A Marine-turned-diplomat who walked away on principle, Matt Hoh joins us to pull apart two decades of war, myth, and money. He takes us inside the Iraq “surge,” arguing it wasn’t counterinsurgency wizardry but a political settlement that finally addressed Sunni grievances and severed ties with al‑Qaeda. Then he maps the pivot to Afghanistan, showing how institutional pride, careerism, and a flood of funding drove escalation despite mounting evidence that military solutions couldn’t deliver a stable state.

We talk about the mechanics of hiding war from the public: shifting risk to Afghan forces and contractors, classifying drone and special operations, and watching U.S. casualty counts fall while spending and violence continued. Matt lays out the war economy in stark numbers, from trillion‑dollar interest payments to an extraordinary lobbying ROI for weapons firms, and explains how prosperity in Washington’s suburbs became the mirror image of devastation abroad. Along the way, he challenges the Petraeus narrative, recounts what Congress did and didn’t do in 2009, and clarifies the limited policy range that boxed presidents in.

The conversation also follows Matt’s 2022 Green Party Senate run, including court battles over ballot access and the hard truth that media coverage often follows ad dollars. We close with an unflinching look at Gaza and regional power: annexation by inches, a compliant media ecosystem, and a ruling‑class alignment that keeps militarism in motion. It’s a bracing, deeply informed tour of how narratives are built, how incentives lock in bad choices, and what it would take to shift U.S. foreign policy toward diplomacy and restraint.

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0:00 Meet Matt Hoh And His Path

5:20 Iraq War Realities Versus The COIN Myth

16:45 How Politics Enabled The Anbar Awakening

25:40 Bureaucracy, Blind Spots, And Nation Building

33:30 Petraeus, The Surge, And A Segregated Baghdad

43:35 Shift To Afghanistan And Why It Escalated

55:10 The Gravy Train: Budgets, Contracts, Incentives

1:05:25 Hiding War With Contractors And Drones