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Hello, America.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Welcome.

This is our Saturday edition, so we will be talking a little bit about warfare in the middle of the show and some news stories at the beginning.

We've got a lot going on, especially Kevin McCarthy was unseated, I guess you say,

in the Congress.

And so we're going to see what happens.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, I gave a little chuckle at Gates

unseating Kevin McCarthy in the Congress on our Friday edition.

So I feel that

I have to eat some humble pie here.

He actually did it.

I was just shocked.

What are your thoughts on that?

I was asked to talk

for Laura Ingram right after it happened.

I mean, literally, I guess an hour after it happened.

And I know somewhat Kevin McCarthy.

He's our congressman one district over

from where I live in Salma.

In other words, the Bakersfield.

It's a large district.

It comes almost up to where I live.

So I've had opportunity and occasion to meet him.

I don't understand the logic of it.

And that's,

I can understand what their motives were, but I don't know if they thought it through because here we are

three days later, four days, and I don't see any plan by the people who deposed McCarthy to have a replacement.

Jim Jordan seems to me the most logical replacement.

because

he got along with Kevin McCarthy and the majority of the constituency, but he had perhaps better fee days with the hard right of the party.

Okay.

So they have

three parts of government,

and they control, I would say, the Supreme Court, but that is iffy sometimes.

They don't have the White House, they don't have the Senate, so they have the House, that's one-half of one-third.

And they only have a seven to eight, depending on who's healthy and present

majority.

And to get rid of the House Speaker, which is an old rule, but they revived it apparently, Kevin McCarthy agreed as Speaker that

he would allow exposure by having anyone at any time make a motion to get rid of him.

And so notice that no Democrat took that up.

even though they might have found some people didn't like him.

It was Matt Gates,

just one, and he got eight people or about four percent of the Republican caucus to get rid of McCarthy.

He didn't say get rid of McCarthy and

vote for X, Y, or Z.

He just said get rid of him.

And why did he get rid of him?

Maybe he had a personal motive, but he said that McCarthy gave in or worked with Democrats.

But to get rid of McCarthy, Gates had to work with Democrats because he didn't have the votes.

So then the Democratic caucus under Pelosi had said,

we don't want

a suicidal house.

So just as I am at the head of the Democratic caucus at the time she was, and I have a narrow margin, and I wouldn't want the Republicans, you, Kevin, as majority leader, to work with dissident squad members, say.

So if they wanted to get rid of me, just six or seven of them, would you promise not to vote against me?

And they kind of had a deal, that each party would stay out of the business of the other party.

Had they done that, Kevin McCarthy would still be Speaker.

But apparently, Matt Gates had talked to his Democratic counterparts and was given the green light.

And there were reports incidentally that Liz Cheney, out of office, but still licking her bitter wounds,

advised certain Republicans to vote against McCarthy and advised her newfound Democratic friends to do the same.

And they did.

So here we have this situation where Matt Gates said, you talked to Democrats and worked with them, and I'm working with them now to get rid of you.

And so that's what he's doing.

And so what are we not talking about right now?

We're not talking about the Joe Biden corruption.

We're not talking about the Joe Biden dementia that is increasing at a radical rate.

We're not talking about the border.

We're not talking about crime.

We're not talking about Ukraine.

We're not talking about the debt.

We're just talking about Kevin McCarthy losing his speakership.

For the first time in history, has a speaker been removed by his own party, by one person, essentially.

And as far as the other seven or eight that voted to remove him, I know some of them, I met them, I don't understand.

Miss Mace said, Representative Mace said he had not been truthful on her issues dear to her, women's issue.

But Kevin McCarthy had helped her,

had helped channel Republican funds to her for her re-election.

It didn't make any sense.

And of course, I'll just end with this note that the Democrats don't do this.

If they have a problem, they caucus together, but they do not air their public linen, and they don't rely on Republicans to come in and split their caucus.

So it was an ungodly disaster.

And the only thing that can

come of it that might be positive is that Jim Jordan is a good friend of Kevin McCarthy's.

And if he was Speaker, he would probably consult with Kevin McCarthy a lot about the intricacies or responsibilities of the job.

He would be conservative, and that would work out.

But for right now, it was a bad, bad idea.

Yes, and isn't it interrupting the budget crisis a little bit?

I mean, wasn't it a really bad time to do it?

It was a terrible time to do it because they were in the midst of calling members of

the Biden family.

They were talking about calling in Hunter or Jim Biden or getting the whistleblowers back or some accountants.

We're not talking about that at all.

No.

There was renewed scrutiny on some of the aspects of the Letita James case and the biased judge.

We're not talking about that.

There was, Joe Biden had just

kind of frozen in mid-sentence.

He was just in front of people talking and he lost his mind.

We're not talking about that.

We're not talking about any of these things, at least for the next week or so.

And we already went through this.

We went through it when the Republicans won the House.

They had, what, 15 votes

for Kevin McCarthy, and they finally elected him.

And they kind of, we thought, bound

their wounds were all healed.

They were now working together.

They were going to unify.

And what is the purpose of all this?

The purpose is to win 55% of the popular vote, get rid of Biden, get a Republican president, win the Senate by four or five seats, and win the House by 40 or 50 seats.

And then...

And then they can have an agenda that Matt Gates wants.

But the idea that you have one half of one-third, and he's screaming and barking at the moon that they didn't stop the debt, and as I said earlier,

where was he in 2017 when they had the House, they had the Senate, and they had Donald Trump as a presidency, and they ran up consistent

$500 billion, $600 billion, $1 trillion deficits.

And for that matter, they inherited a balanced budget from whom?

Bill Clinton, in 2001.

And what it was the first thing the Republicans did when they had the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

They ran up multi-billion dollar deficits, so they lost their credibility.

So what Matt Gates should have said is, we have a terrible record of fiscal responsibility when, when we have the House and Senate and White House.

And so if we can't get that done when we have all of the levers of power, we surely can't get it done when we have one half of one-third of government.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, speaking of the border, then, I hear that they are starting to build a wall, the Biden administration.

Yes, he's building a wall.

We remember when he came in, excuse me, excuse me, he said as a candidate that people could surge the border.

I think he used the word surge.

