01/22/14 – Chase Madar – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com.
Alright y'all, welcome back.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives and my whole show archives and my blog and whatever you want there.
ScottHorton.org.
I'm streaming 3 to 5 here Eastern Time at LibertyExpressRadio.com.
And next up is Chase Medar.
He's a lawyer from New York, but wait, no, he's a decent guy.
He's not a politician or anything.
And he wrote this great book about the passion of Bradley Manning, Chelsea now, I guess, for the paperback.
But anyway, sometimes these things change.
Anyway, great book about the greatness of Chelsea Manning and the heroics, really the self-sacrifice there to bring the truth of the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the State Department cables and the Guantanamo files to the people.
So please look at that.
You can find it on Amazon there, The Passion of Bradley Manning.
And now you've got this great piece here, Hawks for Humanity at Al Jazeera America.
That's America.
AlJazeera.com.
Does the human rights industry adore war?
And let me first say, great job.
You do a very good job naming names here and explaining what you really mean.
So go ahead and tell us a story, Chase.
My story is all about the really tawdry romance between the human rights industry's elites and the military-industrial complex, and how this movement that really got started in earnest in, say, the 60s and 70s, that was all about freeing prisoners of conscience and respecting people's rights and getting political prisoners out of jail, suddenly became one more faction or interest group pushing for war, although war always for humanitarian reasons.
And a few examples I will out are Samantha Power, okay?
She's our ambassador to the United Nations, former director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard Law School, author of a Kulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell, about how genocide is bad and we need to stop it by using armed force.
And then you have Michael Ignatyev, Canadian politician and intellectual, also a former director of Harvard Law's Carr Center for Human Rights and head of the Liberal Party in Canada.
Big human rights guy, he's written lots of books and articles about it, also a big supporter of the Iraq War.
He was one of these liberal hawks who thought that invading Iraq would be just wonderful for human rights, and of course we know that this turned out to be tragically untrue.
And then you have people like Harold Koh, recently the top lawyer in the State Department, formerly dean of Yale Law School, built a career scholarship about human rights law, and he's the guy who wrote the legal justification for Obama's drone strikes, also a big supporter of the Libya War.
And he's someone who is, you know, plainly up for war if it's somehow humanitarian.
Well, and of course, you know, there's only one alternative, and that is the callous, amoral, real politic of Henry Kissinger that says, well, kill them all if we can make an extra 50 bucks.
Yeah, I mean, that's the false dichotomy.
Now, by calling out these human rights industry people who are very pro-war, the alternatives aren't, you know, Henry Kissinger, real politic, kill them all, so what?
And the other alternative is not radical pacifism either.
I mean, there are plenty of alternatives.
And if we really care about genocide deeply, and we should, and we want to stop it, there are many things that we should be doing actively, preventively, that our government should be doing, and well before you even get to the point of invading a country like Rwanda or launching missiles into Syria or any of that business that Samantha Power is tirelessly advocating.
And, you know, this may sound flaky to some people, but real human rights people know this.
And one example was the Rwanda expert Alison Desforges.
She died a few years ago in an airplane crash over Buffalo, New York, but you can find something she wrote very easily online called, Ten Lessons to Prevent Genocide.
And she's focusing on Rwanda here after the genocide, and her ten lessons include things like stop the genocide before it becomes one, react promptly and firmly to preparations for massive slaughter, pay close attention to the media, ensure accurate information of what's happening on the ground.
There are all kinds of diplomatic pressure that can be brought to bear to nip these things in the bud, and it's only the tenth option that she, in her ten lessons, that involves military force.
All right, well, so now wait a minute.
If it's, you know, we're on the National Security Council, and it's 1994, and geez, I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden it's the Hutus versus the Tutsis.
It sure is easy to imagine dropping in a bunch of U.S. Army or U.S. Marines, and no matter who you and your militia are, our guys can whoop your ass, and we're going to whoop your ass until you stop this genocide.
Who could, how could Bill Clinton have not chosen to do so?
Isn't that what you would do?
Yeah, I mean, that's the tough, you know, trial lawyer question, and it's a fair question.
But I think it's not the only question that we need to ask here.
We need to wonder, how did it get to the point in 1994 where a genocide was suddenly about to happen?
How come no one in Washington or London or Paris or Geneva was paying attention beforehand?
I mean, there's a great deal that collective diplomacy can do in a kind of preventive way to stop these things from happening.
One thing you can, I mean, one example of this of a dog that didn't bark in the night is the near absence of electoral violence in Kenya recently.
