02/25/10 – Kevin Zeese and David T. Beito – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Right now it's time to go to Kevin Zese and my good friend David T. Beto.
And geez, I guess I could have been thoughtful enough to pull up Kevin Zese's bio here.
He's the executive director of the Campaign for Fresh Air and Clean Politics, and his projects include Voters for Peace and the Prosperity Agenda.
And David T. Beto is a professor at the University of Alabama, professor of history, and is the proprietor or keeper of the blog Liberty and Power at the History News Network.
Welcome both of you to the show.
Thank you for joining us today.
Happy to be here.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
So this is the big project.
This is the one.
Everybody always talks about it.
What can we do?
Everybody agrees about, well, the ones who do agree about the policy and the priority of peace and liberty.
We all know what we need is a new realignment where the paleo right-wingers and the hardcore anti-imperialist leftists and the libertarians can all get together and be the anti-empire party and really do something about, I don't know, political party, but movement anyway.
You guys are working on a project to actually make this thing happen, an actual center point for people to rally around.
Tell me all about it.
Start with Kevin, I guess.
Okay.
Well, Voters for Peace, you can see our website, votersforpeace.us, held a conference this last weekend as a first step toward forming an across-the-political-spectrum alliance against militarism and empire.
And it was kind of an experiment.
We did it as an invited-only, small meeting to just test the waters and to see if we could all, people from the right and left and progressives and libertarians and liberals, could all be in the room together and at the end of the day not be shouting at each other and find common ground over the issue of militarism and empire.
And I'm happy to say that that worked out fantastically.
The people in the room really came together.
Many of those who have been involved in these issues for longer than I have, back into the early 60s, wanted to see this happen decades ago and are so happy to see it happening now.
And so I think there's real hope here that we can actually create a broad-based, anti-war, pro-peace movement that will allow people from wherever they are on the political spectrum to get involved and actually have an impact on the direction of policy.
So that's the goal.
All right.
So I have a couple articles here I'm looking at.
Eight Hours in the Basement for Peace by Sam Smith at the Progressive Review.
You can find that reprinted there at votersforpeace.us.
And also at Op-Ed News, Time for a Broad-Based Anti-War Movement by Kevin Zeese.
And so, David, talk to me a little bit about this realignment.
How do we get people, how do we reproduce this meeting where people put aside their differences in favor of peace and the Bill of Rights and reproduce that on the larger scale?
Get people to rally around Mark Twain somehow and get this thing done, huh?
Well I think, I mean, I'm delighted by this.
We've been trying for years to do this through Historians Against the War, which is an organization that essentially, I think, has abdicated any possibility of taking any leadership on this.
And perhaps with the Obama administration, we've opened up new possibilities because a lot of conservatives do not like Obama, and a few of them maybe will start asking questions about his foreign policy.
At least I think it's created a situation of flux.
I think the important thing, and this is why I really like what Kevin's is doing, is good leadership from the top.
The organization from the beginning should have clearly stated principles, that it is open to the right, to the left, to libertarians, should have a rather narrow agenda, which I think could be opposition to imperialism, opposition to empire, stay out of every issue, other issues, and make it clear from the beginning that it is focused on these principles.
And then have it balance leadership from the beginning.
I think you're doing the right thing.
Have conservatives, have libertarians, have progressives, have independents in there in the leadership positions, and have a clearly stated statement of principles.
And I think that's the way to succeed in this.
David and I emailed and talked before this meeting, because I know he had the experience with the historians against war.
That started out as a broad-spectrum anti-war effort.
And then when the Obama campaign started going, it fell apart.
So I think another key thing that I would add to David's list would be independent of electoral politics.
I don't see either of the two parties, at least not the leadership in either of the two parties, as being friends of ending war.
Both parties' leadership vote for all the war funding.
You know, when one party's out of office, they'll criticize the other party's president for how he's running the war, and they'll do the same thing when the other party's out of office, and they'll criticize that president.
But in the end, both vote for war funding, bigger military budgets, and the sacrosanct Department of Defense budget just keeps growing, despite it being unauditable and filled with waste, fraud, and abuse, and just being bloated and wasteful.
