01/22/15 – Peter Van Buren – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Peter Van Buren, former State Department employee and then whistleblower, author of We Meant Well, How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, writes for Tom Dispatch, and his latest book is Ghosts of Tom Jode.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back with you, as always.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important article that you wrote for Tom Dispatch.
We, of course, reprinted it under Tom's name here, as always, at antiwar.com.
The military industrial complex in Iraq.
America's open for business in Iraq.
Want to buy an M1 tank?
So now here's the thing.
Before we get into this article, I got to pick a fight with you.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm sure you do.
But just one or two articles ago, you came out in favor of America doing things in Iraq, and in a pretty severe way, I think.
Back in the Peshmerga, back in the Shiites, defeating the Islamic State one way or the other.
I was wondering, I know you mean well, but don't you know that that can't possibly be a solution to any of the problems going on in what used to be called Iraq before America got there right now?
To clarify a little bit, and then perhaps try to defend myself here, the, I had, I've constantly received emails and things that say, you know, you always are saying what's wrong.
When are you going to say how to fix things?
When are you going to offer a solution instead of just pointing out follies and mistakes?
And I gave that some serious thought.
With the premise, and so I wrote an article that said, the only thing America can do to, quote unquote, resolve Iraq, and I choose the word resolve, I don't say fix or win or any of those other things, it's resolve, is to support the division of the country into three statelets, Shia, Sunni, Kurd, and to use America's influence and military power to make that work, primarily by using the American military as kind of a buffer where it needs to be so that these people will sort of focus on their statelets rather than focusing on fighting each other.
The premise of that, which is saying American intervention is necessary, is really something that is coming out of the idea that the toothpaste is already out of the tube.
It's unlikely that America will do the real thing, which is to just back out and realize this is nothing we should be involved in.
But with the understanding that America is going to insist on doing something, what is the least bad thing we can do?
And that's the answer I came up with.
I want to clarify that I'm not in favor of intervention, and certainly anyone who's read most of my stuff would understand that.
But I did want to challenge myself and maybe challenge some readers to answer the question of if the people in power insist on doing something, what possibly could we do?
And that was the answer I came up with.
So take your best shot here.
All right.
Well, I mean, it sounds like from a skeptical point of view, you're actually proposing more American troops on the ground than anything that the president has indicated so far, or even John McCain.
Well, in the context of this, what I'll call a thought experiment, sure.
That's absolutely not what I believe should be done.
I believe the United States should pull out and leave Iraq, sadly, as we've left it, to solve these issues, resolve these issues on its own.
Again, what I was proposing was something of a thought experiment, starting from the premise that we're going to do something.
And if we're going to do something, what is one thing that might bring this to enough of a conclusion that even the nutcases in Washington would agree we can leave and call this one done?
Well, clearly, I am not knocking on John McCain's door with some advice.
Yeah, I get you.
Now, here's the thing about this.
Assuming the premise of them doing something, and never mind any of the moral arguments against it or any of that, but just from that kind of utilitarian view, it seems like if we just look at the history, we could see how, for example, after Sistani called for elections and the caucus system was off and it was clear it was going to be a one-man, one-vote Shiite majority there, the Americans still within the Shiite coalition insisted on picking, basically, Hakeem and his buddies, his closest buddies in the Dawah party, the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah party, because they dress nicer and were a little bit more, you know, could speak on a more Republican level than a scumbag like, say, Muqtada al-Assad or something like that.
And they ended up putting in power, not just the Shiite majority that may well have had to compromise if they didn't have the American Army and Marine Corps acting as their auxiliaries in a five-year civil war there, six-year civil war there, but they also promoted the actual most Iranian fact of the Shiites, who then were the ones who told the Americans to get the hell out, just as well as Sadr would have told them to get the hell out, only he would have told them to get the hell out sooner and he would have, as he indicated repeatedly, tried to negotiate a way to hold the state together and in some kind of coalition with the Sunnis.
And so what happened, in other words, is America, by being there, distorted the power in the first place in favor of the Shiite majority, but also in favor of the very worst of their torturer-murderers in the Bata Brigade and the Supreme Islamic Council in their takeover and creating the situation that led to the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.
So just taking that as an example, it seems like the lesson is, if our government is there doling out money and doling out weapons and picking and choosing winners and losers, all they're doing is further distorting the situation and creating a situation that is untenable and will lead to further blowback coming down the line, basically.
