Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/16/22 Ben Freeman on the Links Between Foreign Governments and America’s Foreign Policy “Experts”

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Scott interviews Ben Freeman about the money governments like Saudi Arabia and Ukraine invest in D.C. lobbying. They begin by discussing the Middle East Institute, a Saudi-funded D.C. Think Tank that brands itself as an objective institution studying the Middle East when, in reality, its “experts” always happen to argue for what the Saudi regime desires. They then turn to the rest of the world and observe how awful and dangerous the rhetoric coming out of D.C. think tanks is concerning Russia and China.      Discussed on the show: “Gulf funded think tank turns pro-Saudi, UAE messaging up to 11” (Responsible Statecraft) “Why the “end the Yemen war” narrative is problematic” (Middle East Institute) “Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz” (Responsible Statecraft) “Tell us how this war in Ukraine ends” (Responsible Statecraft) Ben Freeman is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute. He previously served as Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative with the Center for International Policy. Read his work at AntiWar.com and Responsible Statecraft. Follow him on Twitter @BenFreemanDC. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.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. You guys on the line, I've got Ben Freeman from the Quincy Institute and he's got a new one out

for ResponsibleStatecraft.org called Gulffunded think tank turns pro-Saudy UAE messaging up to 11, all about the Middle East Institute here. Welcome back to the show, Ben. Thanks, Scott. It's great to be here again. Great to have you on, and you know what, it's just great to have your acquaintance here. You are the best guy I know, and there's a few like this, but you're the best guy I know on just watching like a hawk, these foreign lobbies and they're spending in this country to influence the Congress and especially the think tanks. and the way you do, and, you know, our last interview was about Ukraine and how much money they've been spending. Of course, that's all American tax money anyway, but recycled into

public relations campaigns in America and this kind of thing. And, of course, the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby. And here comes the Saudis again. And, you know, I think probably a lot of Americans would be surprised to know that these so-called think tanks that they hear about on NPR news or whatever, that these are all funded by foreign monarchies, really, in America? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Scott. It's very unfortunate that so many of the experts that you see on, you know, whether it's CNN, Fox News, NPR, it doesn't matter what side you're getting your political news from. Chances are the expert that you're hearing from, they've got some ties to some foreign money in some way, shape, or fashion, or another. And also, chances are, it's usually perfectly legal. And they just don't tell you about it. man all right well so what about that i thought there was the uh well and i guess there is the foreign um registration act i i dropped a word from that acronym there fara um they uh so they do have

to register as foreign agents but then i guess that just doesn't matter right that as long as their conflict of interest isn't disclosed when they're being interviewed on these big tv or radio shows or whatever it is or writing their essays for their important um you know, op-eds for newspapers and magazines and things, then who cares if they're foreign agents, right? It's a big difference. Yeah, this is where the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or Farah, as us nerds call it, it's kind of a gray area for Farah, the think tanks, that is, in that Farah has this requirement that if you are being funded, you know, by a foreign entity, specifically a foreign government, and you're doing work that would benefit them or you're doing work on

their behalf that you do have to register under Farah. But for think tanks, at least think tanks think, they're eligible for this exemption to Farah for what the statute calls bona fide scholastic activities. And now, this is where it gets really confusing, Scott, is that I think in a lot of cases, some of the work that think tanks are doing is not really bona fide scholastic activity. You know, this isn't, you know, research that you would see in the ivory tower. In many cases, it's research that would seem to benefit directly these foreign funders that are helping to keep the lights on at these think tanks. Yeah. And then so, but they remain very objective in their analysis, though, a lot of the times right and advise that sometimes maybe we need to cut these