So I think keeping our independence of the Republicans and Democrats is critical.
We need to be able to criticize aggressively, no matter who's running for office.
You know, when President Bush claims he's not going to be an interventionist, but look at the details.
What was he really saying?
He promised he'd end the war.
Look at the details.
What was he really saying?
If you look at either of these candidates' detailed positions, when they were running for office, you would see that they did what they said they were going to do, and President Bush said he was going to attack Pakistan, said he was going to escalate Afghanistan, said he'd make a bigger Department of Defense, he said he would not get fully out of Iraq, he said he'd totally support Israel.
You know, so on issue after issue, Obama's doing what he promised, but too many on the left were so tied to the Democratic Party, they couldn't say it or see it.
Yeah, and now they feel betrayed, and they have no reason to feel betrayed, because Obama did not betray them on the main issues.
I just saw a survey about the excitement factor.
Oh, it was Glenn Greenwald, of course, talked about the degree of commitment that Democrat voters have to the Democratic Party, and it's far less than on the right.
They already, thank goodness, are recognizing and admitting to themselves how disappointed they are.
Here's the thing, well, there's a lot of things, but here's one of them.
Kevin, what kind of right-wingers did you get?
Because there are some Republicans, I mean, you look at Ron Paul, he's a Republican, but he's really a plumb-line libertarian, he's a member of the Republican Party, but what about the guys at the American Conservative Magazine, other groups, did you have those people at your meeting in the basement there?
Yeah, the American Conservative was heavily involved, and I should say at the beginning of the founding of Voters for Peace a few years ago, we had a spokesperson of the American Conservative at our press conference, we also had someone from the Nation Magazine at our press conference, so from the outset, Voters for Peace has taken this position of being open to everyone who opposes a war, not being limited to a partisan side.
And at this event, we had people from the Reason Magazine, people from the American Conservative, people from the Stanford University Institution, I'm blanking on their name right now, former Ronald Reagan campaign advisors, young Americans for Liberty, so it was a really interesting mix of people on the right, and similarly on the left.
The Nation Magazine was present, Progressive Review was present, Black Agenda Report, Veterans for Peace, and so I think we did a pretty good job of getting a taste of people from across the spectrum.
There are many more people I'd love to invite, and we hope to do larger and more public versions of this kind of thing in the future, but I think it was a really good start and a really good test of the waters, and I don't think there was anybody in the room who felt like we couldn't work together, so I think that's a pretty positive first step.
And I think it's good that you've got some responsible leadership there, because there are obviously the fringe elements that we, you know, and I don't think we have any danger of them taking over, but there are elements, truthers, in my opinion, and some groups like that, that we want to be careful to make it clear that they're not welcome or that they can participate, but this isn't going to push those kinds of agendas.
Well, is Voters for Peace the actual core of the, and you can address that, I'm sorry to interrupt, but please also address whether Voters for Peace actually is the group or there's a new group, a new anti-imperialist league of some kind.
My expectation is it'll be a new group, right?
We obviously couldn't put the cart before the horse, and so we wanted to test the waters before we started a new group, and, you know, we'll discuss it, you know, amongst the people involved, and we'll probably gradually expand the people involved to ask that question, you know, what should be the new group, or should we just do it as a Voters for Peace project, or, you know, how should we proceed best, and I'm open to all avenues on that, frankly.
And it's going to take really big names, is what it's going to take, right?
Leadership on the conservative side, on the liberal side of politics in this country coming together on this thing and saying, we really mean it this time, and I don't necessarily mean, you know, party politics type people, but, you know, there's a million anti-war groups with ten members or something, right?
I mean, how do we get this where everybody's on the same page, finally?
Well, I think Kevin is sort of going to do this approach, but one way to do it is to try to reach into communities through kind of a leadership orientation, and, you know, get particular constituency groups like academics, someone's writing about nurses, right, lawyers, you know, get committees that are balanced, that have representation from all these different ideological groups, and then they will go out and find people in their particular professions to sign up.
And so I'm thinking, in a way, this could be a way to create an organization eventually for historians, an alternative to Historians Against the War, but it'll be linked in with this larger organization, and that might be a relatively cheap way to just reach into every community in the country.
