10/02/09 – David R. Henderson – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, TX, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
Happy to introduce my first guest on the show today is David R. Henderson.
He writes for us at Antiwar.com, a regular column titled The Wartime Economist and he is of course a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Associate Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School, is the author of the book The Joy of Freedom, An Economist's Odyssey, and also Making Great Decisions in Business and Life.
And if I can hit the right button here, I will welcome you, David Henderson, back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
I'm really happy to have you here.
I'm happy to be here.
Well, you know, it seems to me like you and I are almost of the same mind here as far as I can tell about this whole left-right thing and putting our priorities straight and such like that.
And I saw Murray Polner had a great article on this line on LewRockwell.com the other day.
Of course, I spend a lot of my time on this show bashing the left and bashing the right, but you always have a lot on your disposition, me, and you're trying to focus on ways that we can get the left and the right to come together to put a stop basically to our government's worst policies, its foreign empire and its violation of our civil liberties.
Is that about right?
Yeah, that's right.
And so I'm somewhat hopeful, locally at least, you know, of Think Globally, Act Locally.
So we have a demonstration planned for this afternoon.
It's the Peace Coalition of Monterey County.
It's going to be in Monterey, California at Windows in the Bay Park from five to seven Pacific time.
And I think already it's an accomplishment in the sense that one of the things I wondered about my allies, virtually everyone else in the Peace Coalition besides our group Libertarians for Peace, is left or liberal.
And I wondered, would they be willing to have a demonstration against the Afghan war?
And the good news is the answer is yes.
And so I proposed it.
They said yes.
Well, then they needed someone to organize it.
And no one volunteered.
And I thought, if no one volunteers, it's not going to happen.
So I volunteered.
This is the first such thing I've ever done.
And we'll see how I do.
Well, that's cool.
So, but you have reason to believe that the word's gotten out across Monterey and around.
Where is Monterey, anyway?
I'm new in this crazy state of yours.
Monterey is two hours south of San Francisco.
It's often referred to as the Central Coast.
Just to put another little way of putting it on the map, our longtime congressman until the early 90s was, oh, Leon Panetta.
And of course, he's now head of the CIA.
So anyway, so that's kind of where we are.
Oh, I see.
Actually, I'm looking at a map now over there by San Jose, right?
Yeah, about 75 minutes south of San Jose.
All right.
Well, so so anybody listening live to Antiwar Radio on the Internet today, if you're anywhere near sort of northern California, it starts at five o'clock p.m.
So you still got plenty of time to get there.
And it's at Windows on the Bay.
What's that?
OK.
Well, I think it's a city government park that's across from a McDonald's.
It's right on the Monterey Bay.
We need to abolish those government parks.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
And I agree with you.
I've got to say that I had to go into the police and get a permit.
And the woman I dealt with was very nice.
I went through my documents this morning, found out I had lost the permit.
So I emailed her and she's got a copy waiting there.
I actually would have been on the way over there except for this interview.
So anyway, I think that they've been working well with us right now.
So in the publicity that you've done for this and trying to get liberals and conservatives and different factions of people together, what are you telling them?
You have a pitch?
Yeah.
Something's wrong with the Afghan war.
It's time that we all stand together outside and yell about it.
Yeah.
Specifically, the line is eight years is enough.
I didn't watch a lot of TV in the 70s, 80s and so on.
But I think there was some kind of TV show called that eight is enough.
So that's kind of remember from when I was a little kid, it's that one guy, not the guy from the GLAAD commercials.
That's happy days.
But it was that other guy.
Anyway.
Yeah.
I know you're talking about.
And so the idea of eight years is enough.
I mean, you think about it.
It's double the amount of time that the U.S. was formally in the in World War Two.
Well, you know what?
What Ron Paul was saying the other day, we did.
We defeated the Germans twice in both world wars combined together in less time than we've been occupying Afghanistan.
Yeah.
Fighting the Taliban.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that's kind of that's part of the part of the what we've been pushing is that's that's the kind of the slogan for it.
Eight years is enough out of Afghanistan.