And that was, he pandered when he was asked, when there were all these people that couldn't get in, because after four years, Donald Trump defeated all of the lawsuits.

He defeated his own Pentagon that wouldn't transfer funds.

He defeated Anonymous.

Remember Anonymous and

the

kind of treasonous guy in his own administration that was writing things to the New York Times about how they were trying to probably illegally disrupt

the Trump executive orders.

They got through all that.

Took them four years, but they started to replace about 500 miles of rickety fence.

They were on, I think, mile 28 or something of the new fence.

They stopped catch and release.

They got the Border Patrol expanded.

They told Mexico, don't screw with us.

Stop this.

And that worked.

They had a lot of pressure to put on Mexico with trade agreements, et cetera.

So Biden came in.

There was no...

There was no illegal immigration.

So he saw all these people there and he thought, hmm, I'll just say,

how can I pander to my base?

I'll just say, come across.

And maybe, you know, 20,000, 30,000 a month, 200,000 a year.

This is just what we need with new constituencies.

And then 8 million came across.

And suddenly, all these border governors in Texas and Arizona, even as far as Georgia and Florida, and Louisiana,

on the coast, and New Mexico, they said, What are you doing?

And a lot of them, some of them,

got smart and they said, you know what?

They don't care about us.

They consider the border of the United States the Oklahoma-Texas border.

So we're going to start bussing them to

Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, New York, and let them see as sanctuary cities.

Let's see what they get.

They'll get their dream come true.

So they did it, not in millions like Texas had experienced, but in a few hundred and then finally a few thousand.

And then the rest is history.

They went ballistic.

So their message was

don't you dare bring illegal aliens that we want into this country and your state to our state and that was a non-sustainable proposition so then

now as I speak Eric Adams remember him with the

here have a plastic water bottle here's some a little package as they got off the bus and now it's

They're going to destroy my city.

It's costing us 10 billion.

And he went to, he's in Central America as I speak, begging those governments not to send people to the United States.

And so with all that pressure coming up, Joe Biden decided to continue the wall.

But of course, we had all of the concrete, we had all of the reinforced rebar, we had all the steel, it was all there.

And I think he either sold it off or got rid of it.

It was rusting.

So now this is

woke hits a wall, right?

Woke hits a wall.

And

it's hitting a wall on every aspect.

We can talk about the crime hitting the wall.

We talk about fossil fuels hitting the wall with record high prices and draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

We can talk about Ukraine hitting the wall, but the point is that woke doesn't work.

And finally, Not that the left cares it doesn't work.

It doesn't care if it doesn't work, but it does care to hold on power.

and it does care for their own prosperity and safety.

And when these things start to affect people who created them, then it's the proverbial Frankensteinian monster that turns on Dr.

Frankenstein and they get angry.

Yes.

And it preempted me because I was going to ask you about the left activists and left-leaning supporters of

the Democratic Party.

Many of them are getting killed.

So, for example, Philadelphia journalist Josh Krueger was

stabbed, I believe, in his house or maybe out in the street in a very nice neighborhood.

Henry Quaylar, a congressman, was carjacked at gunpoint.

A city councilwoman in Minneapolis, Savanthi

Sathanandan, sorry, I hope I did that name right,

was also killed.

Jen Angel, who was a baker in Oakland was dragged to death during a purse robbery and in Baltimore

I think she was also robbed if that was the baker too yeah that was the baker and then in Baltimore robbed her and she pursued them and then they they grabbed her purse and dragged her yeah and in Baltimore that CEO Pava LaPerre she was only 26 years old and she was CEO of beat to death wasn't she yeah she was it's the report was blunt force but yes that's probably what happened to her.

So sad.

All of these.

So there was one in New York with his girlfriend, too.

Did you mention him?

Oh, yeah, I think that was.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

Yeah, Brian Carson and his girlfriend was stabbing.

Guy was out threatening people, and he was a social activist.

And all these people were anti-racist or social activists or pro-BLM.

And the point is, they were all idealist.

And

there were three things that the left didn't understand when after George Floyd, they went into a Me Too trans type hysteria.

One of these hysterias that we all experience, I guess, as Americans.

And so they defunded the police.

They started to have no bail, just let people out.

They started not enforcing the law.

They did all of this, and they didn't understand,

I think, three things.

Number one,

our major cities are where crime is most apt to occur.

Two, not all of them, but the majority of them that have this problem with crime

are in

San Francisco, Los Angeles,

Boston, Baltimore, Washington, New York, Miami.

So they live, the people who created this idea of woke criminal justice, they live where the crime rate is the highest.

And third,

they had

accepted the BLM Kendi line of white supremacy, white supremacy, white supremacy, white rage, white rage, white rage.

white privilege, white supremacy, white rage.

They kept, it was a mantra, and nobody stopped to think: wait a minute, we're doing just what we used to do about black people in the 30s and 40s, and under Jim.

We're just stereotyping an entire race.

And just as when whites did it about blacks, it filtered down to nutty whites who felt that if they were to attack blacks, it would be okay.

So, what we have done is we have normalized racial stereotyping.

And notice that none of the media and none of these police forces are saying these are hate crimes.

But

of the six that you mentioned, every single one was an interracial crime.

The baker in Oakland, attacked by three black guys.

The city councilwoman, I think that's what she was in Minneapolis.

Mr.

Quaylor, attacked by three black people, black teens, the person in Philadelphia, the person in New York, et cetera.

And so what I'm suggesting is that the left didn't realize that they live in the areas that are most prone to crime and therefore are most likely to see dangerous increases in crime.

And they greenlighted or accepted this new anti-racist Kindy dogma of Professor Kindy, who, by the way, his anti-racist center is under investigation at Boston U, and he's going the same way as the BLM people.

Complete fraud.

We won't even talk about the architects of BLM.

They've all been, they fled with their money and their nice homes, and they're out of it now.

And the BLM was a total fraud, and so is the anti-racism.

But he inaugurated this idea that it was to fight racism, you had to be racist.

He says that.

Anti-racist, he called it, but what he's saying is

to attack

racism against blacks, the bad racism, you have to be racist against whites, the good racism.

That is, you have to call them out and say they're supremacist and they're privileged and they're raging.

And they did, and people accepted that.