I like that idea, bringing people in based on their profession, so that you have doctors and lawyers and teachers and everybody organized like that.
Can I be in the radio host's group?
Yeah, yeah.
I hope so.
Yeah, I think Dave has a great outline there of one way to do the outreach.
I think outreach is such a critical step.
I think that is maybe the most critical thing, is how we get more and more people involved, make this a broad-based, large grassroots effort with strong leadership at the top.
And that's what we're trying to go to.
Right on.
Okay, now, David, tell me, is this focus so narrow that it doesn't include reinstating the Bill of Rights in this country?
Because I think that pretty much goes right there along with ending these wars and importance, right?
Oh, I would have to.
And that's broad-based enough.
I mean, a liberal constitutionalist and a conservative constitutionalist, that's, you know, amendments number 1 through 10, go ahead and make sure to throw in 13 there.
You know, these are the most important things in our society as far as keeping and passing on to posterity and all that stuff, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that goes without saying, and you need to link in.
And I think it needs to be an anti-imperialist organization.
I mean, it's got to be broader, in my opinion, than just opposing one war or two wars.
And it's got to make a more general statement about American foreign policy, and I think Kevin agrees with me on that.
Yeah, I think it's interesting.
You know, one of the issues that came up at the meeting was language.
And one of the conservatives in the room was very comfortable with us criticizing the American Empire, but was not comfortable with us using the word imperialism, that he thought that the word imperialism would turn off a lot of people on the conservative side.
I'm not sure that everybody on the conservative side agreed with that, but it was interesting to hear that kind of question raised.
And I think one of the really strong benefits of having this across the political spectrum project developing is that it gets us all to listen to each other.
And as we listen to each other, I think we will get better and better in our language and come up with language that reaches more people, doesn't threaten people, but, you know, lets them see that they have agreement with us.
And so I think that kind of development of language is going to get much stronger by having people who are at various parts of the political spectrum responding to what gets said.
Well, and that particular example is very interesting, because it's my opinion that the word empire is really the one, because at our core, everybody knows that we're not supposed to be an empire, that Americans declared independence from empire, that our ancestors all fled a bunch of rotten empires to try to come here and be free instead of living in an empire.
And that if, you know, somebody's supposed to rule the world, it's the English or somebody.
It's not our job to do this.
And it's the kind of thing, especially for conservatives, I think, if they can accept that you're right, we are an empire, I could see why the word imperialism makes it sound meaner and more purposeful, right?
They'd want to think of it more like, okay, but it was an accident.
We were trying to protect the world from the Russians, and then we accidentally inherited the whole thing.
And geez, but maybe now we can sort of start to reverse this.
But once you understand it's an empire, to hear Pat Buchanan characterize it as an empire means that's not just a term that gets thrown around by, you know, some radical leftist who calls everything empire or everything fascism.
This really is what it is.
We've got what they call full-spectrum dominance, and we're working on it, and it's the wrong path.
We've got to bring our troops home from everywhere, Korea, Japan, and Germany, and Italy, and all the rest of them, too.
Well, I can see the point about imperialism.
I mean, I'm comfortable with the term, but, you know, and it has an honorable history, but it was sort of taken up by the Communist Party at one time and became a kind of rhetorical point that would turn a lot of people off.
Just briefly, you know, we do have models of this kind of effort done before, and I think we need to study those models, because there are pitfalls and there are advantages.
We had the opposition to imperialism at the turn of the century, the anti-imperialist league, which was a left-right coalition.
We had a left-right coalition, to a certain extent, with the American First Committee, and both had problems and successes, and I think it's worth looking at those.
But there hasn't been anything really seriously attempted like this that I know of since, you know, since maybe the America First Committee.
Yeah, since World War II.
A long time.
Yeah, since World War II.
You know, the empire thing, I think, is so important.
You know, in my article on antiwar.com, and I also reprinted it on votersforpeace.us today, I talked about this question of empire, and I think it's interesting that we have probably the largest empire in world history, and it's probably an empire that goes way back to the 1890s.
I'd say the Philippines was probably the real strong beginning of it.
