07/17/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Thanks for tuning in.
Our first guest today is our friend Sheldon Richman.
He's vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and editor of their monthly journal, The Future of Freedom at FFF.org slash subscribe.
And he writes a lot of great stuff.
FFF.org, also SheldonRichman.com for his great blog, Free Association.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, and it's always great to be with you, Scott.
Good deal.
It's been a few weeks since we've spoken, so happy to have you back.
Yes, thank you.
J'accuse, you, sir, are an isolationist.
Yeah, I guess if I got noticed by people like Rick Perry and Chris Christie and Cheney and McCain, they would probably call me an isolationist.
I don't acknowledge that much.
What's with your hesitance to explode little kids to death all the time?
Yeah, that's the funny thing.
It's a smear that's leveled at anybody who shows the slightest bit of caution about the US plunging into foreign conflicts.
I mean, you don't have to be an outright opponent of foreign intervention.
You just need to be somewhat skeptical and more cautious than, I guess, the plumb line set by Cheney.
So if you're, let's say, to the left of Cheney, no matter how far, it could be like an inch, they're going to call you an isolationist.
And that's what we see in the case of them going after Rand Paul.
They're obviously worried that Rand Paul may go for the nomination, presidential nomination, and so they're smearing him even though he's hardly a principled non-interventionist.
Yeah, it seems like no matter how hard he tries, they can't shake the idea that he's just like his dad.
Right.
Well, when someone's engaging in a smear, you keep things kind of general and fuzz it up, and you don't want to get too specific because it may show that your smear is nothing but an attempt to discredit somebody.
Yeah, I mean, his response to Perry was, hey, I'm for bombing Iraq just as much as you are.
So what are we talking about here?
That's right.
He says he would not object to bombers going in, airstrikes, as he put it, or sending arms.
He did express some concern about sending money to Maliki, but that in itself doesn't constitute non-intervention.
And even his reasons for not sending troops were sort of weak.
Now, maybe he has better reasons and just didn't state them in this brief interview that I linked to in my piece, but he said it would be too confusing to the troops to send them to Iraq because they'd be fighting the people whose side we're on in Syria.
Well, does that mean it would be unconfusing and therefore okay if the U.S. government weren't on the same side in Syria?
In other words, if the U.S. government was not trying to oust Assad, the Syrian president Assad, which is also what the ISIS types and al-Nusra and al-Qaeda types are trying to do, if we weren't doing that, does that mean then, since it wouldn't be as confusing, it would be okay to send troops?
The other reason he gave for not sending troops is, why should we send Americans to fight for Iraq when Iraqis won't fight for Iraq?
Well, that sort of leads to the implication that if the Iraqi army suddenly woke up and reconstituted itself and stood its ground rather than running away like it did in Mosul and other places, that therefore, since Iraqis would be demonstrating a will to fight for their own country, we shouldn't be hesitant about sending American troops to fight for Iraq.
So, you know, when you offer reasons like that, it's muddy.
It's muddy.
You want to be as clear as possible for the American people.
If you're truly a non-interventionist, you should say that.
If you're not truly a non-interventionist and you only have these sort of lesser reasons, well, then let's not call the person an isolationist or a non-interventionist.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the other thing.
He could just be a run-of-the-mill conservative, not a neocon ideologue, but a run-of-the-mill conservative pro-interventionist and just be intelligent and have a lot better reasons for staying out of the current conflict in Iraq than the ones that you just mentioned that he's mentioned.
You don't have to be a libertarian or a liberal or a conservative or anything to say, hey, look, you know what?
Our intervention before created this mess.
And if we go in there and start bombing the Islamic State now, that might be the thing that actually turns them against us.
Whereas right now they've got their own problems dealing with everybody else in the region.
You know, something like that at least makes sense, you know, that it would be putting the American people at risk, for example.
Right.
You don't have to be a libertarian to think that.
But again, you know, like you're saying, he comes off with, you know, these kind of, I don't know who tells him to say these things.
Yeah, you can come up with a fairly pragmatic case for why it's not a good idea without involving libertarian principles, as you say.
You see Cheney and Perry and that group, you know, they want to say that what's wrong with isolationism is, and again, they're using the term isolation.
We can talk about why that's an inappropriate term.
But they say the reason, they say isolationism is based on the idea that what happens in the rest of the world can't affect us.
We've got the oceans to protect us.
So that's not the reason for isolationism or non-interventionism.
And a pragmatist in point could say back to Cheney and that group, no, we're not saying that we can be a fortress and untouched.
We obviously can be attacked.
You know, the planes were flown into the World Trade Center.
A plane was flown into the Pentagon.
Another plane was headed maybe for the Capitol that went down to Pennsylvania.
There's no such claim that the oceans make us safe.
The claim is that if we acquire other people's enemies, then we will get attacked.
That's the pragmatic claim.
