Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/19/22 Patrick Cockburn on the Arrogance of War Hawks on All Sides

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Scott talks with Patrick Cockburn about Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Western response. Cockburn argues that, regardless of any media spin, the Russians are running into more trouble than they expected to in Ukraine. He chalks that up to hubris on the part of Putin and other high-level Kremlin officials. But at the same time, he points to that same hubris as driving western leaders in their decision to fund this proxy war against Russia.   Discussed on the show: “London and Washington are Being Propelled by Hubris – Just as Putin was” (CounterPunch) Patrick Cockburn is a columnist for The Independent and the author of War in the Age of Trump. 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 2000. 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 show all right you guys on the line i've got the great patrick coburn of course um award winning middle east correspondent for the independent and author of chaos and caliphate and his latest book

is War in the Age of Trump, and he's got this really important one. I hope you'll read it. It's at counterpunch.org. London and Washington are being propelled by hubris, just as Putin was. Welcome back to the show, Patrick. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Good to be back. Good, good. Very great to talk to you again. So, really important piece that you write here. You start off with World War II and a comparison to America's policy toward Japan in, 1941 before the Pearl Harbor attack. What are you getting at here? Well, you know, the confrontation with Japan imposing economic sanctions, thinking the Japanese

are going through a retreat, they don't. The same thing happened with Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1990, and it seemed to me Putin did much the same. You know, all these wars were kind of assumed that somebody would step back when, in fact, they stepped forward. Yeah, very good point. So, and that seems to be the case really on all sides here in the war in Ukraine, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a pretty extraordinary war, extraordinary that it was launched by Putin on the assumption that, you know, his not very large army was going to face no political or military resistance in Ukraine.

I thought he might attack Ukraine. I didn't think he'd attack Ukraine under such ludicrous ideas as that. And, of course, things sort of fell apart almost to meet. We had the sort of attack from all directions, none of them very strong, none of them got anywhere. Now we have the second round down to Dombas. And then we have, which again doesn't seem to be getting into that very far, although they captured Maria Pol and quite a lot of prisoners. And the question is, well, we have a third round.

Also, what will happen in Russia? Will it be, will they have national mobilization? It's pretty extraordinary that Putin went ahead with this sort of special military operation. And recently treated it like that. That hasn't been in national mobilization by Ukraine. Ukraine was preventing anybody of military age leaving the country, you know, mobilized their reserve. Putin never did that.

Will that happen now? But also, the point I was trying to make is this sort of triumphalism that you see in all the certainly in the media I see American and British is leading, it seems to me, to a sort of extraordinary, so hubris and arrogant thinking Russia can be defeated easily or that if we can have a stalemate in Ukraine, it doesn't much matter. I think it matters a lot because I think you end up with a stalemate like that in Syria, in which the whole country is devastated. Yeah. All right. So there's so many points to bring up there. If we can go back to just how the battles going now. I saw that the Russians, I guess, have, I'm not exactly sure the extent of

this, but supposedly they have taken the town of Curzon, which is, looks to be on the map, like sort of the New Orleans of the Trans, the Nieper River there, and not very far at all from Odessa. And then Odessa itself is not very far from Transnistria, this breakaway province of Moldova on the Ukrainian and Moldovan border there, and there's been some violence there, at least, in Transnistri. So I wonder if you think that the Russians' goals, I'm sorry to ask you to predict, does it look like their goals now are to push all the way through and take the entire southern coast and connect the so-called land bridge that they have connected to Crimea so far? And do you think they'll keep going and try to connect to Transnistria there?

I'm sure they'd like to, but, you know, so far they haven't been able to. They don't seem to have enough soldiers to do that. The Ukraine has been heavily supplied by weapons with weapons by the U.S. and the NATO powers. It's very difficult to see that happening. But has Putin abandoned these ambitions, it doesn't appear so. But they'd have to actually do these things. They'd have to have national mobilization. They'd have to redirect industry to supply the armed forces.

