06/06/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is the great Sheldon Richman, vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you?
I'm doing okay, Scott.
Okay, good.
Yep.
So thanks for joining us.
You got a couple of articles here.
Both of them are really good and worth talking about.
So let's start with the first one first.
Sergeant Bergdahl and the fog of war.
I'm interested to know what you think of, well, this whole scandal such as it is anyway.
Well, what I tried to do in that piece was to show that war is filled with confusion, not only of a, you know, knowledge kind.
The fog of war, I think, typically refers to it's just hard to get information when in the thick of things.
But I think there's also a moral fog for a lot of people because people are ordered to shoot other people they don't know and may not have any particular beef with simply on order.
And, you know, there's a lot of moral ambiguity always.
Innocents are killed, but that's called, you know, given the sterile label collateral damage.
And I'm not saying anything that's terribly startling there.
I think everybody understands that.
So we shouldn't be surprised when someone has a crisis of confidence and maybe goes over there gung-ho as apparently Bergdahl did and was for quite a while according to his colleagues in his unit.
And then maybe perhaps decides that things aren't what he thought they were or as they were represented to him and then has a crisis of confidence and does something that doesn't conform to, you know, the romantic war movies.
And, you know, I was writing this at a time before we didn't know a whole lot about the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance and then captivity.
And so I didn't go into a lot of description because we simply didn't know it.
We know more today than we did when I wrote that back on Monday, I guess, or Monday and Tuesday.
So that's what I was trying to say, that we shouldn't be surprised when someone has a crisis of confidence and maybe takes a— and does something that other people look askance at, including even leaving the unit altogether.
I wasn't defending it.
I wasn't defending any particular thing he may have done because first of all, I didn't know what he did.
But I was trying to say that we shouldn't be surprised when someone has a moral crisis after, you know, volunteering to be in a war.
Right.
Well, one of the most notable things about it, right, is the— well, I mean, obviously the Republicans have decided this is their new Benghazi scandal or whatever.
So there's everything that goes along with that.
But even just the twisted narrative when— I mean, because this is still a U.S. soldier, a white kid from Idaho, and they, you know, TV media, they still are— they want to be somewhat biased towards him or something.
It's hard to—they're a little bit divided in their own minds about what they're supposed to think about this guy.
And so I've heard them refer to his mental illness over and over and over again, that apparently, you know, he snapped, he went haywire, he went crazy, he lost his mind.
Doesn't this sound to you like it must have been some kind of psychotic break or some kind of—he was over—his senses and emotions and thinking processes were overwhelmed by the madness or, you know, this kind of thing where, you know, it's sort of like, well, you're saying the pressure got to him, but the way that they say it, they phrase it in such a way as to deny him agency.
You know, I guess if someone that I'm supposed to love this much could do something I'm supposed to hate that much, then it must be because, you know, some insane part of his brain took over or something like that, you know?
Well, as soon as I hear mental health explanations or illness explanations for people's behavior, I bar the door, I check—make sure I have my wallet, and then I, you know, wait for it to blow over.
And to me, it's totally unhelpful.
It doesn't explain anything, whether it's a mass killer like that guy in, you know, wherever the last shooting was, Santa Barbara or someplace, or this.
I mean, there's no help whatsoever talking about psychological— I don't mean psychological explanations.
We can talk about human motivation, but you're right.
As soon as you take agency out of it and start talking about insanity or mental illness— Yeah, I mean, there's really such a thing as schizophrenia, where people are completely out of their mind and can't tell the difference between what's real and what's their hallucinations and these kinds of things.
Well, that's a whole other conversation.
But there's no indication that that's what we're talking about here, right?
I am a fan, a student, and was a friend of Dr. Thomas Sass.
So that's a whole other discussion, whether schizophrenia is really a medical illness or not.
But let's not take up the time with that subject.
All right, well, I guess I was saying— I've known people who are literally crazy and think there are bugs crawling around in their brain, and it ain't no—well, and I haven't read it all to size, so.
But anyway, I've known people who are actually completely crazy, but I would still draw a pretty firm distinction between that and anything like what we're talking about here.
That's the point, is that they're basically just trying to smear this guy out of his own mind, you know?
Well, to paraphrase something Tom once said, I'm not saying people aren't crazy, I'm saying they're not mentally ill.
But anyway, go ahead.
Okay, well, that's fair enough, too.
And again, that is an entire other discussion and all that.
Absolutely.
And I'm sure that I would agree with a whole hell of a lot of what that guy wrote if I ever sat down and read it.
But anyway— Look, the interesting thing about Bergdahl is— I'm more talking about the media's treatment of the situation, you know?
Well, that's right, but more and more stuff comes out every day.
I mean, we learned yesterday for the first time, and this was a sort of a reversal of things that— this was in the Times, New York Times, but it was a reversal of things the Times had reported earlier, is that they've gotten a hold of a classified report about Bergdahl, and it turned out that he had left his outpost a couple of other times and returned.
Earlier, there was a report that there was a letter— he left a letter in his tent or whatever on his bed saying, I'm deserting, but now that's not mentioned in this classified report, so now that's in doubt.
A whole—we don't really know.
