 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, it is time for Mises Weekends. I'm joined today by an old friend, a guy I've known a long time, Scott Horton. I'm sure most of you are familiar with him from his work, the Scott Horton show, which has appeared on Pacific Radio and other outlets. His long time writing for antiwar.com, his new involvement with the Libertarian Institute and Organization of Website he runs. And most importantly, for today's purposes, he's the author of a brand new book entitled, Fool's Erin, Time to End the War in Afghanistan. This book is making a huge splash in Libertarian circles, but it's our job to make sure it makes a splash beyond just Libertarian circles. So Scott, with all that said, welcome. Good morning and thank you. Thank you very much, Jeff. Happy to be here. Well, so I want to say something right away rather than open with a question, Scott, but I'd like you to comment. This is not a Scott Horton opinion book. Everyone who knows you knows you're strongly antiwar, strongly anti-interventionism, a hardcore anarcho-capitalist in your personal worldview or ideology. But this is a journalistic effort. This is a book about facts, about history, about factions, about events. This isn't just Scott Horton bloviating. I mean, you really wrote a book about the details, the sordid details of this endless war in Afghanistan. Well, thank you for saying so. I really did try. I mean, the fact is, when I started writing, it was actually supposed to just be a chapter. Me and Tom Woods had a deal, and we're going to write more or less debunking the whole terror war for dummies with one chapter on each of the wars. But then I just got bogged down in the Afghan quagmire and the thing got drawn out and drawn out. And at some point I said, well, I guess it is going to be its own book. And, but that's how I am. I'm a very detail-oriented guy. If it was online, the whole book would be blue with footnotes. Well, did you consciously have an audience in mind as you were writing it? Were you saying, hey, if someone happens to be on the left, I want this book to resonate with them? Did you try to write it in a way that it wasn't, it didn't feel like Scott Horton libertarianism on every page? Well, I mean, honestly, I really, even on the show, my focus is not really on libertarianism very much. I mean, if we're just debunking the Iranian smoking laptop or whatever, you can hardly tell if I'm a libertarian or a progressive or a conservative or anything. Most of the time anyway, I hope. It's all pretty much, you know, nonpartisan. I'm trying to appeal to the broadest base as possible, always, anyway, or most of the time anyway. But so this, I did start out with a little bit more of a right-leaning audience in mind in the sense that I was really thinking of Tom Wood's radio audience and he's a little bit right-leaning of a libertarian and his audience is too. But then again, you know, I think people are mostly used to hearing anti-war stuff stated by leftists and liberal types anyway. So, and I just don't talk like that, right? You won't ever hear me say this Navy money should be spent on public schools instead of it, because that's not what I think anyway, right? So I don't say we need more democracy or whatever, how liberals talk. So I think it should be a little bit more accessible to right-wingers and capitalists and libertarians in that I don't have any of those kind of buzzword terms that would turn them off right away. I mean, I am attacking the entire premise of American foreign policy here. So they got to be man enough to deal with that. But when it comes to, and actually when it comes to the audience, I kind of lost sight of what I was doing. On one hand, I was trying to write for really every man. So if somebody could knock out an Iraq or an Afghan chapter, sit down and read it and be done in 15 minutes and pretty much learn what I really needed them to know. But then once I started writing it, and this goes to what you say about the journalistic aspect of it. And there's 1,100 footnotes and probably 1,500 citations in the thing. And that is really, you know, my uncle is an engineer and he's a really smart guy. And I kept thinking of him as my audience and that he was gonna read this thing. And was I really proving my case solidly enough? And so for whatever reason, he just, you know, my uncle became kind of my muse here. And I was thinking, you know, I want him to be impressed. I want him to read this and say, you know, this thing really stands up whether I wrote it or anybody else did. So. Well, I think you accomplished it. I'm halfway through, I'll admit, I'm not completely through. In the introduction, there's a paragraph that I'd like you to explain and defend. I think it really sets the tone for the book. And I'm quoting from your intro here. Where you say, the truth is America's Afghan war is an irredeemable disaster. I think we all agree on that. It was meant to be a trap in the first place. America is not only failing to defeat its enemies, but is destroying itself. Just as Osama bin Laden al-Qaeda always intended. So give us the big picture on that, on those sentences. Okay, so