Why War Doesn’t Work - with General Stanley McChrystal

For five years, you were in charge of the U.S. military's most elite commandos. You found Saddam. You killed the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Are you familiar with The Onion? I am. Okay, let me show you this Onion headline. 80% of Al-Qaeda number two is now dead. Now, General, I take your smile. You understood the joke. Absolutely. Did the Onion get it more right than the U.S. military? Well, the Onion was wrong. We killed the number threes. We killed I don't know how many number threes.

And we used to joke about it, but the point's exactly right. Wait, so just for the analogy, if you're looking at a super team, you didn't get MJ, you didn't get Scotty, but you blew up Dennis Rodman? Yeah. Over and over again. And maybe you got Luke Longley? Yeah, I mean, just... And then Bill Wennington? Exactly. What? Well, you get who you can get. I mean, General, I do think killing the Bill Wennington of Al-Qaeda isn't worth it.

Four-star General Stanley McChrystal spent one year commanding U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan after spending five years commanding the Pentagon's most secretive operations in Iraq as the head of JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. His unit captured Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

I was honestly surprised when he wanted to come on my show because we have very different perspectives on the U.S. military. But I wanted to have an open, good-faith conversation, and he was game for that. which I respect. Now, here's my talk with General Stanley McChrystal about his new book on character, Choices That Define a Life, and about some of the choices that define his own life. Let's talk about the book. You have written a book.

specifically on character. You are a four-star general. I am a zero-star comedian. One of the things that you had to oversee as a four-star general is the state of the geopolitical world. Right now... The state of the geopolitical world is, dare I say, nuts. We're on the verge of World War III. If you could give us Vegas odds over or under, how stable is the world right now? And should I get ready to hit the bunker immediately?

I wouldn't be far from the bunker. I think we're at very dangerous times. Well, if you think back to many times, there are... disagreements between nations, or maybe the rising of a dictator who is likely to start a war. What we've had in the last, call it a couple of decades, is this erosion of...

relations between nations. We never thought there'd be another ground war in Europe. And now we, for three years, we've seen a grinding war in Europe. And so as we start not to respect institutions or nations. or each other, the likelihood that we have some kind of conflict just goes through the roof. That's what you talk about in your book on character, which is it's your personal musings on leadership, character, and specifically honor.

I took this and your recent New York Times op-ed as a little bit of a sneakness of the current president. Is that true? I'm trying not to talk about any specific personality because, you know, we trip over policies and politics and personalities. What we ought to be talking about is character, because as we would describe it in the military, it's left to the boom. It's before you actually have a problem. What are the root causes? And so I think that we have lost sight.

of the fact that character, in many cases, the lack of character is we're seeing the symptoms through certain personalities and actions in our society. Are there particular moments that inspired you to write this that you saw? Oh, wow. There has been a fundamental erosion of particular either democratic norms or social norms that you said, I have to speak on this because you did meet the press and you publicly endorse.

Kamala Harris. But I felt when I was watching that clip of you, you felt deeply personally moved to speak on that issue. What have you seen at large kind of in society that made you go, you know what? I have to, I got to speak on this now. you've seen a bunch of things i've seen in the last couple of decades maybe i've been watching more closely politicians who on one day stand up and they absolutely espouse certain values sometimes they're admirable

And then a couple months later, they flip-flop and they support something that is completely the opposite of what they said before. Now, maybe they had an epiphany and they changed what they think. I don't think so. I think it was opportunism.

I see the way we have public discourse, the way we describe people. When I see how we treat our allies, I'm really bothered. And so it's a buildup of... a lower standard of behavior, lower standard of respect, lower standard of personal conduct, and then you can extrapolate that to organizations and unfortunately to the nation.

One of the things that gets thrown around on the Internet often is we are descending into fascism. Our president is a dictator. Now, as someone whose unit actually captured Saddam Hussein. an actual dictator. How close are we to our president going full green beret and wearing military fatigues? Yeah, it's hard to say. I think that...