But the other thing I did was I and I'm going to do a version of this afternoon and hand it out is kind of a fact sheet about about the war, about Afghanistan, just, you know, how it has been the graveyard of empires.
And why would we think that the United States would be any better at this than the than the Russians or the British?
Well, and it's, you know, they're defining the goal so broad, it's like they want us to oppose them and end this thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, like, are we really supposed to believe that they're going to turn Afghanistan of all places, you know, the town of Bedrock from the Flintstones into the 21st century western modern Americanized, high tech, democratic, feminist state or something?
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah.
Now, I mean, the tragedy, of course, is that Afghanistan was a relatively advanced developed society in the 50s.
I mean, it really has has gone downhill.
But I agree with you that the odds that the United States government is going to turn that around, especially with with UABs and so on, are essentially zero.
Yeah.
I mean, think about it.
I mean, think about it.
Someone invaded this country and wanted to change our form of government and so on, and then, you know, found we had some people who opposed that and they were really bad people, let's say.
And the foreign government sent UAVs over and and maybe every once in a while got a bad guy, but got a bunch of good guys to, you know, I think most of us would say that's not really good.
Well, you know, it's interesting, actually, the news stories this week.
It's amazing, really, to read the New York Times and the imperious tone that they take where they just say, yeah, there's this terrible wave of anti-Americanism across Pakistan and the people, they just don't want to be our partner in our fight against terrorism.
And no one at the New York Times can imagine why that might be.
Three million refugees created just since Obama took office and forced Zardari to start a civil war in those northwestern territories, dropping Hellfire missiles on women and children all day.
What could they possibly have against that?
Yeah, I was at, you know, UNI, I think CII and the Iraq War, too, so I'll just refer to that.
Leon Panetta, before he was head of the CIA, he has this local organization that invites middle-of-the-road speakers, pretty generally uninteresting speeches.
He had two retired senators, one Democrat, one Republican, a couple of years ago.
The guy from Missouri, Dan Forth, and the guy from South Dakota, who almost became secretary of HHS.
I'm trying to remember his name.
Anyway, he had them here, and they were speaking on campus, on our campus, Naval Postgraduate School, to about two or three hundred military officers, mainly Army.
And Panetta kept not calling on me.
I had a question I wanted to raise, and he kept not calling on me.
So he said, okay, I'd like to hear from some of the military officers who have actually been to Iraq, you know, what do you see there, what do you think, et cetera.
And so these two officers got up and said, and they were generally pretty young, and they said, well, we think we can do it, we just need the American people behind us, rah, rah.
And I'm waving my arm like crazy, and finally Obama, finally Panetta, looks at me, and he just has this little bit of contempt in his face, because we know each other from other incidents.
And he says, yes, and I say, well, I'm not a military officer, I've never been in the military in my life, but I do have some thoughts on it, can I express them?
He said, yeah.
So I said, okay, I said, okay, I'd like everyone in this room to imagine that some foreign government comes over, invades our country, and that every day on the way to work, you have to go through checkpoints, and the people from this foreign military are armed, and they have their weapons pointing at you, and every once in a while, they might make a mistake and kill or hurt one of you, and I'd like to ask you what you think would be your reaction to that foreign occupying power.
And they all said, oh my God, we never considered that before in our entire lives!
Well, there was just this long kind of silence, I mean, you know, I didn't actually address it to Dan Forth, or this guy from South Dakota, he's a famous guy, I can't remember his name, but I didn't address it to them, I just kind of addressed it to the group, and people looked uncomfortable, and then this third military officer, a little older, got up, and it was his turn, and he kind of turned his head, so I was a little in his peripheral vision, and said, well, I might not have put it as bluntly as the previous person, but I do think he makes a point, and it was like he kind of went into a more nuanced version of that, which I was happy about.
And then Leon quickly ended the event, so I'm leaving the event, and this colleague from another department on campus, National Security Affairs, they have a lot of people in there who study these things, and he comes running up to me, and he says, you're wrong!
And I said, what do you mean I'm wrong?
What you said was wrong!
And I said, I asked a question, how can a question be wrong?
