Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/9/24 Andrew Cockburn on the Neoconservatives and the Military-Industrial Complex

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Scott is joined by Andrew Cockburn for a high-level discussion of the neoconservative movement and the military-industrial complex. They talk about an article Cockburn wrote on the emergence of neoconservatism, reflect on the origins of Iraq War I and utilize Cockburn’s years of studying the military-industrial complex to analyze where things stand with the war in Ukraine. Discussed on the show: “The Birth of the Neocons” (Spoils of War) Scott’s debate with Bill Kristol  Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine and Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Follow him on Twitter @andrewmcockburn. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 show all right you guys introducing andrew coburn he is the washington editor of harper's magazine and many wrote a bunch of great books about the old soviet union and about iraq and about donald rumsfeld and about the military industrial complex the drone wars and um and he also has a substack because he is a writer and it's twenty twenty four uh welcome the show how you doing andrew uh great to be with you i'm doing fine

great now i just got to figure out where's my tab with your substack on it because man i've got so many tabs here it is you know i quote you all the time about this um the neoconservative who's a neocon? What's a neocon? And all the time people just go, oh, I don't like that guy. He's a neocon. But wait, there's a specific definition here of a neocon. It's kind of a biographical description of a very few people. I would wager it's less than 100 people if you counted them all. You could go to the militarist monitor, formerly right web, and count them off on your fingers.

And I bet you stop before 100 guys. And then, but what you taught me, and I don't remember if this is in the book, Rumsfeld, or you just said this to me on the radio back 20 years ago or whatever. What you said was the neoconservative movement is the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex. And so here's your article brand new today at Spoils of War. And that's the name of the last book, by the way, spoils of war. And that's the substack. And it's spoils of war.

And the article is called The Birth of the Neocons. Yes, indeed, it was all in the aid of the Pentagon budget. So take us back in time, Andrew Coburn, and set us straight. Who's a neocon and what's a neocon? Well, you said it. It's the fusion of the defense lobby, the military industrial complex, with the Israel lobby. And it was the, we have to go further back in time. I mean, traditionally, I mean, way, way back in the like up through the 1960s, the Israel lobby,

although hard over on anything with respect to Israel, was otherwise rather dubbish. You know, the Lyndon Johnson used to complain that they wouldn't support him on Vietnam. He kept saying, you know, well, you know, I've done so much for Israel, you know, every which way, which he certainly had, like giving the go ahead for the 1967 war and covering up the liberty, atrocity, and all the rest. And he would have liked to have had their support for his Vietnam adventure, but he didn't get it. So then, okay, moving forward into the 1970s, and specifically the around about the mid-70s, the end of the Vietnam War, when things looked a little, not that dark, but a little, little shady for the defense complex. I mean,

they just had an enormous war, which of course they'd lost. And, you know, they'd had a million, you know, half a million troops in Vietnam and all the rest, an enormous boom in war production. But all that was coming to, or had come to an end. And so there was the grim prospect

of the defense budget actually going down. In fact, it did dip a little bit. So along comes a very important gentleman called Paul Nitzer. And Paul Nitzers had a huge effect on our history, on this fate of this country and potentially the fate of the world, because he was the author of NSC 68, which was the founding document really for the for the Cold War, for the sort of military militarization of our economy in. response to an alleged Soviet threat in 1950. He prepared this document where you ever saw it. And, you know, that really kicked off the big boom in defense spending that has gone on ever since. So NHTSA in the mid-70s, he saw that there was this awkward problem, which was the Israel lobby, was not supporting the defense lobby. And he saw, he decided to,

to put that to rights and all my information on this comes actually this is I'm the only person who's ever sort of written about this because I had a good source in the form of a guy called Scott Thompson who was at that time what had been in the 1970s was NHTSA's son-in-law is married to his daughter and was also his sort of close aid and also worked in the Pentagon he was an aide to defense secretary Schlesinger and then after that to the dreaded rumsfeld so scott really knew what he was talking about and he laid it all out for me he said nitzer wanted to fuse the israel lobby particularly the a group called um democrats for a coalition for a democratic majority which was a sort of proto neocon group he was um it was a bunch of um Israel supporters particularly a guy called

Norman Podoritz and his wife, Midge Dexter, and there was to sort of bolster support among Democrats for Israel. And Nitz's brainwave was to fuse these two groups, this group, with the defense lobby, which he was a tried and true leading leader. And so he set up a thing called the Committee on the Present Danger, which was superficially was to, you know, raise the alarm about the Soviet threat. But very significantly, the founding members,

the funny, you can see what it was all about. You look at the three leading founding members. NHTSA himself, Eugene Rostow, former Undersecretary of State, who was a fanatical Zionist, really sort of hard over. And a guy called Charles Walker, who was the premier lobbyist of his time,

particularly for defense corporations. So as Scott explained to me, and this is born out, if you look at the sort of membership and the money flow, Walker's job was to supply the defense money to support this committee, and Rastow brought along the pro-Israel people, and Nitzar sort of banged the drum for the Soviet threat.