They'd have to probably introduce Marshall Moore. They'd have to sort of go in for a total war in a way that they haven't so far. Otherwise, they'll be caught up in a sort of stalemate, which in some ways will be like, I can compare with Syria. But I don't think in Syria, you know, it could be sort of marginalized or it was within, within one not very big country. But I think it would be difficult to have the same sort of stalemate in Ukraine because the question of would NATO try to break the Russian blockade of the Ukrainian ports,

which is preventing the export of Ukrainian grain, would the Russians attack Western Ukraine to prevent NATO supplies getting through You know, there are all sorts of ways that the situation could escape rapidly. And there's still, I don't know about the US, but there's still this sort of strange, what I refer to as a 1914 move in a lot of Europe. I think it may be a.m. being a little, but not much. That's sort of, you know, people wanting to fight the war, not sort of thinking it through the, you know, the whole question of will the Russians use?

nuclear weapons if they're pushed in a corner you know it's hardly makes a headline and you know in the 50s 60s 70s you had enormous sort of anti-war movements or people really worried about the use of nuclear weapons and now it's dismissed and it's dismissed by people who on one hand will tell you Putin is a sort of mad monster and the to have invaded Ukraine but at the same time when you say, well, what about the possible use of nuclear weapons? Oh, either they say, well, you're a Putin proxy to even bring it up, or that somehow Putin is a kind of going to be a pussycat, you know, in using them, he's going to be rational, it's going to be cautious.

And so you can't have both. You know, he's either a mad monster, or he's a timid fellow, he's not both. So it's a very sort of strange atmosphere, I think, in the U.S. and Europe at the moment. Yeah. Well, really on that point, there's so many great points to follow up. up here but on the unreality of it all it does remind me a lot of 20 years ago where you got a lot of slogans and a lot of bluster and nobody wants to really think very deeply about this because they don't like the answers just like you're talking about here where they're sort of acting like

nukes aren't a potential problem here when obviously they are we all know that they are but you know what we'll do we'll just go ahead and see how far we can push this anyway wow and there and there seems to be uh i'm sorry i forget who i'm plagiarizing here but I just was reading something, a take I agree with, that said that, oh, it was Jeffrey Sachs was saying he knows of not a single American senior official of any party you could throw in congressmen, I guess, at the highest levels who are insisting on negotiating here, not one. The idea is, it's not even, and here we are, we're 13 weeks into the war, it's not even a controversy that we're not negotiating here. I guess it would be a controversy if someone proposed negotiations. Instead, we're supposed to somehow win this war, I guess? What does that mean?

Yeah, exactly, does it mean overthrowing Putin? But, you know, you also have sort of senior American intelligence people saying that Putin, they don't think Putin would use nuclear weapons unless they feel the Russian states is in danger or unless they feel the regime is in danger. On the other side of the line, you have people who say, yeah, we want to do that. get rid of the regime, what regime change, you know. So you don't, you know, you have to consider these two positions and the likely I'd come, you know, which is pretty horrendous.

And I don't, I find it difficult to understand why there's this sort of war hysteria. And, you know, in the meantime, you know, in Europe, prices are zooming up of, obviously, of fuel of almost everything you know every other country in the world has been affected you know places that countries that never even heard of ukraine but you know south sudan suddenly they're not getting uh they're facing high prices for any food they might like to import so people are being pushed into malnutrition and so forth so you know it's a bizarre it's a bizarre situation And also, you know, what exactly is happening in Russia? Nobody really knows what's happening within the Russian elite.

It's pretty clear that Putin, you know, made a disastrous decision in launching the invasion. He seems to have made fairly disastrous decisions afterwards of sort of claiming that this was sort of not quite a war and not behaving as if it was. You seem to have sort of criticism not from the guys you want to. end the war, I think it was a bad idea to launch the war, but criticize the, well, don't directly criticize Putin, but criticize the government in general for not fighting a total for amateurism and so forth. How far does this pose a threat to Putin? Well, you know, it's a bit like Saddam Hussein, I think it's a bit like Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait in 1990. You know, it was a disastrous decision, who was tremendously defeated, you know, much more than the Russians have been in Ukraine,

yet he still climb on to power for 30 years. Could the same thing happen with Putin? Nor is there an obvious successor. But, you know, one should be careful about this. I always feel with coups and putches against leaders, the one that succeeds is the one that nobody sees coming, that everybody says wasn't possible for the following reasons. So I don't think you can entirely rule that act if Putin continues to preside over this sort of shambles. That's right. I mean, if you listen to the, you know, and Apple bombs of the world, then regime change would automatically result in an improvement from the Western point of view. We would get a compliant government that would then

do what D.C. says, and we'll have another Yeltsin and get him drunk, and it'll be fine it. And they don't even broach the possibility. You might get a real tough guy. You know, maybe Putin isn't Hitler. Maybe he's Hindenburg, and we should settle for that. I think he's more like Mussolini, actually. I think it's more sort of, you know, Mussolini sort of launched military ventures, you know, in Ethiopia and attacked Greece famously in 1941

with rather disastrous results for himself. And, you know, there's, I think, if you look at Putin and you look at Mussolini as that same sort of militaristic posture, you know, the same sort of hubris. And, you know, which one can think of all sorts of historic analogies, you know, why did he do it? One asks, well, you know, the simplest explanation is that Russia had a lot of grievances. Yes, they felt they were being pushed by NATO.

