Scott Horton on the War in Afghanistan
2021-09-15 · Guest: Scott Horton (Director of the Libertarian Institute) · 52:37
Origins and strategic failures of the War on Terror
Bob Zadek and guest Scott Horton discuss the conclusion of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and the broader implications of the “War on Terror.” They examine how the conflict was marketed to the American public and the strategic decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that extended the war’s duration and scope.
Topics: War in Afghanistan, War on Terror, Al-Qaeda, Foreign Policy, George W. Bush, Civil Liberties Speakers: Bob Zadek (host), Scott Horton (guest)
The Marketing of the War on Terror [00:00]
Bob Zadek: You’re listening to the Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion with the smartest guests on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude. And your calls are welcome at 424-BOB-SHOW. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio—the show this Sunday, and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening.
Well, here we are, celebrating peace at last. Declaring a war as ended doesn’t really make it end. It’s just a political statement, and perhaps a military statement as well. But many of my listeners probably were born into the war in Afghanistan. So this is the beginning of something somewhat unreal. All of a sudden, your war has been taken away from you. You’ve never lived in America without us having a war in or on Afghanistan. So you’re probably a bit curious what it’s all going to be like, and you’re also a bit curious as to what it really means for us to say the war in or on Afghanistan has ended.
To help us understand what the War on Terror—of which the war in or on Afghanistan is a part—is, I’m happy to welcome to the show Scott Horton this morning. Scott is the director of the Libertarian Institute. He is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, which is broadcast at 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and he podcasts the long-running Scott Horton Show from his website, ScottHorton.org.
Why Scott Horton and why this morning? Scott has just published Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. That book follows Scott’s earlier book, the prescient Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. To help us put the end—if it is the end—of the war in or on Afghanistan in context, I’m happy to welcome Scott to the show this morning. Scott, welcome.
Scott Horton: Thank you very much for having me. Happy to be here.
Bob Zadek: So, Scott, what I would like to do is—we have so much to cover. The goal of this morning’s show is to help us understand the context of this marketing invention marketed by those who seem to prefer us to be in a constant state of war, the brilliant marketing invention labeled as the War on Terror.
Declaring a war on terror itself is a beautiful concept if you are predisposed to favor a military-driven economy. It’s brilliant because it cannot possibly have an end. It is the gift that keeps on giving, because how does the War on Terror end? Does it end when the last terrorist on earth dies in assisted living of old age or some other malady? Absent that, it cannot end, which means if you favor that condition of foreign policy, you will be happy for eternity.
But Scott, I didn’t always live in a circumstance when we have a War on Terror. And it seemed to me—I try to pay attention—but it seemed to me the War on Terror more or less began, which means terrorism more or less began, on 9/11 of 2001. But it did not. So tell us if you can, briefly, how the concept of terrorism as an enemy—where and how did it begin?
From Al-Qaeda to Regime Change [04:30]
Scott Horton: Well, I mean, I think it was after September 11th that Bush—even on that night, Bush said that the enemy is terrorism rather than terrorists, and obviously rather than Al-Qaeda. And he knew that day who had done the attack. Everybody knew all summer long there was an Al-Qaeda attack coming. And the official story of that day is that if the FBI, CIA, and NSA had been doing their jobs and working together, then they would have been able to stop it because they had so much intelligence. I mean, some of those hijackers had been in the country for almost a year and a half.
So they knew it was Al-Qaeda that did it. Who else is going to do it? Russia? Hezbollah? There’s nobody else on the list. It was bin Laden, and they knew that. And they knew that bin Laden and his entire group made up no more than 400 men. 400 men hiding in no man’s land in the ungoverned spaces between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the far side of the planet, as far as you could ever get from anywhere.
And so if they had decided to just be square with the American people, right? If the people in that government were just average, random, generic, good old, decent Americans trying to do a good job, they would have said, “We’re going to war against Al-Qaeda. And, you know, we’ll try to get extradition, but barring that, we’re going to kill Osama bin Laden and his 400 friends, and then that’ll be what they get for messing with us,” right?
But instead, what happened is they decided immediately: don’t say war on Al-Qaeda. Say War on Terrorism. Because they wanted to draw the writ as broadly as they possibly could. And if you read Bob Woodward’s book, Bush at War, the thing that’s so unique about this book is that Bush told the National Security Council and the White House staff, “Go ahead and give everything to Bob. You know, he’s our court historian. We all love him, we all trust him.” You know, Colin Powell and all those guys in the administration had spilled their guts to him in the Bush senior years, all about the war in Panama and Iraq War I. They were all very familiar with him. So they just turned over everything.