after Vietnam, the American people came down with what was called the Vietnam syndrome. That was what the government called it, the reluctance to continue on this kind of foreign interventionism. And so, as John Mueller talks about in his great book, Overblown, they gave up on containment and they decided, you know what, instead, let's bait the Soviet Union into overexpansion. And Robert Gates are the former CIA chief and former secretary of defense and Zbidny Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, bragged now that, well, Brzezinski's now dead. But anyway, they've since bragged that it was their idea in the first place to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. So Jimmy Carter signed a finding that's an order to the CIA on July 3rd, 1979, to start supporting the Mujahideen, who then started or I guess increased their attacks on the sock puppet Soviet government in Kabul, the communist government in Kabul. That did succeed in provoking the Soviet invasion by Christmas, 1979. And when that happened, Brzezinski wrote a memo to Carter saying, we now have our opportunity to give them their own Vietnam. Vietnam meaning a horrible no-win quagmire that breaks your bank and destroys your country and makes your population all turn on each other and every horrible thing that happened with Vietnam. So it worked. And through the 1980s, Ronald Reagan continued that Carter policy of backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They did bleed the Soviet Union to bankruptcy, which it was going out of style anyway, but it sure helped. And the Reagan Republican certainly bragged that they're the ones who brought down the Soviet Union with nuclear brinksmanship and the war in Afghanistan as two major pieces of that. Well, the Mujahideen believed that too, that they had brought down the Soviet Union, that they saw America's Vietnam trap for the Soviet Union as their own Afghanistan trap. And Bin Laden said throughout the 1990s, quite openly that this was exactly what they were trying to accomplish by attacking the United States. They'd be happy if America would just pick up stakes and come home from the Middle East. But since that was obviously not in the cards, the plan was to bait America. Just as America helped the Mujahideen bait the Soviet Union, they would bait the United States into overexpansion. And I try to say carefully in the book that you and I are supposed to be the ones who are fooled, but our government, they're not fools. What Bin Laden was doing really was giving them an opportunity, something to exploit, which is what he knew they would do. And I quote Bin Laden's son as saying how badly he wanted America to invade Afghanistan and how happy he was that George W. Bush came out in top after Florida in the year 2000 because this is a perfect mark. This is a guy you look right at him, you can tell, I gotta do a slap him in the face once and he's gonna throw a temper tantrum and freak out and do whatever he can. He's gonna go completely crazy and that is going to accomplish Al-Qaeda's goals in the long term. Whether it takes 10 years, 20 years or 30 years, at some point the empire will not, the North American empire will not be able to rule Eurasia forever. And they're simply trying to hasten the day where the economic reality demands that America come home. That's it. It's the Vietnam trap. We did it to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden did it to us. We're doing it to ourselves in Afghanistan again right now. Well, obviously Afghanistan has an amazing history. You know, I just wonder we've had these two superpowers over many, many decades basically using the literal ground in Afghanistan as a pawn, the Afghani people as pawns in these geopolitical battles. I mean, what do you think this has done to the psyche of that country to know that year after year after year, they're being used for Soviet and Western political purposes to, you know, little kids are having their legs blown off. We don't understand this as Americans. We don't understand the kind of hatred that this can engender. Well, you know, I think that's such a great question. I mean, really the answer is Americans paranoid fantasies about what's all about to happen to them any day now at the hands of whichever enemy that government or their peer groups or whatever tell them to fantasize about. This is the reality of the people of Afghanistan. It sounds like they say about the Russians, right? Russia's been invaded so many times that they're just, they're basically crazy, you know? And the same kind of thing with Afghanistan where, you know, the majority, the vast majority of the population of Afghanistan has never even heard of September 11th, which they didn't even do. It wasn't even their government, much less the people of Afghanistan who did that. It was a few Saudis and Egyptians, just a few score foreigners hiding out in their country who were behind the attack. And they've been suffering for 16 years. And then as you say, you know, going back to the Jimmy Carter years, my whole lifetime almost, America has been messing with those people. So if it wasn't us, would it be the