11/15/13 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up is Andrew Coburn and his new piece, Secretary of Nothing, coming out in Harper's Magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Hey Scott, great to be with you.
Very good to have you back on the show.
And just for clarity's sake, in case anybody's confused, I'm not the Scott Horton that writes for Harper's Magazine, the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer.
I'm the lowly radio guy.
He's the heroic anti-torture international human rights lawyer.
But anyway, just so nobody gets that confused.
But your writer for Harper's, now that's for sure, and I love this one.
The last one I was recommending to people earlier too, on the sanctions, a perfect instrument, is really important that people read about Iran sanctions.
But this one is Secretary of Nothing, John Kerry and the myth of foreign policy.
And I dare say you sound downright Rothbardian in your revisionism and in your, basically your individualist critique of foreign policy, which you argue doesn't even really exist at all.
No, I defy you to find an exception.
You know, I mean, every time, you know, people, you know, there's thousands of poor international relations students, you know, trudging through dreary texts about international relations and foreign policy and the foreign policy of the United States or of France or of whoever.
But when you look into any individual case of so-called foreign policy, you find it's someone doing something for their own political or sometimes financial advantage.
You know, I mean, I rattled through a lot of examples in the piece.
Oh, and I want to talk about them all.
But let's start with why John Kerry was never critical for a moment while he was on the Foreign Relations Committee, I guess the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in Obama's first term.
Because he wanted to be Secretary of State.
So we had a whole entire escalation of a war that, well, I don't know, dare I say any senatorial foreign policy hearing could have uncovered what a bogus theory underpinned the whole thing and how it wasn't worth it.
And a bunch of people are just going to die for nothing.
We're going to lose anyway.
Well, exactly.
Especially as he made his name, his reputation in a good way back in 1971, when the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee then, Senator Fulbright, you know, had that was brave enough to have hearings on Vietnam kind of late.
Well, no, he'd been having them for a while.
And he had John Kerry on who, you know, who was, you know, fresh from combat, who famously said, you know, how can you ask a man to be someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Powerful stuff.
And yet, you know, years, decades later, you know, he's all serious and stuck up and wants to be secretary of state and not a peep out of him.
Amazing.
Well, and it's interesting, too, about how you talk about, I guess you have some inside scoop from people talk about how Obama can't stand John Kerry.
He even hates him more than Richard Holbrook.
And I think it's been published quite a few different places, I guess.
Foreignpolicy.com, I'm thinking of, and a couple other places where Richard Holbrook, a friend of Hillary Clinton, came in and was given the job of negotiating a piece with the Taliban at the same time that McChrystal and Petraeus were doing their surge.
And it became such a big pissing match within the government and who was who that they did half the policy, the surge, but they didn't do the other half of the policy, try to negotiate an end of the thing.
Not that it would have worked anyway, I don't figure.
And then Holbrook ended up dropping dead anyway.
But the point being that, you know, just how funny it is that, you know, John Kerry is even worse than that.
Well, in Obama's eyes, you know, the other phrase I heard, which I didn't use, but which is that John Kerry to Obama is like a knife on a blackboard.
You know, he really, I mean, Obama, you know, we now we know more and more about this.
Obama doesn't seem to like people very much, period.
You know, he just doesn't like to talk to people very much.
Well, people don't like him either, which is OK.
But but, you know, I mean, if if they're going to botch the policy that bad between Holbrook and Obama, then what does that say for the entire second term?
And I guess was that safe for Kerry's term so far?
I mean, you're withering in your criticism here and it's easy enough not to sell you short on your writing skills or anything, but he kind of set you up to destroy him.
Fair point.
Fair point.
Yeah.
You know, it's kind of depressing because in a way, you know, he did, you know, I mean, thinking back to 1971 and a few good things he did early on the Senate, you know, he investigated the, you know, narcotics connection between, you know, with the Contras and Nicaragua, you know, and he went off to the POW, MIA racket, you know, so he wasn't so bad.
And now he's turned into this terrible sort of vain character who who floundered around the place and he spent three weeks.
You can look this up on the State Department website, obviously, you know, whatever it is now, nine months, 10 months almost in office.
He spent three weeks in the air, you know, just flying from A to B and then back again.
You know, it's like all process.
He I mean, what someone explained to me early on who knew him quite well was, you know, all he's interested in is the legacy, the legacy of Secretary John Kerry.
You know, so he goes after this, you know, he spends endless hours and your my dollars on gas, you know, getting the Israelis and the Palestinians into the same room in these negotiations.
I mean, a blind man could see that, you know, Kerry hadn't I mean, sorry, that the Israelis, you know, and the faintest notion of, you know, making any kind of equitable peace with the Israelis because they were busily building settlements all the while.
Yeah.
And Kerry has finally noticed he's finally dawned on him that this is, you know, is never and was never going to go anywhere.
