03/11/09 – Tom Engelhardt – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And introducing Tom Editor, Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you?
Hey, Scott.
I'm fine.
That's good.
I really liked your article today.
It's right there at the top of the page in the highlights section, A Falcon of Peace by Tom Englehart.
Exactly.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
Sorry, I was just going to say, it's Antiwar.com slash Englehart, and it's spelled, believe it or not, just like it sounds.
Nobody ever gets it right, but that's okay.
And, of course, you can find it on the – all ways you can find Tom's archives on the right side of the page there at Antiwar.com.
All right, so here's what I really like about this.
What I really like about this is you've written far better than I could have exactly how I feel about the darn war party in this country, and the fact that no matter how wrong they get it, and no matter how bad they lose, they always win, Tom.
It's so true.
It ain't fair.
No, no, it's not.
I started off this piece today – I mean, I started it off on the light side by complaining that I was just sick of being called a dove.
You know, I said, why do they get all the fun?
Why do they get to be hawks?
Why do they get to swoop and pray?
You know, but behind the idea that being a dove is no fun, and maybe not the bird you want to be, is just the strange, illogical phenomenon of the last years of imperial power, American imperial power in the world, which is simply that we have used force over and over and over again so much that making war seems like a normal American occupation now.
And every time we've used force, it's resulted in catastrophe for others, but also for us.
And every time there's been that catastrophe, the response from Washington is to recalibrate and reapply force under some different name.
You know, it could be called shock and awe, or decapitation, or oil blot, or clear hold and build.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, there are a million different names, and each time there's a recalibration.
But always, having failed with force, they return to force.
And nothing else, in a sense, is ever really tried.
It is always the military solution.
And the thing that struck me about it, and has struck me over these years, I mean, this was very true with the Bush administration, where I've said for a long time that I thought they were fundamentalists, not in the sense of being Christian fundamentalists, but in the sense of being fundamentalists about the efficacy of force, the use of force.
And they made it almost a religious principle.
And the American people, in a funny way, accepted that.
And I think today we bow down to the military.
I mean, not just in Washington, but elsewhere.
And our troops and so on and so forth, we send them off cavalierly, but we bow down to the idea of them in an almost religious fashion.
And consequently, the more mistakes they make, the more they remain experts.
And the more right we were, that is, anyone who might be considered anti-war, the less we're paid attention to.
And it's a very strange thing.
Years ago, and I went back and dug it out, David Halberstam wrote in his famous history of the Vietnam War, he had a passage on Dean Rusk, who was to become Secretary of State.
And here's what he wrote.
It's a wonderful warning, in a sense, to anybody who's a dove in any administration.
He said of Rusk, so he was once again promoted, the best people who had correctly predicted the fall of China would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerated.
And then he goes on to say there had to be a moral for him here.
If you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event, you are all right.
If you are accurate on the doveish side, you are in trouble.
Right.
And see, here's the thing, too.
This is, I guess, the part that really annoys me, is how easy it is to be right, Tom.
It's just like you're saying, this whole principle of, we'll just use the Pentagon to smash everything that we don't like in the world or whatever.
It doesn't work.
It's never worked.
And, in fact, it goes against, supposedly, the whole kind of American myth of, you don't fire until you see the whites in their eyes.
And the reluctant gunslinger who hung up his holster and didn't want to go to war, didn't want to have to fight the bad guys until he was just pushed where he absolutely had to go.
And that's supposed to be our whole idea, right?
The minimum amount of force and a fair trial for the accused, and all these principles seem to be completely opposed to the idea that what we ought to do is just invade country after country until everything's fine.
I think, actually, the reluctant gunfighter retired to Arizona somewhere in the 1950s.
No, I agree with you.
I mean, I'm struck, at the media level, the same thing is true, which is, you think about these generals who fought the last wars, and then they're brought in as military strategists.
We've just lived through years of them.
They explain, you know, looking back, certainly they explain ineptly what's going to happen, the use of force, etc., etc.
And yet, you know, they remain the same guys.
The same generals remain the experts today.
They still are trotted out.
If the New York Times, that's my hometown paper, if it decides it wants to do a look back, say, at the disasters of the Bush era, who do they ask?
They ask, I mean, on their op-ed page, they do not ask anti-war people.
They basically, they ask the people who made war.
They ask L. Paul Bremer, who was our viceroy in Baghdad, you know, to write a column on what went wrong.
Why him?
He was wrong.
