05/13/09 – Tom Hayden – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
For the first half hour of the show today, or the first part of the show today, we're going to go ahead and bring on our first guest.
It's Tom Hayden.
I've been telling you guys for the past couple of days about this great article he wrote at The Nation called Understanding the Long War.
Tom is a former state senator, I believe, in California from The Nation Institute.
He's played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades.
And he is the author of The Other Side, The Love of Possession is a Disease with Them, Ending the War in Iraq, and Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden reader.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you, sir?
We're doing fine out here in California.
How are you?
I'm doing just great out here in California myself.
I thought you were in California by way of Texas, or is it the other way around?
Yeah, strike that, reverse it.
I'm in L.A., the show's in Austin.
But, yeah, anyway, so great article here, Understanding the Long War.
That's exactly what I do now.
I understand the long war.
In great part from this article helping flesh out a lot of details here.
Let's talk about John Nagel.
Let's start there.
That's where the article starts.
Who's John Nagel, and why should anybody care who John Nagel is, sir?
John Nagel, I don't know him.
I've been following his work for some time.
He is a former officer in Iraq.
He was a lieutenant colonel in Desert Storm.
He went on to West Point to teach national security studies.
He was back in Iraq leading an armored task force in 2003, 2004.
Anyway, he's become kind of an intellect who has written extensively on past counterinsurgencies and current.
He's a foremost advocate of counterinsurgency.
In these little circles of counterinsurgency experts, he would rank in the front ranks.
He's now the head of a think tank that favors counterinsurgency that's called the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C., which was formed, I believe, in 2007, parallel to the ascension of General Petraeus.
So Nagel would be a person that you could learn about online, Google.
You can go to smallwars.com and read the intellectual writings of the counterinsurgency people, including Nagel.
So if I understand correctly, this Center for New American Security basically is built up to be the centrist National Security Democrats think tank.
This is where a lot of the Obama administration's foreign policy people are coming from.
Apparently, a lot of where his policy is coming from.
Is that right?
I think so.
I would not confuse it with the Center for American Progress, which is headed by John Podesta, who was the head of transition.
Isn't he a member of both, though?
Yeah, you've done your homework.
The Center for American Progress is more liberal Democratic in background, a lot of Clinton people.
And they were quite good on Iraq, but they flipped and are in favor of the Obama policies of adding 17,000 or 21,000 new troops in Afghanistan.
Along the way, I think they had a kind of a rivalry over Iraq or a competition or a battle of some kind with the Center for New American Security.
And thus, that was formed as well.
And it's true, Podesta is on both boards, but he's clearly the head of the Center for American Progress.
And he may be a factor in the other one.
The other one was headed by Michelle Flournoy, who was a Clinton Defense Department person.
She then vetted the Pentagon appointments for the transition team.
She then became something at the Pentagon.
She's an undersecretary of something.
She's got Mike's job.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith's old position.
Policy.
And she's quite active.
These think tanks are kind of like holding companies for the party that's out of power.
And they have different personalities.
It's hard to know what the differences are.
But I think it's right to say that the Center for New American Security is a little more on the hawkish end of that particular spectrum.
Well, in fact, I'm kind of cheating, because Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com's article is about this today, and I clicked all the links and checked.
And he talks in there about how that rivalry that you were talking about, it was because the CNAS, the second one there, they were against any kind of definitive timetable for leaving Iraq.
Whereas the Center for American Progress was saying, let's get out of there.
Yeah.
No, that was a big difference, for what it's worth.
But it's over now.
I mean, Obama has accepted whatever he's going to accept on the Iraq recommendations.
And we're now into a new stage of what I call the long war.
So let's talk about the long war.
It's not a phrase that I made up.
It's a phrase that comes from General John Abizaid, who was the top military leader in Iraq in the mid-10s, 2004 or something.
He began using the phrase, and it's been picked up by all the think tanks, usually goes along with another phrase, arc of instability.
There's said to be an arc of instability that runs from the Middle East to South Asia.
Well, and that's Zbigniew Brzezinski talking, right?
There's a Brzezinski aspect to that, and it has two things about this arc.
One is the line of division between the West and the Islamic countries, and it is the center of oil resources, oil production, oil and natural gas pipelines.
So it's hard to tell what's what here, but it's about geopolitics, and they're talking about 50 years.
I think we should consider that to be their plan, but it could be longer, it could be shorter.