And that's because people in the U.N. and Washington and Paris and London noticed what happened four years ago, that you had a lot of violence, ethnic violence, after the last round of elections, and everybody got on the same script and pressured the government and took steps there so that there wouldn't be some, you know, near civil war there.
And that should have been done all along in Rwanda and other places.
But instead of acting preventively and using foresight and forethought, there's this crisis mentality that's purely reactive, it gets wrapped up in partisan politics, it gets wrapped up into some non-profit groups that are pretty dodgy and don't have any sense of human rights law or the local politics or likely consequences of their actions.
You know, stir in a little bit of George Clooney or other Hollywood stars, and you get a recipe for creating bigger problems.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, ever since Rwanda, everything is Rwanda, right?
Like it's Hitler or something.
And that's what they push that story about, about Darfur in Western Sudan for so long that there had to be intervention there.
But, you know, I actually know a guy who is a pilot for these NGOs doing relief missions all over the world, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all over Africa and all kinds of things.
And, you know, the way he explained that was it's not ethnic at all, man.
Everybody there is black and Arab, and they all are Sunni and they all are the same.
They all speak the same language with maybe slight variation of dialect.
And the real battle going on is between the nomads and the farmers.
And, you know, if you want to and and, you know, they're allied groups and whatever, and the government is on the side of the nomads against the farmers and whatever.
But still, the point being that, you know, you let George Clooney sell you a tootsie hootoo thing where it's all cut and dry, you're going to find yourself in a terrible disaster.
And that was one that George Bush, for whatever reason, decided not to take.
I guess they're more interested in runoff with the South than the West of Sudan.
But yeah, yeah, you know, here's the thing.
When people speculate about Rwanda, how sending in paratroopers would have stopped everything.
First of all, that's speculation.
We don't know that that would have stopped the slaughter.
We really don't.
And if we're going to speculate about what military violence could have achieved, I think we have a duty to also speculate about what non-military measures could have achieved.
And as our point of entry here, not take 1994 when the crisis is about to happen, but think about what could have been done in 1992 and 1991 and not in the 80s to prevent this from happening.
As the Belgians were withdrawing, they should have really tried to negotiate a deal instead of just leaving and letting the majority get their revenge on the minority that they had propped up in power all along.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, they would have done something.
They just up and left them high and dry.
They're sock puppets.
They're they're they're quizzlings.
They just left high and dry.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, it certainly could have been prevented in the first place.
And so, I mean, there you have it.
And I think the human rights industry has gotten far too close to Washington in advocating for war and and seeing that as the main solution.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to stop you here.
I'm terrible at watching the clock, Chase.
Forgive me, everybody.
It's Chase Medard.
He wrote this great book, The Passion of Bradley Manning.
I really do hope you'll read it.
We'll be right back to talk more about the do good or warmongers in the Democratic Party in the White House after this.
Hey, I'll Sky here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the shows, listeners, sponsors and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon dot com, stop by Scott Horton dot org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon dot com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at Scott Horton dot org or go to Scott Horton dot org slash Amazon.
All right, you guys.
And sorry for the sloppy production values here, I'm trying, I don't know.
Luckily, I have exquisite taste in guests, and so that helps make up for my flaws and errors here on the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Chase Madar.
He's a lawyer and he's the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning.
And we're talking about this great article, Hawks for Humanity at America dot Al Jazeera dot com.
And I'm sorry, you were beginning to say that these liberal internationalist hawks, that they really do have the ear of people in power who really take these arguments seriously, or at least they really like using them as a fig leaf.
You mentioned the Iraq war there as some kind of humanitarian intervention.
They really did pretend that for a long time.
Right.
Colin Powell's big halabja speech and all of that.
We've got to go save the Iraqis from the dictatorship the Republicans foisted on them previously.
You see certain elite members of the human rights industry, you know, very willingly participating in many rushes to war where they are used as fig leaves, you know, whether it's justifications for launching missiles into Syria to make that situation better or the NATO campaign on Libya or, you know, even the Iraq war or propping up the Afghan campaign and its escalation under Obama or going farther back to the Somalia campaign in 1992, 93, and then the bombing of Belgrade for human rights, of course, back in 1999.
And many of these illiberal internationalist types, multilateralist types in the human rights industry, they think they're the ones who are influencing Washington for the better.
But what's really happening is that the human rights industry or certain parts of it are just become appendages of imperial Washington, you know, high minded appendage that can make nice speeches about human rights and moral values, but really just ends up being another prop for a militarized foreign policy.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I mean, it seems like that's that's the story of any time Mr.
