02/25/14 – Ivan Eland – The Scott Horton Show

On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first-ever National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Giraldi, McGovern, Kotowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew, and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research, Middle East Policy.
That's the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship, Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest is Ivan Eland.
He is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
And he's the author of The Empire Wears No Clothes, Recarving Rushmore, and most recently, No War for Oil, U.S. Dependency and the Middle East.
Welcome back to the show.
Ivan, how are you doing?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
First of all, let's talk about this book.
When did it come out?
Well, it came out a couple of years ago.
I've actually got a new book on counterinsurgency, The Failure of Counterinsurgency, but it's a little bit newer.
Oh, great.
But the No War for Oil book is still quite relevant, and even more so with U.S. discoveries of oil here in the U.S.
The book basically says, well, we shouldn't fight a war for a resource that we can get by buying it.
And of course, it's even more so since now we can buy more of it within our own borders, but that's really kind of irrelevant.
And the counterinsurgency book goes into the history of counterinsurgency warfare and why they usually fail, and it specifically mentions other cases besides the failure in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Oh, okay, great.
Well, jeez, I want to talk about both of those subjects still before we get into the budget and also North Korea.
First of all, as far as No War for Oil, you say it's irrelevant.
I think that's probably the most important point there about what's irrelevant.
You were saying is whether we have oil resources here or not, oil's expensive enough now that it makes economic sense to get it out of the shale and the tar sands and all this stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
The principle of the book is let the free market decide.
We let it decide on many other things.
Oil is really not a strategic commodity.
It was only created, that conception was only created out of thin air by the British Navy when they went from coal to oil, and of course, they had coal in England and they needed to get their oil from somewhere else.
So that made them conscious of oil being not within their boundaries.
And of course, that idea that oil was somehow strategic has been, has migrated to other countries such as the Germans during World War II and the U.S. now.
And it really shouldn't.
Now, this new, and of course, the reason I was saying that it's even more so now that we're more irrelevant now that we're producing more was because of the canard that we need to be independent of foreign oil is really nonsense because if you want to do that, you're going to have to pay a lot more for oil and other forms of energy.
If you want to be oil independent, energy independent, whatever, what they don't tell you is you're going to pay a lot more.
And as you point out, the reason that we have an oil boom here in the U.S. is because the price of oil is high enough that it makes these more expensive extraction methods from shale competitive in the market.
If the price of oil goes down, you will see some of that oil production in the U.S. dry up quickly.
But so, you know, really is where, as you're well aware, of course, is what made you write the book in the first place.
I'm sure to try to challenge this consensus, left, right, Republican, Democrat, either coast or Houston, Texas, or anybody else, everybody says it matters or not one way or the other.
It's important whether we are energy independent, of course, as long as we have to get oil out of the Middle East and we have to be militarily intervening over there all the time.
So let me put it this way.
You call it a canard.
What if there was not a drop of oil in Texas?
What if there was no oil in America and we really did have to get all of our oil from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, somewhere else?
Don't we need to secure that oil?
Is it still nothing but a canard, Ivan?
Yes.
I mean, we don't talk about, like, 70 to 80 percent of our semiconductors come from East Asia, but nobody talks about, you know, using military force to ensure that the supply lines for semiconductors are, you know, semiconductors go into everything, right?
So this is an idea that is ridiculous.
I mean, there are many products that we don't produce here in the United States, strategic ones, or you have to put the strategic in quotes because none of them are really strategic, but you know, things like we have other things like that are not strategic by any stretch of the imagination, like bananas, you know, do we grow any bananas in the United States?
Probably not.
And so, you know, efficient trades mean certain countries are better at either manufacturing or growing or extracting minerals better than other countries, and that's why we have international trade.
And even if we don't produce any oil here, there are many sources of oil, as you point out, Russia, the Persian Gulf, there's some in the North Sea, there's off Alaska, Northern Canada, et cetera, so there are many sources of oil, and we really don't need to use military power to safeguard stuff that the market will bring to us.
I mean, oil has gone around wars and even through wars because sometimes, like Iran-Iraq War, the two countries were trading, were swapping oil even as they were blasting away at each other.
So, you know, countries trade with each other even when they're at war, so the idea that we really need to have, you know, guaranteed supplies of oil.
The other interesting thing about it is, you know, if you go by the price as being the value of something, the platinum group metals are even more valuable than oil, and they're actually used in cracking petroleum molecules from the bigger crude oil molecules into the smaller gasoline and diesel fuel molecules.
But nobody says that, you know, we need to use military power to safeguard these.
We've had a shortage of oil tankers.
