from peoria. she could see the community come together and make changes for this community and that is what she learned. i think here in peoria she is becoming more revered and quite frankly because of the work of george of st. clair and others to kind of set the record straight. she was not a hater. she was blunt and opinionated and brilliant but she loved her children, had a traditional life, married woman, in peoria people remember her being brilliant and gifted, there has been reluctance but she didn't care. i am so enmeshed with her and my feminist friends, but she is

thought of more highly all the time. >> when i tune in on the weekends, usually authors are sharing their new releases. >> watching nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. >> on c-span they can have a longer conversation and delve into the subject. >> booktv weekends bring you arthur after author, fascinating people. >> i love booktv and i am a c-span fan. be change we will begin our

program now. can you hear me okay. well, good afternoon and early good afternoon. thank you to everyone who comes to our program today and a special welcome to our speaker, molly mccartney. i am a gm you english professor and i will introduce today's program which is part of the 18th annual literary festival. in my mind, fall for the book is the best extracurricular event, at george mason, there is not a close second. you haven't done so please silence your cell phone. at the end of the program,

helping through the festival, for the chair. and planned future program, thank you for doing that. following today's lecture there will be a book signing outside the door, a service provided by the campus bookstore. in addition, it is cosponsored by national -- the fairfax county democrats fall for the book would not be possible. the book featured today is product of two distinguished career journalists, james mccartney, now deceased and his wife, molly mccartney, for nearly four decades reporter for the chicago daily news, james

covered the principal institutions of the federal government with special emphasis, with 30 countries. including 15 years at the washington post after her husband's death in 2011, molly continued research, writing of the book he was working on in his retirement. the co-authored product, "america's war machine," vested interest, endless conflicts, is a carefully researched and masterfully written description and analysis of the present day complex, and greatly enlarged version of what president eisenhower named with accompanying cautionary remarks,

the military-industrial conflicts that is complex. america's war machine is the most important and timely book. we are fortunate today to be able to learn from its co-author. please give a warm welcome to molly mccartney. [applause] >> thank you very much for that introduction and thank you for coming. i am going to use the slide to illustrate the points i want to make but i want to begin with a description of what i want to talk about and then go into the details. this book is based on jim mccartney's experience including his service in world war ii on

the front lines in france and germany and reporting more than 30 years starting in the early 1960s and continuing until his death in 2011 and because this represents his thinking i want to tell you about his background, came into the newspaper business, his style of reporting, and what he learned from his front row seat of history. i will also talk briefly about how i came to finish the book, and agent and first-class publisher, saint martin's press. then we will talk about the point of the book which covers the things mentioned in the introduction but jim wanted this to be an introduction to the ongoing washington debate, he wanted people to know what he had learned, he wanted people to

care about this issue as much as he did, he wanted people to understand what he had come to understand, to know why it is important, how it affects your pocketbook and why everyone should care about this issue. i will begin with this quotation. naturally the common people don't want war, that is understood. but the people can be brought to the bidding of the leaders. all you have to do, denounce for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. it works the same in any country. the person who said this new something about taking the country to war, he understood militarism, moving people into a patriotic frenzy that can lead to war. does anybody know who said this?

it was not dick cheney. anyone know who said this? it was herman goring, the nazi war criminal who was convicted in nuremberg in 1946, what he described is what dwight eisenhower in his 1961 speech called the military-industrial complex and what jim mccartney and i watched expand in the years since then into a war machine that led the country into endless conflict. most recently and ongoing think of the push for the us to go deeper into syria, think of the endless conflicts, never-ending wars and covert actions in which the us has been involved since the end of world war ii. how does this happen? how in the world does anyone

suggest the us military is under-sized, unready and underfunded, when we outspent the rest of the world? together we spend the more than the rest of the world combined on military and national defense. let's start by looking at the vested interests that result in us wars and intervention. president eisenhower named two of the elements that are part of this machine. what he said, this is a great quote, the councils of government, we must guard against unwanted influence by the military-industrial complex. the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. we have two element of eisenhower's military, the defense contractors as they are

known. jim mccartney covered that speech, and at the time, he was based in washington, explained in detail what eisenhower was talking about. for example you have $25 billion tug-of-war because that was the money involved then. there were 5 parts to the series he wrote. the pressure was on profit and the defense contract for congressional approval of weapons they want to build. lawmakers by for defense, military rivalry involved and how these defense pressures come