So anyway, but I mean, it did get them a few people thinking, and probably they then stuffed that thought.
Well, what's funny is, I mean, we all know how a question can be wrong if it's based on a false premise, but your premise was that American soldiers are occupying Iraq, so I'm not sure where the error fits.
That was hypothetical.
Hypotheticals can't be wrong, right?
Yeah, exactly.
This is the thing, too, and I don't know why it is so hard for people to wrap their heads around this, but even Jimmy Carter, who, you know, despite some of the ridiculous things he says, says some really good things when it comes to Middle Eastern policy a lot of times and so forth, but there's apparently a quote from, you know, back when I was a baby times, where he was asked, yeah, but isn't this Iranian revolution and the taking of our hostages just a consequence of overthrowing their government and installing the Shah back in 1953?
And Jimmy Carter replied that that's ancient history, which I guess means that no one in Iran ought to be able to remember 26 years ago or have a grudge about that.
And I just thought, well, you know, take 26 years ago.
If the Ayatollahs had overthrown Ronald Reagan and put an Ayatollah in charge of America and they'd ruled this country with an iron fist all this time with their brutal, soviet secret police force torturing us to death and so forth, would we have forgotten about that?
That somehow our dictator was a foreign puppet oppressing us?
Well, to make it the exact, a better analogy, it wouldn't have been that the Ayatollah was installed.
It would be that the Ayatollah, say, took Ronald Reagan out and put Walter Mondale in his place, something like that, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that would be, that would be the analogy.
And arms Mondale's death squads against us.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
So you get a heavily beefed up CIA that acts internally, you know, something like that.
I think that'd be an analogy.
And there's, it's clear cut.
We wouldn't have forgotten that.
We'd still be fighting it.
Of course.
And that's why no one will ever try to take over America too, because like the Japanese general whose name I can't remember said when he was asked, yeah, but weren't you guys going to invade and conquer the United States?
He just laughed and said, are you kidding me?
There would have been a rifle behind every blade of grass.
How is it?
How the hell could any foreign force ever, you know, even land on a single beach in this country?
They never could.
Yeah.
Um, um, oh yeah.
The thing about Jimmy Carter, I've quoted that a number of talks and what I do after I quote that line, if I say, okay, that was 26 years later.
Uh, and I say, um, okay, I'd like to ask, have any of you ever taken a course in ancient history?
And a few people raised their hand.
I said, do you remember in your, in your course talking about anything that happened 26 years ago?
Yeah.
But yeah.
Um, so, um, anyway, so back to the demonstration.
So I'm somewhat hopeful.
I mean, the number of my allies on the left are going to be there.
Um, what I want to do is, is I want to have it be somewhat informative.
So I am handing out this, this writeup that I'm, that I'm doing, uh, you know, just so people can have something to take away, something to think about and, and we'll see how it goes.
Everybody, it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with David R. Henderson.
He's the wartime economist at antiwar.com.
And we're talking about a demonstration that they're going to have today, uh, at five o'clock Pacific time at windows on the bay park in Monterey, California.
And uh, is there a place where they can go online and look all this up for them to join up there?
Uh, yes.
The peace coalition of Monterey County, their website, if you just Google peace coalition of Monterey County and find, uh, I think it's called calendar.
Uh, once you get to that site, it will show it.
Okay.
And now who else, uh, speaking at this thing?
No one speaking.
Uh, they tend not to do those.
What will they do is we have a lot of signs and, uh, we're right by a lot of the drive by traffic that's going home at night and that's kind of how they've done it in the past.
Um, you know, I, I, I've kind of gone with their tradition.
So, uh, the big way I've stepped out of the tradition is actually to have, have a handout because, um, we, they didn't even do that in the past.
Well, you know, uh, you had a, I guess it's your most recent article on antiwar.com is about, uh, an evening where you went and saw Cindy Sheehan giving a speech up there.
Right.
Yeah.
And I guess you came away from there, uh, having learned quite a few things, huh?
Well, I was very impressed with her.