but also that Putin had been 22 years in power, had a high opinion of his own abilities, and was surrounded by sort of advisors who were sort of courteous who told him what he wanted to hear. So this led him to sort of launch this disastrous espade. Sure, I mean, motive to do it is one thing, but that's not the only reason to make a decision. The idea that, you know, it's going to be easy

would probably play into it. And it does seem that, I don't know, was he convinced by some Russian neoconservatives that he was going to be greedy with flowers and candy, at least in the east of the country, that this is just going to be great. Because it seems like that would be the reason that they didn't call in the massive air power to soften up the forces in the east before they rolled in the way they did. It was just for PR reasons, right? But then that didn't work actually well.

I guess so. They obviously just completely underestimated. But do you remember a rather large invasion that happened in 2004? three when lots of guys were going to say the U.S. Army was going to be greeted with flowers and sweets when it arrived in Baghdad, and everything would be fine, you know, and it wasn't. I'm presumably that Putin got similar advice, but I don't think, I think that, you know, there's a lack of realism about this. What if Russians suffer a defeat, would it be a final defeat, you know, all in March on Moscow?

I doubt it, you know, will Putin go? And if he goes, will there be somebody who's a lot tougher than he is? As you just said, the, you know, what resources do they have left? Or is the, you know, the whole regime so sort of rotted by corruption and despotism, but it can't really fight back? Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I mean, Patrick, even if they just stop at Crimea, they have, I mean, I guess it depends on your map, but the greater Donbass region there,

includes all the land, you know, Maripole and that whole Azov coast there all the way to Crimea, and they've got that, the freshwater resources. If they just called it quits here and said, okay, we're securing the independence of the Donbass, then the question would still remain whether the Ukrainians would try to stay at war to fight that and kick them all the way out, but it seems like the Russians at least would be able to hold on to the east. They've sure got it now, don't they? I guess they lost our key. Yeah, I mean, these things, could happen, you know, you see. So, you know, it depends how much the Ukrainians believe their own press clippings really are they see on television. Yeah. It depends on the American

weapons, too, doesn't it? A lot. It seems like that's already making a difference over there. Sure, yeah. You know, but it's clear, you know, the Russians, you know, the Russians, at some degree this is weapons, but it's also, you know, the Russians, you know, the biggest shortage seems to have been infantry, they just didn't have the guys who were in the trucks who are going to take part in the invasion, and to a substantial degree they still don't. Could they change that? Well, possibly, but it's getting pretty late to do that while Ukraine is fully mobilized. Yeah. The danger from the Ukrainian point of view, I think, is that one that this goes to their head that they sort of think we're going to continue to defeat the Russians and let the war

rumble on you know but wars are notorious for people thinking they're on the verge of complete victory and a year later they've been who suffered a shattering defeat when all wars are a bit like that but there's another question which comes up in compare it to Syria or wars in the Middle East that you know on the one hand you get support from allies outside. You get weapons, you get advisors and so forth. But you also, to some degree, greater or lesser degree, become their proxies and import that quarrels. So Syria became the sort arena in which lots of corals are being fought out. It shouldn't have much to do with Syria, you know, between the Turks and the Kurds, between the Americans and the Iranians.

Part of this was in Iran, but basically it became the arena for a whole series of interrelated wars, military conflicts, and it became very difficult to disentangle them and to end the war. Now, could the same thing happen in Ukraine? As you just mentioned, neither, but nobody in senior official Washington was to negotiate or end the war. that might be good for the U.S., but is it good for Ukraine? You know, also these wars go on. You know, you just can more and more and more things get blown up. More and more of the people leave become refugees.

Who do you, you know, you lose people who go abroad. You begin to, you know, I remember Iraq, all the doctors went. The people who went to the university, the people who could get, you know, off for a bit, sticking it out for a bit, you think, How about applying for that job in New Zealand or, you know, San Francisco or something? So, you know, countries begin to sort of begin to lose their best educated people, their most skilled workers, people can get a job elsewhere. Right. And all this devastation, if you use heavy artillery for long enough, you know, you basically can pulverize city after city.