The danger is if we start thinking that's okay, because humans being what they are, almost anyone put in a very powerful position is going to try to pull together more power, gather more power. I worry that if we as a nation and the people around that aren't vigilant to protect us against ourselves. I mean, let's be honest. If you made me president for life tomorrow.

I would start off and I'd be a great guy. And I'll bet in a couple of years, you wouldn't want to have me on your show. Sure. You know? Okay. I mean, that's me. And I think I'm probably average. Okay. I'd love to actually pull family members to find out how they feel. So what are the things you're alluding to? And you're being very respectful. And I do appreciate that. But one of the key critiques that we hear in the media is that.

Our current president isn't operating from a place of character. Specifically, the president is operating from a place of emotion. He's very emotional. His supporters argue that he's playing 4D chess. Sometimes I feel like he's shooting from the hip. Do you agree with that kind of premise of what I'm laying out? Well, my views on President Trump are out there. I've come out before. But I'd say he's not standing alone in a field in that.

I think the number of people who are operating outside of character or without character is the disturbing part. And if we find ourselves standing in the field with them, we got to wake up and get out of there because the reality is it's that. erosion that is the dangerous part. It's not the power of a single person in our government is somewhat limited, but the power of a bunch of people who are not willing to be the checks and balances, that's fatal. How do we get here?

I'm 39 years old. Some of the most formative years of my life were the war on terror. I think about this, I go, well, that word, the war on terror, that's actually just a war on an emotion, a feeling. Terror. You are terrorized. You feel fear, anguish, terror. Wouldn't Donald Trump be the natural endpoint of fighting a 20-year war on a feeling? I think he's the natural import. endpoint of that and of some other things. I think he's a natural endpoint of frustration with the idea that elites...

have gathered disproportionate amounts of power and wealth and that much of the country feels like they are not been represented. I think this idea that the world is out to take advantage of us. and in some cases to attack and kill us. And all of those things stir up emotions that I usually associate with tribalism.

You link arms together and you say, we're going to defend ourselves because we can only trust each other. And that's dangerous because as soon as you start that, you start to immediately characterize everybody else as them. as the enemy. And then of course, once you think of them that way, at some point they become. And you really wax poetically about that point, about people's humanity, not only your own humanity, the people that you serve with.

But even when you've served in war, their humanity. A couple things I wanted to unpack on, because we're talking about character, we're talking about emotion. When you look at U.S. history, has the United States in your mind...

responded to crisis emotionally or stoically and calmly? I think emotionally in almost every case. If you look at the beginning of U.S. Civil War. If you look at the Spanish-American War, the destruction of the Maine, you look at the sinking of the Lusitania and then the Zimmerman telegram that brought us into the First World War. But that's natural.

I mean, we shouldn't be shocked. We shouldn't even be embarrassed by that. But why haven't we learned our lesson by that? You're clearly laying out the patterns here. Right. Every generation has to learn their lesson again. We read history, but we make many of the same mistakes. If you think the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and then the Patriot Act after 9-11.

I would say they rhyme. And so this idea that emotion is large. When I taught my course at Yale to freshmen, I used to do one session on the 9-11 attacks. And they were young enough when it happened that they... They didn't have the feel for the moment. Sure. But I had them watch the videos and listen to the 911 calls so that they would understand just how viscerally emotional that was. And when that happens...

When in their life, when something equivalent happens, they are going to be equally emotional. Yeah. And they will want to do something. I remember being in high school at that time, the two emotions that people felt. I could feel it in the air. Fear. and anger. Correct. We have to do something about this. And I remember George Bush said it very clearly. Number one, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. And number two, we can't let the terrorists win.

