For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm joined in the studio by my friend Alan Bach.
He's the Senior Editorial Writer at the Orange County Register and is the author of the column Eye on the Empire.
For Antiwar.com, it's available at Antiwar.com slash Bach.
I'll also mention he's the author of the great book Ambush at Ruby Ridge and what I'm sure is great but haven't read yet, but I'm soon to, Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana as well.
Welcome to the show, Alan.
How are you?
I'm feeling very good.
I think it's always safe to say I'm doing better than the country.
Yeah, well, that probably is safe to say.
You know, I called Lou Rockwell to arrange a radio interview with him.
He said, well, what's the topic?
I said, well, you know, the permanent crisis.
Same old, same old.
Yeah, anyway, so welcome.
I'm glad you could join me in studio here.
It's nice to actually see you face to face, Scott.
Yeah, indeed.
Likewise.
All right, anyway, so let's talk about Afghanistan at the dawn of the Obama era in America.
You know, we define all our eras by whoever was president at the time.
I learned that when I was a little kid.
So apparently now is the Obama era.
He's been saying he campaigned on expanding the war in Afghanistan, the true front, the central front on the war on terror, unlike Iraq, he argued.
And he's going to take our troops out of Iraq.
He's going to put them in Afghanistan and win the war on terror there.
And you have a recent piece on antiwar dot com about the war in Afghanistan.
And, well, frankly, it is in a sense it's a fresh start having a new president in there.
Do you think that maybe the powers that be and the wise men of American foreign policy might decide that actually expanding the war there is a bad idea, that maybe this isn't just a setting stone that we're going to head further down that path?
The optimistic side of me likes to like to think so.
And I think that there are some straws in the wind that suggest it's possible.
There's almost like a cottage industry of various foreign policy experts that are doing things about Afghanistan that basically say, you know, you really don't want to get very deeply involved in there because it's going to be an intractable mess and you're not going to get the outcome you want.
You know, the Carnegie Endowment just did one that I printed out, but I haven't read yet.
George Friedman over at Stratfor dot com did a long piece on Afghanistan.
And his bottom line was the interest in the United States there is to make sure that there aren't any al Qaeda elements that are operating in Afghanistan in a way that could be a prelude to an attack on America.
And, well, al Qaeda isn't operating there.
So our objectives are achieved.
The best thing we can do is pull all our troops out of there and start relying on intelligence to get Osama bin Laden.
Well, and the thing is about that is he's in Pakistan.
And I guess the assumption is you have to still have all your bases in Afghanistan in order to strike into Pakistan.
Well, you know, I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion.
Depending on how things work out in Pakistan, it might.
The Pakistani government already has a sort of a don't ask, don't tell policy about strikes inside Pakistan.
Sometimes they'll complain about them, sometimes they won't.
But they're not going to do anything to really stop them unless it gets too intense.
Do you worry that he'll actually expand the war into Pakistan further than just what Bush has been doing and what he's already been doing with the CIA drones and that kind of airstrikes but not ground troops?
Well, I think that's possible.
Although if you assess it in a sort of a realpolitik kind of way, using drones to go after people is bound to involve civilian casualties.
And when you're fighting a counterinsurgency, civilian casualties are bad propaganda and they lead you to lose ground.
So you might want to scale that back a bit and build, which we don't have now, human intelligence capability in Pakistan, probably in cooperation with the Pakistani government, and really go after him in an effective way rather than in a way that wins recruits to him.
Yeah, as in sort of maybe 007 in disguise on the ground in Waziristan kind of thing, you mean?
That kind of thing.
Here's a story.
A few years ago I was talking to a really plugged-in foreign reporter who said that he knew a tribal chief in Pakistan who told him, go back and tell your people that we're a huge tribe here.
We hate these hyper-religious insurgents stirring things up and we'd like to work with you to tamp them down.
And this guy said, I went back and I talked to top-level people at the CIA and said, this guy is begging to be an asset.
And I did that about three different times and they never called him.
I never got in contact with him.
That's kind of elementary.
If you want to increase your influence in an effective way rather than in a way that stirs up a lot of trouble and enemies.
Well, see, that's the thing, though.
Not that I would necessarily advocate that myself.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the thing, though, is apparently the entire American establishment, beyond just what we've thought of as the neoconservative war party, basically all seem to have agreed up until this point that they want to occupy Central Asia.
They want to stay in Afghanistan and at least not necessarily invade and do regime changes but make agreements to put bases in all the stands and further their influence in Central Asia kind of on a permanent basis.