monarchies off until they start holding regular democratic elections and adopt a constitution and bill of rights and stuff like that, right? I wish. I wish. I mean, my gripe is, you know, it's a free world. You know, people are allowed to take money from, you know, whatever foreign government they want to. But my gripe is that they need to be transparent about it. They need to tell folks about it. And so when these folks go on CNN or, you know, they're writing an article in the Wall Street Journal, let's say, just tell people that the topic that you're writing about or that you're talking. about you're funded by the people who could benefit from what you're saying. If you're candid about that with people, then I think everybody's on the up and up. It doesn't look like you're trying to pull one over on somebody. The problem I really have is when these folks are trying to put themselves out as objective, you know, as a purely objective expert, you know, I don't have a stake in the game, you know, just trust me as this neutral party. And then they leave out those

potential conflicts of interest. That's when I think it's really problematic because they're deceiving consumers of their information. Yeah. All right. Well, so what's their current game here? I see this thing about they're accusing the Biden administration of tilting toward the Ayatollah. Get the hell out of here. You can't pay me enough to come up with some crap like that. And I could really use the money, but there's got to be a limit, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's what's really problematic about it to me with, like, a lot of the rhetoric that we're seeing from some of these Saudi and UAE funded think tanks now, they're sort of creating this argument that I'm not sure is really there. And they're saying that these countries in the Middle East, because of Biden's negligence, the countries are turning more towards China and Russia and sort of using that as a threat to try and get the U.S. to do more of what these countries. would like. And the real problem I have, especially from a Quincy Institute perspective, where

we're advocating for a foreign policy of restraint, is that a lot of what they're advocating for is kind of like a NATO light in the Middle East, which is to say we would have this like security cooperation agreement with some of these Gulf dictatorships. And we would effectively have U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for the security and to keep U.S. military troops on foreign soil, which needless to say, would be very costly, very problematic, could get the U.S. involved in God knows how many other wars in the Middle East, too. So I think it's important for us to call out kind of these arguments and some of the money behind it. Yeah. And you know, for all this narrative about boo-hoo Iran taking over the region,

first of all, it was America that gave their best friends Baghdad. And it was America that made the Syrian regime more reliant on Iran and Hezbollah than ever before. So they have to shut up and not complain about that. But then secondly, as soon as there was even a hint that Biden really meant, the same thing. And he didn't really mean it any more than Obama did when they announced the pivot to Asia. America's not leaving the Middle East. You know, part of Middle East domination is all about controlling China's access to energy anyway. You know what I mean? We're not leaving the leaves. But even when Biden seems like he kind of might be losing interest at all, we see UAE princes fly straight to Tehran. You see Saudi princelings straight to Baghdad to meet with

Iranians and talk about let's dial these tensions down, maybe even find a way to end the war in Yemen, all these things. Right. Not all hell breaks loose because America leaves, but hell starts tightening down a little bit because these royal thugs no longer have the American superpower at their back or even seemingly are losing our support at all to get away with what they're getting away with, right? It's like a little bully with a big bully behind him kind of thing. Yeah, exactly right. And I mean, to anybody who would question that, show me the scoreboard where it's worked. We're having the US be the military backers of all these dictatorships. How has that really worked for the U.S.?

And, you know, you look at it right now, too, with gas prices being the way they are, and these Gulf countries, these major oil-producing Gulf countries, are basically saying no to the U.S. on efforts to try and rein in the price of gas right now. So if they're not even going to help us, you know, rein in the price of gas for American consumers,

what exactly are American taxpayers getting out of this deal? you know, what are we getting out of the fact that we're the big bully, the big backer for these dictatorships? I'm just not seeing the return on investment for your regular Americans with this arrangement we have now. Yeah. And did this change? The last headlines I saw was that Bin Nayef and Ben Salman, the princelings in charge of UAE and Saudi, wouldn't even take President Biden's phone calls? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, And so, you know, despite, we're talking billions of dollars in arms sales, U.S. arms sales, to both Saudi Arabia in the UAE. Well, I mean, full complicity in their genocide in Yemen for the last seven years.

