10/14/09 – Charles Pena – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest on the show is Chuck Pena.
He's a fellow at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
And he's a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.
Well, imagine that.
A former senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, an advisor to the Straus Military Reform Project, and an analyst for MSNBC television.
He's a co-author of Exiting Iraq, Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against Al Qaeda, and author of Winning the Unwar, a New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.
He regularly writes for us at Antiwar.com.
The archive, of course, is Antiwar.com slash Pena.
And welcome to the show, Chuck.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for that very kind introduction.
Oh, sure thing.
I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
Now, I have a confession to make, which is that I'm so jaded about the FBI failing to stop real terrorists in this country, like, say, from 1989 through 2001, and then trumping up all these bogus terrorism cases since then.
I can barely stand to do the research, and it's proven here.
I don't know anything about this case, this Denver, Colorado, and Queens, and all this Al Qaeda and whatever that supposedly is going on here.
Can you, before we get into, and I know this is a bit beyond what you wrote about in your article, but before we get too far into the point of your story here, can you give us sort of the background, what I've been missing, and tell the audience what this case is about, what the accusations are so far, whatever level of court proceeding it's at so far, if you know, that kind of thing?
Well, Scott, I don't know that you've been missing anything, because you have as much access to the news as I do.
I certainly don't have any inside track on what's happening, but if we are to believe what we're being told, we have a legal Afghan immigrant who is being accused of plotting terrorism here in the United States, and having, more importantly than that, having actually gone to Pakistan and trained with Al Qaeda there in Pakistan to learn the craft of bomb-making, and using readily available materials, or relatively easy-to-get materials that aren't banned hazardous materials here in the United States, to put together bombs and then, who knows what, do who knows what with them.
That's essentially the accusation, and if this is real, and as you've pointed out, there have been a whole lot of other cases since 9-11 of would-be terrorists here in the United States, and some of those folks, some of those people have been found guilty of various charges, usually lesser charges, as opposed to the most serious charge of either committing an act of terrorism or actually plotting an act of terrorism.
Many of them have been amateurish in terms of the actual plot.
The one that comes to mind most immediately to me is the Fort Dix 6.
You had six guys who were plotting to attack Fort Dix, a military installation, and not just any military installation, an actual training installation, so that the soldiers there are probably more prepared and have more ready access to firearms than at other military installations.
And you have six guys who plan to attack a fairly heavily armed military installation that strikes you as they're not terribly bright in terms of the kind of target they would pick.
But this new case, again, if it turns out to be the real thing, does represent the real problem that the United States is going to potentially face with any potential future terrorism.
And we're not talking about a foreigner flying here or sneaking into the United States to commit an act of terrorism, which was essentially what happened on 9-11.
We had a lot of people who came in, and some who came and went several times into the United States.
And this is a case of almost completely homegrown terrorism, not entirely, not like in the British case with their subway bombings, where all the perpetrators there were actually British nationals born in the UK.
In this case, we have someone who has legally immigrated from Afghanistan.
You would think that if some real serious foreign terrorists are plotting to blow up some things in America, that their first order of business is to try to get somebody to recruit somebody who can get into the country, rather than some sneak attack with a submarine or something that they don't have.
Well, I think the one benefit, if you will, of the obsession with security in the post-9-11 world here is that it is now much more difficult for someone who isn't already here in the United States to try and get into the United States and conduct an act of terrorism, particularly a large-scale act of terrorism, not necessarily on the scale of 9-11, but to do something like the Madrid bombings, which were on trains and rail lines, similarly the UK tube and bus bombings, smaller scale than 9-11 by a factor of 10 or 100 at least in terms of the number of people who were killed or injured, but still at least psychologically devastating enough in terms of the resulting carnage.
The larger concern now is that people already here might become radicalized enough that they might take up the terrorist cause, and that's a much more difficult problem to tackle because the set of solutions that you have to deal with it, one, you don't have that many, and two, a lot of them aren't particularly good ones, particularly if you're interested in living in a free society.