Um, and what I liked right at the start, and I quoted this in the article was one of the first things she says is that if all of these wars were wrong under George Bush, they're just as wrong under Barack Obama.
And I mean, that's, that's really how, if you're going to be serious about the world, if you're really going to have your hat in the ring and think about things and not just be really a child, you have to judge actions based on action, not on the, whether the person has a damn or a rep after his name.
And so that's, I was very pleased to see her do that and say that.
And in fact, it's funny because, uh, call me, call me a masochist, but I watch a lot of Fox news at night and, uh, and, uh, and so I was either a Riley or Hannity, I think it was Hannity.
You know how they try to pump you up for the next thing that's going to come after the break.
I think it was a year or so ago, just before I saw Cindy speak.
And Hannity says, uh, you'll never believe what Cindy Sheehan is doing about Barack Obama.
Oh yeah, it was before, uh, Kate Codd, right?
So, so Cindy Sheehan was being consistent, uh, you know, in, in going to, going to Martha's Vineyard where, where Barack Obama was and protesting him there just as, just as she did for Bush.
And you'll never believe like, oh, in other words, we've actually got an adult in the crowd.
You know, right.
And of course, but that's not what he meant at all.
What he meant is obviously she's a crazy person, right?
Cause she's not, you know, that's not how it works.
Yeah.
She's a crazy person.
Cause she's not like me.
I will, I will pound on people when they're Democrats.
I will love them, uh, when they're Republicans, almost independent of what they do.
Uh, well, oh, but, but unless by the way, they're anti-war because then of course Ron Paul fits that, but he went after Ron Paul all the time.
Yeah, of course.
No, that's Sean Hannity.
It's just a big child.
I don't know how anybody watches that.
In fact, I actually watched Fox news for about a year straight in the run-up to the war in Iraq, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
I put myself through that, uh, as you say, like, go ahead and make it the worst of the worst.
But after that, I just gave up.
I just couldn't do it anymore.
But my favorite though, in fact, as long as I'm on this train of thought, I'm going to go ahead and say my favorite was Shepard Smith in, I think it was January, I guess it could have been February of 2003, breaking down crying because obviously Saddam Hussein is already in material breach of the material breach.
And George Bush said that if he's in breach of the breach, then it's time to start this war and what in the hell are we waiting for?
And Saddam could attack us at any minute, I'm sure was, you know, the biggest thing on his mind and, and the guy literally like broke down in tears, but we already, he, he already didn't produce his weapons, which means he's in material breach, which he breached the breach and he, the tears started flowing.
Why are we waiting until next month for this war to start?
Damn it.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Yeah.
Now he's the conscience of Fox News, which is hilarious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Um, well, yeah.
So, so just back to the whole idea of, of a coalition, I think the whole idea of a coalition is that you work on the things you have in common.
And so we aren't going to have any posters that have Obama's name on them.
That was like some of the people like Obama, that's fine.
We're focusing on the war.
Now, if a reporter asks me, you know, what do you think of Obama?
I will say, look, I'm speaking for myself, not for the peace coalition.
I think he sucks, you know, but, but that's not what, uh, that's not what we're, we're trying to have these things that we have in common.
Sure.
But you know, I think part of this, uh, you know, first of all, obviously it's identifying priorities, right?
Peace and the bill of rights first, everything else later.
And then, uh, but also there's a question of how do you, how do you break through different constructs of the way of looking at these things?
And so it seems to me like, you know, if you're, if you're going to tell the local reporter, Obama sucks, you have to make sure then to attack him from the left the whole time, rather than attacking him from the right, you know?
Well, attacking him from, from an anti-war position.
Yeah.
I mean, attacking him from the positions that ought to be his, if he was true to what he, you know, pretends to be, et cetera, like that.
Well, not totally.
Cause remember, he was the guy who wanted to expand the war in Afghanistan.
And so I think you can't just, you can't just attack him from, he has kept his promises as one of your friends, or I think you've interviewed Anthony Gregory has pointed out in speech, you know, so, so he has kept that promise.
Yeah, I guess I was going for the, what they believed about him, not what he actually said in the fine print.
