03/31/10 – Malou Innocent – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our first guest on the show today is Malou Innocent.
She is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute and a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh, well, I appreciate you joining me.
So I saw this great Cato Institute symposium or some kind of thing where you brought all these conservatives together to talk about maybe whether they can get around to lightening up on the permanent war issue or something.
And it looked like a pretty smashing success there.
Why don't we start with that?
Yeah, it was.
It was really a success.
In fact, Representative John Duncan from Tennessee, he made a very cogent and compelling argument as to why the war in Afghanistan and wars in general are not conservative in the least.
He's actually more of a traditional conservative, one who would like limited government both at home and abroad.
And he really underscored what I like to say is the philosophical inconsistency of many conservatives nowadays.
In one sense, they say that they do want limited government.
They're not willing to pay for welfare, for health care, for all assortment of other things.
But they're unwilling to really compromise on how much our bloated military and our extended empire overseas really does lead to bigger government.
Not only is it sort of the military-industrial complex that this feeds, but it's also serving to help the privatized defense industrial complex as well.
And he sort of highlighted how wars of this nature increase deficit spending, increase the national debt, and really is not critical to our nation's national security.
Well, and James Duncan, he actually puts his record where his mouth is.
He opposed the Iraq War.
Exactly.
One of the very few Republicans to do so, right?
Exactly, yeah.
And I think more conservatives need to stand out on this.
I think that the neoconservative strain of the GOP has really overshadowed many of these truer traditional conservatives.
And definitely we can have disputes about what policies we like and don't like, but at least remain consistent and really go back to their non-interventionist roots.
Now, it seems like still to this day, a major point of contention really is just in kind of the basic view, because, of course, the vast majority of Republicans are not neocons, right?
They're just plain old cons or even just Republicans and aren't even all that ideological or what have you.
But they tend to get drawn into all of this, and it seems like the basic premise of the war on terrorism is actually still operative in the minds of many of these war hawks, and that is that, hey, we're at war with Islamic extremism.
Islamic extremism came and picked a fight with us, and we have to keep fighting it with war until there is no more Islamic extremism.
And that was a fight that actually took place on your panel there at the Cato Institute.
Exactly, yeah.
And I think the problem is that many of these conservatives or traditional conservatives have sort of been roped in with the neocons in the sense that we already know that conservatives in the GOP essentially have a monopoly on the national security discourse.
And so there's always this knee-jerk reaction to support whatever invasion there is going on, whether it's Iraq, whether it's Afghanistan, whether it's Iran now.
Now we're saber-rattling with Iran.
And I think that war hawks have just tended to think that any invasion or any sort of proactive measure is in America's national security interest.
But I think the assumption that we're working on with the so-called war on terror is very erroneous.
Essentially, we have government officials saying that we will not want to have any region of the world that will provide safe haven to terrorists.
And that's simply fantasy.
How on earth can we have any credible assurance that no region of the world will have terrorists?
And so this is essentially a handy justification for unlimited intervention abroad.
And it really needs to be called out as such.
Well, now, but so what if a neocon says to you that you're actually just either naive or ducking the question somehow, what about Islamic extremism?
Maybe you're right that it's not the right policy to just send generals racing with their billions of dollars anywhere someone raises a flag that says al-Qaeda on it.
But what are we to do then?
Or maybe you would dispute the premise of that.
Well, I know.
I think that's a good question.
I think that what's funny is that they're sort of being naive.
I mean, basically, the present policy we're operating on is the notion of counterinsurgency, the notion that we must clear, hold, and build areas in Afghanistan in order to win over support of the population and create a stable society that will never again provide sanctuary to extremists.
This is incredibly naive.
Number one, as I mentioned in a recent article, India, which is a huge ally of the United States, it's an economic juggernaut, a country much more stable than Afghanistan, is suffering from several different insurgencies.
Also, al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9-11, they didn't just find safe haven in Afghanistan, they found safe haven in Germany, in Spain, in the United States.
And I would also mention that Islamic extremism did not attack us on 9-11.
Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9-11.
And there are certainly Islamic extremists that want to attack the United States, but they don't have the capability to attack the United States.
And especially when we look at the Taliban militants situated in this region, they're very much a localized and indigenous group that threaten the Afghan government, not the U.S. government.
And I really think that we need to sort of de-link that in our minds, that certainly these militants maybe collaborate with many of these other insurgent groups, but they definitely don't pose a threat to the security of the United States.