It would be different if we lived in a dictatorship or the former Soviet Union.
You have absolute authority and you can deal with things the way you like and you don't care about what happens to the rest of the population, but that's not the America, at least hopefully, that we live in or that I hope anybody wants to live in.
Well, you hit on something very important there when you talk about the motivation of people to do this.
It really doesn't matter where they are because people are individuals, and we've seen actually in recent months, and I guess maybe over the last year or so, Somali-American immigrants and even American-born children of immigrants apparently, or at least according to the state, have gone to Somalia to fight against the American-backed side as some kind of holy war or something.
Well, I mean, if you want to deal with terrorism, you can try and play what I call defense, which is trying to stop the terrorism from occurring, even though you assume that there are a certain number of people out there who may be plotting or conspiring against you.
But defense is ultimately a losing proposition in the sense that you can never build a perfect defense against terrorism.
I mean, all you have to do is go ask the Israelis how hard it is to play defense against terrorists in Israel.
You may get lucky and stop a lot of attacks, but eventually if there are enough people who want to do it and they are willing to try enough times, and particularly if they're willing to die in the process of trying, eventually somebody will be successful in conducting an act of terrorism if they're determined enough.
So if you really want to deal with the problem, and I'm not saying you abandon playing defense and putting up reasonable and cost-effective and sensible security measures, but you have to start dealing with root causes of terrorism.
Why is it that anyone, whether they're someone who lives halfway around the world or someone who lives here, whether they were born here or legally came to the United States, why would they want to engage in the act of terrorism to begin with?
What is their motivation?
As a country, as a government, I don't think that we have really seriously addressed that issue, because part of addressing that issue requires taking a look in the mirror and being able to ask ourselves, what is it that our government does and the policies of our government that might contribute to the motivation of people wanting to become terrorists?
The hardest thing in the world to do is to be brutally honest and admit that we're a good country, but that doesn't mean that everything that our government and our policymakers choose to do is good, just because we're a good country.
Chuck, I think that one advantage that we have there is that the only other example or the only other excuse or reason, I guess, that the government can come up with to explain why anyone would want to attack us in America is just so transparently childish and ridiculous, that they hate us simply for how good we are.
Now, I could see how people would buy into that right after the massive trauma of the attack and that kind of thing, but that rings pretty hollow, and I think we saw in Ron Paul's campaign in those debates when he said, no, they attack us because we've been bombing them for a decade leading up to this, you understand?
People immediately said, see, that's what I'm saying.
Finally, somebody said it out loud up there on the political level like that.
People really can understand that if we can just explain it right, I think.
And again, I'm not trying to justify anything.
I'm just saying there's a cause and effect.
When you bomb people, they want you to feel what that's like sometimes.
You've just hit, I think, the part that makes it difficult.
That's not a justification for saying that, oh, so if we get attacked by terrorists, we deserved it or we brought it upon ourselves.
I mean, nothing could be further from the truth in terms of we don't deserve to be attacked, but we have to separate the emotionalism of that with the reality of cause and effect.
If we do certain things like bomb other countries, and even if our intention is to hit military targets, but we kill civilians in the process of doing that, no matter how hard we try not to, and I know the military does try extremely hard not to, but it's impossible to conduct a military operation without some sort of collateral damage, there are consequences to that.
And even if we're not talking about bombing anybody, there are consequences to having our military stationed in other countries.
And we need to understand that and then ask ourselves, do we need to be there?
I mean, the good example is U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia prior to 9-11.
Of course they were there so they could bomb Iraq from there.
They were also there supposedly to provide a certain amount of security for the Saudi government.
Did we really need to be there?
Because if we weren't there, would Osama bin Laden have been able to point to the United States as this foreign enemy in the Holy Land as a way to motivate a small number of people, but enough to become terrorists against the United States?
It's not that we have to do what bin Laden or anybody else says, because that's the immediate reaction of a lot of people.