Cause in fact, even in the fine print, he made it clear he didn't want to really get out of Iraq.
He just wanted to name tens of thousands of forces he was going to leave behind something besides combat troops so he could leave them there forever.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
So.
So the, the image that he ran on a peace platform is in fact entirely bogus.
It's just that it's valid in the sense that vast numbers of Americans believed in it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think the other thing, again, it'll depend on whether the reporters there and what they asked, but I, and this is a demonstration on Afghanistan, but I think it makes sense with everything happening in the news now to talk somewhat about Iran and how, you know, it's just seems to be this, it's, it's like, it's amazing.
It's, if you look at everything being said, it's very similar to what was said about Saddam starting around 2002.
And there was just this buildup, buildup, buildup.
Now, looking back, I can understand why people thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because now there's some evidence that he thought he did.
But when you, if you look at the big argument people are making about Iran, it seems to be that they've violated an agreement.
Well, assuming that the guy, the former Marine who, Scott Ritter, Scott Ritter, yeah, assuming he's correct and, and I, I've read it in a couple of places.
It's a pretty safe assumption, I think that, um, that the Iranians were keeping to an agreement, not that they made because their own parliament had not, had not ratified it, but this other clause was put in a few years ago and they just said, we'll be good guys and we'll stick to it.
And then they decided not to, but it wasn't the breach of an agreement.
And that's my understanding.
Right.
And they're beating them over the head with this supposed technical violation, right.
As though it means that, uh, there's been, you know, any, uh, obstruction of the IAEA's ability to continue to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material, which of course is not the case.
And ElBaradei said so on the public records in the Guardian yesterday, there's no evidence that they have a nuclear weapons program at all.
And in fact, there was an article in the New York times that had a bunch of scaremongering at the top by Broad and Sanger, but I guess the third author, uh, added in at the bottom there that the American intelligence agencies are still arguing with the Israelis and saying, no, we're still firm behind our conviction that they have not, they do not have a nuclear weapons program and your evidence is flimsy and not good enough.
And that's actually even in Broad and Sanger in the New York times, if you get down to paragraph eight or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and so, you know, it's, it's even balder in a sense to go for this one than, than to go for, for the Iraq war.
And the other thing is Iraq had been an aggressor against Iran in the eighties against Kuwait in the nineties.
Iran hasn't been an aggressor yet, but it's, uh, my, my wife is Jewish and we were sitting there watching, um, watching Fox last night and, and, and, you know, some, and they showed a montage saying, Hey, you know, got out of our country, it's our business.
And my wife says, yeah, it's their business, you know, so I kind of people with some common sense can look at this and, and see this.
And it is really striking.
My analogy back to the agreement would be that, you know, the negotiators came back from Kyoto, um, you know, with the climate, uh, the global warming agreement back in the nineties and the U S government liked it.
This was under Clinton.
And they said, Oh, this is great.
This is great.
You know, we're going to try to get it, uh, get it ratified by the Senate.
They never even tried to get a ratified by the Senate because the Senate voted 95 to zero, not to ratify any agreement that didn't include India and China.
So it was never ratified.
And so for someone to say, to come to the United States and say, you broke your word, you haven't gone along with Kyoto.
Well, no, because they didn't find you, David Henderson.
You are clearly, maybe it's because of your wartime economist mindset.
You're clearly confused.
The standards that the American empire holds other people to does not apply to us period.
And you're just silly if you think otherwise, but actually, as long as we're talking about Iran, uh, this is probably going to be my only chance to cover this in the show today.
And it's extremely important.
And I'd like to have your comment on it apparently.
And I haven't even had a chance to really go through all the material on it, but apparently Barack Obama, uh, has decided to agree already on this first day of negotiations, uh, has struck a deal with the Iranians that they will take their industrial grade, uh, uranium that they've enriched to 3.5%.
And they will send that off to Russia to be further enriched to 20%, which is may or may not qualify as highly enriched, but certainly not weapons grade.
It's got to be above 90% uranium, two 35 to be weapons grade.