Just like an artificial bubble in the housing market by a bunch of money being pumped in there by the Federal Reserve leads to a very real crash.
This leads to the very real violence that we're seeing right now and the disillusion of the Iraqi state that you're saying we ought to go in and make permanent now is the one that we created with all our distortions from last time.
Two things.
I mean, again, I just want to keep backing up to the idea that this was something of a thought experiment and it's obviously flawed, but it was based on the premise of, well, how can we put some kind of conclusion on this that allows us to leave?
The idea, though, is that a tripartite, a tri-statelet, whatever word is most politically palatable, Iraq is something that basically exists right now.
It exists in a chaotic form and needs to find its base, if you will, settle where it needs to settle.
And that is what is going on whether the United States wants it or participates in it or just steps away from it.
To your larger point, though, I think you've hit on the core strategy, in quotes, of American foreign policy in the last two decades or so, which is basically by our interventions to stop some problem, we actually create that problem or create a bigger problem.
If folks needed a more contemporary example, they can look at Yemen right now, today.
Yemen was supposedly at one point a stable country.
Then it became unstable with the rise of Al-Qaeda, which certainly we all understand was midwifed by the United States with Saudi help in the 80s.
Then there was something of a coup, if you will, the United States promoted that got rid of the former leader and replaced him with his son, who was very happy to take American money.
Now...
I'm sorry, I've got to stop you.
The music's playing here, Peter.
But when we get back, we will pick up on that Yemen example and we'll change the subject to this current article, which is also very important too.
Absolutely.
It's Peter Van Buren, former State Department whistleblower.
Now he's at tomdispatch.com.
Back in a second.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm online with Peter Van Buren, former State Department whistleblower, author of We Meant Well.
And this one's at tomdispatch.com and at antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name there.
America is open for business in Iraq.
But now where we left off, you're talking about Yemen and blowback.
And I like to call it backdraft because blowback is the consequence of the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies so that everybody's taken by surprise.
Whereas backdraft is just when our government does things right in front of everyone that are so stupid that it blows up right in their face.
And so that's my own little terminology there.
You can adopt it if you like, but give me credit.
I will.
I will, Scott.
And I won't give you any credit if it works for me, which is the secret to being a good writer.
You know, it's almost like a physics thing.
You know, there's, I think it's called the Heisenberg principle that says as soon as you observe something, you change it.
And that's kind of how American strategy, particularly in the Middle East, is working.
As soon as we intervene, we screw it up.
And we were talking about Yemen before the break.
And here's a perfect example.
So the United States installed a dictator, if you will, in Yemen that was very sympathetic to American needs and aims.
And this caused a domestic organization, the Houthis, who essentially threw him out of office yesterday or the day before, and are now once again looking to Iran for support.
You know, none of that would have happened if the United States had just kept their hands off of Yemen or worked with a government that had popular support trying to get its way, get them to work towards America's goals.
However, governments that have popular support tend to be more interested in their own needs and keeping that popular support than just sucking up to the United States.
So we install these type of puppet governments.
And then we're deeply surprised when they don't work out.
And you can take that bit of history all the way back into the days of the Spanish-American War and certainly America's actions throughout Central America in the 80s.
You mentioned the Iraqi examples earlier.
Iran, who I almost misspoke on there, was another perfect example where the United States maintained the Shah of Iran in power so long that the Islamic Revolution was a no-brainer, and then we acted surprised.
We have to stop intervening.
The world is not a chessboard.
America can't just insert itself, make a few moves, and expect things to work out the way we want them to.
The other sides have their own needs, their own values, their own aims and goals, and their own rules.
And America's desire and almost dumbfounded insistence that it doesn't work that way is what gets us caught every single time we put our foot into another big pile of it overseas.
There's almost a practical side to this that stuns me, and that is, and this kind of dovetails, I think, into talking about the military-industrial complex, is the results are so blatant.
For two decades, at least, we'll focus just on that.
The United States has done exactly the same thing, intervene militarily and manipulate politically all over the Middle East, including Afghanistan, and it hasn't worked.
Now, there's got to be a reason for someone being that willfully ignorant of reality, and I'm afraid one of those reasons, and I'll include stupidity in Washington, never can leave that one up, but one of those reasons is what I wrote about just this week, and that is the enormous profits that American companies make off of American wars.
Yeah, that is a huge part of it.
On the stupidity thing, I have to chime in here just because I think it's funny.