I'm not defending the guy one way or the other.
I mean, I'm defending his crisis of confidence in the war.
I wish he had discovered that before he ever left or joined up.
Right.
But I'm not defending any particular course of conduct he took, but I think we need to wait— like everyone else, people are beginning to say, we need to wait and see what exactly happened.
It's not really clear.
If he wandered off a couple times and then came back, how do we know he wasn't planning to come back this time, but got caught by the Taliban?
So we don't know.
It's hard to comment when we really don't know what the facts are.
Sure.
Well, and that's the whole thing, though.
The real point being—and, you know, today's the anniversary of D-Day, right?
So it's sort of, you know, back where we're talking about collateral damage and this and that.
If you were a soldier in the army conscripted into the Great Crusade against the Nazis and your job was killing the Wehrmacht on the battlefield, you might even feel 1% sad that they're a bunch of German conscripts, too.
But you know what?
You're wearing gray and you're on this battlefield and I'm going to shoot your ass.
And even through the horror of that, you could still see how someone could rationalize what was being done in fighting that war.
But that is not at all what we're talking about here.
We're talking about a war that was won in the autumn of 2001.
And ever since then, it's been a brutal occupation.
And every bit of collateral damage—so-called collateral damage— is basically all the damage is to innocents at this point.
And, of course, they lost anyway, right?
After all of this, the Taliban's coming back to power as soon as America's gone.
Give them, you know, two and a half months after—you know, six weeks or two and a half months or something after the final end of the American occupation of the drones and the rest, and they'll be back in power in Kabul and anyway.
So, you know, no wonder that anyone would want to up and quit at some point if they started seeing through this.
You know, I interviewed Michael Hastings about his article, The Runaway General, and not about McChrystal and the whole scandal there, but about the actual war, what he actually wrote about the war.
And that was that every single man in the army thought that the entire thing was risking their life for nothing.
The whole thing was a big, stupid joke.
Counterinsurgency, where they're supposed to stand around now like traffic cops and just tell Afghans that, oh, we love you all day, and build them a whole new government out of a whole cloth and appoint all their new technocrats, a government in a box and all this crap, while they're getting shot to death and their best friends are getting shot to death.
And that's the joke he described in his letters back home.
And now we're out of time, and we'll be right back with Sheldon.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I was just talking with Norman Solomon.
I'm working on lining up an interview with him later about this great new project that they're doing.
Dan Ellsberg did a three-minute video pitch about it, and they're trying to make it so easy for government officials to anonymously upload documents in a way where they don't have to come forward like Snowden.
They can get away with it, and the heroic Dan Ellsberg is leading the charge on that, and Norman Solomon is working on it with him, the director of War Made Easy.
So, that should be coming up here in just a little while.
Now, I'm talking with Sheldon Richman, and I'm more talking at him than interviewing him, and I'm sorry for that, but anyway, so this is the point.
Bergdahl's crisis of conscience came in the middle of, regardless of exactly what he did about it, came in the middle of a hopeless, ridiculous, tragedy farce of a war in Afghanistan, you know, years, eight years after the damn thing should have been over if it ever should have been started in the first place.
And so, that's where your first article, Sheldon, really ends, about Sergeant Bergdahl and the fog of war, and then picks up again in your next article, which is up there today.
You heard the goal is freedom article for Friday at FFF.org.
The disaster that is U.S. foreign policy.
So now, I'll be quiet and let you explain what you mean to the people.
Well, I think in the larger scheme of things, the Bergdahl matter is a sideshow.
Each side now can use it.
And when I say each side, I mean the conservatives and the Obamaites, progressives, or whatever you want to call them.
I haven't given up the word liberal, so I don't call them liberals.
You know, they can fight over him, but they all share the same premises, namely that the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity.
That's how they put it.
Obama says that, too, and that it was right to fight it, and that it was a good cause, and then they'd have differences over how and when it should end.
But otherwise, they share the premises.
And so, I was questioning those premises.
By the way, one more thing on Bergdahl.
If you look at an article today by Amy Goodman, I believe it was Truthdig.
I don't know if it was today, but I read it today, just in the last couple days.
She quotes from some of Bergdahl's colleagues from the documentary that was done about their unit by the journalist at The Guardian.
And others than Bergdahl were questioning the war.
Now, they didn't leave their posts, but they were saying, all we're doing is screwing these people.
First, the Russians screwed them.
Now, we're screwing them.
We did the same thing in Iraq.
I mean, if Bergdahl had been saying these things, we'd see it all over the media and all over Fox News.
But his own colleagues were saying something very similar.
So anyway, my point is that the main people who are having this brouhaha over Bergdahl share the premises that the war on terror is the right thing to do.
I mean, Obama may not be calling it that, but he's not really questioning it, certainly not deeply.
And my point, and it's a point I've made before, it's a point you've made and your guests have repeatedly made, is the war on terror was the result of misconceiving the causes of Americans hit by al-Qaeda on 9-11 and previously.
So in other words, they misconceived the causes, and therefore, their response to it was wrong.