We had a shortage of refining capabilities after Katrina, but did anyone say, well, we need to be, you know, independent, completely independent of foreign refining or foreign tankers or whatever?
So, you know, the problem is your supply line is the one, is as vulnerable as the weakest link, and of course there's always another link, but the miracle of the market is that most of the people have an incentive rather than to interdict the price of, you know, the commodity of oil, the selling of oil or platinum group metals or, you know, oil tankers or whatever.
They have an incentive because they can make money to not impede those shipments, and therefore if you're willing to pay for this stuff, you can get it.
Right.
It's funny, too, that, you know, when you bring up the, well, you know, if we had to diversify where there are all these other sources to go to, I can't think of why anyone in the Middle East would want to stop selling us oil unless it was some kind of short-term revenge for us either waging war against them in the name of securing oil or debasing our currency to wage war against somebody else in the name of securing oil over there and buying their oil and depreciating dollars like what precipitated the boycott back in the 70s.
But otherwise, if we were just leaving the hell alone, they'd have every interest in doing nothing but sell us oil anyway.
Right.
Well, most of those countries over there, like from 75 to 90 percent of their foreign exchange and exports is oil, right?
And so they'd be foolish.
They have no diversity in their economies or very little diversity, and therefore they have a tremendous incentive.
They probably need to sell the oil more than we need to buy it.
The other, I think, you know, the other thing to remember is that, you know, it's expensive to keep these armies over there for something that may never happen.
That is a war that is so bad that the oil shipments can't go around it or through it, right?
And so, you know, if you take oil off the world market, the price will go up.
If you put more oil on the market, the price will go down.
So all you're going to have to do is pay more for oil.
And in fact, most of this fear is caused by the 73 oil embargo, which was actually a failure.
And the Saudi oil minister who orchestrated the embargo even admitted publicly later that it was a fraud.
So the supplies just reordered and there was a lot of fear in the markets.
But in fact, you never saw another oil embargo after that because it was such a failure for the Arabs.
Right.
All right.
Now, I want to ask you about about coin real quick before we get into the budget, which, you know, will bring us right back to the subject of the empire in the Middle East and elsewhere.
But on the matter of the counterinsurgency doctrine, it always seemed to me like the entire discussion over there at the Center for a New American Security and all that, the so-called coined in East is especially when they're talking about, you know, supposedly copying the Iraqi surge in Afghanistan and all that, that they were taking the context of who they were and who their enemies were and all that out and reducing it down to like a board game or something, whereas like McNamara's whiz kids crunching numbers and saying that, you know, according to our formula, we ought to be able to change this entire society or something without even looking at the fact of who it was that they're fighting.
The Pashtun tribes who don't lose and haven't lost in 2000 years or whatever it is.
So I just was wondering if you could explain how it is that these guys convince themselves of what we can see all in front of our eyes right now, a complete failure of a policy.
This surge and counterinsurgency doctrine as deployed in Afghanistan from 2009 through say 11 and a half.
Well, the premise of the counterinsurgency doctrine that is, you don't go blasting your way into every place and alienating the people because guerrillas, unlike conventional armies, they hide in the sea of the people, right?
And they're hidden.
Well, of course, but because of the counterinsurgency doctrine is you give candy out to kids and you give candy out to adults, essentially, you know, water projects or aid or whatever, and you want the people to love you.
But the problem with that is, and this is an example of the, illustrated by the drone policy, our drones actually kill less people than the Taliban does, civilians, yet we get more blame than the Taliban does.
Why do we get more blame?
Because we're foreigners.
Taliban live there, right?
And therefore, the people excuse brutality from locals more than they do the foreign invaders.
So when you're fighting a counterinsurgency war and you're a foreign invader, you have all the cards stacked against you except one, and that's technology.
But in counterinsurgency warfare, technology is much less useful than in a conventional war.
So you may have the most powerful military in the world, which the United States has.
It has the most powerful military of all time in world history, relatively and absolutely, and yet it's just lost to a counterinsurgency war.
We don't hear that much in the media because our media likes to rah-rah behind the team as well, but they have been lost.
And of course, Libya was not a counterinsurgency warfare, it was air war, but that's been a disaster after we toppled the dictator.
So we go in and try to mold these societies either by counterinsurgency warfare or by a quick air campaign like in Kosovo or Libya or someplace like that, and we have the same result is we have chaos, and when we try to intervene and bring our own values or our own political structures, they're not very well suited to the places that we're trying to take them.
So I think guerrilla warfare is more political than military, and we excel at military stuff but not political stuff.
All right, we've got to hold it right there and take this short break.