You're saying that bin Laden says get out of Saudi Arabia or whatever, that we should do it.
And the answer is no, we shouldn't do it because bin Laden or anybody else says we should.
We should do it because we need to do a rational analysis of whether or not it's in our best interest to be there or not.
And if it is, then we should do it whether bin Laden said to do it or not.
In fact, Bush and Cheney even recognized that and closed down most of the bases.
I guess they kept a little bit there, but they moved pretty much everything to Qatar and Bahrain and so forth out of Saudi Arabia implicitly recognizing that.
Of course they blustered and invaded Iraq the whole time that they were doing it.
It doesn't do too much good to move out of one.
If the accusation is that the Americans are occupying Muslim countries and there's no real reason, no true security reason for us to be doing that, it sort of doesn't matter whether you move them out of one country and put them into another.
It certainly doesn't help when you choose to invade yet another Muslim country.
We have to look at that.
I'll be the first to say it's not a panacea.
If we could magically wave a wand and have U.S. troops out of Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, that's not to say that there are still going to be people who might want to come after us.
And it's certainly not going to change.
Especially not after the last eight years.
And it's not going to change the minds of those people who have already decided that we're the enemy and that they want to come after us.
But it will make a huge difference in the ability to further recruit new terrorists to the cause.
When I say we, I mean our government, our policy makers, have to come to grips with that.
And quite honestly, for all the change that the Obama campaign talked about, when it comes to this issue of foreign policy, it's different stylistically.
Certainly President Obama seems to be much more well-liked and well-received throughout the world, including the Muslim world.
But when you get right down to it, his policies are largely the same types of policies that the Bush administration had.
Just done slightly differently and maybe done in a way that is more palatable to a larger portion of populations around the world.
But still very much, I think, going to result in the same ire amongst the people that are the ones feeling that they're occupied.
Well, you know, in the larger sense, it's always seemed to me that the Bush administration really just got the entire 21st century off on the wrong foot.
With the way that they responded to September 11th.
And the whole world was ready to basically forgive and forget past sins and be friends on September 12th.
He shoved it in their face, and he started what could turn out, I think, if we were talking 100 years from now, we might be looking back at the beginning of what I think is a quite unnecessary real clash of civilizations between the West and the Muslim world.
So when I say, yeah, especially over the last eight years, I'm not just picking on Bush for picking on him's sake.
I'm saying that I think you're right.
If we waved our magic wand and we brought all our troops home, or anything short of that, we could be looking at what's happened over the past decade or so, couldn't we, Chuck, as sort of a Woodrow Wilson watershed event that leads to major consequences flowing from here for our relationship with the Muslim world from here on out?
I mean, we're talking about a sixth of the people of the world here.
And to be fair, I mean, President Bush, and as you know, as almost everybody who knows me knows, I was very critical of the Bush administration and their policies.
But let's not kid ourselves.
I mean, the foreign policy that has been driving this problem is not a product of just the Bush administration.
No, sir, I just mean that they shoved it into sixth gear.
Right.
This is something that has been going on for decades.
The 9-11 became a springboard that magnified everything.
And I think the biggest mistake that we made after 9-11 was believing that that was a world-ending event, that if we didn't respond forcefully and with great vigor, that we were looking at the end of civilization as we knew it.
And we blew the threat completely out of proportion, as though it was this existential threat to the survival of our country.
And the Obama administration, to a certain degree, hasn't changed any of that rhetoric about Al-Qaeda, that somehow this is still this dire threat to our very survival.
And look, we're talking about just a very small portion of the Muslim population are radicalized enough to become terrorists.
And these people don't have the capability to destroy our country as a country.
It's not like the former Soviet Union that could have flattened us with nuclear weapons.
I mean, Al-Qaeda or anybody else interested in becoming a terrorist against the United States, they don't have that.
They can kill people, and that's not to minimize the fact that the taking of innocent life is somehow unimportant.
