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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
War Inside the Pentagon? The Military vs. Trump and Hegseth (G&R 487)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics for Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics. Brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
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B
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the creative Red Podcast. I'm your co host Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California today. And as always, I'm joined by Bob
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A
Azenko and Niles Ohio.
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B
And today we're going to be doing another one of our episodes on military dissent. Partially because it is anniversary. We like to have a hook and tie in with things that have happened in history. And so we're looking at a pretty important anniversary which has happened this week, which is the, it's the anniversary of Dewey Canyon 3, which happened in 1971, 55 years ago. It's also actually the anniversary which was actually organized and carried out by the Vietnam Vets against the war VVAW. Also the anniversary of the founding of VVAW, which happened in 1967. But going to just, but we're going to use this to talk about military dissent around Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration and just kind of get into all of that. And so I'm going to hand it off to Bob.
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A
Yeah, this is an area I know a little bit about, if I may shamelessly plug myself. I actually wrote a book about this. This is about military, civil, military relations, the Vietnam War, but with particular emphasis on the way the military understood that the war wasn't going well, it wasn't a good idea, the way the US Fighting wasn't going to work. They tried to get this message through to civilian leadership, including JFK and lbj, and they ignored it. And there we were.
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B
And JFK was a secret dove. I don't know what you're talking about.
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A
Yeah, secret dove. And this is something we've discussed in, I don't know, maybe our most frequent topic in the last six years. And really even recently we've done this. We had Zach Hansen on twice within the past calendar year talking about soldiers and criticism of the Trump military policies. Before that, we talked a lot about Mark Milley, who was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in many ways was Trump's bed noire in his first presidency. We had shows about the fiasco that was the army parade. We've talked about gis, we've talked to Graham Klumpner, Klumpner who was an anti war vet. We talked about the Pentagon's feud with Mark Kelly and Jason Crow and other military or, I'm sorry, Democratic political leaders who were military veterans and beyond that, there's just so much information and more and more has been coming out in the last month or so about the military's relationship with the White House and the Pentagon. And in particular, I think Peter Hegseth is really, I think, the dominant character in all this. I think we've known for a long time that Trump is as crazy as a shithouse rat. Hegseth may be right, right there with him. He's the Secretary of Defense with probably the least background to make him competent to fill that position that we've really ever seen. Just a little on Hegseth, because I don't know if people know that much about him. He was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard. So he's a guardsman, which not to dismiss that, but it is different. And I know a lot about active duty people, vets, active duty soldiers and vets who point that out all the time. He was a guardsman. He was at Guantanamo. He was in Iraq and Afghanistan. After he left, he was an executive director at a group called Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, right wing groups. And he became a contributor to Fox News, of course, which is where Trump found him. He's also reputedly a drunk and a rapist. In 2021, he got into a bit of hot water ahead of Joe Biden's inaugural. A fellow Guard member in the D.C. army National Guard reported him for having a white supremacist tattoo and said that he was potential insider threat, which he is. And he was removed from security for that. And he was a host, a co host, I guess, of Fox and Friends for many years until Trump said, this is the guy we need to run the Pentagon. Right. Makes perfect sense. Right. And he has been in conflict with the military really since he took over. He's waging a war on what he calls wokeness in the military, on dei. In the military. Symbolic stuff, really. I think in this case, really shows a lot about what he believes in. He removed books from the West Point's library written by people like Toni Morrison. And I think he removed To Kill a Mockingbird while allowing things like Mein Kampf to remain on the shelves. And then when he came in, he said he wanted to clean out the army and make it a tough military force. No more of this wokeness. No more change the name to the Department of War rather than Department of Defense, which is the media goes along with. I don't know why, because it's still the Department of Defense. Just a couple months actually takes an
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B
act of Congress to change the media.
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A
And we've talked about that on the show as well. A couple months after he took over in early 2025, he directed all the branches to get rid of 20% of their generals, their four star generals. And he said it was a way to promote efficiency. Not surprisingly, the majority of people dismissed in the hegseth year and a half, or however long it's been now seems like a decade. It's only been like a year and a half. No, it's like barely been a year, actually.
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B
Year and a kid.