Right, see, they don't want to admit, none of them want to admit, I mean, never mind, you know, GE owns NBC and all that kind of thing, which is obviously part of this, and really just the size of these corporations and the regulatory power that government has over them and the way that that binds them to the power of the state.
But even just on the basic level, you know, Chris Matthews doesn't want to interview you, who got it right all this time, because you might challenge him on why he didn't.
And they want to go along with this myth that everybody who is credible and decent accidentally fell for the thing and got it wrong about Iraq, but if you were the kind of person who opposed the war in the first place, it doesn't matter that you were proved right.
The assumed premise of their rejection, I think, of even hearing from people like you and me, is that you dishonestly opposed the Iraq war in the first place.
Even if you did oppose it, you opposed it because you just didn't like George Bush or whatever their phony argument was back then.
They still want to go with that.
And it was a luck out, you know.
Yeah, right.
They were wrong with reason and purpose, and you lucked out and got it right.
With your bad motives.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, no, I don't think it's nothing special about me that I was right about Iraq.
I was out in the streets before the war with millions of people who thought it was wrong, many of whom thought it was just wrong to do it, but also could see that a catastrophe was probably coming, and were saying, hey, no, don't do it.
And one of the things that strikes me, I mean, it's amusing in a grim sort of way, is nobody turns to people like us, Scott.
Nobody up there turns to people like us until things have gone utterly disastrously.
And then they turn when things are such a mess that it's not obvious what the solution is at all.
I mean, they've created such a mess.
And then they say, hey, okay, you're so smart.
What's your plan?
Well, thanks a lot.
Why didn't you listen to me when I was saying don't do it?
Right, and then they always do the opposite of what you say anyway, and then they promise that if anything ever goes wrong, it'll be your fault for stabbing them in the back when everything was going fine.
And the other problem is, you know, really, I mean, all this money goes into the question of the application of force.
I mean, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
It happens to be called the Pentagon budget.
And even not counting that into think tanks on the use of force, I mean, functionally on the use of force on the world as everybody assumes it works, nothing goes to people who want to think about what other paths and possibilities are available.
So when you actually get to a moment like this, actually the truth is, what we know is we know that basically imperial force in our world doesn't work.
We don't really know what does because nothing else has been tried.
I mean, I was the last person to claim at this point.
I mean, you look at Afghanistan.
That is a catastrophe.
It was clear to me.
I mean, it was clear to many people that this at some point was going to be a catastrophe, that we really should not be occupying Afghanistan, that other countries had tried, other empires had tried and failed and so on and so forth.
You know, this wasn't so complicated.
But of course, all they've done is to apply force and more force.
And now we're about to apply more force.
We're about to send in 17,000 more troops.
And in this period, a completely discredited retro regime, the Taliban, has been able to return as, you know, some kind of national resistance force in Afghanistan.
And not only that, but in Pakistan across the border.
So the war has spread.
And our response to the spreading of the war is we now send these drone airplanes.
Now this is what the Obama administration is doing.
Forget Bush, who started this.
They're intensifying the sending of drone aircraft with Hellfire missiles over the Pakistani tribal lands and whacking at suspected places that have Taliban or al-Qaeda supposedly leaders.
And, of course, around them in these villages, just normal people who get very angry when they get missiles.
But it is this thing of, oh, gosh, it's spread to Pakistan.
Now let's whack them in Pakistan.
So you get more force applied.
The war spreads further.
This is like by this time a catastrophe.
You look at this situation now and you say, I mean, we would say, I mean, I'm in favor of getting out of these wars.
But, you know, these situations have gotten so complicated and dangerous that it becomes a conundrum.
Well, what do you do exactly?
And all we know at this point really is what they do doesn't work.
What we would do, I think, needs to be explored.
But, of course, nobody bothers to explore.
Well, and, you know, it's got to be emphasized, and, of course, I guess it never will be other than, you know, right here today, that it was the bombing them from the drones that spread the war that the Taliban was, as you said, they were defeated.
They were the retrograde.
Everybody was glad to be rid of them.
Now they're back after all these years, and it's because we keep bombing them.
And, by the way, I'm not really a religious guy, and I don't really think along these terms, but trying to put myself in their shoes, it sounds pretty satanic to be bombed by a Hellfire missile all the time.
That's right.
You know, we don't think about the naming practices of our – I mean, this is another thing that I've written about at TomDispatch.com.
As I have done recently, it's written about imperial naming practices.
I mean, back here, we're talking about – you know, it sounds kind of antiseptic, but if in the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan, this program being run by the CIA, these things are called – the two armed drones are – the first one's called a Predator, as if right out of one of those nightmare sci-fi movies.
