Episode 47: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

So usually I'm ready to get out there and walk, but I'm a little less eager given the press that San Francisco has gotten. But I'll get out there among the fentanyl-addicted crowds soon.

And maybe I'll pick up some Marlboros and other things that help you get through war zones intact.

I do end up with the same shirt.

Once, they would describe all these folks as libertarian, but there are a lot of sort of non-libertarian coded people here. Schellenberger's here.

I'm going to be interviewing him on stage tomorrow night, I got a speech tonight. There's just lots of sort of interesting people here. I have not talked to any of them because I'm basically antisocial, but it's interesting and out my window. I don't know if you know this, Walter in the middle of Memphis, you know those Bass Pro shop stores that get like a special designation as a museum.

So they build these huge things.

I don't even know if you can go in it, maybe there's a tomb of, like the founder of Bass Pro shops in there.

So we are closer than we usually are, right because I'm in the middle of the country, this time I'm on the Mississippi, but it's been an interesting week, a lot of things have happened. One of the most interesting, I guess, is just these continually odd developments in the war in Ukraine. Which feels like it should be a story of overriding importance that we're all talking about nonstop, because the fate of the world kind of hinges on what happens there.

And for most people, it's kind of an afterthought, but there were a couple of significant developments this week or in the last week or so. There was a NATO conference at which, I guess Volodymyr Zelensky didn't get exactly what he wanted and got a little upset with his fellow or not quite fellow NATO members. And calling their lack of a concrete timeline unprecedented and absurd. And then there was a parallel development where, in an effort, I guess, to show their level of seriousness in supporting Ukraine, the Biden administration decided to start providing the country with cluster munitions. Walter, What did you think of this development and did you watch any of the coverage of this?

I have avoided thinking about it, frankly, because I feel a sense of moral confusion over the whole thing. But knowing that we're now providing a munition, which I was led to believe had been kind of ruled out in a national conflict, was not encouraging. It, first of all, suggested that the whole thing has reached a terrible state in which only the most gruesome kind of combat can be expected. We seem to be on a downward spiral. I saw all the arguments for and against the cluster bombs.

And it was weird to have to now examine from the ground up. Something that I thought had been concluded by the civilized world, which is that these things are terrible.

They're terrible for a couple of reasons. They don't go off immediately all of them, and they tend to be picked up later. They're sort of like landmines by children, especially.

You'd think that would be some kind of highly classified secret.

I start with a reverse or Occam's razor or something. It's not quite that, but of total skepticism when it comes to war propaganda, particularly. I figure that if they're admitting it so easily that maybe it's not as bad as they, they're making out. Because why would they make themselves look so bad? Why would they invite our enemies to start to plot their moves around the notion that we don't have any artillery shells left? But so, so, yeah, I don't believe it.

I mean, they could prove it to me, I suppose, but I don't want it proven. I will register my my sort of automatic skepticism on that.

I wasn't sure what it meant at first.

Then I started to see the excuse all the way. When we're running out of conventional ammunition and we can't let that happen. Which, to me, I interpreted first as well. Maybe this is some weird way of trying to convince all of Congress to approve. You know, mass armament construction for, you know, another round of funding for for Ukraine, I have no idea. Then, when I actually started looking up the coverage and trying to see how they were justifying this, it was. It was like a parody version of Iraq when they were talking about surgical strikes. Play the the interview with On CNN, where Victor Blackwell is interviewing a former Pentagon official about why this is OK.

S munitions These cluster munitions any safer less likely to create the duds than the Russian cluster munitions do.

DUD rate is less than 5 percent, and they're advertising a rate of about 2.

3 or so percent now. The DUD rate will probably be higher on the U.S side than advertised, but it will definitely not be as high as the Russian DUD rate.

The U.

S is making a new move to better supply Ukraine to take on the Russians, two U.S officials tell ABC News. The Pentagon will provide cluster munitions despite human rights concerns.

Cluster bombs have gained a reputation for killing and injuring civilians, especially children, who come across the smaller explosives or bomblets that fail to initially detonate. After being dropped. Many U.S allies have signed a treaty banning their use.

Lower DUD rates?

It reminds me of all these kills, exactly, and I don't know that I care, to be honest. What the dud rate level of a cluster munition is if it's above zero? I also heard in one of these clips strange oxymoronic formula, the safety of these weapons.

Now, are weapons not by their nature unsafe? Are they not designed to be unsafe?

If we're, if we're going to argue that our cluster bombs are safer than theirs.

What we're really saying is that they're deadlier initially than they're. The word safe, in other words, has no place in the discussion. For me, the logic of all of the defenses that I've heard has come down to this.

They did it first, number one, number two, ours are better than theirs, and according to this strange metric, DUD rates, and three, we don't have any choice.

We ran out of the normal stuff. The assumption there is that if we still had the normal stuff, we'd be using that. But we just don't have that luxury anymore. None of these are very persuasive on a human level, they may be.

They may be persuasive if you have completely ingested the logic of deteriorating conditions and increasing savagery, and your feeling is that vengeance must be meted out. War is ugly and it should go to its ultimate stage, but the truth is that this war has has not gone to its ultimate stage. We don't have F-16s there.

We don't have certain kinds of weapons. We were still ruling out the use of tactical nukes, I hope, which could be justified using the same logic that they're using for cluster bombs. Frankly, I mean, I don't see that with this kind of reason, you could rule out anything if your only goal is to match the other side. To not have to use your conventional stockpiles, which you don't have much left of. Anyway, you are getting closer and closer to the unthinkable, as far as I'm concerned.