down to a 1-way road. what we know from eisenhower is there are two elements to this, it led to jim winning a fellowship to study harvard university for a year. it led him to decide america has an addiction to war. his skepticism of the military, the passion to tell the story out of his own experience. is anybody here 19 years old? in 1943, the middle of world war ii, the world was on fire, and if you are 18 years old, 1943 you are drafted into the

military. think about that. the innocence of that period is hard to capture but one thing that struck me about it, just graduated from high school, has been drafted, doesn't know how to drive a car. i started driving when i was 14 but this was the 1950s. gasoline was rationed, cars were not as common as they are today. if your family had a car you didn't turn it over to your teenage son to go driving, he didn't know how to drive, so he could report for duty in the army. note that his older brother was in the army, had been drafted and that was also in europe. after basic training, jim gets on a troopship with 5000 other

troops, one ship out of new york harbor crashed the atlantic is crossed the atlantic and they end up in southern france, this was four or five month after the day so he was not part of the normandy invasion where so many people died, he was part of the third wave and they get to southern france and their truck north, about 400 miles, this is november, they are wearing their summer uniforms because the military has not been able to catch up and give them winter clothes so he gets out of the truck that brought into this area where you hear the guns going off but they are on the front lines and he looks around and sees the mountain trail with g.i.s carrying stretchers. as they get closer it is clear

what happened, the stretchers have a g.i. who stepped on a shoe bomb which is the ied of the day, it was the size of a cigar box with tnt in it and the lid was propped up and buried just under the ground soil so you step on it and it blows off your foot and the germans were good at this, not that we were not doing things like this but germans knew that if you could take one man out of action, take three or four guys, taking several people fighting troops with this kind of strategy, jim got through, never stepped on a shoe bomb but he was in combat for six month under fire every day living in foxholes trying to stay alive, pushing the germans back into germany. they thought they were going to die and many did.

he thought he was going to die but in late march 1945 a few months before the war endeded, he was hit by shrapnel in germany walking down a road and they heard the german 88 coming in, and i found a picture -- that is jim, sorry and you can see the picture on the left, the time he went into the military and 46, he was 6 feet tall and at that point, a lot to eat on the front line. see if the next slide does it. the way these guns work is they shoot the shells over the enemy on the other side. and when it got close to those guys, it would explode because

it hit something because it exploded, then shrapnel went everywhere. you took cover and on this particular day, walking down the road there was a ditch they threw themselves into the ditch. but recovered. no permanent injuries. and enrolled in michigan state on the g.i. bill. involved in college newspaper, falls in love with journalism and after graduating from michigan state, in northwestern, ran out of money halfway through, this is middle america, not a lot of student loans, his father offered to loan him the

money to finish. he ends up as a reporter with chicago daily news and 1960 get sent to washington and that is how he came to cover eisenhower, he would like to tell people how he heard this speech, you understand when covering that speech nobody was in the oval office with president eisenhower. you watched on tv and followed along, but in listening to this eisenhower talked about the economy, the red scare and the military-industrial complex. jim's reaction was what is this guy talking about you what is the military-industrial complex? how does it work?

why is it dangerous and why should i care? those with the questions in his mind. he was not in position to ask questions and that led to the series of stories i showed you earlier. 1968, moved from chicago daily news the washington bureau, huge chain and became the national security reporter for these papers including the philadelphia inquirer, every paper you can imagine, nothing in the washington post, he began to cover national security. he was like the foreign service because they had no bureau at that point. he thought he was in vietnam, was in and out of the soviet union, saudi arabia, remember, there were no cell phones, no

computers, had a small portable typewriter he carried around with him with a bottle of whiskey to bribe teletype operators to make sure your story got back to washington. briefly we are going to get to the book in a minute but just to show you these are a few press credentials, one of the last ones the reykjavík summit between reagan and gorbachev. these are some of the stories, this is from the 1965 intervention in the dominican republic where president johnson -- you can see the theme of these stories. then we have the vietnam story where he is reporting. reykjavík, this is a column he

wrote in 2005 does america love peace as much as we think? the book which reflects all the things i described is also based on my own experience as a journalist for 5 newspapers including the washington post. my specialty for many years was pocketbook issues, very good experience if you are going to write about this because this is the biggest pocketbook of all so i was able to combine what jim knew about the military-industrial complex with what i knew about dealing with big institutions including big oil. it also helps i studied a lot about the middle east at georgetown university and harvard. i had done a lot of traveling so the result of all this is the book. as i said what the book does, documents the expansion of the