But when you coincide with the

dismantling of the criminal justice system,

both at the prosecutorial level and at the law enforcement, defund the police, Soros, DAs, etc.

And

you spike the crime rate in these big cities where your young hipster leftists are in greater numbers.

It's not happening, you know, out in rural Tennessee or in rural upstate New York.

It happens in cities where the left traditionally dominates and where a lot of minority populations are.

And then you give an an added message that it's okay to stereotype people by their race, then what do you have?

You're going to have a lot of

people who are mentally unstable or of a criminal mind or have been convicted.

Every single one of these people I mentioned, these suspects or the people who have been charged with these crimes have had a lengthy record of criminal activity, or either and/or they've had some mental problems.

They get that indirect message that it's okay

because these people are privileged and they're supremacists.

And that's what's happened.

And nobody,

nobody, nobody will say that.

In fact, I just said it, and I'll probably get a lot of hate mail like I usually do, but the fact of the matter is it's not one, it's not two, it's not three, it's not four, it's not five.

It's six recent cases all over the United States in big cities.

That's what they have in common, of violent

murders

by black teens with a criminal record of

just walking by white people, just were targeted for what reason?

I suppose they were white.

People are going to say, well, the the black victims are more numerous.

Yes, because they live in the inner city.

So that's my point.

These people who were attacked, whether it's Representative Quaylar or some of these activists, did not live in the worst crime areas.

They didn't even habituate there.

They didn't go there.

These people were targeted outside of the inner city for the most part.

Maybe not the baker in Oakland, but she was in an area that was safer than most parts.

And I think it's just the idea that it's okay to do that because these people are privileged.

And so what's the, if, how do you stop it?

You have, get rid of these DAs, and they start charging people, and if they're guilty, they convict them, and if they're convicted, they're incarcerated.

And we don't just let people out.

We did that under Trump, we did it under Obama, and the premise was, well, these were all drug charges that were inordinately falling.

No, they weren't.

They were usually drug trafficking.

And if you look at the people who were put in jail for drug trafficking, there was usually add-ons to those sentences.

An illegal gun, the use of violence, a prior criminal offense.

They were not just people smoking marijuana, put in jail for 20 years.

So we let a lot of people out of jail for the wrong reasons, and they're out on the street now, and they're not going back into jail for committing violent crimes because of no cash, no bail.

And

you're not charging bail, and we're letting people out.

And so it's going to increase.

And we'll see if it has a difference because you're talking when you talk to people who knew these people, either the people who were attacked, like Representative Quaylar or the woman whose name I can't pronounce,

Minneapolis, they have a change of heart.

I think Mr.

Quaylor voted to defund the police.

I know the city council woman did, and I don't think they do that again.

And if they don't do it again, what does that say?

I voted to defund the police without any concern about all the people who might be hurt that I would never see because I am a public official.

Now that I am a public official who has been hurt

or threatened by the policies that I enacted are supported, now I want to change those policies.

Yeah, and it seems like a total lack of imagination on the part of the left that they can't see that, well, these crimes going on outside the black neighborhood.

What do they think these people are doing in their own neighborhoods?

They don't care.

They do not care.

They do not care.

They just know that it's a popular thing to say to defund the police to black elite activists.

They know that the black community who actually lives there is not for that.

They do not want to defund the police.

They do not want to walk in a black neighborhood and be targeted and raped or killed or mugged.

But they know that

that violence, that violent act is used by their own representatives to go to Congress or the state legislature and say, look,

we are the victims of racism and redlining and violence.

And our communities are suffering from violence because of economic deprivation.

And therefore, we want this and this and this.

And so they're out of touch with their own communities.

Their own communities are saying, well, maybe we like these entitlements, but we want security, and we don't have it.

And they did it with the idea that they don't live there anymore.

It's like the Obamas.

He's a perfect example, Barack Obama.

If you look at what he wrote in all of his memoirs, if you look how he voted in the Illinois legislature, if you look what he said as a senator, it was all the same.

It was racism, racism, racism.

Trayvon's the son, looks like the son I never had.

We all know the police stereotype, all that stuff.

And where is he today?

Is he living in the Chicago mansion?

He doesn't even go back there.

He's either living on the beach in Hawaii under guard or under guard at Martha's Vineyard or under guard in his mansion in Calorama, Washington, D.C., as his wife makes $740,000 per hour,

$12,000 a minute, Michelle did.

And you can really see these things are iconic.

So the wall was a symbol that the whole woke immigration thing is over now.

I mean, they'll still try to let people in, but they don't believe it anymore.

It's completely bankrupt.

When Joe Biden campaigned on let them surge and the wall is racist and we're going to dismantle it and even sold off the materials and now he's going to build it, then you know it's completely bankrupt and they know they failed.

And when you have

affluent middle-class CEOs, community organizers, small business owners, U.S.

Congress people, city council people, all who have been targeted by career black criminals

and they had championed BLM and defund the police and no bail,

let them out the same day, and now they're angry and they feel this is unfair, or or their relatives understandably are angry, then you know that it's bankrupt.

And you know that BLM is spent, a spent force.

When Mr.

Kendi's anti-racism center was a complete fraud, and the people who gave him $50 million plus understand they got nothing for their money, he didn't do anything.

They haven't written a book.

They haven't done anything, two or three papers.

It was just a fun time to spend somebody else's free money.

And that, and then you couple that with Michelle going over to Germany, and she's going to talk about the holy trinity of DEI.

Oh, wait a minute.

She wasn't talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

She said she was.

That's what they wanted, but notice the equity now in documents, speeches,

references by our elite has suddenly dropped out.

It's diversity and inclusion.

That's what Michelle got her $12,000 a minute for, but not equity.

How is it equity to be so privileged to own three mansions and to

make $12,000 a minute?

I mean, what are you going to talk about the inequity of that?

And how can you be, look at all these people.

And is Mr.

Kendi going to talk about his $40,000 for 30 minutes on Zoom or his $50 million plus anti-racism?

He's going to talk about equity.

Is he going to go tell the guy in East Palestine who works at UPS, hey,

you need to get schooled on equity.

I'm going to school you on equity.

Is that what Michelle's going to tell him?