And again, you know, there are questions, that's what's so strange about this, well, is the Russians invaded, but they didn't sort of, they didn't, for instance, tried to destroy the Ukrainian infrastructure. If you cost your mind back to 1991, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, they, you know, the bombing, I was in back down the time of the bombing, what did they do, you know, they attacked the power lines, they dropped these. long sort of wires, shorted all the overhead power lines, they hit the refineries at the power stations. You know, you can pretty, there are various parts of the infrastructure that can't be hidden and can't be moved, and which you can destroy with missile pretty easily. That hasn't actually so happened yet in a systematic way. It's still good happen. How far is that the Russians didn't want to do it?

How far is it that they just said is organized? They didn't get, they weren't able to do it effectively. We still don't really know about that. Hang on just one second. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them,

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or leaving their competitors in the key. That's greenmill supercritical.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods this Liberty classroom instead. Thomas done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers

on up through the postgraduate level. and it's all very reasonably priced. 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. Yeah, I mean, you have weapons coming from the far west of the country, a nation, the size of Texas,

the size of Afghanistan or France, if people want a comparison, something like that. And they're coming from the... And it's a pretty long ways country laying down on its side, too. Coming from the far west of the country all the way to the... battlefields in the east across how many bridges, you know, that, that are still standing. Again, that seems, I guess the idea was, I guess the idea was that was part of the PR, was we're

going to come in soft because we expect the people in the east of the country to be glad we're here. And then they didn't really have much of a plan B or C, I guess, because they're, you know. Yeah, but that's, you know, that's pretty stupid. And also, you know, it is stupid. Then again, It's the 20th anniversary of, you know, they're pretty nasty, but they arrived. Maybe on sort of, for a few hours, they believe what they be told, you know, beforehand that you're going to be greeted with for flowers and sweets. But, you know, somebody shoots them, you know, maybe they have sort of shooting each other, you know, as often happens in, in wars, you know, one lot of Russian troops are shooting

in another of Russian troops and thinks they're being attacked by, you know, by, you villages, then they start running up, people and shooting them. You know, occupations are always pretty brutal, and they always produce a rat. Now, this isn't to excuse the Russians at all, but, you know, they seem to have sort of got the worst of all possible worlds. They came in. They imagined that they'd be welcomed. You know, Putin was calling on the Ukrainian army to get rid of Zelensky and lay down its

arms. You know, all this is the stuff of fantasy. And then, you know, when the troops come under attack, yeah, they start shooting civilians. I mean, I've never sort of seen an occupation or invasion where this didn't happen. You know, it's used to in Baghdad and the American troops very dangerous to get close to them. After the first few suicide bombings, because any car that got close to an American vehicle, they'd first shoot at the engine, then they'd shoot at the driver. The you know, the British Army in Northern Ireland in Belfast, a famous, I think called the Bally Murphy Massacre, which seems to have been the result of two groups of British,

started when two groups of British power troopers started accidentally shooting each other and imagined they were being shot out by the local inhabitants, a number of whom they then shot dead. You know, that this is mean this is the pattern of all wars. And I don't, you know, one thing that strikes me is just the repultage of this war. It's sort of, again, it's sort of 1914 type stuff.

You know, it's perfectly reasonable. We're talking about Syria to say that the Russians are behaving before devastating places like they did in Damascus or East Aleppo with artillery and attacking civilian areas. But, you know, that's true. But, you know, if you go to the east of Syria, you've got come to the city of Raqa, which is completely devastated. about 400,000, which is completely devastated from one end to the other, which was primarily an American firepower, American air power. Or you can go to Mosul, you know, the West Silent City, the old city is just a great heap of ruins. Again, that's mostly Americans and sort of Iraqi artillery. You start using artillery and built up areas, you know, that's what happened. Of course,

this doesn't excuse everything, but if you have total sort of demonization, of the Russians. It gets very difficult to end this type of war. And that's what I find pretty depressing, which it sort of reminds me of all the wars I've seen, mostly in the Middle East, in which one side becomes convinced they're winning, or have one, which they haven't, and these wars go out endlessly. And the sort of, and I think this has done since I sort of first started reporting wars is that the media sort of divides everything into white hats and black hats so it becomes very difficult to negotiate and enter this i mean in in damascus you know diplomats including american diplomats who wanted to see if they could arrange some

sort of truces and ceasefires of the beginning of the war in 2011 would say openly you know the The press coverage was such, that even sort of talking to the government's side, your range ceasefire, became sort of politically impossible. And the coverage from Ukraine seems to me to be the same. You know, and just, you know, what's the policy in this war? You have this enormous mass mobilization everywhere. But, you know, as you said yourself, is the aim to defend Ukraine. That used to be it.