So I guess would you have to have basically a rethink of that entire policy to really consider not escalating just in Afghanistan, you know what I mean?
Actually, I don't know if you would have to.
If withdrawing military forces from Afghanistan could be sold as a way of stabilizing the regime there in a way that it doesn't pose a threat to its neighbors, then you could just say, you know, this is how we achieve our goals of having more influence in Central Asia.
There you go, see?
Alan Bog, you're a genius.
It's all about spinning it so the empire can save face while they lose.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's definitely the way to go, right?
Is say like, hey, look, we all saw it.
The kids can fly kites now.
Everything's fine.
Let's go.
Yeah.
Why not?
You know, and the thing is, we're not the super nannies of the world.
You can't desire a situation where women are put in subjection and humiliated.
But on the other hand, you can't stamp it out all over the world with military force.
Ain't going to happen.
So, you know, we need to be a little more, you know, as George W. Bush would have said when he was running, a little more humble in our foreign policy and sort of let other countries be what they are.
You know, it seems like without people like him running this country, the people of Afghanistan would probably be more open to the kind of ideas that, you know, people in the West are so determined that the rest of the world accept, you know?
We might be able to sell our ideas better if we weren't such murderous hypocrites, I guess.
We might.
And we might begin to think in terms of how do I find out about a native culture and how it operates so that I can identify aspects of that culture that are in agreement with the overall philosophy of freedom.
Well, in the 1980s, the Reaganites found a lot to find in common with the Mujahideen and said, look at them, they're good right-wing religious people like us.
They love freedom like us.
So, it's all, again, it's a matter of spin, isn't it?
Well, I guess it is.
But no, I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean to trivialize it, because you're right.
I'm fully of the agreement that there's no need to have a continual clash of any kind between the West and the Islamic world, that there's plenty to agree with there.
Well, yeah, and why shouldn't we start thinking that way?
And to some extent, you know, there's more straws in the wind.
When Obama has made it clear in some of the press statements that they've released is that they're committed to doing the 30,000 surge in Afghanistan, but at the same time that they're building up those troops and hoping to stabilize the situation in the countryside, they might to some extent.
While they're doing that, they'll be undergoing a thorough strategic re-evaluation of our objectives and how to get there in Afghanistan.
And, you know, could they come to the kind of conclusion that I just advocated?
Well, a lot of people who are basically, you know, cold warriors have come to that kind of conclusion.
Official foreign policy circles, basically.
Yeah, official foreign, you know, certified experts in foreign policy.
All the people who got it wrong last time.
Well, it's kind of a dream, because in a sense, there's been this split where the conservatives were for Iraq and liberals weren't, since the invasion anyway.
You know, obviously congressmen don't count, but I just mean kind of among the population.
But it seems like there has kind of been an agreement on the so-called left and the right and the moderate center about Afghanistan is the good war, as opposed to the one in Iraq.
And so it seems like overcoming that and really getting out of Afghanistan, where, you know, the last place Osama was seen alive by, you know, American army guys or whatever, is going to be much more difficult than just the Iraq policy, which a smaller number of people supported.
So you'd have to, I guess, have a real change among all those official people.
Well, I would guess that we might have.
I think it will take at least a year to put all 30,000 troops into Afghanistan.
The present timetable is for 10 or 12 by June.
So I think we've got a year to make the case that American interests can best be served in Afghanistan by withdrawing all military forces.
And, you know, just putting the Afghan government on notice that, you know, we don't want to run your country internally, but if there's an al-Qaeda base established in Afghanistan and we find out about it, we're likely to strike it and maybe give you five minutes notice.
It seems fair enough, I guess, which was basically the same deal before, only it was never enforced.
That was kind of how it supposedly was before 9-11, right?
So there's reason to be cautiously optimistic.
But, you know, the safest prediction is usually that the government will do the wrong thing.
And, you know, from what Secretary Gates is saying, he's pretty thoroughly committed to the wrong thing because his emphasis in one of his statements, and I hope I'm being fairly accurate in condensing it, is that what they want to do with the surge of extra troops is to pull out of the cities and engage the Taliban militarily in rural areas and make the focus military.
You know, the U.S. does the military and we'll let the pansy NATO guys do civil society.
You know, it seems to me like exactly the wrong approach.
So, you know, it would probably be a hard sell to him to change policy so drastically.
I mean, what does the Taliban even mean anymore anyway?
Like, who is the enemy in that country?