But we have to put some perspective on it.
I mean, even 9-11, as terrible as that was, is not the same thing as having nuclear weapons raining down on you and turning the country into dust and ashes.
And yet we somehow let ourselves believe that that was the case.
And so the question is, is it possible to change the dynamic here?
Is it possible to change course, change the terms of reference for how we deal with this particular threat to the United States?
In some cases, the Obama administration, I think, has done a little bit of that.
And in other instances, I think they've gone down much the same path as the Bush administration.
And so in many ways, we're still stuck on the same treadmill that we've been on, not just during the Bush administration, which maybe accelerated the treadmill, but one that we've been on for decades.
Well, I almost think as much hope as the guy inspires in people around the world.
I don't know if you saw the recent poll that said America's most popular country in the world again.
But that hope and change thing really works, man, apparently.
But the thing is, they're setting themselves up to be really disappointed.
And I think anybody could expect from Bush the way he acted, but this guy Obama is supposed to know better.
He's supposed to think a lot more like you when it comes to these kinds of things.
And these people are going to be really bummed out to find out what he has in store for them.
Well, I think at least in the near term, what everybody needs to be watching here is what the administration decides on Afghanistan.
Do we throw even more tens of thousands of troops into the country, which is what General McChrystal has requested?
Numbers as high as 40,000 have been reported.
Or do we begin to scale back and engage in a more limited mission in Afghanistan, and especially one that doesn't include nation building and trying to turn Afghanistan into a democracy?
And we're going to know here in, if not days, weeks, what the administration is going to do in Afghanistan.
And I think that will say a lot in terms of our foreign policy.
And it's going to speak volumes, I think, to the Muslim world, what we choose to do.
Well, I think for those who are really paying attention, they can tell that his Iran policy hasn't really changed at all in terms of accusing Iran of making nuclear weapons that we all know that they're not even making as an excuse for regime change there and an excuse for new sanctions, for now at least, and quite severe ones.
Well, you're right.
Iran is a great example of how what the Obama administration is doing isn't really that different than what the Bush administration was doing.
They're just being more diplomatic.
They are trying to extend some diplomatic overtures and hoping that diplomacy might help resolve this situation.
But at the end of the day, what the Obama administration wants is the same thing the Bush administration wanted.
The Bush administration just was willing to be more forceful about it, less willing to rely on diplomacy, probably more willing to use the military option, particularly earlier rather than later.
Thankfully, they chose not to exercise the military option.
But it's certainly still on the table with the Obama administration and might actually become more of a reality depending on how things unfold.
I want to get back to where we started this conversation on the threat of terrorism inside the United States.
Basically, the way it works is this is the FBI's job, right?
They're the ones.
And so even if they completely blow it over and over again, you cited the New Jersey case, and I guess we could just really quickly, the Virginia paintball guys, the Detroit Five, the kid in Lodi, California, the Miami Seven, there have been some extremely questionable prosecutions here.
Those are really only the high-profile ones.
I think probably hundreds of people have been intimidated into doing plea deals for lesser charges, as you, I think, kind of implied there in one of your early answers in the interview.
And I wonder, you know, the whole story of the boy who cried wolf is that eventually there was a real wolf.
And it seems like the next time there's a red alert in this country, things are going to really change.
It's going to be really bad.
And these are the only guys that we have to count on.
And here we have a guy who, you know, part of the back of my head is saying, hey, you know, if they say that this guy went to Pakistan, met with Al-Qaeda guys, came here and really was going to do all this stuff, maybe there's something to that.
But then again, maybe he was completely set up by an informant getting paid and staying out of jail himself and whatever, like the rest of these cases.
Don't you think we're in a real tough spot here with the FBI that has done nothing but fail for a generation since Omar Abdel-Rahman arrived on these shores?
Well, you know, in this particular case, we're going to have to wait and see what happens.
And if it turns out that it was the real deal, you know, I think we have to give due credit where credit is due to the FBI as well as other law enforcement agencies here and maybe even overseas that were involved in this case.
