12/02/08 – Frida Berrigan – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet every weekday, 11 to 1 Texas time at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our first guest today is Freda Berrigan, she's the Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation.
She served eight years as Deputy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City.
And she's got one, a great one, that came out last week on Tom Dispatch, which is actually running today at LewRockwell.com.
We ran last week at Antiwar.com.
Who rules the Pentagon?
Weapons come second.
Can Obama take on the Pentagon?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
Oh, it's good to be with you, Scott, thanks.
I'm very happy to have you here, and this is such a great article.
Thank you.
You really got your pen around the numbers here and all this spending and percentages and how much money is going to which parts of the military and all these great things.
Very interesting stuff.
So, I guess let's start with the assumption that Barack Obama, he's just nothing but a piece, Nick, like you and me.
The question is, will the guy who's merely the President of the United States be able to command the bureaucracy, frankly, the world empire that is the Department of Defense?
Well, we will have to see.
And I know that many in the peace movement, many people who voted for Obama just listened to particular parts of his speeches, particular pieces of his planks of his platform.
And we engaged in this kind of selective listening process in order to frame him as a piece, Nick.
He's never said he's a piece, Nick.
He's never really run on that platform, but he did take advantage of the unpopularity of President Bush and the Americans' dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq.
And certainly all of that contributed to his win.
Now, of course, when I wrote this article, Weapons Come Second, we didn't know that Robert Gates was for sure going to be the Secretary of Defense that he was going to stay on at the head of the Pentagon in the Obama administration.
We didn't know that Hillary Clinton was yet formally tagged as Secretary of State.
And some of these other selections that the Obama administration in waiting has made were not confirmed at that time.
But now they have been confirmed just this week and yesterday.
And the picture that emerges is, well, I guess it's mixed, is the best way to say it.
I look at Robert Gates staying on, and my heart kind of sinks.
I kind of think, oh, well, we have more of the same with a different face on it and with a different imprint.
It will be the Democrats' war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It will be the Democrats' global war on terror instead of the Republicans'.
It will be the Democrats' half-trillion-dollar military budget and, what, trillion-dollar wars throughout the world.
This will all have a Democratic imprint.
This will have Obama's thumbprints on it instead of George W. Bush's.
But one of the things that is interesting is some of the things that Gates has said that have been contradictory of President Bush.
And James Jones, who will be the National Security Advisor and was the Director of Operations in Afghanistan, has also said some things.
And I don't know whether to hold on to these and be very hopeful about them or to just put them in the mix as things we need to watch out for, right?
But, you know, as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates has been saying things like, well, the State Department is so much smaller than the Defense Department, you know, there are more members of military bands than there are senior diplomats and people in the Foreign Service who are in charge of diplomacy and soft power throughout the world.
And James Jones has said the NATO operations in Afghanistan, we're not winning in Afghanistan.
We can't win with the current policies.
And these have been in contradiction to the Bush administration positions and policies.
And will those sort of – I mean, it's not quite accurate to call them dissident positions, right?
These are very powerful men and they're total insiders, right?
But will those kind of analyses be given greater range within the Obama administration?
We'll have to see.
But as my piece talks about, when it comes down to dollars and cents, we're in quite a serious situation, Scott, with regard to the military budget and just the sheer volume of our federal – basically our federal energy, your tax dollars, my tax dollars that go into the military, Obama doesn't – it doesn't seem like he's going to change that at all.
And within the context of the economic crisis we're facing and what those dollars are really doing abroad, right, the killing and the bombings and all of that that they represent, that's something very, very serious.
We know the top headline today on antiwar.com is quoting Obama from his speech yesterday announcing Gates and Clinton and Jim Jones.
I just love it they got Jim Jones to run the NSC.
The U.S. will continue to have the strongest military on the planet, which of course is the distance between ours and I guess who's second behind us.
Is it the Russians still or who's second behind us?
But it's a distant, distant second.
It sure is.