So equity is out the door because this whole BLM anti-racist movement, it's a largely media elite academic phenomenon.

And it's self-interested and it's boomerang terribly on the innocent.

And these poor people who were either injured or terrified or killed,

I mean, they are the casualties, fatalities of ideology.

And anybody with a right mind could see that this was going to happen.

Because when you tell an entire group of young black teens that it's not their fault and you defund the police and they have

a statistically high crime rate of four five six ten percent ten times excuse me they're three to five to six percent of the population they're committing crimes at fifty percent of all crimes so you know it's twenty times their numbers in the demographic and you say that the white rage and white supremacy and white privilege is the reason that they're not happy or they're discriminated against and their prior criminal record will not be an obstacle for letting them out.

And whether it's shoplifting or assault, they're not going to go to jail.

And you're going to live in a big city with these high crime rates, then you're going to have the ingredients of what we just talked about.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and come back and we'll turn to our war.

We're going to be talking about Afghanistan, perhaps a little bit broader, but the Soviets were at war with them in the 1980s, and we were at war in Afghanistan in 2000 until just recently we pulled out.

So we'll talk about that topic when we come back.

Stay with us.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, this is our Saturday edition, and we're looking at Afghanistan today.

And I know that we had a recent pullout from Afghanistan that was a disaster.

The Soviets had no less disaster in the 1980s.

It really signaled the weakness of their own military when they pulled out.

And Afghanistan in general is kind of interesting.

I was hoping maybe a little historical discussion of that area.

It is a crossroads between

Asia and the Middle East.

And I thought maybe you had more even on the ancient Bactria, which is what it was called.

But go ahead, Victor.

Yeah, well, it comes into the ancient record as Bactria, and that is usually, and then the Punjab.

I mean, Alexander the Great, it comes in really in association with Alexander the Great and his successors when in the early 320s BC,

after destroying the Persian Empire and torching Persepolis in Iran, he made his way across what is now the Iranian border, went into Kandahar area and the Kabul area and pacified it.

And he was pretty brutal.

If you read, he killed and slaughtered a lot of people.

But the key is he only controlled the lowlands, the area that was subject to cavalry and phalanx warfare, phalangites.

He could not go up into the mass of Afghanistan, the high mountains.

And it lasted for about 300 years.

The Romans did not want to deal with it, and it reverted back to these tribal groups.

And

essentially, when the British didn't want it, but the great game was

it had borders with India, which is now Pakistan, but it had a border with China, it had a border with Russia.

So the idea was whoever controlled this area would have the ability to pressure these different major players, China, Russia, Iran.

And so the British felt that to protect their position in India, they should go in there.

And they fought three, they were slaughtered in the First Afghan War, but by the third, they had won, and they had installed a king after World War I.

And pretty much till 1973 or so, there was a monarchy in Afghanistan that had some limited control over the plains and had an international reputation of

legitimacy.

And then the highlands were given over to the tribes to do what they did: fight, kill each other, grow opium, whatever.

And that was pretty well until you had a coup,

Sovietization, and then you had a series of, let's knock off Mr.

Kamal or whatever his name was, and then the pro-Soviet dictator who had taken over and destroyed the monarchy was suspected of conflicted loyalties.

So then another dictator took him, a communist dictator took him over, and then that one was considered

perhaps finagling with the Indians or finagling with the Chinese or finagling with the Americans.

So he was knocked off.

And then finally, the Soviets said, there's just too much turmoil here.

And even though they hate us, we've got a border with them.

And we do not.

They were looking at what had happened right across the border nearby in Iran with a Khomeini revolution.

And there was the beginning of a Taliban fundamentalist

revolution

in Afghanistan.

So on Christmas Day 1979, they just invaded Afghanistan and they were very effective at the beginning.

They came in

and they regularized or institutionalized communism.

They poured a lot of money.

They eventually had 600,000 people in there.

And then, of course, as Afghanistan always does to Alexander the Great or the Persians, whoever goes in there, they began to attack them.

And the Soviets were not like Americans.

They reacted in a very brutal way.

So

if Russians were walking in Kandahar and all of a sudden 100 of them were murdered or shot, then the Russians would wipe out a village or the Russians would drop dolls that looked like toys and then they would have

mines in them, and they would use cluster shots, they would use all sorts of things, and it became a brutal war.

And then we decided.

I remember Christopher Hitchens wrote an article where he sided with the Soviets, and it was, before you laugh,

the late Christopher Hitchens, he said, well, they were for the equality of women, and they were not as corrupt.

And they were trying to

stamp out religious fundamentalism.

Yes, Christopher, but they were invaders.

And the point he was trying to make is compared to the Taliban fundamentalist,

they were preferable.

And then he made the argument that in that period of 20 years of U.S.

hostility

toward the Soviets, and we started to sell them Stinger missiles.

Those were those shoulder-fired, heat-seeking, very sensitive, anti-aircraft weapons that made a big difference.

I think, you know, you can go on any academic search and you will find left-wing academics angry that we did that, that we gave stingers to the Taliban because they were pro-Soviet.

And the Taliban then had those weapons and, you know, they had them for the next 20 years.

and they were being supplied by the Islamicist in Pakistan.

Okay, so after 10 years in 1989 with Gorbachev looking like the Soviet Union was going to collapse, they just got out.

They said, you know what?

50,000 wounded, 15,000 dead, 10 years for what?

The Americans are supplying our Americans have killed thousands of us with their in it with their weapons.

These Taliban people are crazy.

It's not worth it.

So like the British, they came to a cost-benefit analysis.

And we had never been in there.

So from 89

to 2001,

you know, for,

oh, I don't know, 12 years, everybody said, leave it alone.

It's bad news.

But the Taliban got stronger and stronger.

They got weapons from the U.S.

They had weapons from Pakistan.

They were somewhat influenced by the Islamist revolution going on in Iran.

And they hosted bin Laden.

And he came in, and the rest is history.

So then we decided

we have a rule in the United States, as does Russia, as does China.

And we have a rule about proxies.

I guess we forgot it now with Ukraine, but the rule was pretty hard and fast.

If you are going to fight us

and

or rival us and there is a proxy that you use or we use,

whether it's the Vietnamese during the Cold War, whether it's the Koreans during the Cold War,

or whether it's Afghanistan during the Cold War, there is a rule.