And this represents a, I guess you'd say, escalation, or maybe a deterioration in our approach to the unthinkable, is what upsets me most.

Endeavor that is just bottomless, that they're going to keep doing this, you know? They trotted out Jake Sullivan to defend this decision. First of all, whenever he appears to make a critical statement about a war, I always take that as a bad omen.

But he gave this amazing quote to Politico. And I don't want to dwell too much on the media side of this. But the role of the press in kind of hyping these absurd and just cruel and inhumane explanations for using these banned weapons, I don't know. I find it kind of inexcusable, like the tone of both the ABC and the CNN.

Reports reminded me again of Starship Troopers. That kind of rah-rah, you know, we must beat the invading bugs kind of delivery. But anyway, here's Jake Sullivan talking. And he says, We recognize that cluster munitions created risk of civilian harm from unexploded ordnance. This is why we deferred the decision for as long as we could. But there is also a massive risk of civilian harm if Russian troops and tanks roll over Ukrainian positions and take more Ukrainian territory and subjugate more Ukrainian civilians. Because Ukraine does not have enough utility.

So yes, the risk of us doing something that's inhumane. And maybe 20 years from now, 30 years from now. You know, a few kids might be chasing a ball into the woods and lose a couple of arms, you know? Hey, war is hell, and we have to balance that against the risk of Russians taking more territory. I don't know, man, why do we have to be making calculations like this? Like, I feel like we don't vote on these things anymore.

They just do it.

Also, if these things are so great, why didn't we use them right away? I mean, they're basically confessing that they aren't good, that they deferred to this point.

You know, they make, oh they're so good, oh they were using them and so on, but those things were always true. Why are we doing it now? Obviously we're desperate.

Obviously, Ukraine is desperate. They don't want to use that. Because part of the way that they have manufactured rationales for this war, or sort of created bombs for our conscience in America. For this, for this action that we really can't protest and can't stop is that it would be over quickly. That the heroic Ukrainians were in a position to repel this invasion rather handily, but, of course, that wasn't true either. And so all of the, all of the changing and developing stories about this war suggest to me. That little Walter Kern sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco. That it's time to negotiate with the Orcs, the evil Russians, the people who. We should not contemplate ever sitting down at the table with the bug planet.

Yeah, because ultimately, the rationale for a negotiated peace, should there be one, and I hope there is, is going to be desperation, too. That's what brings people to the table when they no longer feel they can prevail militarily, or at least not with.

Without unsustainable destruction.

And in that sense, maybe we're closer, maybe maybe using these horrible weapons suggests that we're on the road to not surrender. But it's always one more thing this will work this, this will turn the tide up.

It was the counteroffensive just a little while ago that was going to turn. It was other weapon systems earlier in the war that were going to turn the tide. The Javelin missile, the Patriot, the handheld drones, the handheld drone. And once more, America, which is kind of a tech addicted country that thinks that the solution to every problem is just a better tool, a better instrument. Is being led to believe that, oh, this one weird trick that we didn't try yet is going to be the one. Um, I very much doubt it will.

That the trend doesn't suggest success here.

And yet they won't admit to the kind of desperation that would prepare the American people for a negotiate. Yet again, they're telling us, we, rather than that, we will plumb the very depths of destructive warfare. We'll start to, we'll start to break through red lines, moral red lines that we that we set earlier. They no longer apply.

It seems like free fall to me, a free fall into a barbarous, destructive, deadly situation which could at any time break out and turn into a world historical.

Now, our best hope is to.

Increase the savagery.

And he says, I think we're trying very hard not to. And he goes on, in that quote, to talk about how Americans perpetually think that. The answer.

To sort of deeply complicated conflicts is always some technical thing that there's, you know? In Vietnam, obviously, the situation was different. And what he came around to saying was, you're not going to get people who are fighting for their freedom to to give up. Just because you've developed a new device or something like that, that doesn't work. But they continue to think that it would, right? This is obviously a very different situation, this is an invasion by another country, but there are lots of, you know, complicating factors going on there.

There are hatreds that go back hundreds of years.

There's resentment that it was built up during World War II and the years after that, when the West and the East were fighting. And you know, there's all kinds of things going on here. The idea that you're going to turn the tide by dropping a new kind of device into the mix is it's just. It's such a peculiarly American delusion to think that that's, that's going to be the deciding factor. I mean, I guess sometimes in war, technology is a game changer. And we're about to see the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer come out. And this is going to be the ultimate demonstration of that American belief system. That, you know, you get a bunch of scientists together and they're going to, they're going to change everything. But here is that, really, what's going to happen here?

I don't think so.

And then, in the post-war, uh, atmosphere, repented. Basically, uh, he, he. He saw the logic of where this was going, especially as the uh, hydrogen bomb was introduced. And, uh, kind of backpedaled. And you know, he had leftist sympathies, uh, it seems, uh, and was hounded out of the polite military industrial complex society. Um, so so he, he is a he is a, uh. Case study in both successfully developing a technology which did end a war, did stop a war. Um, and also someone who realized, maybe madness, um, uh, so so I don't. So I don't know that that movie does anything but kind of demonstrate our point.

Um, but. But afterwards, after the nuclear, uh age started, America pursued a suite of weaponry that was short of short of nuclear, short of atomic, um, but also very deadly. And and through my youth and watching the Vietnam War on TV, and also, you know, uh, being part of the homeland. As as people came back, uh uh. One of the lessons was that napalm didn't work.

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