Iranians or the Indians or the Pakistanis or whoever? God knows, I don't know. But the fact that it's the American's fault is intolerable. I mean, as you say, yeah, in fact, little kids are losing their legs. I mean, you know, there's a new movie that just came out called National Bird by Sonia Kenenbeck. And it's about the drone war. And, you know, they talk all about Afghanistan and Pakistan. I forget if they do Yemen and Somalia. Anyway, but she interviews this Afghan man and his son and their whole family was slaughtered in his drone strike, like 25 of them, they were on a caravan from one town to the other. And the Americans just lit them up and just slaughtered them on the side of the road. And it's this one man and his son, and his son is like 13, he's just clinging to his father like a baby, right? And the father is trying to explain what it's like to be in such pain, emotional pain, having lost his entire family like this. And he's describing his heart being torn in half and this kind of, and you know, these are the people who we hear all the time, what barbarians and what savages they are and this kind of thing. But you look at him, this could be your next door neighbor. There's nothing uncivilized about him. We're the barbarians, flying our high tech reaper drones, tearing his family's lives literally to shreds. Yeah, it's really, it's heartbreaking, but you know, you have a whole chapter about the history and the background and the factions behind all this. It seems to me in reading that chapter that this book is really a cautionary tale against interventionism generally because Americans are really bad at following. They're really bad at going along with facts and they tend to suffer from presentism saying, well, I don't really care about what happened 30 or 40 years ago that set the stage for this. They're harboring bin Laden. So talk a little bit about how Afghanistan is a cautionary tale that ought to put us off invading and attempting to meddle in countries across the world. Yeah, well, you know, it's that libertarian insight, right? Hayek and the information problem that even if they were really great entrepreneurs, they wouldn't know what the heck to do over there. You would need millions of them to finally figure it out in little pieces at a time. But no central planner can decide what to do with a place like Afghanistan. I like to make the analogy to Iraq. I think it's, I hope it's simple enough for people to follow. And when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 for Iraq War II, that basically he was taking the side of the super majority population of the country, the least the political leadership of the factions of the Shiite Arabs now who had been ruled under a 20% Sunni Arab minority dictatorship for generations. So it took eight years of a bloody civil war to help them win and they finally did win. And then they said, thanks a lot for the help. Now get out. But anyway, they were able to defeat the Sunnis, drive them all out of Baghdad and create this new Iraqi Shia stand from Baghdad over to Iran down to Kuwait, right? Okay, in Afghanistan, there's nothing like that. In Afghanistan, we're trying to foist a coalition of small minority groups, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras. I don't know if the Sikhs really participate in this, but they're up there. The Turkmen and these small minority groups together make up 60% and America is more or less, and this is slightly oversimplified because there are some Pashtun representation in the government, but not to any real effect. And we're trying to force this minority coalition government onto the plurality. It's not the majority, but it is by far the plurality Pashtun population of the country, 40-something percent. And that's that dominate in the entire south and east of the country. And so it just can't work. It can never work. In fact, the army is almost entirely Tajiks and with some Uzbeks, the leaders are all Tajiks, the leaders of the intelligence services are all Tajiks. And you can see, like if you watch the HBO documentary about the invasion of Marja, or really any documentary about American operations, especially during the surge down there in the south. And they have the Afghan army guys and the American Marines and soldiers are telling the Afghan army guys, all right, tell this guy, this, this and that. And then, but they're embedded Afghan army guys say, I don't speak the same language as him. I only speak Urdu. He speaks Pashtun. I don't know what, this is like trying to build up an army from Mexico and force it onto the people of the United States of America. It's just not gonna happen. There's too many people to conquer and not enough power to do it with. And in fact, when you look at the ratios, they had two soldiers to one civilian for a while there in Marja. When it's supposed to be like one soldier per 10 civilians should be enough for your counter insurgency doctrine. We had two soldiers per one civilian still lost. The Pashtun population of Afghanistan can not be pacified, period. You could call an H bomb strikes if you wanna just complete the genocide. Otherwise, what you're going