05/14/09 – Kelly B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest on the show today, she's our newest regular columnist at Antiwar.com, Kelly B. Vlejos.
Hi Kelly, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
My first question for you is, tell me the bad news about the American Conservative Magazine, the anti-war right flagship publication.
Is it true the terrible rumors I hear that it shall no longer exist in the future?
Well, you know, I don't know if I'm talking out of school here, but I think there's been enough hints on the blog, at TAC, weblog, that it will remain in spirit in magazine, 11th hour save for the American Conservative.
It is going to a monthly rotation, as opposed to a bi-monthly one, but it has been saved, it's not going anywhere, and it's going to be bigger and better.
More pages, more art inside, so that's a good thing.
I'm glad to spread the good news.
Yeah, that's absolutely great.
I think, you know, people on the right, if they don't have a right winger, they can identify themselves with, like Ron Paul, I think, said, hey, it's okay to be a right winger and anti-war, and people really latched onto that, and I think that the American Conservative Magazine really serves that same function, too.
Hey, here are real conservative scholars who are opposed to this imperial madness.
Absolutely, and I think it's more now than ever.
I mean, I thought during the Bush years that the American Conservative, which it actually emerged out of, the early Bush years, post-9-11, to sort of combat the conventional Republican wisdom and the way that the war was being executed, I thought that that, I mean, it was all-out necessary then, but going into this administration, where it seems as though that, again, there is no room, there is no fit for conservatives, anti-war conservatives like yourself, like myself, who don't sort of fit into that right-wing template that, you know, I see the Republican Party is still clinging to, I think a magazine like the American Conservative is even more necessary and important for the landscape.
Well, yeah, especially because so many right-wingers who just love George Bush and Dick Cheney and war and torture and everything else have all of a sudden discovered the Constitution and limited government and sound money and separations of powers and all these crazy things, so I guess it's nice to already have a home for them to go and learn about people who have been right about these things all along, who haven't just recently discovered liberty.
Right, if they're serious about it, yeah, if they're serious about it, I mean, unless it's just a partisan bail, you know, and we saw this during, and this happened with the Democrats as well, you know, during the Clinton years, there was all sorts of constitutional abridgment going on, whether it be spying on people on the Internet or what happened at Waco or Elian Gonzalez, you know, Democrats didn't want to know nothing, you know, this is the way the federal government operates, and then during the Bush years, they all of a sudden care about the Constitution all of a sudden.
Well, I kind of like to think that each time they flip-flop, we get a few that stay, you know, principled.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, so you've gotten some controversy here with Tom Ricks, the Pentagon's, I mean, pardon me, some independent journalist of some, I don't know what, you know, I'm supposed to think of his role in this society, but anyway, he's emerged as the journalist champion of the Saint Petraeus, General Petraeus, and his counterinsurgency doctrine, and he didn't seem to take too well to an article that you wrote called Exposing Counterfeit Coin.
Yeah.
What's going on?
What was your article, and what was it that Tom Ricks objected to so much, do you think?
Well, as a journalist, you know, and that's like the perspective I like to give to you, because I'd like to say right up front, I mean, I'm not ex-military, I don't have a huge, broad experience in military doctrine, but as a journalist, I knew that I was really treading into some, you know, serious territory when I did this story, but I did it anyway because I had used Gian Gentile as a source, who is, he is active duty.
He is a professor at West Point.
He's a lieutenant colonel.
He is, you know, I mean, he's out there putting, you know, putting himself on the line by criticizing the counterinsurgency doctrine as we see it going forward under General Petraeus and his, you know, so-called brain trust.
I had interviewed him several times before, and I thought, you know, I'd like to do a profile on him because he really, you know, does emerge as sort of the alone voice against the conventional wisdom, of which the Obama administration is clinging to at this point.