I used to, you know, when I was much younger, I used to be so concerned that all of our horrible foreign policies were all some kind of deliberate sabotage by the master planners at the Council on Foreign Relations who know damn well what they're doing, and sort of a, more of a libertarian take on that kind of John Birch conspiracy theory view of the Rockefellers and their front men and what they're up to, that it's all ultimately treason and it's all so well thought out and all that.
And then, but the perfect opposite explanation of that that I can think of is this article I read in the Washington Post about Susan Rice and a few others sitting around at the State Department with kind of like a Dr. House whiteboard saying, okay, let's remake American foreign policy.
Let's re-examine our Asia policy and the degree of our pivot and what should we do about the Middle East and this and that.
And I'm thinking, really, you have a meeting on the direction of the entire ship of the entire American empire and it's Susan Rice and another room full of a few idiots on a Saturday at Foggy Bottom and they have no idea what they're talking about.
They don't speak a single one of the languages.
They don't know a damn thing.
They might as well be Valerie Jarrett, the political advisor, Karl Rove, the political advisor, deciding everything.
I mean, the Libya thing is a perfect example where Robert Gates said, don't do it.
And it was Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton.
I don't mean to just sound like a sexist, but I just mean, these are particularly vapid people, even compared to Robert Gates.
You can see the idiocy in their thousand yard stare.
And just to think that this is how we come up with this stuff is, you know, it'd be a good PR stunt.
Let's overthrow Gaddafi.
Maybe we'll make some oil money or some little tangential kind of thing without considering what's going to come of this at all.
You know, I've always maintained it.
It's kind of, we talked about physics.
I mean, this is like Occam's razor.
The most obvious explanation is often correct.
And after 24 years at the State Department, I sat in my share of those meetings.
And you're right.
You're absolutely right.
This is like a bunch of 12 year olds imagining the best, coolest way to do something and acting just like 12 year olds do, randomly doing this and ignorantly doing that and really not knowing anything about what they're doing, but still whacking away anyway.
It's hilarious when a 12 year old does it, but it's terrifying when that, in fact, is what dominates America's foreign policy planning, such as we can use the word planning.
The ignorance, the stupidity levels are frightening.
You throw that in with the general butt-kissing themes of bureaucrats, particularly at the State Department.
So Susan Rice mutters something about, let's, you know, get rid of Gaddafi.
And a bunch of smart people who absolutely know better, who are on-the-ground diplomats, who do speak these languages, instead of clearing their throat and saying, what a dumb idea and here's why, instead smile and say, well, that's what the boss wants.
If I do what she wants, maybe I'll get promoted.
And off we go on another adventure.
The thing that lives in the background of all this is, as we were mentioning a moment ago, is the idea that all of these dumb-ass decisions make a lot of money for people.
My article was about billions of dollars that are finding their way into American arms manufacturers for weapons going to Iraq that they don't need, they can't maintain, and which will not play any strategic role in whatever the United States imagines we're supposed to be accomplishing there vis-a-vis ISIS.
Particularly, I focused on M1 tanks.
This is a huge, complicated beast.
It takes a long time to learn how to drive them and use the computers and shoot them.
And they require near constant maintenance in order for all this stuff to work.
It's a huge challenge for our own military where we focus on these kinds of things and generally have a semi-educated workforce.
It's almost impossible for a third world army, which is what the Iraqis are, to be able to use these weapons, to maintain them, to even keep them moving.
The answer, of course, is that, well, they need them because we're selling them to them.
And the other answer is, well, we'll also sell them then maintenance contracts.
It's like when you buy your cell phone or something and they want to sell you the extended warranty and they want to sell you the priority care line and the accessories and this and that.
All of a sudden, the thing you bought doubles in price.
People are making money off of this.
If the United States did not intervene in these countries, then there really wouldn't be as much need to sell weapons.
There certainly wouldn't be the infrastructure to sell these weapons.
The M1 tanks, for example, that are going to Iraq are all going to be set up at a base that we built during the surge quite conveniently with a little bit of irony.
It was the base where Chelsea Manning served and the base where I served.
So it's historical in so many ways.
And didn't they mostly abandon the tanks because they're soft bottoms in an IED war?
So they switched to using MRAPs finally from the aluminum Humvees and the M1s that were really vulnerable to the kind of war that they were in back then, right?
Scott, Scott, Scott, you're not thinking like an industrial capitalist here.
What we have done with the Iraqis is we first of all sold them a lot of our old used junk in some of these tanks that we didn't want to pay to ship home.