I mean, it was actually named before they began, but, I mean, it's the same idea.
The other one is called a Reaper.
That's the more advanced one.
It has even more bombs.
It has – the Predator has two – and the missile is called a Hellfire missile.
You've got – the Reaper can only be a Grim Reaper.
That's obviously – I mean, it's only reaping one thing.
And it was meant – the name was meant for that, which is it was reaping lives.
So we've got over Pakistan and Afghanistan, we've got two weapons, the Predator and the Reaper dropping Hellfire.
And then we wonder why – you know, why does this look so odd to the – I mean, whether they know the names or not, this is – in fact, it's a rather accurate description of what we're doing.
If you're just a peasant in some – you know, these are just peasants down there.
I mean, there are also these – there's the Taliban and there's al-Qaeda, but these are peasants.
And one of the strange things is if you're in Washington, however much you try to get together think tanks and whatever to think all this out, in different ways, you know, it's very hard to think of the world as not like you.
So they – you know, Washington imagines that if Washington's leadership was knocked off, it would be headless.
And in fact, it probably would.
But, you know, when you have a religious guerrilla movement or a group – some kind of terrorist organization, the killing of leaders is not as crucial a thing.
And the actual firing, constant firing of missiles into this area, whoever gets killed, however many al-Qaeda subcommanders get killed or whatever, the actual firing of missiles into this area repeatedly also creates angry people who want revenge and who are ready to join these movements.
So it's kind of a losing – it's a logically losing proposition.
There should be another way, but we never can think beyond the application of force.
And I think right now, you know, one of the sad things about the Obama administration is that it, too – yes, it's calling for various international groupings to come together and talk about Afghanistan, and it's talking about the military – again, the military peeling off and negotiating with local Taliban commanders who might – or Taliban leaders who might be more supposedly moderate.
But they're still putting first and foremost the idea of intensifying our force in Afghanistan, sending in 17,000 troops possibly if the commander in Afghanistan, McKiernan, has his way by another 13,000 or 14,000 and who knows what beyond that.
And they're talking in Afghanistan about fighting.
I mean, McKiernan talked the other day about fighting in a press briefing about fighting for another four or five years at this level.
You know, to get back to sort of the Iraqi side of this thing again, first of all, I thought it was really important that you point out in your article just how cavalierly – and you did mention this at the beginning of the interview – just how cavalierly the American people treat the soldiers that they claim to worship and really hold up as idols at the same time, will make them do five tours in some hellhole and pay no mind to what happens to them there.
And, of course, there's that recent article, recent news story – I saw it at Raw Story yesterday – about the Balad burn pit and how the Army did a study, and they've known for years that any soldiers breathing in this smoke – never mind the Iraqis because I guess they don't count at all – any soldiers breathing in this smoke are breathing in carcinogens and could die.
And they kept this from the soldiers there, and they've kept the soldiers exposed to what they know is cancer-causing pollution this whole time for years.
They don't care about them at all.
I didn't even see that.
Wow.
Yeah, it is.
It's at the Raw Story.
I'm not surprised.
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely horrible.
And, you know, this is the thing, too, is the Iraqi people do count.
And you also mention in your article this recent study about the 750,000 war widows.
Is that right?
Well, you know, this is one of those odd things.
It was, again, an incident that got very little attention.
Yeah, it's a recent report, and it's a little foggy.
This is why it's a little hard to sort out.
They actually say Iraq has an estimated 734,000 widows.
Most of them, assumedly, were widows, or that is widows due to the general chaos, violence and whatever of the years since the American invasion.
So we're not talking about Iran-Iraq war widows and things like that?
No, no, no.
Assumedly, we're not.
I mean, it was a rather foggy article, but what we can certainly say is that they're based on it, that there have to be hundreds of thousands of war widows.
And, of course, all you're talking about here is women who were married to men of a certain age who died.
You're not talking about women who died.
You're not talking about children who died.
You're not talking about grandmothers and grandfathers who died.
And you're not talking about what I would have to imagine would be close to the largest group of Iraqis who died, which would be young men.
Fighting-age males not yet married.
Or simply young men who were being murdered in the Civil War by death squads or whatever.
So, you know, I think the answer is-you know, I think when you look at these figures, it becomes less unbelievable that maybe somewhere upward of a million or more Iraqis died due to something- due to events that were released by the American invasion that never had to happen.
Right.
Well, and that's the whole point, too, is it's not-no one in the audience should think that what you're arguing is that the American military murdered a million people outright or whatever.