And as I was working on the story, you know, I sort of wandered on to these counterinsurgency blogs, of which, you know, Tom Ricks is a, you know, a frequent, you know, character and participant, and I realized that there is a whole club out there of counterinsurgency experts, typically that they're military or former military, that are attached either to think tanks or what have you, or just, you know, people on the blogs, but they're basically symbolized by this one, you know, sort of pro-counterinsurgency theme.
And I knew that when I wrote this story and it came out that, you know, I was going to get all hell for it, and I did.
And because Gian Gentile is sort of like a bane of their existence, you know, and he weighs in on these blogs too, and, you know, so he's quite known among this crowd.
He's just not known within the mainstream, and that's what I want to do.
I want to bring this guy out to the mainstream.
So I wrote about him, and I immediately get backlash from the COIN crowd.
There's a whole crowd at the Center for New American Security, which is a think tank in Washington that's basically home to a lot of these former military people, including John Nagel, whose former military worked for Donald Rumsfeld during the Bush years and now has shifted over to what was a primarily democratic think tank that is all centered around this sort of counterinsurgency doctrine.
Anyway, so they're all on the blog.
They get a hold of my story, and they totally lambaste me for being an outsider.
I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
You know, this is what happens when anti-war, code-pink people get involved in military stories.
Right, right.
Kelly Vlahos from Fox News, Homeland Security Today, and the American Conservative Magazine.
Exactly.
They automatically assumed I was a flaming liberal.
But I expected that.
It was something that I expected.
I was a little surprised when Tom Rick weighed in on it, and more sort of viciously than the others had.
Well, and you know, his argument, and he was just quoting somebody else's argument, and I guess later he kind of apologized, and I'll let you address that.
It was only sort of a kind of apology.
But his argument basically was, oh, so if you don't agree with me about Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine, and you're interviewing this guy Gentile about why it's bad, then obviously I guess you just agree with him that instead of clear build-hold, we ought to go search and destroy some more.
That's what you think, and you're supposed to have to refute that?
I mean, what kind of ridiculous argument is that?
Yeah, and I can see why he makes it, because it's a quick hit.
It's a quick hit at us, because if I really want to come down to it, you know, if we really want to take Gian Gentile and take the Coen crowd and just totally deconstruct everybody and where they're coming from, yeah, Gian Gentile, and he's very upfront about this, is not anti-war.
He is a soldier.
He's not even anti-counterinsurgency.
But his main argument is that that counterinsurgency, the way it has been developed under Petraeus, you know, over the last few years, the New Field Manual doctrine, the whole bit is basically an argument and a template, a blueprint, what have you, for a long, unending war in which the U.S. Army is used as a nation-building apparatus that goes out there and changes society at the point of a gun.
And Gian Gentile says, no, that is not what the Army is about.
The Army is about defending the republic.
You know, the national interest, defense, you know, whatever you want to call it, but it's not about going out and changing society, nation-building.
And he says this post-9-11 ethos where the military is used to go out into every little dark crevice of the world rooting out terrorists and trying to change the way people think by winning over hearts and minds while simultaneously bombing the hell out of them is not going to work.
And so whatever, you know, wherever he's coming from in terms of being a soldier and wanting to see more conventional, the conventional side of warfare not stripped away so as to when we might have to fight a conventional war someday or a big war that we're not, you know, taken unawares, okay, that's fine.
We can argue as people who might be against war, we could probably have plenty to debate with Gian Gentile over, but the point here was this counterinsurgency doctrine.
And what Tom Ricks was trying to do was pull a fast one and make it sound like, well, we just want more war and we don't want their kind of new war, which is to win hearts and minds, yada, yada, yada.
Well, and now please address Rick's somewhat apology to you.
Well, you know, I really don't know Thomas Ricks personally.
I do know from going on his blog and seeing how he's weighed in on other blogs, you know, and some of the things that he's written lately about whether it be about the surge, which of course he's become the sort of anointed, I call him the anointed scribe of the surge, you know.
He's got all the inside stories.
He's like Bob Woodward, you know.
He's got the inside interviews with General Ray Odierno and David Petraeus.