I think it's about – I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's about a fourth or a fifth what the United States spends on an annual basis.
And then China is right there behind Russia.
And then countries tumble very, very quickly into the tens of billions and then less than that very quickly.
Well, like Bill Hicks used to say about, oh, come on, Bill, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world.
And he would say, yeah, well, after the first three largest armies, there's a real big drop off.
And really, after the first largest army, there's a real big drop off.
It sounds to me like from him that's a straw man that he's setting up that, oh, don't you worry, we're going to continue to spend trillions and trillions on this thing to make sure that we're still the strongest in the world, even though he would have to not spend a dime on it for eight years for it to not be the strongest in the world anymore.
Right.
And we've seen him being very strong on this particular point.
It was interesting in the last days of the campaign, Bernie Sanders, the Democrat from Vermont or independent from Vermont, gave an interview.
It was sitting down with an editorial board and said, let's cut the military budget by a quarter.
Let's cut 25 percent from the military budget.
And he, Obama, didn't back him up on this at all.
And it became an issue in the campaign where McCain and Palin were using that comment to characterize the Democrats as weak on defense and naive and soft.
And of course, Obama distanced himself from that comment.
But it was striking that 25 percent decrease in the military would still leave us orders of magnitude above any other nation.
In fact, it's a lot more than many in our community, in the peace and security community, have been calling for in terms of cuts to the military budget.
The figure that many in our progressive think tank circles use is a $60 billion cut from the military budget, which I think is closer to 8 or 10 percent, and is really just cutting some of the most egregious and wasteful and redundant and irrelevant weapon systems from the military budget.
So Bernie Sanders took it one step further.
But I think in order to get to a different kind of military budget, to stop spending half of all discretionary money in the federal budget on the military every year, we really have to fundamentally reexamine what the military is for and what national security means.
And do we have a big military because we can have a big military, or do we have a big military because we need to have a big military?
And then what is that military protecting the United States against?
All of the enemies that the United States has combined spend, I mean, it's a pittance, it's a drop in the bucket compared with what the United States spends.
You know, Ron Paul was calling for cuts in the campaign and said, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
Give me a break.
And in fact, I talked to one of them, I guess, a week before last, when Barney Frank announced that he wanted to pursue military spending cuts, which of course, as he said, does have the right-wingers, you know, calling him soft and all this.
I heard some Republican talk radio criticizing him for it, while the Russians are on the march in Europe, don't you know?
But I asked Ron Paul whether he looked forward to working with Barney Frank on military spending cuts and he said, oh, absolutely, you know, of course, any cut is never going to be enough for Ron, but I really hope to see, I really am hopeful that there will be some sort of left-right coalition, at least on the margins in the House of Representatives, to make this point in public, if they can't actually accomplish it, you know?
Well, now is the time.
Now is the time.
With the economy looking the way it is, with these calls for massive spending on infrastructure, on a new, new deal, that sort of thing, where is the money going to come from to repair our economy?
Inclusion.
And as the United States' influence wanes, right, how we're going to need to be working in collaboration with more countries, we're going to need to be cooperating in different ways than we are now, and we may be taken down a notch, and we should start building the relationships now so that that's not a radical or precipitous or damaging move.
And I conclude the Tom Dispatch piece with kind of a call for some of the best of the rhetoric that we heard from Obama when he was a candidate for president about international cooperation and working with other countries and engagement, and point out that how can we cooperate from our shining city on the hill?
How can we cooperate from the green zones of the world?
How can we cooperate when we're spending many times over what other countries are spending on the military?
That's not cooperation, that's a continuation of empire, and we've seen certainly over the last eight years how damaging and how destructive that kind of empire power projection really is.
Yeah, and you know, I think, I guess I like to hope that putting the veneer of, you know, I guess having a president that looks like he's from southern parts of the world rather than the northern parts, and having the veneer of the baby blue flag of the United Nations and multilateralism and so forth, I hope that that's all too thin of a fig leaf now to cover the fact that the UN basically serves as just cover for what is the would-be Pax Americana.