Smith goes to Washington as he ends up becoming one of them, you know, that's what it means to go down into the into the abyss.
It becomes you too.
And all of that.
Right.
Yeah.
And it seems like they don't even they don't even really try.
I mean, the same thing with Cato, you know, among libertarians, they're not really warmongers.
But, you know, during the worst time after September 11th, for the first couple of years there, boy, they sure were kind of quiet about that stuff, whereas before they'd been so good and and really the rest of their people are good on it, you know.
But as an organization, though, not so much.
That's not as bad as the liberals who really I mean, because after all, without, you know, O'Hanlon and Polak and and the the Democrats leading the the left, the center left part of the consensus, the Iraq war couldn't have happened.
I mean, it was really a White House led thing as it was.
And there was a lot of skeptical people, even among the powerful in America who had to be overcome.
And, you know, the Michael O'Hanlon's of the world were like the saving grace for Bush and Cheney.
Yeah, I mean, it was led by the neocons, but there are plenty of willing accomplices coming up with all kinds of moralistic reasons, human rights reasons for invading Iraq from Christopher Hitchens to Michael Ignatyev to George Packer and David Remnick at the New Yorker.
And it I mean, it just turned out to be a huge catastrophe, a catastrophe that continues to this day.
But one of the reason why the human rights crowd thinks that wars can be really great and really successful is this absurd faith in the power of of law to regulate military violence.
The idea that if you just have enough lawyers involved, then strikes will be really surgical and precise, that if you just have enough specialists in international humanitarian law, as it's euphemistically called, involved, that, you know, it'll be really therapeutic and humanitarian the way you bomb.
And this is very rarely the case, not going to say categorically that it never works out, but most of the time you just get a bigger disaster, whether in Somalia in the early 90s or bombing Belgrade over Kosovo that resulted in intensified ethnic violence and the ethnic cleansing of about two hundred thousand Serbs and Roma people from Kosovo province, which hardly anyone ever mentions.
And that's a really big deal, that consequence of the 99 war that no one ever brings that up.
Yeah, no one ever brings that up.
I mean, it's something that's so forgotten.
But if you say to somebody who doesn't know about this stuff, hey, you know, would you see this as a success if, you know, two hundred thousand people were the victims of ethnic cleansing?
And you say, well, no, I mean, that's clearly a failure.
But that was exactly the consequence of the Kosovo campaign.
Well, now let me ask you about the I'm sorry, you're still in the middle of a point there.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, yeah, I just want to finish this.
But this idea that military violence can be easily regulated, it just doesn't, you know, bear truth.
I mean, you're kind of a libertarian or total libertarian, so you're familiar with this whole idea of market capture and regulatory capture, that it's the big, you know, business interests that end up, you know, taking control of the regulatory process.
Well, that's pretty much true with military violence as well.
Military law, it's not for the protection of civilians.
It's for the protection of soldiers and generals to shield them from any kind of legal liability.
It's all about granting them permissions rather than, you know, really restricting their action.
Yeah, that's a that's a very good way to explain it.
Absolutely.
And, you know, another kind of libertarian take on this is about I'm not exactly sure how it got the name public choice theory, but it's the individual selfish a-hole theory, if you ask me.
And that is that there really is no national interest, just individual interests.
And so and I think Michael Hastings work on the Libya war in Rolling Stone is that it's my favorite example of this for now anyway, is that Samantha Power, due to her supporting Obama and opposing Hillary Clinton in the campaign, had been relegated to the deputy assistant secretary of nothing on the National Security Council doing, quote, do-gooder rinky dink stuff like teaching the Iraqis about democracy and stupid crap like that.
And she wanted some attention.
She wanted a promotion and she wanted the president to pay attention to her.
And when the Arab Spring broke out and the protests in Tripoli broke out, she decided this was her chance to finally be somebody like she always wanted to be, whatever the crap.
And that's how we got stuck with that war in Libya.
Yeah, I mean, that's a convincing explanation for part of it.
I mean, that's the way to get ahead in Washington is to support wars, not to be against them.
Even after the failure of Iraq, even after the slow motion ongoing failure in Afghanistan, that's still the way to get ahead.
And it's just crazy as if we've learned nothing.
But I want to talk a little bit about what, you know, that the human rights industry should be doing, because I don't think the human rights business and their organizations are all bad.
In fact, I've gotten nice emails since this piece came out yesterday from people working at places like Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights saying, yeah, you know, I agree strongly with what you said.
Thanks for saying it.
