Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #478

The following is a conversation with Scott Horton. He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of endtwar.com, co-host of Provoked, and host of the Scott Horton Show on which he has done over 6,000 interviews since 2003. He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have, over the past three decades, criticized US foreign policy, especially in regard to military interventionism and the military-industrial complex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton. I think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called Wars on Terror. I think, to me, it was a wake-up call. I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex and seeing what the government's capacity is to mislead us into war and to continuously erode basic human freedoms. Uh, if I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the Cost of War Project from Brown University just so we understand the cost of these wars. The post-911 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths. And the cost, in terms of dollars, was $8 trillion with $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion on Iraq and, uh, Syria and the result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say they did not accomplish its purpose, and in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the, the numbers before the war and after the war. Percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%. Percent of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%. Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%. So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans. As you do in your book, Enough Already, uh, can you lay out how, the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were misled into this War on Terror that was so costly in so many ways?

Yeah, well first of all, thank you for having me again. It's great to be with you on the show. One important statistic, uh, that you could mention from the Cost of War Project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes, right, and the same group, um, it was... Well, 'cause I'm telling you this like at least five years ago, God, it's the future now, this, this may have been seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen had blown their own brains out since then, well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is. So, talk about the cost of war, that's far beyond, you know, the actual deaths in the war. We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, marines, and soldiers on the ground killed plus contractors and all that.