And then Bob Woodward publishes the transcripts in the book of the National Security Council talking in just the days after September 11th. “We gotta start bombing Baghdad.” “Well, yeah, I know, but we gotta start bombing Afghanistan first, or it’s gonna look funny if we go to Iraq before we go to Afghanistan.” But then, geez, when we go to Afghanistan, should we try to kill Osama bin Laden and his few Arab friends? Or should we go for regime change against the Pashtun Taliban indigenous regime there in Kabul?
And they decided immediately to focus not just on the Taliban too, but on the Taliban instead. And they let bin Laden get away. And I make the case in both books—and it’s a circumstantial case, but it’s a very strong one—that when the CIA and the Delta Force had him cornered at Tora Bora, that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Franks deliberately decided to withhold the reinforcements they needed so they could let Osama escape so that they could lie to your mama for a year and a half and say Saddam could give these weapons to Osama.
Well, that lie doesn’t work if Osama’s already dead and the American people believe that the war is won, justice is done, and that’s what you get from messing with us a year and a half ago, right? So they let him go to be the Emmanuel Goldstein figure, like out of 1984, the permanent enemy lurking out there somewhere.
And for older people in your audience who remember the Bush years, did they not invoke the specter of bin Laden is still out there somewhere and could do this to us again? As Bush said, “Imagine the September 11th attack, only this time with the hijackers armed with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They could set up a mushroom cloud over an American city. We have to invade to preempt and stop this alliance from attacking us, which we know they’re going to do,” which was all just lies. And they knew it.
And you know, for the 9/11 truthers out there who believe that Dick Cheney and the Israelis or whoever it was did 9/11—I don’t think that that’s right at all. But you gotta hand it to them. They might as well have done it. They exploited the grief and the fear from September 11th in the most cynical fashion, in a way that it would be nice if we were talking about a foreign government doing this. We’re talking about our own government used and exploited the deaths of 3,000 people to make the American people as afraid as they could make us so that they could launch a bonus war or two or three against countries who had not attacked us and had nothing to do with the attack on the United States or any alliance with Al-Qaeda at all.
Bob Zadek: Let’s take a step back, Scott. One step back. Your story started with Osama bin Laden and his 400 somewhere on the other side of the world, in the hills and mountains of Afghanistan. But that starts the story at chapter two. Why did 400 or so angry humans—why were they sitting around somewhere in Afghanistan, angry at America and plotting against us? The story doesn’t—they weren’t born that way. The story starts perhaps one chapter earlier. What were they so angry about? After all, we couldn’t have been farther from them geographically or in any other way. Why pick us, and what were they so angry about that made them spend all of their time plotting against us? What happened before that?
Scott Horton: Yeah, great question. So, first of all, these guys used to be friends of ours, at least friends of friends.
The Origins of Blowback [11:39]
Scott Horton: The Jimmy Carter governments and the Ronald Reagan governments backed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and that included the Arab Afghan army—tens of thousands of Muslims recruited from all around the world, especially the Arab world, to go and assist the Mujahideen in fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which did help to break the Soviet Union. It was one of the straws that broke the camel’s back on that “evil empire.” And so the Reaganites took credit for that over and over again. In fact, the Democrats gave the Reaganites credit for that. So hey, you can’t deny Ronald Reagan helped bring down the Soviet Union in this way. Even Hillary Clinton has said that and so forth.
Well, guess what? The Mujahideen understood the same lesson: that they had defeated the godless communist atheist, great in terms of land mass size, the greatest empire the world has ever known. And they brought it to its knees with faith in Allah and AK-47s—which are Soviet weapons, but anyway.
Bob Zadek: And taking the money from the United States.
Scott Horton: And don’t forget the United States. And then what they decided was they were going to turn their war against America. And the reason why was, first of all, Iraq War I, Desert Storm, but especially the aftermath of Iraq War I, where it was Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney who had promised King Fahd that as soon as the war is over, we’re going to leave and pull all our troops out of Arabia. But they didn’t do that.
Fact, for your audience, here’s a good touchstone. There’s a movie called Three Kings with Marky Mark and Ice Cube and George Clooney. And it’s a gold heist movie, but it takes place—the setting—it’s from the ’90s. The setting is the aftermath of Iraq War I. And America occupies the south of the country, and there’s this massive Shiite uprising and Kurdish uprising to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But then Saddam crushes that insurgency, and that’s, you know, the setting in the background of that movie.
