 After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces. How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not? President Joe Biden's decision to pull the United States military out of Afghanistan after two decades has been roundly condemned by interventionists who say that the retreat was humiliating and disastrously planned, leaving thousands of Afghans preyed of vengeance and violence at the hands of the Taliban. For Scott Horton and other critics of U.S. foreign policy, the biggest question about the withdrawal is what took so long. Horton heads up the Libertarian Institute, is editorial director at antiwar.com, and hosts the Scott Horton Show podcast. He's also the author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terror. Risen talked with Horton about why American intervention in Afghanistan was doomed from the start and how a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe. Scott Horton, thanks for talking to Risen. Happy to be here. Just before we started talking, Joe Biden, President Joe Biden explained his rationale for withdrawing from Afghanistan right now and in the manner that he did. What did you think of Biden's defense of his policy? I think it was perfectly reasonable. I mean, I don't know what else he was supposed to say in the circumstances. It's far too late to start the war all over again or anything like that. If anything, you know, really the biggest weakness of his policy has been that he broke the deal, essentially. The deal that Donald Trump had signed said we would be out by May 1st. I mean, I think just for political reasons, he didn't want it to be Trump's withdrawal. He wanted it to be his own thing. And so he delayed that, but that just gave the Taliban this much more time to take over the entire country as America is on their way out the door. So that's the reason for the big scandal now is we didn't get our decent interval. We're supposed to be able to leave and then they are supposed to give us a few weeks before embarrassing us this badly by taking over the whole country like this. You know, let's get to Biden in a second to everybody in the news, it seems, is talking about this humiliation for America. And we haven't been this humiliated since Vietnam and Saigon. Do you know, is that in any way, shape or form accurate? I mean, do you feel humiliated by the American military is leaving Afghanistan? Or do you think that's a proper way to be assessing what's going on right now? No, I think essentially people are reacting against what they assumed was going to happen, which would be that the Taliban would come in and kill everybody and that we'd have a horrible Black Hawk down type disaster as our guys try to get from the embassy to the airport, like some horrible action movie or whatever. But they haven't done that. And the Taliban are they're obviously ruthless. But oftentimes they make rational decisions. You know what I mean? Doesn't mean that their policy is always just crazy. Essentially, they're not bin Ladenites. You know what it is? I think people were thinking of when ISIS took over Western Iraq, that it's going to be like that. But the Taliban really aren't bin Ladenite lunatics like that. They're very conservative and extremely authoritarian, but they're not, you know, revolutionaries, really. Yeah. And I guess there's effectively they're state actors. I mean, you know, and it's exactly who is in the Taliban now and what the difference is between when it was actually running Afghanistan before 9 11 or before the US invasion. But, you know, they're they're a government. They're not non state actors. That's right. For many years, they've called themselves the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and they've acted as a shadow government from the American side's point of view. But essentially as the only real government in much of the country for many years now and even David Petraeus at the height of the surge at the dawn of the surge, I guess, back 10 years ago, admitted that the posthum population, especially in the south and east of the country and the predominantly posthum regions, that they vastly prefer the Taliban system of civil and criminal justice to that imposed upon them by the United States and the new government that we had set up there. And so one of the arguments against Biden and I guess it's as much against the, you know, the last 20 years of American presence in Afghanistan is that the way that the withdrawal happened was, you know, clearly we, you know, there were a lot of people who thought they were going to get out, you know, there were one of the most disturbing scenes I saw for I guess was from over the weekend where people were actually hanging onto planes as they were taking off. CNN was showing a guy who apparently fell from a plane. That was a couple hundred feet up in the air. There is room to criticize the US in the manner that it pulled out. Is there or where do you draw the line on something like that? Sure. I mean, they assumed that the Afghan National Army was going to fight. They didn't and they should have at least taken a reasonable, you know, except to the reasonable risk that the Afghan National Army was just going to continue to fold and give up and take off their uniforms as they had been doing for weeks now. And instead, they said, no, we want to keep, you know, a full staff at the embassy and a division of soldiers and Marines to protect them. I guess a division each of soldiers and Marines to protect them there for the long term. And, you know, possibly Kabul could be threatened months from now in this kind of thing. And so they could be blamed for that. But again, they're not being all massured and shot on the way to the airport. They're, you know, taking helicopter rise or they're driving to the airport and then they're flying right out of the country. And even in terms of the mobs of civilians at the airport in Kabul trying to get out, I don't know why the planes can't just keep flying them out. I mean, there's a panic going on there, but it may be, you know, totally unjustifies. Far as I can tell, the Taliban are not going to build a Berlin wall and prevent people from escaping the country if they want to emigrate and have a plane ticket go right ahead. So far has been their policy at least. Yeah, yeah. Do you what what does the US? What does the American government owe to the people who, you know, cooperated with us, who helped us? You know, what should we be doing to that? Because, you know, there's a huge amount of tragedy here. Obviously, Afghanistan under the Taliban was a horrible place to live for many people. It's going to be that way again. It hasn't been great the past 20 years, if we're if we're being honest. But, you know, what what does the government? What does the US military, what does US government owe to the people who put their lives on the line to help us in whatever we were trying to accomplish? I mean, they should absolutely help them resettle wherever it is, including the United States. I was just joshing around, but not really on Twitter saying, give them Martha's Vineyard, right? And that's not because I don't want them in Texas. I don't care where they go, you know, in America, I'm all about that. But and especially if they're people who are going to have a mark on their back if we leave them behind and why why do you think the United States is so bad at that? I mean, we did the same thing, something similar in Iraq and in other places as well. You know, when General Powell talked about the pottery barn rule of saying, you know, you you break it, you own it, we seem to be really bad. I