And then for some reason, at some point, we had to go buy trucks because that helped America. So I had to go to Toyota-thon. Yeah, I mean. Even though those cars were made in Japan. Yeah, I don't think that was. very well thought out, but it should be instructive because the instructive part is not what happened on 9-11. There were mistakes made that allowed 9-11 to happen. But what we did afterward, there were...

a number of mistakes made, but they weren't made with bad intentions. They were made by good people with good intentions working hard. That should be what we pay attention to. Because if we look and we say George W. Bush was the... The guy who was wrong will blame him. Uh-uh. We were all part of that. And so we've got to understand that dynamic is repeatable. And so when that comes again next time, will we be a little bit wiser?

or we will at least recognize that that dynamic is growing. I mean, what scares me the most general is I don't think we'll learn that lesson. And one of my favorite artists has this great quote, history repeats itself and then deletes itself. That's one of my favorite Iraqi artists. His name is Narsi.

But General McChrystal, for five years, we can kind of break this down for the audience and how this plugs into the book. For five years, you were in charge of the U.S. military's most elite commandos. You found Saddam. You killed the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Are you familiar with The Onion? I am. Okay. Let me show you this Onion headline.

This is from 2006. It says 80% of Al-Qaeda number two is now dead. Now, General, I'm not here to explain comedy, but I take your smile. You understood the joke. Absolutely. That you cannot kill your way out of a political problem. Did The Onion get it more right than the U.S. military? Well, The Onion was wrong. We killed the number threes.

Number two was Zawahiri. So you had Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri. But we killed I don't know how many number threes. And we used to joke about it. But the point's exactly right. When I first got involved after 9-11, I came back from Afghanistan. I went to the Pentagon. Wait, so just for the analogy, if you're looking at a super team, you didn't get MJ, you didn't get Scotty, but you blew up Dennis Rodman? Yeah.

Over and over again. And maybe you got Luke Longley? Yeah, I mean just... And then Bill Wennington? Exactly. What? Well, you get who you can get. And there was an idea that... If we decapitated Al-Qaeda, that we would take the energy out of the organization. But the energy wasn't in the head of that organization. It was in the ideas of that organization.

It was in the sense of humiliation felt across the Islamist world. So you really had to step back and say, what's the energy that is causing people to follow somebody as extreme? is Osama bin Laden or Amin al-Zawahiri. And we tried to do that. I'm not going to say we were stupid. We weren't. I mean, General, I do think killing the Bill Wennington of al-Qaeda isn't worth it.

And operationally, there's a value to do that. And you are trying to tamp down the value or the violence and the effectiveness of the organization. So I don't buy the idea that there's no value in that. My point is that it's necessary but not sufficient. The real effort is cultural and political. It's trying to get at the root causes of it. But if I went into a... a rally of Americans at any point during that war. And I said, okay, we're going to kill Osama bin Laden. I'd have gotten...

Standing ovation, a lot of tears. If I said, we're going to go and we're going to spend a long time trying to build up understanding with people in the Islamist world, all this kind of stuff, it would have been completely silent because...

That's not the emotional sexy response, right? But that's the necessary part. You know, the sexy response also didn't make sense to me because there was this line that I heard repeatedly, which is, they hate our freedom. They. But they're over there. Why do they care if I have the HBO cable bundle? Like, someone in Al-Qaeda is just like, what? He has Amazon Prime Video. So much freedom. And Showtime that's now been rolled over into Paramount. So many options. Like, I don't...

That never clicked for me. Yeah, we need to be sure that we are even-handed here because of all the mistakes we made and the attitudes we took on, they were equally guilty. If you were talking to a leader there... They did do all those things. They tried to simplify us. They tried to characterize us in a certain way, weakness, all the things of our social lack of discipline.

our lack of morals. And so they did the same thing that we find ourselves doing. Were they doing that? Were they making fun of America? Of course. So, I mean, you know, we go around and self-flagellate all the time, but... Everybody makes that same mistake.

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Well, General, I got to give you this, which is even in this conversation and in the interviews you've been given, you have been very empathetic. towards even people that you have been in combat with. I found this interview that you recently gave and I wanted to show it to you. If I was a young... Palestinian who lived in Gaza, who'd been raised in Gaza, say I was born about 2000. My experience would be such that I accept that I probably would be.

a supporter of or a participant from Hamas because that would be my perspective. General, if I said those exact words, I would be sent to a prison in El Salvador. Let me also just say this just because this is on video. I just want to let you know, even though I don't know if you've been listening to Chapo Trap House or Stavi got to you and you're on your anti-imperialist stuff. I just want to let everyone know that I condemn.

