12/12/14 – Andrew Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Haven't I told you guys a hundred times you ought to read Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew Coburn?
Yeah, of course I have.
I quote it all the time.
I quote him all the time.
It's such a great book, and there's one very important point.
Well, that stands out to me that I always go back to, and that is, Andrew, your phraseology in the book that the neoconservative movement is really where the Israel Lobby meets the American military-industrial complex.
I guess the bankers and the oil men, they already had their council on foreign relations, but all the arms manufacturers, they needed a few of their own, and so they made a deal with the Israel Lobby to create all these think tanks and lie us into war all the time.
Is that about it?
That's about it, yeah.
Welcome back to the show.
How's that for an introduction?
You got it right.
The Israel Lobby traditionally was like kind of a peacenik on everything except Israel, like they were anti-Vietnam and so forth, and there actually was a gentleman called Paul Nitzer, who was one of the great cold warriors who saw in the 1970s if you could put the Israel Lobby together with the defense lobby, you were home free, because then you'd have the Israel Lobby weighing in, and in fact, it worked so well within a few short years, the Anti-Defamation League was saying that to criticize the defense budget was anti-Semitic.
That's funny.
Just because so many people from the Israel Lobby and the neoconservative movement, they just had such a lock on that point of view that we must increase defense spending at all times.
It was perceived to be a Jewish point of view, at least if you dared to disagree with it, right?
Well, that's right.
They were on the payroll, like Paul Wolfowitz was.
He was pulling down a lot of big money from Hughes Aircraft, I remember.
Rumsfeld had defense stocks all over the place.
So as usual, it all came down to money.
Right on.
So, yeah, I was really reminded of that, and people can go.
Again, the book is Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, and there's so much stuff in there, guys.
Just trust me, go get it.
Now, the brand new one is for Harper's Magazine, and I guess I could have figured out what exactly your title is there.
Could you tell me?
Game on.
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, I meant you.
You're a contributing editor.
Oh, right, my title.
No, I'm Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
Washington editor, that's the term I was searching for there, Harper's Magazine.
And, yes, Game on, East vs.
West, again, and this is in the January issue, correct?
Correct, yeah, but you can get it now.
I mean, you can get it online now, at least, and you can subscribe and get all sorts of good things, yeah.
Okay, great.
So that's, again, harpers.org and your local book stand.
Game on, East vs.
West, again, The Rise of the New Cold War.
There's a brand new article today in Newsweek about Mikhail Gorbachev complaining about the rise of the new Cold War and just how unnecessary it all is and just how much it's all America's fault, which is hardly disputable at all.
But you really do us a great service in this article, Andrew, in the way that you go back to the end of the Cold War and the very tough position that the military-industrial complex found itself in and what they set about to do about it.
Well, right.
I mean, it was terrible.
They'd lost the enemy.
They'd lost the hand that fed them for so many years, which was the Soviet threat, the Russian bear that was going to invade and take over Europe and the rest of the world, and that's why we had to go on spending billions and billions to fend that off.
And suddenly, no Soviet threat.
What to do?
So what they did was they, you know, the Cold War was meant to be over, but they set to work to get it going again.
If you remember, there was a very nice period of around 1990, 1991 when we all thought the Cold War was over, you know, and Russia was our friend and we were demobilizing and taking nuclear weapons out of Europe and, you know, the Russians were moving out of Eastern Europe and we were all going to be friends.
But then suddenly we start hearing, we won the Cold War and we've got to keep Russia down and we have to move NATO eastward.
And that was the initiative.
That was the guarantee that sooner or later you would have renewed tension and confrontation.
And, you know, guess what?
The guy very much running that after a while was a vice president of the Lockheed Martin Defense Corporation, the biggest in the world, Bruce Jackson, who set up and ran the committee to expand NATO.
I mean, it was all presented as some highfalutin exercise in diplomacy, but really it was to the benefit of the Lockheed Corporation and others like them.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I never can quite put my finger on exactly how this goes.
I talked with John Mearsheimer on the show after he wrote his article for Foreign Affairs saying it was the Americans who picked this fight.
And his point of view is that intellectuals with their doctrines picked this fight because they believe that, you know, what Bill Clinton calls free markets and democracy, right, not what Murray Rothbard would call free markets, but the American empire version of spreading our goodness to the world, you know, the end of history kind of thing, that just this ideology of American goodness and that, of course, expanding the EU means, of course, expanding NATO and just keep on expanding it.