And it worked like Gangbub, And I should say they then recruited all sorts of people who became the neocons. In fact, one of them was a guy called Richard Allen, who was later Ronald Reagan's first national security advisor. He said, we were the original neocom. We were the real neo-conservatives. He told this to me. I interviewed him about this. And he bragged about it.

And they were also coming along with people like Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan himself. it was, you know, governor, people like Max Campbellman, who was a very powerful, very powerful corporate lawyer and, you know, trustee defender, defender of Israel. And then you had the people of low lives like the Wolfowitz, Paul Wolfowitz, Lane Kirkland, who was the head of the AFL-CIO, who was a very, very staunch Israel supporter, and also staunched. supporter of ever bigger defense budgets for I guess obvious reasons and it really worked well in fact I quote Les Aspen who was a people have forgotten him now but he was the he was a democratic congressman who was like a sort of supposedly an expert on defense of a

sort of doveish kind but he certainly knew a lot about what was going on on the defense business And he actually said in 1977, he says the Israel lobby is no longer in favor of producing the defense budget. You know, it worked. They were no longer, they'd lost their dovish stance. And by 1982, the head of the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, premier, you know, Zionist group, he actually wrote a book in which he said, you know, old-passioned anti-Semitism is no longer problem in America, the new anti-Semitism is people who is the peace next, people who are against defense spending. So, you know, what greater victory could Nitz of hope for, you know, that now opposing

the defense budget was anti-Semitism. So there you have it. Yeah, you know, there are two quotes of two of the godfathers, Potahoritz and Crystal, where from the mid-70s where they say, listen, you know, anybody who loves Israel has to support American interventionism overall. We have to keep a strong America so that it's available to protect Israel. They both say virtually the same thing. And now this marriage that you're talking about where all these groups got together, this is the mid-70s, right? So during the party, you're still in the preparation for Reagan, right?

It was officially set up in 1976, but actually Alan told me that they were hard at work before then. They announced it right up to the... 1976 election and when you say Wolfowitz in the scum you're talking about the guys from the university of chicago who were had been all working for scoop jackson the democrat senator from washington state or as they call them the senator from bowling and then yeah yeah jim lobe tells this story too about how well and this is you know legendarily pod horitz had written about how much you hated black people and all that stuff so there was like it was essentially like the Truman Democrats, and there's a big overlap with the Zionists there, who were reacting

against the new left, who were against Vietnam, pro-civil rights, and sided with the Palestinians, or at least did not overtly side with Israel in the 67 war. And so they said, well, if this is who Democrats are now, then we're moving to the right. And then what's interesting, right, is they don't make their alliance with the kind of rhinos in the middle. They make their alliance with the conservatives and joined into the Reagan administration. Yeah. I mean, Podorus, just as a footnote, I mean, he'd been quite a sort of active, I guess, you know, in opposing the Vietnam War in the 60s.

You know, you can gauge the swing, the extent of the swing from that. I mean, he said, you know, that all went away, of course. But yeah, the crystals, the Podorits is, you know, and then, of course, it became multi-generation, generational, you know. You know, Jude Winniski once told me, and he was, you know, by the time I met him, he was ex-neocon. So he had been a leftist, and then he had become a Reaganite hawk, and then he had become more of a paleo-con like Papu-Cannon. But he was like a monetarist, you know, economist type. And he told me that, oh, I'm so embarrassed because, and I'm really sorry, because I'm the one who introduced Richard Pearl to Dick Cheney.

