And so this isn't a problem of the past. It isn't just looking back and complaining.

This is about how the past is informing, you know, the conversation about U.S. policy today, this time in Ukraine. Yep. So it goes. And, you know, I finally learned that or remembered, I guess, when I reread the book that, that doesn't just refer to every terrible thing. That's when people die. And you go, so it goes. That's when he would say that, Vonnegut. But so, or his character would, I guess.

But so, yeah, that's what we're talking about, these people killing people, is exactly what it is. And the way that they talk about it is still blows me away. Yeah, we just need to send some more Russians home in body bags and coffins and that'll learn them. Like, man, you know, the microphone's on, right? You're writing this thing just right out. You know, the Russians, they can read in English and they can tune in to the radio. What did they call them back in the day? They called them the 101st keyboarder brigade.

something like that. Oh, I'm sorry. You know what? I'll Google it while you're answering my next question. It was a funny, snarky term for the people like Jonah Goldbergs and all of the neocons who basically armchair generaling every single day on their blogs during Iraq. And it's like, hey, hey guys, why I should just strap a gun on and go fight yourself? You don't want to? Sorry, you know. And that's how I feel today when I read some of these tweets that are just so enthralled with the war porn and admonishing anybody who might, you know, offer some restraint on the situation, calling them tankies and just, I mean, it's just, it's like, okay, well, when's your plane leaving? Because you can go over

there and volunteer. Americans have done that. So what's stopping you? Yeah, I remember back then, you know, Jonah Goldberg said, well, I have other priorities. I have a wife and a kid. You think these Marines and soldiers don't have wives and kids? Unbelievable. He's the leader. This is the editor of the National Review. And by the way, speaking of from, this is the thing I was spaced out that I was going to say. If people just type in on Twitter, the hashtag Ramando 20 years ago, I've been linking to a lot of Justin's old stuff from the run up to the war. And just the other day, I posted Commissar from, which was

Ramando's rebuke to from, a Canadian who wrote in the National Review that Lou Rockwell and Justin Romando and Pat Buchanan and I guess Scott McConnell, I'm sorry, forget the names of essentially all of the right libertarians and paleo conservatives who opposed the war are all a bunch of horrible anti-Semites and the title of the article in the National Review was unpatriotic conservatives. And so in the tradition of them kicking out the John Birchers and the Ayn Randians and the Libertarians, now they are kicking the paleo-cons out of the right and using, you know, anti-Semitism

as at least one of the bogus claims against them. And the whole thing, this guy's not even from here. And, oh, sorry about the pun with the from, but yeah, this guy's not from here. And he gets to say this. Yes. It's so funny. I just Googled Justin and the keyboard warriors

and the first thing that came up was Jeffrey Goldberg, and guard of American journalism. But anyway, yeah, these guys, just horrible. And so if people want to look at that commissar from, he says, you know, if Bill Crystal is the little Lenin of the neo-conservatives and Norman Podhoritz, they're Stalin, then that makes, um, uh, from would be, oh, I forgot how to pronounce his name, the guy from the checka. Anyway.

Save me. Don't you know the name of the guy for the checker from me? No, I'm just kidding. Listen, anyway. No, these guys are horrible. I don't have in front of me. I should have known what I was going to say before I started to say in that. But you bring up a good point because David Frum kind of went away in his little hole,

but he was always still there all through the Trump years. And it often struck me, why are we listening to this guy from Canada telling Americans how they should vote and who they should vote for? and admonishing half the country for voting Republican and for this particular guy. It just floored me, and they kept having him on panel discussions and book talks. And, you know, he basically leapt into that, like, stream of people in the Washington or, you know, the elite media pool or whatever you want to call it that found like they could make a lot of money by writing books about Trump. You know, and it was like a little cottage industry. It still is, I guess. But he threw himself into that.

And there's no reflection about it. Like, why are we listening to this Canadian tell us what we should do? Seriously. And by the way, so that's a great segue into your other piece here, the symposium, aside from Bush and Cheney, who's at fault for the Iraq War. And I appreciated what you said here, which strangely enough, it's the nicest thing, you know, that really resonated with me in the entire. deal that you could that anybody said about anyone was you said at least richard pearl had the

decency to at least mostly retire from the washington scene and doesn't you know continue to disgrace us with his presence he goes on newsmax once every few years or something right um and that is nice of him i don't know if that's a real like i remember gordon prezer speculating maybe he's got some health problems or something yeah it doesn't seem like it must be humility i don't know. Say that. So somebody else must have written that. So I want to give them credit.

