Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Mate.

Joining me is Samuel Moyne. He is a professor at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University.

His new book is Humane, How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

Samuel, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Aaron. Your book has gotten some controversy. It's been attacked by both people on the left and the right, which is always a good sign, I think. Before we get into some of the

controversies, let me just ask you to lay out your thesis. As I understand it, and correct

me if I'm wrong, you are arguing that the process of making the conduct of U.S. wars more

humane has in fact legitimized and prolonged the underlying enterprise of war itself.

Yeah, that's basically it.

You know, I'm interested in how it was that Barack Obama could reinvent the war on terror.

And as I see it, it was central to that reinvention that he could respond to the way that people had attacked George W. Bush's

war. And that was largely on the grounds, not that it was illegal, but that it was fought illegally.

And the results were that Obama was able to offer a humane and legal form of the war on terror, which continues to this day.

So talk to us about how Obama came about that. I mean, first of all, he campaigns as kind of a

peace candidate. He highlights the fact that he opposed the Iraq war, of course, on narrow

strategic rounds. I don't think he ever called it illegal.

But so how does he go from portraying himself as being this champion of peace who was going to

turn the page on the Bush era? And then what actually happened when he comes in office?

You know, Obama was brilliant, at least as a kind of electoral strategist because he was the first and now a succession of three presidents who have won by selectively opposing American war, two of them against Hillary Clinton.

So he, Barack Obama, assented against Hillary Clinton, in part at least,

because she'd voted for the Iraq war.

Donald Trump falsely claimed,

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