And, you know, I know in the case of ISIS or ICE, I guess it's not called ICE, right?
Because it's just the Islamic State.
So rather than ISIS.
So, you know, they claim, well, we've got people there who carry European passports or even American passports.
So that means they could come back and attack.
Well, a couple of things.
Number one, you know, people like that could think of that anyway, no matter what's going on.
But if you start sending in bombers and ground troops, which I guess no one's really called for yet, aside from special ops, which count as ground troops, of course, but not thousands and thousands of them.
If you do those things, then the U.S. government is just putting a target on its back, right?
Saying hit me.
That's the pragmatic case without even considering principles.
You're inviting retaliation.
You're creating the desire for vengeance if you participate.
It doesn't make some crazy idea that, you know, it doesn't pretend that there aren't airplanes that people could fly across the ocean.
That's, again, that's part of the smear, right?
You misstate the position enough times.
And if you don't answer back like like Rand Paul's not doing, then people, the spectating audience, the people just sort of watching and reading this will say, well, yeah, that seems like a good argument, but you got to give the counterargument.
Right.
Well, and, you know, and I'm sorry, because I always get stuck on the Rand Paul tangent here, but, you know, it's just part and parcel of his whole weakness here is he's because his name is Paul.
All these people are going after him hardcore, but he is not prepared.
He all he comes back with, as Phil Giraldi wrote in his recent piece, these bumper sticker slogans about, oh, they hate us and burn our flag and whatever.
Who's burning our flag?
He's he wants people to just think of what clips in Nightline from 1979 is supposed to be the basis of his entire foreign policy is a bunch of cliches and crap when he's the son of Ron Paul and when he's got the hugest hill to climb when it comes to winning this fight inside the Republican Party.
But he wants to go in there, you know, with one hand tied behind his back and his other hand with no gun in it because he's just too damn lazy and and unprincipled to find out the truth and so win such arguments.
But anyway, we'll be right back with Sheldon Richmond on isolationism and rampant.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richmond, Vice President of the Future Freedom Foundation.
You know, Sheldon, I remember after September 11th, it might have been on the 12th or the 13th, somebody on CNN saying, it might even been that day.
Within that first week, one of these CNN anchor hairdo type saying, wow, these terrorists, they've awakened a sleeping giant.
And I remember thinking, yeah, but you know what?
Even in your own mythology, you believe in America, the sleeping giant was awakened back in 1941.
Now, how in the world are you going to pretend that we ever disengaged from the planet after the entire era of the Cold War and all the, you know, NATO expansion and empire building and an intervention in the Middle East in the post-Cold War era?
Who but a CNN hairdo could believe that the American giant was sleeping on 9-11 when, if anything, it was too busy patrolling the damn DMZ over in Korea and no fly zone bombing Iraqis to protect their own damn airspace?
Yes, I addressed that briefly toward the end of my piece.
That's very important.
It's very important to the, you know, the Cheney style case.
If they're going to make their case, they have to get the American people to believe that 9-11, you know, was, came out of the blue.
U.S. was minding its own business.
And of course, I have to say the same thing about Pearl Harbor and any other example they can come up with where, you know, American military or American people, Americans were attacked by, you know, some foreign government or foreign group because the story doesn't work quite so well if people generally know that the U.S. government, through its own actions for many years, was inviting such, you know, such attacks.
And by inviting, I don't say they necessarily self-consciously were trying to bring it about, although in the case of Pearl Harbor, you know, we know plenty about Pearl Harbor and there's no excuse for people to pretend that it's otherwise.
I mean, we have, you know, the Secretary of War at the time, Henry Stimson, saying just a week or so before Pearl Harbor, a little more than a week in his own, in his diary saying, you know, reporting on a meeting of the war cabinet saying that our goal was to figure out how to maneuver Japan into firing the first shot.
I mean, there's no secret here.
You don't even have to read all the revisionist work that's been done over the years, although that's easily accessed.
Same thing with 9-11.
I mean, you really have to be self-blinded to think that the U.S. was sort of an isolationist, this is what Cheney would have us believe, on September 10th of 2001.
I mean, it's laughable.
You can't even say it without cracking a smile or chuckling.
It's just so absurd, so far from the truth that Cheney and those people take us for fools, that we won't know better.
Well, you know, I mean, you can see how it's superficially plausible, though, when people think of the 1990s, they think that that's peacetime.
And they think of the 1990s, they just think of Crystal Pepsi and Jerry Seinfeld and, you know, what the hell, what war, what violence was going on.
People don't pay attention to foreign affairs.
So, you know, it might have made the news or Christiane Amanpour might have been talking about, you know, bombing in Kosovo and in Serbia and reporting on the, yeah, the bomb, the routine weekly bombings in Iraq and the vicious sanctions which were killing kids all through the 90s, starting with George H.W. Bush and then through Clinton's years.
You know, most people aren't paying attention to that.