We do not allow our South Vietnamese to go into China or Russia, and you don't allow your North Vietnamese to conduct operations against us.

Same with the Koreans.

You do not allow the South Koreans or the Americans to go in to bomb China like MacArthur wanted.

And And the Chinese do not use their North Koreans to send missiles against us, which

is a red line.

And anytime you get close to that red line,

think about it, then bad things happen.

So when Kim Jong-un, the proxy of China, threatens the Trump administration with nuclear weapons, then Trump says, my button is bigger than yours.

And I'm crazier than you are.

And I will use it if you don't stop.

And

so, what happened?

Bin Laden was our enemy, the Taliban was a proxy, they allowed Bin Laden, gave him the wherewithal, I should say, to attack us on 9-11.

So, we said,

we're going to go after Bin Laden, but we're also going to get rid of the Taliban.

Fine, everybody was with that.

We did it from October, November.

We were done it in eight eight weeks.

We had the Karzai people in there that were corrupt but secular, more secular and westernized, worked for oil companies.

And we had worked with the

National Alliance.

So it worked.

And we got out.

And then we made a tragic mistake.

And that is, if you go into Afghanistan, there's only one way to run it.

You make a big base in the flatland.

We had one at Bagram.

And you use it for reconnaissance and operations.

but you don't try to take over the country because you can't.

You can't go into the rough land.

You can't go into 70% of the country.

You can't deal with these tribes.

And

we did exactly that.

And we did it for

from,

if you think about it, 2001, unlike the Soviets, they did it for 10 years.

We did it for 20.

So then Joe Biden comes in and Donald Trump had worked out something where he said that we're not going to have any more of these wars.

We're not going to have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 Americans in here.

And he just told the Taliban, if you don't attack Americans and we keep to the major cities,

we're fine.

All we want to do is just keep a lid on things.

You can run the rest of the country.

If you do,

we will drop the mother of all bombs, et cetera, on you.

And he did.

And so it was pretty quiet.

Not very many people got killed.

Not very many Americans got killed.

When Biden came in, of course, they saw what the Russians saw, that this was going to be a chance to

take advantage of whoever was their opponent, which was the Americans.

So they did.

And we gave up Baghem after putting $300 million into it.

We put a billion dollars into an embassy.

We put $50 billion into equipping the Afghan army.

Joe Biden wanted, according to the Washington Washington Post, a 20-year anniversary celebration that I, Joe Biden, was the first president to get everybody out of Afghanistan and end and win, solve whatever the Afghan war on the anniversary of 9-11.

And I, Joe Biden brought this to a close.

So he told the military in June and July, get out.

And they, some of them,

privately, they say, privately, well, you can't get out because because it'll be a bloodbath.

And General Milley, of course, publicly said, the National Army is 300, 40,000, 400,000 people.

It's not going to, it's fine.

So none of the Pentagon warned us publicly.

Privately, they all thought it was going to be a disaster, but nobody wanted to say that.

And so the rest is history.

In August of...

Joe Biden's first year in office enjoying 55% approval rating.

He got out in a matter of days.

He turned over the only defensible air base that would have been valuable in that part of the world, Bis-A-V, the Iranians.

If you ever wanted to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, Bagram would have been ideal.

If China was pressuring you somewhere else, you had a base near China and ditto the same with Russia.

And it was pretty much impregnable.

Because it was a huge, refitted Air Force base.

And we had a big embassy there that was serving to control basically culturally

Kabul.

And what did we do?

We completely then

did the two stupidest things in the world.

One, we abruptly pulled out without thinking,

with no deterrent, no air power used.

And two,

instead of just giving them aid to say, here is an aqueduct the way the Soviets done, we had done that.

Here's another dam.

Here is a

farming project.

We decided to be cultural imperialist under

Biden.

It started earlier in the State Department.

So we thought we're going to have a gender studies program.

We're going to try to teach you about trans people.

This is,

I guess they thought because homosexuality had been ritualized among Afghans that they wouldn't object.

And then we had a pride flag on the embassy.

And then we wanted to teach them about racism and the George Floyd.

We're just racist, we're really bad people.

And you have to learn from us that racism is bad.

So we had the George Floyd mural,

and

we flew the pride flag, and we had the gender studies.

And of course, to a traditional Islamic society, that was an anathema.

And then as we went out, and they started to attack, and they blew up 13 of us, and even though we had information about that particular particular terrorist ring we did not want to preempt.

But then afterwards we did and General Milley said it was a righteous strike.

We blew up a convoy of cars and we just killed what, 10 innocent civilians.

And then when we flew everybody out we had a press conference, I can still remember it, in August.

of more than two years ago, and we had a Pentagon spokesman assuring us that when these refugees arrived to the the United States, that they would have culturally sensitive food prepared for them.

Not about we left thousands of pro-American Afghans who were going to be, and they have been systematically rooted out and executed,

tortured.

We left contractors, European and American contractors there that who knows what happened to them, and we just got out.

And that's where we were.

And so the old rule stays: if you're going to go into Afghanistan, stick to the planes,

be

retaliatory, do not nation build, and get out.

So what would that strategy have done under George Bush?

After we removed the Taliban, we should have just collapsed,

put a token leader in, said, you know what, we don't really care what you do in your country.

We're not going to try to nation build.

But we have Baglam Air Force Base and we have have 5,000 soldiers around it and we have infrastructure and you screw around with us and we're going to bomb you.

You put Bin Laden back here, we'll just bomb you and be like mowing the lawn.

Every time it grows up, we're going to bomb you, but we're not going to get involved in your affairs.

And when you don't like us bombing you, then we'll leave.

If you behave and you just say, you know what, we're not going to let any more al-Qaeda people into our country.

When you do that, we'll leave.

But until then, we're just going to stay here.

We don't want to screw around with you.

We don't want to like you.

We don't want to hate you.

We're just here in this particular fortified enclave for one reason: that you don't ever allow another 9-11 to occur.

And I think that was what historically works.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

And I have a few questions to ask you on this Afghan situation.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and you can find Victor on social media.

He's at X, the former Twitter at V D Hansen.