military-industrial complex to include these additional elements. we have 5 altogether. the military, defense contractors, congress, the intelligence community and think tanks and these elements, and he wrote about and documented, part of this book. let's go individually with each of these, starting with congress which supports billions of dollars in military and security spending and a search for votes and campaign contributions, so a good example what happens with congress is the story of the

cargo jet, there are two parts to this story. in 1990, dick cheney who later became vice president, in 1990 he was secretary of defense under george hw bush and cheney, the guy who was over the pentagon and defense operations wanted to purchase 120 of these jets. once they were built the program was supposed to stop because that was all the military needed. congress disagreed. they voted to provide more than the pentagon wanted, they voted to fund 151 and later 180 and these numbers are here because it is hard to follow. that was 1990. the defense secretary is robert

gates, 205 were enough. we don't want anymore. congress voted to fund 223 a cost of 250 million each. [inaudible question] be change sorry. the c-17. a typo, sorry. ignore that. nobody -- i showed this slide repeatedly, you are the first to catch it, the same plane, sorry for the confusion. the question is why did congress do this? why are they giving the military more weapons and airplanes and tanks and ships than the

military? because the c-17 program like a lot of these others is a kind of a welfare program. it supports 650 suppliers, 30,000 jobs in 44 states. it offers jobs for companies, jobs for workers, political support for cooperative lawmakers. if there is a safe boat for any member of congress it is a vote for defense. armament and programs. anyone who fails to vote for those programs and support the defense establishment will be attacked as weak on defense and is going to hear about it in the next election. i am a big fan of superman. i love the bloomberg business news story about the c-17

because this was their headline. it is a bird, it is a plane, it is pork. because that is what it was but this is only one example of how congress force-feed the pentagon. there are a lot of other examples was more ships for the navy then the navy wants, more tanks for the army than the army want. you may remember the story, this is a fairly recent story about the tanks. again, the headline tells you a great deal about it. this is the way cnn played the story. tanks but no tanks. as you know, congress voted to continue making the tanks. why did they do that you queue the little towns where these parts were being made said there goes our economy and they went to their representative in congress and said you have to

keep making these because it will ruin us and if you are a member of congress you can get other members of congress to vote with you to keep those going in your little town because you will vote for him and his program. there is a scratch my back i will scratch yours at work here. i would also mention star wars which was ronald reagan's idea, that program proposed in the mid-1980s has never worked the way it was supposed to, still being funded by every president who has come along since reagan and still being funded even though it hasn't worked. get it into the bureaucracy. some people would say so you are spending on defense, you are giving us jobs. what is wrong with that? the problem is the research shows that you get more jobs with non-defense spending then

you get with defense spending and we know this because the university of massachusetts did a study, $1 billion in federal money, 11,000 military jobs with it, and you get more. and you get more. spend it on education jobs you get more. the bottom line of that study was this quote, spending on the military is a relatively poor source of job creation. okay. let's talk about the intelligence community, this is another major element that can lead to war.

i am talking about a flawed twisted intelligence exaggerated strip. or as it is put here. in the run-up to the iraq war, 2003, president george bush wanted to remove saddam hussein through military action and the case for this invasion was the idea that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that was based on, quote, intelligence that was then twisted to justify the invasion. one of them, the secret notes after their meetings with officials of the bush administration that said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

we have to show the public why we are doing this and make the intelligence be the basis of our actions. if you think about it, it should not be a surprise that the intelligence community taylor's information. if you work for somebody, give the boss what he wantss or you will not have a job for very long. i was at a dinner party a few months ago where i made this point knowing there was a cia guy at the dinner and wondering how he would react to what i said and when i finished he said you are right, exactly right, give the boss what he wants or you will be reassigned, i will talk about twisted intelligence, the consequences of people who go up against the establishment

on issues like this, this is about the beautiful blonde spy, you may have read the story but it started with president bush telling the nation in his state of the union message in january 2003 right before we went into iraq that the british learned saddam hussein had recently bought significant quantities of uranium from africa. ambassador by the name of joseph wilson happened to be married, who wrote an op-ed and appeared in the new york times challenging what bush had said. wilson had been sent specifically to africa to see if there was any truth to this end what he said was it wasn't