Yeah, you beat me too, it, Scott. That's what I was going to say. They could not commit most of the atrocities they're committing in Yemen without U.S. military weaponry, U.S. military training, U.S. military support. You take all that away in, you know, a lot of the devastation in Yemen. is just not happening. And yet, despite those billions of dollars in tens of billions of dollars in military equipment going to these countries, including armed drones going to the UAE, including F-35s, we're talking some of our most advanced military weaponry. And they won't even take our

calls? What kind of relationship is that? You know, if I'm in a relationship like that with a girlfriend, you know, I think I dump her. And so at some point here, when does the U.S. just say, oh, okay, I've had enough. Yeah, I like this sentence in your piece. The Middle East Institute did not respond to a request for comment. Well, what the hell? How illegitimate are they? That they just think, uh-oh, they had a meeting. Should we talk to this guy? Let's just ignore him and hope it goes away? Because what do they have to say to you in their own defense? Look, the fact that Saudi Arabia really, really, really likes what we say. It's just a coincidence. They happen to have really great opinions like us. That's all. Yeah, I was surprised that they didn't comment. And I mean, for me, it's, you know, asking for

comment is just journalistic integrity. You know, we, I had a bunch of information in there. You know, I saw a pattern of things that they were saying. And, you know, seemed, seem to me at least to be very, very clearly supportive of the goals and aims of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. and in all these pieces, they weren't mentioning their funding. And so I wanted to point that out to people. And I very much wanted them to comment on it. What I was really hoping for, Scott, honestly, was them to say, you know, a sort of mea-culp-a. You know, our apologies, you know, we're striving to be more transparent.

You know, we'll go ahead and ask that to be added to the pieces. But they didn't respond at all to that request for comment, unfortunately. So I guess we'll never know how they really felt. Yeah. Hey, look, we're talking, is it true? Am I reading this thing, right? Tens of millions of dollars for just a little old Middle East Institute. Oh, yeah, yeah. They didn't, in fact, just a few years ago, in one fail swoop, one gift, they got $20 million from the UAE. And, you know, it helped to fill some of their senior ranks, higher staff, helped to help to bolster their nice new facilities there. Yeah, it's tens of millions of dollars.

just from the UAE in Saudi Arabia. And by the way, are you familiar with the Middle East Institute stand on the Yemen War over the last seven years by chance? Do they have a stand? No, I'm actually not. No, I don't know either, but I bet it's bad. Yeah, yeah. No, I can't recall.

I'm not sure, but I can't recall seeing anything that's extremely critical of it. But, you know, I could certainly be wrong. Yeah. Well, I just search site for Yemen and see what I can see here. And now, you also say in this article that the Middle East Institute is far from alone when it comes to being backed by the Saudis. And then, you know, obviously the Israelis are part of this. The Turkish lobby, at least at one time, was very powerful. I think the closer they are with the Israelis, the better for them. But can you sort of, you know, you've got listeners out in some. Cincinnati somewhere need a mind's eye kind of picture of just how influential these foreign lobbies are and how much sway they have in D.C. compared to, say, the American people or the arms manufacturers themselves or the, you know, friends of Israel and all those different affinity organizations, some of them directly related to the Israeli government and many of them not. Oh, enormous, Scott. It's hard.

to put it in perspective, but I think it's fair to say that these foreign governments are far, they're far more powerful than a lot of our domestic lobbying groups even. You know, domestic interest groups can be very powerful. But for these foreign lobbies, they've sort of got their tentacles in all these different pots of influence. They've got their lobbyists. They've got their public relations professionals working with the media. In fact, they have advertising deals directly with the media itself. CNN, for example, has this separate Dubai now kind of outlet that puts out what I think are frankly puff pieces about the UAE, and they're under the banner of CNN because they have this arrangement with the UAE. It goes beyond that.