And then you can find him on his Facebook page at Hansen's Morning Cup.

And there is a nice Facebook page with Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, not associated with us, but they do a great job bringing up old things that Victor has done and the new stuff, of course, as well.

Victor, you mentioned nation building, and I was wondering just broadly a question about that.

Given what's gone on in Afghanistan and the terrible pullout that we saw and leaving Bagram there for them,

and also just generally,

our nation-building efforts, I think there was a lot of people that were unhappy about what happened in Iraq.

And even before the Soviet Union fell, I suppose in the Latin

American nation as well, we spent lots and lots of money.

nation building and as you're saying it's a seems to be a failed diplomatic position and I was wondering if you think in the future we are going to move far away from that.

And then what will it look like with America around the world if we're not out there putting money into nation building?

And just so your audience knows, we put 44,

sorry, $444 billion

into Afghanistan, and we're over $100 billion in Ukraine right now.

I think people,

whenever you have a problem like this, you ask, how did we get here?

Because it's usually not some sinister conspiracy.

It's misplaced intentions or not enough information.

So we went into Vietnam because the French said that if they couldn't any longer have this colonial outpost and they shouldn't have it, and we were going to have a

non-communist government, and Ho Chi Minh broke the deal, and China and Russia, as they always did in the Cold War, cheated.

And we went in there to try to stop them.

The more you go in there, you say, you know what?

You just can't fight because they're winning hearts and minds with their communist doctrine.

So, because they're poor and oppressed.

So then we poured money and the rest is history.

It was a disaster.

We did it in Korea.

That kind of work.

So we said,

After Vietnam, we don't want to do this.

So the first Gulf War.

We go in,

and the world says Saddam should not be able to take the oil of Kuwait and if he takes the oil of Kuwait he will take the oil of Saudi Arabia and he'll keep on going and he will control 60% of the world's oil.

Soviets and Chinese thought it was kind of good that he did because they could deal with him.

But the West, who was very dependent upon that oil, said no.

And so we went in there.

and we got him out of Kuwait.

And suddenly we said, after Vietnam, we're not going to go nation building.

So we went home.

In fact, Schwarzkopf, our general, actually had a meeting with the Saddam generals and we even allowed him to fly helicopters.

So as soon as we stopped, they started murdering Kurds

and they started murdering Marsh Arabs and they broke the accord.

So then we said we're going to have no fly zones.

So from

what, 91

for 10 years, the United States patrolled the skies of Iraq and tried to limit the amount of damage.

And what did he do in that time?

He gave bounties to the

suicide bombers on the West Bank.

He offered sanctuaries to the First World Trade Center bombers.

He gave sanctuaries to the worst terrorist in the world.

He tried to conduct genocide against the Marsh Arabs.

He violated all of the 91 accords that had allowed him to stay in power.

And then weapons of mass destruction.

I don't know what degree he had done that, but we should remember that

there had been an effort to take out the Iraqi nuclear reactor during the Iran-Iraq war.

And there had been one nearby in Syria that the Israelis took out.

The Israelis did this.

So

the point is he had the ability to do, whether he took it to

Syria, I don't know.

It was an enormous mistake by the Bush administration after getting a congressional resolution to go in and attack Saddam for the reasons I mentioned after 9-11 to A, stay there, and then to B, to predicate your war not on the 23 writs that had been passed by the House with sizable Democratic support in the House and Senate, joint resolution to use force against Saddam, but to stay there after removed him, and I supported staying there.

In retrospect, it was a big mistake.

And second,

another big mistake, and I did point that out at the time, was why would you predicate your war on weapons to mass destruction when the Congress had given you 23 reasons?

23.

Terrorists, 9-11 people breaking the cords, genocide, genocide, bounties.

They had every global terrorist in the world in Baghdad.

Okay, so we did that, and then the rest is history.

We were there from 2003

in March all the way into 2008, and then Barack Obama did just what Joe Biden did later.

He just pulled out without any thought.

The government collapsed.

Al-Qaeda came in, started beheading people, took over half the country, and Trump came in and said, you know what?

I'm going to bomb the SHIT of Al-Qaeda.

I'm not going to go in there and try to take over that.

And he did.

And he bombed and bombed and bombed, and Al-Qaeda fled, and then the government kind of came back, and that's where we are.

And so now

nobody wants to nation build because we're thirty-three trillion dollars in debt and we don't have the ability, unlike the British, to do it.

We don't understand it.

And the other thing is, whereas before we were culturally imperialistic on the corporate side or the right side, the left used to criticize us and say, Oh, my gosh, you go into a country and you put McDonalds there.

Why why do you think they hate you?

Or you go into

you go into Vietnam and people are

having hot dogs and marshmallows and you just bring this crass culture and now the left does it.

And they go into a country, they want gender studies and gay studies and pride flags and the whole anti-racism dogma and the people hate it because it's foreign.

And I just don't think that we should try to do anything.

But with this caveat, once you do that,

you know what's going to happen.

You're going to get a Milosevic or Saddam.

Saddam killed a million people,

just murdered them, just murdered Kurds, murdered Marsh Arabs, murdered Iranians, murdered his own people.

We didn't do much about it.

And that's one of the reasons that when we went finally in, we tried to do something.

And Milosevic murdered thousands.

So we went in there too.

And

I guess we went into Libya.

I opposed that.

I don't know why we went in there under Hillary and Samantha Power

and Susan Rice were the Troika that put us in there under Obama, but we were there.

We moved in because we said Qaddafi had killed people and Assad had killed people.

And Obama said if he moved his WMD, he would go in there.

And of course, he didn't.

Typical Obama.

Talk big, carry a twig.

But the point I'm making is that when you don't go in there, that's fine.

And that's in our interest, but just don't then say, my God, he's a murderer.

It's our fault that he's murdering.

So it's lose-lose situation.

Nation building is always used after you remove a murderer.

And if you don't remove the murderer, you're going to have more murder.

If you do remove the murderer and you just say, we're going to have Bagram, And we're going to use it as a base, and outside Bagram, the Taliban is murdering people, then people are going to say in Washington, oh my God, you have a big base at Bagram with all that power and right outside they're killing and hanging women.

So it's but Americans are not that way.