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A
Yeah. But the majority have been black and female, who he doesn't really think belong in the military. He's also promoted this really zealous Christianity, this kind of Christian nationalism, invoking God in order to kill people and all kinds of stuff that takes me back to like Manifest Destiny in the early 19th century. Pretty crazy stuff. He told the national guard to cut 20% of its top positions. Just really, just eviscerated the military. So he starts off pretty rock in a really rocky way with them to begin with. And it only got worse. And I think the kind of current story kind of begins last fall winter when Trump began the the attacks on alleged drug boats right off the Venezuelan coast and in the Caribbean generally. Hegseth in October 2025 fired Admiral Alvin Holsey, who was the the chief of Southern Command. And I think we mentioned this on his show last year as well. Halsey quit and he whenever these guys quit, they're just going to make a generic statement about they're proud to have served and all that kind of stuff, boilerplate stuff. All the reports that came out after that said Holsey took issue with these attacks on what for the most part are probably civilian boats or guys in boats carrying a few pounds of marijuana on boats that have 100 mile range. And Trump is claiming that they're going to flood the US with fentanyl and all that kind of stuff. And the one thing about Hexad, they never back like Trump, he never backs down. He just doubles down. After he fired Halsey, he said, I fired a number. I've seen your officer since taking over. The previous chairman, other members of the Joint Chiefs, combatant commanders and other commanders. It's nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture. That culture is diversity. That culture is integrating the arms forces. Remember, the arms forces is 40% non white. Right. Hegseth set out to get rid of that. He wanted to create this kind of Christian fighting Institution warrior culture is a big warrior culture. It's very masculine and manly and test toss their own fueled. Right. And he talks about, he would talk about like the rules of war and, and in very bleak ways with, he would put things in terms of you have this masculine warrior ethic and then you have this kind of feminine rules of war and stuff like that. And it was very clear. And as we'll see really, I wouldn't even say borders. I would say it's openly advocating what most people would say are war crimes, which I think everybody outside the White House and other MAGA parts would say are war crimes. What's surprising though is like there really was pushback and we don't hear too much about that. But in, in, in October 2025, when this really began to ramp up, the Washington Times is very used to be crazy conservative. Nowadays it's just whatever right wing media is so bad that the Washington Times isn't so bad anymore. But the Washington Times even said that the Pentagon officials and commanders said that Hegseth had lost the trust and respect of some top military commanders with moves widely seen as unprofessional. The Washington Times again said inside the Pentagon, Hegset tenure has been tumultuous. The level of turnover among high ranking officers and civilian officials has not been seen in recent history. Sources describe an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear with hirings and firings sometimes seeming to come out of nowhere. And whether you want a tough, masculine ready to fight military or not, that level of instability is just never good. You know, you're replacing people. There's a significant amount of institutional memory. You gotta be at it for 30, 40 years to get to these positions and to come in and have this guy who was a National Guard major get rid of you because he thinks you're too willing to promote black or women soldiers or that you're. You actually believe in the Geneva Convention is really unsettling. And Hegseth and I think a lot of Trump people love that he blows things up and he speaks his mind and he tells people what he believes and all that. But institutionally it's not a great idea. And you and I have talked about this many times. I always thought because the Democratic Party is just more useless by the day, I really can't even find words to describe anymore how utterly impotent and just utterly useless it is. Right. So we always said maybe Wall street and the military will get in his way, which I think is in large measure what happened in 2020. Right. I think that's what did them in 2020. Wall street ain't even doing it now. They're really useless too. So what we're seeing now, I think is that I think we're starting to see the military stand up institutionally, not really politically. Everything is political and I certainly wrote a book, so the military is very political, but they also have this kind of institutional background going that they really do believe in, and they're very jealous of that as well. There's an old joke about the Vietnam area saying that it was very hard to hold together an alliance fighting the Vietnam War. And the punchline was in the alliance was the army, the Navy, the Marines, right. So these guys, they have a great deal of like military respect, but I would suggest even more for their own particular branch. And Hegseth is just blowing everything up. It's really nihilistic, right? Hegseth took steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen black and female senior officers throughout the military. They believed. Why wouldn't they? That they were targeted because of their race or gender or maybe because they had been promoted by Biden or something like that. And this information comes from off the record interviews with perhaps a dozen senior officials in the Pentagon. So this isn't just reporters making it up. Right. And then in March of 2026, which is after the war began, and we'll get back to that in a minute, but Hegseth blocked the promotion of four army officers, two black men and two women who were going to be promoted to become one star generals. Right. Now there were reports that the media never pursued, that Trump had also said, I don't want to be seen on the dais with black and female generals. Who knows? There's no reason to believe that's out of the question. And in fact, when that happened, Don Bacon, who's, I'd call him a MAGA Republican, wouldn't you?
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B
Yeah, yeah, totally.
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A
Bacon is a Republican Republican from Nebraska, a Congressman who I believe is retiring now. His retirement is directly linked to this too. Let's be clear on that. He's also retired Air Force general and he went after Hegseth when he blocked the promotion of these senior officers. Bacon said the Secretary of Defense has the legal right to fire these flag officers, but it is not morally right nor wise. Further, he owes an explanation to the tax paying citizens. Hegsev is firing people left and right. He's conducting these like, attacks on small boats in the Caribbean which don't really seem to have much of a military application. He orders an attack on Venezuela, I think the reason, the only reason that didn't blow up even more was because it more or less worked. Right. They captured Maduro and the new regime seems to be somehow cooperating with him. Right.
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B
So some of which has led to the current debacle because they thought they could get away with anything.
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A
Oh, absolutely. They thought that Venezuela was now a template for the rest of the world. And that brings us, of course, to Iran, which they thought was going to work well and, in fact, obviously hasn't. And this is clearly where we see the. The knives coming out. I think for Hegset, I think it's. It's not hard to. It wouldn't have been hard to predict that, like, Noam and Bondi would be the first to be fired. And I think Hegsev. I don't know. I've been saying this. I've been wrong for a few months, but I just can't see him surviving that much longer. But you never know.
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B
They're saying the same thing about Gabbard and Lori Chavez. Ramer, too, who's the Secretary of Labor, that they're also on the chopping block. Yeah, he's definitely has a thing about firing all the women right now, so.