Who said that in the symposium? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought that was your line. No, I didn't have a line. I stayed out of the symposium. I let everybody else do the talking. Oh, I screwed that up then here. No, that's okay.

We can look it up while we're talking. Yeah. Oh, I control FD. Oh, is Barbara Slavin. Okay. Yeah, I want to give her credit. My brain remembers that now that I remember. I remember it. Yeah, it was Barbara Slavin. I like her. She's a good lady.

Yeah, and she did recall his nickname Prince of Darkness. Is she the one who came up with that? I don't think she came up with it, but she recalled it in her little symposium contribution, which I appreciated. Yeah, absolutely. And listen, I mean, the guy he was just on the defense policy board, the chair of it at the time. And so people might, you know, underestimate his role. But he, along with Bill Crystal, you know, outside the government. And, you know, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby inside the government, Worms, there, and this guy was really a pivotal ringleader in all of Washington. And, you know, at the American Enterprise Institute, they were a huge force in pushing the war.

And he was, you know, really one of the ring leaders there. In fact, maybe that's why he stays out of town is he would rather let, you know, these others kind of take the heat. You know, Wolfowitz also has mostly gone away, right? Yeah, you know, I feel like there were some of these ringleaders. It actually took a toll on them. And I can't, I have nothing to prove. I don't have nothing, you know, no evidence to that.

Can't be shame. But I do feel that there were a few people who just sort of sunk back into more private life instead of pushing forward and doubling down like others. But I don't know. But I think it all goes to show. look at all of the people that were raised in this symposium. Everyone from Pearl and Fife and Wormser to Christopher Hitchens and other people in the elite media, Michael Gordon, who co-wrote some of those Judy Miller pieces about WMD ahead of the invasion. You realize what an all-consuming

situation this was on so many levels. You had military people, you had political types, you had think tankers, academics, and then you had the press. And they were all working in concert to make this happen. And we talk about what's going on today in Ukraine and feeling the overall pressure from the blob and the establishment for an aggressive policy. against Russia and Ukraine, but I don't know if you'll agree, Scott, but I feel like it was it was so much worse back then because they're just, I think the neocons had such a vested interest to taking out Saddam that they pulled no,

there were no stops pulled on making that happen. And it was, there was a lot of pressure for people like you and I and others who were trying to vocalize, some sort of dissent or opposition or restraint and we were marginalized pretty heavy and didn't have Twitter or any of these other platforms to, aside from antiwar.com and your show, but like we needed more megaphones. We didn't have them back then. Yeah, it was a really dark time. I mean, the amount of kind of peer pressure that just the average idiot in your neighborhood felt to go along with this. We all better agree on this.

else, boy, everybody at work's going to be mad. And, you know, I'm not sure about it in your town. Well, you know, it must have been up there too. But, you know, in Austin, Texas, the American flag sticker meant I support invading Iraq. Somehow they were able to pull that off. So every car had that. And it was clear that that was what it meant, you know?

And so, and then if you didn't have the American flag sticker on your car, then you didn't support invading Iraq. Right. What a, yeah, it's just crazy. If you were in a liberal enclave, you know, like in a suburb of Washington, D.C., like where I live, there, you know, there were fewer incidences or examples of that. So it was definitely a mix, whereas I can't even imagine, you know, outside of that. because where I live, it says it's very liberal and there was a lot of antagonism against George Bush. Yeah.