Because, you know, whatever, the students that came from Pakistan and established that Taliban government back in 1995 and whatever, I mean, how many people are we talking about here?
And they're the same ones or this just means anybody who's a Pashtun and fights against the occupation in Afghanistan.
I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it.
I don't understand really what the Taliban even means now.
The one thing George Friedman in the Stratfor.com said is you've got to make a distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Well, what about between the Taliban and the people of Afghanistan?
Well, the key distinction of the first order is the Taliban is an indigenous Afghani group.
Yeah, there may be some foreigners there, but basically it's a group that's going to be around.
You know, they're not going away.
They may, you know, if you use a lot of military force, they may go hide in caves for a while and only come out and plant a bomb every so often and you'll think you beat them.
But if you let up, they'll come out in stronger force.
So the Taliban ain't going away.
You have to understand that and say this is an Afghan problem, and if we can get the Taliban to say we won't let al-Qaeda in, you could probably make that deal.
It seems like something they could have tried, although at this point I don't know that they'll betray the, I mean, because to even say al-Qaeda up there in the mountains, I mean, how many?
Because, well, for example, there's that great article you might remember a couple years back that Robert Dreyfuss did for Rolling Stone called The Bogus War on Terrorism where he had interviewed all these intelligence guys and about how the CIA with their laser designators and the Air Force had basically blown almost every one of the friends of Osama away, and it was just 80 guys or something that escaped at the same time as Osama bin Laden did, that the vast majority of them had all been bombed away.
It would seem like there's even that many al-Qaeda there for the Taliban to turn over to us under the greatest deal in the world, or would they?
Well, you know, Stratfor has a whole cache on al-Qaeda, a library of about a dozen different articles over the last year and a half or so, basically saying this is an exhausted group.
They're not getting any new recruits.
A bunch of them have been killed.
They're capable of making videos, but they're not capable of mounting a serious operation of the kind they would need, which would be something that would dwarf 9-11.
They just can't do it.
We can pick them off.
Of course.
I mean, we were talking about a superpower versus a gang of pirates.
What are they going to do, bring us to our knees economically somehow?
Oh, I guess that's sort of what they've done.
That's our job.
Yeah, exactly.
That was their thing.
Their job was to kind of smack us in the face and then trick us into overreacting and surrendering ourselves.
And then Bush's job was to destroy the economy.
Yeah, exactly.
Drive the empire off a cliff, which, you know, frankly is where it belongs.
I mean, that's the thing is that there shouldn't be an empire in the first place, and that's what's tough is, you know, it's not like I'm ever in the position of arguing that the terrorist guys are right or whatever.
I mean, they obviously have a point in that America shouldn't be an empire in their part of the world, but obviously they're just like Republicans, which is the worst thing in the world in terms of morals.
They think it's perfectly OK to slaughter civilians for whatever their political purposes are.
And that's, you know, the very worst morality in the world.
They're all a bunch of would-be politicians, if you ask me, the actual terrorists.
But it just so happens that the best foreign policy would be to not pick a fight with them in the first place and not be over there in the first place.
I don't want to sound like my argument is the same as theirs or whatever.
Well, no, it isn't.
You know, you can make a strong argument, and in fact, I'm working on a book on it, that the core interests of the United States are best served by making a strategic reevaluation and saying our area of strategic concern is the North American continent.
We want to make sure that nobody gets us with an ICBM, and we'll take measures to make sure that doesn't happen.
But otherwise, you know, you come and mess with the North American continent, you've got to deal with us.
But nobody will want to.
You know, that would be one hell of a job for, you know, Korea or China to accomplish.
It's not in their interest to do so.
Well, it doesn't seem like it's in their interest to pick fights with each other either.
It's not like there's the excuse that we're keeping the peace over there, really.
I mean, China and Japan, they're not going to go to war with each other if America's out of the picture.
Would they?
I don't see why they would.
Well, you know, they've got their disagreements over various issues, and they'll snap at each other every so often.
But, you know, it's hard to imagine, you know, initiating anything major militarily.
Well, they all have a lot more at stake than the last time they went to war.
Well, I guess that's assuming that the economic crisis doesn't make paupers of everybody.
Yeah, well, there's that too.
The degree to which all this prosperity was false, I guess we won't know until it hits the bottom, right?
Well, you know, it's definitely on the downslide in China, because they've basically built their economy to be export-oriented.
And now that the U.S. has come to understand that we don't have any real money, we're not buying as much stuff from China.
And so their whole economy is drying up.