Oh, really? That's a terrible thing to have in your conscience. seriously yeah pearl was you know he worked for Jackson and also you know look at look at like Daniel Patrick Moynihan

you know from New York I think he you know he was he was very much of this ilk you know sort of you know a great quote unquote liberal unquote

and yet fanatical in his support for Zionism and he was very much And actually, oddly enough, Pap Buchanan, I think, takes credit for, or took credit for having, I found a thing where he'd urged in 1972, he'd urged Moynihan to, I have to look it up while we're talking, to say, you know, you could, you could do yourself a lot of good by, you know, saying we need military, you know, defense, dollar for defense is a dollar of Israel. Yeah. That wouldn't surprise me. I mean, Pat is always an anti-communist first. And so it was really with the end of the Cold War was when he said, okay, now we can give up the empire. The emergency is over. And so now we don't have to defend the world from communism anymore. But up until then, he was all about facing down them reds, whatever it took. And including,

you know, I still think he's last I heard, he still was in favor of Vietnam and thought that was the right thing to at least try to do there and that kind of thing yeah yeah yeah and he was nixon's guy so he's loyal to the end but um but yeah it was you know he opposed iraq war one he was like what are we doing now we're going to take advantage of the soviets getting out of our way that's not the deal the deal was that we come home now you know what are we you know yeah which was you would think would have been the reaction of the american people but instead it was like oh yeah USA we're number one let's go beat up on a weakling we can do it yeah exactly well it was in the name of beating up a bully right the bully was saddam and we

were saving the poor Kuwaitis Andrew did you hear oh right yeah yeah there's poor hapless Kuwaitis um and actually you know we'd um well this is something something else i've been working on the degree to which Saddam, you know, Saddam always believed in conspiracies and people was a new book about him where people, you know, he's kind of derided for his sort of, you know, silly Middle East and belief in conspiracy theories. But actually, you know, he was, you know, we were the ones who gave him the go ahead to attack Iran, which is really sort of ultimate led to his downfall because of bankrupted Iraq. and down the line. I mean, there was a lot of so much manipulation went on. Sorry, I'm drifting off the subject, but, uh, no, that's important. Yeah, this is a, um, Pat Buchanan, since we've talked about this, I, this is a detailed memo on white, on white house strategy for the 1972 election, co-author by Pap Buchanan, suggested that the Penn Secretary, Melvin Lair,

should speak out on what effect cuts in the Navy's budget proposed by George McGovern would have on Israel, quote, with the conclusion, not unjustified, that the future of Israel, the survival of Israel, with McGovern's naval cuts, will be the decision of the Soviet Polyb Bureau. Well, that sounds like that. Yeah. So it is the case that Israel was fighting against nation states back then, not just bombing civilians to bits.

So, you know, it's, there's a. little bit more of an argument there and again when everything is about a showdown with the soviets then it is what it is we love you pat i don't know if pat listens to the show but we love yeah uh what we say yeah um you know on the kuwait thing you know i argue in the book that i really don't think it was a conspiracy it really i bet if saddam hussein you know looking through his eyes it certainly was but it looked to me like just let's tan right hand don't know what they're doing kind of you know republican politics where i think it was the cia and d ia were telling the kuwaitis to be tough and intransigent and then the state

department was telling saddam hussein go ahead and kick their ass see if i care and then at the defense department wolfowitz and cheney he was deputy secretary of defense for policy at the time, I guess. And they were warning, oh my God, Saddam's serious. We got to stop him. And they had Bush send a letter to Saddam. And then Wolfowitz was like, no, the letter's not tough enough. The letter even reads like permission. And so they had him send another one. And by then the tanks were rolling in. So it was like, so it's also though, you know, they, someone like Chas Freeman, who was the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time. He told me that he could see that Saddam was up to something

that was, you know, likely to be, you know, he would believe what Saddam was saying about Kuwait. And he kept trying to sort of tell the State Department that, you know, look, you better pay attention to this. And he said he couldn't get their attention. He was told to shut up, basically. Well, you know, April Glasby said to the New York Times, that, look, nobody thought he was going to take the whole country, you know?

In other words, conceding that, yes, the idea was, go ahead and take the northern oil fields. They're overproducing from shared oil wells and supposedly slant drilling and all this. Well, go in there and break their knees then. But not take the whole country. And then Margaret Thatcher freaked out. She was the one who had the problem. Because, you know, even the first three days, Colin Powell said, we should just draw the line at Saudi Arabia.

They chaired like the National Security Council meeting, and they said, we should just tell him, don't you dare roll down to Saudi or we will bomb that crap out of you. But as far as Kuwait, we don't really care. And that was the consensus for the first three days until Thatcher called Bush a Wimp and said, don't go wobbly. And then they escalated after that. Yeah. Yeah, that's what happened. What a shame. That whole thing.