We're talking about think tanks. They go into academia, too. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, are some of the biggest donors to America's colleges and universities. Qatar is actually the very very biggest donor to America's colleges and universities. So you get all these different... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that last thing again? Qatar is the largest foreign donor to

America's colleges and universities. More than China, more than any other country, any other boogeyman that folks might think up, Qatar takes the kick. And these foreign governments, there's not even a tradition or a moray or nothing that prevents foreign governments from just

bankrolling American universities. And how much money are we talking about there? Oh, billions and billions of dollars, actually, more than the Department of Education actually tracks this. There's a, for you really inquisitive listeners, there's a foreign gifts database that the Department of Education tracks, and they've tracked more than $10 billion in money coming from foreign powers. The Qatar itself has donated more than a billion dollars of that.

So we're talking just huge, huge sums of money. My alma mater, Texas A&M, for example, is one of the largest recipients of Qatari money, too. So even, you know, right there in Texas where you're at, Scott, you're seeing this money affect right in people's backyards. It's not just in D.C. It's the point I always try to make to folks. The lobbyists and everything, sure, they're roaming in the halls of Congress here. But, you know, wherever you are, chances are some of this money is flowing there. And it's very likely flowing to your local college and university.

Right. Hey, after all, you know, as you say, comparing them to American lobbies like the most powerful ones, say the NRA or the AARP or Friends of Israel. That's a foreign lobby and a domestic one that's still here. We're talking about sovereign governments with budgets in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, whatever. They can afford. All this is absolute chump change to them to outrank. If you had every peace activist in America, including all the millionaires, all chipping in as much as they could possibly spare. It doesn't completely. compared to what a sovereign government can just print or borrow from China, whatever it is. Right. Right. That's exactly right, Scott. And, you know, some of the figures that, you know, I threw out to people, oh, you know, 30 million dollar lobbying campaign, people are like, whoa, that's a lot of money. For these countries, you know, if you're Saudi Arabia, that's a rounding air in your budget. You know, that's nothing to them. And if you can, if you can spend $30 million on a lobbying and PR campaign and use that to secure a $10-plus billion arm sale package, that's a gigantic return on investment that I think anybody on Wall Street would be glad to get.

And these foreign governments are getting it all the time, unfortunately. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more. That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks. Hey, y'all, Libertasbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's 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. You guys, check it out. This is so cool. the great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this

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the sorry and he says boy Biden bad news everybody Biden has appointed this guy Lender King to try to end the war but we got to win it first

you can't oh no they're going to revoke the designation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization that's problematic Ben so yeah there you go that's what

endless financing we'll buy you it's the same thing we talk about with russia policy too we have for i guess decades now last couple anyway you have all these think tanks talking about the possibility of confrontation with russia and with china where they just omit the word nuclear in the entire damn study and he just i mean that's no way to get paid well we can never fight them we're deterred by their h bombs well then you don't get your twenty thousand dollars dude so you know So nobody writes that one. And so you have all these people just leave nukes out. And then they have these entire war games.

In fact, they had this thing on, I didn't get to watch it yet. They had a thing on MSNBC where they were, you know, talking about doing a war game with China here. And they act like, well, we could just sink their Navy or we could just obliterate Russia's land army. And then somehow we would not lose our hometowns over this. And you're just supposed to ignore the fact that everybody knows that even China, even though they only have 300, They have 300. Forget only. That's enough to destroy our entire country.

Never mind what Russia could do. But then they just talked for years about, yeah, here's how we'd fight a big tank battle against Russia. I'm like, you guys are crazy. You're going to get us all killed. And look at us now. We've been fighting an avowedly proxy war, an avowed proxy war against Russia for months now, right on their border. And it would be controversial to propose peace talk. Oh, you think we should just give in to Hitler and no, no, no.

And, you know, it's like it's 1962, and Jack Kennedy's refusing to send Bobby to talk to Cruz Jeff's guy, you know? And the thing is completely nuts. And it's based on the idea that, well, what are they going to do about it, I guess? Because they just refuse to consider the fact that, well, they can kill all of us is what they could do about it. And it is, and everybody knows this, sorry, everybody knows this. When it comes to nuclear war, it's use them or lose them. That means as soon as the war starts, it's on. Forget it.