They've got to figure out how to cope with it.
Well, now, what about defense spending?
You know, I talk with Chalmers Johnson, and he says this military empire is just bringing this country to its knees.
We're spending a trillion dollars a year-plus, as much as the rest of the world combined.
And there's a controversy now where the Washington Post editorial page apparently is accusing Barack Obama of wanting to cut the military budget, and all the liberals are rushing to his defense, saying, no, he's not promised not to.
And I got a Media Matters email alert that Obama is not promising to cut the budget.
So I guess I wondered, what do you think it will take if this crisis so far hasn't done it?
Do you think this crisis eventually will end up forcing a rollback of some of America's military dominance in other parts of the world?
Or this thing is going to be the last, the empire is going to be the last thing to come down at the expense of all the rest of us the whole time?
I don't know when the empire comes down.
Sure seems expensive.
Well, it is, and I think it's important to keep making the argument that the empire is not in the American interest.
You know, most Americans can be sort of hornswoggled into saying, yeah, we ought to go get that so-and-so, because he's abusing his people, or he's harassing his neighbors, and he's a dirty, rotten foreigner to boot.
But the idea of having an ongoing empire I think is still foreign to the American character.
Most Americans really don't give two hoots about the rest of the world.
Well, they get really mad if you call America an empire, too.
Hey, you can't call America an empire.
But then they kind of realize, oh, geez, what am I denying here?
You know what I mean?
They just never thought of it that way, though.
It is a foreign concept.
It is the kind of, well, we were born out.
Rebellion from one.
And it's a different kind of empire.
It's not all the same structures that the British empire had.
You know, it operates more on the basis of military bases than actually taking over foreign governments.
Yeah, more bribery, Swiss bank accounts, and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
But, you know, it is expensive, and it hasn't been discussed very much, and I wouldn't want to put a number on it, but our empire has been a large contributor to the financial meltdown because, you know, they've had to, you know, the loose money policy of the Fed in the early 2000s, you know, fed the housing market, but it also fed the ability to finance the empire with funny money.
Yeah, the invasion of Iraq, specifically, and Afghanistan.
The whole terror war has cost about a trillion so far at least, right?
I don't remember.
I'll bow to you on the number.
Well, I don't know.
They say it's going to cost three trillion or four by the time we're done.
Yeah, that is an estimate.
That's the war bubble.
Not just the housing bubble, it was the war bubble that's popped now.
Yes, yes.
And so how much longer are they going to be able to do that?
There's already people saying, you know, 900 billion.
That's jump change.
You ain't going to jump start the economy with that.
We need multiple billions.
How do you get multiple billions, especially when China is looking around and saying, you know, we'd better invest some of that money we got stored away in placating our own people rather than financing the American empire.
And maybe it's even time to call some of those bonds due.
I guess they'll just print it then, but you can only inflate the currency so much in a row.
Yeah.
What are they going to do then, I guess?
Is there actually a day of reckoning where, for financial reasons, it has to just call quits on the foreign wars?
Because that's the only way it'll ever happen, right?
I was sort of celebrating the financial crisis, thinking as bad as it's going to be, maybe it'll help to make people en masse kind of reassess our position in the world as far as how many aircraft carriers we have in other people's seas, you know?
Well, you would think it would.
I remember Doug Bando, even as far back as October, when the financial crisis first hit, said this is the end of the empire.
You know, over time, they're simply not going to be able to finance it anymore, and they're going to have to disassemble it.
Yeah, he wasn't so optimistic yesterday on the telephone.
Well...
But it sounds good, though.
I mean, I think we need to push that meme, because it's certainly the case.
I mean, it's nothing but true, the slogan that this recession, it was a war bubble, it's a war recession, you know?
Those things go together.
If you just lost your job, the money that would have paid you was probably spent slaughtering an Arab somewhere.
You know, or leaving a million-dollar tank over by the side of the road with the tracks blown out and it not being able to be any good for anything but scrap metal.
Yeah.
There's a bumper sticker, actually, that we made of the Orwell quote.
It's from the part of 1984 when Winston Smith is reading the secret book, how we do it, that O'Brien the Torturer gave him, the one before the telescreen is revealed kind of thing.
And it says that the war all the time is just to take all the excess wealth from the people, so that everything's always in a state of immense shortage, and just take that wealth and pour it into the stratosphere or dump it in the ocean and sink it by building all their fancy rocket ships and their floating fortress and all these things.