Well, what happened there? That was a true story, you know, for the setting of that fictional story. What had happened was Bush Sr. encouraged that revolution, and they dropped leaflets on Iraqi army divisions and in Shi’i territory: “Now’s your chance to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.” And Bush had even said on Voice of America that, you know, we stand behind them and encourage them to do this. But then they choked. And again, remember, America was occupying the southern half of Iraq at the time. They choked and changed their mind.
Why did they choke and change their mind? Well, because they realized that they were importing the Iranian Revolution—the Shiite Iranian Revolution of 1979. They were importing it into Iraq there in the spring of 1991. They had just spent—most of your audience probably already knows, I could have said earlier—that while they were backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, they were backing Saddam Hussein against Iran to contain the Iranian Revolution, to try to overthrow it, and then barring that, to try to contain it. Now, in the aftermath of Iraq War I, they’re importing it into Iraq. And they realize this, and so they choke and they call it off. And then it’s like the Bay of Pigs, where it’s this massive massacre. We send people into battle and then leave them high and dry to be slaughtered. A hundred thousand people were killed. And they let Saddam keep his tanks and helicopters to crush the insurrection.
And then they decided to stay. “Oh, well, we have to have our bases in Iraq now to wage these no-fly zones over southern Iraq and northern Iraq to protect the Kurds and the Shiites from Saddam Hussein.” Well, he’d already crushed the insurrection. It’s not like he was just gonna keep killing them all until they were all dead or something. The rebellion was over. So it was a pretext.
But the Israelis especially insisted in the beginning of the Bill Clinton years that Iraq is too weak to help balance against Iran. Now America must stay in Saudi for a policy of “dual containment.” Instead of balancing Iraq and Iran against each other, now America is just going to dominate them both and have a cold war against them both. And this policy of dual containment was, you know, invented by Martin Indyk, who had worked for Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister. Then he comes to work for Bill Clinton. And the Clinton government in early ‘93, they were reluctant to do this. But then came the big fake hoax of the alleged assassination plot against H.W. Bush. Remember the lie that they were going to kill him with a truck bomb in Kuwait? Well, the whole thing was completely debunked. It was just a whiskey smuggling ring that the Kuwaiti government embellished into a plot against Bush Sr. But once that happened, Bill Clinton then decided to go ahead and go with the hawks and institute this policy of dual containment. But what that meant was we’re staying in Saudi for the rest of the century. And what that meant was bin Laden then was gonna knock our towers down.
Bob Zadek: Putting ourselves into the minds of these 400 who were the source, or which was the source of the successful attack on the towers, putting ourselves in their heads. Here they are sitting in the mountains, and they are very angry at the U.S.—to be simplistic, but not inaccurate to be simplistic. Now, I think what you’re saying, and just am asking for reaffirmation or correction, I think what you’re saying: they looked upon the region in one respect, as the Arab part of the world. I’m being very simplistic, forgive me. And they didn’t want us there, and it was our presence there for whatever reason, but our presence—it’s, “Hey, this is our house,” and the way football teams sometimes think.
Scott Horton: Well, let me be real real clear about this. Imagine a Saudi army building a base in San Antonio, the land of the Alamo. Think of what Texans would do about that, even if our governor invited them. And yet Jesus wasn’t born in San Antonio, right? But the Arabian Peninsula is where Muhammad was born and where the religion of Islam was born, in the twin holy cities of Mecca and Medina. So this is San Antonio times a thousand, right?
You can think of this. Think of San Antonio too when you think of the Russians in Crimea. The Russians lost hundreds of thousands defending Crimea from the Nazis. You think they’re ever gonna let anybody ever have it, ever? After losing hundreds of thousands fighting for it, it might as well be holy land. Just to put you in their perspective for a minute on that one.
But that’s what these guys were upset about: that American combat forces—not just oil businessmen walking around, combat forces from Christian North America, whites and blacks and Hispanics, none of them Arabs, and virtually none of them Muslims—occupying essentially… you know, America is the world empire, and Saudi is our client state. When America says we’re gonna leave some bases here, the king doesn’t have much choice in that. And bin Laden despised the king and denounced the king for going along with it, King Fahd back then.