Well, I live in Austin. It's very mixed here too, you know. So I think people were more, they felt more free to show signs of pushback, but it was really focused on George Bush. I don't think people were really comfortable with being anti-war, but they were more comfortable as like, well, I'm not, I'm not going to fly that flag. or I'm not going to put that flag on my sticker because they saw it as support for the Bush administration or the GOP. So there was some dissent on that level. But I feel like all of the anti-war protests that occurred here in D.C. were all like hard left, anti-imperialists. You know, it was a grab bag of regular radical dissenters. And then eventually you had actual

veterans who came home and started their own protests, like the Winter Soldier hearings. But yeah, it was just, it was kind of suffocating. So for somebody who felt like they were like someone like myself was, I believe I'm more of an independent leaning right libertarian, I really didn't have a home because I wasn't about to align myself with just people who are knee-jerk, anti-Bush. but I was so uncomfortable with the direction that the politics were going. So thank God for places like anti-war.com and the American conservative because those were where people on the right went who didn't feel like comfortable,

you know, support things. Yeah, and there really wasn't nearly as many places to go. There wasn't anything like Facebook or Twitter, you know, level social media yet or anything like that. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic habanero, honey habanero, pineapple habanero,

Poblano jalapeno, and the Blood Orange Ghost. They're all so good, I swear. And for a limited time, Tennessee Hot Sauce Company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the sun thermonuclear hot sauce. It's full of Carolina Reapers, Scorpion Peppers, Dr. Pepper, Hydrogen Isotopes, and all kinds of things that'll burn your tongue clean off. Seriously, it's really good. Get yourself a hot sauce subscription.

Spend $40 or more and use promo code Scott to get a free bottle of hotter than the sun hot sauce. That's tnhot sauceco.com. Hey, y'all got to check out these awesome busts of our hero, the great Ron Paul. They're made by the renowned sculptor Rick Casale, the 13 inches tall hand-painted bronze resin based on Casale's brilliant original.

You may have seen mine in the background on my bookshelf in some recent interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton, and you'll save 25 bucks, and this show will get a little kickback, too. That's Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-Rick-Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Searchlight Pictures Presents

The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things, comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th.

Get tickets now. and by the way i didn't mean to say like this flag stickers for the most intimidating thing just that that was sort of the results of it was like people felt a lot of pressure that they better put that flag on their car or else people at work are gonna all think they're crazy whatever and and the pressure and you know basically the only alternative media to be on tv really you know other than low circulation type magazines or something was talk radio and talk radio is rush limbaugh gordon lydie neil bords and michael weiner and A.k.a. Savage and Mark Levin and all these guys. And they just, and every one of them is Sean Hannity. Every one of them screaming at the top of their lungs for two hours straight every day. How dare you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just to the endth degree, Bill O'Reilly ruled all of TV cable news. And MSNBC and CNN are just dying to try to keep up with that level of believe. on the part of the regime at the time and could never

do it. So, yeah, people who were young then, they don't remember. It was like, you could probably compare it almost to like the McCarthy era or something like that, you know? Although it's true too that, you know, in downtown Austin, everybody agreed otherwise, you know what I mean? So there's like,

you know, obviously a partisan role to be played and all of that. But ultimately something like two-thirds of the population supported the war and it was mostly because they were made to feel like they had to because otherwise you hate America and freedom and love terror or something. Yeah. And it really, I mean, the, the central or the mushy, the mushy middle, you know, the democratic establishment, they were absolutely afraid of being seen as anti-war.

So you just take your democracy now's and your Amy Goodman's out of the picture because they were as marginalized as we were. when you had your mainstream Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, all being dominated by mushy corporate, go along, get along idiots who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag about what was going on, who deferred to all of these generals and all of these top former retired Pentagon officials brought them on their shows in a rotating cast. remember the message force multipliers, as well as all these think tankers like AEI and Brookings and later on CNAS, I mean, they were part of the problem. They might not have been pro-Bush. They might have criticized Bush on a daily basis, but they didn't criticize them enough to say, we need to get out of this war.

They never went so far. They just basically said, well, Bush isn't the right guy. to execute this. He's messing it up, but they never had the guts to say we should have never been there in the first place. Yeah. Hey, and by the way, as long as we're talking about heroes of the right here, we should not forget to mention Ron Paul and Jimmy Duncan and other members of Congress and the Republican Party who opposes this thing. And Ron didn't just oppose it. I mean, he heroically opposed it. And when I first found anti-war.com, it's like, huh, what's this, anti-war.com? Is that some kind of commie thing? Hey, they got an article by Ron Paul on the front

page. I like these guys already. That was in, you know, 99 or something. Then when the, when a Rockward 2 came is when I really started reading them every day and stuff. And yeah, so of course, no, he's the absolute hero because he stood up to the Republican establishment in two presidential elections. Well, and as a congressman during the war, too, I mean, in this, in the start of the war in 2002 and 2003, he voted against it. He challenged Henry Hyde and the other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he introduced a declaration of war and then voted against it and urged them to vote against it, but also said, if you're going to vote for the authorization, then I demand you vote for it and take responsibility for your actions, and they all refuse.