Just take all the excess wealth of the people and destroy it, because otherwise they might spend it bettering themselves and educating themselves and improving themselves and becoming a challenge.
And then they wouldn't be so easy to control, those obstreperous people.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Let me ask you something, because I might as well.
I don't think it's really that kooky.
It's something that we should all ask, I think, whether the inflationary boom and then the bust and all that in the business cycle is really the way it's designed to be deliberately.
Because, you know, there's that old Thomas Jefferson quote where he says, if the people ever let the – he's talking about Hamilton's plan to make a national bank, right?
And he's saying if the people ever let the private banks control, through Hamilton's Treasury Department, the creation of currency, then they will be able to, first by inflation and then by deflation, they'll rob the people until they're homeless on the land their fathers conquered.
And so it seems like if Thomas Jefferson understood the business cycle back then and that it was the manipulation of the currency that caused the boom and bust in order to transfer everybody's wealth from all the classes to the very top one, that the people who do it to us must know that that's why they're doing it too, right?
Well, yes.
Jefferson died way back in the day, is my point.
It's been a long time since this was kind of established as how it works, you know?
Well, Jefferson – part of the progressive American myth about Jefferson, beyond the fact that he owned slaves, is that he was kind of a dunce when it came to economics.
He had a kind of a rosy view of human nature and thought that government ought to be limited to the task of preventing one guy from hurting another.
And he was just sort of naive.
Well, in fact, they say that because he opposed the Hamiltonian system.
And what you get in your high school history books is that the Hamiltonian system was what made America strong and powerful and wonderful, when in fact it twisted American development in ways that created a lot more centralized power than would have happened in a lot less distributed wealth.
Too bad.
But Jefferson read Adam Smith, he read Ricardo, he read Jean Baptiste.
He tried to get Jean Baptiste to come and teach at the University of Virginia after he established it.
He knew his economics.
Hamilton didn't.
Hamilton just knew how to assemble power.
How to commit larceny.
So as to direct money to him and his friends.
It was really more his friends and him.
He didn't become wealthy on it.
He just thought he was doing good because he knew the way wealth ought to be distributed better than those obstreperous people.
Yeah, well, and so the question still remains.
If Jefferson figured it out back then, this is kind of secret knowledge that just got buried and lost away to history until Mises, and then still nobody paid attention and everybody still believes that the Fed is here to stop booms and busts rather than to cause them.
I mean, at some point it seems like people say, well, sure, booms and busts a lot even though we have the Fed.
Maybe it's the other way around than they say, you know.
Yeah, years ago, I forget his name, but he was the head economist for the Chamber of Commerce, did a piece and said, which pinpointed the history and he said, before the Fed, we had a few minor booms and busts.
After the Fed, they've intensified in quantity and in how broad they are.
So what you've got to figure out is the Fed is causing the boom-bust cycle to be deeper and stronger and longer and more destructive than it ought to be.
Maybe we ought to get rid of the so-and-so.
Right, but I just wonder whether they're all really so stupid as we blame them for being, you know what I mean?
Because it sure seems to work out well for a bunch of rich people who get to create money out of nothing all day during the boom, and then during the bust they get to sit back and buy up everybody else's property for pennies on the dollar, and then when the Fed finally comes in in the form of a Paul Volcker, somebody to wage war against the inflation that they caused and jacks the interest rates up 20%, they get to sit back on their pile of money and collect all the massive interest the whole time, boom-bust and everything in between.
The people at the very top are zooming the hell out of all the rest of us, seems like to me.
Well, I think that's...
I'm not sure I can find a whole lot to argue with about that.
I can see the flaw in their economic reasoning.
I just wonder whether they're really more like Hamilton.
They don't really care about economics other than just how to commit larceny, how to, you know, expropriate, how to make sure that the right people get the money.
All right, well, I want to talk about your friend that you haven't known in a long, long time, who it turned out you Googled him and pleasantly surprised.
Well, it turns out he's been writing.
I like this story.
Go ahead.
Well, this is a funny story, and it just happened in the last day or so.
Last night an old fraternity brother of mine from UCLA days, who's living in Georgia, gave me a call, and I hadn't heard from him for quite a while.
And he said he wanted to send me a CD of his church choir doing the Mozart Requiem, which he knew I would like.
And we got to talking, and we got to talking about another of our fraternity brothers named Lee Gunn.
And Mike said, you know, Lee is one of the few guys that knew what he wanted to do when he was a teenager, and he went ahead and did it and succeeded at it.
And what he wanted to do was be an officer in the Navy.