By the way, this conversation came up earlier. Let me ask you about this, because I was just in ninth grade at the time, and I never heard of any revisionism about this. Bill Hicks kind of said, allegedly, you know, but I didn't know anything more about it than that. But it turns out, there's a Seymour Hersch article about it. But what I'm interested in is what you guys knew at the time about the alleged assassination attempt against Bush Sr. in 93. Did everybody really believe in that? Or did everybody like you and Gareth Porter and whoever who are in the know? Did you guys all know that that was a hoax all?

along or what yeah well i relied on my brother patrick who was i think he was either in iraq or you know it was following it very closely he and he was the one who i think got hirsch to write about it uh or inspired hirsch to write about it that um yeah there was obvious you know there was clearly these whiskey smugglers who were meant to have been plotting the assassination had had confessions beaten out of them by the kawaitis who had every incentive to you know, serve this kind of thing up. And, you know, I don't think no, no one took it very seriously. Even the, as I recall, the memory's a bit hasty now, but even the, you know, even the Bush people

didn't take it very seriously. It was only later on when young George was looking, looking for some excuse to, you know, invade. He started talking about, they tried to kill my dad and all that. Yeah. So that's my idea is that I think most people believe that that's true. people have ever heard of it think that like as far as they know nobody ever disputed that when really seymour hers totally debunks it as you say it was just a whiskey smuggling ring that they embellished into this thing and then my favorite anecdote out of there and this just seals the case

is that the same guy who pushed this lie is the same guy whose daughter claimed that she had seen the babies thrown out of the incubators the comedian ambassador yeah it's literally two years later yeah sorry three years later is the same character coming up with this nonsense and then that completely ruined because this is like you know

Clinton's first six months here so this completely ruined any reproachment with Iraq after that and and it helped to push through what was the Israelis preferred policy was the dual containment policy of Martin Indick

who had just found it at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, the AIPAC spin-off with a bunch of military industrial complex money. And their idea was, nope, we'll stay in Saudi Arabia to contain Iraq and Iran both, even if that leads to us getting our towers knocked down 10 years later. Exactly so. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. It was the, and Clinton never had the wit or the interest to sort of, you know, figure out what was going on. Yeah. Yeah, they snuck at him. As you say, it really, it really locked in place the whole

Clinton Iraq policy from there on. I think it was Jim Loeb that once talked about how all these different think tanks, a lot of times they're just different pieces of paper in Bill Crystal's desk drawer, right? Like he just has his secretary fill out the paperwork and they create a new think tank. This one's the foreign policy initiative and this one is the committee on this and that and whatever the hell they do. And they create a new one all the time. Yeah, yeah.

It builds this echo chamber effect, but it's just Bill Crystal talking to himself, him and his friends, you know. Yeah, Bill Crystal, who remember he gave us, what was their name, you know, McCain's vice president. Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin. Yeah. He was the one who sold Sarah Palin to the Republicans. Yep. And what was her, like, endearing quality?

that she was a mindless war hawk and she's like a real redneck of a reub and the redneck rube's love her he thought you know like that was his calculation he's as cynical as could be right and typical sort of Washington arrogance you know the people out there deplorables you know I don't know if you ever saw my debate

with him but he goes first and he begins with geez I used to come down here to this neighborhood and play pool sometimes to sort of you know kind of see how regular people live or something like the way he explains is so funny dude yeah yeah like he's just such an alien to the society that he's in charge of for some reason yeah well well so look in your article you begin actually with a conference call from general

dynamics where like after all business is business and you can only couch it in so many euphemisms and they're just saying, yeah, we're making a killing on artillery shells right now. It's a investment. It's a, you know, buyer's market. Come on in. Right, because, I mean, general dynamics. They have this, you know, wonky old factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is actually the end.

They've got the monopoly on these 155 millimeter artillery shells, so the only American producer. And it's a typical, you know, defense, you know, modern defense operation, i.e., you know, it hasn't been properly maintained, they can't meet their production targets. I mean, one of the reasons that the Ukrainians are going under is down to the fact that this, this crank, creaky old factory can't produce enough shells, so it hasn't done. And why is it that they have a monopoly? Is it really like a license issue? Because you would think that they would be offering these contracts to,

anybody who could fill them now. Well, you know, it takes a while to sort of, you know, to, to, to, to put a, you know, it's quite a complicated business making these artillery shells. So you can't just sort of take over an empty factory or run up a factory and sort of and build them. And you've got to remember that, you know, the defense complex is, is a whole series of monopolies now. I mean, this is what happened.