There's no limited nuclear war with a couple of, you know, tactical strikes here and there. Once they nuke NATO headquarters, we launch everything we've got. That's how it works. Right, right. And what's killing me, Scott, is, I mean, complete agreement with you. And unfortunately, no one in Congress is saying this. I should say, except for one person. We've got this $40 billion new aid package going to Ukraine, and nobody's blinking at the number.

The only person who did was Senator Rand Paul, and, you know, he made the controversial statement that maybe we should consider what's in this, and maybe we should consider the potential risks for escalation that could come from an aid package of this side, military assistance of this size. But he was on an island, and nobody else stood there with him. Now, Congress, not debating any of these issues, not thinking about the possibility of escalation or the nuclear weapons issue either, is just going to let this go through. And meanwhile, Russia has said publicly, Putin has announced, that arms transfers are, he's considering them legitimate military targets.

So we're putting U.S. soldiers directly in arms way whenever we're getting new arms to Ukraine. And so we may say that's, that's, we can have a debate, whether that's good, bad, you know, is that, are we willing to take that risk? But nobody is even acknowledging right now that giving arms to Ukraine is a risk to the U.S. soldiers and it increases the risk of the U.S. being involved in a nuclear war with Russia. And we have to include that in our calculations here. Yeah. Well, you know, I think that David Stockman and others are really on to something when they talk about the psychology of the Democrats now and how essentially now that Putin now that Trump is just a stand-in for Trump and this is just more derangement than anything it's also as

John Mearsheimer says that when the war broke out after you know as the result of the coup of 2014 then of course they couldn't admit that their coup had led to the war so what happened was Putin turned into the devil and then you know bad men do bad things and that's all you need to know about that and so you know they have their narrative that is right they're very invested in and of course the entire you know 2016 uh hoax of russian meddling in the election that democrats still aren't over even though it never was true um and so you have all that but then it seems really important to go back to your last piece that we talked about here about the ukraine lobby where and i believe you broke it down between the

think tanks the congressman and the media and how they just dumped in more money than the Israelis in just the last couple of years in order to influence and it's just so easy to see like even if that's just the margin they're all ideologically committed for whatever reasons you know Putin is a conservative christian white guy and they hate that whatever is their stupid problem you know um that this is the margin is all this money is that that's right the consensus is ukrainians heroes black sun and all and uh and putin's the devil in this script and that's it and so you just have it's such a consensus it's unreal i haven't seen anything like this since 20 years ago even during syria well no they were this

stupid on syria too but but this is right up there right with like the lynching of the branched of idiots, the lynching of Saddam Hussein of Bashar al-Assad with the way that they're doing, you know, rounding up this hate mob kind of mentality against the Russians now. And then, but then you have all this money coming in so that if you're a congressman, you'd be crazy to go against this right now, right? It would just be, never mind principle. It would be irrational for you to try to go against this tide, you know? Yeah. I mean, the, the war machine is really, rolling right now. And it's very tough to stop it. And how much money are we talking about that the Ukrainians are spending on these PR firms again? The Ukrainians, the Ukrainian lobbyists are

kind of a cheap date. And I say that out of affection. They, Ukrainian interest spent just over $2 million last year on their lobbying in PR firms. No, no, no, but you told me they were out outspending the Israelis and the Saudis even. Oh, they're out working. That was the other part I was going to say. That's why I call them kind of a cheap date on K Street. The Ukrainian lobbyists, they work harder than any other lobbying team I've ever seen. You know, the Ukraine lobby last year made over 10,000 political contacts. And to put that in perspective, you know, the Saudi lobby, which we've talked about a lot, Scott, they contact between two and three thousand people a year. And so the Ukrainians last year, for a fraction of the price, they're contacting almost four