So after UCLA, he joined the Navy.
He spent a better part of three decades there and just retired a few years ago as a two-star admiral.
And so today I decided, well, I think I'll Google Lee Gunn and see if I can find out a little bit about him.
And it turns out he's in the Washington area.
He's the president of some of the largest churches in the country.
He's in the Washington area.
He's the president of something called the American Security Project.
I hadn't heard of them before.
I hadn't either.
They're a defense think tank that was established in the last few years.
Anyway, so I Googled him a little bit more, and I found out that just a few months ago this last summer, he was one of a number of people who wrote in the Washington Monthly about the use of terror by American officials.
And if you don't mind, I'd like to read a few paragraphs.
Yeah, sure.
It's short.
Go ahead and read it.
This is Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn.
And what's the title?
I like the title.
And here's what he had to say.
The headline of the article is, No Torture, No Exceptions.
And here's what Vice Admiral Gunn wrote.
Here are four simple truths about torture for you to consider.
It is un-American, it is ineffective, it is unnecessary, and it is damaging.
And he goes on to expand on those four points.
Torture is un-American, points out that Jack Bauer is a fictional character, but it's bad for our culture that we are looking to make a hero out of someone who constantly breaks the rules and hurts people.
Torture is ineffective.
You don't get good information out of torture.
Torture is unnecessary.
Intelligent interrogators can get a lot more out of somebody with well-established, non-coercive means.
And torture is damaging.
It hurts our image abroad, and it puts our troops at risk because other countries, if they capture some of our troops, can say, well, hell, they torture.
What's wrong with us torturing a few of them?
Well, you know, one thing that gets me, too, and, you know, I guess we can never be able to read Dick Cheney's mind exactly, although it's pretty easy to see the gears turning in his head when he's on TV, but, you know, so many of these guys were tortured into lying.
And then you go and look, and you see how they were copying out of the Chinese torture manual from the Korean War era.
And, you know, the whole thing, I was raised as a kid learning about how, you know, the Manchurian candidate and all the guys that went on TV and seemed to be, you know, mind control, whatever.
And the whole point of all that was how to torture people into lying.
It wasn't about getting good information out of them.
It was about getting them to say, Saddam Hussein taught me how to make chemical weapons, you know?
And then so that's what Sheikha Libby said, and that's, I forget all the others that said that.
Of course, that poor guy, Binyam Mohamed said, oh, yeah, me and Padilla, we were going to set off a radioactive dirty bomb, so that's why you need to, you know, turn him over to the CIA and military and torture him.
And it doesn't seem like much of this really even had to do with interrogation, had to do with trying to figure out a way to justify invading Iraq.
Well, you know, as we know now, and I think some of us were pretty sure then that they were going to invade Iraq.
You know, they talked about the necessity to invade Iraq within days of taking power.
They bombed them within like two weeks, right?
Yeah, and so, you know, it's just so unfortunate that this gang got into the White House and the Defense Department.
Gosh, I hope we've learned something from that.
But, you know, Afghanistan has always been called the graveyard of empires.
You know, from the days of Alexander the Great, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, they all, you know, tried to control Afghanistan.
And Afghanistan beat them with these bunch of backward and bloodthirsty tribal guys who knew the countryside and said, you know, this is our country, get the hell out.
So if we can't learn from that, how can we learn from our own history of the last ten years, right?
Yeah.
I don't know.
It seems pretty easy.
But, again, you know, I think, you know, as your old friend the Vice Admiral there mentioned, this whole thing about Jack Bauer in 24, I only watch cartoons on TV, honestly, South Park and The Simpsons and stuff.
I don't bother with any of the cop dramas, you know, where it seems like every drama on TV is about government employees and how great they are anyway.
But that one particularly, it was like, here's a show where the show supposedly takes place in real time, right?
So each episode is one hour of a 24-hour day in the life of this guy.
And somehow he figures out a reason he's got to torture somebody every hour of the single day.
I tortured 24 people today.
Jesus.
You know, that's a lot of people to torture.
Sometimes two in one episode, you know, that kind of thing.
And rather than rejecting that, though, the American people apparently, like, bought what was sold during the commercial break for that show, you know.
It's been a successful show.
It still is.
The kind of thing that Americans really, you know, a friend of mine pointed out that, hey, this is the water torture, that's John Wayne.
Have you ever seen a John Wayne movie?
He'd grab the American guy and dunk his head right in the horse trough and hold him there until the guy was ready to do whatever John Wayne said.