You can look at Smedley Butler's career, the most decorated Marine in history, who, after he retired, you know, wrote the book, War as a Racket, and described himself as a racketeer for American business, you know, in the Philippines, in Mexico, in China, in Haiti, in Cuba, Nicaragua, and on and on and on, over 30 to 34 years of a military career.
So, I mean, that was really the beginning, I think, of the empire, and then the Cold War, you know, gave us a rationale for, you know, battling the Soviet Union in multiple parts of the world, gave us the NATO treaty, you know, gave us other treaties like that, and so we've kind of, the empire got more formalized, I think, during the Cold War, but it now continues.
You know, we have not left any, people, one of the guys who helped me put this together, George O'Neill, likes to joke about how, you know, you talk about an exit strategy from Iraq, how about an exit strategy from the Spanish-American War?
How about an exit strategy from World War I or World War II?
Hey, the troops will be home by Christmas, I promise.
I mean, really, but when you start to talk about an empire, it starts to explain U.S. policy, because you look at Afghanistan, it really doesn't make a lot of much sense.
I mean, there's some natural resources issues there, there is, you know, the question of gas lines, you know, from that part of the world, but when you look at the world map and you see where Afghanistan is placed, next to China, next to Pakistan and India, these are like three major countries you want to be in a strong position, or it allows us to put missiles nearby China, put military bases nearby China, you know, there was an article in the China Daily the other day about how the U.S. is usually surrounding China with missiles, it's near Iran, I mean, so you start to look at the map as an empire chess board, and our foreign policy makes a lot more sense than, you know, freeing the Afghan women or bringing democracy to Iraq or, you know, those kinds of phony excuses that were put out to go into those wars, but empire really makes it make sense, and we understand you're an empire, then once you understand you're an empire, we can ask the question, is empire good for the United States, is it good for national security, is it good for the economy, is it good for the rule of law, does it make sense to spend a million dollars per soldier in Iraq for one year, I mean, excuse me, in Afghanistan for one year when our economy is fragile and maybe even collapsing, I don't think it makes sense at all, but that kind of discussion is not had in the media, you know, we're the biggest empire in world history, a hundred years plus old, and the media does not discuss are we an empire, and is it good for us, does not even discuss it, most Americans don't even know it.
Well, you know what, though, Kevin, I mean, this discussion is being had in one place on TV, and that's when Ron Paul is speaking, and this is kind of, it's an important point kind of in the larger sense, it leads me to the question of whether we really can get our priorities straight and focus on our sames and not our differences, I mean, here's a guy who bends over backwards to say, look, if it was up to me, I would end the empire and I would not mess with any of the social programs, I would just, you know, undo the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, and reinstate the Bill of Rights, and yet still there are left-wingers and liberals who will just denounce this guy and see him as the devil, he's even worse than Dick Cheney, he wants even less doctor care for you than Dick Cheney will give you, and those terrible libertarians, and here from my position, and you know, David, I mean, here we're clearly on the same side of the class war, where it's the top, you know, .01% of the richest people in our society using the state as a club over the head of all the rest of us, and yet, people are still, for, you know, the pettiest reasons, unwilling to, you know, put their priorities straight, I mean, the question, I guess, I'd put to you would be, in your case, I mean, would you prefer war and a free doctor or peace and no free doctor, you know, I mean, if that was the decision, what's more important, stopping killing people is the more important thing, right?
Well, I think ending empire is at the heart of the matter, I think if we end empire, then we can start to focus on other issues, because it would make a gigantic difference, I think one reason why we're seeing the United States in decline is because we spend as much as the whole world on weapons and war combined, and so I have no doubt that that is undermining our economy in various ways, and so I think ending empire is a top priority, if we can do that, it would be an amazing paradigm shift for the country, it might actually save us from ourselves, if we don't do that, I don't see how we're gonna correct the other problems that we're facing.
And I think one of the advantages of this kind of a left-right, across-the-spectrum, political coalition is that, you know, we can hear each other, and so, you know, the views of Ron Paul will be heard by people on the left, the views of Ralph Nader and Dennis Costanzo will be heard by people on the right, they'll be able to talk to them and hear, you know, really debate issues where they think to disagree with them more clearly.
