10/20/14 – Gene Healy – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show, live here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to three weekdays.
And full archives at scotthorton.org.
More than 3,500 interviews now, going back to 2003.
In fact, I think 2003 is when I first interviewed Gene Healy.
He is vice president now at the Cato Institute.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gene?
Hey, pretty good.
How about you?
I'm doing real good.
There's about a decade in there where I didn't interview you, but now I'm glad to have you back on the show.
Me too.
For some reason, it never did work out in the meantime there, but author of The Cult of the Presidency, a very important book, which is nonpartisan, believe me.
All right, and now, so your article here at cato.org today is the spotlight on antiwar.com, the forever war president, Obama's transformational war powers legacy.
So what do you mean by, oh, it says here, originally appeared at The Federalist.
What do you mean by transformational war powers legacy, Gene?
There's all this talk of transformational presidents, and Obama has said, or is believed to have said, that he wants, like many other presidents, to be a transformational president, somebody who really changes the political ground.
And these are the presidents that typically, in the scholars' ratings, finish towards the top because they had new deals and new frontiers, and often new foreign adventures abroad.
And I think one area where he's achieved this aim is probably not where he set out to achieve it.
I think his legacy on war powers is something that is transformational, it is something new under the sun, where there have been, I mean, certainly we've had no shortage of wars, wars without congressional authorization, from Harry Truman on, especially.
But I think what is happening in the Obama era is that you're getting into a situation where a quantitative difference is a qualitative one, where he is, as Professor Steve Vladeck has put it, in danger of changing the constitutional default setting from peace to war.
And so, while presidential wars in the past have been misguided, there have been many occasions where presidents have struck out on their own without Congress, but those were, by and large, departures from a peacetime norm, whereas in the 21st century, what we're seeing is almost a wartime norm, that peace in periods without airstrikes and drone strikes and new bases abroad are really departures from a permanent backdrop of war.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the real thing of it is, too, even with this, well, and maybe especially with this much of his presidency behind him, it seems like he's probably as restrained in foreign policy as we could hope to expect a president to be in at least the next couple or few terms going forward.
I mean, who do we have to pick from who's less belligerent than Barack Obama, who, after all, as you say here, continues to talk a good game about, hey, everybody, go back and make sure and read your James Madison.
We don't want to do this forever, as he does it forever.
Next is Jeb.
Next is Hillary.
What are we going to do?
Yeah, that's a, that quest, that's, I wish I could figure that out.
But yeah, there is this strange thing where, you know, I think I talk about it in peace.
In May of 2013, he gave, the president gave this speech at the National Defense University that was really kind of weird and dissociated, because he seemed, you know, not to be speaking as the president, but almost as, you know, a thoughtful critic of presidential warfare, as if he was trapped in a never-ending cycle of war.
And like you said, he invoked James Madison's warning that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of conditions of continual warfare.
Meanwhile, he seems, you know, bent on testing that proposition and seeing whether Madison, in fact, was right about that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, it's the other thing is, too, is it's not just that.
It's even on the terror war, is he keeps saying, you know, Junior Varsity, this and that.
Listen, every time a Sunni with a rifle claims he loves Osama somewhere and fires this gun in the air, that doesn't mean we're supposed to fall for it, right?
Here he knows better than that, and he keeps saying he knows better than that.
And yet, at the same time, in two major cases in Libya and Syria, he actually intervened on the Mujahideen side and has helped, you know, inadvertently or indirectly to, you know, build them up to where now they've actually declared a whole state, which now he's got to go back to war with.
I mean, these are huge own goals.
If his, you know, own policy really is to try to wind this thing down and to try to, you know, to tell Americans that it doesn't matter if Ansar al-Sharia is running around in Libya or their breakoff is in Mali, that we don't have to go and chase these guys everywhere they run.
But now that's exactly what he's done by building them into such a big force in Iraq and Syria.
There's that famous quote from Osama bin Laden about all we have to do is raise the flag of jihad anywhere on the ends of the earth.
And I'm paraphrasing here, and the United States will be there in force.
Well, we're definitely, you know, playing that out.
You know, Obama has seemed at times the reluctant warrior in sort of the way that, you know, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara seemed the reluctant warrior.
But in actual fact, he hasn't been particularly reluctant to go to war.
And, you know, you've had, there was a piece in PolitiFact a couple weeks ago where they were testing a reporter's claim that Obama had bombed more countries than George W. Bush, and they rated it true.
In fact, he had, but they couldn't settle on a precise number because there's this sentence in the piece that both presidents may have bombed the Philippines.
We're not sure.