to have at best is some kind of autonomy and separation, if not a complete separation of the Afghan state. Well, Scott, one thing I really get from this book is just the sheer futility of all of it. Here we are 16, 17 years on. And as we mentioned earlier, Americans are bad at following the bouncing ball and maybe that's a good thing from the government's perspective. But in terms of shifting goalposts, the changing rationales for this war, I wanna do another quote from your chapter on how long will we stay there. This is from Colonel Bacevich. Am I pronouncing that correctly? He observed this about the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism trademark, capitalized war on terrorism. We've done counter insurgency. We've done counter terrorism. We've done advice and assist. We've done targeted assassination. We've done nation building. So we have these shifting goals. Remember when it first started out, it was get the guys who did 9-11 who are harboring bin Laden, bin Laden's in a cave. There's a lot of talk about caves for a while there. Isn't this astonishing how asleep at the wheel we are and that we allow the foreign policy establishment to keep changing the goal or the purported goal? Right, well, I mean, their thing is always, and there are a ton of quotes like this in the book from beginning to end, it's just not enough. It's never enough. If you're in the State Department, the CIA, the Army or the Marine Corps, you know what? If only we'd had a few more infantry and a little bit more money. If only the local State Department flunkies had had a little bit more money to pass out to bribe. You know, there was this one warlord. I'm sure we could have bribed him if we'd only had one million more dollars. Whatever excuses they can come up with, it's endless. And so when this or that strategy or set of tactics doesn't work, then they say, well, we have to try the other one. Right, there's no withdrawal. It's just not an option. I mean, Ron Paul ran for president in 2008. That was your withdrawal option. The rest of the options are different kinds of staying, basically, and so, but then as Bacevich says, none of them work. In fact, Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump's first national security advisor, the Turkish foreign agent there, well, he was Stanley McChrystal's right-hand man in the insurgency. And he had written this report criticizing the quality of intelligence in the Afghan war. And of course, he was arguing for a giant surge, but there was still a kernel of truth in his argument. He was saying what we're doing, he ridiculed the policy as anti-insurgency as opposed to counter-insurgency. And he said anti-insurgency is worthless or even counterproductive. All you're doing is creating more enemies. That was Stanley McChrystal's own numbers, insurgent math for every one guy you kill, you create 10 more. For every two guys you kill, you create 20 more. That's a great way to lose a war by killing your enemy and multiplying them in that way, like making Mouse in Fantasia with the broomsticks there. You just keep making it worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And in fact, as Flynn said, the Soviet Union found this out. When they left in 1989, they had more enemies than when they invaded in the first place. And then of course, his argument was, that's why we need this full surge so that we can have really good on-the-ground intelligence so we'll know who to kill and then that will give us the edge. Now, of course, that didn't work either. That was a giant catastrophe too. But there's no denying the wisdom in what he's saying there that we're flying blind, where it reminds me we'll be on the dark side of Mars right now trying to figure out who is who and who we're supposed to be killing over there. And all they ever do is kill the wrong people and create more enemies every time. And even when they say, yeah, no, we're killing the bad guys, look at our body count. Yeah, so what? Look at how much of the country the Taliban controls right now, more than at any point since the turn of the century, since the start of the war. And they wanna say, this is because Obama drew numbers down. Well, but didn't they promise that they were gonna win back in 2009, 10 and 11, that the surge was gonna work and that he would be able to draw down? That was Petraeus' promise that the war would be over no doubt by 2014, sir. Yes, sir. But that didn't happen. They lost. Well, it almost sounds like an alcoholic or a gambler negotiating with themselves, right? You talk about the surge, there's this idea of if we just stay one more year, if we just pass the appropriations bill for some more money for Afghanistan, if we just increase the number of Marines, you know, one more year, whatever. It, you know, there's an analogy, Scott, to economics, the sunk cost fallacy. We spent 16, 17 years, trillions of dollars. The debt was about six trillion. September 11th, it's now 20. There's enormous human costs and dead bodies and maimed bodies and, you know, including U.S. soldiers. But there's this idea we can never finish the job. What's the mindset here? Is it just the military