Well, and when it comes to al-Qaeda, it seems to me, and I guess none of us have a time machine when we go back and do things right or anything like that, so people could argue about the best way forward from here, but it seems to me like at least as far as the argument about the religious extremism, that basically in a sense it's getting the cause and the effect and kind of the window dressing confused with the motive, right?
So it's sort of like, well, the neocons, they have their agendas for their different purposes, but then they call it defense against the Islamic whatever it is.
They dress it up as patriotism and defensive action and all that.
Whereas Osama bin Laden has his motivations, and of course he dresses it up with religious terminology and so forth, but it seems pretty obvious to me that he would just be a kook on the street corner that nobody would pay any attention to if it wasn't for the fact that the American government is constantly killing people and setting things on fire in their region of the world.
That's what makes what he says seem credible.
Exactly.
Rather than, you know, wow, this guy wants to take us back to the 12th century.
Who wants to live there?
Right, right.
And I think the original invasion of Afghanistan was justified.
The problem is that this has become mission creep.
Now we're talking about building roads in Afghanistan and Helmand province, trying to encourage local farmers to cultivate wheat instead of opium, and really this is whole social engineering, and the longer actually we prolong this war, I think the more we play directly into Al-Qaeda's hands and end up pushing these otherwise irrelevant guerrilla groups closer together and really want to attack us.
I think it's important to mention that since 9-11, virtually all of the attacks on the United States by terrorists have been on U.S. troops deployed on foreign soil, and if you look at the Al-Qaeda threat centered in this region, even General Jim Jones, who is the National Security Advisor under Obama, he has said publicly there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.
So essentially we're using over 100,000 foreign troops to catch less than 100 Al-Qaeda fighters.
I mean, the imbalance of this is totally disproportionate, and I think, again, like you mentioned, we do certainly engender more anger and anti-American sentiment the longer we're there, and even though people say, oh, this is a legitimate defense, this is not a legitimate defense, especially when we consider that we really achieved a victory over the course of several years in sort of monitoring Al-Qaeda through international cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies to sort of nab and capture certain operatives.
We really don't need 100,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan to keep America safe.
It's not a precondition.
Well, and you know, if you look at what's happened in the last few years with the war in Iraq and all that, and really Al-Qaeda's side of that, they've really made sure that everybody in the Middle East hates them anyway.
Despite America's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and these occupations that basically, and even Somalia, which just proved all of bin Laden's predictions to be true and that kind of thing, people still hate him because of the bombings in Saudi Arabia, the bombings in Iraq, the bombings in Jordan that kill Muslims, and in the polls around there where people agree that they want the American empire out of the Middle East, they don't admire Osama bin Laden at all.
They admire Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, even though the Shiites, of course, are a small minority among Muslims.
Across the Muslim world, they prefer Hezbollah.
Nobody likes Al-Qaeda.
Exactly, exactly.
And these guys are the seeds of their own destruction anyway.
They're really just like the American empire, only smaller.
Right.
Much smaller.
Exactly.
I think when people, especially on the right, whether you're talking about the neocons or even just the simple war hawks, they really inadvertently sort of feed Al-Qaeda's message.
They make Al-Qaeda and they make Osama bin Laden 12 feet tall.
They make him this huge existential threat to the United States when he's not.
Honestly, I mean, the Soviet Union was an existential threat to the United States, not Al-Qaeda.
And in fact, I think our real threat in this region is the fact that our military operations in Afghanistan are pushing the conflict over and destabilizing Pakistan.
Pakistan is really the critical node in all of this, and I think that the military operations we see in this region are actually increasing the number of militant recruits for the indigenous Pakistani militants that keep attacking Pakistani cities relentlessly.
Yeah, another self-fulfilling prophecy going on there, where they say, well, Pakistan might fall apart and then we might have to invade and seize their nuclear weapons.
So what we ought to do is just bomb them until they fall apart so that we can invade and seize their nuclear weapons.
It's funny you mention that, actually.
I recently wrote a piece.
It's not going to be published until summertime, but it essentially makes the case, that very exact case, that our present policies are producing the self-fulfilling prophecy of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan.
It is precipitating its disintegration.
And I think that there are some scholars who do make that argument as well, such as Anatole Levin and many others, but really the traction within the political discourse in Washington is this emphasis to overreact to threats.
And it's really unfortunate, because I think that really our policies are undermining our very interests.
Now that it's the Democrats' empire over there in Eurasia and the Middle East, is it truly the case that the right is getting better?