He's sort of their, you know, he's their court scribe as far as that's how I see him.
I see that his ego has sort of ballooned a bit, you know, in the last year.
His book, The Gamble, has come out and it's been lauded.
It's on bestseller lists, you know.
He's been embraced by the military establishment, particularly the one that I've described, and I think that, you know, he might be a little bit more thin-skinned than we would assume somebody of his position or stature was, and I just think that when several of the commenters, you know, people who had commented to his little swipe at me had come out and said, you know, just because we're not in the military doesn't mean that we don't, as American citizens, we don't have a point of view or we can't debate a subject or explore alternatives the way things are done.
You know, give antiwar.com a break.
You go on the site.
See who's writing about it.
You know, who's writing for it before you come to all these conclusions, you know.
Well, and especially, Kelly, pardon me for interrupting here, but especially when this whole ideology and so-called counterinsurgency doctrine is completely bankrupt, and especially when Rex has been invited on this show and doesn't respond, and here they're talking about Iraq, the model.
I mean, this is Petraeus' great success in counterinsurgency, and he proved how well it worked and why we ought to fight like this for the next, you know, decades upon decades, because what a great job they've done in Iraq, when you don't need a counterinsurgency expert.
All you need is Patrick Coburn and Gareth Porter, and these people will explain to you, you know, Robert Dreyfus.
They'll explain clearly.
What happened was America helped the Shiite militias, the Iranians, the Da'wah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council win the civil war.
The Sunnis were getting sick of al-Qaeda in Iraq anyway, and all Petraeus did was pay them to do what they were already doing, and anyone who has access to the headlines can see that al-Qaeda is blowing up the Awakening Council members.
At the same time, Maliki is arresting them, and you still have unresolved problems in Kurdistan, and the whole thing is falling apart.
This is not some doctrine.
That's some, you know, beautiful new model we might as well invade Australia and improve their society with, too.
It's craziness.
It's paper thin.
Absolutely, and the whole thing about this counterinsurgency is that it doesn't seem to have to work.
There's no standard by which to go and say, well, does this work?
You know, everything's based on the surge.
Violence was reduced, okay, so it worked, but there's no other metric.
So, I mean, there's metrics out there, the human metrics of what's going on in Iraq right now.
I mean, like you said, it's falling apart, but they've already moved on, and the field manual is out there, and the doctrine is out there, and they're, what, seconds away from applying this to Afghanistan, which is really scary.
Well, you know, George Bush said in 2000 that victory means exit strategy, and President Clinton needs to tell us what the exit strategy is.
There's the metric, and according to Tom Ricks, in all his public interviews on The Daily Show and everywhere else, oh, yeah, this is a wonderful success, and that's why we'll have to occupy the country for the rest of everybody's children's lifetimes.
Right, but that, you know, and that's the sick thing about the counterinsurgency, you know, the whole debate, is that what does counterinsurgency mean?
We clear, hold, and build.
Do we go away?
No one seems to be able to answer that.
Do we ever go away, or does this become an imperial adventure, like the British, where we just remain in countries forever, or until they finally figure it out and kick us out?
But, I mean, there's no endgame here, and Michelle Flournoy, who is now the Pentagon's top woman, top person for policy, said at a Brookings, actually, I believe it was a Brookings Institution panel about a month ago, that she expects that we will be in Afghanistan in some capacity for at least 20 years.
Where the hell did that come from?
We don't talk, Obama's not talking in those terms.
And, again, this is the lady who's now got Doug Feith's post, or Abram Shulsky's post, as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, right?
Right, and she was the founder of the think tank that, you know, I was just talking about, the Center for New American Security, of which Rick is a fellow, and John Noggle is the president.
You know, and all these people, David Kilcullen, another counterinsurgency expert, is an advisor.
You've got a few neocons in there, sprinkled in, like Robert Kaplan.