industrial folks doing what they do, which is perpetuate their existence? Or is there actually some kind of mania that makes us think this is winnable? No, I mean, yeah, winnable. No, I don't think so. I mean, the recent special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan was recently fired by Trump and she said, meh, just as well. I mean, you know, she wasn't upset about it. They tried to make a scandal out of it. The Democrats did. She was like, meh, you know, it's not like there's much to get done over there. And she said, she doesn't think that any serious expert thinks this war can be won. And that was what she said. All right, she said, in any reasonable time horizon that would be acceptable to America. In other words, less than 50 years or 100 years or some kind of thing. So now I don't think there's really much of a mania. I think what it is, is what you said in the first place there, the sunk costs and just the economics of bureaucracy that the army and the Marine Corps and each and every individual general and Colonel too, have an interest in getting their ticket punched and moving up one step and getting a new star on their shirt and a little bit more money when they retire and go to sit on a board of directors of some firm and they all have their own interests. The CIA and the State Department guys have their own interests. We're talking billions of dollars of heroin money. So God knows what American government employees are involved in that mix and laundering money and in the transport of that heroin and whatever I'm sure we'll find out in 20 years. I mean, we know that the government of Afghanistan is up to their eyeballs in it, no question, but the real nitty gritty details about the American role, I don't know yet, but I'm sure we're gonna find it. And anyway, yeah, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. That's what they say. And look at what's the opposite. I mean, you spent a part of your career in Washington, DC. Can you imagine Mattis and McChrystal who both lost this war personally? The National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Defense saying, well, you know what? Our army and our Marine Corps just aren't up to the task. They can't do it. We failed, we lost. Oh, well, I guess we got to come home now. And they can't do it. It has to be forced onto them by the president and it has to be forced onto the president by the American people. Otherwise, the Taliban can keep fighting and the Americans can keep fighting until the dollar breaks. And as long as we're talking about economics, this is one that I actually cut out of the book because non-libertarians said, I don't get it, but I'll tell it to you because I like it. There's a whole business cycle theory going on here too. And it's all, of course, ultimately backed by inflationary money here in the United States, but you can look at the US soldiers themselves. The soldiers and the Marines are basically inflated dollars in a sense. And they help to prop up the power and influence of people in Afghanistan, whoever they make deals with, and drive up the value of those people's authority in whatever places. But once that inflation stops and once those bad loans start being called in and the army troops gotta come home, your surge is over and the easy credit times are over and the soldiers come home, well, then it all collapses because it was an artificial demand. It was this excess inflated demand for the power of this or that group that propped them up so highly in power. So then the correction has to come. And that means that when America does end the war, let's say you and I convinced America and America demands that Donald Trump end this war this week, it's going to be a disaster. Again, unlike Iraq where we're fighting for the super majority population who, let's face it, once they win, they're basically solidified in power in the capital city at least, even if they don't rule the whole West, but here everything is so distorted. When we leave, it's going to be a disaster. When we leave, the place is going to fall apart. There may be a whole new civil war for control over the capital city. The Taliban may be content to hold on to Pashtunistan or they may go ahead and march on Kabul. You know, I don't know that the Indians could really step up their support for the government in Kabul, which would then provoke the Pakistanis into upping their support for the Afghan Taliban and on and on and on. It's going to be a wreck. I'm not promising things will be better for Afghanistan once America leaves, only that it won't be our fault anymore. And I don't argue in the book even that we should negotiate with the Taliban and find the most peaceful conclusion that we can and go because I don't believe the Americans will ever do that. I don't think that they're willing to negotiate with the Taliban in a way that's going to leave the Taliban with control over 40 or 50 or 60% of the country. They're just not going to do it. So I think that it's kind of a mini fool's errand to even ask them to try or to take that angle that we should negotiate. The Americans should just come home. They should just call this off and