But then so here’s the thing about it, and I hope that your audience is mad at me right now for citing bin Laden and his statements, because the reality is this guy is a mass murderer. And once somebody’s a mass murderer, then who cares what they say? You don’t take their word for anything, right? If he’s a murderer, he’s a liar. But here’s the point. This was his recruitment shtick. This was how bin Laden got other people to do what he wanted them to do. He said the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places must be expelled. And he also routinely denounced American support for Israel in their occupations of the Palestinians and of the Lebanese.
And in fact, his first declaration of war in 1996 was called the “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” Pretty subtle, huh? And then in there, he goes on and on about the Israeli operation Grapes of Wrath in Southern Lebanon that Shimon Peres had launched in ‘96, and including the Qana massacre of ‘96, where 106 women and children were killed by the Israelis, hiding in a UN shelter. And bin Laden went on and on about this.
Well, guess what? This is how he recruited Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of September 11th. Bin Laden said the Americans must be punished for what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon. And this Egyptian engineering student studying in Hamburg, Germany, said, “I agree with that.” And he and his friend bin al-Shibh went to Afghanistan and met bin Laden and were recruited and were the leaders of the “planes operation” of 20 years ago, yesterday, that killed 3,000 people. And then they also accused us quite correctly of supporting all the dictators of the region, pressuring them to keep production high, and therefore the price of oil artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And then this one’s interesting.
The Mujahideen and the 1990s [21:26]
Scott Horton: They accused us of turning a blind eye to Russia, China, India, and Uzbekistan for their oppression of Muslims. But as I’m sure you’ll remember, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton took the side of the Mujahideen in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Chechnya. Most people don’t know about that one, but while Bill Clinton was financing the Russian war against the terrorists in Chechnya, he was also financing the Chechens’ war against the Russians at the same time with the help of the Saudis. And he was also training Uyghurs for use against China, which is going to be an issue coming up, you know, here in our medium-term future as well.
And then when September 11th happened, Bill Clinton, Tom Lantos, and Brad Sherman all said something very close to, “Geez, how could these Muslims attack us after everything we’ve done for them lately?” But the reality was all the policies that had provoked them to turn against us were still on. The fact that we supported them against the Serbs in Kosovo, against the Russians’ interests there—um, you know, that didn’t impress them. I’m sure they, you know, appreciated it, but it didn’t buy their loyalty.
And they were attacking us all through the 1990s. I mean, by the time Bill Clinton’s supporting them in Chechnya, it’s treason. They’ve already tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They already killed Americans in 1995 and 1996 with bombings in Saudi Arabia. They blew up the African embassies in the summer of ‘98. They blew up the USS Cole in the year 2000. And, you know, but during all of this, our government is essentially—in fact, Coleen Rowley just wrote about this. They connected Zacarias Moussaoui before 9/11. They connected him to Al Qaeda through the Chechen terrorists.
And you know what FBI headquarters said? “Yeah, no, but we like the Chechen terrorists. They’re our friends. And so this doesn’t concern us.” And we know now, if they had gotten their FISA warrant and looked at Moussaoui’s computer, they could have directly connected him to the hijackers in Florida and stopped the September 11th attack. But that was why the government wasn’t interested in considering them an anti-American terrorist: because he was friends with pro-American terrorists, or at least terrorists that America was pro.
Bob Zadek: So the goal of the terrorists was never—ultimate goal, although it’s hard to speak as if they’re a monolith. But from what you are saying, the goal of the terrorists from 9/11 and beyond was it simply to get American forces, the occupying forces in their minds—and they’re not wrong—to get the American occupation forces out of, uh, that part of the world?
The Strategy of Provocation [24:30]
Scott Horton: Sorta, but it’s complicated. Now, here’s the thing: if you ask the war party, read the New York Times, they’ll tell you that, yeah, see, they—bin Laden said we were a paper tiger, and if they hit us hard enough, we’d turn around and run away. Now, I believe that that was the strategy, probably with the Africa embassy attacks and things like that—that they thought that they could get America to just pull up stakes and go.
But let’s get realistic about September 11th. They hit the Pentagon. They hit—they killed, you know, only 3,000, but it could have been 10,000, right? What if those, uh, buildings had come right down instead of, uh, people having an hour to evacuate before they finally collapsed? I mean, this—they were attempting to provoke a cataclysmic clash, an apocalyptic conflict between the United States and the Muslim world. At the very least, they were trying to provoke a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan.