You know, it's the new establishment, you know, military think tank for Washington, and it's all centered around this counterinsurgency, of which we know little about, other than it's supposed to, you know, win hearts and minds, clear hold and build, you know, fight terrorism, change societies, but it still doesn't tell us, do we remain in these countries forever to make it work?
This clear hold, build thing, the most sophisticated version of the Vietnam stab in the back theory that I've ever heard, actually has, you know, some detail to it, and it says that, you know, the generals who were in charge in Vietnam were a bunch of idiots, and they spent more than a decade sending our guys on search and destroy missions, and, you know, counterproductive warfare against the people of Vietnam, and then finally they got a great new counterinsurgency strategy, clear hold and build, and it was working, damn it, it was working, until the liberals in the press and Jane Fonda and pinko commies like Richard Nixon and all these terrible people ended what would have been, you know, they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, or vice versa, you know what I mean, and it's all the anti-war people's fault that the war in Vietnam didn't work out after all, and that's exactly the same thing we're talking about here, right, is that generals Pace and Sanchez and Franks and all these guys in charge of the Iraq war, that's what they did for the first few years of this thing, was search and destroy missions, going around murdering people, but now they've figured out the proper strategy is you have to, once you invade a neighborhood, you have to stay there until those people either love you or I guess figure out they're never going to get rid of you, and so they come to accept it, and then you move on and clear and hold and build the next neighborhood.
Again, this leaves out the idea of an exit strategy at any point, I guess, but as far as within the argument that they're making, do you even think, or the people that you talk to, do they credit this change in strategy from seek and destroy to clear, hold, build with any kind of progress in Iraq, or do they basically say what Coburn says, that no, as soon as he's lost the Civil War, there was a change of circumstances is really what happened?
I hear, when the question is put to somebody, say like Tom Ricks, about what's going on in Iraq, he seems to change his outlook on Iraq from one interview to the next, but it seems to me that they're ready to write off Iraq, which I think is really, really sad and pathetic, and I remember one story I did for Anti-War a few weeks ago was about the Iraq we leave behind, and somebody had commented on the column and said something like, all you Anti-War people are all ticked off and traumatized over our initial invasion of Iraq, and now you don't want us to leave because, now you're whining because you're leaving.
It's like, well, that's not the point.
The point is that what you're leaving behind is an absolute disaster.
It's a crater of humanity, and I fear that because of the shift in focus to Afghanistan, a lot of these counterinsurgency types really don't want to talk about what's going on in Iraq right now.
They talk about the inherent corruption in the government.
They talk about Iran meddling.
They talk about al-Qaeda coming back, but they don't want to seem to address that the clear hold and build thing didn't seem to hold true because it's not holding.
I mean, the whole thing is holding.
I think the real question here, too, is, you know, the one that I've kind of been ignoring is, isn't this all just a bunch of smoke and mirrors?
Because what they really want to do is conquer Asia and own it, and if they've got to come up with one lie after another to do that, then they'll do that.
You know what?
Al-Amin al-Zawahiri is going to get us or something.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, because I know we don't have much time, and I'd love to discuss this with you, is this new appointment or nomination of Stanley McChrystal.
Well, let's do that.
Let's talk about that.
In fact, that is quite important.
He's from the Special Operations Command.
He's a seek-and-destroy kind of guy, right?
Well, he's a seek-and-destroy kind of guy, but he's also a darling of this counterinsurgency set because, according to all the bloggers and the pundits, he, quote-unquote, gets it.
He gets counterinsurgency.
He's an asymmetrical kind of guy.
You know, he's out there.
He's ferreting out terrorists, you know, within the urban landscape.
I'm a little befuddled because I'm with you.
He sounds like a search-and-destroy kind of guy, but yet he seemingly has been absorbed into the breast of this counterinsurgency, the new war.
Well, maybe his part is the clear, and somebody else comes to hold and build after him or something.
Yeah, and win hearts and minds.
I guess maybe he's just friends with Petraeus, and that's really what it takes.
Well, yeah.
It does sound like that.