So, I mean, I think he, you know, but seeing him being beaten up this last week by the you know, all the wrong all the people, you know, the Israelis and the French and everyone else.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Because on Palestine, you talk about how I mean, it's not just a blind man, Kerry himself, even worse than a blind man can still see that it takes it would take a real push to forge some kind of deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, you know, along the lines of two states, et cetera, like that.
And you say in the article that only Obama could do it and he could do it.
But he'll be damned if he's going to do something like that and let John Kerry, the scumbag, take all the credit.
And so screw the Palestinians then.
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
The Palestinians, you know, where, you know, as someone said to me, you know, the White House guy said there's room for only one narcissist in this administration.
And he's the one sitting in the Oval Office.
Even at the expense of last chance, if it isn't even too late for that for some kind of settlement here.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it may someone has to do something radical, you know, I mean, really radical to threaten to kick him off welfare.
And that'd be the end of that, right?
Well, for a start, yeah, I think so.
You know, you know, I mean, not many people know this, the last president to do that was Jimmy Carter.
He actually threatened to kick them off at one point.
But, you know, that's all been forgotten.
Yeah.
And then, you know, now, Kerry, you know, they've managed to botch up this Iran negotiations.
I mean, letting the French, the French of all people screw things up.
So I don't know, I think he's, I mean, it's just a very depressing prospect.
But I mean, you're going to find tomorrow people talking again about foreign policy.
It's a sad spectacle.
Well, you know what I think it is, is even for somebody like me, well, those of us who don't have power, we can imagine good choices that could be made, certainly instead of the things that our politicians are doing, we can imagine alternatives that we might have done from the point of view of what would be good for America.
You know, like, wowee, if you got a job as a senator, seems like you'd try real hard to do what's right for America pretty quick, you know.
But no, if you're actually a senator, it never occurs to you.
Or if it does, it's only through the lens of what's good for me first.
And you'd never how often do you see any kind of real sacrifice among these people for their own political career in order to stand up for the right thing?
Well, there's Ed Snowden and Brad Manning.
Well, exactly.
Because, you know, when you, by the time you get to be a senator, let alone a president, you think what's good for you is good for America.
You know, the two kind of merge.
I think they merge in their mind.
You know, so if it helps your re-election and, you know, fill those campaign coppers, then that's good for America.
You know, that's what we see.
But you know what, back to Palestine for a second.
Why is it in Kerry's interest to get up there and huff and puff and do nothing about it?
Same thing for Obama in his first term.
You know, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did the smart political thing, which is save it till the last year and then do nothing and don't stake anything on it.
And then it's not a big deal when you don't accomplish anything.
But Obama first term and Kerry second go, oh, I'm the one going to fix this.
But then without the will or the capability to do it.
That's right.
I mean, you know, I think for Obama, he'd have to be almost have been prepared to be, you know, a single term president, I think, you know, I mean, I think, you know, what they, you know, what they do is I know what, you know, the way the Obama administration, what I hear from, you know, people who work or have, you know, both work and have worked there is it's all like very short term.
They're really thinking about, oh, my God, what's going to be, you know, what's on the cable news, you know, they're very ad hoc, you know, long meetings, you know, trying to come to a decision all driven by, you know, what's on Fox or something stupid like that, instead of, you know, thinking, as you say, what's good for America, what are we going to do?
And here's the right thing to do.
And it's going to do it, you know, whatever it costs.
So that just does not happen.
But it never happens.
You know, I don't know, you know, I mean, maybe I don't know.
Abraham Lincoln.
Well, I mean, yeah, in the article, you you cite Alexander Hamilton, who would be my favorite example, citing his favorite example, Pericles, who just about destroyed Athens by winning, right?
Right.
He destroyed.
Well, yeah, first of all, he started a war as as, you know, as Hamilton notes, basically to satisfy to do a favor for some hooker friend of his.
I mean, he said that the complaint of a prostitute, he went ahead and destroyed an entire city who she had a beef with.
I know someone hadn't paid her.
And that, you know, that that's, you know, well attested to.
And then when Pericles got into a spot of political bother in Athens, he basically started the Peloponnesian War, which destroyed Athens.
You know, so it it this is the way it works.
I mean, I mean, Hamilton, you know, quoted a pretty ancient example, but he said Hamilton himself, who knew a thing or two about politics, said this goes, you know, this is the way things normally work.
And indeed, it's the case doesn't matter if it's a democratic system where, you know, going directly to the voters or some kind of system like the Soviets had or even in Nazi Germany, everyone, every leader does politics and every leader does foreign policy, thinking about his own political position.
Now, I think libertarians have a real leg up on this just being individualists.
We see all these decisions through the lenses of or try our best to, or we at least understand that these things all happen because of the understandings of the individuals involved in their individual motivations, which almost always means putting, you know, what's good for them first and anybody else second and that kind of thing.