All of it. I completely understand that if you said that, you think that you would be targeted, and I don't disagree. But at the same time, we need to step back and say, why is somebody...

thinking that. If I had a different life journey and grew up somewhere different in the United States, different thing, I'd probably feel very differently politically and whatnot. And you have that quote in the book, in every war, each side seeks to dehumanize them. Exactly. That's what you're talking about. So then destroying them is easy.

to think even comedians can't step away from thinking sure sure i try to i try to now i've been accused of not being so sharp but i'm trying my best general but you are saying Look, the people that are involved in war, and in this particular case in Gaza, they're human beings. They're not monsters. And they're responding to their experiences. So here's my question.

Do you think the military teaches people to humanize the other side, or when did you come to this conclusion? Is it while you were serving, after you served? The military does a little bit of both, unfortunately. On the one hand, because it is designed to be... an aggressive culture particularly historically you sort of want to simplify things admiral bull halsey had this billboard created world war ii that said kill japs kill more japs

And that was at the entrance to one of the harbors that his ships went in and out of. I mean, that's pretty focused. But in the moment, nobody had any problem with that. I think that the military... But on the other hand, we do a pretty good job in the American military of talking about rule of law, law of armed conflict, morality. So better than almost any military I've seen.

We balance that pretty well. But if you think about what you're asking a young soldier to do, you're asking to screw up their courage, go into battle, be aggressive. And then at the same time, you're asking them to almost in a nanosecond. switch over and be humanitarian to surveillance or the wounded enemy. It's necessary, but it's hard. It's like taking attack dogs and suddenly asking them to calm down and don't attack anymore.

That's why discipline is so important. And that's why leadership in the military is so critically valuable. And that's why, of course, leadership at the national level is so important. You have been an expert specifically on... leadership, but also your expertise and your frame of mind and thinking.

was relied on for military interventions in the Middle East. What is the lesson that we as Americans keep failing to learn when it comes to everything that's happening in the Middle East? Because things are worse in Iraq. in Libya, in Afghanistan. Why, as Americans, do we always resort to military intervention over other forms of diplomacy? Your point's right. When we do military intervention...

I think that we don't do some things that you absolutely need to do before you go. First is understand the conflict. We went into Afghanistan after 9-11. We had not been involved for about a decade because... After the Soviets had been pushed out, we backed away, closed our embassy. So we went in almost blind, deaf, and dumb. We didn't have people who spoke the language, who knew the area. We had a few people who might have had a little bit of peripheral interaction with it.

But we didn't understand it and we tried to be in a hurry. So we did things with expedience, which weren't with bad intentions, but they were ultimately in effect. There was this feeling of we'll get in there and fix it. That's right. We'll fix it. Is there any data set that... can undermine that unshakable faith that military intervention will fix it. Yeah, history.

History will show you that that almost never works from outsiders going in to fix something like that. It really has to be fixed from within. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be involved. We shouldn't support. We shouldn't do things which allow budding nations either to defend themselves.

or to increase their effectiveness or their governance or their economy. General, I really, and I don't want to interrupt you here because I respect you so much, but I need you to do this while you're on the book tour, which is, hey, I've served. I've seen how messy the puppy dog gets around the world.

For every crisis that happens in this country from here on out, I know everybody learns things through TikTok and Instagram stories, but I need phones down for 90 days. Open up your Houghton Mifflin history book. And you need to read about how we fucked it up.gov. Is that possible? Probably not. Would it be valuable? Absolutely. And we need to start at the top. We need to admit.

with our national leadership who do have the time and staffs to help educate them themselves so they can understand it. These guys, they write so many books about history. They evoke their favorite president all the time. You know, it's interesting. When I went to Afghanistan, I had been a student of Vietnam because my father and brother had served there. And so I was very familiar with what we got wrong in Vietnam and what the costs were.