there. one week after this column appeared in the new york times, columnist named robert novak published an article about wilson's wife valerie and the fact she worked for the cia, he ruined her job and all of her contact people who were subject to all sorts of things which i don't know if anyone died as a result of this but there was fear it would. much longer story to this, scooter libby who worked for vice president cheney was convicted because he lied about the cover-up and was sent and served time in prison. this twisted intelligence plays into the way in which we sometimes take actions based on information that is totally wrong and i will summarize. there was a so-called missile gap in the kennedy

administration which turned out to be false. there was failure to perceive a erection of the berlin wall in 1961 and failure to perceive its fall in 1989. may have been alive when the wall came down, remember how everybody was so surprised, and failure to perceive the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 and failure to perceive the terrorist attacks in 2001. we will talk about the think tanks. when president eisenhower made that speech in 1961 there were very few think tanks, there were a few but not many. they turned policy papers but not big players. today there are 1800 think

tanks, 400 of them in and around washington and they don't think, they justify according to the critics, very recently this was in the last week the new york times did a huge spread on the way these think tanks operate because ideally you would think it is a think tank, it is an defendant, is a nonpartisan point of view and research its conclusions but what the new york times reported and the book shows is the think tanks are often pushing the agenda of people who fund them in their studies and specifically the new york times piece had a couple defense contractors as examples and elizabeth warren was outraged by this. there were stories about her

reaction to senator elizabeth warren, what -- they were wondering about their position through the think tank, a thinly disguised form of lobbying. there is a good youtube piece about this. with the exception of the libertarians at the cato institute who oppose any intervention the conservative think tanks, aggressive on interventions and the ways in which america uses its military to manage the world. the group providing the rationale for the invasion of iraq, the project for a new american century, small arm of the american enterprise institute which is one of the

largest and best-known conservative think tanks was the iraq invasion was in 2003 but as early as 1998 the people were writing letters, one of them went to president clinton calling for the removal of saddam hussein. who signed that letter saying let's get rid of saddam hussein? donald rumsfeld, paul wolfowitz, richard pearl and others who favored a new extent of american influence around the world. president clinton as you figured out ignored the letter, but on february 20, 2001, 9 days after the 9/11 attacks, rights to president bush in the white house repeating the call for regime change in iraq, the people who signed the letter

were in the government, rumsfeld was secretary of defense, wolfowitz was deputy, and dick cheney, a supporter of the program was now vice president. what happens? we invade iraq. it was not a cakewalk as many in the conservative community said it would be. instead we upset the balance in the region, no weapons of mass destruction were found, no one greeted us as liberators, thousands died. the cost is now into billions, some estimate trillions of dollars, not a pretty picture. in fact if you accept the idea america is a peaceloving nation as many people do, it is a disturbing view of the world but

it is also an example of how the washington-based system works. we have seen a presidential campaign in which candidates call president obama week on defense and urge the us take a more aggressive, tougher stand and roll in the middle east, and rebuild the military, simply not true. we want to send more troops, remember ted cruz in the middle east, tear up the iran agreement, chris christie wanted to shoot down any russian plane that came into that area and as rand paul, a libertarian, welcome to world war iii if you do that has for donald trump we can't be sure what he will do.

he has been on both sides of all of this. and in essence we have a war machine that drives not just the overt things but covert. i went to give an example of that our involvement in iran. not many people here born in 1953. a bit of history. you recall 1953 when a cia who helped depose the democratically elected prime minister of iran after he nationalized british oil. with the prime minister gone, he install the public, the shah provided some ardor in the country and ensure a smooth flow of oil while repressing his own people and committing many human

rights violations which many people who overthrew the shah in 1979 were people who blamed us for having supported the shah all those years. they are the ones who took our diplomats hostage, took to streets screaming death to america. there were other reasons as well but this played into what happened so why are we surprised they hate us? think about it. talk about vietnam. in 1964 the us government told us one of our routine patrol boats had been attacked for a second time in international waters by the north vietnamese. president johnson quickly won the resolution of congress expanding the war in vietnam. guess what eq there was never a second attack. it was not a routine patrol