I guess there's George Will and Dana Rohrabacher sure seem to be making some progress in y'all's discussion there.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
I'm wondering if conservatives will really begin to think differently about all the wars, simply because a Democrat's in office.
But I'm not too convinced of that, only because I think upwards of 75% or 80% of congressional Republicans still support Obama on this initiative.
In fact, it's one of the very few things they support Obama on.
But really, I think they need to understand the facts.
I mean, when people keep saying that we must commit to victory in Afghanistan, what does that mean?
What is success?
How do they define victory?
And another question I think is really important is how do we define failure?
How long will we remain in this region until we realize that our efforts will come for naught?
And I think we really need to understand that the basic components of counterinsurgency doctrine that many Republicans and conservatives really endorse are not present.
There are many things that we just cannot do in Afghanistan according to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' own counterinsurgency field manual.
We don't have the time, we don't have the manpower, we don't have the patience in order to recreate a Central Asian version of Arizona.
We won't be able to do this.
And I think we do have national security interests in this region, but it does not require hundreds of thousands of troops.
Well, and that's such an important point.
You know, I saw the poll the other day saying that the American people are more for the Afghan war now than they were a month or so ago, and I guess that's because of the operation in Marja, and I guess Obama's given a couple of speeches about it and all that.
And yet, as you say, and this is such an important point, according to the counterinsurgency doctrine, to do the war that McChrystal and Petraeus want to do, you would need the rest of the whole U.S. Army to occupy Afghanistan for 50 years or something.
And they're not doing that.
They did this surge, but it's much less than anything in Petraeus' coin strategy.
So this whole thing is still just some degree of temporary war until we go.
They're not even planning to win at this point.
Exactly.
Just to stay.
In fact, in fact, I actually just wrote a recent blog post at Cato at Liberty on this, about Marja, about the offense on Marja.
Many people would say, and I would agree, that this was really an attempt to galvanize public support at home, not necessarily to have a score, a victory against the Taliban.
Even to this day, in Helmand and in Kandahar province, there are reports that Afghan police patrol during the day, and at night the Taliban swoops back in.
And really, if you want to sort of clear and hold an area permanently, you would have to have, as you just mentioned, several hundred thousand of troops.
You'd have to have them there at least for 12 to 14 years.
You'd need a great deal of political will back at home.
And really, you'd also need a legitimate host nation government in Kabul, which we do not have.
The fact that Hamid Karzai's brother is a huge drug kingpin who's getting payouts from the CIA also doesn't help the notion that we're trying to build a democracy and endorse freedom and liberty.
And so really, there are a lot of inconsistencies with this policy, and many people who I agree with who sort of make the argument that we really need to narrow our objectives in this region, they bring this to light, but there are many internal inconsistencies with our policy and our vision of trying to implement counterinsurgency.
Well, and this is what George Will said when he wrote his essay for the Washington Post that brought him all this heat.
Of course, he's a leader on the, I guess, somewhat neoconservative, right?
I would say he's more traditional conservative than anything else.
Because what's funny is that he wrote the piece on Afghanistan, and then he got a lot of heat, and then the very next week he wrote a piece on why we should get out of Iraq.
So I think he's of a place that we can't do nation building, we shouldn't try and do nation building, and this is all social engineering, and he doesn't endorse it at home or abroad.
Well, and in defending himself on his Afghanistan piece on the George Stephanopoulos show, I guess the first Sunday after it was published in the Post there, he gave his just cold assessment, and it basically was, hey, look, the strategy says you need this many troops.
We cannot do that many troops, not by a long shot.
So what are we doing?
That's it.
You're either doing this or you're not doing this.
And so I guess that whole conservative let's go kick butt and avenge 9-11 and whatever, all of a sudden at some point this runs up into the wall of logic even in the minds of conservatives.
Exactly.
I think even if we did have the troops, even if we could have 200,000 troops in southern Afghanistan alone and 650,000 in the country entirely, then we'd have to ask, even if we wanted to deploy those many troops, can those troops capture and kill more terrorists than their presence helps to recruit?
And really, if you can't answer that with any sort of assurance, then we'd be feeding more recruits to the insurgency's cause, and then we'd be feeding the narrative that this is a hostile foreign occupation of the region.
So, I mean, even the notion that, number one, I would agree that we don't have enough troops, but number two, I don't think that Afghanistan or remaining in Afghanistan is a precondition to keeping America safe.