And anybody who said differently that it was to regime-chained Russia was denounced as sort of an apologist for Putin. And three months later, the policy is, seems to be at least largely regime-changed in Moscow. Anybody who disagrees with that as an apology for Putin, you know. So this is very crude stuff. And, you know. And also, I think there's a sense. that we've seen the worst of this war, but actually, you know, so far Russia hasn't been waging total war, which you could do, presumably, by destroying the Ukrainian infrastructure

with missiles. That's not easy to do, but it's doable. They could do that. They could have a national mobilization. You know, all these things could still happen. and there's this really rather extraordinary so happy-go-lucky attitude by governments by Washington of thinking, you know, just let this go on. Well, Patrick, Colonel Douglas McGregor, who's kind of a conservative old anti-interventionist,

retired Army officer, he had said from the beginning, and he said this to me again recently, that I'm here any time now, the Germans are going to insist. that we wind this thing down right as you already mentioned consequences for you know prices and availability of food stuffs for the people of europe is already in jeopardy here this is already on the table and not even to mention south of the equator and the rest as you said at some point the germans are going to have to insist that look we can't just fight an afghanistan or a syrian style, you know, dirty war in Eastern Europe, right on Russia's border, and not just with tow missiles, but with javelins and stingers and all of this stuff. And for some pretty

radical moderate rebels there in Ukraine as well, I mean, at some point, somebody's got to tell, just as Merkel came and told Obama, Obama, I'm going to go sign this Minsk two deal with Putin. And he said, okay, okay, right? It wasn't his idea. It was Merkel. insisted on that, and not that they ever implemented it. But you know what I mean? But so I'm waiting for that to kick in where somebody tells Joe Biden, he has to cool off. But it could also be an escalation. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Say again. Well, it could be the response to the war going on, you know, of sort of basically a stale mate. I mean, there's a lot of violence, but a stale mate with the Black Sea ports of the Ukraine's Black Sea ports still blockaded and so.

forth might be pressure for de-escalation, but given the current mood, it might also be pressure, there might also, the war will also be a pressure for an escalation, you know, send more missiles to sink Russian ships or intervene directly to lift the blockhead. The, you know, that seems to me just as feasible, perhaps even more feasible. But again, what's so, so worrying of these sort of great decisions seem to be sort of taken in a sort of cavalier sort of uncaring way as if they didn't matter too much

and without any counterbush from anyone and that's true and as far as I can see in America is certainly true in in Britain and in much of Western Europe yeah so

Patrick in your article I'm kind of influenced I'm influenced Scott by the fact that most wars I've seen don't end you think they've won haven't won You know, they just go on and on, whether it's in Lebanon, whether Syria, Iraq, or Gannstone.

Yeah. The, um, and, uh, let me, let me ask you about that because I know that you've covered more than a dozen wars, right? Sure, yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, people, I think, I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way, because, you know, there is kind of a common theme here in the media where Ukrainian lives matter so much more than Iraqi ones and this kind of thing when it, you know,

know, life is cheap to a westerner in the Orient, that kind of deal. But my point is not that so much is the level of risk in having a proxy war with Russia. I mean, frankly, America could beat up on Saddam Hussein all day and even lose to an insurgency there without any real cost to our army at all. We just had to leave. But you know what I mean? It's not like our infantry was decimated, right? So, but here we're talking, the level of risk here. It's just absolutely out of control. It's like having the Vietnam War or something right on Russia's border. And it's so much more important.

And yet they're just going on as though they're just picking on Saddam Hussein, who they know good and well can't really do anything about it. And that's the part that is really unsettling is the unreality. I know they're going to lie to me all day, but they seem to even be lying to themselves about who it is that they're messing with here. Yeah, I think that there are other contributory reasons, you know, Russia was meant to have a powerful army, you know, but it, that people were frightened of, you know, but then it goes into Ukraine and falls flat on its face, you know. So maybe that sort of reduced the level of anxiety about what the Russians did. Maybe it'll go on doing that, but maybe not, you know. You know, nobody's very keen, for instance, to invade North Korea because they, you know, they, you know, they, think that nuclear weapons be used almost immediately, but somehow the sort of the fear level

of what Putin might do, what Russia might do, is gone right down, perhaps propelled by that failure so far. And, you know, there's just, you know, thinking back to Afghanistan, 2001, to, you know, there was the same triumphalism. But the war, not only wasn't over, it's scarcely being fought. You know, the Taliban had gone home. Defeat of Saddam Hussein, because he'd been considered, you know, the guy who was responsible for all. Everything goes wrong in Iraq. But the guy, you know, what followed him was actually far more dangerous. So, you know, it's a rather sort of similar move. And, but very little sort of concern about. And for a long, quite a long, time, you know, the Ukrainians were kind of