I mean, who can take seriously multilateralism when all it means is America doing their thing but somehow twisting arms to get France and Germany on board or some crap like that?
What does that mean?
You know?
Right.
I think that the rest of the world is very, very tired of that dynamic and was burned very badly in Iraq and the whole notion of a coalition of the willing and other countries dragged along kicking and screaming or induced with major increases in military aid in order to have this veneer of multilateral operations within Iraq, and then little by little, nation by nation, that coalition, because it wasn't a true coalition, has disintegrated, and there are very few countries left as part of that.
And I think we'll see something similar happening.
I like to think of it like this.
Like, what if they had let Colin Powell run the thing and they had told Colin Powell, look, go ahead and promise the French and the Russians that they can have Kirkuk, we'll just take the stuff in the South and they can take all the oil in the North, and cut some deal and gotten France and Russia to vote for it on the Security Council?
Well, then what?
It would have been better to kill a million people with a baby blue flag instead of a red, white, and blue one?
You know what I mean?
Like, what's more legitimate about a U.N.
Security Council vote than a decision by the President and his White House staff or, you know, the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate?
Right.
Exactly.
It still doesn't make the war right, it still doesn't make the deaths of innocent civilians correct, and it just, I mean, it's a war by another name, and I think the nations of the world are learning that, and we'll see that dynamic unfold also in Afghanistan, where NATO was kind of pulled in there under similarly false pretenses, and is doing, is carrying a huge burden, and NATO forces are being killed there and are killing Afghani civilians, are not bringing any modicum of security or stability or democracy to Afghanistan, and I think Obama, by making Afghanistan the focus and talking about increasing U.S. forces there and really solving that problem, is getting himself into, you know, a quagmire of the fourth order.
You know, when you mentioned Robert Gates sort of, you know, representing the so-called realists and contradicting the Cheney line, the more hawkish policy on some of these things, would you include in that his speech that he gave, critical of the Air Force, and saying that they were focusing too much on, you know, big-ticket F-22 fighters for a war with China that's never going to come, when we need to focus more on bombing little brown people in their countries we've invaded?
I mean, that was basically what the speech was about, we've got to figure out how to get you Air Force guys, get your head around the idea of how to fight a counterinsurgency from the air, and make yourselves useful.
Right, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yes, mm-hmm.
Well, it was that, was he, when he was saying that and taking on the Air Force in that capacity, was that kind of contradicting the Cheneyists and the more kind of, well, the neocons who dream of maybe confronting China one day with all their fancy jet fighter planes?
Well, we have seen, you know, both the neocons and the Air Force and corporations like Lockheed Martin and Boeing who are making these big-ticket items that are costing billions of dollars, I think there's $8 billion in the 2009 defense budget, or military budget, for these three new fighter planes.
And that's just for this one year, and each one of these fighter planes is kind of more sophisticated and fancier and faster and more powerful, and has a bigger payload than the other, they're, I mean, they're all...
These are the 22s, the 35s, and the, which is the third?
The F-18AE next level there.
The super-duper Hornet.
They're, they're the super-duper Hornet.
Mm-hmm.
And so these three fighter planes are, are still in the budget, and I think the Gateses of the world would like to, to cut those, and then, as you say, right, put that money into the Army, put it into counterinsurgency, put it into wars that fly below the radar screen, and there's this interesting battle, I don't know, interesting is such a non-word, right, but there's this interesting battle between aspects of the military-industrial complex where, you know, we spend billions on fighter planes, yeah, I mean, you can make a lot of money building tanks and the future combat system, for example, which is this military system that allows individual soldiers to see around corners and to deploy weapons from afar, you know, there's money to be made in counterinsurgency weaponry and materials and technology, but certainly not as much.
And all of this is wrapped up in this, what's called a capabilities-based approach to planning for and financing and building militaries, as opposed to a threat-based.
What are the threats that are out there, and what are the tools that we need in order to confront them?