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A
Oh, abso. Absolutely. And I want to start because the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago had a long article like, I think it was called How Trump Went to War or something like that. And it starts in early February. Remember, the first attacks began on February 28th, 27th or 28th midnight. So I'm not sure which day they actually give. But the anniversary of the Tet Offensive, by the way, which is maybe prophetic. Right. But in early February, a couple weeks before that, Satan. Yahoo. Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. Right. Went to the White House and made his big pitch, the same thing he's been doing for 30 years about why it was time to get rid of Iran. And he had these grandiose ideas and these assurances of success. There were four points to Netanyahu's argument. He said that they could decapitate Iran's leaders, kill the Ayatollah. He said that they could cripple Iran's power, do immense damage to its military capability. He said third, that they could provoke a popular uprising. And then fourth, as a consequence of that would be regime change with a secular leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now, you and I can look at that and say he's crazy as a batshit rat, as a shithouse rat. But that was also said at the meeting that day, especially parts three and four, provoking a popular uprising and regime change. I would even argue that, like, they did kill the ayatollah, so they decapitate the leadership. When you say they decapitate leadership, they kill the ayatollah. But there are a lot of people who can fill that position. It's funny when people talk about that. I think if you got rid of Trump tomorrow, would he be irreplaceable? You could, like the old William Buckley line. You could take the first 200 names out of the phone book and replace Trump, and it'd be. And it'd be an improvement.
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B
But the Iranian government's just because I also think they were looking at it like Venezuela and Maduro, and the Iranian government was just like, so much better organized that they can. You can take out leadership several levels down, and they're still like a very functioning government which can wage war in
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A
against the US Very decentralized. And I hate to get into, like, cultural or civilizational explanations, but Persians know how to do this. They have millennia of. Of doing this. And they pointed that out themselves. I'm not trying to be like, Orientalist here, but, yeah, there's no one there, and I don't have any access to documents or anything like that, and I'll be dead before any of that's released. But I suspect that when they were talking about this, none of that ever came up. I doubt these aren't the type of people who would sit around to talk about what the enemy can do. Right. I've read, I don't know, who knows, hundreds of thousands, millions of words. Well, words, of course, in documents over the years. And like, often they would say, what can the enemy do? Even in Vietnam, they would say, what can the enemy do? What's going to happen here? These guys are not intellectually probing or intellectually curious or anything like that. But when it came to the regime change arguments in the meeting, I guess after Netanyahu left, the CIA director John Ratliff said it was farcical. And Rubio, Marco Rubio, who is the Secretary of State, was in a UFC fight instead of negotiating a war in Pakistan, the same you had. That'd be like LBJ taking Dean Rush to the cockfights and Nuevo Laredo instead of sending him to it's I, Hunter Thompson and Gore Vidal fuel him up with mescaline. They could not make this thing out but stick. And even Rubio cut in and said, in other words, it's bullshit. So Rubio saw through it. J.D. vance. It's been reported many times, is very skeptical of this, but whatever. But the interesting one here is Dan Cain, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He's Trump's pick. Trump nicknamed him Raisin Cain, like tough guy. And he thought Cain was going to be his patsy. He figured Cain would just go along with whatever he wanted. Cain, and I suspect Cain may be ideologically predisposed to this projection of American power. Probably is, right? Definitely very different than Millie. No doubt about that. But he's like, you don't get to be a four star general by being.
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B
He was actually a three star general.
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A
Oh, a three star general, okay. Yeah. You get promoted, you probably know something. And he worked his way up through the Obama and Biden administrations as well as Bush.
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B
He was also commander of jsoc, if I believe, which is. Yeah, all the special operations.
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A
Special ops, yeah, yeah. He's not Flynn, right? Or he's not crazy like Flynn or my God. And so in this meeting Trump says, general, what do you think? And Kaine is typical military guy. He's not going to come out. And I saw this time and again, right? And this is what the j. I can never not take a swipe at them. This is what, like the JFK conspiracy. People don't understand. You have to know how to read a document, you have to know how to read words. That sounds silly, but they don't, Right? These guys are never going to come out and say that's a dumbass idea, President Trump or whatever, Right? They give you unveiled ways, they tell you what they're really thinking. But then they also say, but we could do this. And so Keynes said, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell and their plans are not well developed. They know they need us and that's why they're hard selling. That's actually not that cryptic. That's actually not very subtle when you think about it. So he's saying you really can't trust Netanyahu and you shouldn't really believe what he says. But Trump didn't care. Trump's really only concerns were killing the Ayatollah and blowing shit up. Must be this, what they, you know, fancy words were like projection of power and diminishing Iran's capabilities. And he just wants to blow shit up because he's like a sixth grade boy with firecrackers. Trump is the creepy kid who like blows up frogs with firecrackers and shit like that. Cain, ironically too, Cain earlier, like a few years earlier had Been optimistic about being able to actually defeat Iran decisively. But when the reality. And that's easy to do when it's not like looking. You're not looking at it in the face when it's not on the table. But now that it was a reality, Cain became really cautious in this presentation with Trump. He said he. He gave what. And the New York Times used the word alarming. And I don't know if they made that up or if that came from somebody in the room, somebody in the Pentagon, I don't know. But it was described as an alarming military assessment that a major campaign against Iran would terribly deplete stockpiles of American weapons, especially missile interception interceptors, which they've been sending to Ukraine and Israel in large measure. Right. Which has happened. And Cain said that there's no way we can easily replenish this stuff. And Cain invoked. Guess what he said Iran would do if the United States started war? They would block the Strait of Hormuz. It's not like Trump didn't even know this. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff brought it up at this, like, pivotal meeting, and he flagged that if that happened, he didn't know what the US Would be able to do. Trump dismissed that. He said, the war's not even going to get that far. It'll be over. He envisioned, as you pointed out, a Venezuela operation where they would get rid of Khomeini and the leadership.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And then the next shah would become like the new Delsey Rodriguez. And again, I don't like that. But there is really this kind of cultural ignorance is important in this particular case. Right. It really is.
