01/19/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's our friend Sheldon Richmond.
He's the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation and the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
Hey, Sheldon, how are you, man?
I'm doing fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing very good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
It's been way too long, but you write about a lot of interesting things other than foreign policy.
And so I read you, but I don't always interview you.
But so very important article here.
We're running as the spotlight today on antiwar.com, a really good piece of work put together here.
The Open Society and Its Worst Enemies, and this is the goal of this freedom column from last Friday.
So I guess, you know, to start us off here, I think I want to bring up this Patrick Coburn article.
I don't think it quite matters if you read the very last one I read or not, because you know what he has to say about this stuff.
He's describing the rise of jihadi terrorism across seven or more countries in North Africa and in the Middle East right now.
And we see the Islamic State with now tens of thousands of fighters.
And it seems like since history always just began yesterday or today, that we kind of have a problem regardless of even if you would argue Bush and Obama got us into this mess.
There's a huge problem of, you know, Bin Ladenite and Caliph Ibrahimite loyal jihadi militias all across North Africa and the Middle East.
And so what should be done about it?
I mean, if Coburn is saying that much is true, I think you and I can pretty much take that much for granted.
But so what do we do, Sheldon?
Seriously?
Well, the question that's relevant to the article is how much of that is going to come to the West.
If stuff's going on over there, it's not the problem that I'm addressing in that piece.
My piece was how can we in the West maintain our more and less open societies?
They're not nearly as open as you and I would like, but they're certainly somewhat open.
I mean, you still can pretty much publish and say what you want, and you ask more so than, say, France.
So how can we maintain that as well as have the government vigilant against jihadis coming or Islamists coming from, or even self-radicalized, they don't need to have gone over there.
But how are we going to guard against events such as, you know, Sharmi Abdo or the hostage taking and murders in the grocery in Paris?
So my point was you can't have an open society and a foreign policy that provokes enemies because the government will use that provocation to then curtail civil liberties here at home in the name of, and a lot of people will go for it for that reason, in the name of making sure, you know, Sharmi Abdo incidents don't happen.
So what we need to do is disengage, I think you agree with me on this, disengage from Syria, Iraq, and those other places over there, and at least reduce the threat that people are going to get angry and come over here, or that people here will be self-radicalized, as they put it, and do something bad.
I don't know that we can fully, you know, guarantee it will never happen.
I'm not sure the genie, you know, the genie's out of the lamp.
I'm not sure you can put the genie back.
There are people with scores to settle, and they still might feel that way even if we announced a credible non-interventionist foreign policy tomorrow, some people, I think, will still have, you know, scores to settle in their mind.
And so, you know, but I think typical normal police work can handle that without a surveillance state and all the other bad things that you and I complain about all the time.
So, yeah, I mean, it seems like even in that Coburn article where he describes, you know, just how huge these movements have become, at the end he still says, jeez, I don't know, maybe ask the Turks to close the border with Syria.
He still is not recommending a...
And he's not a hardcore anti-interventionist, I guess.
He's just a journalist, right?
He tries not to have too many of those kind of opinions of those broader things.
So he'd be willing, I think, maybe even to say, yeah, go ahead and bomb him if he actually thought so.
It seems like that sometimes.
But he's not saying that here.
He seems to think, well, he seems to say, well, you know, we can all tell that it's been our policy that's made it this way over the last dozen years, where when bin Laden, at the time George Bush let bin Laden escape into Pakistan, he brought a couple of dozen guys with him.
The rest had already been exploded by the Air Force.
That was all they had was a couple of dozen guys.
Right.
Well, right.
I think if you look at the whole picture, certainly since 9-11-2001, it doesn't say much for the logic of the Bush-Cheney approach to all this and basically Obama approach.
As far as bombing, if they're concerned about self-radicalization and lone wolves, a stepped up bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq certainly can't be counted on to make things any better.
It's just going to accelerate and aggravate the very situation that we've identified.
But of course, you know, the establishment can't acknowledge that the problem is U.S. foreign policy.
I mean, occasionally they do.
I mean, you're fond of quoting that Petraeus testimony, which got him in trouble.
And Max Boot, I guess, bailed him out of it when he when he acknowledged that our support for Israel kills Americans.
But how many people have the courage to say that?
It won't even get discussed on the cable television shows.
I mean, I watch enough of these things.
I don't know why.
I guess I hope one day I'll tune in and there will actually be a discussion.
They can't even acknowledge.