And you know what I mean? He's the best. Yeah, he's my hero. He absolutely is. And, you know, I was saying on this event that we had on Wednesday that, you know, my, when I was working at Fox News at the time after 9-11, you know, I felt increasingly uncomfortable about the way that the United States was reacting to the attacks when the Patriot Act was passed. And everybody, except for Ron Paul and Bob Barr and maybe a handful of others, I don't even know who they are at this point, just went along with it. These sweeping national security state measures just taking away. civil liberties left and right. And here is Ron Paul going, hello, what are we doing here? This is an overreaction. And of course, the Republicans were four square because, you know, it was George

Bush and it was Republicans were in charge and they were law and order, maybe. But the Democrats, too, they're so fearful of being seen as weak on terrorism that they went right along with it. And I said, there's something really bad is happening here. And then that, of course, led to the drumbeat, which we know now that was happening for years for the war in Iraq. It just went from Afghanistan and al-Qaeda to the axis of evil. And then Iraq, global war on terror. And it meant global war on terror internationally and at home. and that's a whole other show because people like to brush that one under the rug too

how much Americans were targeted after 9-11 Hey Kelly I wanted to point out this piece by Robert Dreyfus now I knew him back then as one of the greats I interviewed him a bunch of times I've read a bunch of his articles and I can rattle some of the titles off the top of my head like Vice Squad that he wrote for the American prospect and agents of influence about Ariel Sharon funneling fake intelligence into the stream that he wrote for the nation and, you know, a few more like that. But he linked to his own article in your symposium here.

And it was an article that he wrote for the American prospect. He chooses Abrams Shulski who ran the Office of Special Plans under Douglas Fythe, under Paul Wolfowitz, under Donald Rumsfeld. at the Pentagon. And so he picks Shulski. Then he links to this article that he wrote, the Pentagon muzzles the CIA. Now, everybody knows it's true that the CIA tortured innocent men into implicating Iraq for backing al-Qaeda. But the analysts, some of them at least, were really getting their arms twisted to pretend that they believed in the weapons. And that was a real thing that was going on. So when we talk about the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon,

that was kind of the end run around the CIA which they ended up of course getting on board anyway I'm not trying to absolve them but the Pentagon is way out front on this but anyway here's the real thing I'm getting at is

I don't remember this article at all and the date on it is November 21st 2002 months before the war and this article is fantastic I mean he has the whole thing Dreyfus is brilliant

he has the entire story of how this neoconservative network works inside the government, names all the names and all the departments. I mean, the whole thing is, what, 2,000 words or something. And it's just, and you take all of the rest of his work on the neocons during that era and add to this. I mean, it's just incredible. But this article, I'm just kicking myself

because the chapter of my book would be different if I had known about this article. There are facts in here that belong in there that I did not know. So this is a really great one. I really hope people will look at it. And he's got Rule Mark Grech and Pearl and who's the other neocon in here? Rodman. I forgot his first name.

Somebody Rodman was one of the neocons that I had missed to in the Pentagon there. And what bothers me most about this is that, yeah, it's in the prospect. But why didn't these things rise to the level of mainstream coverage? because the gatekeepers at the major news networks, which were owned at that time by like eight conglomerates, now it's like six. You know, would it let this stuff actually submerce or surface and become part of the conversation

about whether we should have went to war or not? Like you said, he lays it all out in this article. I'm flabbergasted looking at it right now. And you don't remember it, I don't remember it, because it stayed in this little under the radar alternative media zone that was never engaged with by the mainstream press.