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B
Right.
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A
And Iran is in Venezuela, so it's, it's not shocking. But Trump just dismissed the possibility. Right. He thought it'd be a quick war and he believed that. What had happened last June, was it the June war or July 25th? I can't.
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B
The 12 day war, the 16 day war.
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A
But, yeah, he. And remember, at that time, Iran responded, but they, like, told everybody ahead of time where they were going to shoot their missiles and stuff. It was basically a way to say, we can do this, but we're not gonna. So Trump said, the war will be over by then. Cain didn't take a stand. And this is what generally you see. This is the kind of give and take. And so, like, people could. The Oliver Stone crew would look at this and say, see, Cain was all in. No, Cain said, my job isn't to tell you what to do. And if you believe in the military chain of command, it's not right. His job is just to point out the risks and possibilities, which he did.
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B
The other thing about the 16. The 12 day war.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which is it goes along with Israeli strategy that they've been using a couple of different theaters, which is they negotiate and then they kill the people that are negotiating. Right?
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A
Yeah. Which is also Hezbollah, Lebanon, Hamas, Hamas, you name it. This is what they do. And it's worked really well. They've killed a lot of people. But obviously the region is not under Israeli control and it's less stable than it has been, I don't know, 1973, maybe. Maybe forever. Right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And so during these meetings, Cain himself would offer, like, a scenario. We could do this. And then he would say rhetorically. And then what? Trump doesn't want to hear. And then what he just hears, blow shit up. Blow shit up. Blow shit up. Put a firecracker in the frog.
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B
That'd be over in two days.
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A
Two weeks.
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B
Two weeks. Two weeks.
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A
Now, Kaine wasn't like Milley. Milley did take Trump on kind of face to face. Kaine didn't do that, which again, is not unusual if you look at, like, Earl Wheeler in the Vietnam era. Didn't take LBJ on directly. These guys really didn't. It was very clear, too, what they were saying. And Johnson and his advisors understood that Trump and Exif obviously aren't capable of that. Trump listened to the tactical analysis. We have these weapons. These weapons can do this. These weapons can be deployed here. Just the kind of tactics in a military campaign. He ignored strategy, whether it should be done, whether it was a good idea, what the longer consequences were. There are people who attribute, like, strategic analysis traits to Trump. The kind of 3D chess. Right. This is part of nuclear deterrence. And this bluffing means. No, he's. He's as crazy as a shithouse rat. I've never said that. I've studied this shit. And, like, I'm reluctant to go along with, like, I always, like, most of my fights come with lefties who say shit like that.
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B
Right.
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A
In this case, there's no rationale for what he's doing. There just isn't. Other than he's crazy as shithouse rat.
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B
Right.
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A
There's nothing to this. This is a guy full of vitriol and anger, clearly mentally unstable and deranged. And I'm talking about heg SAP. Right. Trump even worse. Right.
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B
Dumb and not. Has no experience or school schooling and diplomacy or military strategy.
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A
Neither of them. No. I thought they were playing the game of Risk. Like you could get a bunch of high school kids who play Risk and they would understand this. Like I've often said, like, I could have given to my class a map of the region. I probably have before I used to teach, I'd have a map up of the Middle east and the Iran Iraq war. I remember the Iran Irv War. I'd say, this is the Shah Al Arab, this is the Strait of Hormuz, blah, blah, blah. Like high school kids could figure out, oh, they could stop traffic, they could stop oil, not these guys. So Trump ignored any discussion of strategy, focused just on what weapons the US had and what they could do, what they could blow up, right? That canceled out everything else. Kaine never directly told Trump that war with Iran was a bad idea, although colleagues in the room, in the Pentagon military office, military officers, uniformed people, not Pentagon civilians, believed that Cain, that was exactly what Cain thought. They believed that Cain thought this is a bad idea. And again, if you look at, I called in Vietnam, I called it the non sequitur, where they would give you these long reports full of like really bleak analyses. This is wrong, this is bad. The enemy has this. We're not capable of doing this. And then at the very end, it was like a non segregated say, we've got them, we're going to win this thing. And often it was based on we have so many soldiers and so many beef 52s and so much artillery. And that's so it's the same thing. And because of that, Trump went to war. And we've, we've definitely have seen what's going on since then, right? Hegseth at the beginning of the war, and we'll talk about the war itself in a minute. But I think it's also important to note at the very beginning of the war, Hegseth came out and again began these pronouncements about how the US Was going to fight this war and they weren't going to have their hands constrained and they weren't going to be held to the niceties of international law. There were reports of commanders in the area who were telling soldiers that they had to fight this war for Jesus against the infidels. And those reports were making it back. They were actually getting a lot of GI hotlines were getting filled with people complaining about that. At one point he said, we're going to fight this war with no quarter. No quarter means like no rules of war. Stanley McChrystal had been a commander in Iraq at that point, said that those are the Words of potential war criminal right there. And McChrystal then said, this is pretty good. The Secretary of Defense is a disgraced major who was kicked out of the D.C. national Guard. These guys, when they get into it, they have great cat fights when they go out. It's pretty awesome actually. It's mean girls in high school or something like that. They can really. So Trump went to war. Hegseth immediately starts this macho posturing, right? The first night of the war, the US attacked and hit a girls school, killing about 170 children.