The importance of it, I think, here's where some light bulbs might go off for people trying to puzzle through this, is we're used to relatively short wars.
When I was a little boy, World War II, in which all these tens of millions of people were killed, was a five-year war.
Korea was a two- to four-year war.
Vietnam, depending on how you measure it, was an eight- to twelve-year war, longer.
But essentially, it was really 1965 when the American ground troop escalation happened, and it started to de-escalate and fall apart five years later.
Well, the model here, as you say in your article, it's very blatant in the language, too.
The model here is not World War II or even Vietnam.
The model here is the Indian Wars for the Old West, the entire 19th century, right?
No, I think that's a template that is lodged deep in the memory banks of the Pentagon and the infantry, and people really ought to understand it and go back to it.
But this war is about the defeat of militant Muslims who sit astride the oil lanes, really.
And the key to the model is that you can have several wars at once.
You can have Iraq and Afghanistan, and next Pakistan, perhaps Iran.
You can throw in the U.S. backing of Israel against Hezbollah and Hamas.
And you can see how it's fairly easy to reach a conclusion that these wars, in some variation, could go on for 50 years.
It's quite staggering when you contemplate the number of casualties and the economic costs versus the relative cost of just going solar and conservation and getting the hell off the oil addiction.
Well, is the purpose to sow instability through this region, or is that just the consequence when they try to do the opposite?
I think there are some people in the shadow world of the intelligence agencies who sow discord.
But in general, I think it's about the deference we pay as a society and as government to the military mind.
And the military mind sees more threats than we mere mortals see.
It's the old saying, if you see every problem as a nail, the solution is a hammer.
You can see it in everyday life and domestic politics.
They're always talking in the crime and drug wars on America's streets about law and order first, then we'll get around to social programs and jobs.
I think it's just the military taking the lead.
It's not that the oil companies and other bad guys are not totally into it and supportive of it.
But I think if you were trying to figure out who's driving the long war, it would be the military.
It's framed as a necessary war for two reasons.
One is the fear of terrorism, which we're sure to be hit with the terrorist attack over a 50-year period.
So it has a way of renewing itself.
And secondly, the other thing that is the motive is the permanent security over all sources of oil.
And I guess behind that is an assumption that we, unlike Western Europe, can't be secure without a global empire with no competition.
Other countries are living pretty well after empire.
We have not entered that phase yet.
We don't have their experience.
And this connects to the domestic issues.
The primary reason we don't have national health care is that we've been fighting these wars while the Europeans have disengaged from most of their military empire and have invested in health care and pensions, shorter work weeks, etc.
So at the end of the day, a 50-year long war would really knock the possibilities out of real funding for energy alternatives, education, health care on the domestic front.
Give it up if you think you can get national health insurance and the long war and somehow afford both.
It's not going to happen.
Or even just have a regular, stable, prosperous society, all things being equal, even from today.
The cost of this empire is clearly more than the benefit.
But I guess it's a matter mostly of teaching conservatives about capitalist economics and that the oil will always be for sale whether our Marine Corps is standing around or not.
It's a world market.
All it has to do is get to a boat and then it's on the open seas and it's for sale.
All you've got to do is go to the Netherlands and pay money for it.
I think you're right.
In terms of psychopolitics, by which I mean the psychological stuff, you have to ask what it would take to convince enough American voters to get angry about this and what it would take to convince them that we don't need to be the policemen of the world.
This comes and goes as an American concern.
It was very high after Vietnam.
Then after 9-11, the argument in favor of policing the world grew with American people, American voters.
It's still got some resonance today.
All it will take, and it's guaranteed I think, is the loss of American civilian lives and some other violent attack on broader Americans at home.
This process has this self-fulfilling aspect that I think people should be very scared about.
The new commander that was appointed today is kind of a perfect specimen.
He comes proudly out of the dark side that Cheney was bragging about.
This is the new General McChrystal, who is replacement Kiernan.
He's from the Special Operations Command.
Stanley McChrystal.
Other people will be done with him and examine him in their own way.
The thing that I would draw your attention to is that he played a key role and he was reprimanded by the military, by the Pentagon, for covering up and falsifying the circumstances surrounding the death of Corporal Pat Tillman, an American hero story.
He was killed in friendly fire, but the Pentagon had first said that he was killed in mortal combat with the enemy in Iraq.