And you mentioned anti-war dot com there. I mean, it's just a Romando. I really give him the credit and I was paying attention at the time I really think this is just true that more than any other person, he's the one who forced the meme as you'd call it now

about the neo-conservatives into the public because, of course, everybody in academia and in foreign policy expertise and whoever they know who the neoconservatives are this very weird sect of people who are somehow related to the crystals and podhoritz's and their daughters-in-law and whatever the hell right that's what the whole thing is um Jim lobe wrote the great piece all in the neocon family for alternate how these you know it's a very small sect of ex comies here that we're talking about and um almost all of them ex-democrats and stuff stuff. Yeah, so in 2002, I thought that the Republican Party, that to me meant James Baker the third, the Sith Lord, right? And the waspy guys, like oil and banking and all these, you know, the old American establishment. And if it hadn't been for Romando, I would not have understood at all that, no, man, there's this weird sect of guys from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. And you might not know their names, but here are their names and here are their new jobs.

and that's why we're going to war. And, you know, he wrote, Justin wrote in March of O2, our hijacked foreign policy. Neo-conservatives take Washington. Baghdad is next. So that's, you know, three, four months, five months after September 11th, whatever it is. But you see where that kind of talk got people.

It was the same thing for the American conservative, becoming the targets of David Frum and others being called anti-Semitic. So there was this sort of, this idea or it was it was purposeful to target anybody who raised these issues about neoconservatives and where and their affiliation with a project for a new american century for example as being anti-jewish and that was a way to silence people from calling out the obvious this wasn't about jewishness this was about a lecudnik hardline pro-Israeli policy that had basically, you know, it had basically commingled with interests,

American foreign policy interests, creating an agenda, an agenda that was laid out with the project of a New American century. It was laid out years before when they were able to convince President Clinton to sign an executive order on regime change in Iraq. So the fact were there, but the manipulation was the chill that went out to the anti-war community was if you start pointing the finger at neoconservatives, you will be called anti-Semitic. And I know that Justin suffered from those attacks because even when I started writing for anti-war.com, you know, I remember being concerned, will I be lumped in? Not because I wasn't proud of what Justin was doing, but I knew that anti-war.com was taking a lot of hits for its positions on

Israel, on U.S. foreign policy with Israel, on the neoconservatives. And I really give people like Justin and Jim Loeb and others who just powered through that regardless of the professional risk to tell the truth. Because like you said, everybody uses the word neoconservative. now. Everybody points to people like Douglas Fife and Bill Crystal and others as neo-conservatives. But back then, you were taking a little bit of a risk by connecting all these people with neoconservatism. And I'm glad that that's over to a large extent, but not entirely. But it was a creepy time. Yeah. I think the smearer stuck a lot harder back then compared to now. It's been overuse so much that people don't really believe.

it but there was kind of the idea that like no one is going to falsely accuse somebody of that because that looks terrible you know so you're kind of guilty before proven innocent or something but people know better than that now but you know there were plenty of that's why um eli like was able to say that and right and now that i'm thinking about it he probably didn't say racist he probably said anti-semite yeah which that that's even more um shocking and and it's because true exactly it wasn't true but by the implication it's like well that makes you part of the problem kelly because you work for a magazine that's anti-semitic and you know in this town now and you know anywhere else that that that could be that could be a professional a professional killer yeah

although i mean the thing of it is too look how many jews have written for the american conservative over all these years, you know what I mean? And how many friends... You talked about Jim Loeb. I mean, here's the sweetest guy in the world. He doesn't have a sour bone in his body for anyone. He's simply a journalist who documents things. He's a real-time historian.

I mean, nothing with that. No grudges whatsoever. I first talked to him in 2003. And I said, that's funny. I watched this thing at AEI on C-SP. And I saw that Pat Robertson was there. Now, that's not a, he's a neo-connor not. No, no, no, no, no.