Well, if they want us out of the region, why are they trying to lure us into the region? And the answer is to replay the same strategy that we helped them use against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s: to bog the empire down, bleed us to bankruptcy, and force us out the long and the hard way so that we’ll stay gone. And that was the plan. And they said it all along, and I prove it in the book. I got all the footnotes in the world, where, uh, in fact, my most recent article at antiwar.com details all this too, where bin Laden said over and over again before September 11th, that his goal was to provoke an overreaction by the Americans that we would go and get bogged down and bled to bankruptcy; they would do the same thing to us as he had done to the Russians. Uh, you know, as his son said, uh, to get us to chase after the red scarf, like a big dumb bull that chases the red scarf. And then so that’s exactly what they did.
Now, the real irony here is this is why Jimmy Carter started backing the Mujahideen in ‘79 in the first place. It wasn’t just, “Oh, we don’t like Russians, let’s shoot some.” There was a whole, you know, plan behind it. It was to provoke the Russians into invading Afghanistan. The American people have Vietnam syndrome and don’t want to contain world communism anymore. Well, maybe we can bait them into over-expansion. They didn’t want them to spread into West Germany, but how about—well, who cares about Afghanistan? Those people are expendable, right? We’ll, we’ll provoke them into invading Afghanistan. And then we’ll support this effort, this guerrilla war effort against them for 10 years.
It worked better than they ever imagined. But that was what they were trying to do. This was their language. They said, “We’ll give the Soviet Union their own Vietnam.” And that—they even put those, uh, words in the mouth of the character Colonel Trautman in Rambo III, when he’s a captive to the KGB and says, “We’ve already had our Vietnam, now you’re going to have yours.” And this was the whole point. So then how could America fall for this again and do the same thing to ourselves that we had done to the Russians, trying to replicate the thing that we had done to ourselves in Vietnam? It’s just, it’s incredible that they would go for it, but they went for it.
Bob Zadek: Scott, the irony is that if Reagan’s policy—using the Mujahideen as the Stinger missiles and the like to, um, start to bring down the Russian Empire, the USSR—if that was a brilliant policy, what you seem to be saying is that policy, having been recognized as being a brilliant policy with enormous leverage—all you have to do is give enough Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen, and you bring Russia to their knees—the brilliance, the leverage of that policy, was now that very policy. We fell for it ourselves, and we were sucked right in. And you mentioned in your book that Osama bin Laden was able to, from the grave, um, uh, carry out the Reagan-esque policy against us. Um, is that simplistic, or is that pretty much what happened?
Scott Horton: Yes, I mean, you know, sometimes doves get mad at me like I’m making excuses for W. Bush, and I’m saying, well, he’s just a big dummy who made a mistake and was tricked. But that’s not right. What happened was bin Laden saw in W. Bush the perfect mark. And his son Omar explained this in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010. He said, “My father, in the election of 2000, he was so happy that Bush won.” He said, “This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country.”
He says, “In Clinton’s time, you sent some cruise missiles after my father, and he didn’t get him. But now”—and this is—the interview was in 2010 when bin Laden was still alive for another year—he said, “Now you’ve been here for 10 years and you still don’t have my father, and you spent all these billions of dollars. It would have been better if you had kept that money for your economy. In Clinton’s time, America was smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf, right?”
So, but so what was it that he saw in W. Bush? Like to be perfectly frank about it. He’s a Republican representing Houston, Texas. Corrupt corporate oil interests. And he’s a mean and dumb and short-sighted and narrow-minded, cynical little B-word. And Osama could tell that. Osama could tell, “If I slap this guy in the face, he’s gonna cry victim, and then he’s gonna go completely overboard in exploiting the crisis to the nth degree.” That’s what empires do. And that was the dynamic that he was counting on. The more corrupt and cynical and ruthless the American president, the better. Because again, he wasn’t trying to get us to turn and run. He was trying to get us to double, triple, quadruple down and kill ourselves.
Which, by the way, ironic note, new study out: 30,000. 30,000 Iraq and Afghan war veterans have killed themselves in the last 20 years, which is a perfect reflection of the American policy of imperial domination. It’s murder-suicide. That’s what it is. We’re never supposed to be an empire in the first place. This is the kind of thing that happens to empires. You know, they provoke resistance, then they cite that resistance as the reason that they need to have an empire in the first place, and then they go broke. Somebody pull up the national debt clock right now. What are we at? 29 and a half trillion. Well, 29 and counting very, very fast, of course.