So even if we did have the number of troops or the adequate level of patients and resources, we shouldn't be doing it.
Well, there's also the question of how long we can expect the Chinese to continue financing our war on their western border.
Yeah, it's sort of ridiculous.
It's funny, it's like we borrow money from the Chinese to protect East Asia from China.
It's really ridiculous, and I think that really this is going to come to a head.
Economically, we cannot sustain the massive DOD budgets and our social entitlement programs.
Something's got to go.
And I think that even though the military does have a huge lobbying arm within the beltway, something's got to give.
I'm not sure how, or at least to what extent, we'll be able to really shovel more of these billions of dollars into Iraq and into Afghanistan.
And the notion that we'll be leaving Iraq anytime soon, I think we need to not hold our breath on that.
I won't believe it until I see it, especially since General Odeniro, the top commander in Iraq, is now saying that we must sort of slow down the timeline for withdrawal there.
So that also raises the question not only just in Afghanistan but in Iraq, how long will we remain in this region?
And I honestly, sad to say, I really think we'll be there in both countries for the foreseeable future.
Well, now, there's also a big push on parts of the right, especially the Bill Kristol neoconservative right, for an interpretation of the Constitution which says that whoever the president happens to be, that that commander-in-chief clause is the only thing that's actually the law of the land in this country and that he can do anything he wants and that the terror war is so vital and our enemy so dangerous that any part of the Constitution, like, say, for example, the Bill of Rights, the amendments that supposedly limited the powers inside the previous articles there, are basically null and void.
And they've gone so far, as I'm sure you're aware, the Foreign Policy Initiative group, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney's daughter Elizabeth, they put out this ad where they basically accused current, at least candidates for higher-level positions inside the Department of Justice of being the al-Qaeda seven, of being on the side of the enemy because they participated in legal cases where they were defending the accused.
And this produced a backlash at some point.
Again, this is another conservative principle that has been very successfully by the neocons, I guess, pushed and subsumed below the desire to kick butt around the world and all of that.
But at some point they ran up even Ken Starr and a whole other, you know, giant group of conservative lawyers said that this was absolutely shameful and wrong and that it is the most important part of America's tradition, going back to John Adams defending the British troops in the Boston massacre, that not just the accused but the guilty as hell deserve a real defense.
And the idea that they would impugn the loyalty of American lawyers for doing their job in an adversarial legal system was a bridge too far.
And I wonder whether you think that that's another part of maybe the conservative movement that might be revived a little bit with Democrats in power, that maybe there should be a law that limits the ability of the executive to kidnap and torture and murder and do whatever they want to whomever they want.
Well, I think what's important is that we really need to call out the neocons for who they are and unfortunately there's a problem of definitions.
Honestly, neoconservatives, many neoconservatives, actually started out on the very, very far left.
They're big government leftists.
In fact, many of them began as Trotskyites.
And so I'm not actually surprised that they'd want a monarchy.
They'd want this whole collectivist notion of, you know, sort of the House and American Activity Committee, you know, search and destroy all these lawyers who work very hard to defend their counsel against what essentially is very wrongful policies of torture and preventive war.
So I really think we need to understand that neoconservatives themselves are very much for big government, are very much for a nanny state, are very much for intrusive surveillance of individuals, and they're not conservative really in the least.
It's sort of a weird sort of nomenclature that we've had over the past several years.
And also, I'm not too surprised that they're trying to rewrite history to say that the Founding Fathers would want this.
I think the Founding Fathers would be rolling over in their graves.
It was many of the Founding Fathers who said that war is the death of a republic.
And I think we need to understand that even these ideas of torture and waterboarding, we determined that that was torture after World War II.
So I'm not sure who these guys, such as Cheney and Bill Kristol, who they're really preaching to.
I really hope that more Americans begin to push back against their narrative because it is extremely dangerous and very counterproductive to our security.
Well, and you know what?
It's kind of convenient in a way, too, that the conservative movement, broadly speaking, in the country, could just say, oops, you know what?
We got hijacked by a bunch of crazy Trotskyoids who convinced us to wage a permanent revolution and war against the rule of law and the people of the Middle East.
We got so carried away with revenge after September 11th, we kind of fell for it.
But you know what?
No more Bill Kristol.
No more Weekly Standard.
No more National Review.
No more permanent warfare.
We want our Constitution back.
Sorry for falling for it.
And, you know, wipe their hands clean, and they can even make it all somebody else's fault, or mostly.