It's so funny, because, you know, that's just such a, almost comes across as kind of a bland policy assessment, but just think about the, through the looking-glass world that we live in, where our policy is built around what weapons are being sold, rather than the government procuring the kinds of weapons they might need for what the actual threats to the American people might be.
I mean, you know, you brought up Boeing there, Jim Jones, the new National Security Advisor, who's going to feed us all the cyanide Kool-Aid to death, just came from, I just Googled his name and the first thing that came up with his bio is on the board of directors at Boeing.
Boeing, Boeing, that's right.
Unbelievable.
I mean, and the other thing about a threat-based analysis is, hey, maybe the tool for the threat isn't a weapon, and maybe it's not a military tool at all.
If the threat is, you know, we just celebrated, or celebrated, marked World AIDS Day, if the threat, the most existential threat to people is communicable diseases, there's no weapon that's going to protect us from avian bird flu, or from AIDS, or from any other disease that is able to move much more rapidly in a globalized kind of world.
If our greatest threat to our life and liberty is really our own government, then certainly buying them more weapon systems isn't going to help that situation.
That's right.
So, when we talk about this threat-based analysis, you can look at it through the prism of the weapons and the military capabilities that we need, but you can also look at it through the prism of, well, universal health care, and jobs, and et cetera, et cetera.
You can kind of go down the list of human needs, what human beings need for security, and that's a very, very different conversation than the conversation that's happening certainly at the Pentagon and certainly at the White House.
Right.
Can you help us maybe go through this, under the heading, Desperate Defense, again, the article is Who Rules the Pentagon?
It's on lewrockwell.com today.
Just pull it up there.
Desperate Defense.
You go through and you talk about some of these memos that you've gotten your hands on from the corporate masters at some of these, at Boeing, and I forget which other companies here, and I was wondering if you could sort of give us the briefing on what these guys are telling each other about the future of their weapons businesses in the incoming Obama era.
Sure.
Well, just as the auto executives are driving their little electric cars across the country this week in order to go back to Congress with their hats in their hands because of a tanking economy, the military industry is also getting very, very nervous about the future.
And we heard in the lead up, well, during the campaign season from analysts connected to the defense industry saying an Obama presidency is going to be very, very bad for the defense industry.
Because despite everything that Obama has said, the industry has seen the writing on the wall and that we're not going to have half trillion dollar military budgets on an annual basis anymore.
And so they're gearing up and their propaganda machine is kind of in overdrive right now.
And so they're saying things like, we're going to have to tighten our belts, we're not going to have big military budgets anymore, we're nervous, there's a lot of uncertainty out there.
Well, this is calming my nerves a little bit.
They're very, very anxious.
And I think most of it is hyperbole and trying to kind of grease the skids for increased military spending and to preempt some of these calls that are coming from the Bernie Sanderses and the Barney Franks to keep that call from being echoed by more mainstream people.
But even John Mercer, at this point, the head of House Appropriations, is saying that the salad days are over for the defense industry.
Over the last eight years, not only have they had these huge military budgets to pick from, but they've also had basically no accountability, contractors, overseeing contractors, overseeing subcontractors, billions of dollars just kind of disappearing and all of that.
And so they're seeing an Obama administration as the end of all of that.
Right.
Now, from our regular American people's sort of point of view, though, we have to keep in mind the comparative situation where what you're talking about is, under the last eight years, it has been an absolute free-for-all beyond the capacity of human imagination.
And so Obama could have the most hawkish foreign policy and the hugest defense budgets and unlimited corruption, and he still wouldn't be able to compare to this by a mile.
That's right.
That's right.
We have to keep all of this very, very much in perspective.
And just if you listen to these guys, you think, well, the Pentagon's larder is empty.
You know, they're being stretched beyond capacity.
And they are really choosing between different programs and only, you know, that they're basically giving these systems to the federal government, giving them to the Pentagon.
And that's certainly not the case.