And simple as that.
That's the American way.
There's nothing new about that.
In fact, I talked with a guy named Alan Nairn the other day.
He says, hey, America's been torturing people long before George Bush and Dick Cheney.
It's just usually we just have a death squad do it for us.
And name your country where America backs the military dictatorship there from, you know, all across the Middle East and Central Asia Not as much anymore, I guess, in South America, but I don't really know.
But there's a lot of torture that goes on under the auspices of America just once removed, you know, all our client regimes, right?
Well, yeah, that's true.
That's true.
This is a deeper problem to root out than just what Bush and Cheney have done to us.
They were just sort of the icing on the cake of the torture state, so to speak.
You know, one can, you know, I've heard people criticize that, you know, there are some loopholes in the policies that Obama has announced.
But at least he's announced a policy saying that our policy is not to torture.
As much as I may disagree with the incoming attorney general on a number of issues.
Yeah, get me started.
He seems to have a sense of, you know, what constitutes torture and the idea that American officials don't do that, shouldn't do that.
That's what makes us American.
Well, it's going to be interesting to see, really, isn't it?
Well, I mean, I guess we can already, you know, either of us could write the script for it in one way or another.
I guess it'll be a couple of twists and turns.
But basically this guy Holder has sworn before the Senate that, yes, waterboarding is torture and torture is a felony.
And that's the law.
And yes, I'd like, you know, I'm applying for a job as attorney general here.
And they confirmed him.
And so now how does he not indict or appoint some kind of special prosecutor, do something about George Bush, his principles, the national security team of the cabinet and their lawyers, who we all know, there are books and books written about it, conspired to violate the law and torture people.
I wonder if we couldn't learn something from South Africa right after the end of the apartheid regime, where they established a truth and reconciliation commission.
And, you know, they said, we're not looking to put anybody in jail.
We're not going to prosecute anybody.
We want to find out what happened.
You tell us what you did.
We're not going to, you know, put anything, but we want to know.
We want to know how this regime worked so that we don't do that again.
And, you know, they haven't necessarily done perfectly in South Africa.
But, you know, that just might be a way to handle it.
Maybe Congress, some congressional committee could do it.
It would have to be bipartisan and genuinely bipartisan so that it would have credibility.
But it seems like they just kind of want to whistle past it, you know, and say, all right, well, let's not look backwards and what's done is done and not do anything.
That seems to kind of be the general political zeitgeist or whatever there.
But I don't know what's going on in the Justice Department.
It seems like, you know, the other Scott Horton, the human rights lawyer, he used to write that blog, Balkanization, Jack Balkan and all those lawyers.
And they were all good on every one of these Bush legal issues this whole time.
And now it's basically all his old friends from the Balkanization blog are running the Office of Legal Counsel up there.
And so he was saying, you know, it's clear that they're going to make it policy.
The torture is going to stop immediately.
But then the question is still, I think, a matter of political pressure to figure out whether there's going to be any kind of truth and reconciliation commission or actual, you know, that's just me, I'd just appoint a special prosecutor, maybe like ten of them and assign each prosecutor to each principal and each Bush administration lawyer who I know was in on it already and just get right to it.
But that's just me.
I mean, what you're saying in the truth and reconciliation commission, basically you're recognizing that it would not be easy to hold trials for any of these people in this country politically.
They still have, you know, a lot of people would see that as, you know, terribly unfair and their heroes being persecuted.
And you'd have Rush Limbaugh and all those guys every single day denouncing it.
And maybe there's a halfway point that we could find here.
The return of the Salem witch trials.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
How dare you accuse these admitted felons of breaking the law.
It's unfair.
It's unjust.
The laws of war don't apply in wartime.
All right.
Okay, so now let's wrap this up.
Tell me about the new website, FreedomPolitics.com, right?
Yes, it is.
FreedomPolitics.com.
What's going on there?
This is a project that was officially opened on January 20th of this year.
It's a project of Freedom Communications, which is the parent company to the Orange County Register, which is the place where I work.
And what we want to make of it, and there's still more plans and we're open to a lot of feedback, is a site where anybody who believes in a fair amount of freedom could find a place where he can learn something, be persuaded, be challenged.
And so we'll have just a wide variety of freedom-oriented, what you'd call libertarian, writers.
Trying deliberately, though, to make it as Big Ten as you can, huh?
Yeah.
That's good.
Yeah.
You know, every political movement has a tendency to rupture into factions, and the libertarian movement is no exception to that.