They can't ever accept lose-lose.

They always have to be no, no, no, there's an answer, there's an idealist, and they do that.

And one final thing is that

you know, I think all of us supported getting rid of the Taliban.

I don't think we ever signed up for trying to make that into, you know, Washington, D.C.

or San Francisco.

Although we kind of made San Francisco into Kabul.

Yes, that's true.

They made more like us and we did them.

But Iraq, I think 80% of the people supported going in there.

But what got me about Iraq was all the people who prior to that war, And I didn't even know who they, I didn't even know what it was, the Project for American Century or whatever it was called.

This was dreamed up by

Bill Crystal, Bob Kagan, David Fromm, all these guys.

They wanted during the Clinton administration to remove Saddam and to nation-build and spread democracies.

Okay.

They were the original architects of it.

So the rest of us said, okay, we go in there.

We're not going to do what we did in 91 and let him come back.

We just weakened him.

We're going to get rid of him.

And then we'll have to make the conditions so he can't re-emerge.

So we signed up for that.

But here's my point: the people who

wanted to get rid of him during Clinton and convince Bush to get rid of him, the neoconservatives, which I thought was, you know, I had no problem with it.

I thought some of them were good.

But they all soured on the war.

It was my beautiful removal of Saddam is screwed up by somebody else's occupation.

So you had this really weird situation where Richard Pearl and

Crystal and all these people were criticizing

us being in Iraq, but not like get out of Iraq,

but you're not listening to me, me, me, I have the answers, but they didn't have the answers.

So they turned on the war.

And so a lot of the architects of neoconservative nation building in Iraq either voted for Obama or turned around and started attacking George Bush.

And you can really see it in Vanity Fair.

They had a whole article about these people.

So I went over there twice and thought, well, maybe they're right.

Maybe they're wrong.

I want to see it.

And I came back each time after being kind of embedded over there.

And there were all these American kids from the Midwest, everywhere, and there was all this material, and they were fighting, fighting, fighting, while we were saying it was a waste of time.

So I thought to myself, you either support the war or you get out, but you don't keep fighting the war and then you

trash what we're doing because these kids are getting killed.

Then bring them home and say it was a screw-up and it's not worth one American life.

Or if you say it's worth American life, don't criticize them.

So that was my takeaway.

And I said to myself when I came back the second time, in 2007 from Iraq, I said, I will never, ever, just as a private citizen, not that I'm having any influence, I'm never going to support a nation-building enterprise again

for this reason, that the people who propose it and the architects of it who plan it

and the critics who make fun of people who don't support them are going to bail the first time.

They're going to be the first people to bail, and the people who are stuck dying are going to be the middle class.

And that's what happens.

That's what happened in Iraq.

That's what happened finally in Afghanistan.

That's what happened when we went into Libya.

That happens all the time.

It's not worth it.

So do you envision that the world are the United States in the world would look something like, you know, if we had Bagram still, we would be just isolated there in Afghanistan.

We would be isolated.

We would be isolated like the 600 other bases.

We have 600 places.

They're not all bases, but installations are facilities, the word the Pentagon uses, all over the world.

And believe me, they're not happy places.

They're not like Germany, right?

So we would have had Bagwam Air Force Base.

We could have held that forever.

And then we wouldn't have gone out.

And then every six weeks, the New York Times and the Washington Post would run a sensational story and saying

a feminist was hung, hanged, I should say, and a civil rights activist was blown apart by the Taliban, right outside the doors of Bagram.

And we did nothing.

And then our generals

would consult with him, and they'd say, wait a minute, we got reconnaissance from Bagram over China, Russia, Iran.

We've got the ability at a moment's notice that if any, if Pakistan blows up or Iran blows up, we have the ability to deal with them.

If crazy, you get a crazy leader in Pakistan that threatens the United States with nuclear weapons, or you you have a crazy guy in Iran who wants to start,

we have the ability to take them out.

So that was the idea behind it.

Okay.

And I agree with you.

We should back up to that position.

I wondered also,

because you were talking about the United States getting involved after 9-11 in Afghanistan, and they had a

political candidate for their presidency, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated on September 9th, 2001, and so just two days before our 9-11.

And they seem to always start that war with, ah, this guy was killed.

And I was wondering what you knew about him, because it seems he was anti-Taliban, and the Taliban probably took him out.

I mean, the assassination.

But did you have any reflections on Massoud?

Well, that was the whole.

That was the whole strategy of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

That was the whole idea.

So when they killed Massoud, I guess the word means what?

Blessed or happy.

And he had this resistance that was ecumenical that even though

he wasn't a Pashtun,

Tajik, I guess,

he was able to unite various factions against the Taliban.

And he was a very magnetic leader.

And bin Laden knew that when he hit the United States, the United States would hit him back and they would use Massoud, who had popular support, probably 51% of the population, to get rid of him and the Taliban.

So what he did is he staged a little documentary or a group came to take a picture of Massoud and it was a bomb and they blew him up.

Just right before, we didn't know what was going on.

We didn't realize that this was a giveaway that they were going to attack us because they got rid of the only person that we could have used in a nationalist uprising as a surrogate.

So, had Massoud lived

and had we bombed the Taliban out of existence and taken over Bagram, then maybe Massoud, if we didn't get involved in their affairs, just had Bagram to back up Massoud, he might have been able to constitute a legitimate government.

But that was exactly why Bin Laden did that.

And bin Laden then,

the West always has a way of both screwing up and getting you in the end.

And how do we get bin Laden in the end?

Apparently, he was just sitting in his Pakistan hideout watching westernized type porn all day long on a westernized video.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And he got addicted to it, and he got fat and lazy and paranoid.

And he liked his material comforts.

He liked his wives.

He liked his porno.

He liked his video games.

No surprise.

So we got him that way with rather than all the Torah Bora bombing that didn't work and all of that.

All right.

We're a little bit over time, but I want to still ask you, because we usually do agriculture at the end of this, and I do have a question about opium and Afghanistan.

It seems like most of the opium trade came out of Afghanistan.

And I was wondering if you knew anything about the opium poppy and why it seems to be centered there.

Is there some growing condition that's particularly important?

You can grow opium.

We could grow it in the San Joaquin Valley.