The fateful thing that happened in the 1990s was. William Perry, he, you know, they organize this whole policy of implementers, this whole policy of turning the whole defense. It used to be in 1991, I think there were like 50 or 55 prime defense contractors. So at least maybe, for better or worse, you had a bit of competition. But Perry slimmed the whole thing down to five, five major ones. maybe you could add toss in a couple more so maybe it's six or seven now so they you know there's like basically you know lockheed makes the fighter planes northrop makes the bombers general dynamics

makes the artillery shells you know a couple of other very incompetent corporations make the navy ships and it's one of the reasons uh that u.s defense is in such a shape, it goes back to that. You've got these monopolies who have no incentive to, and Boeing's in there too, of course, no incentive to be efficient, productive enterprises, every incentive to gouge the taxpayer and dull it out of their shareholders. Yeah. Hey, you guys, did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director, so yeah. 13 of them now, including my four. We published five more in 2023.

Lori Calhoun and Tom Woods books about the COVID regime, Joe Solis Mullin on the fake China threat, Jim Bovard's latest, last rights, and our managing editor Keith Knight's domestic imperialism. And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate.

And thank you. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all, you need to protect them. You need to put some, at least, into precious metals. Well, Roberts and Roberts can set you up with the best deals on silver, gold, platinum, and palladium.

And they've been doing this since 1977. Hey, if you just need some sound advice about sound money, they're there for you, too. Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-9760. That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's rrbi.c.o. You'll be glad you did. Now, look, I know that mostly we lose wars against peasants in their neighborhoods, because our government won't resort to nuke in them.

But we can't quite win them over with machine guns, no matter how hard we try. And so we're used to losing wars like that. Vietnam, the entire Middle East, for example. But the idea is, and boy, you know, if you read defense news and Defense One and the Washington Times are like the, what, UPI 2, sort of, you know what I mean? There's that second UPI feed that's just all.

military industrial complex news and stuff you read all this stuff where and this is just in the popular press i know it's like this in all the journals and whatever too where they just go on and on and on about what it would be like to fight russia and or china and just presuming they never even discuss it a lot of times they just leave out and presume no one's going to use any nukes in the thing it'll strictly be a fair fist fight and uh we'll just fight a conventional war and then the idea is then we can really unleash all of our cool bombers and ships and planes and all these things that are

essentially useless against you know Pashtun tribesmen in the Helmand province and stuff but we could in a war versus another military like Russia or China I mean we could have a lot of fun like a World War II movie or something where it's really exciting and really big important

explosions happen and stuff and they really talk like that a lot but never even mind the nukes never even mind the nukes I kind of wonder whether they could even take the Russians of the Chinese or really they do nothing but blow smoke. And those F-35s would just fall right out of the sky if they were ever really put to the test. Well, here's the thing. I mean, they should be realizing, maybe it's dawning on them that, you know, that they really, Ukraine has shown just what a disaster we have in, you know, our defense system is. I mean, we've sent, you know, you see more and more of this leaking out.

Like, we sent them our best drones, and the Russians just jammed them and they fell out of the sky. It's useless. We sent them our, you know, tip-top anti-A, you know, air defense missile, the Patriot. Well, that doesn't seem to be doing so well. Oh, and the Abrams tank, which you're an expert in. Talk about that. Well, the Abrams tank, we sent them 31 Abrams tanks, 31 Abrams tanks. and the Ukrainians have had to pull them out of the line

because they keep being knocked out if they even get to the line because they break down so often you know that they I mean the thing is a joke it needs an entire separate fuel system because it runs a you know runs on it has a gas turbine engine

so it needs a different kind of fuel doesn't not like diesel everything else runs on it has it's terribly it has these filters to stop dust getting in to jam the engine, but the filters keep having to be changed. Even when they've got the fuel, they, you know, they've run out of fuel. It's got very short legs.