But, you know, this case has to wind its way through the court system and we have to see what happens.
And I think it's probably healthy to have at least some skepticism about this.
I'll have to tell you that at least of all the cases that I've followed, and I haven't followed all of them by any stretch of the imagination, this one, you know, it seems to have more credence to it than many of the others.
I'm not saying that for sure this is a slam dunk that the FBI got somebody who really is a real threat to the United States, but based on the reporting, and again, I only have as much access as you and all your listeners have to this, that there's more here than in many of the past cases.
Well, and for the sake of argument, I mean, if we assume that that's true, just for the sake of argument, that this is the real one, and this really highlights the problem I'm getting at, doesn't it, that we're in no position to believe them when they tell us that they actually did protect us from a real threat, you know?
Well, I mean, you're right.
Part of it is, well, okay, even if this is the real one, a lot of, you know, many people will say, yeah, well, but the other ones weren't quite so real, so how do we know for sure when you say that the next one is real?
How do we know whether to believe you or not?
And that is part of the problem in post-9-11 with a lot of this, is that I think there was a lot of pressure put on all of these agencies to show some success, and, you know, politicians, of course, always love to trot out, you know, see, we're doing something, we're catching terrorists, we're keeping you safe.
And so, you know, I think that's really what's happened with a lot of these prior cases, is that, you know, a lot of pressure to show some success, otherwise you're not relevant, you're not doing your job.
But that could come back, you know, to bite them in that, well, people may not really believe you.
Not only that, I mean, and even whether people believe or don't believe, I think, you know, the larger problem and the larger issue is that we can't always be successful, right?
Hopefully we'll get lucky a lot, but you can't get lucky all the time.
And so if this is how we're going to deal with terrorism, even if the FBI was, you know, if all of these other ones were real too, eventually there's going to be somebody they don't catch, because we're talking about, you know, something that's relatively easy to do.
I mean, 9-11 is a difficult undertaking, a difficult plot, but if a guy just wants to, you know, make some homemade bombs and blow them up somewhere, that's much easier to do, and if there are enough people who decide that that's what they want to do.
There aren't enough FBI, as well as other law enforcement people, you know, in this country, to go find all of them and do something about it.
And if that's all they focus on, if that, you know, and if your local police department is out looking for guys, you know, trying to make bombs, it means they're not doing something else.
Right.
So, you know, this is, that's the problem.
And then the question is how we react the next time.
I mean, I think probably everybody with the kind of adult, realistic point of view that you're taking about all this realized on September 12th that, hey, man, if it comes down to it, somebody can hijack a fuel truck, somebody can get an automatic weapon and go to a mall, somebody can wage an attack, somebody could go to and kill all the people waiting in line to go through security at the airport.
I mean, you know, for crying out loud, there's only so much you can do.
The real question then is what does a sober, reasonable adult say and do?
And how do they act if somebody is successful in doing something like that in this country?
Are we going to let a red alert turn into, you know, all of a sudden Homeland Security gets brand new powers over our state police or, you know, any number of imaginary consequences we could come up with?
Or are we going to be adults about this and realize that, you know, we have to keep our Bill of Rights and go about our business anyway, even if bad stuff happens?
You know, I'm with you on this one, Scott.
The problem is that, you know, when bad stuff happens, it's amazing how, you know, people get emotionally in their willingness to give up things that at one point in time they felt were important to them if they believe that, well, I could die tomorrow.
It's a perfectly human reaction.
I get it.
I understand it.
But we ought not to be making our decisions.
And we certainly, our policy makers, our decision makers in Washington, in state capitals, and, you know, and in localities ought not to be making decisions based on that emotionality.
They need to make decisions, you know, hard decisions based on, you know, just reality.
If people want to, you know, become terrorists, we're not going to be able to stop every possible terrorist attack.
And just because, and if one, God forbid, happens, it doesn't mean it's the end of the world.