They won't bring anybody on to say, you know, as Ron Paul put it to Giuliani back then in 2008, they're over here because we're over there or they may be over here because we're over there.
You don't find anybody to say that.
I mean, yeah, even Ron Paul is saying bomb them.
That's it.
In fact, he was asked, so you still want bombing because it seems to just make matters worse.
And he says, no, I'm still for it.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you're right.
There's nobody in politics leading in politics who who are who is taking this position in politics or Paul.
It takes either.
There's just right.
There's a former congressman there.
I want to give credit to the only bright spot I can think of right now, and that's Eamon Moyadin, the the correspondent in he's been in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East for NBC.
And then he was stateside for a week or two and they would have him on like morning Joe.
And he was the only one saying this.
He actually was saying this kind of thing, not as hard or, you know, as firmly as he might have.
But he was he was pretty good, certainly compared to everybody else.
Like, you know, Richard, who's the head of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Hots.
Yeah.
You know, that typical lineup.
And there was a man saying some really good things.
So I give him credit.
Now they sent him back to the Middle East.
Maybe they wanted to figure he won't be able to say that so much if he's there.
But I don't know.
But it's just incredible how this is lacking from the public discussion.
Right.
And, you know, actually, that Daily Beast piece about Rand Paul, they've got it right.
The premise of the question is right.
Hey, Rand, the air war isn't working.
It's making matters worse, apparently.
And so there's a little bit of a crack in the narrative, but just barely.
But I think that we ought to be able to rest assured that these Al Qaeda guys and ISIS guys have proven that they're such bastards, that they will not have.
And they rule pretty crappy territory, too.
They will not have the ability to rule for long, to stay in power for long.
They're much more likely to burn themselves out if we stay out just from a utilitarian view.
But anyway, back in a sec.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show, guys.
I'm online with Sheldon Richman.
We're talking about his piece about the open society and its enemies.
War being the health of the state and all.
So, yeah, I don't know, man, Sheldon, I guess.
So right wingers point of view on what it sounds like you're saying is just surrender to the bad guys that we can't win.
And so we ought to just let them win, because otherwise they might shoot up a mall or something.
Well, it's not ours to win.
Here we are now mired in a very complicated situation in the Middle East, Iraq and Syria in particular, but other places.
Part of it is the the old Shia Sunni controversy, but it's not I don't think it's only that.
I think there are other things.
I think there are political and ideological disputes going on within the various camps.
I mean, I do believe it's very complicated.
I don't know if it's going to burn itself out the way some people think or whether it's very strong the way I guess Patrick has said.
It's interesting.
You've had guests on who take various sides of that question, and that's interesting.
I'm not qualified to say whether ISIS is going to burn itself out soon and there'll be a bottom up awakening or not.
I mean, I just don't know.
But but I think, you know, that's far away from us.
And it only gets closer to us when we're involved.
And again, it's the Ron Paul position.
We can't solve these problems, certainly not with bombing.
And, you know, and drones and other things which has so alienated people.
I mean, we know that the Paris actors were radicalized by Abu Ghraib and other things.
So do we want more of that?
That just doesn't seem the way the way to go here.
So it shouldn't be a question of, you know, who's going to win over there, us or them, because it's not ours to win.
I don't see how we we quote we can win.
However, you'd want to find we, you know, that's a big area with a lot of people and a lot of old fights going on.
And how the heck do we think how presumptuous that you have to be to think you can venture into that and solve those problems and bring about, you know, liberal democracy?
I mean, it's it just sounds totally crazy.
And I don't think it's being done out of an honest motive that they can actually win this.
I think the U.S. wants the best it can manage it because it's interested in resources and it's interested in hegemony to keep others from being hegemonic.
And of course, it's interested in Israel, which wants to maintain its dominant position.
So all those things, I think, are going into it.
The idea that somehow the U.S. can win it.
I don't really think that's on the minds of the policymakers.
All right now.
So you talked about this earlier, the the threat of, well, obviously, there's people who don't even have to travel there in the first place.
But what about battle hardened Syrian war vets?
I mean, this is the guys who have done the Syrian civil war and the Libyan war before that.
The guys on the ground, they were the Iraq war vets made in in Bush's last, you know, Hell's Kitchen over there kind of thing.
And so now we have thousands of veterans of the Syrian war, at least, let's say, hundreds and hundreds with Western European passports.