It runs out of fuel very, very fast, and you need a whole, as I said, a whole separate supply train to keep it going. I think that, you know, the Russians put one on display in Moscow just a week or so ago. They had a whole lineup of captured NATO-supplied weaponry, and there was an Abrams tank in there. So it's, you know, this is our premier tank and seems, you know, it hasn't done well at all. This is so fun. Look, I mean, I know you're you, but from this point of view, it's just great. You're the guy who wrote the book on how the Russian military, the Soviet military, back in the 1980s, was really a paper tiger. and their tanks were pieces of junk

and they didn't have any gasoline or skills and they lose their right arm loading the shell into the thing in the breach and all this stuff and then the whole thing fell apart what like seven years after that book came out six years after that book came out the Soviet began to cease to exist

and then and now you're going oh yeah Scott the American tanks Paper Tiger the what we were going to meet them with pretty much of a paper tiger then yeah yeah same thing right because it's the abram's tanks are from that era right that's right so that's what we would have met them with in the fall

the gap in 85 if it had come down to it that's right i remember making a film about this in 1979 god help me sure that's how old i am but they um you know it's a but it's not just the tanks like you know we sent them all our you know most of a huge quantity of um of of of our, you know, 155 artillery pieces, not just the shells, but the actual cannons, turns out they wear out in a hurry. They're very delicate, you know, they're very high tech, lots of electronics involved, and the batter of the barrels wear out quite fast. It's been true of all the European guns they've sent too. You know, it's just been, it hasn't really sunk in much over here yet what a disaster i mean how much ukraine has shown up how badly off we are in terms of

defense um you know that the like you know that they didn't you know we were very proud we set we sent the ukrainians these uh gps guided bombs um you know which were brilliantly accurate and everything um but the russians turned out the russians have thought of jammers so they're being jammed the GPS signal gets jammed, and they go off target. You know, it's the same with these, you know, the attack, high Mars, you know, precision, long-range missiles that we're sending them. That same thing happens with them. You know, there's been, I mean, there's been some successes,

but generally it's been pretty much for disaster. So I think the people you're talking about who are rooting for the big grown-up war with the Russians and the Chinese should be a bit careful what they wish for. Yeah, seriously. And especially when, and this is the thing that they willfully ignore because it takes all the fun out of it, which is that, no, we can't ever fight them because it almost certainly would go nuclear within four or seven days or something. So you just can't. When you have these crazy, it's very odd, I'm sure you've been watching this, the more and more, as things look bleaker on the Ukrainian front, more and more. more and more you'll have you know talk about sending you know French Macron's been talking about sending French troops to Ukraine and just the other day Hakeem Jeffries you know minority democracy you know minority leader in the house the democratic leader then he said it's quite

likely or not I can remember the exact phrase did you catch it when he he talked about the likelihood that we would be getting and sending sending troops to Ukraine if things start to go go south though yeah it's just crazy and then you know of course when the french were talking like this the russians i don't know if they announced them or they already are holding these military exercises nuclear exercises yeah yeah and i mean you would think that they would take that seriously but they just don't they think a nuclear deterrent means that they can do whatever they want not that they better not because they should be deterred because the other side has nukes too. They just turn it inside out. Like it's just a shield that means that they could just

pick any fight and no one will dare to resist them. Mind you, we have nuclear exercises all the time too. It's like this has been taken as a sign of Putin's irresponsibility and what a... Well, he included Belarus in the thing. I mean, it was... It was, and I think, you know, the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense said that this was in reaction to what Macron had said about you know the possibility of putting troops there and about and i guess because um uh cameron who's now the defense minister the former prime minister now defense minister david cameron had talked about well the ukraine's had the right to hit russia with the weapons we give them and the russian said oh yeah well maybe we'll hit britain how do you

like that yeah yeah no i mean he's the such a ridiculous statement i mean the british the british they really are a joke these days I mean, they've got, you know, a tiny army, and they like to behave like it's still, you know, Victoria's Empire or something. Yeah, I think it was, someone said the other day, you know, you listen to the Brits and they all think they're Palmerston, you know, who was the big imperialist British prime minister in the 19th century. Yeah. Well, you know, as ever, you know, part of the real problem here, and this goes for Palestine or any of them, I mean, look at afghanistan they stayed in what was obviously in hindsight now everyone has to agree like the worst stupidest thing we should have never done they stuck with that for 20 years because they just can't admit how stupid and wrong they were last week when they said that it was right to do and so none of them can admit that they push things too far in ukraine which is what led to the loss of crimea and now break a war in the east back you know 10 years ago and And that, you know, that's what's led to this and that because they share at least a little responsibility that like maybe that means that they should find some kind of reasonable accommodation here, some kind of thing.