There's Friedmanites and Misesians and all kinds of other anarcho-capitalists and limited government and all kinds of divisions.
But it seems to me if you want considerably more freedom than we have in this country and you want to talk about that and learn about it and maybe try to figure out ways to get it done, this would be a place you'd want to come to.
You'd learn some things.
You might be goaded into action.
Can I plug another couple of websites while we've got the time?
Yeah.
Talk about your blog.
And I want to also, well, I'm going to go ahead and ask you so you can make this part of the same answer.
I want to know all about the book that you're writing that you mentioned there.
Okay.
I have a personal blog.
Thank goodness I have a son of the correct age to have set it up for me.
And it's www.allenbach.com, A-L-L-A-N-B-O-C-K, two four-letter words, www.allenbach.com.
And there's a place where you can click on it that says blog.
And you go directly to the blog.
And there's a few other things on the site, too.
But, you know, I comment most days.
I probably won't get around to it when I get back home tonight.
It's a good site.
I like it.
It's a good companion to Eye on the Empire.
I guess I don't usually read the Orange County Register online.
Maybe I should.
But I do read the blog sometimes and Eye on the Empire, of course.
And that's the other thing that I'd like to say.
I think the orangecountyregister.com slash opinion is a place that I think more people ought to go to more often, of course.
That sounds good to me.
I guess maybe I was under the impression that I had to pay money to read anything on there or something.
But that's probably a very old thing if it ever was.
No, I think we had that policy for a very short time and stopped it a long time ago.
Okay, well, my bad.
I didn't mean to slander your wonderful paper there.
We haven't figured out how to work the Internet yet, but we did figure out that if you charge for content, nobody's going to pay.
Yeah, well, that's sort of true.
It seems like the New York Times is having trouble learning that book.
Who wants to read them anyway?
All right, and then now the book.
Tell me about the book.
Well, the working title is Beyond Empire, and in it I want to make a case.
It'll be a journalistic book because that's what I do, so not a lot of big polysyllabic words in it.
But I want to make the case that it would be in the United States' best interest to declare that its strategic interest lies in the North American continent and we'll withdraw all our military forces within that perimeter and probably reduce them because we won't need as many as we've got overseas to simply guard that perimeter, and nobody would want to attack it anyway.
So it would be in our interest to adopt that as a grand strategy and to couple it with a completely free trade policy with all the countries of the world, give up the notion that you can change regimes by imposing economic sanctions.
It doesn't happen.
The dictators just make the people pay for it while they get rich.
That sounds really good.
I can't think of another book that actually tries to take that on and say this is the way we should go from here as kind of a unified explanation.
Well, there's a number of books that creep right up to the edge of it.
Ivan Ehlen did a very good book.
Right, right.
Chris Lane, I forget the title of his book, and almost everything Ted Carpenter at Cato has written.
Yeah.
That's the essential, except that sometimes they sort of retreat into the language of strategic think and talk about having an offshore balancing policy.
Yeah, yes.
Just keep a few aircraft carriers and satellites alive so that if any of the natives get too restless, you can go give them a whiff of the grape.
I like how Ron Paul said to the Washington Post, and he's always the most radical in the interview at the most establishment places, like we can protect this country with a couple of good submarines.
Get at it.
We don't need this Navy at all.
We can sink the whole thing, make reefs out of it for the fish.
All right.
Well, listen, I kind of want to ask you now all about South America policy and that kind of thing, but I fear that the interview is running a little long, and I've got some chores to do on the deadline here that I need to go ahead and cut this thing short.
But I'm interested in the whole North-South America distinction and all that.
I'm trying to arrange an interview with the guy that wrote the spotlight piece on Antiwar.com today, which is about repealing and repudiating the Monroe Doctrine.
I hadn't read that piece yet, but the title is certainly provocative.
Yeah, yeah.
It's very interesting.
It kind of goes along with what you're saying there, but I guess we'll just have to leave it a cliffhanger until you hurry up and get that book finished, and we can talk all about the foreign policy of freedom that you're proposing here.
By the way, what's the name of the book going to be?
The title I would like it to have is Beyond Empire.
Very good.
Nobody steal that.
An American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, maybe.
There you go.
All right, everybody.
That's Alan Bach, Antiwar.com's eye on the empire.
That's Antiwar.com slash Bach.
He's a senior editorial writer at the Orange County Register, author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge and Waiting to Inhale the Politics of Medical Marijuana and the upcoming Beyond Empire.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Alan.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I really enjoyed it.