mean, we're much more interested in breaking things than in kind of paying the bill, aren't we? Well, of course, because there is just in total denial lying to us and themselves about the position that they're in all the way up until the bitter end, right? And so why would we need to evacuate all the Afghan interpreters and whatever? If everybody knows we're leaving behind a 300,000 man army that can fight and withstand the assault and and hold up the Kabul government, which is just a fantasy. But that was the premise upon which they were basing their decisions. You know, let's talk a little bit about the the experience in Afghanistan. Do you think after 9 11 and the fact that bin Laden was there and the Taliban government was offering him, you know, some kind of sanctuary? Did the United States have the right or, you know, was it is it a defensible decision to go into that country looking for him after 9 11? Almost. And in fact, coincidentally, today, the day of Biden's speech is a four year anniversary or it's the four year anniversary of the publication of my book on Afghanistan, Fool's Aaron. And the way I make the argument in Fool's Aaron is that they could have negotiated and the Taliban started out with conditions. Well, you have to give us some evidence that bin Laden did it. We don't believe you. And then if you do, then we'll turn him over to a Muslim country. Well, they knew bin Laden did it. They knew Al Qaeda was going to attack us all summer long. That was easy enough. Colin Powell said, well, write up a dossier and give it to you soon. And then they didn't do that. Bush said, no negotiations. And by the way, by a Muslim country that could be Egypt or Jordan or Malaysia or, you know, a country that is any organ part of the organization of Islamic conference who would have turned him right over. Bin Laden and all of his friends would have extradited him immediately to the United States, you know, they'd have landed the plane on the tarmac and turned right around kind of situation. So that could have been done. And then the Taliban ended up saying, OK, we'll try to give him. We'll give him to the Pakistanis and the Pakistanis to climb that. I'm not sure if that was that American behest or not. But they that was Pervez, Mushair, if the dictator, Pakistan, ruin that one. And then on October the 8th, after the bomb started dropping two thousand one, the Taliban said, OK, OK, I'll tell you what, we will extradite him to any third country, just not directly to the United States. And we don't even want to see evidence anymore. And Bush said, too little, too late, ignored it and took the war, not really to Al-Qaeda, but took the war to the Taliban. They the first thing they did was fight for General Dostam against the Taliban, again, up in the north of the country, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kanduz and all these areas. Meanwhile, Bin Laden and all his friends were getting away in the eastern Nangahar province and there's two great books, Nick. Well, there's quite a few books about this, but two really essential books about this are Jawbreaker by Gary Berntson, who was the CIA officer, the second CIA officer in charge of the hunt for Bin Laden there. And then the other one is called Kilbin Laden by Dalton Fury, which is the alias for a guy named Thomas Greer, who was the Delta Force commander on the scene. And both of them, you know, write about how, of course, they had outlawed, pardon me, outsourced the task, mostly to these Afghan militiamen who were supposed to do all the fighting for them and all these kinds of things and how they begged for reinforcements. And both of them, Berntson and Greer, say repeatedly in their books, we just couldn't understand why they wouldn't give us the Rangers we needed, the Green Berets we needed. And they had them. There were Rangers in Kandahar and at Bagram, and there were Green Berets up in the north of the country. Fighting the Taliban, and there were even General James Mattis was there with 4,000 Marines, and they were not allowed to go and reinforce the CIA and the Delta Force at Torah border to get Bin Laden. And I believe I make the case, it's a circumstantial case, but I make the case in both books that this was a deliberate decision made by the Bush government to essentially take a very big risk that he was going to get away in order that they could spread the war because who cares if Saddam Hussein is friends with Osama Bin Laden if we already killed Osama Bin Laden and the American people feel like the war is won and revenge has been taken. And so they let him escape. Then what they do, they went to Kabul and they overthrew the Taliban government, bomb them out of power, and then they created a brand new government and dedicated the American military into fighting all of its enemies for the indefinite future. And then that was the fight that they could not win. Yeah, your sense then is that the Afghanistan mission was compromised from beginning because it wasn't ultimately, it wasn't ultimately about getting Bin Laden, it was about nation building in that particular part of the world. And in fact, in a Bush at war, which is the Bob Woodward, the first Bob Woodward book about the Bush administration, which is based on interviews with the primary, you know, principles on the National Security Council and also based on the National Security Council notes from their meetings that Bush just gave him everything. And in there, it shows that he, I think, directly quotes and shows how Connolly's arise in the CIA said, we should not fight the Taliban. We should go around the Taliban. We should focus on Bin Laden and any Arabs, any Saudis and Egyptians in Afghanistan in late 01. You better run. But everybody else, let's leave them alone so that the Taliban will see that we're only doing this and we're not doing that. And then Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush objected to that and said, no, we want to go ahead and conflate them all together and pretend they're all one big enemy and that's who we're fighting. And, you know, I finally figured out, Nick, that this is a big part of the reason why so many people were 9-11 truthers right away that they were so apt to take up that thing was because the lie that the Taliban had done it, right? The Taliban are a bunch of hillbilly cavemen from the town of Bedrock on the other side of the world. Why would they knock down our towers as they hate our freedom? It's just so much BS that people thought, well, Cheney did it or whatever it was was their favorite theory when in fact Bin Laden was the son of a billionaire from Saudi Arabia and his partner Zawahiri was a prominent surgeon from Cairo. These are, you know, wealthy educated men who were behind the Al-Qaeda plot against us, not cavemen from the town of Bedrock at all. They just happened to be hiding there. The leadership of the group happened to be hiding out there, it was all. One of the lessons that I want to tease out a couple from Afghanistan and also, you know, Iraq and more broadly the war on terror, which is the subject of your most recent book enough already. But, you know, in Afghanistan, one of the things that has come out in this, you know, it just reeks of Vietnam. It reeks of like any number of, you know, deep involvements of the military overseas as well as the national security state or surveillance state at home. The amount of lies that were coming out of, you know, out of Afghanistan from the very beginning. You've sketched some of them. It wasn't that long ago that I guess was the Washington Post, mostly that published the Afghanistan papers, which