The War on Terror as a Total Victory for the Enemy [31:43]
Bob Zadek: Um, so it seems to me, um, that the war on terror—I hate the phrase, but everybody knows what I’m referring to. The war on terror, whatever may happen in the future, we have already lost it. We have lost it if you simply count dollars spent, lives lost, lives disrupted, and, uh, measure that way, there’s no way we recoup the lives and the treasure lost. So the, the war on terror, the longer it continues, the more that we lose.
And I’ve, I’ve often observed that if the terrorists brought down the Twin Towers, and then retired—retired to the south of France and watched the, the action after that—everything that happened, they didn’t have to do another thing.
Scott Horton: You’re exactly right about that. You’re exactly right about that. And in fact, in that interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the reporter Guy Lawson asks Omar bin Laden, “Well, do you think Osama, you know, your father’s gonna continue to attack the United States?” And he says, “No, I don’t think so. Once America invaded Afghanistan, his plan worked. He’s already won.”
That interview was 11 years ago. And I think that, um, as I said, um, there’s been no president, um, Democrat or Republican since 9/11, who simply has recognized, “No, the enemy has stopped.” Yeah, they’re going through—they’re continuing this Hollywood set of terrorism, but they don’t have to do anything. It’s a total victory. Hang up your cleats and retire. You have won and just sit from the sidelines and watch us continue to search grandmothers at the airport for eternity and to, sp, lose American lives in a part of the world that we, uh, but for our relationship with Israel and perhaps Saudi, a whole other discussion.
Uh, we are continuing this ritual with no end in sight and no goal. No one can set, no one can tell us what the goal of the war is. In World War II, there was a goal. We had a defined enemy; we had to make them surrender. We had to bring them to the battleship, sign documents, and then we can pack it in. But are we gonna have terrorists sitting on a ballish battleship somewhere in the South Pacific signing a peace treaty? Of course not. Never. In fact, who even knows if there are terrorists left to sign the treaty?
Global Hegemony and the Objective of Perpetual War [33:55]
Bob Zadek: So we have—we are now on and have been, it seems to me, on war on terror autopilot with maybe an enemy that doesn’t even exist, maybe and maybe not. So now we are to your book, the prescient title, Enough Already: A Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Now tell us today, Scott, give the other side—the pro-war on terror crowd—give them every benefit of the doubt that you can. What is the goal of the war on terror? And how will they know that we have won so that we can stop the defense contracts and bring home America’s young men and women? From their point of view, what will be the objective measure that the war on terror can be ended in their minds?
Scott Horton: Right. Yeah, I don’t think they have an endpoint. I think you’re right that they’ve written themselves a warrant to continue doing this from now on until they’re stopped by another force, meaning the American people make them stop.
Is it—but okay? So if you go far enough down the chain of command, you could find somebody at, you know, the Delta Force or JSOC or the CIA who say, “Look, our job is killing Al-Qaeda guys. We find old friends of bin Laden or friends of friends, and we put bullets in their head or bombs on their head.” There’s some truth to that, but that’s not what this is about.
What this is about is the project of American global hegemony, as they call it—preeminence or dominance. And what it means is—and they’ve written all this down at the end of the Cold War, at the end of Iraq War I in the Bush senior years—the policy is that America will maintain military dominance over the entire planet forever, and that we will never tolerate any power or group of powers that could possibly come together to challenge our military dominance. And we call this keeping the peace and leading the world and the liberal rules-based international order and whatever set of euphemisms.
But it requires, for example, dominance in the Middle East. Why? It’s not because we’re dependent on that oil, and it’s not just for, you know, Exxon oil interests making cash money or, or making gasoline cheap enough that we can get to work in the morning or something like that, as much as the geostrategic imperatives. We need to be able to turn off the tap of oil to China in the event of a crisis with them. The continuing Cold War—you thought Nixon ended the Cold War with China 50 years ago. Nope. We still—it’s still going on this whole time. And not only that, guess who else drinks Middle Eastern oil all day? Our friends. The Indians, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Australians, the Indonesians, right? So this is leverage. This is American military dominance over the planet, and it’s just one small part of it.
And then, as they used to say in the 1990s at the Pentagon, this was their slogan: “You know, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.” And they weren’t anticipating their own building getting hit by a jumbo jet, I guarantee you that. But, um, well, actually, some of them probably imagine such a scenario. But, um, you know, that was the fire that they were playing with. So terrorism is the side effect of the policy of dominance, and then it becomes the excuse for the policy of dominance.