I don't expect we're gonna be endorsing candidates, I don't think that should be our role, I mean, there are other vehicles for that, and I think endorsing candidates is gonna get us into divisions that we don't need to get into, but I do think we need to have an honest critique of everybody running, and their positions on war, weapons, and empire, and if we can do that, get out the truth about what these people stand for, that's a major, major step forward for improving our electoral system.
And I think there's an argument, you talk about talk show hosts, committee, journalists, you know, I mean, it would be very, very good if, I mean, just from my standpoint, you know, you had Ron Paul, you don't want to get tied in with one person, and I kind of don't like doing this, but you had, you know, him making statements about the role of the Federal Reserve, and Iraq loans, and Watergate, and, you know, just raising questions about maybe, you know, there's some evidence here, and there have been mainstream people that have said that there's some nefarious things going on.
Immediately dismissed by the media, this is totally lax curiosity, totally lax skepticism in many of these cases, even to look into these questions, and whether they're valid, and if we could get some way that this organization could help put a little pressure on people in the media, and say, hey, you guys, why aren't you looking at this?
Why don't you, you know, why don't you start asking some hard questions about all these different connections, which the media just isn't doing?
Well, I think a lot of that, you know, I've been involved in a lot of issues, and I've seen how that can be effectively done, but it takes money, and I think that it's going to be critical that we raise, get some major donors as well as grassroots donors to support this kind of effort, because if we, for example, had the funds to do an advertising campaign in the leading political weeklies and monthlies that opinion leaders from across the political spectrum read, we could be putting out a campaign that puts the truth out, and that forces, and the media reads those publications, and by having those ads in those publications, and if they don't report accurately in the future, then they look like they lack credibility, they lack integrity, and so if we are able to get the truth out, and that really does take money, and so the key is we need some big donors to support the people already involved in this, but the key is big donors who will recognize the value of educating the public and the media.
You know, one thing I did in the drug war, in addition to that kind of advertising campaign, the organization I was associated with, Common Sense for Drug Policy, we also put out something called Drug War Facts.
If you go to drugwarfacts.org, you can see it.
What it is is about two dozen issues in the drug war, and just facts and citations with links to the original source on key issues, and we send this out, we publish this annually as a hardcover thing, a booklet, and send it out to media outlets, so the media would have the facts, and we constantly update it on the web so that anyone who wants the facts knows where to go for them, so if we did something like that for, you know, American Empire facts, and include the size of the military, you know, the cost of guarding the massive U.S. embassy in Iraq, you know, the number of bases around the world and where they're all located, and all those kind of basic factual questions with citations to the quality sources, we will affect how reporting is done in this country.
We'll make it easier for good reporters to get information, and we'll be able to...reporters who don't put out good information will be more easily shown to be, you know, false and misleading.
So we have a lot of power in fact if we can get them out there.
Is this organization going to have...is it going to be starting out with some money behind it?
I mean, I don't know if you can talk about all this, but...
Yeah, that's probably not a program for a radio show, you know, there was a funder who got involved in this first phase, and he's interested in going forward, but it should not rest on one person's shoulders.
You know, we need to have a broad...just like we want a broad-based movement, you need to have a base of donors from different parts of the political spectrum as well, and you can really then, you know, put out all views because you have all views funding the effort.
Yeah.
Well now, I didn't mean to focus too much on Ron there with that question.
I guess I was just trying to use, you know, his character in public as it's portrayed now and how big it is now, and the reaction to him when he's so good on ending the wars.
And I just, you know, it's kind of a measure to me of the ability of people to put their differences aside and focus on their sames.
But now as far as the organization, here's what we need.
We got to have a giant convention in a place with a stage and a really tall ceiling, and then there has to be a big portrait of Mark Twain, you know, the one with the black background and he looks all dignified with the big mustache and all that.
And it's got to be the Anti-Imperialist League again.
That's the model, isn't it?
Well, I think those kind of icons from the past are important.
I wouldn't do it all around Mark Twain, but there's a lot of people of significance from our history who have been anti-empire, anti-imperialist, anti-war, and a lot of their voices are not heard.
You know, I mentioned Smedley Butler already, the most decorated Marine in history.
His military tactics are still taught in boot camp.