it was just kind of like, you know, history as a really bad rerun of Vietnam. What, you know, what did we learn about the government's unwillingness or is it an inability to tell the truth about military adventures coming out of Afghanistan? Yeah, well, you know, I remember right when the terror war started, there was a mantra that this is not going to be like Vietnam. I know that was a direct quote of H.W. Bush from Iraq War One, which we've been bombing Iraq 30 years ever since then, but anyway, but I don't mean in just the cliche sense, the way H.W. Bush said it, but there was a real sense in which, oh no, George W. Bush, he loves the military. He's going to take such good care of them. And, you know, this is going to be, you know, nothing like back when old, you know, that generation ago when Lyndon Johnson and the boys screwed up that whole thing. This is a brand new page where, but then what are they doing? They're essentially shoving young GIs into a meat grinder, which not as bad as Vietnam, but still, it hurts to get shot. If you're the one getting shot, that's for sure. And sent these guys on these crazy missions all across this country for years, essentially to die for nothing, at best to die for each other, risking their lives in battle, but on, sorry, but a fool's errand. You know, you look at Matthew Hoes, the great former Marine Corps captain, turned State Department official, who turned whistleblower in 2009 and tried to stop the Afghan surge. You might remember in the late summer of 09, and Obama of course didn't take the out and went ahead and escalated anyway. But, you know, I've talked with Matthew a lot of times one of the things that, and you'll hear this story, you probably heard this story before, I've heard this over and over and over again from different veterans. It even makes it into movies and documentaries and whatever, that when the Americans arrive, the local Afghans think that they're Russians because they're so isolated in their little villages and valleys. They don't even know that the Russians left 20 years ago or 10 years ago at the earliest, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And so, and then when they see the Americans, they don't know that the Americans have come. Even though we've been there for five, 10, 15 years, they haven't heard that the Russians have left and the Americans have come. How are these people part of any sovereign nation really at all when they have even different dialects from village to village to village, from valley to valley to valley? And then we send a bunch of American Army infantry in there to just turn their lives upside down and to pick winners and losers and control, this guy is no longer in charge of the timber industry, now this guy is and create an unending series of catastrophes. What could possibly come out of policies like this? It's just, and as you're alluding to in the Afghan papers, the commanders at the top, they knew that this is all crazy and they knew it was all going nowhere but they're getting their ticket punched and they get to move on. It gets to be somebody else's problem by the time the problem comes due. And so then it's the GIs who have to pay the bill in real time there. Yeah, and that's even going back to World War II, when you read soldiers' accounts of things, the person in the platoon or the individual dog face or something, matching up what he's doing on a daily basis or an hourly basis with a grand narrative of what the war is trying to accomplish and how your actions fit into it, that's difficult under the best of circumstances and at least in something like World War II that the large narrative was there when you look at documentaries like Kamra Obscura and whatnot about Afghanistan, it just comes quickly, nobody knew what was going on. Was that a problem and kind of telescoping out or to the war on terror? As we invaded countries and occupied countries, was that part of the problem that kind of starting a global war on terror sounds good but then exactly how that's gonna play out in any given situation seems like much more difficult to kind of conceptualize and characterize and certainly in Afghanistan, I can remember when Obama tripled troop strength there, there was no clear indication of, I mean, okay, this is what success looks like when we reach this target, then we can declare victory. So was it just that there was never any kind of definitional endpoint to any of this stuff? Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of it. In the Obama government, they call the Afghan good enough, which just meant everybody pretend that you did your job today and try to go home and that's it, you know? The whole thing was a joke. I actually just saw HR McMaster, who was part of the surge, of course, famously Trump's second national security advisor, but he was the Army general and under David Petraeus, he was in charge of abolishing corruption in the Kabul government during the surge there. And I just saw him tell Jake Tapper, you know, we finally had it figured out, just right what we were doing in 2017, and then Trump went and ruined everything by making this deal. I saw the guys from Foundation for Defense of Democracy saying the same thing. We had everything just going just right where we wanted them and then all of a sudden Trump called a ceasefire with them and negotiated the exit and only then everything went bad because they just can't admit, they'll never tell the truth that there was no, if the end state was as Colin Powell and them defined it at the beginning, a strong central government with a democratic system of regular, free and fair elections and peaceful transfers of power and a rule of law and independent judiciary and all these things, well, they just did not achieve that. That was the blank check that they'd written for themselves but they achieved nothing like that. And then of course, they finally had dumbed it down to, well, we're gonna build up an Afghan army that's strong enough to stand on its own and strong enough to protect the government at least that we built in the capital city, poof. America turns to get on their plane and turn around and leave. The Afghan army ceased to exist right before our eyes. Do you, do you think between Afghanistan and Iraq and when you look at surveys of the American population, you know, that nation building and that kind of that sort of neo-conservative vision of kind of bringing, you know, liberal democracy and representative government to all parts of the world, is that dead or is it, you know, kind of a vampire? It really never quite does. Yeah, well, there's no accountability, right? So all the same people who push those same narratives are all still here and all still have Northrop Grumman funded think tanks and will continue to publish their studies and dominate the conversation. And Jake Tapper, you know, he's a perfect example, you know? Well, geez, HR McMaster, some Americans, geez, the majority of them, we're fighting for democracy and all this. The super majority of the American people don't wanna do this. And McMaster says, well, so what? So our job is the government to lead, in other words, ignore public opinion and do whatever we want because that's what we think is right in spite of them. So much for democracy. What do you think about Biden? Is, you know, Biden at various points in his career has been, you know, a reliable, you know, kind of a centrist, you know, military industrial complex kind of guy. He's, you know, he's totally willing and able to, you know, increase Pentagon spending. But his talk today was, you know, it was pretty good. It