As he watches the escalating crises in our world today, this is the main takeaway for Chas Freeman, who, as the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, knows a thing about diplomacy.
“It’s a lot cheaper and more effective to sit down and talk to someone than to pull a gun on them and shoot them,” he says. “But that’s what we seem to have substituted for our normal course of diplomatic interaction.”
Freeman explains the leading cause of forever wars: “There’s nobody quite as bloodthirsty as a civilian with no experience of war.” As shown in the episode thumbnail above (side note: you know it’s a bad crew if the most likable character in the picture is Matthew Miller), the warmongers in charge of foreign policy are all civilians. When the top US general Mark Milley called for peace talks in Ukraine, it was these bad actors who shut it down.
“The military know that they can die in a war, that their comrades will die,” says Freeman. “They know that you should never enter a war without figuring out first how you’re going to end it, on what terms, and with whom.” But the ‘leaders’ we do have never had to fight. “Civilians typically define no end state, have no war termination strategy, which is why we get forever wars.”
And the future only looks bleaker.
“Here we have an election which is between someone who is widely regarded as a senile war monger and somebody who has been correctly diagnosed as a malignant narcissist.”
Subscribe to hear the full interview with Chas Freeman on why the protest vote against Biden in Michigan was “very significant,” how the New York Times has been complicit in the information war, the main similarity between the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza (bet you can guess it), and the main difference between the genocide in Israel and the one in South Africa:
“South Africa was on the verge of having a race war but it never had one. Israel is having a race war.”
Be the first to comment