boat. it was an american spy ship equipped with listening devices picking up communications they could hear if they get close to those north vietnamese command centers that even robert mcnamara, the secretary of defense has since said there was no second attack but the fact it was presented as a second attack was the basis for getting that approval from congress for johnson to expand the war in which thousands more people died. you may remember president obama was recently talking about the unexploded american ordinance dropped during the vietnam war. we weren't at war with them but because there seemed to be north vietnamese using the ho chi minh

trail that ran through laos and bombers, i can't remember the numbers they were so horrendous, the bombs we dropped on that country many of which never exploded and still killing people who find them in the fields. and we would give them more money to locate those bombs before they kill more people and of course most recently we have the invasion of iraq. we were told we got to go in because saddam hussein has weapons of mass destruction but he didn't. today iraq is a mess. it has opened the door for the isis extremists who pose a new threat. the new york times recently had a column by one of these middle east experts who said iraq is the mother of isis, saudi arabia

is the father. let me talk about that a little bit. we shudder, we just shudder when we see isis beheading people on tv or on the internet, terrible. but guess what? saudi arabia routinely behead people. they recently beheaded 70 people including a cleric they didn't like who did some things they felt did not support the saudi monarchy. i would also note osama bin laden who had been offended by the presence of american troops in the 1990 gulf war declared you will pay for this, you put your troops on sacred ground and we are coming after you and they did. 15 of those 19 hijackers were citizens of saudi arabia where the religion is so conservative

women can't drive much less go uncovered outside the home. let's follow the money for a minute. i want to get to questions. i want to put some numbers up here. also talk again about one weapon in particular and ask why do we keep sending billions of dollars to build weapons systems that do not work, at least don't work the way they are supposed to, such as the b 22? this is what time magazine said. it is unsafe, can't shoot straight, cost 30 lives, $20 billion, now headed for iraq. after i mentioned that in a talk not long ago one of the military guys came to me later and said they fixed those problems, working fine now, update your

example, i said i am not sure that is right but i appreciate you telling me and i went back to my sources who knows more about these things than i do, what is happening? it is an expensive bust. cannot be used in combat the way it is supposed to be used. they fly combat missions with this things don't go the way they are supposed to. things happen and he referred to a video on youtube showing a be 22 crashing. the father of one of the two marines killed in the osprey crash in 2015, is going to sue boeing for design flaws. i hope you will laugh at my next example. does the us government really employ more musicians in its military band than it has diplomats? somebody laugh. yes.

this -- yes. this is something walter pinkus has written about in the washington post and robert gates used to talk about in his speeches. how much money are we spending? we spent more than we did during the cold war, more than we spent in vietnam, more than all our enemies combined. this is based on 2012 reports, the numbers are not the same. other countries are spending a little more but we are outspending them. a number i saw on china was the defense budget is three times what china is spending. here it was a little less. david, who works the wall street journal, and doing some other things, has a book called red ink in which he said the us the

defense budget for the next 17 largest spenders and he went through and named them. i would note, discretionary spending, after medicare, social security, they have to spend money on discreditable spending, 50% is for defense. if you add up the pentagon and all the other things associated with national defense, you are getting into $1 trillion a year and this is based on some research by winslow wheeler, one of the experts on this issue. another way to look at defense spending is to look at what happened since the 9/11 attacks.

you turn your mind back, the soviet union collapsed in 1991 a lot of people thought we would get a piece dividends, don't have to spend much on defense. there was a slight decline in the years after that in the 1990s, but we were not going up anymore. then we get to 9/11, 2001, and it goes off the charts. they couldn't throw enough money at the military. i talked to one woman, wasn't anybody objecting to this? she said you suggest cutting or spending less in the military it is considered treason but anyone who had those ideas didn't talk about it publicly. it was seen as unpatriotic and not something you do. i have another slide here which shows the increase over the years and you can see the wars for iraq and afghanistan really shot up from the red. one of the problems is the

imbalance. we are putting all our money into the defense pentagon military side and very little into the diplomatic side. this is something he has been acknowledged and been a concern to the people who are in the military, in a speech admiral mike mullen, the joint chiefs of staff, kansas state said us foreign policy, too dependent on the generals and admirals. you have to ask, is it a coincidence that the 9/11 terrorists crashed one of their

hijacked airplanes into the pentagon while ignoring the state department? or was it that they understood the sources of influence that drives the american government? think about it like this. when world war ii ended did the, we got the korean war and the cold war and since then we maintained a large standing army and huge intelligence bureaucracy involved in endless conflict around the world. we have been involved in something almost all the time that resulted in the deaths of millions of people and cost billions of dollars. the number for iraq and afghanistan and pakistan is roughly $6 trillion and the reason those numbers keep going up is the people who were injured in those wars come home and we are involved in medical