was, you know, he was like, this was screwed up from the beginning. He, you know, kind of threw Obama a little bit under the bus. He was like, you know, we should have gotten out when we could, because we had accomplished everything we could accomplish in Afghanistan, but we stuck around. Do you think he may actually chart a different course for American foreign policy that might last more than the next couple of months? Well, I don't know about that, but you're certainly right that he's taking a brave stand here, you know, relative to Joe Biden, certainly, in refusing to back down on this withdrawal right now. And honestly, I think it's personal with him. You know, his son, Beau, died of brain cancer. And there's an interview that Biden did on PBS NewsHour, where he talks about this really important book called The Burn Pits by Joseph Hickman. And you might remember, Joseph Hickman was the hero who blew the whistle on the CIA murder of three guys at Guantanamo Bay in 2006, that the other Scott Horton, not me, the Columbia professor, wrote about for Harper's. But anyway, Hickman wrote this other book called The Burn Pits, and there's a whole chapter in there about Beau Biden and how he is dead because he got brain cancer from the burn pits in Kosovo and in Iraq War II. And my hypothesis is, and Biden talks about that in the interview a bit, that someone brought it to his attention. Do you realize your son has a whole chapter in this burn pit brain cancer book? And he went, oh no, you know, and that kind of really shocked him. So my idea is that he knows good and well that he is one of the most responsible men for lying us into that war and for pressuring us into that war as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate in 2002, who refused to hold any real hearings, refused to have real experts testify, except just a couple of hawks and really helped the Bush government, you know, shepherd that through the Senate, where, you know, in the house, the majority of the Democrats voted against it. In the Senate, the Democrats controlled the Senate and they could have stopped that war. And Joe Biden led the effort for that war in the Senate. And I don't think he can deny that to himself that in effect, he killed his son by lying us into that horrible no-win war and getting his son into that situation. And when you hear him talk about it now, he gets personalists. I'm not sending any more soldiers over there just to fight for the women's rights in some other country where they won't even fight for themselves and whatever. You could tell he kind of really means it compared to even typical Joe Biden, not meaning whatever he's saying for political reasons or just saying whatever his shtick of the day is. You can tell that he's pretty mortally wounded by that thing that, you know, he knows that he's got that responsibility there. And I don't know that we'll get a new Biden doctrine, but I think even by the time he became vice president, he did not want to fight for the Taliban anymore. He did want a small escalation, but he wanted to focus on mythical al-Qaeda guys running around Afghanistan supposedly somewhere, but not fighting for the Kabul government or fighting against the Taliban anymore. That was 12 years ago. So I think he's pretty convicted about that. In his remarks, he did say that human rights need to be central to American foreign policy. Do you agree with that? Well, yeah, I mean, he was saying, yeah, but you don't do that with militarism, which is fine, right? As long as he is not writing himself a blank check for intervention in other people's countries, that's fine. And, you know, it's kind of a thing of mind because I'm a bit of an evangelical libertarian, you know, I like spreading libertarianism to people and that includes people in other countries around the world. And there's a lot to criticize about other societies and other governments in the world. In fact, sometimes, especially us non-interventionists or anti-interventionist libertarians get in trouble for not attacking Venezuela or not attacking Saddam's Iraq or not attacking Cuba right when it's a cause celeb in the media and everybody's supposed to be attacking these countries because, you know, certainly at antiwar.com and other places, we definitely put, you know, anti-American interventionism first and we're not trying to, you know, go along with those choruses. But what I'm trying to get at though is what if America was not the world empire and what if we really weren't intervening? What if there's no question whether the protest movement in Cuba or Venezuela is backed by the United States CIA or not? What if there's no question that the Green Revolution is somehow funded by the NED when it breaks out in Iran? But what if we all just want to condemn the Ayatollah as a bad leader because he is one, because he is one and we don't want to have the stink of the CIA on us and we don't want to have the stink of the CIA on reformers in these countries who that's their biggest, you know, Achilles' heel is they get accused of being sponsored by the United States even if they're not. And really they're just fighting for their own rights in their own country. And so I think libertarians like us would be in so much better a position to criticize other governments of the world the way they treat people if our government wasn't really the worst thing going on in those countries. So when you say the worst thing going on, I mean, you don't mean that, you know, the United States is prisoning and torturing people in Iran, but rather they're making it impossible for Iranians to have a, you know, a kind of transcendent resistance movement because they're always going to be accused of being US. Yeah, Iran would be a bad example for my overstatement there. I mean, in Iran, we have this, you know, absolutely brutal sanctions regime against them which is about as bad as anything that their own tyranny could do to them. But if you look at Pakistan, I mean, they've actually, you know, more or less called this off since late Obama but for years there, there's an absolutely brutal drone war in Pakistan. Of course, as we've been talking about, there's this catastrophe that's been raining in Afghanistan next door for 20 years straight now, including a massive escalation of the air war even during Trump on why this is trying to get us out in places like Iraq and Libya and Syria and Somalia, which hardly anyone ever covers but that's a huge one. Jesse Walker at Reason has written quite a bit about this in the past and in Yemen, there's just no question that the USA and our own government's activities in these people's countries is the worst thing about those countries. So, you know, there's plenty to condemn about Al-Shabaab, for example, but they don't kill Somalis the way America kills Somalis. Catch up briefly, what would, you know, what would a libertarian foreign policy from, you know, from Scott Horton, your name to Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, you know, what should we be doing as opposed to what we've been doing for at least the last 20 years? Well, we should absolutely renounce the doctrine of global hegemony and understand that just because we can afford it, which we can't, we have a $30 trillion debt, but let's just say we could afford it. We're supposed to eschew power. We're not supposed to be an imperial sort of force in the world like the European powers of old. America is supposed to be, you know, a prideful, limited constitutional republic. And we can see how embracing the national security state, you know, since World War II, but especially in our current