But so what Obama has in effect done by working out this deal with the Iranians that the Russians are going to further enrich to 20% it's actually for medical purposes, uh, uh, is why you would use that particular grade of uranium, uh, purity, uh, he's conceded that it's okay for them to enrich uranium up to the 3.5%.
Well, this is, they keep saying that Iran has to verify the peaceful nature of their program.
Well, if the IAEA, who are the people in charge and have the jurisdiction over this have done nothing but quote, continue to verify the non diversion of nuclear materials to any military or other special purpose.
Well there you go.
And apparently, you know, whether the Ayatollahs just, you know, uh, twisted Nicholas Burns arm.
I don't know how they worked this out.
I don't know exactly what's going on behind it, but it seems to me that the empire has just made a major concession to the Iranians, which is, you know, all that, all that you've been doing this whole time is perfectly fine.
Just don't do what we've been falsely accusing you of doing, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, and actually, if that's what, I mean, it's not my, it's not my, my favorite policy would be to just stay out of it, but given that they're in it, I think that was a fairly reasonable measure of, you know, given that their governments intervene, right?
And especially the U S government intervenes, if they're going to stick their nose in people's affairs, that's a better way to do it than, than say bombing them or sanctions or all these other crazy things.
But I do fear that Obama will get attacked on the right for this, but by the neocons and so on.
And that, you know, well, I just fear that, that he, that that will happen.
And, and he's actually made within certain limited, a certain limited set of options.
He's, he's, he's made actually a fairly reasonable move.
And I do fear he'll be just attacked for that.
Well, and that brings us to a final point here for you to address, and that is the problem of the now very angry, I don't know if it's really fair to call them radical, right?
The people who were the lockstep Bush supporters, the Sean Hannity crowd who are now this, you know, hijacked former Ron Paulian tea party movement.
These are the same people who cheer when Liz Cheney goes out purely for selfish reasons, obviously her check, the last name to defend torture, because obviously, you know, she's scared that her father might go to prison for the rest of his life for being a torturer.
And they cheer.
They love it.
The conservative movement in this country, other than those who, you know, really committed to their broad principles and could name them.
Basically, most people who fall into the conservative category have abandoned even religion.
They've obviously completely abandoned federalism, the bill of rights, any fiscal discipline whatsoever, also that they can torture people.
And now these are the people in the dissent.
How do you, David Henderson, the wartime capitalist economist, get these right wingers to abandon the empire that they've invested so much of their emotions in?
Well, OK, and it's always a matter of moving on the margin.
I teach economics and the first day of class, I hand out this thing called the ten pillars of economic wisdom.
And one of them is that economics thinking is thinking on the margin, you know, thinking about things on the margin.
So you make little baby steps.
I'll tell you what I've done.
There are two posters that I've come up with.
We've made a few copies of them for the for the event tonight.
There's an event here right near where our event is going to be held.
It was an event last weekend called Cherry's Jubilee, and it's all these beautiful old cars that they make look really nice, and there are a lot of them are really valuable as a result.
And I'm walking through there looking, wondering, enjoying these cars.
And I'm thinking, you know, this is the kind of place where you'll often see people waving the flag and talking about supporting our troops.
And by the way, I support our troops, too.
I want to bring them home right away.
But they don't mean that, right?
They mean put them in harm's way.
Of course.
So they see this, I see this, and I'm thinking, just all this wealth, and then there's sometimes these pro-war people.
Not that there were, but I kind of had expected it.
And I thought, wait a minute, there's a poster.
War destroys wealth.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, there you go.
I mean, really, it does come down to selfish interests, right?
You're not going to be able to convince these people that Iraqis or Afghans or Somalis are human beings with a natural right to life.
That's only for Americans.
Well, um, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You went way further.
Can I talk?
All right, I wanted to say, I mean, you seem to be at least implying that you have to go for the selfish motivation.
It's your money being destroyed.
Not necessarily.
War destroys wealth.
It destroys wealth there.
It destroys wealth here.
It destroys wealth.
And I think that's never a way that the anti-war thing, at least in recent years, it's never a way that the anti-war thing has been pitched.