The vision that I'm getting here is that the counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq worked, quote-unquote, because you had the strong man, the brain, the head at the top, you know, David Petraeus, and then you had General Ray Odierno below him, who was sort of commanding this real tight-fisted group of counterinsurgency types who basically turned the war around.
Because you had this sort of direct linear command like this, that worked, and you had people who got it, quote-unquote.
And so they're sort of trying to put this template onto Afghanistan by having, you know, Stanley McChrystal at the top, and forgive me, the other general who's going to be sort of doing the groundwork, Rodriguez is his name?
I'm sorry, you're ahead of me on that one.
Yeah.
So basically they're trying to shift the command, and they're all friends.
They're all coming from the same perspective.
You know, they're all on board with the counterinsurgency thing, and they basically convinced President Obama and his administration that this is the way to go.
You know what's interesting here?
And I kick myself if I left this out of the discussion.
I don't know whether you're in any position to comment, but Justin Raimondo pointed this out in his article the other day, that if you look at the Center for New American Security, it's the Rockefellers.
That's who it is.
It's Lockheed and the Rockefellers run the thing.
And so, you know, people think, you know, hope and change and this and that, but this whole takeover all of Asia thing is really part and parcel of that centrist, democratic, neoliberal, Rockefeller foreign policy we've had since World War II, isn't it?
Yeah.
And I think that the shame here, you know, for many of the Democrats, the quote-unquote anti-war Democrats who worked so hard to elect candidates, including President Obama, because they felt that they were going to get changed, they were going to get some sort of real shift in foreign policy, were totally shut out of the process.
And when President Obama turns to the Center for New American Security and he plucks the founder out to make her the top policy official at the Pentagon and he embraces all the policies that are coming out of there, you're basically shutting off any other outlet, any other point of view, you know, because he's basically anointed them as, you know, the think tank for his foreign policy, you know, feeder machine, I don't know what you'd call it.
And, you know, it's sad because there's a lot of people and a lot of hope that this administration might be different in terms of the way it looks at our relationship with the world.
And he has turned to the same old people, they might have a D at the end of their name, but they come from the same cradle, so to speak.
And it's too bad.
I mean, the paleo-conservatives and the anti-war conservatives have been shut out throughout the entire Bush years.
We're used to it at this point.
Libertarians.
But I think the Democrats really got a shock of cold water in their faces at the beginning of this administration.
And it's not going to get any better with what's going on in Afghanistan, particularly with Stanley McChrystal being made the top Afghan commander.
Well, I'm glad that they're not the ones anymore, but to see Bill Chrystal at the Weekly Standard saying, Hail Obama for his wonderful Afghanistan-Pakistan policy.
You know, it's not quite the neocons, but I guess it might as well be with these neoliberals.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I made a point on an American conservative blog yesterday saying that, you know, when you have Charles Krauthammer and Max Gou and Dick Cheney basically praising Obama for picking McChrystal, you really have to take a step back and think, What is going on here?
Well, and especially when this week we have the greatest number of Pakistani refugees since Pakistan split off from India.
Yeah.
I mean, a million people displaced from their homes, widespread violence, major consequences that no one can predict down the line from a million refugees.
Come on.
I mean, we're destroying the country next door now, too, like Cambodia and Vietnam.
And we still have millions of people still displaced in Iraq, and nobody cares about that anymore.
I mean, in terms of anybody, you know, in the power structure of Washington.
Yeah, sure, you have plenty of NGOs and humanitarian aid organizations that are underfunded and, you know, ignored, but, you know, the real policy, they don't really care, the policymakers.
We're moving on now.
We're moving on, you know.
So there's 5 million displaced people in Iraq and Jordan and Syria, and it's like, well, we were never there.
Yeah, that's yesterday's news.
Yeah.
All right, everybody, that's Kelly Blejos.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
You can find all that Kelly writes at original.antiwar.com slash blejos, that's V-L-A-H-O-S, and you can find her articles right there in the right-hand margin at the front of the page at antiwar.com.