And I mean, what's the best we have is like the French national police and intelligence services, our allies, the Turks and, you know, whatever other national police and spies in Europe to keep these guys, you know, from from coming into France and the rest of Western Europe to keep them from getting visas to the United States.
Who are we counting on to track these guys for us and prevent them from coming back and and doing more of these attacks?
And you can see how they kill 17 people.
They might as well have killed 3000.
They pretend, you know, the government's pretend it was September 11th all over again for 17 people dying, as Patrick Coburn says, playing right into their hands, of course, with the overreaction.
But it seems like there's a lot of chaos to come and who the hell is going to stop them after our side, the U.S. and the West, our allies have been backing the jihad in Syria for the last three years leading up to this thing.
So for now.
Right, well, so it goes back to my the first one of the earlier things I said, we want to certainly minimize that danger by announcing a new policy and incredibly implementing it.
In other words, get the hell out of there.
That would make the I think the U.S. less of a target by by some of those guys who would desire to come over.
But the question is, then the one I pose in the article, I mean, the title of the open society and its worst enemies is a play, of course, on Karl Popper's two volume book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
So I was drawing attention to its foreign policy.
The foreign policy makers are the greatest enemies because they make they make enemies for us.
And then we have to worry about them.
And then and then people are willing to accept civil liberties violations because we have to guard against these enemies, the very people you're referring to.
So, you know, how much do we want a police state?
Because somebody may be able to sneak in even then you're not going to it's not going to happen.
No government is that competent to make sure no bad person ever ever sneaks in or or gets in on a visa, you know, who who otherwise would have been caught.
They're never going to be perfect.
So, you know, are we willing to just give up our security and our privacy because of this?
And I'm not I know a lot of other people who are not.
And again, let's work on minimizing it by changing our foreign policy.
But that's not even on the table.
Right.
Changing our foreign policy is not even an item of discussion.
So all the all of it's going to be in how much civil liberties violations are we willing to accept?
And look what they're doing in in in France.
I mean, France had that great march.
I know you've had comments about this already.
They had the great march on behalf of free expression.
And the next day they arrest 54 people, including a comedian who may be a nasty guy and say nasty things.
But he's just saying he's just saying things.
Do we want that or are we going to be driven to that sort of policy?
And I, you know, a lot of people I know are standing up.
They don't have the forum, but we're standing up and saying, hell, no, we don't want to give up our liberties in the name of protecting us from the very enemies you created.
Let's stop creating the enemy.
Right.
Well, you know, Robert Pape was on the show.
This is, I think, as close as we can get to the influence on the policy from our side is Pape has explained that, you know, he has an audience at the Pentagon, at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I'm sure not at AEI, but, you know, at some of these places.
And apparently he has gotten it through their thick skull.
I think even he said he talked to the National Security Council that ground troops is the thing that really causes the enemy.
But then and he's also written about the how air power is is basically good for nothing as well.
But I think, you know, it's sort of taken the place and it's sort of convinced them that, yeah, well, we'll just bomb them from the air and then that won't generate the terrorists for us or whatever.
When, you know, that that's not really the point.
The point is ground forces are worse.
Not that drone strikes are great, you know, but that's as close as we can get that and another CISPA and another Patriot Act and another, you know, decade of Guantanamo and NDAA.
Well, you know, I don't I don't know how this actually plays out.
I wonder what people would say about this.
I admire his work, but it seems like ground troops would draw draw jihadis to the places where the ground troops are.
Right.
So if you have ground, I'm not advocating ground troops.
I'm just trying to trace the logic.
If you have them in Syria or Iraq, then the jihadis can say, you know, hey, let's go kill Americans.
Let's go to Iraq or Syria.
But if it's from the air and if it's drones, they can't kill Americans.
So they may then think, hey, let's go over there.
Let's go to their home, you know, their home court and inflict some damage.
So.
But the problem is, is that if you have the ground troops there, then, yeah, it's an easier target.
But you're also recruiting that many more of them.
So at best, you're putting off the consequences, you know.
Well, yeah, maybe.
I mean, like I said, I wasn't I wasn't advocating ground troops over.
No, I know.
When you say better, it depends on what your standard of better is.
Why does me?
I think the point is that ground troops make some matter.
Ground troops is seems to indicate that, no, they really mean to change our entire way of life, you know, rather than just we hate them for killing us, which already makes people pretty damn mad.
Pape, of course, spends his full time studying this stuff.
So far be it from me to to be skeptical of it.
But it just it just I just wonder whether air power is that much, quote, better in the respect he's talking about it.