They're just fellow travelers, see, that's different. And, you know, here's how you delineate. And the delineation was not that they're Jewish. The delineation was that they're this certain sect of people, some of whom are Jewish, but not all. I mean, Salme Khalilzad was on the National Security Council in the Bush government, and he's not Jewish. Right. And there was, you know, especially at the time he had what Michael Novak and all those guys. I used to know a whole bunch of examples of Catholic,

mostly Catholic, neoconservatives, who are fellow travelers with this whole movement too. But, you know, Jim Lowe, I think just the fact of Jim Lowe and his journalism itself, you know, proves the point. And not because of his Jewishness, but just because of his total, just nice guy, objectivity, journalismness that just shows that there's just no grudge here. There's no, you know, anti-exam.

anyone's sentiment other than this group of bad guys, bad actors, money makers, think tankers, and war starters. I mean, under American law, they all belong in prison. Everybody knows that, so what's the beef anyway, you know?

Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, it was, you know, it's very instructive to look back at that. It was, it was very McCarthyite back then. Yep. And, you know, it's easy to say now, oh, well, everybody knew it was a failure, you know. And it's funny, Scott, because I noticed doing a little

research for this week for the anniversary, you know, by 2000, like late 2003, um, early 2004, the press was already issuing all sorts of mayaculpus for the WMD, being wrong on the WMD's and falling for the whole Judy Miller curve ball and Colin Powell and whatnot. And so there was this acknowledgement that they that they dropped the ball on that but they spent the next 10 years almost supporting the war it was like okay well we're it was wrong we you know we got in there in the wrong pretences but but we'll go along with the other justifications for being there because now that we're there we have to reconstruct and now we have an insurgency and we got to fight that and then now oh wait now okay is in here and we got to fight them so

the press never really learned its lessons from those from those years um and it just you know so when you hear people talk these days for the anniversary and they say oh yes there were no wmds and we should have done a better job it wasn't just that wmds they did a bad job at reporting it writ large and that included everything from u.s soldiers committing massacres and their raids and in the urban environment to torture, to the CIA's role, to Blackwater's role, to like the PTSD that the veterans were coming home with. All that stuff got shunted to the back pages for nine years. Yep. In fact, I mean, this is still my major complaint about all the coverage then, too. The reporters, almost none of them bothered to learn who was who in the war and never

bothered to explain anything beyond it's America and the Iraqi people against the terrorists who are trying to thwart democracy and freedom when that wasn't the shape of the war at all. If you knew where to read anybody who knew anything about it, for example

a guy like Bob Dreyfus writing about, well, let me introduce you to Abdulaziz al-Hakim and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and what difference it makes, right? You're not going to get that on TV ever. And you're not going to get it reading, you know, the newspaper ever. I mean, the New York Times. And I'm

glad that, you know, we got the opportunity here to highlight the great James Cardin. He picks on Michael Gordon, who never got fired, right? Yeah, right, right. Jimmy Miller, he co-authored the aluminum tube story and a bunch of the other ones. And they went, oh, you know, put a scarlet A around her neck, and she deserved it. She was just horrible. I almost went on a tangent there. But anyway, he was just as bad. And then as, as Cardin points out, very well here, and this is in the book, too, that, you know, he, oh, you know what, he doesn't point that out. I'm just going to point it out. This is the same guy who perpetrated the EFP hoax of 2007 when they said that Iran is behind every roadside bomb that goes off if it goes off in Shiite. All the copper cord, EFP IED bombs, which is a total lie. And as I demonstrate in the book, I got, you know, 100 different footnotes or 15 or something about, no, those bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis on tech that they got not from Iran, but that they got from Lebanon, Lebanese, Hezbollah, who got them from the IRA, not from the Ayatola. So anyway, the whole thing was a hoax.

and it was Gordon in service of Vice President Cheney and David Petraeus to frame Iran as responsible for all their failures in the war when they were the ones who chose to fight a war for Iran's best friends, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and the Supreme Islamic Council, the guys that Robert Dreyfus could tell you about, but the New York Times never will. So how do you like that? And this was the basis of the surge. This is, you know, at the time that they're launching the surge, this was the whole attempt that was ultimately, I know, remember thwarted by Admiral Fallon, who was the commander of Sentcom at the time, that they were going to take the war to Iran then. They were blaming Iran for those bombs, and the plot was that they're going to, and they even had

Wormser talked about publicly, that they were going to do an end run around W. Bush, and they were going to maybe even have Israel start the war and force Bush into it and hit the nuclear program and hit the IRGC bases inside Iran. And then the commander of

Centcom, completely insubordinate, said, that's not happening on my watch over my dead body, screw you, no. And they were like, oh, well, what are you going to do then? So thank you, Admiral Fallon, wherever you are. But, I mean, that was clearly the plot, and Gordon was in on it because, Kelly, he wasn't held responsible for all the lies that he had told in 2002 and 03 with Judy Miller in the first place. The same thing we're talking about at the beginning about.