And we did most of the same mistakes in Afghanistan. And you could see it happening. And again, I go back to it was good people trying hard. And that's the danger of it. Because if we try to say, well, we'll just get better people and send them over, that wasn't the problem. The problem was the mindset and the process that we followed. We couldn't unify our effort and we couldn't clarify exactly what was doable.

by foreigners. And I think those things we can learn from, but they are hard lessons to learn. We have the memory of earthworms is what I'm realizing more and more.

Chapter 17, you talk about a thought experiment that you did with your students in a leadership course at Yale. So this is the scenario, all right? There's a nuclear bomb and there's a little red countdown clock and the countdown clock is ticking. And you ask the students. Is it okay to torture the terrorist to find out where they put the bomb? And you wrote that you were stunned by their response. How did they respond?

Well, first, the scenario also put their family in that city. So there was a personal connection. And I said, is it OK to torture this subject or this detainee to try to get the information? And they go, oh, yeah. It was always a majority. who said, oh, yeah, you know, you got to get the information. And we would sort of back up and I'd say, no, wait a minute. You know, torture is not only wrong, it's illegal. And so you can't do that. And they go, yeah, but.

There's a bomb in the city with my family and that guy's got the information. We got to get it. And you suddenly realize how powerful that kind of a feeling is. We go back and we say. the things we did wrong after 9-11. And there was not outright torture, at least not that I ever saw. But the reality is there's this pressure to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Yeah.

Okay, time for a fact check. So, while Stanley McChrystal was the commander of JSOC in Iraq, he oversaw a detention center called Camp Nama, which soldiers said stood for Nasty Ass Military Area. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at Camp Nama were, quote, regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions, and beaten.

The New York Times reported that soldiers there beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces, and used detainees for target practice in a game of paintball. And one interrogator at the camp reported seeing the general in person... inspecting that prison multiple times. Now, the general knows all of this, but I think it's important for you to know, too, before you hear the next question and the next answer.

I mean, you're right. I'm still not sure if they were right or wrong. The students. Exactly. I know the right or politically correct answer, and I personally don't condone torture. But if my family were in danger, I would likely react similarly. So maybe I do condone torture. I'm just, this is really, I'm very curious here. Did any of your students think that it was a little weird getting asked a question about torture from a man who oversaw?

a military detention facility in Iraq. Well, I think they knew that I knew something about the subject we were talking about because it is much more complicated than people think. Now, there's a right and wrong. There's a black and white on this thing, but there's also the reality of how things are. And so I think the ability to recognize that if you haven't thought about it beforehand. Yeah.

It's more difficult to confront that. After 9-11, the United States had not really thought about it before. Suddenly, this horrific action occurs, and there's all this talk about taking the gloves off. We're going to do whatever it takes to defeat these terrorists. And there were some ideas that were floated around that were, I thought, preposterous, but they were in the emotion of the moment. And that gets back to our earlier conversation. You need to understand that boundaries will be pushed.

in moments like that. And you need to think about them beforehand. You need to decide what your character is. Yeah. This is where there's particular chapters in the book where you really wrestle with these pretty gnarly philosophical questions. specifically about pushing those boundaries. In Iraq and Afghanistan, you oversaw a system of those night raids. Some of them did not go very well, okay? Particularly the one...

outside of the city in Gardez in Afghanistan. Now, I'm not going to get into the details with you. Maybe when you do the podcast with Mehdi Hassan, he will go into every bullet point. Okay, so Mehdi told me the general's not coming on Zeteo, so I'll just have to give you these bullet points myself. In Afghanistan, the U.S. military regularly carried out night raids. Now, these ramped up under the leadership of General McChrystal, and at their peak...

His soldiers were reportedly doing 12 to 15 of these a night. On one of these night raids, in February of 2010, U.S. Army Rangers raided a house outside the city of Gardez. What happened was covered in Jeremy Scahill's Oscar-nominated documentary, Dirty Wars. And I'll let Jeremy describe what happened. What happened in Gardez was that U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that there were—you know, a Taliban cell was in a—was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber.