It's Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute and Antiwar.com and the Huffington Post, and we're talking about, well, we've been talking about the failure of COIN and war for oil, but North Korea and defense spending.
Coming up next.
Hey, all.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with Ivan Ehlen.
He's a senior fellow at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
Very very libertarian there at independent.org.
He's the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty there, and has a regular column, of course, at Antiwar.com as well.
So now there's big news.
The New York Times version, Ivan, says, Pentagon plans to shrink Army to pre-World War II levels.
I'm sure you're buying that, and then, I guess, secondarily, you must be really enthusiastic, huh?
Well, not really.
It's an improvement.
I think the Army has to be reduced.
It was pumped up, of course.
It depends on what you call reduced.
Of course, it was pumped up to 570,000 people during the ground wars, and now we're going to go back to 440,000 to 450,000.
Of course, we still have a lot of reserves and guardsmen as well, so it's not like that's the only people that we have there.
The other problem with that is that when people say it's the smallest Army before World War II, they're comparing the Army to a time when the Army hadn't been built up yet, and, of course, the Army now is much different.
It's more high-tech.
You need fewer soldiers.
I mean, in the first part of the Iraq invasion, we demonstrated that less soldiers supporting air power could, of course, take out probably any Army on the planet.
So we can reduce the Army, and we can probably reduce it even further than it's being reduced here.
So I wouldn't say that this is too drastic.
I would say that we probably ought to consider doing even more than they're doing and that they're kind of not facing up to the real issues and the real cuts that need to be made.
Yeah, but I think you're forgetting that Barack Obama is a secret Kenyan commie Nazi selling this country out.
And, you know, like Dick Cheney came out and said that, you know, oh, yeah, sure, you got plenty of money for food stamps, but no money for defending this country.
What about that?
Well, of course, our military really doesn't defend the country as it proved on 9-11 when it sent fighter jets out into the ocean.
You know, our military isn't configured to defend the country at all.
In fact, our military is an offensive power projection force.
And, of course, George Bush probably came close to the truth when he said after 9-11, the best offense is a good defense.
Or did he say, no, the best defense is a good offense?
Sorry.
And so, of course, that's how we feel is that anything we call a defense, but it's really it should be called the Department of Offense or the Department of Defense of other countries, because we spend a lot of money defending South Korea, Japan, and still Europe, even though there's not much of a threat there anymore.
So and, of course, many other countries around the world, Taiwan, and now we're getting more heavily involved in Africa.
So we project our forces around, but very little of this has to do with defending the country.
And you could actually make the argument that the Iraq War and the Afghan War dredged up more terrorism, which, of course, the terrorism was caused in the first place by people not liking our foreign interventions overseas.
So whether the military is actually defending the country, I think is no, you'll find almost nobody saying that.
But I think you really are really a dispassionate analyst would say, well, let's examine this.
The more we intervene overseas, the more our citizens are at risk of terrorism, both at home and abroad.
So I think we could probably reduce the military, use it for only in rare cases when we actually had to defend the country.
And we would all be safer than having a big military that's globe girdling and intervention of superpower.
Well, now, when they were having all those debates about the sequester and whether the automatic cuts were going to kick in at the Pentagon and that kind of thing, and they really are, I guess, just talking about curbing the rate of growth and all that, what counts for a cut in D.C.?
But, of course, all the generals were squawking, and I can't remember who it was.
It seems like it must have been an article, but someone had compiled a YouTube like this too or something.
I'm trying to remember my source here, but there was a great kind of compilation of quotes of these military men warning specifically the Congress in testimony before the House and the Senate that, hey, listen, if you do these cuts, I am not going to be able to go and wage a war on the far end of the planet at a moment's notice or anything like that.
So you guys got to know that that's what you're sacrificing.
If these cuts go into effect, and it was one of those things where, I mean, it's kind of the wrong figure of speech, but I don't know a better one about out of the mouths of babes or whatever, where these guys don't realize how this might sound to an ear biased against them in any way.
And they're just being completely honest about it, that, hey, conflicts at the outer reaches of the empire, you know, fires break out, I may not be available to go put them out for you, Senator.
Are you sure that's what you want?
And the question of defending America never even came up at all.
And no one was even embarrassed.
That's what I mean about out of the mouths of babes.
It was like a naive discussion, because no one even was recognizing that, wow, we really are a bunch of imperialists, aren't we?
Well, of course, if we really wanted to defend the country and spend as little money as possible, we'd probably have a Coast Guard and some nuclear weapons and call it a day, right?
That no one's going to attack us if we have a nuclear arsenal that can, you know, do that, but, you know, to incinerate their country.
Now, that may not be the way you want to go.