Basically what they're doing is laying the groundwork for an argument that they've wanted to make and that they've been trying to make for the last ten years, certainly since the end of the Cold War.
Hey, let's not go through this messy process every year of deciding how much we need to spend on the military.
Let's just make it a percentage of GDP, of gross domestic product.
And right now, we spend about 3 percent of GDP on the military.
We want 4.
We want 4 percent of GDP.
And it sounds like a tiny little increase.
Now, wait, wait, wait.
What was the source of that one again, now?
This is...
I want to quote that forever now.
Oh, there we go.
Lockheed Martin.
Yeah.
Lockheed Martin.
Well, you know, of course, that's completely and totally unconstitutional because right there in Article 1, Section 8, I think it's Article 1, Section 8, it says that no appropriation of money to the military can be for more than two years at a time.
And of course, it's forbidden from making laws that say we're going to fund the military to this extent into the indefinite future like that.
Well, there you go, Scott.
These weapons manufacturers are anti-constitutionalist.
Why do we need freedom so much?
I don't understand it.
So this 4 percent of GDP is sort of their holy grail, that that's the starting point.
Unbelievable.
And then they build from there.
And if we did 4 percent of GDP, we would be a secure, safe nation and we would never...no one would ever be able to hurt us.
Oh, that's good.
Well, and you know, you have this great quote from a Morgan Stanley researcher, a memo that he sent out on the day after the election.
I guess he woke up first thing in the morning and fired off this memo that indicated what now?
Now, the memo was basically like, there's not going to be a peace dividend under President Obama.
And he was trying to soothe the nerves of this nervous defense industry, saying there's not going to be any peace dividend.
He's not going to decrease military spending.
And all signs point for smooth sailing, at least for the next 18 months.
And so we continue to hear this hue and cry from the defense industry, from military contractors who have been carving up a big fat pie from the federal budget every single year since President Bush came into office.
And you know, it wasn't so lean.
They weren't so hungry, even under Clinton, when the military budget, you know, went from about $250 billion to about $300 billion.
And I love the way this reads here.
We believe, based on discussions with industry sources, that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget, at least until the first 18 months of his term, as the national security situation becomes better understood.
I like that.
Isn't that nice?
You just wonder how much the Morgan Stanley analysts got paid to write that little memo.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and the thing is, too, like, I basically, I understand kind of the propaganda purpose and that kind of thing, but I kind of take it at face value, too.
And then I don't see why we should hope for any better after 18 months, unless, in fact, the Austrian economists are right, and that they will not be able to inflate another bubble, that the recession is coming, and no matter how much they try to inflate, it just won't work and that, you know, some are saying that this is really the end of the American empire in terms of just how bankrupt we are, trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.
And I guess it depends on who you ask.
The politicians, I don't know if they understand yet, but always seemed to me it'd be better if we just kind of gave up our empire rather than, you know, completely collapsing our own civilization back here at home, you know?
Right.
And so, I mean, we can look back at history and see how desperate faltering and failing empires become, and there's many examples out there of how not to do this, and the real question is, you know, can big states and large powers, can they choose something different?
Can they choose to quietly and gently kind of cede center stage?
And that certainly remains to be seen.
Are you hopeful at all about Obama's, as best I know, somewhat wishy-washy position on so-called missile defense systems being placed in Europe, in Poland and the Czech Republic?
Well, no, not really.
I mean, I think President Bush pretty much locked that in at the end of, you know, in the last couple months and did so, it seems like, basically just to anger Russia and just to provoke a response, this whole notion that those systems are there to protect Europe against a nuclear-arming Iran, you know, there's just really no support for that.
And so, will Obama move to, I mean, the systems haven't been built yet, but will he move to overturn that policy decision?
Will he, you know, do what the Russian president has asked or demanded that the United States do?
I think that demand coming so soon after the election, you know, in some ways might have pushed off any sort of good decision that Obama could make, because if he moves to do that, then the right and the military-industrial complex will say, oh, look, he's just ceding to Russia, he's capitulating, he's going back on this bold decision of the Bush administration.