I mean, that's how people would react to it.
But it's not.
When you're a public official, particularly an elected public official, you know, I mean, you tell me what elected public official other than possibly Ron Paul is going to get up in front of people and say, well, you know, we're going to do some things, but we're not going to do all these other things.
And that means some people might die if, you know, terrorists attack the United States.
You know what's funny, Chuck?
I'm glad that you mentioned that.
Because I actually have a dream that I go back in time and somehow convince the people that Harry Brown would have won the presidential election in 2000.
Because I can measure all of what's happened since then compared to what I know Harry would have done.
In fact, I asked Harry what he would have done.
And I know that he would have given the whole world a lecture about liberty and the rule of law and how we're real sorry for the bad stuff, but we meant no harm, and we're going to do the limited amount of retaliation, the minimal possible, and we're going to be best friends with everybody from now on as best of our ability.
And, you know, he would have taught you how Harry Brown was with the Statue of Liberty speech and all that stuff.
And I can see what the alternative could have been this whole time.
It's not that far out of my grasp at all.
I know how it would have been.
I know how it could have been.
I mean, the same thing if you go and say, okay, put Ron Paul in that position if he'd been the president on 9-11.
He would have said, everybody be cool, not everybody be afraid and do what I say.
You know, and Ron had a real following in the campaign, and the question is can people who believe in what Ron Paul was talking about on the campaign trail, is there enough momentum to carry that forward and not let it fizzle out?
Because neither of the two big parties are going to go there.
I mean, it's not in their interest to talk about the things that Ron Paul was talking about.
And the question is, you know, will enough people eventually get fed up with, you know, the two big party machines who, they may hate each other, but the one thing that they hate more is the idea of a third party cutting into their power base.
You know, and that's one of the, sometimes I wonder whether, you know, what it would be like in the United States if we had a parliamentary system of government, which inevitably is multi-party rather than dominated by two parties, because then I think, you know, someone like a Ron Paul would be able to have a bigger voice and a bigger political following.
Well, you know, just getting that message out where people can, you know, understand that crisis and Leviathan mechanism and be wary for next time that it doesn't work on them, you know, it's one thing to be scared.
It's something else to turn scared into carte blanche for executive power.
You don't have to go that way if you know better, you know, if you've learned better first.
But, you know, we're seeing it here in a different fashion with the Obama administration.
You know, in this case, it's health care.
I mean, health care has now become a reason to, you know, give the executive and the government, you know, more power in an area where people are, quote, scared because they either don't have health insurance or don't think they have the, you know.
Or just got laid off.
Right.
And so, you know, it's not just a, it's a phenomenon that politicians, you know, use on all number of issues to, you know, you make people scared that if you don't let the government do something, then something bad is going to happen.
I mean, it's a pretty simple equation.
Seems to and unfortunately seems to work pretty well in Washington anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I guess we'll continue calling the score as best we can and trying to show people that, you know, it's really not that hard, is it, to quit seeing things that way and be more realistic instead, is it?
I mean, it's being more realistic, right?
And I think most people, you know, especially if you get outside of Washington, that, you know, most people at least would be more open and willing to acknowledge that.
Whether they would agree on, you know, what the right thing to do is, you know, you know, we'd have to see how that goes.
But I think, you know, I think you can get people to agree.
Sometimes, you know, the things that we do in the world, you know, have an effect and a consequence, and that one of those consequences might be that people decide that they hate us enough, you know, to become terrorists, that there's not just this intrinsic hate out there in the world.
But then you get to the tough part of, well, okay, you know, what would you do?
And I still think you'll get a divide between, you know, people who say, well, then, you know, maybe we need to be less interventionist.
Maybe what we ought to do is meddle less in other people's business if we don't need to.
And yet other people would say, yeah, but we've still got to do something about it.
You know, we've got to go get those people that do, you know, the guy who's willing to become a terrorist.
And if that means doing something that creates more of them, well, you know, we just can't do nothing.