And one of the reasons we're not sure is because of the baffling interpretation of the 2001 AUMF under which the administration feels privileged to keep from the American people the actual list of groups that were at war with the associated forces.
If you read Nick Turse about the SOCOM and the Joint Special Operations Command running around Africa, there's no way to know what the real number of countries they've bombed is, but it's a lot more than six or seven.
In fact, when Carl Levin at an Armed Services hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in 2013, asked the Pentagon personnel, asked the Pentagon spokesman for a list of the associated forces, you know, are we at war with al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, you know, who are the groups on the list?
He was told, well, we could maybe give you a list, but you can't share it with anyone because the explanation later was that it could be a threat to national security because by letting it be known publicly that some of these groups were on the list, they could build credibility, you know, streak cred among other jihadis, and that in itself would bolster their threat to the United States.
So you've got a situation where, you know, they talk about secret laws, the secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that we learned about from Edward Snowden, but, you know, we've essentially got secret wars.
We've got an archipelago of secret drone bases being built up in the Middle East and Africa, and we've got a host of groups that were engaged in special forces operations and drone strikes against, and we're not allowed to know who these groups are.
You'd think this would be the, you know, the core area of debate.
You know, if anything is conceived, Madison said that in no part of the Constitution was more wisdom to be found than in the clause that gives the powers of war and peace to the legislator, not the legislature and not the executive.
Yeah, now that's why we'll have to pick this up on the other side of this story, because on that very point, it's Gene Healy, vice president at Cato.org.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Tomorrow, Eric Margulies will be here to talk about some Iraq war history.
Stephen Zunis on Israel-Palestine, and on Wednesday, Andrew Coburn will be here.
I'm always talking with his brother, Patrick, about the wars, but Andrew has a new piece all about the A-10 and the B-1 and the military-industrial complex and the economics of politics, as Anakin Skywalker calls it.
Oh, wait.
No, I guess I was Obi-Wan Kenobi.
No, I was Anakin.
Anyway, this is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Gene Healy, and so the economics of the politics of constitutional war powers.
That's where we left off this conversation, and I really like the way you go through it in the article and really explain.
We have plenty of time for you to explain just how bad these guys are at trying to make up their excuses for going around the Constitution the way they do.
America goes to war, and Congress goes on an early summer vacation to just let the President decide.
The President, who's at his lowest approval rating ever.
The President that nobody considers to represent them any longer, very few, and yet the Congress just says, hey, go ahead.
Under what all theories?
Because there are a few.
Gene, could you please explain?
Sure.
What Obama wants to avoid, because he's not George W. Bush, supposedly, he wants to avoid the outright deciderist theory, the John Yoo-style theory where these decisions are for the President alone to make as a matter of inherent executive power.
Ironically, even though Bush maintained that he was not required to get congressional authorization, he got congressional authorization for both major wars of the Bush administration.
But Obama doesn't want to be seen to be advancing a constitutional theory under which, essentially, I can do whatever I want.
But what he does, I think, is in many ways more embarrassing.
I give John Yoo the credit for saying openly, I believe that the Constitution means the President has the right to start wars whenever he thinks it's a good idea.
Obama's never going to cop to that charge.
So instead, he and his administration go on a search for authorizations from past Congresses, and they take old AUMFs, old authorizations for the use of military force, specifically the 2001 authorization passed three days after September 11th, and they're also keeping alive the 2002 Iraq War resolution for the current fight against ISIS.
And they really have to waterboard these authorizations to torture any kind of argument for a new war out of them.
In the case of the 2002 Iraq War resolution, the thing is titled, Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq.
The preamble to the resolution is full of, as you'd expect, references to Saddam Hussein, resolutions of mass destruction, and UN Security Council resolutions.
The operative clause of that resolution is about the continuing threat posed by Iraq, i.e. the Iraqi government.
Well, the Iraqi government, the new Iraqi government, the Shiite-led ramshackle government that we helped set up, is part of our coalition of the willing in this operation against ISIS.
It's not a war against Iraq, it's a war in Iraq and Syria against a different enemy, you know, 11 years or so after the war against Saddam Hussein.
And similarly, they're really relying a lot on the 2001 AUMF, which the further you get away from September 11th, the worse that language seems to fit anybody that we're fighting now, particularly ISIS.
You know, one of the major problems with trying to shoehorn ISIS into the 2001 AUMF is that the language of that resolution is aimed at the perpetrators of 9-11 and anyone who harbored them.
Well, they've been excommunicated by core al-Qaeda, they're not harboring them, they're most of them, many of them are too young to have been involved in any way, shape, or form with September 11th.