They grew it in America.

They grew it.

The big place of the supply was the Nile Delta, Nile River Basin.

It grew

in antiquity.

There's Greek vase paintings that have poppies in them.

And

so we were self-sufficient in opium, I think, in the 19th century.

But why is it in Afghanistan?

It's in Afghanistan because it's wild lands.

So anytime you have an opium field and it's producing opium, it's going to be used for illicit purposes.

And eventually some government or somebody is going to get angry and if it's in a wide open plain like the Nile Delta or the Tigris and Euphrates or the San Joaquin Valley, they're going to outlaw it or get rid of it.

But you put it up in Afghanistan where nobody wants to go there,

then it's going to be very difficult with a bunch of tribal crazy people that are growing and profiting from it.

And so I think Tony Blair was the one that said, we're going into Afghanistan to end the heroin addiction in Britain by getting rid of the poppy fields.

Good luck with that.

Yeah, that's what she said.

So, no sooner had we gone in there and we said they can grow rice, they can grow wheat.

And then people said, No, they better grow.

Maybe we can have them grow the opium and maybe we can buy it from them and then burn it up.

And then people said, Well, there's hydrocodone and oxycondone, all these people, these synthetic derivatives of opiates.

Maybe we can use it.

And the rest is history.

So that's

it's a place that nobody wants to go to.

And once you go there, you don't want to be there and you want to get out.

And therefore,

it's a good place to grow opium because it's hard to get to, and the people who are growing it are crazy and fanatic and will fight you to the death forever.

And in a cost-benefit analysis, it's

not worth it.

You can get rid of it by bombing it or using defoliants, and then you're going to be the bad guy.

You know, a Western plane came in and defoliated an opium with dangerous toxic chemicals.

Who wants to do that?

Or

they use napalm and burn the

opiate fields up.

And then somebody said they destroyed their only source of income.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's the whole thing about the West, that

we don't realize that our enemies understand that about us.

And

they understand that they can always appeal to

our

sense of moral smugness or moral

superiority.

We think it's because we have this righteousness or enlightenment or post-Christianity, but they don't look at it that way.

They think we're nutty and they can always embarrass us or con us by appealing to the angels of our better nature in a way they just don't with the Chinese.

Yeah.

Nobody criticizes the Chinese.

I mean, they know what they're doing.

They got a million people in labor camps.

They harvest organs.

They take out leaders.

Nobody says a word

because they don't listen to it.

No.

I'm not suggesting we be that way.

I'm just suggesting that the way we are innately has certain conditions that we should be aware of.

Yeah.

Victor, I have one comment from a reader that that wanted to correct us on something.

I believe we said that the bond for the high-speed rail was 30 billion and he sent in a correction that the bond on the ballot was a 9.95 billion.

Yes, I corrected that, but

I wasn't wrong.

I was wrong in the way I phrased that sentence.

I said, voter, and I'm just doing this by memory because I didn't know you were going to bring this up, but it came up when that letter was addressed to the website, and it was

one sentence in that article on California the destroyer was re-changed.

Thank you, and I appreciate the comment.

But

I said that

voters approved a $33 billion bond for an envisioned

high-speed rail.

What I should have said was voters approved a 9.98 or whatever it was bond for an envisioned 33 billion.

So what I'm saying is I wasn't wrong by saying 33 billion because when that bond passed,

the argument was that you were going to fund the first phase, but the total cost was going to be 33 billion.

Nobody voted for the 9.98 without knowing what the cost was going to be.

So they were told it was $33 billion.

So I should have said they voted for $9.98 as an installment on the envisioned $33 billion.

I didn't use the word envision.

I just said they voted for a bond for $33 million to build high-speed rail.

And that's what we did.

And we've spent now

probably the whole $30 billion and we haven't laid one foot of track.

And it's been the high-speed

rail authority was created in 1996.

The bond was passed in 2008.

The money is gone.

So now they get federal and state supplements out of the budget.

And if they don't want to put it obviously on the ballot again for an extension or another bond, because people would overwhelmingly reject it, and you'd have this Stonehedge mess here.

So from Bakersfield to Merced,

it's what, 180 miles.

We're going to be able to pay 86 bucks, they say, and you can drive 200 miles.

But my problem is there's not a lot of people in Merced that want to go 200 miles an hour to get to Bakersfield.

And they don't have the money to pay for it.

And this was all used because once they passed the high-speed rail architects, got this pass, they looked at where it should have been, and it should have been from San Jose

to

San Francisco, going over Pacheco,

all the way to San Joaquin Valley, and then up to Sacramento, maybe a triangle, Sacramento, and San Jose and the Bay Area and San Francisco, Oakland.

And the people there just said,

I don't want this.

We don't want that high-speed rail going through our neighborhoods.

Yeah, unless those, all those yokels down in Fresno County and Kern County, they need the money.

They'll lap it up.

We can experiment on like lab rats with them.

Yeah.

And they have cheaper land.

They have cheaper land, but it's been bogged down.

California can't do that anymore.

I talked about that earlier.

We're just unable to do that.

We sue each other.

If we say we're going to have a rail line through Kings County, then

people, all the landowners, the farmers, everybody says, well, you're going to destroy my business.

You're going to take out my orchard.

I can't do this.

I'm going to sue you.

So then you get a a lawyer at $1,000 an hour.

Then you've got to get an environmental statement that has to go through the pellet court system.

We just can't do it unless, you know, it's not like we're going to build the bomb or liberty ships where we just say to Henry Kaiser, wipe out Hayward and build it.

Or we say to Henry Ford, wipe out Willow Run, Swamp, and do whatever you want.

Just build B-24s.

We don't do that.

So we can't, and we're the most litigious

state in the Union.

So whether it's replacing the Oakland Bay Bridge Eastern Span or building high-speed rail or the LAX, we just can't do it.

No.

We cannot do it.

And on that, Victor, thank you so much for the journey from our House of Representatives lacking its own head all the way through Afghanistan and to this last discussion of high-speed rail.

We appreciate that today.

We appreciate all of our listeners.

And oh, I wanted to just say the comment was made by Alan D.

Payton.

So thank you, Alan, for the correction or at least clarification on that.

And thanks, Victor.

Well, thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.