And that's part of the problem.
You know, it's both human nature and I think American nature.
The idea that maybe not doing something is really the best course of action runs counter to most human nature and I think to the American can-do spirit.
And that's why I think it's a difficult sell, if you will, to say that, well, maybe we should do nothing here.
People don't want to hear that.
They want to hear what we're going to do.
Well, it's sort of like even if just pretend Clinton had really wanted to just make a deal with Saddam Hussein and normalize relations during his time, he couldn't because they'd already told, the Republicans had already told the American people that this guy was Hitler.
And there was no dealing with him because it's kind of off the table.
And I think the same thing has happened here where Osama bin Laden has turned into Khrushchev, who is in charge of this massive Islamic caliphate Soviet conquering the world, turning it all green like an old John Birch map of the world turning red or something.
When in reality, there were only a few hundred of these guys on September 10th.
And the U.S. Air Force and the CIA blasted the two-thirds of them, I guess, to death in 2001.
And then a few dozen of them escaped and have been in exile in the Hindu Kush mountains ever since.
And there is no threat from Osama bin Laden other than him putting out podcast videos and audio tapes saying, see, we were right, go and inspire yourselves and organize yourselves and attack America.
And now, how are we supposed to, you know, we didn't invade Germany where the Hamburg cell was or Spain where Mohammed Atta met with Ramzi bin al-Shib for money transfers and whatever.
We didn't invade South Florida where they took flight school.
You know what I mean?
At some point, there is no choice but to say like, I mean, you can work with Interpol or whatever and arrest people who are actually conspiring against us.
But the military response here seems like it's way past time for this to be over.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we had our chance, you know, in the immediate aftermath of September 11th to try and get bin Laden and the people who were ultimately responsible for the attacks against the United States.
We got some of them.
We didn't get the grand prize in terms of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zarhiri and some of the other senior leaders.
And, you know, the military is just a big stick.
And at this stage in time, it is the wrong tool for the problem that faces us, but, you know, the problem for the United States and presidents and other decision makers is that, you know, they look around and they say, oh, I got a great big military.
You know, let's go do something with it.
You know, there's an overreliance on the fact that the military, you know, is the right solution to the problem.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it is.
But it's not always the right solution.
And I would argue more times than not, it probably isn't.
Even limited use of the military isn't always the right solution, that you have to acknowledge that there are just some things that you can't do, no matter how big and powerful a country you are and no matter how well equipped and how, you know, advanced your military is, that, you know, sometimes you just can't do things.
Some problems are too difficult or just not solvable using the military.
Well, you know, it's interesting because you're basically paraphrasing Madeleine Albright there and saying that what's the good of having this giant military if you can't use it?
And if I remember right, and I'm not a master of this kind of stuff, but I'm sure you know much more about it, basically the generals after Vietnam had a strategy to make the military too big to use.
That's what they, that's the Powell Doctrine and all that stuff was basically let's not use it.
And that's not, you can't really do that when you have a giant standing army.
Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, wants to use it.
Well, I mean, you know, I do think it is one of the problems of having a large standing army that you don't, when you don't need one.
I mean, there's one thing during the Cold War you could make certain arguments for why we needed a, you know, the size of the military that we had, but certainly in the post-Cold War era, and, you know, now we're talking, you know, going on 20 years here after the Cold War.
You know, we don't, we're not faced with that kind of threat anymore where we need, you know, the kind of military that we have.
It's not that we don't need a military, but we certainly don't need, you know, the kind of large military that we have that now ultimately, you know, really plays more the role of the world's policemen than it does, you know, protecting the United States against the actual threats that exist to the United States.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your insight on the show today, Chuck.
Scott, thank you very much.
All right, everybody.
That's Chuck Pena.
The book is Winning the Unwar, a New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.
He's a senior fellow at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
And the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, the website there is realisticforeignpolicy.org.
And, of course, you can find him at antiwar.com slash Pena.