It was not until members of his own unit, as I recall, began to get quite upset about this exploitation of the death of one of their buddies, that it all came out in a scandal.
This is the fellow who was held responsible for doing that.
Why do I stress this?
It happened several years ago.
It's because the point has to be driven home to each and every one of us that counterinsurgency is not just about secret operations over there.
It's about keeping those operations secret over here.
Well, and this is where the term blowback comes from.
Chalmers Johnson talks about how it doesn't just mean, you know, you've got to be careful, it doesn't just mean consequences from conflicts.
It means consequences from covert action, so that the American people, something big happens, but they don't know why.
They don't know the back story.
They don't really understand how things got the way they were.
So therefore, like the planes of September 11th just came out of the clear blue sky, and no one could imagine any reason why there would be these enemies who would be against us like this.
Well, this fellow, he kind of completes the loop if you're into conspiracy theories, because he was technically in charge of all the secret operations from 2003 to quite recently in Iraq.
He was the top spook, and these are people who conducted operations completely out of sight.
There's like two wars.
One is the war that the media reported.
The media was being heavily lobbied, we now know, by Pentagon operatives who basically infiltrated the commentariat.
That was one war.
But then there's another war that the media never covered, and which was always kept secret.
And what happens on the secret side, as you say, does suddenly cause blowback, or mysterious things begin to happen that the public can't account for.
And I think the reason for secret wars is very rarely to pull off an operation.
The enemy, the other side, whatever you want to call them, is very good at countering secrecy, and is fully paranoid about American operations to begin with.
The reason for the secret ops is more to keep it secret from the media and the American people than to keep it secret from the enemy, if you know what I'm talking about.
This is the danger.
This means the whole war now is going to be a secret dirty war.
Previously, you had generals who were sort of accountable to the media, accountable to the public.
This time, when this guy goes for Senate confirmation, Senator Kerry, for example, who was one of these people in his own past, may not be able to ask him any questions, because everything that the guy did in Iraq is a secret.
Yeah, I mean, I guess Special Operations Command, they answer directly to who, I guess.
I know they're outside of the regular chain of command of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs and all that, right?
Well, they certainly are considered to be keepers of secrets from everybody else.
This is going to be a tough one for Obama, but for your listeners who want to know more, go to Bob Woodward's last book, The War Within, page 380 in the hardcover edition.
He talks about top secret operations that were launched in May 2006 in Iraq against Al-Qaeda.
Supposedly, that's a definable entity.
The Sunni insurgency, which is very difficult to define.
Renegade Shia militias, difficult to define.
And what they did is they carried out a massive secret targeting and kill program, which Woodward is excited about.
And Woodward quotes the top counterinsurgency advisor on this program as saying that he got orgasms every time he saw the results of the kills.
His name was Derek Harvey, Defense Intelligence Agency.
And according to Woodward's history, this kill program in which the U.S. was judge, jury, and executioner had more to do with calming down Iraq than the surge of those ground troops for combat in 2007.
And guess who was responsible?
McChrystal.
Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, employed what he called collaborative warfare, using every tool simultaneously.
And that's the guy whose success at killing people caused all the orgasms.
Great, yeah, now he's going to be the guy in charge in Iraq.
He's the top, yeah.
No, in Afghanistan.
Well, the thing is, I just saw the other night on TV, they did this interesting thing.
It was on the Science Channel, I think, or Discovery, one of those, about network science.
And how from the inside of the Kevin Bacon game and the six degrees of separation, they've kind of figured out this whole new science that they're getting into in network science.
And they showed a clip of one of the guys talking about how, I mean, in not specific language, but it was pretty clear he was talking about the same Woodward program here, that they used this network science to figure out who were the leaders of which cells and what have you like that.
And they gave the credit to that program for the ability to find Zarqawi and to find Saddam Hussein hiding out at the farm where he was and all these things.
Maybe, yeah, but notice the one thing that the public is kept from realizing about this.
The whole thing, from beginning to end, the development of intelligence, informants, targeting, execution, is completely insulated from any review, overview, oversight in any public sense.
Right, because the CIA has to inform the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and the congressional leaders about what they're doing, but the Special Operations Committee does not.
Correct.
You got it.
So now we're going deep into deep territory here in the conflict between the prerogatives of empire and the aspirations of democracy, no?
Absolutely.
As Thomas Johnson always says, you have to give up your empire or live under it.