And it comes, like, with this kind of unbearable lightness of being a public policy intellectual and that it has so very little to do with Lockheed or very little to do with hating Russia and wanting to destroy it or any kind of thing like that.
He talks about it like it's almost a schoolboy naivete, which he sounds the same way himself as he describes it.
So I wonder just how much of that is at play.
Is it really just, you know, these PhD smart guys?
I disagree with him a bit.
I mean, he's right in a way.
There were some sort of firebrand intellectuals, if that isn't a tautology, between, you know, there was a guy called Ron Asmus who's dead now, but he was like a big proponent and he pushed very hard and lobbied in the bureaucracy quite effectively for expanding NATO.
And he, by all accounts, was a kind of a true believer.
But most of them, I think, people don't do.
I don't, you know, as we've discussed before, I don't really believe there is such a thing as foreign policy ever.
You know, it's always some personal or, you know, general domestic political advantage.
You know, Bill Clinton pushed for NATO expansion.
And, you know, if you ask the people who, you know, the officials, they'll say, oh, well, it's because he was convinced of the rightness of the cause and Vaclav Havel, you know, begged him to do it.
No, Bill Clinton saw that if he'd have a much better chance of winning Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin in 2006, or his chances, you know, would be improved by some measurable amount if he, you know, made things, made nice to the Polish emigre community, the Polish community in those states, which is quite a significant block.
And so they were all hot for expanding NATO and having Poland in NATO and ditto with the Czechs and some of the others.
So he was in favor of expanding NATO.
I think that's why things happen, really.
Call me cynical.
But, you know, Mearsheimer, I mean, I have a lot of respect for John Mearsheimer.
And, you know, I agree with a lot of what he said on this issue.
But he definitely believes that, you know, that states have a foreign policy.
I don't think so.
I think politicians have foreign policy, and they do it, whatever it is, to their own advantage.
Right.
Yeah, well, and, in fact, in the article, the way you relate that anecdote is it's Brzezinski, who is the closest thing we supposedly have to one of these, you know, old greybeards, selfless, you know, brilliant, old enough to not be self-interested in any way kind of statesman or whatever the hell.
And he was the one who said you're going to lose Polish votes.
That was the way he put it to Bill.
That's right.
You know, and it's obviously good for Brzezinski if he's, you know, a big player.
And maybe, I guess, there's a bit of, you know, emotion in there, too.
He's a sort of fanatical Polish nationalist.
So that probably gets him in.
I'm sure that came into play.
But, yeah, you know, that's the way it worked.
You know, Bruce Jackson will tell you, and he certainly told me with an absolutely straight face, that he's pushing, you know, his work to expand NATO was purely, you know, disinterested of public service.
He thought it was the right thing for Europe and had to keep America.
It was really a way of warding off American isolationists.
All right.
The consequences on the other side of this break with Andrew Coburn from Harper's.org.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm with Andrew Coburn about Lockheed's foreign policy, NATO expansion.
And, you know, it's funny.
I think Richard Cummings wrote about Bruce Jackson years ago in a great piece for Playboy.com, and he quoted him talking just the same way you've got him here, Andrew, saying, oh, no, man, I really just believe in the beauty of NATO expansion.
It has nothing to do with my affiliation with Lockheed at all, except NATO expansion, in essence, means standardize your Air Force with our Air Force with Lockheed products, and that's basically all it means, right?
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
And go on, you know, and you've got to go on buying our spare parts forever and ever, and, you know, you bankrupt yourselves in the process.
Yeah, that was the main point of NATO expansion.
And it was also to stop the Germans getting any ideas about, you know, becoming any kind of leading an independent Europe.
And there was talk for a while, wasn't there, about an EU army?
I remember Thatcher denouncing it and saying, no, we have an alliance with the Americans, and that comes first, and the rest of y'all should know.
Right.
I mean, the Americans were always very keen to put us, always made sure that didn't happen, because a European army, European defense force means a European weapons procurement, means them buying European much more than they do now, and not buying American.
That's, you know, that's what it all comes down to.
That's why, you know, it's very important to keep NATO in there and keep NATO, you know, ruling the roost as far as defense and weapons buying is concerned.