era, has really transformed the nation of our, the nature of our national government and how it deals with us and how much power it has compared to the states and how much power it has over the American people, especially when it comes to, you know, Homeland Security and FBI, CIA and NSA, electronic spying programs directed against the Americans. Don't forget the CIA was outed in the Vault 7 leak for spying on us just as bad as the NSA and all of that. So, I mean, your contention or, I mean, it's a line of reasoning that, you know, by fighting abroad, I mean, by being in all sorts of places abroad, that ends up bringing the national surveillance state home because you know, you got to keep tabs on what's going on, especially in the name of the global war on terror. We, you know, we're over there to fight them there rather than have them come home, but that means we're constantly monitoring all kinds of communications with people in the US at the same time. You know, the same thing goes for our economic problems and it's, you know, a major part of the reason for our inflationary monetary system is to pay for this world empire and especially these wars, these aggressive wars without having to raise the people's taxes and borrow as much as we can from China and Korea and print the rest. Yeah, you know, because even as late as Vietnam, we were raising taxes expressly to pay for the war. I mean, LBJ passed a war tax. So look at the catastrophe of the 2008 crash and the, you know, nine and 10 and all of the results of this for the American people. They had crashed the whole world's economy, but especially for the American people. That's our price, all that economic pain and dislocation, quite frankly, all those suicides and divorces and foster families and crazy disruptions across our society from those economic problems. That's all attributable to the warfare state. That was Bush and Greenspan's conspiracy to make money seem free, to make the wars seem free. That resulted in that massive crash. And you know, when the lockdowns forced the crash last year, we were due for one anyway. It had been 12 years and we were due for the massive crash. Trump was desperate to try to get across the election finish line before the crash finally came and the governors beat him to it. And then what do you do? He and the Federal Reserve, they created trillions and trillions and trillions more dollars and just set us up for the next crash to make all this government seem like it's free, keeping tax rates nominally low. And then we just suffer the pain of these booms and very real busts that come every decade or so. If nation-building, certainly from a popular point of view, and it's important to remember after 9-11 and I hesitate to include you in this, but those of us who are old enough to, who were adults when 9-11 happened, there was a kind of bloodlust in the air where everybody in America almost was in favor of some kind of massive military response. Certainly Congress, you have portraits of Ron Paul behind you. You've done a wonderful collection of interviews with Ron Paul. Even Ron Paul voted in favor of the authorization of the use of military force in 2001, only one Congresswoman, Barbara Lee of California voted against it in the House and the Senate combined. Are we done with the global war on terror as much as a public as we are with the, as with nation-building, do you say? Well, I'm not sure what the polls say about that if they've ever really, like if the Pew or the Gallup if they do on the big surveys, if they phrase it that way, exactly. I think they usually ask about in this country or in that country. But this brings me to a point I try to always remember to make about the reason we have obviously the motive of Al Qaeda who came out of the Mujahideen that the Carter and Reagan administration had backed against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. They were turned against us by the policies of Bush and Clinton in the 1990s, Bush senior, I mean, and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, even though Bill Clinton kept backing them anyway, like in Chechnya and Kosovo. But then, you know, they returned against us, especially first and foremost because of the American basis in Saudi Arabia being used to continue the blockade and the bombing against Iraq there. And that was the number one cause and there are others. But anyway, but then there's- And just to put a point on that, that was when Bush said they hate, George W. Bush said they hate us for our freedom. It was actually plausible that Al Qaeda hated us because we had bases in Saudi Arabia. Oh, sure. And in fact- And elsewhere throughout the world, too. Yeah, I mean, the most important thing that you can do is just read Osama bin Laden's declarations of war from 1996 and 1998. The first one is called Declaration of War against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places, not subtle. And both of them, and then there's the letter to America that the Guardian published in early 02 explains all this as well that the motive and in fact, there's a very authoritative source, especially for right-leaning national security type folk who might be listening to this is the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, who's a very conservative guy and the former head bin Laden Hunter at the CIA. And he said, look, these guys are religious radicals. Of course, they are the leaders of Al Qaeda, but they don't hate us for who we are or because of who they are. They hate us because of what we do. And in fact, Scheuer's thing was as a CIA analyst, he would be like a very objective neutral reporter and at least sometimes and say, listen, if you still want to continue these policies, that's fine. As a democracy, talk about it, vote on it, keep the policies. All I'm saying is you need to understand these policies are what's driving the terrorists' war against us. Just simple as that. And very quickly, it's the bases in Saudi to bomb and blockade Iraq, support for Israel in their occupations of Palestine and at that time also of Lebanon, support for all the kings and dictators and sultans and el-presidentes of the region, pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And then as they accused, turning a blind eye to Russian, Chinese, Indian and Uzbek oppression of Muslims, which as I was saying before, isn't really true because Bill Clinton was backing the Mujahideen against the Russians in Chechnya and against their friends, the Serbs in Bosnia and in Kosovo. And he was also backing Uyghur fighters against China. So in fact, after September 11th, Bill Clinton and two of his democratic allies from the house, Brad Sherman and Tom Lantos, all three of them said something like, how could the Muslims attack us after everything that we've done for them lately? But the thing was the six major reasons that they were targeting us were all still in play. And the fact that we had backed them in Kosovo did not bribe them off. But here's the real point, I'll try to wrap this up quick, is that, so that's their motive, but the strategy was to bait America into making the same mistake that the Russians had made and invade Afghanistan. To bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy and force us out the long way and the hard way. This was the American deliberate policy against Russia. We'll give them their own Vietnam. That's not just in Rambo three. That's big New Brzezinski, Walter Slocum and Robert Gates in the Jimmy Carter years. So this is the reason we want to back the Mujahideen in Afghanistan is to provoke the Russians into invading, then we'll bog them down