And you can either, your empire can fall, I guess, the Japanese model or the British model.
I would rather go out like the British or even the Russians than the Japanese or the Germans, you know, if that's my choice.
Yeah, I think that's a fair, I'm on your side there.
Yeah, well, and it does seem like we're not giving up our empire, more and more we are living under it.
And this is, of course, what the libertarian argument against war tries to emphasize a lot, is the effect of all this overseas warfare on our systems of law here at home.
And we can see everything falling apart now.
Our local police carry machine guns and our leaders can openly brag about torturing people on TV and nobody cares.
Or I guess they do, but they get away with it.
Everything's fine.
Yeah, I don't think it's true that nobody cares, but we're trying to make a difference here.
So, you know, I would urge your listeners to concentrate on, you know, that segment of voters who, they defer to the military or to the police.
They wind up on juries and they vote for the prosecutor's version.
And they're kind of under the spell of that power because they're afraid.
It's kind of scary if you think that the military is lying to you.
Something like that.
And so the more progressive view on this has to find a way to break through that public mentality.
There's already a sufficient number of people who will be outraged if you make a good argument.
But they don't have the staying power, the bureaucratic power of the special ops.
What I'm saying is we have special ops inside the beltway aimed at us.
Not just special ops over in Pakistan and South Waziristan and what we can call Pipeline-istan, if you will.
And people, it's really hard for people to handle the idea that somebody is spying on them and trying to manipulate their feelings, trying to exploit the death of an American war hero and that sort of thing.
And I don't know where it's going.
What I do know is that we'll be the last to find out if we don't wake up.
I don't think they're fooling anybody over in Pakistan.
Well, you know, as far as trying to convince or show how these things work, I guess the people that you're talking about are what I would very vaguely define as the right, people who prefer country music or classic rock to more hipster kind of things in the broadest sense.
But now that liberals are in power and all these people have decided that they've rediscovered that there's such a thing as the Constitution and the rule of law and sound money and limited government, which they never heard of for the last eight years somehow, it seems like if those are the hardest people to get through to on the issue of foreign policy and the military, that now perhaps is a real opening to say, see, it's Obama's military now.
How could it possibly be doing the right thing when it's him?
Well, there's another group, I wouldn't call them the right, I would call them the liberal hawks, the people who genuinely believe that Iraq was a disaster, but you can't just pull out of a disaster.
They believe we can do it right in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These are like the Cyclops liberals, I would call them.
They keep stumbling forward trying to do good.
In this case, they're going to vote for the $84 million supplemental that is at least 80% military.
They're going to vote for the $7.5 billion from Kerry for so-called civilian and so on.
I guess they believe that we have to keep the hunt militarily against al-Qaeda and bin Laden, and I think they believe that on policy but also on political grounds, kind of mixed up in their heads about which is which.
And as long as that's going on, that military battle's going on, they think we can do some good by pouring in some civilians and some money for schools to replace madrasas and some health clinics.
We're back to this idea that winning hearts and minds is compatible with civilian casualties.
And I think it's so illogical that it must be because they're just afraid of the consequences of the alternative.
They just think the alternative is just getting out.
So these are the concerns we have to address, and not least of the people we have to engage with is our own media, because they've already experienced military occupation.
You remember all those talking heads in the beginning of the Iraq war.
They should have learned from that.
They should have wised up.
They have a bit.
But now they've got a real problem.
They've got generals and operators who are, by nature, secretive.
How do you ask them a question without the follow-up being, well, how do I know you're telling me the truth?
Because your business is being a spook.
You're secret.
I was at a meeting with the head of the CIA once with some community people out in Los Angeles.
I saw that on C-SPAN.
He was trying to assure the community that they weren't lying about the connection between drugs and the Contra War.
One guy got up in the back and said, you're the head of the spy agency, right?
So your business is secret.
Yes, yes, yes.
So how can an audience ever know if you're answering truthfully or if you're just perpetuating some falsehood?
It just stopped him in his tracks.
I think he said something like, well, we have an inspector general for that.
I'm sorry, Tom.
We're all out of time.
This has been just great.
Everybody, Tom Hayden, he's from the Nation Institute.
And he's got this excellent article at the Nation right now.
You know, you talk about getting through to people.
Print out copies of this and send it to your congressman.
This is a good one.
Understanding the Long War.
And I'll be looking forward to part two about the Long Peace Movement, too.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.