But the administration is, you know, you kind of have to tease this out, but the longest statement we have of their legal theory is by an unidentified, unnamed senior administration official who told the New York Times that, paraphrasing again here, but something to the effect that because a lot of people in the broader world of jihadism think that ISIS is the legitimate heir to Osama bin Laden's legacy, and because we think they represent a threat, we have all the authority we need for a new war 12-some years later against a group that didn't exist on September 11th.
That's really quite a stretch, and you wonder what the, you know, would it be any worse?
It might actually be better if they owned up to their actual legal theory, which is we can do what we want when we think there's a threat to U.S. national security or to our political viability.
Right.
Well, and back to what Obama pretends some of the time about how, no, we're not at war with any Sunni with a rifle.
That basically is the real policy.
Any time you got a Sunni with a rifle somewhere, we can go bomb.
Now, I don't know if they could extend this as far as bombing Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, who are Shia and who are pro-Iran and who are sworn enemies of al-Qaeda or not, but certainly if a jihadi goes from where Obama backed him in Libya on over into Mali and hijacks the poor Tuaregs' rebellion there, then that's fine.
He can intervene against them, I guess, and, I mean, in that case, they did send special forces and help the French in limited ways with their invasion of the south, at least, so.
Yeah.
Well, that one didn't even make the news, Gene.
Yeah.
They've essentially turned the 2001 AUMF into a permanent delegation of war powers to the President, and the Pentagon has said quite openly that we see this going on for 10 to 20 more years.
Like I said in the piece, that means this could be the basis for President Chelsea Clinton's kill list in 2033.
You've got a legal theory that's completely divorced from the actual language of the authorization, and one that they're telling us will be operative for now up to 20 years.
Yeah.
And, you know, underlying it all, a refusal to admit that anything that they've done really has led us to this place.
I mean, the closest you can get to that is some Democrats defending Obama by saying, no, it's Bush's fault in a partisan way.
But you do not have the national security state or the news really in general saying, what have we learned about how we got here, and how might we be careful about how we do this right this time, at least, right?
You don't even have any reflection at all, because nobody can admit it, because they're all guilty as hell of the same damn idiocy that got us into this mess.
And so just go right on like history began on June the 4th or 5th.
Well, he may have ended up with the Democratic nomination in 2008 because he wasn't in the Senate to vote for the Iraq war, and because as a state senator, he made that speech against quote unquote, dumb wars like Iraq.
Well, his legacy with these expanded, you know, boundless interpretations of past authorizations for the use of military force, his legacy is essentially creating a legal theory that allows him and future presidents to fight as many dumb wars as they like.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and they just keep doing it.
And as you say here, yeah, quoting Lang, the self-licking ice cream cone, or I like, well, I won't ruin the article's punchline, everyone go read it, the forever war of President Obama's transformational war powers legacy.
But yeah, they can just keep creating enemies ad infinitum.
And again, even as the president himself admits that, you know, that's how we got here to a certain degree, he concedes it.
He just keeps right on.
So, yeah, I don't know what else to say.
It's a it's a heck of a mess.
Well, you know what?
Back to the legality for a second.
And we got about, you know, I don't know, I forget if it's a half a minute or a minute and a half here, Gene, for you to comment.
But back to the point about the lawlessness of the declaration of war, that really just goes to the overall major problem of empire and the lawlessness of the government in general.
If they can lawlessly get us into a major war, they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want.
What can't they do?
If they can do this, which everything else is less than this.
You mentioned Congress heading out of town, you know, and it made me think of Speaker Boehner, who says, you know, this shouldn't be done by a lame duck Congress.
We may need ground troops, but let's not be in a hurry to vote about it.
Meanwhile, the same Speaker Boehner, who sees unprecedented lawlessness in Obama, you know, delaying the imposition of the employer mandate and is suing the president for not implementing portions of the law that the GOP views as socialism.
You know, he thinks that this is the end of the republic, but we're in no hurry to vote on the most important thing that the Constitution gives the Congress responsibility for, war and peace.
It's a pretty sad situation.
Yeah, that's what Chalmers Johnson named his third book there in the trilogy, Nemesis.
It's a republic or empire, but it just can't be both.
And we're living it every day.
I'll tell you.
Well, thanks very much, Gene, for your time.
It's great to have you back on.
All right, so that's Gene Healy.
He's vice president of the Cato Institute.
Thank goodness for that.
The cult of the presidency, America's dangerous devotion to executive power is his latest at Cato.org and it's a spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for listening.
We're all over time and got to go.
See you all tomorrow.
Hey, all, Scott Horton here.
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