and give them their own Vietnam, just as we had just suffered through and see how they liked that. And then of course, as we all know, the popular history is, this is one of the straws that broke the camel's back and helped bring down the Soviet Union along with the oil price crash of the late 1980s there. Well, the Mujahideen had learned that same lesson, including the Arab Afghan army had learned that same lesson as the Reaganites and said, yeah, we did that, right? And then they decided they're gonna do the same thing to us again. And so when George Bush decided we're gonna go to Afghanistan and stay, he was doing exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do. When then he went to and took out the socialist infidel as bin Laden called him, Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, that was as Michael Scheuer called it, a hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden, that he would turn Iraq, at least Western Iraq became Jihadi University. Now then, if that's true, which it is, then when Obama went to Libya and then to Syria and helped even to inadvertently, they weren't really going for this, create the Islamic state caliphate that ended up invading and taking control over all of Western Iraq from 2014 through 2017. This is all Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams. Remember in the Bush years, Glenn Beck would threaten us with the Islamo fascist caliphate, but then you look at a map and you go, well, where is it? Because there's all nation states in the way, there's no caliphate. Well, Bush's Iraq war and Obama's Syria war created the caliphate of bin Laden's wildest dreams and Glenn Beck's nightmares. All of that is all, as they say in soccer, own goal. None of this had to happen at all. Do two questions. One, people who are defending the status quo of saying what we could maintain a security force in Afghanistan forever, and it would be a very light cost in terms of the overall federal budget or the military budget. One of the things that they always say is, well, you know what, since 9-11 basically, we haven't had a domestic terror event from Islamic terrorists. Because of Afghanistan, because of Iraq, because of Syria, because of Yemen, et cetera. How do you respond to that? Well, just as long as you don't count the terrorist attacks that have taken place, right? Like the Fort Hood shooter who was an army officer. I always want to call him Omar Hassan, but that's a pro-skateboarder. Hassan, something Hassan. I'm sorry. He was a major. Yeah. I'm sorry. He was a major, right? Yeah, yeah, an army major. Then of course, there's the Boston bombing, the San Bernardino massacre, Omar Mateen's massacre in Orlando, Florida. There is a guy named Zazi who this was not an FBI put on job. This was a real one that had a plan to bomb the subway in New York. There was, of course, the shoe bomber who failed. Richard Reed, the shoe bomber who failed. There was Abdul Mutalab, the underpants bomber who luckily failed, but that was an al-Qaeda attack that almost succeeded in blowing up a plane over Detroit. Well, I don't know how close they got to succeed. And that's what they were trying to do. Blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 09. So just as long as you erase all of these out of your memory. In fact, let me elaborate on one without just being mad. There's a New York Times reporter. I'm sure you read him. His name is Thomas Gibbons Neff, and he's their expert on Afghanistan. He's a former Marine and he used to write for the Washington Post. And he wrote a thing in the Washington Post that I quote in fool's errand where he said he's in Afghanistan fighting these guys like, you know, fighting in Afghanistan. And then he reads about the Boston bombing and about how the younger brother wrote on the inside of the boat that he was doing this because of the war in Afghanistan. And then Thomas Gibbons Neff says, well, wait a minute, you know, I'm over here risking my neck. And I'm telling myself that I'm doing this to keep these guys away from my mom and my little sister, right, that I'll I'll draw the violence to me out here on the frontier out here in Afghanistan to keep them safe back home. But wait a minute, if my war over here is causing them to fight us at home in that short circuits, the whole logic, doesn't it? And I guess I gotta quit. And that was when he called it quits and became a reporter instead. So another question is, you know, at least since the end of the Cold War, you know, certain factions in America, certainly in the military, also in the kind of commentary it has been, you know, have been on the hunt for a replacement for the Soviet Union. You know, sometimes that's the Russian Federation. Sometimes, or more often now it's China for that brief period, you know, and just before 9-11 the weekly standard had stories about how China was emerging as the new Soviet Union. That all got kind of swamped over by Islam of fascism, which clearly I think even the most ardent war on terror person would admit that, you know, that radical Islam was not the kind of organizing principle of, you know, hostility to the United States that was gonna swamp us. It was not a, it's not up to the task the way that arguably international communism could have become the dominant force on the planet. How do we influence people so that we don't just start now shifting, you know, we went from the Soviet Union to Islam of fascism or, you know, Islamic terrorism, and now we're looking at China. How do we break the spell of a kind of need for a Cold War where there is an equal and opposite enemy that must dictate that we give up parts of our freedom and that we change the way we organize our basic social, cultural, and economic life in order to defend against this threat? You know, I'm reminded when I was a kid I first learned the term military industrial complex from the kid down the street who I guess learned it from his dad. You know, we talked about how either that or your neighborhood was filled with little kids who were in the CIA, right? Or something, you know, the same dad taught us about the Fourth Amendment too and really meant it and really wanted us to understand, you know? We don't have kings around here. Only black robe judges who were a lot like kings. But anyway, no, so when you first learned the concept of the military industrial complex it sounds a little weird. It sounds maybe something like a topic that weird people are interested in. But then you learned that that's Ike Eisenhower who coined the phrase five star general commander of all the United Nations forces in Europe in World War II, two-term president. And he's the one who said, we gotta be so careful about this. And I think that's, you know, part of it. He's just normalizing without emotion and just explaining, you know, almost arguing past the sale. Just convincing people, getting everyone to accept and understand. It's all a lie. It's a racket. They just want to steal money from you. That's all it is. It's a government agency. And they fail upwards. Good for them. But it's at our expense and that you just don't have to believe this stuff anymore. And that's, you know, I don't know if Ron Paul ever used this term, but when Ron Paul ran for president in 08 and 12, that was what was so special. That was what got people to fall in love with this guy and follow this guy is cause he just told him, oh, you don't have to believe in this stuff. It's not true. Why would you believe in that? And it's just, it's like a license that you don't, you're confined to this social psychology that says we all agree on whatever it is or else you're on the other side or whatever it is. And Ron Paul just says, no, that's not true. And cause look at his character. He's a perfect square. He's a Methodist. He's married to his first wife. He's Republican politician from Texas, just like George Bush in that, you know, most general way. And he's just saying, man, no, this is true. And what he did was he relieved people of the burden of all that cognitive dissonance of having to pretend to believe in this stuff when it's just not real. Now I like to tell people, take a globe and spin it. Go around the planet and look, every power in Europe are our friends. And that includes the Russians. We can pick a fight with the Russians and have a phony cold war with the Russians. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin says, oh, our American partners, they don't have any beef with us. They don't have any reason to want to fight us. They can't afford to fight us. Then you look at Africa. There's the biggest power in Africa is Egypt and they're no power at all. They're under America's thumb. They've been under America's thumb for 30 years at this point now. In South America, the biggest power is Brazil, but they're not a power. They don't have a Navy. They're not worried about picking fights with anyone or achieving regional hegemony or- What about China though? China clearly is interested in regional hegemony as well as global, global reach. I mean, they're pouring lots of money into Africa and elsewhere to have influence. Do you worry about China or on what terms should we be concerned about China over the next 20 or 30 or 40 years? I think all of that is just really overblown. And if I was Taiwanese, I'd be worried about China. If I was from Hong Kong, I'd be worried about China. But I don't think that they pose a threat to Mongolia or to Kyrgyzstan or to Afghanistan or Japan or Korea. In fact, I did a panel at FreedomFest with your friend Fiona Harrigan. They're from Reason. We were on a panel together and it was hosted by Grover Norquist. And Norquist pointed out that China's completely surrounded not by adversaries, but by ancient frenemies at best, people who seek in no way a world dominated by China. And that's both Korea's and Japan and then all of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand and that whole area down there. And then they have these restive populations, of course, of the Tibetans and the Uyghurs and they've got the Mongolians and the Pakistanis and the Indians and essentially, there's not much opportunity for them to expand out. And a friend was pointing out to me the other day about how they had a border dispute with the Indians and the Himalayas. And their commanders ordered them to drop their rifles and they went over there and had a big fist fight because they didn't want to risk getting into a shooting match with the Indians there. And so I'm not sure if you're a fan of David Stockman. He's like me, only also knows all about money but he's angry all the time and great on foreign policy. He is very angry and very wise. I love the guy. So he refers to the entire nation state of China as the China Ponzi. To him, the whole thing, it's a gigantic Alan Green span bubble waiting to shatter at any moment now and he's not concerned about the rise of their power. One, Iota. How do libertarians, you mentioned this earlier, we believe in individual rights. We believe in limited government. We believe in people being able to live how they want. Those are wonderful values. Obviously there are limits to what the United States government can do. And getting to there by dropping bombs or occupying territory for decades doesn't seem to be the best way to go about that. But what are ways? Do we do it through trade? Do we do it through cultural exports? Do we do it through immigration? Letting people move here. What are the ways that libertarians can help to change the world in a more libertarian direction even in countries that are far afield from Texas? Yeah. Well, it's hard to picture the future maybe especially for me but if you think of the counterfactual, right? We're Ron Paul I in 88 and oversaw the end of the Cold War. And then in 96, Harry Brown I, the libertarian party candidate, the great Harry Brown and one in 96, 2,000. Right now I do want whatever drugs you're on. I want you to write them down and then send me a prescription for them. But okay, continue with the counterfactual. I mean, that dealt to eight, man, it's great. That the, I mean, it is interesting that weirdly at the end of the Cold War, which I'm 58, when the Cold War ended, it was almost inconceivable. And I can remember trying to, I was in grad school at the time for literary studies and I tried to engage all of my colleagues who were mostly commies in this momentous occasion, which was just a victory for freedom in a pure sense. And everybody was like, I didn't really, the Soviet Union wasn't that important. It didn't matter. Like, I was kind of in favor of it right up until yesterday, but now let's just pretend it never happened. In a substantial way, American foreign policy and America's national identity, we never really had a rethink, did we, about, okay, that's over now and that frees up. I mean, there was in the 90s, there was that discussion of the peace dividend, which kind of did happen under H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, ably, abetted by Newt Gingrich. I mean, we cut defense spending and we had something of a peace dividend, but we never really changed how we think about our place in the world. Right. And, you know, semi-famously, after Iraq War I, the neoconservatives, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad and Libby, working for Dick Cheney, wrote the Defense Planning Guidance. That says, okay, now that the Reds are out of the way, we can dominate the planet, we can do whatever we want, we'll never allow a near-peer competitor to challenge our military hegemony over the earth. And then that was truly Bill Clinton's foreign policy. I mean, it wasn't the spread of violent war, it was the spread of violent bribes to allow new military bases all across the planet and, you know, essentially behind the scenes, influence peddling to get their favorite friends to send out, you know, American troops and bombs, you know, at a high rate, I remember a Cato Institute study that he had more kind of military engagements. I mean, there were small scale than Reagan did in eight years and things like that. So you have Ronnie Reagan, you know, the great, you know, insane, you know, Obama back to the Stone Age guy was restrained compared to Bill Clinton in terms of, you know, actually dropping bombs on people. And certainly the 90s, you know, people thought it was peacetime. You know, essentially we're low level wars, small wars, as you're saying, you know, here and there in the other place, but essentially spreading all this out. But so I like to think about what's the opposite of that. So I'm younger than you, I'm 13 years younger than you, just turn 45. So I'm like in high school as the Soviet Union's falling. And I know that you remember this, how the entire conception of when the year 2000 was still in the future. And this, what a milestone that was when the odometer one day flips and we're on the other side of that in the 21st century. So I spent a lot of time even as a kid wondering, how is that going to be, right? And then how it was was, we hired the Clintons and the Bushes to run it all. And this is what they wrought out of it, where if you think about Ron Paul overseeing the end of the empire at the end of the Cold War, okay, Warsaw Pact is