But instead, no, it's like Superman versus Lex Luthor and they know that they're the heroes and they got to defeat the bad guys and they won't stop. And I don't want to give them that much credit. But I listen to what they say and they seem so self-righteous that that, you know what I mean? Like, that's really all they need to know is that they're the heroes in this thing, you know, and there's no doubt in their mind. You know, there's an important point, though, which it's worth mentioning, which is, you know, you talk about, you were talking earlier about the, you know, they keep losing these wars to, you know, tribesmen and so forth. I wonder if a way they really care, you know, that they, you know, there's a story I'm sure I've told you and repeated umpteen times. A friend of mine who was present at a meeting as a sort of aid of a meeting of a group of senior generals, four stars around the time when, remember Trump had a mini surge in Afghanistan? on, like around 2018, anyway, he did.

Beginning in August of 17, yeah. 17, sorry, okay. And he was, and they were, they were discussing this. It had just been announced. And they were all agreeing that this is utterly pointless and, you know, it wasn't going to make any difference. And, uh, see, but they said, it will help. The quote was, what my friend was hearing was,

it'll get our men bloodied and it'll do us a lot of good at budget time. so that's the point that i mean about getting getting the getting a few of their men killed they didn't care about that but what they do care about is you know budget the budget time and that's what all this is in service of winning winning or winning the war is kind of you know beside almost beside the point yeah you know that rings a bell and now i'm like man that better be in my book because i think i do remember knowing that at one point but i remember if i knew that while i was writing my book about afghanistan or not i think that's such a good one cyclopedics uh it might be in there i i i hoard those type of statements you know what i mean those those little

things they add up and paint one hell of a picture you know when it comes to all these things i got quite a few of them where they talk about you know afghanistan as a team building mission for NATO because it needs something to do or else people and they would say this outright in English or else people will question why we need it so we have to give it something to do you know exactly that's crazy all of them and at such risk I still can't believe I'm shocked but not surprised whatever but it's still amazing every day that they're keeping this war going this extremely hot proxy war this horror show of a war people getting blown to bits as you know the headlines every day over there is people getting killed in you know the most violent ways and including civilians get caught in it and civilian infrastructure which means a lot of suffering besides direct deaths and stuff and right on russia's border two 300 miles from moscow from st petersburg and we're just going to keep this going on

and then how it's going to work out nobody knows the previous policy that we're going to force them all the way out in Crimea too well we've abandoned that now we're going to help them hold the line until what I mean and then it's like they have

they don't even have a plan they don't it is kind of shocking we're both old enough not to be shocked by this anymore but still I mean that they you know well we've got to keep you know they

the reason, I mean, Trump gave the okay for Johnson to let the Ukraine money get through because, which seems to me what happened, I don't know what you think, but the... Oh, yeah, absolutely. He said, oh, I know. How about we'll just make it a loan, which is, yeah, right, a guaranteed loan, meaning not a loan, a gift, but window dressing enough to get it through is exactly what happened. Right, because they don't want to be, you know, what neither side wants is to be. have to face the accusation, you know, you lost Ukraine, you know, so they just keep it going

forever. I mean, we'll be, come the 19, you know, the 2028 election will be hearing about who lost keeping the war going so no one can say, you lost Ukraine. I mean, that's what, that's what it is. I mean, I think, I mean, maybe the Ukrainians will realize, will get out from under and realize they're being had. But, you know, It's going to be an interesting six months. Yeah. I mean, you know what? For the Americans, too, all they have at stake is embarrassment, right?

There's no accountability. Nobody's going to be in trouble for anything. Some people might make a little bit less money. And some people might, they won't have to admit it. They'll just have other people say that they were wrong. But we're already saying they were wrong and they were. Yeah. That this is going to be great.