But you talk about in your piece, how I guess you cite all the, you know, if you were, I'm a community college dropout, so I don't know all this stuff.
But I think you're talking about like what you're supposed to read if you're a graduate student in foreign policy studies or whatever.
And you cite all these authors that are mainstream academia.
This is the truth about how the world works kind of stuff.
And they don't even look at it from an individualist point of view at all.
And you talk about, for example, this guy Barnett, who did so much to bankroll the rise of AIPAC and other major parts of the Israel lobby in the United States, and how they completely even miss his existence in the political history of America and power dynamics in the world because they just don't look at it that way.
They actually, the very best and brightest of the academics on this subject have no idea what they're talking about.
In other words, I think you're saying well, that's exactly it.
I mean, that they, you know, you don't make your way in academia, you know, and you know, they all possibly with, you know, nice fat consultancy contracts with the government.
If you talk, talk dirty, like about money and lobbying and, you know, and scuzzy things like that, which is actually what, you know, makes the world go round.
So no, of course, you won't find mention of, you know, this guy I talk about Barney Barnett, who basically structured AIPAC.
He didn't start it, but he structured it.
But what he did with it, he was a lawyer who organized in such a way that made it hugely, a huge advantage to it.
And then he went on and did the same thing for the Cuban-American lobby, made them very powerful.
But, you know, I mean, so I say he's a huge, if you're talking about, you know, recent political history of the U.S. and its so-called foreign policy, you should look at Barney.
Or, you know, the other examples, if you, you know, why did the U.S. push to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, thus thereby terminally pissing off the Russians because of breaking a promise we made to them?
Well, it was Bruce Jackson, who was a lobbyist for Lockheed.
He did the work on that one, made a lot of money for Lockheed, you know.
Right.
Yeah.
Bruce Cummings has a great article about that Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
Exactly.
In fact, I think this is your term from when I interviewed you about your book, Rumsfeld, years ago now, about how the neocons are really the cross between the military-industrial complex and the Israel lobby.
That's right.
Because so many of them worked for Lockheed.
Even Hadley was the only one of them who didn't work for Lockheed, but he worked for the law firm that worked for Lockheed.
Exactly.
You know, I mean, you can't find, when you look around, you know, you can't find an exception to this.
You know, I mean, for instance, I was just going to stray from talking about my own piece for a second.
I was just reading a book about the Dulles brothers.
Yeah, I have it on the shelf.
I'm trying to get through Goliath first, but I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, you should finish Goliath, even better, much better book.
But this is pretty interesting because it makes it clear that the Dulles brothers, you know, they did, you know, they dominated, which we have to call foreign policy, for like, you know, years and years and years.
And most of, almost all the time, they were doing it for their own business advantage.
You know, either their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, or, you know, themselves.
Like, okay, they do the coup in Iran, 1953, overthrow the democratic government.
Why?
Well, you know, you can talk about U.S. foreign policy, or you can talk about the fact that Mossadegh just canceled a contract that they had a huge financial interest in.
It cost them a lot of money.
You know, and when they weren't doing it for their own advantage, they were doing it because their boss, Dwight Eisenhower, told them to do something or not to do something.
So now, it was occurring to me when I was going through your article, and you have so many great examples of the, I guess, what you could call, Justin Raimondo calls exactly what you're talking about.
His theory is libertarian realism.
The theory that all foreign policy is domestic politics expressed overseas, basically.
And I was thinking about the coin theorists and the libertarian, pardon me, don't let me say it that way, the liberal humanitarian interventionist types who actually seem like mostly they're concerned with their own feelings.
And that can actually be really powerful, right?
I remember reading, or I met a guy who was a millionaire, and I was telling, this is years ago, and I was telling him all my crazy New World Order conspiracy theories, and he said to me, you know, whether we're talking about Henry Kissinger, or, you know, the most powerful bankers, or oil men, or industrialists, or whoever, really everybody just wants attention, man.
Just like you.
Just like everything else.
And you know what?
If I could be seen at the party drinking a drink with Andrew Coburn, then maybe somebody who's even higher up, you know, more powerful, David Sanger, or some really influential journalists like that might take notice of me.
And then I can move up in journalistic circles.
And that's how everybody thinks.
And so you don't even need any secret societies or anything like that, especially when you're in these permanent bureaucracies that can never be fired.
Everybody just sucks up and kicks down.
Simple as that.
Yeah, I guess, you know, we can find, yeah, that is true.
I mean, you know, let's accept, I don't know, Gandhi.
Come on, there's got to be, there are some exceptions, hey, you know, but I'd say it's a pretty fair rule, most of the time, most of the time.
Yeah.
But so when they're talking about, oh, Rwanda, or where, I mean, there is no real interest there, other than it would have made me feel good if I could have stopped the massacre.