Zelensky was kind of playing things down. But more recently, you know, it sounds as if they've sort of a certain arrogance was taking over there as well. The, so I think the, you know,

situation is pretty bad. It's pretty unexpected. And full of sort of nasty surprises. And And, you know, just like it's worth

recalling of almost everything which the media thought and pundits thought would happen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. It didn't happen. In fact, the reverse happened. And, you know, so there's quite good reasons they're thinking they'll get it wrong again.

And that doesn't, I mean, you know, you look at the quality of the leaders, you know, you look at Putin, seems, you know, pretty crack. It's the living in something in a fantasy world, you know, Boris Johnson, you know, hopping from, you know, sloganeering the whole time, trying to stay in office, you know, but pretty a weak shambolic government. You look at Biden, you know, looks pretty feeble and so forth.

I don't know. How far do these people, you know, Johnson can say, obviously, have specific advantages from doing his sort of Winston Churchill Act. Yeah. And rushing about Europe, Biden, you know, does this do Biden much good in America? We sort of politically, you know, any polls I see, it doesn't. And I doubt even, I mean, in Britain, the cost of living is shooting up, you know, 10%. I think people's sort of interest in the war is hebbing, or in other ways, being overlaid by, you know, concern about this sort of

what looks like an economic calamity. After all, Patrick, people don't even know where Ukraine is. It's so far from here. It's on the other side of Slovakia from here. I mean, it's just, it might as well be the far side of the moon. So it's pretty hard to keep people interested in something like that, you know? Most people thought it was the Ukraine. Isn't that a region of Russia anyway?

You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think so. I don't, I mean, I mean, I can't think of any war I've ever reported that had a sort of good result for pretty well for either side. Because it's uncontrollable, it has too many moving parts. I think politicians, the qualities that make a successful politician make a really bad warlord because they're dealing the situation with which they're

on, they'll get a lot of applauded, you know, for being tough with the enemy. But, you know, they're in a crisis we've had so many moving parts. moving parts they have no experience but they don't really know which way it's going to go they're sort of prisoners of events and you know maybe the US thinks you know this is a chance to become

the sole superpower once again and that suddenly worries you know Chinese you know not just Chinese but the India you know Turkey and others that they quite liked the rush had to be there as now alternate sort of sort of superpower of these nuclear days that worries there but it's a situation in which there you know so many calamitous things could happen that you know it's pretty weird it's impossible to predict

but again you know we come back to a point we're making discussing earlier on is what's extraordinary is the sort of just lack of alarm at any level Yeah. The risks involved in this war. Yeah, it's true. You know, I have a semi-regular guest spot on a cable TV news show, and I try, I skipped it one time. I didn't have a chance, but every single time I try to say it's been this long since our secretary's state, Anthony Blinken, has spoken with Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister. And it seems to me like that is the single most important political question on the planet,

facing all of mankind is when is the secretary state sitting down with the foreign minister in geneva that they can come to an end to this war how can how could there be any other priority in all of world politics other than stopping the fighting here as absolutely soon as possible and um the only one saying it on there i mean it's just that's not the narrative the narrative is jack keene says we just need to pour in some more javelins to ching yeah Well, it's sort of this idea of achieving military victory, but what would it look like? You know, it's not really there. And it's a regular, great sort of gigantic leap into the dark.

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. 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 audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at

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And they've got a bunch of great titles, including Inside Syria by the late great Reese Erlich. That's listen and think.com. Well, now, wait a minute. If I was the Secretary of State, I would just say, essentially the original Russian proposal with obviously some land swaps as the Israelis would say some kind of you know wiggle room in here but essentially Crimea has been independent that ship sailed in 1783 if not 2014 forget that and the Donbass you're not going to be able to kick

the Russians out of there without keeping the fighting going for an infinite period of time so just let the Donbass go anyway and let the Russians be happy with that. And America's not going to give them a war guarantee anyway. So we'll probably give them some weapons, but they could promise not to join NATO. We could promise not to bring them into NATO. And that's a good start. And we could offer verification for our missile launchers in Poland that we're not. Yeah. But I think that, you know, at this stage, Ukraine is going to ask for a guarantee, you know, for a cost I guarantee. It doesn't get invaded again. That's perfectly reasonable. You know, there's no doubt,

Putin has created the situation, which he claimed he was most threatened by, you know, the of, you know, he has, in most senses, brought NATO into Ukraine, you know. He may not, they may not formally join NATO and, you know, under the protected under what's called the fifth article, that an attack on Ukraine is attack on NATO. But, you know, they're clearly going to ask for guarantee of their frontier, because reasonably enough, they think, what if we get attacked again? You know, what if Russia reorganizes and decides to have a second go? So, you know, that's not unreasonable. Things that could have been done before the war can, you know, can no longer be done.