Don't worry. Trust us. We're going to drive them right out of there and all of this stuff. The momentum is on Ukraine. side in the war and all their claims that they made you know who was it um who was a was a who most recently said oh well the the Ukrainians will have a successful counter-offensive in 2025 and they keep saying that it's yeah manifest nonsense yeah so it's um yeah another lost war yeah and this one the concert was quite serious yeah yeah absolutely and look going back to

the birth of this thing 10 years ago, you were the one who had that great report. It's just a slice of life in Washington, D.C., that just seems so important. Could you tell the story about your friend who was at the party in Crystal City when the little green men took Crimea? Oh, remind me. Oh, yeah. No, yeah. You told that story about you had your friend who was at a party, and it was all, you know, Crystal City is where all the Pentagon contractors are. And maybe it was like a breakfast meeting or something or something. The news broke that the Russians are taking over the Crimean Peninsula and everybody laughed and cheered and was happy that now we're going to make all this money and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, ring a bell. No, it wasn't quite that. It was a friend of mine who was a lobbyist who went to a meeting. He went to a breakfast meeting for a congressman from Arkansas. you know, big, big, big wheel in the, one of the defense committees on the hill. And I saw him later that day, my friend. And I said, what's, it was, it was just, as you said, just after the little green men had taken over.

And I, I said, oh, you know, he said, he'd been at this breakfast. I said, who else was there? And he said, well, my friend wasn't a defense lobbyist, but he said, he said, most of the people there were defense lobbyists. And I said, well, what was the mood? How were they reacting to the news? he said, I'd call the mood borderline euphoric. Right. Yeah, I like that.

Oh, I embellished all the clapping and cheer in part. Borderline euphoric is good enough, though. Euphoria will do it. Yeah. Sorry about that. I'm glad. I have the quote right in the book and the footnote, so I don't embellish the quote in writing, only out loud when I'm talking and forget.

But I guess just because I can see the scene, you know, it sounds like something out of a Terry Gilliam flick or something or something. But in a way, your instinct was right about Crystal City. The Ritz-Kalton in Pentagon City, which is, you know, part of that whole area. If you ever want to see, physically see the military industrial complex, just go there at breakfast time. And you see it's all the defense contractors, half the people there are in uniform and the other half of, you know, in $3,000 suits. it's the lobbyists and the defense contractors, all having breakfast. That is the military industrial complex.

It's always an eye-opener. No, it's not an empire unless the guy in charge is wearing a cloak and shooting lightning out of his hands. Anything less than that is acceptable. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, no. Otherwise, if you were describing the capital of any other empire in the world, we go, wow, what a corrupt and decadent imperial court of rich welfare mongers that place is. You know what I mean?

But somehow this is the American way that we're just going to keep going like this, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's acceptable. It's funny. I would say, well, you see uniforms because they're on their way to work in the Pentagon, but most of the time, you know, I often comment on this. You don't, you wouldn't realize what a militarized state is. is from just looking around because you don't really see people

in uniform. You know, if you go to Moscow or or even, you know, a lot of carvenils around the world, you see a lot of people in military uniform. You don't hear. I mean, all these, you see them people with short haircuts

jogging around the Pentagon. You know, we have all these military cities that are sort of hidden away like, you know, Killeen, Texas or lots of places around the country. country were the military towns but the you know they're quite separate anyway yeah yeah it's true and it is kind of a you know as they say with the professional army not that i'm arguing for the draft but with the professional so-called volunteer army although they're pretty well paid but

after generations of that go by and it's such a small percentage of the population and they're out at these isolated places in the country away from everybody else like you're talking about it does kind of very inbred. Yeah, and it makes them very separate from whoever they're defending.

I know there's a big worry on the right now. I don't know if this could be a real concern, like historically speaking, but where like all of, because of all of the woke stuff, a bunch of, you know, older Americans have dropped out

of the military and then but now they're trying to recruit all immigrants to be in the military but then i heard i mean not the and immigrants might be super patriotic but then again they might not be i don't know you know one in four marines is now his uh a latino yeah i mean but born here or born there uh i'm not sure a lot of them not born here yeah but um i mean this was the fast track to citizenship or was supposed to be in the bush years and whatever. And, you know, I'm not overly paranoid about this. I know that

you know, most American Hispanics are just patriotic Americans. They're not here representing Mexico or anything like that. But if you have a military that's essentially strangers, like, we're like most

of them are not from here. Then that does raise questions about how willing they would be to go place is that previous armies would have refused, you know? Yeah. In terms of enforcing crackdowns on Americans, I mean. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's a good point.

So, yeah, it could be that some of the paranoid are ahead of their time. It happens. You know what I mean? Paranoid is someone who knows what's going on around it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, listen, well, I hope everyone will go to, spoils of war.substack.com. This one is called The Birth of the Neocons

and check out all of Andrew's great books, including Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy and the latest spoils of war as well. And thank you very much for your time again. Good to talk to you. Thank you, Scott. Always a pleasure. Have it going.

Take it. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.