say whatever's going to happen there. It's all Bush and Obama's fault. Trump's missed his first opportunity to do this, but I think it's still not too late. He could do it. He better hurry, but he could just say, look, the Pashtun tribesmen aren't our enemies. They didn't do 9-11 and they're not trying to kill us now. They're only fighting because we're on their front lawn and the government in Kabul, that's the Bush Obama government in Kabul. I don't care about that. It's not my responsibility. It's no longer the American people's responsibility. They're son's responsibility to prop up and power there. We're done. I think he could do it, but he needs the demand outside. He's not going to do it himself, obviously. What do you think would happen if we did that? If we just picked up and we literally brought, you know, flew those planes back here, brought all those troops, left those bases empty, pulled up all of our miniature cities and just left Afghanistan in whatever reasonable timeframe that would take as a practical matter. What would happen in the immediate vacuum? Well, I think the Taliban would certainly consolidate control over the entire South and East. I assume they would just go ahead and march into Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province and Kandahar city and Kandahar and all the way up to the East and maybe Jalalabad and the places where they're predominant, they would go ahead and take over those cities. Now, whether they would go ahead back to the 1990s and fight a full civil war in order to take control of the capital city and to try to take control of the entire country, I don't know. I mean, it would be a bloody disaster if they did. It seems like what they ought to do in that situation would be settle for good enough, settle for their own sovereignty, their own independence over their own territory, but I don't know why they would necessarily if they don't have to. And then when it comes to the factions in the North, I think they are only held together by the threat of the Taliban and American money and military power. And I think that probably the coalition government and Kabul would fall apart and maybe turn completely to fighting amongst each other for control or maybe they would end up separating off into their own provinces. I have a quote from an old politician in Kabul in the book where he names all these warlords and he said, well, this guy's gonna run off with Kandahar and this guy's gonna run off with Nangahar and this guy's gonna run off with coast and basically saying that the country's gonna split up not necessarily have a giant war over control over the whole thing. So I really don't know, but I guess it does sound sort of irresponsible to say, look, it's gonna be really bad when we go, but that's kind of what I'm getting at with the business cycle theory there, that it's the distortions in the market for power in Afghanistan created by American intervention that have set things up this way. It's sorta like I asked Bob Murphy when the market crashed in 2008, I says to Bob, yeah, but Bob, maybe we should have a soft landing. Maybe they should inflate enough money to prevent the crash from being so bad that it creates a deflationary spiral and brings the whole economy. The economy could crater if they don't bail it out. And Bob said, yeah, but the thing is they can't do it. What they'll do is they'll do it wrong and they'll make things worse and they'll put off the consequences and then the do will come do anyway and that's what we're talking about here. It's the exact same thing. You can't, there is no set of planners in the State Department who can figure out which politicians in Afghanistan should control which fiefdoms with however much amount of power and basically set the table just right to leave, right? It just can't be. We have to let matters take their own course and severely regret it and curse George W. Bush and Barack Obama and their generals for what they've done here. Well, you describe all the factions, all the warlords, this super shaky coalition government, the Taliban itself. It makes the Vietnam War with the NVA look simple in comparison. Do you think we owe it to Afghans, much like we did after Vietnam to allow a bunch of them to come to the U.S. and become citizens because of the horrific conditions we've created there or the horrific conditions that might arise if we leave? Yeah, I think that's fair, especially those who, I mean, this sounds kind of unfair but I guess especially those who've been collaborators with the Americans are likely to be punished for that. But yeah, I think they all ought to go to Arizona. They ought to get Scottsdale, Arizona and they ought to get the very best part of Chicago, Illinois and these are the John McCain and I guess give them Crawford, Texas too. Just give them the whole damn town. And yes, I mean, the Americans absolutely at the very least owe these people a massive apology. I mean, there's no point, again, there's no point in giving them any money because only the worst people would get the money anyway. But boy do we owe them sorry. And then yes, some kind of system of asylum for people who