US Power And The Gaza Genocide | Harry Berger & Darryl Cooper (Preview)

## Framing the Argument: Power, Responsibility, and the Human Price What emerges from the conversation is a sustained critique of how American power is used and justified abroad, particularly in the context of recent Middle East conflicts. The exchange insists that decisions to employ force cannot be treated as routine policy choices or rhetorical gambits; they must be weighed against the predictable human cost and the deeper strategic consequences. This is not an abstract moralizing: rather, the discussion draws on personal experience, historical patterning, and on-the-ground observations to argue that U.S. military interventions have repeatedly produced outcomes far different from the ends promised in their rhetorical packaging. At stake, the conversation suggests, is how Americans remember themselves and how future generations will judge the claim that the United States acts as a benevolent power. ## Military Service and the Human Cost A central theme in the conversation is the way military service reframes attitudes toward war. Speaking from the vantage of those who have worked within defense structures—some of whom were not front-line combatants but who nonetheless bore witness to its machinery—the discussion highlights a common veteran sensibility: war is not an abstract instrument of policy but an intensely personal and often traumatic event for those who fight and for the civilians caught in the crossfire. The exchange stresses that even “successful” military operations entail predictable civilian deaths; the example of children killed in early bombing campaigns is invoked to illustrate how civilian harm is not an aberration but a structural feature of modern air-dominated warfare. This lived proximity to violence breeds skepticism about triumphant narratives. Veterans, or those who have worked alongside them, are portrayed as uniquely attuned to the moral gravity of deploying force. The conversation does not advance a categorical pacifism; instead it calls for greater humility and deliberation in decisions that send young people into harm’s way. The moral calculus, the discussants insist, should account honestly for foreseeable civilian casualties and the long-term burdens of occupation, stabilization, and political rebuilding—tasks to which militaries are often poorly suited. ## Humanizing the “Other”: Travel, Encounters, and the Limits of Media Frames A striking thread in the discussion is the transformative power of direct contact. Recounted travel experiences—staying in homes across divided communities, talking with families on both sides of a conflict—serve to dismantle the reductive images presented by nightly news cycles. The conversation argues that people everywhere are fundamentally similar in their attachments, fears, and grief; when viewed up close, combatants and civilians cease to be cartoon adversaries and instead become recognizable neighbors with ordinary aspirations. This humanization undermines dominant media framings that flatten complex political realities into moralistic binaries. When foreign populations are routinely presented as caricatures—monolithic threats, passive victims, or villains—policy debates become impoverished, and public support for coercive measures is easier to manufacture. The exchange calls for a recalibration of empathy: if the emotional reaction to a stranger’s child pulled from rubble is the same whether that child lives thousands of miles away or next door, then moral reflection should similarly be divorced from proximity and nationalist sentiment. Such an insight challenges the cognitive shorthand that enables extraordinary violence to be normalized in the name of security or liberation. ## Lessons from Iraq: Misapplied Successes and Strategic Amnesia Much of the conversation turns to the Iraq wars as a cautionary tale about learning the wrong lessons from apparent military success. The discussion reconstructs a pattern: a conventional military victory, achieved with disproportionate air and technological superiority, fosters a hubristic belief in the ability to impose political order by force. The 1991 campaign—celebrated in popular culture and widely perceived as a vindication of military prowess—helped inculcate a durable faith in the efficacy of decisive kinetic operations. That faith, the conversation contends, was then applied to qualitatively different problems in 2003, where the old template—rapid overthrow followed by a managed transition—ran headlong into sectarian fragmentation, institutional collapse, and the limits of coercive power. A critical point made is that the policy of sustained pressure, embargo, and periodic bombing created a “liminal” state: Iraq under sanctions and intermittent strikes was neither sovereign in a meaningful sense nor a stable partner. That liminality, far from justifying a full-scale regime change as a tidy corrective, produced the social dislocations and institutional vacuums that later made occupation and nation-building so costly and chaotic. The conversation also highlights how political marketing and media packaging—most notably the use of focus groups and carefully constructed narratives—can manufacture consent for wars that are neither adequately debated nor strategically coherent. ## U.S. Power and Regional Reordering Another major strand examines the broader regional consequences of American interventionism. The discussion maps a pattern of systemic shifts: the removal of secular Arab strongmen, the weakening of state structures in key countries, and the resulting reconfiguration of regional alliances and power balances. Whether these shifts are the outcome of a long-term, coordinated strategy or of a sequence of opportunistic decisions is less important for the argument than their cumulative effect. The conversation stresses that a series of interventions—targeted air campaigns, covert operations, and overt regime changes—has repeatedly produced environments in which non-state actors and neighboring adversaries gain leverage. Within this framework, the interlocutors argue that some regional actors have benefited from—or been left unbalanced by—the erosion of old counterweights. The U.S. capacity to project force has been decisive in many instances, but projection alone does not translate into durable political orders. Moreover, the perception that the United States would intervene militarily on behalf of certain partners has both reassured allies and further entangled American credibility in regional disputes. This dual character—protective yet destabilizing—complicates any