But look at the perverse situation, the way it stands in the Middle East now, in the aftermath of Iraq War II. Because who’s the biggest obstacle to American dominance in the Middle East? It’s not Al-Qaeda, who are dissident radicals from our allied states of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The obstacle is Iran, which used to be under America’s thumb after World War II and up through 1979, but then the revolution came and they declared independence from us. And we’ve had a cold war against them ever since then. Well, how are we supposed to dominate the world if we don’t have an alliance with the Persians? It’s the ultimate frustration for the American Empire.
But they try, and they have their bases all through the Arabian Peninsula. They had their former friend Saddam Hussein, who was no longer compliant, that they needed to, you know, find a way to do something about. But then here’s the thing about the neocons is that they’re as dumb as they are cruel. And so they didn’t realize—and it’s kind of amazing that they couldn’t figure this out—but if you look at their thinking and the Clean Break policy, there’s—they have this idea, a nonsensical idea why it made sense to them, though.
Um, but what they didn’t realize, I guess, in effect, was if they got rid of Saddam, they would empower Iran. They thought they were gonna empower the Iraqi Shiites over the Iranians and lord it over the Iranians. But it’s just absolutely been the other way around. And they realized this. I mean, this is the entire Iraq War II. Everybody knows Iraq War II was horrible, and all these people died, and there was a civil war and all this. But remember on TV, all they ever told us was, “Well, it’s America and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists. And we’re trying to create a democracy for the people and the terrorists are trying to thwart it.” Well, that was just nonsense.
What was happening was we were fighting for the Shiite supermajority—the same ones that Bush Sr. encouraged to rise up and overthrow Saddam and then stabbed in the back in 1991. His son picked up right where he left off 12 years later and came in in 2003 and drove them all the way to Baghdad and then fought a five-year civil war for them to ensconce them in power. It’s the same regime that’s still in power in Iraq to this day because it was a supermajority; it was the factions of the supermajority Shiites that he put in power there. But they’re in league with the Ayatollah in Tehran.
So the Bush government—this, the change did not come with Barack Obama, the secret Muslim from Kenya and all this stuff. The change came from W. Bush. That we really wish we hadn’t empowered the Ayatollah and the Shiites in Iraq. So now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go right back to backing the Al-Qaeda terrorists again: Fatah al-Islam against the Iranians’ friends, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood groups in Syria, Jundallah in Iran—head shopping, suicide bombing, bin Laden crazies, backed by the United States and Israel against the Iranians. And then took their side after Iraq War II.
What did Barack Obama do? Not that he was a secret Ken, uh, secret Muslim from Kenya. He was a secret W. Bush. He took the same policy and continued it and took Al-Qaeda’s side in Libya and took Al-Qaeda’s side in Syria. Now in Libya, that wasn’t about the Shiites; that was just because the Saudis hated Qaddafi for other reasons. But in Syria, Bashar al-Assad represented a link in the alliance between Hezbollah and Lebanon and Iran.
Redefining War and the 2001 Opportunity [42:46]
Scott Horton: And, you know, Obama said to Jeffrey Goldberg in 2012 in The Atlantic magazine—Jeffrey Goldberg said, “You know, Barack Obama, don’t you think that if we got rid of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Syria, that that would help bring Iran down a peg?” And Obama says, “Absolutely.” And that was the reason they did it. They said they were fighting to protect the Syrian people from their government. Please. Come on. The CIA was backing bin Ladenite head-choppers, suicide bombers, terrorist murderers. What “War on Terrorism”? It’s a war for terrorism now. Again.
Bob Zadek: Now I want to focus on—we’re running out of time a bit—I want to focus on a very short word. Part of your website, antiwar.com. I want to focus on “war.” Implicit in so much of what we’ve talked about is equating war with helicopters and missiles and drones and killing. I may be—I’m not an expert in military affairs—but I simply can’t imagine that any war, using that word in its most simple sense, any war will be fought with instruments of war. All the war we have—the Cold War, you use the phrase with China, the Cold War, if there is one in the Middle East—is not a war of who has the most dead bodies. The war being fought with China is an economic war, it’s a cyber war, it is a war of stealing intellectual property, it is a war of disrupting infrastructure. It is not a war for territory, nor is it a war for building a captive population.