times as many people as the Saudi lobby is. So it's just an extraordinary advocacy campaign on behalf of Ukraine. But then they're also, so they're buying up, they're paying PR firms, but they're also donating to think tanks too? Very limited. The think tank focus was primarily was at the Atlantic Council, which is, you know, not surprising, it tends to be a sort of pro kind of NATO think tank, you know, pro transatlantic relations. I get the words right out of my mouth there on the not surprising guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the Atlantic Council does have significant funding from Ukrainian interests,

specifically one of the oligarchs over there, Victor Pinchuk. And, you know, he's, he's been tangled up with Paul Manifax. for in other people before. And so, you know, he has something of an unsavory past himself. But he's given significant amounts of money to the Atlantic Council. And the Atlantic Council, whether it's connected or not, who can say, but the Atlantic Council has put out a lot of very, what I think is a militarized U.S. response to the crisis in Ukraine.

To include some of the scholars over there calling, we're very, very early on. calling for the U.S. to implement a no-fly zone in Ukraine. And this is to your point about, like, people not really thinking right now. And they didn't even think about, like, well, what would happen next? If the U.S. were to do that, if the U.S. were to shoot down a Russian mig, like, what would happen next? Like, none of that was never in any of the, the articles or the interviews. And fortunately, the Biden administration didn't listen to the Atlanta Council on that Right. Yeah, that's true. You know, I couldn't find this footnote for the longest time. Then I found it again. It was Ambassador Ivo Dodler from 2015 being interviewed on NPR news about why we ought, why Obama's a coward for not dumping in more weapons into Ukraine after he's, you know, the first black president to sponsor a Nazi coup d'etat. And then, but he was afraid to send in enough weapons. And so Ivo Doddler is telling Robert, Robert, seagull on npr news that yeah so we ought to dump a bunch of javelin missiles in there and then

you know there's only deniable russian forces in there you know minimal russian forces helping the separatists and the don vass at that time and so robert seagull says well so then what'll happen he goes well what'll happen is we'll be sending all these russians home in in body bags you know and then robert seagull goes yeah and then what and he says well and then that will cause the debate to go up inside Russia. The debate to go up, Ben, to go up. And then you're supposed to just conclude that obviously that means that all the angry moms in Russia will blame Putin for getting their son killed rather than blaming the

Americans for actually killing their son. And you're just supposed to just, in where he says the word up, you're supposed to daydream all the rest of this crap about. about how this is definitely going to fill in our interests and will be contrary to Russia's interests. And then Robert Siegel's like, oh, okay, okay, good. That's what we'll do. We'll kill Russian soldiers, and that will make the debate go up.

Great interview, Ivo Dodler. Thank you for your report about why we ought to dump a bunch of Lockheed products into. And I was going to start claiming who else was the byline on that, but. I almost forgot. I want to make sure I'm right, so I'm not going to claim it. I think Bruce Jackson's name was on there, wasn't it? Anyway. Yeah, I mean, Scott, I think that's exactly just like ripped from the headlines today. People aren't thinking about what happens next on any of these proposals, you know, whether it's the no-fly zone or arm sales. You know, what happens next on those, like, what's the in-game for this?

You know, one of my colleagues, George Beebe, lifelong intelligence guy, just had an article for Responsible Statecraft, too. that was about how does this end where let's let's let's let's play chess with this instead of just playing checkers or I don't know I think we're we're playing tic-tac-toe badly right now so any any advancement up would be good but George Beebe asked how does this end and that's the way I wish more folks in Washington would start thinking about this when we give those arms over there how does that lead to a more peaceful resolution and I frankly don't think it does but we're not even having the debate right now. Yeah. And by the way, since I brought up, I knew I was screwing it up. It wasn't Bruce Jackson that was on there. It's Strobe Talbot, the guy who was

the primary leader of NATO expansion in the first place, right there with Michelle Flournoy, who championed the Afghan surge that completely failed and oversaw its implementation as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Admiral James Stravarez, who would have been Secretary of Defense under Hillary Clinton, or maybe National Security Advisor, but if maybe Flournoy would have been Secretary of Defense. But either way, he's the guy who told the New York Times in January that, yeah, we don't know anything about defeating an insurgency, but we sure know how to back one.