I mean, if I if I lived in a village and, you know, every day there are jets or drones coming by and every once in a while they they wipe out a block of homes or something, I would I would I wouldn't be too loving of the of the car.
Country of origination, even though there weren't ground troops.
So I don't know exactly how you measure, you know, which which they hate more ground troops or or air power.
I don't know.
My my focus is on can we have a free and open society if if we're doing that stuff?
And my answer is no.
You know, maybe years ago you could, but not with cheap transportation now or the Internet where you can have self radicalization.
Maybe in the 19th century you could have an empire and it not wouldn't come home so forcefully.
But I don't I think those days are gone.
Yeah.
No, that's a very important point.
You know, I keep thinking of that, but I never say it.
But you just reminded me again, there's the old onion book, Our Dumb Century, where each page is a headline from each year of the 20th century, you know, and right around 1901 or 1902 or something like that.
It's Zulu's East Queen at Spearpoint.
And it's all about the the African pygmies with their spears sacking London and and taking the queen hostage and all of this stuff.
And it just goes to show, you know, the inequity and the power in the war there and how how safe the English really are back at home while they're bringing all this violence to people, you know, in the farthest reaches of Africa, that kind of thing.
But that is exactly what is no longer true.
As you said, that's something that these guys are having a real hard time getting through their head, that it's that easy.
And that's why they killed Al-Aulaqi.
I don't think he was really running Al-Qaeda over there, but man, he was making some YouTubes that were scaring the crap out of D.C. because that's all it takes now to get in some guy's head.
And then you see how easy it is to kill a few people with an AK-47, you know.
And in fact, I think you and I've talked about this for years about in Somalia, where we've had all these Somalis who have gone or Somali Americans who've gone from Minneapolis, where there's a huge population of Somali Americans and there's been a dozen or two even that have gone to Somalia to fight.
And it's so easy to just consider, you know, not that I'm trying to give them ideas or whatever, but it's pretty obvious that they could just stay here and fight.
And you know what I mean?
They got the supreme symbolic target, too, with that mall.
That's as far as the economic target and all that.
So, you know, I think we've gotten off extremely lucky.
If it's just a matter of time before we have enough of these lone wolves or very small cells of guys infiltrating and coming here and hitting soft targets, you know what I mean?
Well, I hope not.
You know, they still say the the chances of being a victim of that sort of thing is very small.
Well, the cops want to take credit, but they don't get it.
They've only busted maybe one or two actual terrorists this whole time.
And the only one I can think of is Zazi, the Denver cab driver.
The rest of them all got away with at least trying their attack, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, look, it's it's not it's definitely something that should be on our minds.
But once again, you know, are we willing to give up our freedom?
We have left.
I mean, let's not fool ourselves.
We don't have a fully open society, especially since 9-11 with with indefinite detention and all the spying and the stuff that Snowden let us know about.
So we've already traveled down that road.
Do we want to keep going down that road?
Because, again, we're afraid people are going to come over here.
But I don't believe there are people who ever would have dreamed of coming over here for that purpose if it were not for Bush and Cheney and, you know, that whole string of misleaders that followed up to the present day.
And by the way, you know, for everybody listening, just so you know, at worst, I'm playing devil's advocate here, you know, I totally agree.
I'm just obviously the solution is to end all the intervention.
But I just want to to at least try to, you know, set up the argument where we're addressing the real world.
We're not, you know, downplaying either, you know, numbers or intentions or anything like that on the part of these guys, you know, in the first place, because I think the problem is much worse than it was when Obama inherited it from Bush.
And at that point, it was a thousand times worse than it was after September 11th.
So, yeah, that's right.
I mean, you know, originally you had a few guys, a few hundred guys or whatever it was in in Afghanistan and some perhaps over the border there over the Durand line in Pakistan.
And now look where it is.
You have franchises popping up all over the place and worse than that because you have, you know, organizations which are broken off and have been condemned by the by the original organization, namely ISIS.
And how is that any better than what Bush faced on December on September 11th, 2001?
It's not.
He just he just dispersed it and made it larger and made people more angry at us.
You'll still hear people say today, yeah, but they attacked us on 9-11 and we hadn't done anything.
Yeah, yeah, that was when the war started.
Everybody knows that.
Didn't you see the footage?
Clear blue sky, clear blue sky.
That's all you need to know.
OK, all right.
Thanks very much, Sheldon.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show and putting up with me.
My pleasure, Scott.
Anytime.
OK.
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