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B
And that manob.
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A
The manob school and GI hotlines were flooded after that. And I think GI hotlines have reported people who are talking, asking for information about conscientious objectives that they're citing. Two things. One, a lot of said, a lot of people said, I don't want to die for Israel. But the biggest issue they've said by far is that the shelling of the girls school, the killing of those little girls made them like worn out. And I know it's hard because everyone said this is the way we fight our war. Yeah, of course you do. We just talked about the anniversary of Mili not that long ago. This is how the US fights its wars. Right. But somehow that did strike people differently. Maybe because of social media, maybe because of what we've just seen in Gaza.
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B
Yeah, I, I would actually say Gaza has a lot to do with it.
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A
Yes.
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B
We had a US service member kill himself self immolate.
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A
I'm sure they're familiar with Aaron Bushnell even though the media doesn't really talk about it. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So the US began this bombardment and it was overwhelming. And they killed the Ayatollah Khamenei as long as, as well as many other ranking officials, including, and this is not insignificant, a lot of diplomats, anyone who was capable of going to the peace table and discussing this was targeted. And that is Israel's M.O. israel's been doing that for years. Israel is always afraid peace could break out. Like JFK in Vietnam when they killed zm. Right. You kill people who are willing to negotiate and may find a solution to this short of what you really want. You had to get rid of Diem because he was talking to the Northern Vietnamese and if that happened, then Vietnam would all be communist within five, six years. And in the same regard, the Israelis, you know who, and I'm not saying that the US want the war for Israel. This has been building up forever. American politicians have targeted Iran as public enemy number one forever. They boasted about being Willing to blow it up. Both McCain and Hillary Clinton did that in 2008. Kamala Harris did it in 2024.
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B
Kamala Harris, Hillary did it in 2015 too.
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A
Hillary and Kamala and Biden and all of these people. Obama, I don't give him credit for much, but the jcpo, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Agreement, actually was a step backward. It was a de escalatory. It actually held Iran to terms way stronger than anything that they're going to come out of this with. And despite the narrative, the basically overwhelming media narrative that Iran never upheld its inside of this, actually it did. And in fact, I was shocked the other night. I saw a clip. Was it Blinken or Jake? Jake Sullivan, I think was on that liberal icon Jon Stewart show. And Jon Stewart kept saying, you know, Ron broke this. Biden broke the treaty. And Jake Sullivan finally said, no, it didn't. Like they actually, they had. We had I don't know how many inspections of Iran. So there actually was an agreement. I got to give Obama props for that and for his Cuba policy, which is probably going to be obliterated very soon as well. Right. So the war began. Khamenei and many other officials were killed and it didn't matter. It didn't matter. Right. As military officials predicted and had told Trump, Iran fought back and fought back more than I think any of us expected. Right. To be sure, Iran is getting pummeled. I can't remember, I should have written down just the damage done.
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B
Over 20,000 missions have been flown over by these guys in the US and
- [29:39]
A
that's the number of buildings blown up and the number of munitions plants. I think the number of people killed is 2,3000 somewhere on there, maybe 20,000 wounded. But Iran has struck back. And I don't, because I think quite often we're getting this. Like the US Is getting killed in the war. Iran is getting hit very hard and suffering significant damage. Like that needs to be said, right? But like In Vietnam, the US killed 2,3 million Vietnamese. It blew up Vietnam, it dropped 4.6 million tons of bombs. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. And I think that's what we're seeing here as well, which is. Is really important. Iran struck back. It's attacked Israel. It's hit Israel and many strategic parts. Right. It's hit Dimona, it's hit the city where the Iron Dome is located. And this is their way of saying, dude, we can do what we want. They've attacked bases all over the region in every state of the Gulf. Now the GCC has been attacked. This is another one of Jon Stewart's. Why are they blowing everybody else up? He's attacking Iran. It's like, dumbass. Because there's American bases all over the region, idiot. Sometimes when liberals think that they're like, you see the steam coming out of their ears. They've hit American installations. They hit like the CIA compound in Riyadh. They disabled the LNG factories in Qatar. What did they got rid of like 20% of the capability. And that's the. Isn't that the biggest producer of LNG especially?
- [30:59]
B
It's the biggest provider of. To Europe in particular.
- [31:02]
A
Yeah. Fertilizers as well, which are really essential in Asia as well as in America with American farmers. Right. They've attacked US Businesses, banks, Amazon.
- [31:12]
B
They've been data centers and in the data centers in the Gulf states.
- [31:16]
A
And then, of course. And who could have seen this coming? Except everybody. Who was that meeting in February? They closed Hormuz. Right. Iran has shown the ability to keep fighting, even though Trump. How many times has Trump said, the war is over, we've defeated them. They said that like 10, 15 times. I think, like every other day. Right.
- [31:31]
B
Yeah. The one other thing the Iranians have done is they've mobilized like pro Iranian militias in places like Iraq, Hezbollah and Lebanon, Houthi in Yemen. And so it's also worth noting that there's also, like, forces within some of these other Middle Eastern countries that are like, have joined the fight.