-- medical care for them the rest of their lives and the cost of medical care keeps going up. so the other piece of this, our efforts to maintain the flow of oil, to send in the military, to make sure oil is flowing and those pathways remain open, in 1980 there was a mini crisis in which president carter, democrat, threatened to use nuclear force if necessary to keep the oil flowing. we are still living with the consequences of what we have been doing in the middle east and continue to do in the middle east, then you have people who are tired of these wars, tired of our involvement especially now that we are less dependent on that oil but the forces for

war keep pushing. now, one more piece and i want to take questions. jim mccartney was good at asking weston's to illuminate and he would say, why does the media go along with these conflicts? why does the media support threat inflation and the demonizing of enemies who may be very bad guys but don't represent the threat, i want to wrap this up with words about the media and the complicit role it plays. there are three cases in the book, one of them is about iraq, where the cheerleading of the war by the pages of the washington post and the new york times was deafening.

for example, the day after colin powell made a speech to the united nations making the case that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction and we needed to take him down the washington post op-ed had a series of articles, a well-known liberal who would have been opposed to something like this after listening to colin powell, i am persuaded, jim hoagland, more of a middle-of-the-road guy, found in colin powell's comments he found what he called an old trooper in reference to colin powell's smoking gun it will, richard cohen and others who agreed with colin powell, the new york times also doing the same thing and it was clear in the coverage, not just the

opinion page but news pages that everybody was on board for this more. the new york times ran sort of an apology in which they acknowledged they inflated those stories. the post never apologized but the managing editor did, in an answer to a question say i guess we did overplay those stories. i am a creature of the media. i love this business, i believe in it, i the press and the free press is an essential part of a free society, and while i have talked about instances where the media failed to do it job there is also plenty of examples of where the media did great work. you know about bob woodward and coral bernstein on the watergate break-in that led to president

nixon's downfall. recently you had the boston globe and the stories it did on priest abuse which as you know not only got lots of pulitzers but ended did the up in a movie called spotlight, a great example of what the media did write. the guy who is editor of the boston globe who was responsible for those stories was a guy named marty baron, executive editor of the washington post, we are lucky to have him. i hope you will think of those ways the media can do a good job, the way in which jim mccartney did a good job in trying to illuminate these issues and get people to think about them. when we were living in florida in 2000 he became a very popular speaker, various groups would like to hear how does washington work and he was good at talking

about the use issues but when bush invaded iraq he began to focus more and more on the war and peace angle and when he was finished people would say i had no idea. please write a book explaining this because i didn't understand the connections. that is what he was working on when he died in 2011 and that his memorial services a few weeks later one of the women who had known him and been active in getting him out to speak said what is going to happen to jim's book? i said i really don't know. she said you need to finish that book because that needs to be out there. though it did take me a little while to get through the material, make sure i had everything i needed and it was a way to get what i needed and i had been listening to this for

30 years. right home on the dinner table. it also helps that i am accustomed to researching and writing and knowing a good story when i see one. this is a great story. i have to tell you i am also a skeptic. one thing they tell you in the newsroom is i don't care if your mother told you, you better check it out so i checked out everything, made sure we were exactly right each as herman goring said the common people don't want war. that is understood. this works the same way. i will briefly summarize my point and ask some questions. i did this in the form of take aways. let me go through these quickly.

we keep going to war without regard to the cost of war. according to the website costofwar.org, is $6 billion. many people still believe the us should be and operator of the world's police and impose democracy everywhere even where there is no tradition or belief in democracy and have no to tunisians to make democracy possible and even though we fail to make that happen in iraq even in libya now i would note, who are our enemies today? the military people would tell you they are most worried about russia and china, rising china

and belligerent russia, but if you watch television you would think the terrorists are the problem. the sad fact is the terrorists win when we overreact and i would argue we have been overreacting since 9/11. for example, i heard somebody make the comparison at a presentation not long ago, you are more likely to die from a fall in the bathtub from a terrorist attack. perspective is important. think about this. the pentagon budget is 10 times more than the state department would we put our money into the military, keep trying to use it to solve political problems. when there is no military solution to many of these political problems. that is what we have been hung up on with syria. the military can go in and take