straightforward claim that U.S. power has been uniformly stabilizing. ## The Politics of Memory, Honor, and Institutional Decline A less technical but equally important theme in the conversation deals with how nations narrate themselves and the political consequences of those narratives. The discussants voice concern about institutional capture, the erosion of public trust, and the ways in which policy elites deploy language and symbolism to legitimize coercion. For some in the exchange, the stakes are not merely policy success or failure but the historical memory of a nation: how posterity will judge a country that claims moral exceptionalism while engaging in practices that delegitimize international norms. Veterans and historians, the conversation suggests, are particularly sensitive to honor-coded arguments. The desire to be remembered for noble achievements—scientific, cultural, or moral—intersects awkwardly with the messy reality of geopolitical maneuvering. When powerful institutions pursue strategies that yield short-term tactical gains at the expense of long-term legitimacy, the country risks being seen as inconsistent or hypocritical. That reputational cost, alongside the human toll and strategic backlash, provides another reason for greater prudence in the use of force. ## Toward a More Deliberative Foreign Policy What follows from the exchange

US Power And The Gaza Genocide Tucker Carlson called my guest "the best popular historian in America," and after talking to him, it's easy to see why. Darryl Cooper breaks down the role of US power abroad and explains the roots of the Gaza genocide in this extensive 75 minute interview. Check out the full video on Harry Berger's new YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofncgia1sAs Subscribe: https://bergerposts.substack.com Follow on X: @BergerPosts #M2 Harrison Berger, a young US journalist who has been on this channel before and whose videos I have published here previously, now has his own YouTube channel. I urge you to go and check it out—I will link it in the description and everywhere else. Here is his latest interview: it's a preview, the first 20 minutes of his discussion with the historian Darryl Cooper. Have a look at it, and if you want to watch the full program, go over to his channel and watch it there. Enjoy! #M3 Tucker Carlson called my guest today the best popular historian in America, and it's easy to see why. Though he disagrees with that assessment, Darryl Cooper is definitely influential. His MartyrMade podcast and Substack consistently top the charts, and his new podcast, Provoked, which he co-hosts with Scott Horton, will undoubtedly do the same. He is by far one of the most fascinating and knowledgeable people I've ever talked to, and it was a privilege to get to speak with him. I hope you enjoy the conversation. I want to start with this—just your background. I mean, there are many elites who like to sit on the sidelines and send other people's children to fight wars. These are people who've never served in the military. I mean, they've probably never even been in as much as a fistfight in their lives, but they're the most dedicated cheerleaders for war. And cable news green rooms are filled with these types of people—they're really overflowing. But you're someone who served in the military, and unlike our political elites, you are not a warmonger. Actually, you're the opposite. Can you explain how your military service has informed your perspective on war? #M1 Sure. So first and foremost, I want to say I'm not a combat veteran. I was in the Navy. I worked on air and ballistic missile defense systems off the coast of some dangerous countries, but I was never getting bullets shot at me. So I don't want to give that impression or take credit for that. But, you know, what you're describing is actually pretty common among veterans. We keep a pretty tight community and kind of stay in touch in general through friendships, organizations, and so forth. And -- 1 of 7 -- there's been a real... I mean, you see this even among people who are the most "hoorah" kind of guys—you know, like somebody like Jocko, who I've worked with and have a podcast with. Jocko's, you know, he's a pro-America, Navy SEAL, warrior dude. But he's also a reasonable man, and he looks back on the last 25 years and says, "I led men in battle and watched them bleed, watched a few of them die—and what for? Like, what exactly was all that for?" I think a lot of Americans are kind of thinking that way, but a lot of veterans feel it very viscerally. Even somebody like me, who was just sitting on a ship off the coast watching this stuff happen on my radar, still knows a lot of combat veterans. Like I said, it's a tight community. I've had friends who were over there who were traumatized, friends who were injured, friends who were killed. And so we take it a little bit more personally, I think, than even the average anti-war activist—and all respect and power to them. But it's something that we feel quite viscerally, I guess. And so for me, having traveled widely—so after I did 10 years in the Navy, I got out and worked as a civilian engineer for the Department of Defense for 10 more years. I finished that in 2020—well, 2021, actually. And for most of those 10 years—and actually two years before that, so probably about 13 years—I would travel all over the world, eight to ten months a year. I was traveling mostly overseas to work with allies or on U.S. bases and U.S. installations and ships on their air and ballistic missile systems. And so, you know, you go around, you spend a lot of time in these other countries, and you start to kind of—well, first of all, it makes you grateful that you live in the United States, because a lot of the rest of the world is a tougher place to live. It also gives you an appreciation for how fragile and almost unnatural this sort of situation of general peace is, generally speaking. It's a little heated politically and such, for what we're used to. But in general, we're not worrying about a civil war breaking out in the United States. And for a lot of the world, that's just the daily reality they live in. But the biggest thing about all that travel is you really get to realize that people are pretty much the same everywhere. I mean, there are differences in emphasis and attitude and various things, but the average regular person—when you start to get to know these people—you know, I used to go to Israel a lot. I probably traveled there 12 or 15 times in my capacity as a DOD engineer, and probably for a collective six to eight months total. While I was over there, when I