I mean, that's kind of fair enough, right?
Well, yeah, stopping massacres is obviously good, but the trouble is, you know, look what happens then.
I mean, the next big effort of initiative of Ms. Rice and Ms. Samantha Power, who was to, you know, to basically lead the charge on intervening in Libya, you know, stop the massacre in Libya.
There's going to be a massacre in Libya.
So the next thing we know, we're at war, and, you know, we're into bombing Libya, and sure enough, down goes Gaddafi, you know, he gets lynched, and what do we have now?
We have the place reduced to bloody anarchy, and, you know, I'm not one for dictatorships, but they really should have thought what might happen, you know, and now we have, you know, including now they're in a bunch of trouble, because the people we'd been helping and encouraging and arming turn around and, you know, lynched our ambassador, effectively.
Well, what's funny is everybody already knows that, right?
The road to hell and good intentions and everything?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, but it looks like people in power tend to forget that every so often, or actually most of the time.
Well, there's a whole crowd of them who do anyway.
Yeah, and then they were all, I mean, I say, you know, well, maybe you want to go into that, but I mean, you know, they were about to do the same thing in Syria, you know, absolutely up to the ears in good intentions.
In fact, hold that thought for a second, because you've got a great point about that in your article, but I want to go back to Libya for a second, because I was just remembering that it's actually Michael Hastings' piece on Libya and the decision to go to war in Libya in Rolling Stone, where he talks about how Samantha Power had been, because of her rivalry with Hillary Clinton, the first secretary of state, or in the first term there, she had been relegated to the deputy assistant secretary and nothing on the National Security Council, doing what she called do-gooder rinky-dink stuff, like teaching lousy Iraqis about democracy and stupid crap like that, and she wanted some attention.
She wanted a promotion.
She wanted people to say her name instead of always just talking about Hillary Clinton all the time, whatever, and this was her chance, was if she could get a war versus Libya, then now it ought to be easy enough to win, and she could attach her name to that, and then everyone would think she was great, and maybe pretty, or whatever.
Yeah, he was right.
Well, Hastings, you know, he was a really, he was a great journalist.
I mean, what a terrific loss, but yeah, it was Power, and it was Rice, you know, actually more important than Power was, I mean, you know, it was Susan Rice, who, he was jockeying, you know, the thing was, you know, Obama, you know, likes her so much, and, you know, the crucial thing that happened with Libya was that you had this, you know, Rice and Power saying, let's, you know, let's do Libya, and on the other side, initially, was Gates, the military, and Gates, you know, who, you know, weren't too interested, and Clinton, who didn't think it was, might not be such a good idea, and then Clinton changed sides.
She, I don't know why, I mean, she, maybe she figured that Rice had gotten to the president, so she better get out ahead, so there was, you know, a crucial meeting in, sometime in March 2011, when Clinton's on the line from Paris on a video, you know, video conference, and the whole national meeting of the White House, national security conference, and suddenly, Clinton, to everyone's surprise, comes out for war, and sort of suddenly aligns herself with Rice, so, you know, the Gates and the military are done down, and off we go.
Yeah, and then, of course, yeah, it literally led to the war in Syria.
I mean, it was going to happen anyway, one way or the other, I guess, but there's all kinds of Libyan fighters and guns immediately broke off and went to go join the jihad in Syria, which, as you point out in your article, which I hate to spoil the end and everything for everybody, but the American people stopped the war, because it was in the individual interests of a bunch of different politicians to do what the American people said, dammit, this time, and the American people happened to be right on something for once, which was really great.
Right, you know, in a way, I contradict myself, because I'd say it turns out the American people have a foreign policy, which is, let's not get involved anymore with these stupid drive-by shootings, and they made it, you know, they made that stick.
It was a great, great moment.
Yeah, it really was.
I keep trying to remind myself, hey, remember when that happened a few weeks back?
That was really something else.
And again, it's only us powerless people who imagine there's such a thing as a foreign policy to have one.
If we had any power at all, we would be off doing favors for our cronies, basically.
That's the name of it.
Exactly.
I don't know.
And then we'd all have, you know, oil companies and stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Or we'd...
Or ribbons for our jackets.
I want one.
I want one.
Yeah.
All the little ponies at Animal Farm love to have a little ribbon in their hair.
Oh, that's so true.
That's so true.
Yeah, so it's, um, yeah, that was a, you know, that was a great moment.
We should, we should, we should almost have an anniversary celebration, you know, next year.
Hey, that's a good idea.
That's a real good idea.
All right.
Music's playing.
We got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Adrian.
Always a pleasure.
Great stuff.
All right.
That's Andrew Coburn at Harper's Magazine.
And again, the piece is Secretary of Nothing, John Kerry and the Myth of Foreign Policy.
We'll be right back.
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