everybody out but what happens then? are we going to stay forever and run their government and become the target of what they don't like about us? this is what the fight is about. there is also a huge disconnect between the military and civilian population because we don't have skin in the game as we did in world war ii where everybody was involved in the war effort. now we have a volunteer army and it does these things and we don't pay a lot of attention to its. than the middle east, we went there because of the oil, stayed because of the oil and we are still there because of the oil even though we are less dependent on middle east oil today. eventually this will change the power structure in the middle east and our involvement. we are in a transitional period. i would say this for trump, he brought the issue of the fact that we are paying for this,

making sure the oil is open and available for our friends in japan and europe. they are spending their money on health and education and other things and we are picking up the bill for their defense.

>> perpetuating war withs in the middle east does not advance america and one day, america

will awaken to this and the wars will end. right now, america is slumbering. so questions? and while you're thinking i will tell you a friend of mine said well that all sounds really interesting but is there any sex in your book? [laughter] and i said well i sort of mention general petraeus in his biographer but other than that mostly policy. so please ask me questions. >> follow-up on this from the feedback you're getting? >> what i've really been doing is talking about the book because there's so much in it that people seem to like. i mean, it sort of connects all the dots so i've done only op-eds, right now i'm just doing book talk and trying to get people to see this as a sort of military industrial is complex 101. it's an introduction to the issue it's a ways to sort of

figure out the debate, understand players who is pushing what had. so forth. >> might want to drag in ideology and one of the reasons is not oillet but the christian evangelical right -- prime example of it who believe that they lobby any defense contractor. >> the question anybody? yes. >> maybe you answered in earlier in what you were say i watch bill maher who is partisan in science but one of his points on military overspending the fact that maybe i have the wrong name for it so the f 2-rbgs -- >> f35.

they say they keep paying for more and more of these to be built and just sitting in hangars rotting. so my question is now that we're out of immediate wake of 9/11 where we can say things that were considered treason back then. how come nobody in the military one of the higher ups ups is sas wait a minute weft no use -- : well, if they did i'm not sure congress would stop funding it but interesting seen as our latest cutting enweapon to keep us at the top of the militaries around the world so that if we went to war we could beat everybody we also a great plane. problem is it is a complex plane and not been able to figure out all of the bug and all of the problems some of which are in the software. every time they think they've gotten everything fixed some new problem pops up. i talked to somebody just a few weeks ago about it so to say what's happening with the f35 he

said well you're still having problems he said and one of the things that they haven't even considered is the fact that -- why are we spending all of this money to develop this troubled product which is a manned weapon when we have the drones which don't have to be manned? and are a lot less expensive and other piece of that is if you're going into century warfare, that would be sort of -- seems to be less and less of a role for the f35. for the reason if you can use unmanned drone but other piece of it he said, these are planes that operate off of the ships, you know, and he says they're short leg. they can't fly long distances so you have got to get your ship up to the enemy in order for plane to fly over and do any damage and again the question is why are you doing that when you could stleez unmanned drones so

yeah, they're continuing problems with the f35. anybody else? question? yes. [inaudible] understand the answer why washington post and "times" pushed iraq war were -- >> that is true. knock "new york times" apologized why they do that? bauds they get -- here's what happens. it give you an example easier to know. although the big media was onboard, there were reporters writing stories, questioning the presence of mass destruction. one of them was walter at the washington post but they weren't putting his stoirs on the front page but like in a19 because they didn't believe those stories. they believed the government. a better example even is what happened with knight ridder they

had two roarts jonathon landay and walter working for night ridder if you're in washington you don't get the same kind of help from the -- experts that you are if you're "the washington post" and "new york times." you're called to get return if you're washington post and if you were not ridder it's like i get you later. so what you do as a reporter you don't get top guys anymore. you go to middle people who are really doing all of the work and know what's going on, and those are the people who were telling jonathon and walter we don't see this evidence of -- evidence of weapon mass destruction we just don't agree so they were writing stories for those newspapers and what happens? the philadelphia inquirer owned by knight ridder did not run some its own bureau stories because they didn't match the "new york times" story. they believe that "new york

times" instead of their own people because it's like if you don't believe it, you must be unpatriotic and there's a heard mentality within the media that does take effect in cases like this where if everybody is reporting it must be right. and if you report something else, oh -- something is is wrong. how do you prove it? so that's -- that's one of the problems within the media. we all know it's there. and iraq was probably one of the worst examples, i mean, there have been bill did a whole hour-long program on failure of the media in the iraq war, and he had both jonathon and walter talk about their experience and they've been on m about pr and talked about this as well. when you're running up the government as saying -- this and who are you to say that government is wrong? so that that's the problem.