So, I mean, I think those systems will be costly, you know, we promised Poland in particular a lot in exchange for that territory, and then building those systems there will be a multibillion-dollar undertaking, and so maybe pleading poverty seems like the best way to go.
Yeah, perfect out in so many of these situations for him.
If he wants to, I have no reason to believe he really does, but, you know, like Alex Coburn said that everybody has this secret Obama they believe in, who once he has total power, then he'll reveal just how good he really is.
And you know, I guess my secret Obama is going to reveal how great he is.
That's his perfect excuse for every wonderful thing that I would have him do, is say, sorry, we're broke, we just can't do it, and you know, we might have been able to do it, but especially with the extra cost of having to put in anti-aircraft systems with American soldiers operating them to protect the anti-missile missiles in Poland, that was just the deal-breaker, just too many dimes, we just can't afford it.
Perfect excuse.
Yep.
It's dad or pet food for the daughter's new puppy, so we're not going to be able to do that right now.
Right, and rest assured, the taxpayers are picking up the dog-shot bill.
Okay, last five minutes here, I was wondering if you could address this news as reported in the Washington Post yesterday about the expansion of active-duty military there, say, in the next two or three years, I guess, they hope to be up to 20,000 active-duty militaries under the Northern Command, the American Theater of Operations, for use against Americans, for use in helping support local law enforcement, and so forth.
They say, how serious is this, you think?
This is pretty serious, Scott.
How serious are the people in D.C. who aren't, you know, I mean, the think-tank crowd, the people, the policy wonks, the New America Foundation types, are people really upset about this, or this is sort of, kind of a, well, we'll put off worrying about that?
Well, I haven't seen a lot of scuttlebutt and hue and cry over this from colleagues who are based in Washington, but I do think it's very serious, and I think that it's one of these things that's happening pretty far below the radar screen.
It's not getting a lot of attention, and the augmentation, the strengthening, the building up of Northern Command, the freedom with which that new post-9-11 arm of the military, this is a new command that was set up after September 11th, and that command's relationship to the Department of Homeland Security, which is, you know, one of the most ineffectual bureaucracies, it sort of defines ineffective bureaucracy.
Thank God for that.
In an era of many ineffective bureaucracies, right, it sort of is the standard-bearer from that, these 22 agencies that were kind of smushed together, a budget that has increased significantly every year, a mandate that, you know, covers the map, and basically, they can't do anything.
So, this 20,000 new soldiers, you know, it's, you know, where are these soldiers going to come from?
Are they going to come from?
Are they going to be conscripted in the new National Service Program?
Will they be able to choose five years in old folks' home or two years in the Army, and that kind of thing?
And, you know, that was one of the things that Obama and McCain certainly agreed on, was the right, I guess, and authority of the state to force people into their employment.
Into National Service, that's right, yep.
And, you know, there's something kind of strange about this, too, and I don't know if anybody's really gone in-depth and written about this or not, but I have seen a speech that Obama gave where he talked about creating an American security, domestic security service the size of the Department of Defense, which has got to be an exaggeration, because it's impossible, but wow, that really sounded like, whoa, we're going to head right for East Germany status as fast as we can here.
Right.
You know, take that TIPS program and put it on amphetamines or something.
If you see something, say something, because if you see something, do something, and then we're all in big trouble.
Yeah.
Society of snitches.
Is that really where we're headed in the United States of America, where everybody's in a race to narc on each other first so that they're not the one that gets ratted out for whatever it is?
Hey, you know what?
That sounds kind of familiar.
Yeah.
Well, it seems to be getting that way.
All right.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your insight on all these issues, and I look forward to interviewing you again about probably the very next thing you write.
Hey, good to speak with you, Scott.
Take care.
Thanks very much.
All right, everybody.
That's Frida Berrigan, Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, formerly the Director of the Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center, the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City.
And this is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back after this here rock and roll.