- [31:51]
A
They've also unleashed the Arab world and persons on Arabs. But like all of these governments there, they're obviously monarchies and dictatorships and they're really not democratic institutions. But what they now have is millions of people in each of those in. In that area, many millions of people in the entire region who are now pissed off. And they're not just seeing this as Iran, they're also conflating this, as it should be, with Palestine. We're not really talking about Palestine through all this, which is really the keystone to the entire thing, the pivot point of all this. So they've unleashed these immense levels of popular opposition to these various monarchies, to these various states. And clearly, like the Saudis, they can suppress this. They can just go in and kill people or do whatever they want. Also the other thing they've done is there. There really was significant opposition to the government in Iran. That's basically gone now. Except for the American expats and Tarangilis, the. The handful of people who may support the Shah, the Pahlevi, those People who were fighting against the government just months ago, they don't want the US Coming in there and blowing up their country. So if there was going to be a popular movement against the Islamic Republic, there's no chance of it now. Trump has made that impossible.
- [33:06]
B
My understanding is the Israelis were also hitting the homes of some of those opposition leaders, too, because they. Because they actually felt like the opposition could be as much of a factor in resisting whatever comes next that the Israelis and the US Want as well.
- [33:21]
A
Yeah. There was talk early on of the Kurds. The US could arm the Kurds and they would fight against the regime, which obviously was never going to happen. Trump admitted that he gave money to the Kurds. And it's genius, right throughout this. And I don't want to keep going on. It's. I think it's a really important talk. It's fascinating to me. But throughout this, we've seen an increase in criticism from the. Within the military. Now, publicly, it comes from retired officers like McChrystal, James Mattis, who was Trump's secretary of defense. And he and Trump have been on bad terms ever since then. I don't remember if McMaster has said anything. I think he's made some kind of
- [34:00]
B
John Kelly says stuff pretty.
- [34:02]
A
John Kelly, Yeah. All the people around in Trump, one,
- [34:05]
B
Kelly and Barry McCaffrey has said stuff.
- [34:07]
A
McCaffrey, McChrystal, they were against Trump from the beginning. Randy Manor, who I wasn't really familiar with, I'd heard the name before, has become like a real media star. Right. He was the vice chair of the JCS. He's called Hegseth a war criminal. He's criticized U.S. strategy. He said that this can't succeed, along with many other. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff. Chief of staff. He's been like a celebrity, a lefty media celebrity for what, two decades now? And he's been out there doing the circuit as well. So things weren't going well. And then Hegseth and Trump, as they do, threw gasoline on the fire. On April 2, Hegseth fired the Army Chief of staff, Randy George. There were various anecdotes given for this in the media, all probably true to some degree. George had been opposed to Hegseth blocking promotions, especially of black and female officers. George was an ally of the Army Secretary, Daniel Driscoll. And Driscoll's main supporter in the administration was J.D. vance, Yale classmate. So Hegseth saw George and Driscoll and Vance as his opposition. And it's Pretty clear. I'm not going to. I don't want to ever say anything nice about JD Vance, but apparently Vance did have misgivings about this, at least more than the other guys did. And then, of course, George seemed to be very wary of what Hegseth was doing in. In. In Iran. And then also, and this didn't get as much attention, he also fired General William Green, who was the chief of chaplains. And by all accounts, Green was uneasy about this increased Christian nationalism that Hegseth was promoting throughout the military. Right. And then this. So there's a great deal of consternation. And then Trump again keeps adding to it with his tweets, Right. I'm going to attack and destroy Iran. And Tuesday is power plant day, and we're going to hit the water supply and we're going to go after. He's promising, wipe out a whole civilization. And then that was the tipping point when he says Iran is going to cease to be a civilization. And at that point, the ceasefire was announced. If not, it'd be interesting to see what would have happened, because there were reports at that time and none of them were credited. And I haven't really been able to follow them up. And the US Media, of course, does a shitty job on all this, too. There were reports at that point that several fairly high ranking commanders had said, we're not going to do it. So there's clearly. And it's not out of the question. That's one of the reasons Trump backed off and agreed to these really bogus talks. The talks themselves are farcical.
- [36:49]
B
It's also when we see the former generals and admirals really taken to the airwaves.
- [36:54]
A
Yeah.
- [36:54]
B
Calling it war crimes to really denouncing it, which there's obviously a channel in between active duty brass and former brass going on.