Therefore, the whole concept of war, the whole concept of occupation—it’s like cavalry. It’s like, who cares about who has the most weapons of war when victory or defeat will be decided on an economic battlefield, not a physical battlefield? And indeed, the bringing down of the Trade Towers was not done with instruments of war; it was done with cutters to open boxes, and it was done with airplanes. So isn’t the whole concept of war itself misunderstood? And therefore, if I’m right, doesn’t that change the whole policy of the War on Terror?
Scott Horton: Yeah, no, that’s such an important point. I mean, the comparison to Pearl Harbor was made over and over again because, hey, surprise attack, 3,000 killed—all good so far, right? Except that, what you just said, they had to hijack our civilian domestic airliners to even have weapons to use. A “Hail Mary” pass effort on the part of this tiny little group of stateless bandits, these leftover terrorists from two wars ago, who were desperately trying to get something started.
And so, you know, in other words, as antiwar.com said all along, but as even General Zinni, the former commander of CENTCOM, and Gary Berntsen, one of the CIA leaders at Tora Bora who tried his best at the time to kill bin Laden, as they admitted back in 2016, the whole war could have been over by the end of 2001. By Christmas 2001. All they would have had to do—even assuming they couldn’t have negotiated extradition, which I make the case in the book that they could have—but even forgetting that, if they had just focused on bin Laden and Zawahiri and their friends and just killed them, the whole thing could have been over by Christmas 2001.
And then that was why they had to conflate. Remember the “Axis of Evil”? Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Osama bin Laden? That’s somehow an axis? Where have I heard that word before? Oh, that was the signed, written blood-oath alliance between Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito in World War II. But Iraq and Iran were enemies. America supported them in war against each other—both sides of it—in the ’80s. You know, it’s not like they didn’t know that. And neither of them had any alliance whatsoever with Osama bin Laden. Both Saddam and the Ayatollah were terrified of Osama bin Laden. And then North Korea? Well, what in the heck do they have to do with anything? Other than, if you said Syria, then people would know this is all about Israel. So we’ve got to throw in—oh, I know, let’s pick a rogue state from East Asia. That’ll confuse the issue a little bit. Then North Korea—what was their tie in this axis? They had sold a few missiles to Iran years before in a commercial transaction. No alliance of any sort whatsoever.
The Recipe for Ending the War on Terror [48:15]
Bob Zadek: What is the Scott Horton recipe for, to quote the title of your book, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism? How easy would it be? And what would the first day of peace after we end the War on Terror look like? And we have about a minute and a half for that complex question to be answered.
Scott Horton: Sure, no problem. I mean, the answer is simple. We have to renounce the policy of dominance in the Middle East. We have to just quit it. As long as America is intervening militarily over there, propping up dictators over their people and all of these things, we are going to continue to have terrorist attacks against the United States. People say, “No, it’s the safe haven. Anywhere where we ever go, we can never leave because then there will be a power vacuum and the terrorists will take it over and they’ll use it as a base to attack us.” Well, like I said, America backs the terrorists, the bin Ladenites, in Syria and in Yemen right now as well. And so I really don’t want to hear that right there. That debunks that whole thing.
But those people are very dangerous, and they could attack the United States, but the only way to make that stop is to stop intervening. Because, you know, let’s say you had the best Delta Force ever, and you could kill only bin Ladenites, you’re still going to kill a few innocent people and drive a few more terrorists into the movement against you. At absolute best, this is a perpetual motion machine. We have to stop it because we’re the ones who started it.
Bob Zadek: And you’re not going to kill a few innocent people, Scott. You’re going to kill a whole bunch of innocent people, and as long as we continue to kill innocent people, the War on Terror has no end.
This is Bob Zadek. I’ve been speaking with Scott Horton. Scott is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio, and most importantly for this morning’s show, the author of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror. And the title of the book tells the whole story. I hope you’ve enjoyed and learned from this morning’s broadcast. If so, please indicate your satisfaction or otherwise by tuning in to the podcast. Share your comments, share your ratings, plus or minus. We read all reviews, we take them seriously, and we try to make the show better and better and better.
So, Scott, thank you so much for the work you have done at antiwar.com. And your book is a must-read. It is not dense; it is readable. It is a book written for people who have spent their careers in the area of foreign policy, as well as those people who just want to exercise their right to vote on the most informed basis. So you’ve done a public service to us all, Scott. Thank you so much. And thank you to my friends out there for sharing an hour of your time with us. Bob Zadek saying so long for now. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.