wasn't working, I would travel around and talk to everybody, talk to people. I had Palestinian friends in Orange County in Los Angeles who hooked me up with their relatives in the West Bank. And so I would stay with them and they would host me, and you just get to know all these people. You travel from staying overnight in a Palestinian home in the West Bank, and then you go stay with a Jewish friend in Israel. And you're like, man, these people could really just be neighbors. You know what I mean? They're very similar people in most ways. When you start to realize that and start to humanize the people who generally just show up as TV characters, or as videos or pictures on Twitter or something like that, you really start to recognize that the person over there, when they're pulling their child out of rubble, feels exactly the way you would feel pulling your child out of rubble. -- 2 of 7 -- There's not some—and I think, you know, when you just watch this stuff on TV, it's easy to almost turn it into a movie, even if you know it's real. It sort of plays in your head like a movie, and you relate to it like a movie. Like, it's super sad—I might cry at a movie—but it's still this distant hyperreality that doesn't quite sink in. And when you really realize that these are people just like you, and everything that they're suffering through—just put yourself in their position, try to imagine it—it makes it very hard to... I'm not some anti-war guy in principle, like an absolutist. Obviously, I was in the military. I worked for the DOD. I've got a bunch of relatives and everybody else who are still in or were in the military. But I'd like to see us just treat the decision to go to another country—to send American kids over there to another country to kill people, to kill children—with the seriousness it deserves. We don't send them to do that, obviously. But on that first night of shock and awe, when we went into Iraq in 2003, they estimate between seven and twelve children died that night in Baghdad due to our bombs. And so let's say we decapitated the regime, killed his sons, killed Saddam. Democracy breaks out and the Iraq War was just the most resounding military and political success anybody could possibly imagine. We still killed a dozen children, you know, and so even in the cleanest possible war, that's what's going to happen. And I would just like to see American citizens and our leaders in general treat that decision with the gravity that it really merits, you know. #M1 Well, let me ask you actually about our role in Iraq, because I was born in 2001. So I grew up with the war on terror in the background. And the official narratives around that war have changed so much. You know, up until the failure of David Petraeus's surge, many people were sympathetic to the idea of a humanitarian intervention—that even if Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, he was still a nasty guy and he had to go. And then even today, the conventional wisdom is that the war was a mistake, that it was a lapse of judgment for a country with a long track record of good intentions. And I think you'll really rarely hear any American public officials suggest that that war in any way reflected American power or represented how we behave abroad unilaterally and often soaked with blood, as you mentioned. The only exception I'd say is actually Trump. He'll often say things like, you know, we're killers too. "You think we're so innocent," as he said to Bill O'Reilly in 2017. "Putin's a killer." #M1 A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? You think our country's so innocent? I don't know of any government leaders that are killers in America. Well, take a look at what we've done, too. We've made a lot of mistakes. I've been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. Yeah, mistakes are different, though. We've made a lot of mistakes, okay, but a lot of people were killed. So, a lot of killers around, believe me. -- 3 of 7 -- #M1 Made similar comments about us with regards to China just last week to Maria Bartiromo. Signed a paper saying that he would, uh, value Mao Zedong's value system. So there was that, and then they hacked—and they hack into our telecom system, they've been stealing intellectual property, there's fentanyl, COVID—I mean, you know, all of this stuff. So how do you negotiate with obviously a bad actor? You don't think we do that to them? We do. We do a lot of things. That's the way the world works. That's a nasty world. You lived through the war on terror, you served in it, and are one of the most knowledgeable people in America about this kind of conflict history. Just how do you understand our role in that conflict—the Iraq War—and how has your understanding of that war changed over time? #M3 Well, you know, probably other countries do the same thing, but we have this terrible habit in the United States of taking the wrong lessons from a conflict and applying them to the next conflict in a way that ends up in disaster, right? If you go back to—first of all, just to emphasize and agree with one thing you said: Saddam Hussein—let's just get this out of the way—he was a real monster. He was not like Assad. He was not like the Ayatollah. They're authoritarians or theocrats, but he was a real monster, like a really nasty guy, for sure. There are lots of those. We fund and ally with plenty of them, you know what I mean? But in 1991, you know, sixteen years after the fall of Saigon, the US military had been going through a real kind of crisis of morale, crisis of recruiting, crisis of image. The government in general had really kind of burned off most of its credibility and legitimacy with the public during Vietnam and just the late '60s and early '70s in general. By the time you got up to the 1991 invasion of Iraq—or I guess we didn't, you know, fully invade—but, you know, it was really kind of... It's hard to explain to somebody your age now, born in 2001, how in 1991—if you go back and Google a music video called "Voices That Care," it was for the troops who were in the Persian Gulf, ready to fight Iraq or during the fighting. And I mean, it is every single celebrity you can think of, from Will Smith to Rod Stewart—everybody who was big then. I mean, it would be like today if it was Miley Cyrus and just 50, a hundred people maybe. And they made this music video. #M3 Yeah, sorry. I was going to say, they did it for Ukraine—I lived through it with Bono and everyone. I guess that's right. They were abducting people, just sending a generation of young men to the front lines. No one really cared. All the celebrities came out to cheer it