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Brian Schweitzer on War & PeaceDemocratic MT Governor |
SCHWEITZER: Well, the Europeans are right. We have had 12 years of war. For the last 11 years, you can't find anybody left in America who can tell you, why are we still in Afghanistan? Al Qaeda attacked us. They're not in Afghanistan. We're fighting somebody called the Taliban. They live in caves in the Stone Age. Why are we still there?
Q: Because we promised we would stay there.
SCHWEITZER: Who did we promise? We promised Karzai, who is a crook, and his brother is the biggest drug smuggler on the planet.
Q: If we leave them to go back to the same cycle that led to 9/11--
SCHWEITZER: Perpetual war in the Middle East!
SCHWEITZER: I lived in Saudi Arabia during the '80s when we were supporting Saddam Hussein, who was fighting Iran, the people that we know are the most dangerous actors in the neighborhood. When we went into Iraq, al Qaeda didn't function there. We destabilized Iraq. We threw Saddam Hussein out, who was a bad guy, like a lot of other people in the Middle East, and now we have al Qaeda. It's our problem. We broke the china. Most people in Washington DC did not live in the Middle East. I lived in Libya & Saudi Arabia. I watched Iraq fight that war with Iran. I knew that we were supporting Iraq during that war. And now we've created a vacuum in Iraq. Those people who supported that Iraqi war didn't understand the politics of the Mideast. Al Qaeda wasn't there. Iraq hadn't attacked us. We made a very big mistake there. It cost us a lot of blood and a lot of treasure. And we ought not make those mistakes in the future.