- [37:03]
A
Oh, they talk to each other all the time. Absolutely. I mean. Oh, yeah, they were. They served in their command. They know each other very well. Obviously. Absolutely. And that's something that I think when we talk about Millie, we pointed that out quite a bit. Like, even though Millie left, I mean, a lot of those guys were promoted and worked with him. I don't know what his reputation is. I don't think it's that bad. But they talk. Absolutely. And they know what's going on when they, they see these TV shows. And in fact, there were media reports at the time that Hegseth would be confronted by a revolt inside the Pentagon. We see any details or anything like that, but it's not a stretch to think that really was the case. One reporter said that, that he had heard that there were Pentagon lawyers who were going to refuse to approve the targets that the White House wanted to destroy. They were going to do it anyway. Right. One of the reporters, after Hegseth gave his, one of his no quarter speeches, said, he said, I had military, former military lawyers say that they were talking to current military lawyers. And these lawyers were going to resist inside. They were not going to sign off on a target list that involved war crimes. This is a reporter who'd been in the field before in the Middle east with American troops. He said, I can tell you from my embeds and from my own time in the military in embeds and the people I've known in the military. The US Military does not intentionally commit war crimes, period. We know it does, but point taken. It does not engage in that kind of war fighting. That's one of our qualities, is democracy, blah, blah, blah. There's no question we've made huge mistakes in this war. But I just. So I know how we did it as a democracy. All right, that's. But the point is they're putting that out there because they think it's important. And so it's. I think it's. It would be hard even if we don't have the documents and we're not going to have them with Trump. You probably. They're probably destroyed. They're probably shredded already, or maybe they're already in a bathroom at Mar a Lago. And that kind of takes us back to the top. We could start talking about this, but that kind of takes us back to the top, which I think is really important and I think in many ways more important. Right. So the resistance, if you want to call it that, or the dissenter opposition, whatever you want to call it, of these officers is critical and it may be the only thing keeping us from total annihilation at this point. But I think the resistance of soldiers can't be understated. I was interviewed recently and I said that in the Vietnam war, if the US had given an order to cross the 17th parallel and invade Northern Vietnam, I suspect you would have had a mass mutiny on your hands. Huge numbers of American soldiers would have said, no, we're not going to do that. Go screw yourself. The number of calls coming into hotlines is increasing. Morale is low. Nobody could deny that the Gerald Ford, the USS Gerald Ford, the carrier was monkey wrenched, sabotaged probably twice with a plumbing crisis. And then a fire, a laundry ring fire. Yeah.
- [39:47]
B
And then too much land yeah.
- [39:50]
A
And then, as I said before, the hotlines mostly cite the bombing of the girls school. Right. Somebody they interviewed who was from the American Enterprise Institute, very conservative institution. Right. Think tank said that much of the turmoil dragged from Trump dragging the military into culture wars and creating the perception that people, that women and people of color haven't earned leadership responsibilities on our military. And that, as I've said before, this is a racist country. And I've been around people in the military a little bit. It's not. Maybe now that was a while ago, but what I saw there was different. There's a chain of command. So you'll see white guys saluting black officers, and they're just, like I said, 40% of the military is not white. It's one of the few areas, like civil service jobs in the civilian sphere. It's one of the areas where people were able to be promoted. Maybe not at the same level. I'm not going to ever say that there wasn't racism in the military in Vietnam. In the first years of Vietnam, the vast majority of people killed were black infantrymen. But it all had. This is a form of social advancement. And if that's blocked, you're telling like 40% of the people there that we don't want you. And you're also telling a lot of vets. And I have, like, you and I know people like that who come back and they're really angry about this. And they'll tell you these stories that'll choke you up about being in the field alongside a black soldier or a woman or a Trian soldier. One guy knows a. Wait, a Trian soldier, not unit. She's like, she saved our lives. They don't care at that point. And Hag said being the clown that he is, would never have any understanding of that. Trump obviously wouldn't either. And this. And I think the military itself sees this as a crisis, too. They've recently raised the age limit to 40, which they did in, what, 03 and 04, I believe. Remember, they couldn't get people. There's a shortage, some manpower shortage. They've raised it to 40. I think they've also said if you have a marijuana conviction, they don't care anymore.
- [41:38]
B
They're also reinstating the registering for the draft.
- [41:41]
A
It's registration for the draft, not what they're doing is making it automatic. You. But I think. Did you, like, have to. Because draft registration has been around since 1980. 81. Jimmy Carter did it actually. Did you actually have to register? Did like, they just Take it from your voting thing, or you actually had to do it, or those.
- [41:56]
B
The late 80s. But yeah, but yeah.
- [41:59]
A
So now it's just like they can't do it for voting. Automatic registration, but they can do it for this. I didn't. What the hell? That was 1980. Who gave a shit? Right?
- [42:07]
B
Yeah.
- [42:07]
A
But what is done, I think is basically deter people, maybe a fairly good number of people from seeing the military as a possible occupation. Right now. Hagseth wants a military full of white supremacist Christian crackpots like himself. Right. As we've seen, this isn't a brains type operation. These aren't the best and the brightest. And so Hegseth, I think, is. Would rather be the secretary of culture wars than actually lead an army, lead a military establishment.
- [42:37]
B
Yeah. It seems like he just actually doesn't know how and that he's constantly faced with this institutional opposition and pits him against, like, people, which he gets rid of and then someone else rises to oppose him. Just reading between the lines of the reporting about all of the difficulty that he's had even maintaining a chief of staff and all the leaks and everything that comes out of the Defense Department, it seems like most of the leaks I see that come out of this administration are a lot of them come out of the Defense Department partially because Hegseth is just in over his head.
- [43:10]
A
Yeah. And they're going after.
- [43:12]
B
Besides being a crackpot, he's also not smart. He's never run a. This is one of the largest institutions in the world.