That's true. The, you know, the Minsk-2 agreement is that sort of, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's kind of, it has. has become sort of ancient history. I think there was a moment during the first month of the war, or maybe it could have been revived, and there could have been some sort of agreement. But, you know, the Russian Putin's failure was so complete, and he clearly feels that, you know, if he doesn't win this war,

you know, he's fighting for his own existence. So, you know, I think that would be pretty difficult. the but you know there's less attempt to even put together the framework of a peace agreement you know the most any conflict i can think of the and um you know what you say that's i mean that's true in the u.s suddenly true in in uh uk yeah i think it was uh the british prime minister who went over there, Boris Johnson, and told them don't negotiate right at the time when there really was a chance to. He told them to stick it out. Yeah, you compared him to... But I think, I think that Putin also, you know, seems to be living in this fantasy world.

You know, there was a moment when the Ukrainians said, well, Crimea will push it for 15 years and then we'll discuss it, you know, so they weren't going to do that. They seemed a possibility that an agreement can be reached over Dombas. The Russian withdrew from the north and sent their troops around. But, you know, there seemed at the end of April to be, Ukrainians seemed to be offering real things. The Russians seemed to be sort of negotiating,

then it disappeared. Both sides think they can still make gains on the battle, which, you know, may or may not be true. but we'll see how that goes. But I think that people still vastly underestimate how dangerous this is. You know, you have to, suppose there's one tactical nuclear weapon used in West Ukraine, and what's going to be the result. Well, it's not, it wouldn't be very big, you know, so forth.

But once you, just the very fact of a nuclear weapon, even a small tactical nuclear weapon, be used, you know, one reaction is going to be a gigantic flood of refugees out of Ukraine. And I have to tell you, because, you know, I read about these war games where they said, look, this is the Russian doctrine, is escalate to de-escalate. And if we get in a war, we use one new, from the Russian point of view, they use one small nuke to convince us to back off. But we have to convince them. We will never back off.

And if they use a nuke, then we'll use a bigger nuke. Now, they better de-escalate. That's the American response to their presumed Russian policy here. Sure, yeah, but it's all sort of, I mean, the answer is they don't know what they do. And I think one thing I'm skipping mind is just that, you know, if you look at all the leaders in Europe and Russia and America, you know, it's a very sort of weak guy. It's very sort of governments that, you know, it's not a lot you can say about them. The, you know, Boris Johnson is, you know, it's currently kind of screwing up the people.

agreement in Northern Ireland, you know, the, you know, this is a kind of pretty frivolous guy with a pretty frivolous government. The idea that these guys are taking decisions about their peace and war is pretty frightening. Yeah. Hey, without getting too far into that, could you explain a little what you mean about him ruining the peace agreement in Northern Ireland? Because that seemed to be the one thing the U.S. government did right in the last 30 years I could think of was help negotiate that thing. Well, you know, we had an election on this. Fifth of May, which Sinn Féin became the largest party in the north. Now, Johnson is threatening to

unilaterally drop key parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which puts the sort of trade barrier between Britain, mainland Britain and Northern Ireland. But you've got to have a barrier somewhere. So would it be within Ireland? That's not, you know, that wouldn't be acceptable to the Irish, nationalist north or south. You know, this was a long-running dispute which had been called a set being sort of settled,

largely settled through the good fighty agreement. And suddenly all these issues have been opened up again. You know, the British government is threatening just to walk away from, you know, an agreement that was signed by Johnson. You know, what will, he'll push back against the EU. When he's, in the past, when he's done this, you know, normally he's ended up, he's been humiliated because it's the, it's the, it's the, The EU's got the big battalions these days, it's just stronger than Britain.

You know, would that happen again? But it's all pretty frivolous, dangerous, but dangerous stuff. The, and it's very difficult, you know, does the British government actually see this? One of the big achievements, perhaps the biggest achievement for British government of the last 50 years was to negotiate an end to the troubles of Northern Ireland. But all those sort of the building blocks of that are all being sort of thrown away. I don't think violence is going to break out again, but, you know, it's going to be a peculiar situation. The largest party in the north is Sinn Féin.