And so do a lot of my colleagues.
Well, they do great journalism.
I mean, where would we be without these guys?
I think, you know, I mean, they're constantly reporting on facts that are hard to come by, often a great personal risk.
And I don't want to, you know, dump on these groups entirely, but I think they really do need to stay out of the business of supporting wars or not and just leave that to other people.
They can document the abuses.
They should do that.
They do a great job of that.
But they should stay out of statecraft.
And because when they do get involved, they just get sucked into the gravitational field of Washington, D.C., of Imperial Washington.
Yeah, I had Amnesty International on this show supporting the war in Libya.
Yeah, dear.
Yeah, it was unbelievable.
Him and Juan Cole.
I mean, this is what happens when Democrats are in power, too, is that people get their partisan colored glasses on and they stop thinking rationally, you know.
That's sad about Juan Cole, but let's not dwell on it.
I mean, but yeah, you get these human rights intellectuals and lawyers and technocrats who just get sucked into it, you know, if they're guys in office.
And I think we've seen that.
But, you know, there are a lot of preventive things that that the media should be focused on and that our diplomats and our foreign policy in general should be focused on.
I don't know if you've had that guy, Micah Zanko, on before.
He's no, I'm from the Council on Foreign Relations.
I read him from time to time about the drone wars and stuff, right?
Yeah, I mean, he he works at a place called the Center for Preventive Action.
He's a follower, a devotee of A.J. Busty, the great American pacifist.
He seems kind of often like a sole voice of reason at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is, you know, otherwise pretty establishment in all the not very good ways.
But the kind of work that he does there is just scoping out conflicts, you know, when they're starting and trying to attract diplomatic attention so they can be nipped in the bud and resolved before it reaches a crisis point like, say, 1994 in Rwanda or the way Syria has become over the past couple of years.
But then again, in that kind of how they broke off South Sudan and then caused a new civil war there.
Well, you know, I don't want to say that breaking off South Sudan was a total failure yet.
I think it's too soon to tell.
I mean, it's that would have been better if it had been left up to them, I would say.
But I see what you mean.
Well, it's hard because when you intervene, even diplomatically, you end up making promises and then you got to live up to them.
And, you know, but, you know, there are promises that involve military force and promises that are that involve just making deals and just getting the South Sudanese to talk to Khartoum and resolve that situation without a massive civil war is a positive achievement.
Right.
Absolutely.
But you have South Sudan, you have leaders who have no experience governing, really.
And I hope we got to leave it there, Chase.
It's it's Chase Madar, everybody.
America dot Al Jazeera dot com Hawks for Humanity.
It'll be on antiwar dot com tomorrow, I think.
Thanks again.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
Anti-imperialism is at the center of libertarianism.
As long as we keep it that way.
So if you're part of a libertarian group, how about having me out to give a talk on the wars?
I work cheap and I'm good on everything.
I've even been known to change a mind or two with some of these things.
Check out some examples at Scott Horton dot org slash speeches and email Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more information.
By the way, this February 15th, the Future Freedom Foundation is having John Glaser and I give a talk at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington.
Come on out and say hi.
Man, you need some new stickers for the back of your truck.
Scott Horton here for Liberty Stickers dot com.
Aren't you sick and tired of everyone else being wrong about everything all the time?
Well, now you can tell them all what's right with some stickers from Liberty Stickers dot com.
At Liberty Stickers dot com, they're against everything.
So, you know, they're good on your issue, too.
Whether it's the wars, police, state gun laws, the left and right of the president, Liberty Stickers dot com has hundreds of choices.
You can find just the right words to express your opposition and contempt for those who would violate your rights.
That's Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
What was the only interest group in D.C. pushing war with Syria last summer?
AIPAC in the Israel lobby.
What's the only interest group in D.C. pushing to sabotage the nuclear deal with Iran right now?
AIPAC in the Israel lobby.
Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC in the Israel lobby.
The Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first and educating the people about what's really at stake in the Middle East.
Help support their important work at Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for the bumper sticker dot com.
I created it, but quickly sold to Rick so I could do this instead.
In the decades since, he's made one hell of a great company.
The bumper sticker dot com makes digitally printed photo quality, full color bumper stickers for your band or your business, as well as magnets, adhesive vinyl decals and labels for products and industrial use and your political cause or campaign too.
The bumper sticker dot com also offers full custom graphic design for bringing your idea to reality.
Let the bumper sticker dot com help you get the word out.
That's the bumper sticker dot com at the bumper sticker dot com.
Tell me you heard it here.