Maybe you don't want nuclear weapons.
Maybe you want a more capable, but still very much smaller conventional force.
But still, my point is that the amount of forces that you would need to actually defend the country is much smaller.
And of course, this always gets lost.
Our security is taken to be so wide.
They don't say strictly defense.
What they'll say is, well, our national interests, we can't defend our national interests or we can't, our security, national security is in peril if we make these cuts.
And of course, they don't say, well, we can't defend the nation with this, because, of course, everybody knows that they really probably could defend the nation quite easily with the, even with the cuts.
So, but this idea that we have to have this defense perimeter clear out, you know, defending, as Frederick the Great said, who was a famous military, Prussian military general, he said, to defend everything is to defend nothing.
And of course, that's what the U.S. has been doing since 1945, is defending everything in the world.
And of course, on 9-11, we saw that that didn't work out too well, especially when terrorism, terrorists can get behind your defenses.
In fact, with, if you're battling terrorism, George Bush's slogan that the best defense is a good offense, which may be good in a tactical battlefield sense sometimes, but when dealing with terrorists, that's quite the opposite of what you should be doing.
You should be doing defense and law enforcement.
All right.
Now, I want to ask you, too, about the planes, because I believe, it seems to me, best I can tell, as far as anybody paying attention to this, that other than those who are in on the scam, there's an entire consensus against the F-22 and the F-35, and that our old F-15s, F-16s, F-18s are plenty good to be the world's policemen or whatever else, to dominate the air over any other nation in the world just fine, without these new ridiculous $200 million hunks of junk.
And I was wondering if you think that there's any group anywhere that's not just, you know, immediately being paid off, you know, Lockheed lobbyists or their counterparts in the Air Force or in the Congress, whatever, who disagree?
Because it seems like everywhere I can tell, people are going, hell, an F-15 can kill you from 300 miles away.
So what is it?
What the hell would we need an F-35 for?
Well, that's the problem that they've had since the end of the Cold War, is justifying these planes.
The threat to the F-22 were Russian, Soviet planes that were never built.
So of course, but did we build the F-22?
Of course we didn't.
And are we going to build the F-35?
Yes, we are, because much of the defense budget is pork.
And what I mean by pork is it's constituency groups getting jobs and defense contracts in their district.
And defense spending is a political business.
Dwight Eisenhower is quite correct about the military-industrial complex.
And I would add Congress in there, too.
You know, these defense industries lobby the Hill.
The Hill wants to bring jobs home to the congressional districts in the states so they can get reelected.
So of course they vote for this stuff.
And defense is such a political industry that subcontractors, the big defense contractors have subcontractors, but they put them in like every state.
You don't get the subcontractor because you provide the highest quality product at the lowest prices in private business.
So I think we have to distinguish commercial business from a private sector defense business, because these companies may be private, but they're doling out subcontracts on the basis of putting them in every state rather than buying the best product, right?
So a lot of defense contracting is shoddy, it's behind schedule, and it's politically insulated from any competition.
And so it's basically a lot of the weapons that are built are not necessarily the logical ones, but the ones that have the most political power and can avoid cuts.
And then, real quickly, is the F-35 as bad of a catastrophe as I'm led to believe?
Well, it is the most expensive weapon system ever, and it was supposed to be designed as a low-cost replacement for the F-16.
But of course, like every other defense contractor, and probably even a contractor even worse, is it's over budget, behind schedule, and the performance is vastly decreased.
So I think what you're going to see is a disaster.
And even if it's not a disaster, they'll limp along, as most defense programs do, and maybe eventually put out something which doesn't work all that well and costs too much.
So I think it probably should just be canceled, because as you point out, with modern command and control systems and electronic systems, you can refurbish old planes.
The old plane's just a platform nowadays to hang weapons and stuff on.
You've got weapons on there.
You've got superior sensors.
You can take older planes, put superior sensors and weapons on them, and they'll fly just fine against other newer aircraft from other countries.
Well, when it comes to fighter jets, it's all about the training, you know, more than the actual aircraft.
Yes, that's also true.
Yes, that's one of the other things, is if we have good pilots, and our pilots are the best in the world, I would argue even better than Israeli pilots.
And therefore, we have so many advantages in air combat that we don't need to be buying any new planes.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk about North Korea, but hopefully I'll have you back on soon, and we can talk about that, because I like your North Korea policy, Ivan.
Okay.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Thanks very much for your time.
Everybody, that's the great Ivan Eland, antiwar.com, independent.org, No War for Oil and the Failure of Counterinsurgency is his latest book.
See you tomorrow, guys.
Thanks for listening.
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