They might hear about it once in a while and then they forget about it.
So on 9-11, they may say, hey, what could we have possibly done to cause this?
Well, that's what Cheney and Perry, of course, in the case of Perry, he may not know.
He couldn't remember his three departments he wanted to abolish.
So maybe he doesn't know this stuff.
Maybe we're giving him too much credit.
But Cheney knows it.
And for him to go and say, boy, anyone who's lived through 9-11 must be out to lunch if he's a non-interventionist or isolationist, as he likes to say.
He's just a liar.
But we know that already.
But a lot of people maybe still don't believe it.
All right.
Now, and I don't know if you saw this, Sheldon.
It's just kind of a side note about Perry here.
You know, he's, of course, going through this whole makeover with his new glasses and whatever, preparing to run for president.
And after all, you know, George Bush, that whole thing about him being a West Texas right-wing redneck and all that, when really he's the son of a Pierce and a Bush from Connecticut.
Basically, he was just ripping off Rick Perry's whole costume and shtick there.
And so I could see why Perry thinks that if Bush can win the presidency by pretending to be Perry, then he can be the president being himself kind of thing.
But anyway, so he's he's doing all his, you know, tutoring, just like Bush did before he became the president.
They brought Paul Wolfowitz and all them to town to tell him the facts of life.
In this case, Perry and I almost can't believe this, but why not?
Perry went and had an extended meeting with Douglas Fyfe and Bill Lutie, these specific neocons that ran the Office of Special Plans that lied us into war in Iraq.
They aren't just, you know, two neocons who wrote a couple of bad things for the Washington Post or something.
These are some hands on horrible neocons.
Lutie, that's Karen Katowski's boss, the guy that she wasn't in the Office of Special Plans, but he was, but was also her boss on another project kind of thing.
But anyway, close enough.
That's how she knew so much about it.
And these are the guys who are telling Rick Perry what to think and what to say.
I mean, I don't know what to say about it or what to ask you about it.
But can you believe that, Sheldon?
Well, that's a question that qualifies as a question.
Well, yeah, that's playing, you know, that's the safe way to go.
If you're running for president and you really hope to get the nomination and you don't want the neocons attacking you, so you go and get advice from them on foreign policy.
There's a pragmatic wisdom there.
I mean, principle or life and death or war and peace.
But if you don't want those guns aimed at you, the neocon guns, you know, with the weekly standard denouncing you, you got to go have sessions with those people.
And that way you'll get their blessing.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
You see this in other ways.
I keep laughing at Chris Christie going before Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas and slipping and using the word occupied territories.
And then he has to go to him like the godfather right on his knees saying, please forgive me, godfather.
I didn't mean to say occupied territories because apparently the the harshest phrase you're allowed to use is disputed.
Yeah, well, of course, in context, he was saying.
And when I looked out of the helicopter down at the occupied territory, I thought to myself, poor little Israel, how can they ever protect themselves from this massive occupied juggernaut of helpless helots that they rule?
Yeah.
And let's not let Rand Paul off the hook because he wrote that National Review Online piece after this conflict broke out, the most recent battle between Hamas and Israel, fully in Israel's corner, calling for an end to any government aid to the Palestinian authority or any Palestinians whatsoever, which which I'm in favor of if you cut all aid.
But he just wants to cut that.
He just wants to end that.
And he was silent about the three billion dollars in military aid that taxpayers provide Israel every year.
And when you're silent on that and you're calling for an end to aid to Palestine or the Palestinians, it's very clear what your position is.
So he's put himself firmly in the AIPAC camp.
How's that non intervention?
Yeah, well, I just actually sent him a tweet.
You inspired me.
I just sent a tweet to Rand Paul.
Israel still to restrain for you?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's really sickening, isn't it?
You know who I like?
Ron Paul.
I about worship Ron Paul because and you know what?
He's not as pure as the Sheldon Richman driven snow when it comes to libertarianism.
He has his faults like on the border and other things like that.
But he has done so much for spreading still real libertarianism out there to the world and on all of the most important things to me, especially on issues of war and peace.
He's just battened 10,000 here.
And he's always said when it comes to this question that, no, you're the isolationists.
You're the ones who put on trade sanctions all the time.
You're the ones who wage these wars that turn the opinion of humanity against our country.
You're the ones who do, you know, every practical thing you do is isolating where all I want is open engagement and trade and friendship with all.
So who's zooming who here on isolationism?
That's the real answer is turn it around, smack him in the face with it, because they're the ones who are always going around picking fights.
That's right.
That is the point.
And that was the plea really of my article.
Call us what we are.
Anti interventionists.
That's an anti war.
That's that's what we are.
Not isolation.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time, Sheldon.
Great to talk to you again, as always.
Any time, Scott.
Thank you.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
All right.
So that's Sheldon Richmond.
He's at FFF dot org.
Again, the isolationist smear.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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