The point is what they call-the way that they did it in the Johns Hopkins Lancet studies and then the Opinion Business Research study out of Britain is they measure excess deaths.
What was the rate of death under the blockade and bombing of the 1990s as compared to post-war?
And then they calculate out the excess deaths.
And I interviewed Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research.
And what he did was he did a study and figured out that approximately a million people had died.
And in fact, he left out Anbar province and some of the more violent places, which would tend to skew the numbers in a more conservative estimate.
And then he said, you know what, before I really do any more press about this or anything, I want to do it again.
And he sent everybody back for six more months of study.
And they came back and said, yep, a million people.
You know, and I mean, you have to put this-I always try to put this into context, because I always put this figure with another figure, which I find just as stunning, which is that when you look at the numbers of Iraqis who went into exile, that is, actually under the pressure of events in Iraq, left the country, and that's believed to be over two million.
And the number of Iraqis who went into what's called internal exile, that is, became internal refugees.
I mean, many of these were people who, when the Sunni-Shia civil war got started, particularly in Baghdad, they were rooted out of their neighborhoods and had to flee.
Also estimated to be two million or more.
You're talking about four plus million refugees of one sort or another, plus a million dead, and then maybe, I mean, hundreds of thousands, let's say, let's be conservative.
And you're only talking about a country with an estimated pre-war population of something like 26 or 27 million.
I mean, there's no way to imagine what this would be like in the United States.
And we never do try to imagine these things.
I mean, this level of chaos, death, destruction, and so on, is just staggering.
And, of course, this hasn't ended.
I mean, the American people have looked away.
It's completely clear.
I mean, if I do stuff at Tom Dispatch on Iraq, it's quite clear that less people will read Iraq than they'll read about the economic meltdown right now, or maybe Afghanistan, or whatever.
Yeah, you know, I saw Jon Stewart the other day.
They did a Mesopotamia, and he had to blow the dust off of the logo.
And then he said, but it's not my fault, no one else has been covering it either.
That's right.
That's right.
And, I mean, I continue to keep, you know, at Tom Dispatch, I do keep, you know, I do return to it, because I think it's important.
And more than important, Iraq remains.
You know, the surge Iraq, the success in Iraq.
And I, of course, have seemed to think of this as success after what's happened, has merely returned Iraq to a state, to maybe the state of killing in 2004, 2005, when it was already certainly one of the most, maybe not Somalia, but one of the most dangerous countries on the planet.
And in recent days, in Baghdad and in Diyala province in particular, suicide bombings have been going up.
And so we don't know.
This is quite an unstable situation.
And we're going to be drawing down very, very slowly.
I mean, you saw that there was an announcement which looks good, 12,000 troops are being withdrawn by September.
But that seems to be all for this year.
Whatever happened to one combat brigade a month, which was Obama's pledge during the election?
I mean, a combat brigade is about 6,000.
But it's pretty obvious that when they put a two-year deadline on it, that that's a two-year race to figure out a way to stay longer than two years.
Come on.
But, you know, one of the dangers is, and again, people don't talk about this, but if sooner or later we get down to 50,000 troops and something explodes again there, we know if American troops are endangered, we're going to do what we did, of course, in Vietnam and what we do in Afghanistan and so on, which is we'll bring in the Air Force.
So, you know, I mean, this is a very dangerous, this is not a finished situation by no means.
And we could see a situation in which in Afghanistan the war ratchets up, in Iraq, who knows what happens.
I mean, this is a very, very unstable situation.
And nobody's thinking, to return to our basic theme, I mean, nobody's bothering, as far as I can tell, to think about what the alternatives would be.
Now, for me, this is, at some level, this isn't complicated.
I do not believe that the United States, you know, that we should be halfway across the earth fighting war.
Yeah, Ron Paul says, just come home.
That's it, we just marched in, we can just march out.
I mean, I think that we probably owe more than, I mean, just, you know, the problem is that when Americans finally get around to marching out, they tend not to look back.
And there's so much discussion here.
I'm of a slightly different, whatever.
I think we do have some, you know, we do owe something.
Well, I'd be for, I guess, having the government write a check and depreciating dollars to each and every individual Iraqi, rather than to a government-to-government transfer of wealth.
I'd be for paying reparations that way.
I just think we need to think about this, but we need to get out of these wars.
All right, that's it.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much for yours today.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that's Tom Englehart, TomDispatch.com.
The World According to Tom Dispatch is the book, and you can find them at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
And that's it for Antiwar Radio.
See you all tomorrow.