Dave Smith: belief

Transcript context

…You reminded me with Netanyahu that one of the goals I have with the podcast is to have the kind of conversation that a historian would find useful 20 years from now, which is tough to do because you’re going to get punished for it. Because it’s mostly I want to reveal as much information as possible without the signaling, without the… You just want to know who was this person. I think that’s exactly right. And I think this was what Darryl was saying. I think that the part of the awful thing of always using World War II as the next example for the next war is that it’s almost like you’re never… They hate us for our freedom, or Vladimir Putin’s just mad and he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. They always insist that we can never treat our enemies as people and be like this is a real person with real grievances. And even, they might be a fanatic also. I’m not saying they’re not. There are these human qualities to it, and it’s always whatever. Before Obama and Hillary Clinton did the regime change war in Libya, it was all this propaganda. They were like, “He’s buying up Viagra to rape all the women and he’s going to go genocide…”. This guy who had been in power for decades. You know what I mean? And hadn’t done that. And it’s just like, oh, it’s like the way you’re supposed to think about war is almost like these people have been possessed by pure evil. They are monsters, and there’s no talking to them. There’s no dealing with them. It’s just simply this. A good example, just this recent conflict with the Houthis, where you have the Houthis in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia invaded in 2015 with the full backing of the United States of America. And the Houthis maintained power for eight years through that. They maintained power until the Saudis finally gave up. It was literally the Saudis were just killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then the Houthis would get a drone off at one of their oil refineries or something like that. Eventually, they were just doing enough damage that it was like, ah, shit. All right, this isn’t worth it anymore. So, they end it. Anyway. You have this thing. You’re like, if they went through a total war for eight years, what you think, Trump sent in a few tomahawk missiles over there is going to stop them from doing this? But then, they didn’t do anything. And this is according to all reporting on it. They didn’t do anything during the ceasefire. It was only once the ceasefire broke down that they went back to attacking ships again that were coming through. You just see this thing where you’re like… It’s not saying right or wrong or who’s good or bad, it’s like sometimes there’s a diplomatic solution and there’s not a military solution. In this case, you’re like, it just shows you if there was a ceasefire here, these guys will chill out. What do you want to do? Again, do you want to go to total war with it? Because we could overthrow the Houthis, if the US invades Yemen. That’s what it would take. fire here, these guys will chill out. What do you want to do? Again, do you want to go to total war with it? Because we could overthrow the Houthis, if the US invades Yemen. That’s what it would take. It’s like, does anyone here really have the appetite for another catastrophic war in the Middle East against the poorest country in the Middle East? Or we could pursue this diplomatic route, which seemed… I’m just saying, based on the evidence that they weren’t attacking ships during the ceasefire, seems like there could be a diplomatic solution here. There’s just a lot. If you make everybody monsters and they’re not human beings, you can’t do diplomacy with monsters, you can’t negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. To our earlier discussion, maybe there are times where you shouldn’t negotiate or you can’t negotiate with humans, but it’s better if you can. We could use a lot more of that thinking.…

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