You know, I wish that we could abolish the Weekly Standard.
It's weird because I think that some people on the right, and even on the left, they were marginalized.
They were impugned for their patriotism, especially in the run-up to the Iraq War.
And I think it's very difficult to sort of hold any movement together where it's on the right or the left.
I think that there will be always these sort of kooky elements who will either hijack the name or hijack the policies and run with it.
I guess I can hold certain conservatives accountable for it.
I think I was a little young before the movement really got off its feet under the first Bush administration.
But I think there really is no excuse for it now.
If you really want limited government in our pocketbooks, in our private lives, in the bedroom, then you should endorse limited government abroad.
Why is it that many conservatives don't like social engineering at home but believe that we can socially engineer foreign peoples in a culture we barely understand?
Again, this sort of gets to the inconsistency of their arguments.
And so I would think that at least no matter what group it is, whether you're talking about unions or you're talking about conservatives or you're talking about any group, I think there's always a potential for some people to use that name and hijack it, just like Al-Qaeda, in fact.
Al-Qaeda has said that they are a pure strain of Islam, and they're not.
So I think there's always a risk of certain people always taking that name and doing whatever they want with it, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, let's hope that more conservatives will kind of follow the path of Dana Rohrabacher and just say, well, yeah, I guess we got that wrong.
In fact, one of the things he told you in that debate that you held there at Cato, or that discussion that you did there, was that all, he said all, and I think he got another congressman to agree with him, all of the Republicans in Congress agree that Iraq was wrong.
I guess that doesn't include Joe Lieberman, but he's an independent.
Yeah, that's true.
And I think we really need to learn the right lessons about Iraq, not that more troops, more planning, more cooperation, more this or that would have led to a better outcome.
The lesson we should have taken away is that you don't invade a country unless it's critical to your national interest, number one.
And number two, we should have also learned that wars can actually expose the limitations of military power.
And I would hope at least that not only just conservatives, but also more Americans begin to realize that war should not be an option of first resort.
It should be an option of last resort.
And we should not impugn the motives or the patriotism of Americans who don't want to see their troops deployed in harm's way for a mission that really isn't in our national interest.
Well, you know, one last conservative principle that I would think is very important, or at least conservatives seem to think was very important to them, say, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago, is the issue of honesty.
And, you know, if we have just on basic level principle, if we're going to have self-government, as they call this here, popular sovereignty and regular elections and all that kind of thing, it does no good if everybody's argument is based on a bunch of lies.
And one of the problems with being in a state of permanent warfare is, as they say, truth is the first casualty.
And, you know, you mentioned all this war hawking against the state of Iran right now, for example.
Well, just yesterday afternoon, I saw David Schuster on MSNBC outright lie and say that the CIA is sure that the Iranians are making nuclear weapons.
And now just this morning, Fox News is passing on the same lie.
It's the same one they say all the time, when the official position of the American intelligence community is that they are not making nuclear weapons and that they have not made a decision to pursue nuclear weapons.
And yet we could have a war based on another pile of nonsense.
People complain they wanted Bill Clinton removed and then hung for lying about Monica Lewinsky.
Well, how about Barack Obama and his administration possibly lying us into war with Iran?
It would seem like that's much more consequential.
And the same thing with the lies about the war against Iraq.
If we're going to have just even basic premise, self-government requires transparency.
Exactly.
No, I would agree.
I think that another thing that we should learn about the Iraq war is how we got into it.
The fact that people were easily led to this notion that, number one, Saddam Hussein was an extremist when he was not.
He was a secularist.
This notion that he had WMD when he did not.
This notion that he was undeterrable and irrational and all these things.
I mean, these sort of lies get filtered in and I would hope at least more Americans are smarter this time around and not believe the hype.
Iran has, I believe, they want a nuclear program, not a nuclear weapons program as of yet.
I would agree with the intelligence agencies.
But also I think that they'd want something like what Japan has, which is a breakout capacity if they do decide to have a nuclear arsenal.
And besides, given the fact that there are U.S. troops on their eastern border and their western border, I would understand why they would want a nuclear deterrent.
So really all of these policies, all of this rhetoric is just pushing the clerical regime in Tehran to want to have a nuclear arsenal, especially since we've been saber-rattling with them ever since we've gotten into Iraq.
All right, everybody.
That is Malou Innocent.
You can find her at the Cato Institute's website, cato.org.
And she's also a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
Anytime.