Iraq vets tell me he's mentioned.
Of course, they don't mention his post-military history where he came out against war and became a leading advocate to keep us out of World War II even.
But so I think there's a whole host of people like that.
Those kind of icons that we need to start to remind people exist and what they stood for.
And Ron Paul, I think it's so fantastic that the same weekend we held this conference that Ron Paul won that landslide at the CPAC convention.
And at that convention, there were sessions on war and empire that had hundreds of people at them, and Ron Paul gave a fantastic speech against war and empire.
And so I think it's such a nice coincidence that the same weekend that that happened in the conservative movement's major conference that we had this meeting going along at the same time.
And maybe there are more right-wing peaceniks than the public is aware of at this point.
Some stars aligning there, it sounds like.
Well, David, give me some analysis of that CPAC thing, because there is a pretty strong division.
I mean, Cheney got hip-hip-hooray and three cheers up there as well, you know?
Well, I wasn't there, but interestingly enough, it does seem like sometimes we criticize Cato, it seems like this Cato-affiliated group, the Students for Liberty or whatever, played a very important role in that.
So 31% is a pretty small minority, so I mean, it doesn't surprise me terribly, but I mean, you have just such opposites there, which intrigues me, right?
You have Dick Cheney, you have Bolton, and you have Ron Paul.
I mean, this is an organization that I've never seen such polarization in one organization, I guess.
Well, the thing is, though, about conservatives is, man, they'll just flip-flop on any old thing, so maybe if we just point out that Obama is the commander-in-chief, maybe they'll just turn anti-war tomorrow, just like it was, remember, back when the Republicans opposed the war in Serbia?
Well, everybody but McCain.
Well, some of them, but that hasn't been happening yet.
I have a question for Kevin.
I've noticed, you know, the anti-imperialists, one of the things they did is they had a lot of vice presidents, and they would tend to find politicians, like former presidents, who would agree to serve as a vice president of the organization, you know, sort of an honorary title.
But I'm wondering, have you given thought to how you would involve the politicians?
I agree with you, it doesn't make sense to get involved in endorsements, because then you're locked in, you know, and the politician will end up usually moving to a pro-war position, you know, once they lock in their anti-war support.
But is there a way to sort of get some politicians as individuals involved in this without creating a situation where they'll do harm?
Yeah, that's a really good question and a very challenging one.
And we intentionally decided at this first meeting not to have any elected officials at the meeting.
The closest we came to a politician, you know, was Ralph Nader, but I don't think he considers himself a politician.
I think he's more of a citizen advocate and uses the political environment as a way to get his message out more than anything else.
So, you know, we intentionally avoided politicians at this one.
I think I could see in the future, though, that we would want to have politicians, and I think we'd want to make sure that when we do, that we balance it, that we are multi-partisan, that we, you know, not only have Democrats and Republicans, but we have Greens and Constitutional and Libertarian and Independent.
And so we show that there's a broad spectrum of people from different party affiliations and independent candidates who oppose war and oppose empire and want to see the military budget reduced from its bloated, wasteful presence of today.
I don't think it'd be smart for us to just have, you know, Republicans or just have Democrats.
I think that would be an alignment we don't want to get into.
I think it's very important for us to remain non-aligned with any political party and stay true to our issue.
I've seen too many movements go into the Democratic Party and die, whether it's labor unions, whether it's environmentalists, whether it's women, civil rights movement.
When they tie themselves up with the party, they die.
And I think the same thing happens on the Republican side, as well.
Give all the constituency groups clout.
I think that's a very good idea, so that they can all fight back if, you know, any one of them is being neglected.
And that's the problem with historians against the war, is we didn't have any clout.
There was nobody who, you know, in the leadership who was sympathetic to us.
All right, guys.
We got to cut it here, because I'm about to move on to the next interview, but I really appreciate the time that both of y'all are putting into this.
And calling all millionaires, we've got a new anti-imperialist league we're trying to put together here, and we don't have any money, so.
Visit votersforpeace.us and sign up so you'll get our mailings and stay involved.
All right, everybody.
This is Kevin Zese and David T. Beto.
Thanks very much, both of you.
Thank you.
Thank you.