And that's why we want to dump a bunch of weapons into Ukraine is they wanted to see the war. And we're going to replicate like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s in Rambo 3. And we're going to replicate. He's bragging about this openly in the New York Times. We're going to replicate the dirty war in Syria under Barack Obama. You know, the one that led to the caliphate and then Iraq War III, Yeah, we're going to do that to the Russians.

And we're going to pour in not just toe missiles, but javelins and stingers. And just these people are crazy. Crazy. You know what that's going to do? See, here's the thing, Ben. That's going to cause the debate to go up in Russia. So you can see how that's going to solve all our problems, right? Yeah.

I mean, another thing, too, to say about all this, too, is on the next steps front, people forget how often in U.S. history, U.S. arms are later used against U.S. troops. And we've seen this in Yemen. We've seen this in Afghanistan. We saw it in Iraq that we ship arms over there, our enemy combatants, get their hands on U.S. weapons in one way or another. And then they eventually use them to kill U.S. troops. And we're not thinking about that right now in Ukraine. We're not thinking about that at all, how, you know, if we start sending tens of billions of dollars in arms over there, what's the potential risk that these weapons could ultimately be used to kill our men and women in uniform? And I just wish, once again, that we were at least having these debates and conversations.

But right now in Congress, we're absolutely not. Yeah. Well, and look, especially since the recent part of the war broke out at the end of February, they're doing everything they can to play down all the neo-Nazism of the Azov Battalion and right sector and light groups there, C-14 and these other groups. But if you've been paying attention since 2014 and 15, there's no question that. Guys, just like the guy who did the massacre at the grocery store in Buffalo the other day, white supremacist who killed all these innocent black people shopping, was wearing a big white sun logo on his chest. guys exactly like him have been traveling to Ukraine to fight with the Azov Battalion against the ethnic Russians in the Donbass since 2014.

They've come from all over Europe and the United States. One of them the FBI says was at Charlottesville at the riot where the guy ran over and killed the lady and injured about other people. And so they just want to play this down. Right in the middle of the liberal Democrats back in a neo-Nazi group in Ukraine, There's just no irony. They just want to pretend that, oh, oh, come on. Lots of Nazi groups use Black Sun logos. Yeah, like the Azov Battalion.

I mean, what are we talking about here? This is completely crazy. This same guy could have been a moderate rebel fighting for America, fighting for the CIA in Ukraine at this exact time, just like when you have ISIS attacks in America while we're backing them in Syria in the Obama years. This is completely nuts, man. You couldn't make this up. You know? The truth for cooks would swing and miss. It's just two nuts, even for them.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sad state of affairs all the way around. It's completely crazy. Well, listen, if we don't get all nuclear bomb to death, which I actually think is a, there's a reasonable chance that that's going to happen now. I hope we can talk again soon, Ben. Thank you. God, on that cheery note, Scott, I really do look forward to talking to you again. I'm usually not that much of an alarmist, but. Joe Biden's the president right now, and we got a border war right there on Russia's western border, man. I just think that things could be better. Yeah, no, I'm with you.

But, you know, I guess one silver lining at Quincy, we're trying to do our little part to hopefully push for a peaceful resolution here. Yeah, you sure as hell are. And I'm so appreciative of what you guys are doing there. and, you know, my previous interview was with good old Ted Snyder also writing for a responsible statecraft. And you guys are putting out great scuff. And we're, of course, are linking to it all the time at anti-war.com. So, uh, thank you. We appreciate the good word out there. Oh, yeah. All right. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it, man.

Yeah, take care, Scott. All right, you guys. That is Ben Freeman. He is at responsiblestakecraft.org. And this one is called golf-funded think tank turns pro-Saudy, UAE, messaging up to 11. 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.