Why are we even talking about Matt, Max Boot, and David From anyway, of all the writers in America, why does anybody have to pay attention to these guys at all? They're still around pushing this stuff. None of them have ever been held accountable. Gordon is now at the Wall Street Journal, one of their top guys. Yeah. You know? And anyway, it goes on. But listen, I'm sorry, I've taken up so much of your time today, but I've had such a great time talking to you. Me too. And I really, even though it's a depressing subject, but. You know what? But I like beating these guys. guys over the head. So it's okay in a way, you know. And look, I want to say a nice thing about Dan De Petrus. He drives me crazy sometimes and I got into a fight with him on Twitter one time or something like that. But he did a really good one about the evil of James Woolsey, the former CIA director, Neocon, Lunatic. And he actually even made a couple of points about Woolsey. Some details here that I didn't know. I don't remember what they are anymore, but I remember thinking, oh, I didn't know exactly that point. So good for De Petrus, wrote a really great thing about a

really bad neocon there. That's nice to see. Yeah, I was really pleased with the different responses that we got. Like I said earlier, you know, my old editor, Bob Mary brought up Woodrow Wilson as, you know, and we might have a little chuckle about that. But, you know, he was the inspiration for the neo-conservative, not the inspiration, but he was a useful tool in regards to how to deliver this argument for the war in Iraq to regular Americans. The idea that America should be a force for good in the world and should be able to use its powerful military to spread democracy. And those were ideals that Woodrow Wilson had warped and used for World War I

and had sort of pushed and it became over time, you know, the foundation of the United Nations and but this more U.S.-led world order that we're always talking about today. So there was some creative responses is all I'm saying, and that that was one of them. Yep. Yeah, true. And there's so many good ones. And I like the one where they, Laura, is it lump? Lumpy?

Yeah, Lumpy. Lumpy. That rice for you. And she blamed Laura Bush, which I think is totally appropriate. People always let her off the hook. Like what? She's just his sidekick or his pet or some kind of like, you know, or whatever extra in the scene or something like that. She was his wife and she was encouraging him to do this. This is definitely the right thing, George. I believe in you. Go right ahead. Right when she could have been the person obviously closest to him to tell him, man, you don't Star Wars. Not really. You could threaten people, but she's going to just roll the whole army in there like this. You know, she could have spoken reason to him, but no, you know? Yeah. So many people to blame. There are probably a number of faces and voices that we're forgetting that were so prevalent back then, you know. I got a long list and enough already.

I went to great pains to name every neocon in the government and outside the government, the think tanks in the media and one giant list of people I hate there in the Iraq War II section. Oh my goodness. I think it's in the Clean Break section because it's, you know, the neocon focus part of it. And that's all a substack, actually. You don't have to buy the book. Go to Scott Horton's show.substack.com and I serialized the whole chapter. It's 14 sections, the chapter on Iraq War II.

And it's pretty sure it's section two, a clean break, has all the neocons I could think of, except apparently I left out this guy, Rodman. Hmm. I'm very disappointed with you, Scott. Damn it. I should have called Bob Dreyfus and said, now, wait a minute. Make sure I'm not forgetting anybody here. All right. Anyway, thank you so much for your time and coming back on the show, Kelly. This is great. Thank you, Scott. All right, you guys, that is the great Kelly Vlahos. She is the editor of Responsible Statecraft. That's the blog, or not the blog, the collection of articles, the website of the Quincy Institute for

international statecraft and that is uh no for responsible state craft i meant to say and that is responsible statecraft.org oh and these pieces are setting the record straight on the teeming media swamp that supported iraq and symposium aside from bush and cheney who is at fault for the iraq war you really got to read that one it's really great the scott horton show and anti-war radio can be heard on K-P-FK 90.7 FM in LA APSRadio.com anti-war.com

Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org