And they raid this house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were— were pregnant. And another person that they killed in the house, Mohammed Daoud, turned out to be a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S. And so the soldiers—

raid this house and they killed these people. And instead of realizing that they had made a horrible mistake and that the intelligence was wrong and it resulted in these people being killed. They actually covered up the killings. And we interview the survivors of this raid, including a man who watched while he was zip-cuffed.

soldiers, American soldiers, digging bullets out of his wife's dead body. As head of the military command in Afghanistan, General McChrystal ordered an internal investigation about what happened in the Gardez raid. Now, the report eventually concluded that the amount of force utilized was necessary, proportional, and applied at the appropriate time. None of the soldiers involved were disciplined for what happened, which sets up this next question.

But the reason why I bring it up, the night raids, the torture, all of that stuff, is to set up this really important final question. I get why America losing its standing in the world is bad for me. But if I'm in another part of the world, if I'm a citizen in Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq, Afghanistan, anywhere in Latin America, if I somehow turn on NPR and it says breaking news.

Today, China is the world's superpower. Why would I care? Yeah. If you don't believe in American values and character, you won't care. Right. Because you will just do a transactional accounting of what's easier to trade with. Where do I make more money? Or if you live in, say, Sudan or another part of the world that we have invaded, just, hey, okay, well, someone else is in charge.

Someone else has the agency and I don't. I think we have to be the kind of nation that people admire enough. Again, we'll never be perfect. Admire enough that they say for all of their faults, the United States is essential. For all of their faults, we want to be with them and like them as much as we can. So thank you for your time here, but I wanted to end with a personal anecdote. And we chatted about this before we came in here. I'd like to shout out my mom.

who has worked at the VA right off of Zinfandel Boulevard, right near the Mather Air Force Base. And she has been a physician who has served members of the military for decades. And as a young kid, I got to visit my mom at work. And I got to see the way a lot of our former veterans were treated. I'm talking about veterans that served in Iraq, Afghanistan.

the Vietnam War, the Korean War. And I got to tell you something, General. It was really sad to see the way our country has neglected people that have served. And in my lifetime, I have found that the ideas of diplomacy or negotiation, these characters or values that we use first have never really been the place. And it's always been military intervention first.

And when I see the patients that my mom works with every day, I would love to live in a country where it's diplomacy and negotiation first, military intervention and force last. But sadly, I feel like it's always been the inverse. General McChrystal, to take us out, do you feel there will be a time in this country where that inverse does happen?

I don't think that's always been the case. I understand your perception, though, because the wars are such big things. I think there's been a heck of a lot of diplomacy, but the reality is in every case. That ought to be what we lean into. That ought to be our first and best pitch of the game because the people that your mother does so much to serve, they're our brothers.

our sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our kids, you know, they are part of us. So when we go to war, a bit of us goes. And so I think that the... The idea that we need to do everything we can, both to be the kind of people we can be, but also to protect the rest of us. That's the key thing. General McChrystal, I thank you for your time and thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, your son. I know you're not a young man, but you're younger. Don't be too binary.

on your assessment of the U.S. has just gone out and rushed to war every time. We've actually done in many cases where we have not, but you just don't read about them and hear about them as much. And you've got a whole group of people who... try to do that every day yeah the problem with the military is it's an easy button because when you press the button something happens much more rapidly than it does in diplomacy or something so if you have a political expedience

a politician is first they press the cia button because they think they can do it secretly and that never works right then they press the military button because and generally the cia button is the overthrow the political dictator exactly and they say it'll always be secret no yeah and then they do the military button, and then they realize that neither of those two solved the problem anyway. I think if you ever studied people in power, their aversion to the use of either...

those kind of covert operations or military go down. It's just like military people. The more wars you've been in, the less you're excited to have wars. Sure. And it makes sense, not just because war is hard. It's actually kind of exciting, I mean, to be honest, but it doesn't work.