and there's also the problem that if those "new york times" guys didn't write what their sources we are telling them they could lose those sources. sost there is a relationship there that is also part of the problem. anybody else? did i see a hand back there? wait he's got one more question. >> didn't want to pre-empt anybody who hasn't asked yet. you wanted more if yowpts to keep going into this issue of multiple source intelligence. >> yes. >> because that's how it was really done. the -- assessment in fact pentagon was doing the thinking, planning as for iraq. they reported it through paul and you know this. the officer of that assessment had a couple of analyst whos who took curve ball, the iraqi

defector around to half a dozen other national intenls intelligent agencies and briefed them and all of a sudden getting half dozen different foreign agencies that we cooperate with telling us the same story and we're thinking this is multiple source intelligence. it wasn't. >> right, and national security did not do her job in vetting where did this come from and how do you know? >> well you get these very complex bureaucracies competing with each other maybe they want to hang on to their information so they don't share it with the guy over there because he's really nots on our team so as a result you get mixed results. lch lev and not very good decision making at the top. you saw that in the 9/11. it turns that the fbi knew some of those hijackers we are here. but they didn't tell somebody else or somebody didn't tell them or whatever and it got lost in the maze. rights. >> leave the headquarters. these are --

complex problems. there's not a gray, i mean there's gray but not black and white. [laughter] right, right so i hope this was useful. >> to be another classroom at 1:30. but let me warmly thank you you're doing a great service to the american public. i hope you can seek many venues and hope your book reaches very wide audience. it's a most important book. so thank you for all of your hard work. >> thank you. [applause] >> and i'm going to correct that slide i'm glad you told me that. [laughter]

[inaudible] >> and here's a look at upcoming book fair and festivals happening around the country. next saturday book tv is live from nyad son for the wisconsin book festival. look for author discussions with pulitzer prize winner and national book award final fist viat as well as university of wisconsin professor kathy kramer discussing the political career of wisconsin governor, scott walker. and then on saturday october, 29th, it's the louisiana book festival held in baton rouge at the state capitol. coming up in november, booktv is live from us aen austin with likes of former attorney general alberto gonzalez, columbia university law professor, tim wu, and orange is the new black actress, diane guerrero and

later in november booktv live from the miami book fair. that's november 19th and 20th. our coverage includes author discussions and call-ins including senator bernie sanders, fox news host dana perino and colton white head for more we'll be covering and to watch if previous festival coverage, click thebook fairs tab on our website booktv.org. >> is more considering that as they stand right now under the prevailing relationship between the states and the federal government, federal funding last for roughly one to five years dpepgding on the program. and federal funding by no means guaranteed to cover 100% of the actual cost. less all of the paperwork and overhead burden. so schools already experience uncertainty by relying on federal funding. what's more roughly every decade or so a success of administrations assume office in

washington, d.c., students, school website teachers, and taxpayers are subjected to new nationwide education agenda and mandates. that require expensive replacement of the previous administration's programs with one from the current administration. what makes strategic dismanlsing different is once control over possession programs is end punsding trowrnd the state, lawmakers, taxpayers, parents and educators can work more closely together at the local levels to better ensure clear education policy priorities. customized to meeting the specific needs of students in communities across the states. without all of that chaos, cost, and june upheaval of previous several decades of federal leadership and education. now, is the time to end department of education once and for all. unlike 36 years ago, today we have thriving examples in the

states of education programs and services that are working for students, their families and taxpayers. there are 61 school choice programs in 30 states in the district of columbia. there are 26 voucher programs. 26 voucher programs, 21 tax credit scholarship programs, nine individual tax credit and deduction programs, and there are five esa or educational savings account programs, and together these programs are helping more than a million school children and families. not to mention the millions more students attending public district, charter, home, and online schools all of their parents choice. dc didn't build any of those programs. citizens in the states did. and these programs in improving student achievement in intrusion competition for students