And then you talk about how in 1999 when they went to war with Serbia for Kosovo, for the Kosovo Liberation Army, let's go ahead and be specific, that the whole attitude there of, you know, just F Russia, it doesn't matter what they think or anything like that.
It seems to me like at least some of these guys would pose as one of these so-called, you know, gray-beard types who can think beyond next week and wonder, well, what is this going to mean for our relationship with Russia?
When at the time there was a little bit of talk about, you know, they had their NATO-Russia council and they were trying to pretend that it was, or maybe they were being realistic.
It's about Polish votes and airplanes.
It's not so much about continuing the Cold War with you guys.
It just looks like it.
But then they go and wage this war and on top of all the NATO expansion and all the arms sales and all that kind of thing, it just seems amazing that, I mean, was there no one?
No one up there is any smarter than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish nationalist.
No one up there is willing to say, now wait a minute, there's airplane sales and re-election funds and everything, but there's also the future history of mankind here, and we're not going to throw away the end of the Cold War just for some F-16 sales.
Come on.
Yeah, well, it's true.
It is always amazing how irresponsible and sort of shallow they are, that they really, you know, these, you know, we've all been growing up, you know, we've spent years and years now sort of dumping on the Bush people and subsequently Obama, but let's not forget the culpability of the Clinton administration.
They were the ones, Madeleine Albright and, you know, her buddies were the ones who really pushed us into, you know, pushed the U.S. and Europe into this war in Kosovo, which was what really convinced the Russians that, hey, the Cold War is not over.
They're out to get us, and you can really date the real sort of hardening of Russian attitudes from that point on, and everything that happened since has only gone to reinforce that.
I will say that in Georgia, when we were sort of like heedlessly encouraging this maniac in charge that was in charge in Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili, to like provoke the Russians and, you know, we would say we were going to let him into, indicating that we were going to let him into NATO.
Condoleezza Rice went to Tbilisi and sort of said, we stand by our allies, and he then starts a war with Russia.
At that point, common sense did prevail.
They said, wait a minute, we're not going to have World War III over this, and, you know, pulled back and didn't reinforce him.
But, you know, that was a bit late in the day.
Yeah, well, it's credibly reported that Dick Cheney did call for strikes, but that Bush said, who agrees with the vice president?
Okay, thanks, Dick.
But he did want to, you know, say Bush had hit his head a little harder on that table when he ate that pretzel or something.
Cheney would have gone ahead and taken the opportunity to get into a war with Russia in 2008, apparently.
Right, and the Russians, you know, I mean, I've heard this subsequent to writing the article that the Russians were convinced, they expected the Americans, maybe, you know, NATO to take action.
But it was so important to them to, you know, to deal with that situation in the Caucasus that they went ahead.
So we came nearer to war, possibly nearer to war at that point than people realized.
It was a very dangerous moment and really brought on by total irresponsibility.
Yeah, Cheney had a guy in Tbilisi.
I suppose I better not say who it was, but he had a trusted sort of national security aide.
No, go ahead and say who it was.
What?
Go ahead and say who it was.
Well, I believe it was a guy called Joe Wood, who was in Tbilisi at the time, who was, you know, at least this is the story I've heard, was encouraging Saakashvili to, you know, saying, don't worry, we'll back you up.
Saakashvili went ahead.
So, yeah, a very dangerous, scary moment that was.
Yeah, yeah, really incredible.
And, oh, I learned a couple of things there from you.
One of them on that particular issue in the article, one of them was that Bush and Stephen Hadley had personally warned Saakashvili in April of 2008, that spring, to not do this.
And then he went ahead anyway, made me wonder about that story, which was rumored back then in 2008, too, about a back channel to Cheney's guys that had encouraged him to go ahead and do it.
Right.
Well, it was all, I mean, Bush and Hadley at the Bucharest NATO conference, they say, don't do this.
You know, we're not going to go to war on your behalf.
Then in July, Condoleezza Rice went to Georgia.
Privately, she said to Saakashvili, hey, you know, don't do this.
You know, we really, you really mustn't start a war.
But in public, she gave a sort of public, you know, presentation, press conference, and she said, we stand by our allies.
Well, Saakashvili chose to believe that one rather than what she'd said to him in private.