The largest party in the south, the next election is likely to be Sinn Féin. You know, the peace agreement in the north depended on good relations between Catholics and Protestants or nationalists and unionists, and good relations between the British government and the Irish government, good relations with the EU all these things are being undermined you know it's only a microcosm but it shows a sort of level of judgment which is you know pretty darr and when one thinks about that you think well what if the same level of judgment is applied to what's happening in Ukraine in Eastern Europe. The, you know, what will the outcome be?

And I suppose that Johnson would like to think that Ukraine, you know, is going to be what Falklands was to the Falklands War was to Margaret Thatcher. But I doubt it, but Britain isn't fully engaged there. You know, because it's a terrifying, or for many of much the population, a terrifying increase in the cost of living. You know, people unable to eat the houses and, or having to choose being doing that and eating three times a day yeah seriously well now so lastly here you have a little aside in your article patrick about the spanish flu as it was called the

woodrow wilson flu of world war one and also even the outbreak of aids and what all that might have to do with war So what? Oh, yeah, this is sort of something I did, this extra things that gets sort of tacked on the bottom I write a bottom of articles, which are rather disparate thoughts. Yeah, interesting, I didn't realize this. I thought AIDS was much more HIV AIDS was a fairly modern development, but it began where it was first located in 1916 and in Kinshasa and Congo.

And what, and it was the sort of outcome of the war. What happened was they have identified where it began, I mean, were transferred from chimpanzees to humans, was in Southeast Cameroon in the rainforests. And it had been there present for a long time. Then this was a German colony in the First World War. The British and the Allies sent native African troops to, as part of a force to fight the Germans.

They didn't provide enough food for them, so they used their weapons to sort of shoot local wildlife, including the chimpanzees. Somewhere through infected blood or somebody was, anywhere, it was apparently a Congolese soldier, went back to Kinshasa, and had the jump had happened. He had AIDS, and it's so festive there for, you know,

decades and then finally sort of spread out to the rest of the world but it was a consequence of you know the war or the first world war and suddenly guys with guns being in these rainforests you know previously you know so they'd mean people there but they have those narrows and spears and they didn't fight the didn't go off the chimpanzees because they're pretty dangerous suddenly had guys with guns we've only shot them the jump happened. Anyway, I find it interested. I'd never heard that before. Yeah, it's amazing. And of course, you bring up the Spanish flu too, which, as you correctly say in here, it's the only called the Spanish flu because they weren't censoring their media at the time.

Everybody had the flu, and it was really Woodrow Wilson's fault more than anybody for intervening in that war. Well, because in these big American training camps that I think it first developed, and you had lots of guys, you know, recruits coming in from the countryside with no immunity against anything and the flu developed there and sprayed very rapidly and then you know ships going to carrying troops to europe you know some of them were sort of you know full of dead and dying people when the time they got to you and yeah you're right i mean this was censors up with censored in britain and so forth and played down but in uh in spain they didn't censor it and they ended up in they'd been called spanish again in other consequences of the first world war i knew about that

I must be to know about that, but HIV, I didn't grow up in AIDS. I didn't realize that that was old so that I'd come with the past war. Yeah, I didn't either. And it's interesting, you link in the piece to a BBC radio documentary about that, too, if people are interested in the origin of that. He's got the link there. And it's only kind of an aside because you're talking about the unintended, unimaginable consequences of getting into a war.

I mean, who would have thought the schifeng plan, included getting AIDS in the Congo, you know? Exactly. Now, that's a so frightening thing, you know, who would have thought, you know, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, you know, that eventually this was to powerfully contribute to

the creation of Islamic State, you know. Yeah. And nobody thought that, you know. The, so and people are so curiously caught by surprise by the, but You know, all wars means that, as I said, you know, there are so many surprising developments,

and there are so many moving parts that it's unpredictable. And I think it goes to politicians' heads. I think the kind of person that becomes a politician, but really they all have a sort of greater or less sort of Napoleon complex. They really like the idea of being sort of warlords at which they've got no experience. And they don't see the risks involved. Yeah.

All right. Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming back on the show, Patrick. It's really been great. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. All right, you guys. That is the great Patrick Coburn from the Independent. That's independent.com. And here he is at his late brother, Alexander Coburn's counterpunch. London and Washington are being propelled by hubris, just as Putin was. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.