desperately need it and who are fleeing the Taliban and what have you who are fleeing the consequences of America's war there. I think that's fair. And in fact, for people who are so angry all the time about all the refugees, stop bombing them. I mean, you notice it's the same people who hate refugees who support all these wars. Well, it's one thing to have real refugees it's another to create them. So Scott, I wanna wrap up on a question that's gonna be a little tough and I wanna ask it in the right spirit. Doug Casey talks about nature versus nurture and are some people just sort of wired to be libertarians and sometimes we beat our head against the wall and say, why don't more people in the general population see things the way we do? And I think you can say that about interventionism and foreign policy. There are people like Max Boote. There are people like Bill Kristol who see this very, very differently from us. And I imagine if you go meet a neoconservative and they're walking their dog and they have kids in the house and a family they seem like fine people on a personal level. Is there a psychology to this adivistic need to control the world and blow up the world? Is it psychological? Is there a nature versus nurture component? What do you think disposes people to wanna rule the world? Well, I mean, I think in the case of the neoconservatives I think they're all a bunch of big fat dorks who basically got their head stuffed in the toilet in junior high school and now they're gonna show you. I look at Richard Pearl or any of these guys William Kristol is another perfect example. None of these guys was on the baseball team. None of these guys had a hot date to the prom. Not one of them. I mean, the neocons are some Freudian psychiatrist dream come true. I mean, you could do a lifetime of study about that kind of insanity. I think the average American likes fighting. I think, well, look, the average male likes fighting at least up to a certain age if they think they can win anyway. And if somebody does something wrong to you, somebody attacks you and you have the right to defend yourself, well, we call that kicking butt. And that's what's about to happen to you, pal. And that's a pretty universal kind of an attitude. And that's why I spend so much time in the book trying to just beat everyone over the head and get them to understand that this is all George Bush senior and Bill Clinton's fault. They started it. The terrorists didn't start it. The USA started it. That doesn't mean the terrorists are good guys or right guys, but that just means they're acting in defense too. And really it's more accurately defense on their side. Not that that, I mean, clearly they're attacking civilians. So I don't mean to say that, but I just mean it was Bill Clinton murdering their people is what made them come to kill us. That's the fact. And so, you know, but you see how perfectly the two sides play off each other, right? Just like in the power of nightmares. He says, you know, the neocons, these crazy Wahhabi clerics who normally would just be some kook raving on a street corner. He needs Paul Wolfowitz and he needs them bad and vice versa, right? These kooks need each other to create the crises to make themselves look indispensable, to make themselves look like the ones who know what needs to be done and that kind of thing. And so, you know, it's the exercise of power. I think probably that is, you know, how basically all people are and it takes a refined philosophy that understands that peaceful cooperation is at least ultimately what leads to the greatest benefits for all. That it's even opposed to our own tribe going over the hill and stealing everything from the other tribe, that we're better off trading with them instead of taking everything for free. You know, it takes understanding and, you know, a lot of people would rather ignore that. I mean, seriously, if you got paid to be, not you, Jeff, but if one were to be paid and inordinate some to lobby for Lockheed, I mean, why in the world would they wanna see it any other way? Why would they see it any other way? If you're a general, you're gonna advise the president that you don't really need me in this circumstance, Mr. President, you should just have the FBI and the Department of Justice handle it, have the CIA scoop these guys up. You know, it's in the nature of probably men and then especially government agents, right? Because of the economics of politics. They don't have the incentive structure to ever make them stop, only to keep doing worse and to keep moving on. Well, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure there is something in the human psyche that makes us warlike, but the problem is that in modern America, the war machine has become so technologically advanced and scary. You know, Scott, thanks so much for your time. This is the book, ladies and gentlemen, on Amazon, Fool's Air and Time to End the War in Afghanistan. I know it was a hard piece of work to write. It's unbelievably annotated. It's unbelievably informative and I really recommend it. Scott, it's great talking to you. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.