- [43:19]
A
Yeah. He's never run any. He's been on a desk at Fox News. Right. Which is probably going to be the background of the next attorney general. Although Megyn Kelly's out now. She's not going to get a cap in a position. No. Yeah. So here we are. It's really bleak. And in normal times, I would think that the dam wouldn't burst, it wouldn't break. It's obviously good to see that inside the Pentagon, these folks are saying, okay, no more. But you also have an administration that doesn't give a shit. And liberals love to say, call Trump Taco, which I hate, chicken out. The guy is. He has this private militia grabbing people off the streets. They're killing people and surreptitiously taking away and hiding the murderers. He's obliterating Iran. They're blowing up girls, schools. They're blowing up power plants. He's threatening civilization every day. Coming any chickens out? Yeah. He hasn't annihilated the whole world, so he's that's ridiculous. So that's why I'd like to think the dam won't burst. But you're dealing with somebody who's just. I don't even know what to say. So deranged.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah. And the. And the other thing is that after the last week when he made those comments about destroying the Iranian civilization, and then all of a sudden we have a ceasefire, which was at a certain level, was to be expected, but the peace. The ceasefire talks fell apart and now they're going to blockade the Iranians. Blockade. And. And the other thing that was like a big part of the media, which is what partially what we talked about when we talked with Zach Henson, is that there's going to be a ground invasion. And they were mobilizing troops to do the ground invasion. Randy George is actually was the highest ranking member of the army who was like, responsible for getting troops and equipment to that supposed ground invasion. And they fired him in the middle of that. But what do you think is going to happen now that the ceasefire talks have fallen apart and the Iranians are like, not going to. Aren't going to budge? Are we going to, or is this just lip service?
- [45:20]
A
Tell 10,000 soldiers, by the way, you're going into Iran. Right? The other part of this, and I didn't bring it up because we still don't know, is like, the media is not talking about that alleged rescue mission. The guy walked 110 miles in uncharted territory in 24 hours. And the US lost six planes on a rescue mission in an area nearly
- [45:38]
B
deployed hundreds of people.
- [45:39]
A
Right. In an area where there's enriched uranium underground. Right. And I gotta believe when there have to be. The Pentagon just had to look and say, what the fuck is he doing? Yeah, blockading a blockade, that's like 3D chess, right? Checkmating your checkmate. Right?
- [45:56]
B
They're not talking about what.
- [45:59]
A
Go ahead, you go. No, they're blockading a waterway that's closed,
- [46:04]
B
which was open before he started the war.
- [46:06]
A
Open before they started blowing it up. Putting a dam in on a dry crick to use the old thing. My mom would take closing the barn door after the horses ran out. Like it's, you know, I've never, I've thought. I think George Bush was a dumbass and he's dumb as boots, but I never said that about Cheney and Baker and Wolfowitz and Rum. So I don't think they're dumb. I think they're malignant, but I don't think they're dumb. What you have here in Trump and Hagseth are two of the more preternaturally stupid people. I used to think Agnew, Spiro Agnew and some of Nixon's people were like dumb as a pile of boots, but these guys, I would not let them clean the bathrooms at McDonald's.
- [46:44]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [46:46]
A
Anyway, what this does is ensure that there will be more VVAW types. 55 years ago. Dewey Canyon, that's also Dewey Canyon. But it's really worth checking out because it's pretty cool. It's really. It wasn't by far the biggest. It was like 20,000 people were there. Soldiers went there, they threw their medals away. This is when John Kerry really started his political career. He testified before Congress. Kerry's kind of a NATO. He's a NATO defense hawk. Right. But he made a very eloquent presentation before Congress. Right. Very poignant words. He said, how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? And so Dewey Canyon 3 was, I think, really critical. And that followed on the heels of the Winter Soldier investigation where soldiers went around the country talking about the war crimes they'd seen and committed in Vietnam. And we already have these anti war groups. They're already up and running and I think they're just going to get bigger in the coming years. You and I both know people who were essentially apolitical at best, who are now like really pissed off.
- [47:46]
B
And one of the ones that we've had on the show, I mean on the show a couple times About Face, which was previously known as Iraq Vets against the War, they actually did their own Winter Soldier investigation in the late 2000s and while the Iraq war was going on.
- [48:00]
A
Yeah, the media is useless, the Democrats are useless. But I think Wall street hasn't done anything. And it's sad. Like, and I'm not saying we need to rely on these people. I think what we're seeing in the streets and like Minneapolis is that's where it lies. Right? That's where the action is. Or in LA or anywhere, Chicago, many, all these cities all over the country, that's where it's happening. Right. And they, that's. They deserve the attention. But it's nice if you do have people within the Pentagon or if you have a Democratic leadership that was assisting you, that was creating some space and you're not going to get that. Seeing these soldiers resist is inspiring. Hopefully Seth can't fire everybody. Hopefully that this growing, I think dissent, this growing resistance in the military will just continue and hopefully prevent Trump from blowing up the world. But that may be a coin flip at this point.
- [48:52]
B
Right.
- [48:53]
A
So I keep going back to Smedley Butler and David Shoup and Anthony Zinni. There's nice history of commanders, military commanders who then became anti imperialist and we'll see where that takes us. But I think this is an important story and hopefully we'll keep talking about it and it'll have a positive outcome.
- [49:14]
B
Yep, folks, you've been listening to the Green and Red podcast talking about military dissent, officers descent. If you like what you're hearing, first thing you could do is check out Bob's book Masters of War and you
- [49:28]
A
can actually, you could even have it. Is it. Yeah.
- [49:30]
B
If you send us a 20, 25, $35 donation. If you email us at greenredpodcastmail, we will get you a copy with a, with a friendly donation. If you like what you're hearing, please check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Blue Sky. If you're watching this on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. If you're listening to this on audio platform, give us a rate and review. It helps with the algorithms. And if you really like us, please check us out@greeningredpodcast.org and hit the support button or become a patron@patreon.com greenredpodcast and until we speak again, everybody go make trouble and misbehave because this is actually the moment we're in, is the moment to be doing that. So we'll talk to you again soon. Bye,
- [50:30]
A
Sam.