Afghanistan and the case for war
In the 30 April 2011 episode, Gary Johnson described his own position on the wars that followed the September 11 attacks. He said he had been opposed to American involvement in Iraq, believing that military surveillance could have detected any Iraqi rollout of weapons of mass destruction and that an invasion would produce a civil war with no end. Afghanistan he distinguished from Iraq: he was initially supportive, on the reasoning that responding to an attack is what the military is for, and that the United States had been attacked by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. He said the country was at war with bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and should remain vigilant to the terrorist threat, and that going into Afghanistan was totally warranted Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
Johnson then placed a time limit on that achievement. He said that after about six months in Afghanistan, the United States had done Al-Qaeda a number and had effectively eliminated them from Afghanistan, and that this had happened ten years earlier. From that he argued for withdrawal: he advocated getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, and said that the problems those areas would face after a pullout would be the same problems under discussion 25 years later if withdrawal were deferred that long. He also objected to building roads, schools, bridges, highways and hospitals in the two countries while borrowing 43 cents out of every dollar to do it, and to further American deaths there Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
The same episode shows Johnson extending the argument to Libya, where he said he was opposed to what the United States was doing A through Z. He asked where the congressional authorization was, where in the Constitution it says that because we do not like a foreign leader we should topple him, and where the threat to national security had been six weeks earlier; he said he did not think it existed. He also asked whether five other countries in the Middle East warranted the same military action, and whether the United States was injecting itself into a civil war. Bob Zadek, in his own framing, observed that America had rebels in the Confederate Army in 1861 and rebels known as the American Revolutionaries in 1776, and said the word rebels is not very helpful; he called the approach in Libya chaotic and intellectually dishonest Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
9/11 attribution and the defense budget
The 18 June 2011 episode with Nick Gillespie contains the excerpts’ most direct statement on attribution. Responding to a caller who had invoked architects and engineers for 9/11 truth, Gillespie said the implication that the attacks were known about or engineered by people other than Al-Qaeda is nuts, and that it is known that Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and his confederates were behind the attacks; he said there is no reason to question that and that to do so is its own form of insanity Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Gillespie then agreed with the caller on defense spending. He said defense spending since 2000 had essentially doubled, that in 2000 in current dollars the United States spent about $400 billion a year on defense and was spending closer to $800 billion, and that Obama’s ten-year figure would be closer to a trillion dollars. He said the country was in at least three elective wars with no clear endpoint and no clear objective, and that those should be cut. He added that conservatives treat any defense spending as exempt from the corporate-welfare charge when it is not, and that Democrats are just as bad on the question Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Zadek’s own contribution to that segment was terminological: he said the defense spending is actually offense spending, that the federal department was originally called the Department of War and changed its name with consolidation in 1947 to the Department of Defense, and that only the name changed while the mission remained that of a Department of War. Gillespie replied that this was about as close to the truth as it needs to get, and went on to say that the United States had been in Afghanistan more than twice as long as it had been in World War II, that nobody knows what the country is still doing there, that Iraq had been spinning in the sand for years, and that Libya was the latest in a bizarre adventure without even a fig leaf of constitutionally required congressional authorization Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State
The 29 June 2014 episode with Ivan Eland supplies the excerpts’ only genetic claim about a franchise. Eland said that Al-Qaeda in Iraq originated as a result of the American invasion of that country, that the invasion fractured an artificial country which had been held together only by a dictator, and that Al-Qaeda in Iraq had by then morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which was taking over the country. He framed this as an argument for going back further in history than Americans usually do to find root causes, and he criticized those who said Obama had not left enough forces in Iraq by saying the question had to begin with going in in the first place United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Eland placed the same method against the Second World War. He said World War II was World War I, Part Two, that World War I was the more historically important event because it took the United States down the road of a new foreign policy, and that Woodrow Wilson’s demand for the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II opened the path toward Hitler taking power later. He said that had the United States stayed out of World War I, Germany would probably have won on a 15-round decision rather than a knockout, and that the borders would have been readjusted as in earlier European wars. He also said Roosevelt declined to negotiate with the Japanese and had cut off their oil and metals in response to their intervention in China, and that there are root causes to such events United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Al-Qaeda as a trivial entity
The 14 February 2022 episode with John Mueller offers the excerpts’ most dismissive assessment. Mueller said that after 9/11 everybody apparently in intelligence thought a bigger attack was coming and that the threat could be existential, that he never figured out what existential meant, and that Al-Qaeda Central had proved to be pretty much like Lee Harvey Oswald — a fundamentally trivial entity that got horribly lucky once China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller’s broader argument in that segment concerned the systematic exaggeration of threats. He said that although governments exaggerate threats they are not always successful, citing efforts to exaggerate the threat about Russia and Ukraine that were not selling well, and that every threat successfully sold has then been exaggerated. His principal case was the Cold War: the argument that because the Soviet Union had allowed North Korea to attack South Korea it was hell-bent on conquest and would soon be willing to attack Western Europe, which is why NATO, previously a thing on paper, suddenly escalated massively and particularly militarily. He said George Kennan and Bernard Brodie, two important defense analysts, held that the Soviets never had the slightest interest in anything resembling World War II again, and that information from the Soviet archives after the Cold War indicated they had no plans whatever to attack Western Europe China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
On counter-terrorism specifically, Mueller said he had done a lot of studies of counter-terrorism expenditures in the United States, which had been about $2 trillion, not counting the wars overseas. He said that for that money to be successful from a cost-benefit standpoint, one would have to demonstrate that it stopped one $4 billion attack every two weeks for every year since 9/11, and that it had instead been an incredible waste of money to deal with a threat that was really quite minor. He said the number of people who die from Islamist terrorism in the United States is about five per year since 9/11, maybe six, which he said does not demonstrate an existential threat China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Across episodes: the same premise, three moments
The excerpts show the same question argued at three moments. In 2011, Johnson and Gillespie both accepted that Al-Qaeda and bin Laden were responsible for 9/11 while disputing the wars conducted in response — Johnson by saying Al-Qaeda had been effectively eliminated from Afghanistan after about six months, Gillespie by rejecting 9/11 conspiracy claims outright and turning to the doubling of defense spending. In 2014, Eland shifted the object of attention from Al-Qaeda Central to its Iraqi franchise, arguing that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was created by the invasion and had morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In 2022, Mueller went further than any earlier guest, calling Al-Qaeda Central a fundamentally trivial entity that got horribly lucky once and quantifying the counter-terrorism response at about $2 trillion against roughly five or six American deaths a year from Islamist terrorism. What changed is the status of the organization in the argument: from a real enemy whose elimination had already been accomplished, to a byproduct of American policy, to a minor threat inflated into an existential one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Al-Qaeda’s founding, its leadership beyond Osama bin Laden, its doctrine, its finances, or its structure, and they name no date for its formation. They do not identify the specific attacks attributed to it beyond the 11 September attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and they give no account of the Afghanistan war’s conduct or outcome after the period each speaker addresses. No excerpt states what congressional authorization, if any, was cited for the wars discussed, nor what any court has held about them.