And then we've sold them, quote, urban upgrade packages that are designed to address the same issues you just mentioned.
See, you got to think the way these folks think.
You don't say, gee, this tank is not very effective.
You say it is ineffective, but here's the expensive solution to all that.
If you can kind of get your head around that, all the rest of this stuff starts to fall into place.
And it's absolutely terrifying when you realize the confluence of people who are making all this money and people who are making policy that enables it and a military that creates the groundwork for more war.
It's basically a recipe to keep everybody making money and to continue to justify a military that is far too large for and far too intervention-oriented for America's true, true needs.
Yeah.
Well, and it really goes to the banality of evil and all that, too, where it's just how the system works, man.
You got a bunch of normal people with mortgages and wives and kids who think that they're good people living good lives.
And yeah, they're lobbyists for General Dynamics and they're there to make sure that no congressman ever demilitarizes anything ever because that's their job.
And hey, if you don't like it, it's a democracy and the American people can change it and a bunch of platitudes and bromides.
But these are the interests.
That's how you can tell right now that Jeb Bush is going to win because you know he's already got all the major constituencies locked up and it has nothing to do with town and country, black and white, liberal, conservative, or any of that.
It's the arms industry and finance and agribusiness and big pharma and the insurance companies.
That's how you know he's going to win because those are the constituencies in America and that it's all so ultimately rationalized.
I've heard it a million times.
Hey, this is how people buy houses in America.
How can you criticize?
Or if you do, take it up with your legislature, but leave me alone.
The only thing that I'll add to that, which is even more cynical, is that Hillary Clinton, who's going to be Bush's opponent in this, is equally deep in with all of those organizations.
They own both candidates.
They own both parties.
And so while we'll fuss and fight over the course of how many years, over which one to see as president, as far as the big picture for these kind of industrial organizations and things, it doesn't really matter.
Their interests are going to be covered either way.
This idea you talked about at the beginning of the hour here, or the half hour, is that there's a secret hand controlling everything, and obviously that's not true.
But there are organizations and people who have specific interests who exert enormous influence on how events go.
They may not particularly care whether the war is in Iraq, or in Yemen, or in the planet Mongo.
What they care about is that there is a war, so that they can feed these very expensive weapons into it.
And so if Jeb wants to have a war in Iran, and Hillary wants to have a war in Yemen, whatever, as long as that war is on, then the interests of these organizations are satisfied, and those strings are pulled.
Yep.
And you know, it's funny that, I mean, it's the ultimate irony, really, that it's Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, who gave us this phrase, and yet it seems like, I guess most Americans, if you just ask their mom or whatever, they've never heard of it, or if they have, it sounds maybe some nefarious conspiracy theory, and certainly not just a very simple concept about how, yeah, sure, people who have contracts with the Pentagon lobby to keep them, you know, and they fund think tanks to make sure that, yeah, this is all very, very simple arithmetic, no calculus to it at all, you know, but it just, I guess, unless it's really beaten into their brains by way of television, it's just, it's still not really the popular understanding of the way things work, unfortunately, I don't think.
You know, the final comment that I'll share with you, and then unfortunately, I need to go out and make some investments in defense contractors' stocks.
First of all, the idea of Eisenhower creating that, this idea of the military-industrial complex is actually spot on.
I mean, who would know better than a guy who was a career military person who became a career politician and president?
I mean, he's seen it.
The other idea is just of people's, perhaps, lack of knowledge of this thing.
Tom Englehart, who edited my article and I, are both of a certain age.
We're old enough that that expression is almost a cliché, the way it was used during the Vietnam War protests.
And I actually said to Tom, I said, you know, should we really say military-industrial complex?
I mean, isn't that sort of almost a cliché, almost a joke these days to say those words?
And he and I talked about it, and we came to the conclusion that while some old folks may see it that way, unfortunately, many of our younger readers may not have encountered the term.
And so we ultimately decided to go with it.
And I think we're both very glad that we did because it's a critical piece of understanding what goes on in America's world these days.
And to the extent that we could pull that term forward and help readers understand that it's still very much a part of the way things work, maybe we did something useful.
All right.
Thanks very much.
I appreciate it, Peter.
Scott, my pleasure.
I'll be back anytime.
I'm sure there'll be stuff to talk about whenever we can.
Absolutely.
We run pretty much all your stuff, except that one.
Thank you.
At Antigua.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Carry on.
All right.
That's Peter Van Buren, y'all.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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