And so that's a little way.
Another way is the connection between war and taxes.
And so we do have a couple we made saying, cut taxes, end the war.
And so just try to reach out to people who think about those issues and somehow think that war is free and try to kind of say, no, no, it's not.
This is one reason that we aren't going to have a tax cut in the foreseeable future.
So forgive me for my hyperbole, but do you think you can convince conservatives that foreigners are human beings and it's not okay to kill them?
I mean, seriously, again, it's a move on the margin.
I think you can convince some of them.
Yeah, ought to be.
I saw this thing that said, quote unquote, Christian leaders.
And I noticed they were all of a certain brand of kookiness, John Hagee and Pat Robertson and these guys on the radical right saying they're the front line demanding sanctions against Iran.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like you ought to be able to anybody who believes in Christianity ought to be able to appeal to the teachings in that religion against warfare.
Right.
Right.
Right.
But I mean, again, I can't change the whole world in one day, Scott.
Yeah, you can.
Thank you, Anderson.
Well, no, you do.
You actually do a wonderful job and I really appreciate you.
I really enjoy all your columns and I appreciate you teaching wartime economics to us here on anti-war radio.
Thanks.
Can I say something about the sanctions, by the way?
Yes, please.
I've written a number of articles on sanctions over the years from the 90s on generally always critical of them.
And I came up with a good analogy in one of my articles back in the 90s.
And sure enough, it fits what I heard on probably on Fox last night in one of the stations, you know, someone saying, well, we want to yeah, yeah, it was that guy with no sense of humor.
Charles Krauthammer.
Yes.
Krauthammer was saying, we need to, you know, really put the screws to these Iranians because that way they'll revolt against their own government.
And so what I did in one of my articles back in the 90s, I think it was time about the Cuban embargo and how well that had worked out.
And I said that this friend of ours, when I was a kid next door, he was a nice kid kind of, but he had a real sadistic streak.
He was friends with my brother, same age as my older brother, and he had a cat and he came up to my brother one day with his cat and he pulled his cat's tail and the cat bit my brother's face.
And it wasn't that funny, right?
So my analogy is that that's the way that a lot of these people who favor sanctions, that's the way they think.
In the analogy, the people who live in that country, the ones that are going to harm with cutting off gasoline and so on, those are like the cat.
The cat's going to get angry and therefore bite the master that he's looking at in Iran.
Here's the problem.
As I point out in the article, people are smarter than cats.
And so when they see this foreign power cutting them off, they're going to know who to blame.
The odds that there'll be any kind of revolution don't go up, they go down.
And again, I always like try to put Americans in a situation, imagine if some other country does something like that.
Just look at September 12th, right?
Every liberal in the society was ready to support George Bush because he was our alpha male and all that.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
Really good analogy.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And the one I came up with was I wanted to try to come up with an example of a country that's freer than us.
And so the best I could do was Switzerland and one where people were kind of upset at their own president.
So the best I could do is 74 when Nixon was about to be kicked out.
And I said, imagine that somehow there's some kind of glitch in the works so Nixon doesn't get kicked out, even though a lot of people want him to, some Supreme Court justice says no or whatever.
And so imagine therefore the Swiss, and you really have to imagine because we're such a self-sufficient country, but the Swiss figure out a way to put the screws to the United States so that they cut us off from a lot of things we really value.
And then ask yourself, who are you mad at?
And 95% of people are going to say, I'm mad at the Swiss.
And in fact, if you give them a couple of weeks, they're going to say, I'm a fan of Richard Nixon.
Exactly.
And they're going to say, you know, let's, let's take care of those infidels who are imposing these sanctions on us.
And then we'll get that done and then we'll take care of Nixon.
But don't you tell us.
Don't you impose.
And it's just, it's just standard human nature.
And I just don't think they're thinking that way.
The unfortunate thing is I got to go because I'm late.
I got to interview Andy Worthington all about the torture regime and Guantanamo Bay.
Okay, great.
All right.
See you, David.
Thanks.
Okay, bye.
All right, everybody.
Anti-war radio.