gone, NATO is gone. We're coming home. We're getting as free market as we possibly can and creating the freest, most prosperous society we can for Americans and lead the world by example. Then you have Harry Brown come in and he gives a Statue of Liberty speech. I'm sure you heard it, the great Statue of Liberty speech about how liberty is the only thing that matters in the whole world and everybody ought to do just as good of a job as we're doing and we ought to do as good a job as we say that we're about and pledge allegiance to all the time, all this liberty and justice for everyone and all of that stuff. And then just be relentless in promoting liberty without the stench of hypocrisy, right? How can we talk about freedom and justice and liberty and for these other people, especially in poorer third world countries where they maybe really do need an enlightenment era when we're soaking in the blood of innocent people here? Very quickly, let's do a little, what Holden Caulfield calls David Copperfield Crap in Catcher and the Rye. So you're 45 years old, where were you born and where did you grow up? I was born in Florida, but I moved to Austin when I was three months old. So that counts. And then I'm just at Northwest Austin Skate Rat. What was your family life growing up? What did your parents do? And when did you come into, did you have a particular moment where Ron Paul Plain was flying overhead and a book fell out and bonked you in the head or something like that? There's a few like that. I don't remember when I first learned, but I did learn very young about Ronald Reagan all over North, selling cocaine while I already knew about their escalation of the massive drug war and especially against poor blacks in LA and all that. So I learned all of that when I was a very young teenager. So you buy the whole, whatever, what was it called, the dark? Oh yeah, you should listen to my Gary Webb interview, man. Okay, yeah. No, every bit of that holds up. Every bit of that reporting holds up. I think these guys are guilty of a lot of things. I'm not sure that cocaine, either powder or crack, needed government help in order to become pretty ubiquitous. If you've taken it, you would know why it's popular, but... That's not the question. I mean, the question is just factually whether that was what happened or not. And I mean, they name names and explain who these guys all were, Denilio Blandone and Irwin Meneses. And now they were in charge, I'm sure that I'm pronouncing their names wrong, but they were in charge of bringing all this cocaine to South Central LA to fuel the... I mean, think about the economic dynamic of that. They're bringing a massive increase in supply at the same time that they're increasing the penalties for having anything to do with it all and increasing a massive counterinsurgency campaign by the LAPD, essentially borrowed from the Marines from Vietnam to use against the people who were involved in the trade and all that. So that was one thing that really got me going. And then Waco was another. Oh, well, before Waco was Iraq War I. Now, so Iraq War I, I was in ninth grade and I didn't really care about the war because I don't care about Iraqis, I'm just a little kid. I just like explosions and jet fighters and stuff like that. But I didn't get all caught up in, oh, we have to go save the Kuwaitis and all of that stuff. I was just, had a more lax attitude about it. But one thing that I remember objecting to before the war ever started was that there's not a declaration of war by the Congress. And I know from even government school that only Congress can declare war. And the founding fathers made it that way for an important reason. And here H.W. Bush even I think said out loud that I don't care what Congress does, I have a UN Security Council resolution and that'll be good enough for me. And then all that talk about the new world order and all of that, you know, was all very interesting. It was amazing. Congress was so much more conflicted over the first Gulf War, even though Bush ended up, you know, with the UN mandate, whatever that's worth, but also a true coalition of countries to go in. And Congress was much more of a, you know, of a speed bump than it was, you know, a decade plus later. That's true. Yeah. The vote was very divided. And in fact, you know, so Bill Clinton was only a governor at the time, but he had made some statements against it. And John Kerry, if I almost certainly have this right, John Kerry and Joe Biden both opposed it in the Congress or both in the Senate at the time. And then these are people, these all three Hillary standing in for Bill, they all learned the lesson from that, that what a horrible embarrassment that was that they had opposed the war. So that was part of why they worked so hard for Iraq War II is they were going to make that same mistake again, having, you know, opposed Iraq War I and then it came out to be so magnificent. Where did you go to college? Where'd you go? What'd you take or how did you emerge as the, you know, the anti-war.com stalwart that you are? Well, I just went to Austin Community College for a couple of years and I dropped out because I didn't want to take college loans and all of that stuff, so. What were you studying? Did you are, I mean, were you like, I mean, obviously you were interested in history and world events and things like that. Yeah, I think I was just taking the basics. So there's, you know, Texas history and government are requirements and I'm not sure, I might have taken one extra history class or something like that, state government class, something like that, but you know, I just like reading books and I really hate government a lot. So I'm interested in trying to make other people hate it too. So I'm always kind of reading something. Did you, did you come from a long line of government haters or are you doing this to piss off your parents? For the honor? No, that's funny. No, my parents are pretty moderate Democrats, not very ideological or anything like that, but. Are they still heartbroken? You know, I actually lived in Texas from 93 or 96 to 98, I lived in Huntsville, Texas, of all places, but it was just as the state was going from being yellow dog Democrat to, you know, kind of reliably blue. Were your parents, are your parents pissed that what Texas has become? You know, I mean, the Democrats were already right-wing Democrats anyway, they were the Conservatives, really just switched parties. It didn't really switch the party in power for real, if you know what I mean, you know? But yeah, I think overall they probably would have preferred the Democratic party, but you know, neither of my parents really prioritized very much of that stuff. I mean, mostly, well, I'm a skater and the very first time I met a cop in the wild, I'm pretty sure I was still 11. And then that was it, permanent vendetta. So, because skateboarding was a crime, right? All those who employed them. Were they busting your chops for skateboarding? Yes, yeah, exactly. Giving me, you know, the full metal jacket, drill sergeant routine. And yeah, so no, this is all revenge against them. So it's revenge against them. So this was yet another skate punk who goes on to become an anti-government ideologue. Yeah, well, they sure help. I mean, we do it to ourselves, but they sure help make anti-authoritarians out of us. Yeah, okay. Well, we're gonna leave it there. We've been talking with Scott Horton of antiwar.com of the Libertarian Institute and author of many books, including Fools, Aaron and Enough Already. Scott Horton, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me, Nick.