It was like, you remember April Glaspie, you know, giving Saddam the idea, was it okay to invade Kuwait?
Well, this was Condoleezza Rice's Glaspie moment.
And so that's what Saakashvili wanted to believe.
And he had, you know, Cheney's guy egging him on.
And Cheney, I mean, as I think I say in the piece, Cheney was win-win.
I didn't say this in the piece, but this is what I believe.
Cheney, if, say, Georgia attacks Russia and by some miracle wins, well, that's great.
You know, we've humbled Russia.
If he loses, more likely, but then still great, because now Russia is exposed as this evil Goliath and great big bully crushing a small country.
Which was the entire, yeah, that was the entire narrative in that summer and fall and even during the presidential debate.
There was even a great moment where Tom Brokaw was hosting the debate between Obama and McCain, and McCain accused Russia of starting the war, and Obama went along with it.
And then you could tell, like, the body language, Brokaw making eye contact with the both of them in turn, and the decision kind of agreed upon that.
Okay, so we're going to go with that then.
Okay, fine.
And he's not going to dispute it, and we're just going to all three, for the purposes of this debate between presidential candidates, we're going to pretend that it was the Russians who started the war and not the Georgians.
And it was just kind of an amazing moment, because you could tell all three were lying, and all three knew they were lying, and all three were secretly lying in concert with each other, right there blatantly in front of everybody.
You know what I mean?
It was great.
Fantastic, yeah, yeah.
And then the New York Times admitted, oh yeah, you know what, we did get that wrong at the end of November 08, right, months later.
They go, oh, you know what, turns out it was Georgia after all started.
Yeah, exactly so.
But, you know, I mean, this is life and death we're talking about.
I mean, how incredibly irresponsible, just all down the line.
I remember Biden, you know, McCain, McCain was at the time, he was calling for armed intervention in Georgia, and I think Biden chimed in too.
I mean, it was like, you know, this scary tub thumping that goes on.
Right.
Well, now, so in our current situation, this is, of course, where the article begins, it's the news of the last year with the American-backed coup in Ukraine and then Russia's countermove in taking back the Crimean Peninsula for the Russian Federation there.
And, you know, I forget now if this was, this was right at the, this is recently, right, in the last couple of years where they had a big meeting with the military-industrial complex and they were absolutely euphoric, yeah, borderline euphoric about the current outbreak of tension here.
That's right.
It was just actually, it was just after, you know, the Russians took over Ukraine, Crimea, I mean.
And a friend of mine who's a lobbyist happened to be at a meeting, a fundraiser for Mike Rogers, who at least was at the time the chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
And I was talking to him the next day and I said, oh, what was it like?
And he said, well, most of the people there were defense-contracted lobbyists.
Well, it's not what my friend does, but he says, yeah, they were people there from the defense companies.
And I said, well, what was the mood?
And he said, oh, well, considering what's going on, I'd call it borderline euphoric.
They were just so happy that, you know, that the Cold War was, you know, was heating up again.
Scare the hell out of them, Harry.
Go out there and.
Right, because as I say in the piece, you know, things have been a bit bleak for the defense industry in the last year or so with this, you know, the hated sequester.
You know, the possibility which was, you know, threatened to cut the defense budget back to what it was in 2007 when we were actually fighting two wars.
And they just, you know, the thought of going back to that poultry level is completely unbearable for them.
So they're desperate, desperate for a way out of this.
Yeah.
So I like the Rockwell's idea.
He says we should pay all these people that all the government employees and all the defense contracts where we should all pay them a million dollars a year to just go on vacation to Bermuda.
Right.
You can't take it all away from them and they'll kill us all.
So just pay them to go on vacation and please leave us alone.
You know, that's an excellent idea.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Be quite good.
Yeah.
Let's, you know, let's, you know, the U.S. government won't pay ransom to terrorists, but we should.
Yeah, exactly.
And be rid of them once and for all.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for your time.
I've already kept you over time, but a great bit of work here again, as always.
OK.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Anytime.
Appreciate it.
All right.
So that's Andrew Coburn.
And the new piece is Game on East versus West.
Again, rise to the new Cold War here.
It's Andrew Coburn in Harper's magazine on your shelves and by subscription at their Web site, Harper's dot org.
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