They acted like it was an out-of-the-blue, unprovoked attack, that it was, like Bush said, it was an attack on our freedom, or our liberty, or our pornography, or our democracy, whatever you choose, choose whichever one you want, but anything but what it really was, namely an attack on U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world.
I mean, it's something that Michael Schurter was telling you just the other day and Phil Duraldi and other people.
So I just tried to reinforce that.
I quoted bin Laden on things you've quoted from him before, about how the whole strategy was to draw the U.S. into Afghanistan and the Middle East, deeper and deeper, to bleed and bankrupt the U.S., and that he ended up getting America exactly where he wanted it.
So that's what I tried to lay out.
Yeah, well, I think you did a pretty damn good job of it, too.
And, you know, what's funny about all this, of course, is the context of this is that the American people, if they don't agree with you on all the fine points of the causes and results of terrorism and this and that, they're still just over it.
They don't want anything to do with any foreign policy, anything, if only just because they don't want to have to pay attention to it, because they're having a hard enough time just living their own life and that kind of thing.
And so in the polls, even the Washington Post and the Newsweek and the Gallup and the Wall Street Journal and everything, Afghanistan is at least arguably the least popular war in all of American history right now.
And yet it's hardly an emergency in the mind of the people, apparently, to end it.
It's not their focus, you know, that people protest about, even though it's the worst, one of the worst injustices that our government's carrying out on the face of the planet.
But, you know, in essence, when it comes down to you saying, hey, so enough is enough, everybody agrees with you, more than agreed about Vietnam or any other catastrophe in American history.
And yet we still go on, and your quote in here, I just love this thing where you quote a liberal on MSNBC or a progressive on MSNBC saying, hey, the war in Afghanistan will be over in a matter of years.
This was Sam Stein who said it without any sense of irony whatsoever.
If you can, I don't know if it's online, I assume it is.
This was on the Morning Joe show the other morning and they were talking about, you know, about the giving up of the five Taliban and Stein was saying something, he was saying, well, this is what always happens at the end of a war.
You know, the POWs get exchanged and Scarborough was saying, yeah, but this war is not over and that's when Stein said, yeah, but it's going to be over in a matter of years.
You could say that about any war, right, on the first day of it, you can say, well, it's going to be over in a matter of years.
Well, they're saying they're going to keep.
They have a really, and don't forget with Obama, they're going to be military personnel there into 2016 and what is it going to be about 10,000 of them through 2015.
So this is not over and yet things aren't going to look any different when they finally do leave.
So why not just leave today?
Right, yeah, I mean, that's the thing too is, you know, when they do it that way, that means I'll have to pull the very last troop out right during the Hillary versus Jeb election of 2016, which, you know, raises all kinds of questions whether that'll happen at all and what their positions will be and insisting that troops stay and of course Obama's already signed an agreement with Karzai to stay till 2024.
So they might want to not talk about that in the news this week, but I do.
That's under a cloud because Karzai hasn't signed that, right?
Karzai's leaving it to his successor.
Well, I mean, this was two years ago actually when they signed that.
So this deal didn't actually include an immunity deal for the troops to stay because it wasn't that in-depth of an agreement, but it did say that in principle, yes, the U.S. will be there till at least 2024.
So, and I guess it depends whether CIA can get Abdul Abdul in there and how that all works out with the new so-called regime anyway.
You know, to step back from this a second, given how recently the Soviet Union had to turn around and leave Afghanistan, it really makes you wonder what the U.S. policymakers had in mind when they decided to go into Afghanistan because why didn't they know they were going to get bogged down?
What were they, you know, what were they thinking?
I just wish I could somehow get inside their heads just for a moment because you have to wonder what did they think they were going to do.
You know, Britain had gone to war in Afghanistan a couple of times, then the Soviet Union, and it never worked out for them.
It's not a place you contain.
It's not really a country.
You know, it's a lot of clans and tribes and warlords.
And after the horror of the decade that the Soviets were there, you had almost a decade of open civil war among various warlords.
And then the Taliban came along.
And at first, probably people were very relieved that the Taliban was imposing order and stopping all this open warfare among the various warlords.
But of course, that came with a very high price, at a very high price.
The Taliban was, you know, horribly theocratic and the worst form of Islam.
And so people, I'm sure, came to regret that.
But then the U.S. came in and then the killing starts all over again.
So let's leave those people alone.
I mean, we're not helping them.
Yeah, it's all the killing without any of the stability because that is how it was, where the Taliban is going to come and the child molester in your neighborhood, they're going to throw them down the well.
And so no fair trial for him.
They might just, you know, that was the way that they did things was absolutely hardcore.
But then and it was because of their at least supposed piety that they were not corrupt in the way that the average warlord was corrupt, which is not to say they weren't corrupt at all, but it just meant they didn't just go around on a foot soldier level, shaken down and beating and raping and stealing from whoever they met.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So that is why they were accepted even by people who were not posh toons in the other parts of the country and all that.
But anyway, hey, listen, of course, we got this stupid time thing here, but I'd like to talk to you more about the war if you can stay over one more segment.
Can you can't do it today?
Oh, got it.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Okay, Scott.
Thank you.
I see that.
Sheldon Richman, everybody.
Fff.org.
Check out his new one today.
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