03/02/15 – John Mueller – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, here on Liberty Radio Network, live from noon to two eastern time on the weekdays.
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All right.
Our next guest on the show is John Mueller.
He is at the Cato Institute and I think is a professor at the University of Chicago.
He used to be, at least.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
Are you still at the University of Chicago here?
No, at Ohio State.
I was a student at Chicago, but I'm a professor now at Ohio State.
Oh, Ohio State.
I'm sorry, I got that wrong.
I was just going from memory there.
Anyway, you're the author of the great book, Overblown, which I just love.
We talked about it years ago, how politicians and the terrorism industry inflate national security threats and why we believe them.
And then, oh, I see you have a more recent atomic obsession, nuclear alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda.
Well, I might ask you a little bit about that at the end of this thing, if we get to it, because I got some atomic alarmism myself.
But yeah, so big fan of the book, Overblown, and try to recommend it and link to it and things when I can.
And the bottom line is they always overstate the threats to the American people from our enemies.
And you go back in that book, you talk about Abe Lincoln and all the threats, if I remember right, of the South is going to conquer D.C. and all of the North at any time now, even though it was really a war of secession, not a genuine civil war in that sense, where they were fighting for control of the capital.
And then you talk about all the threats of the Japanese during World War II and other boogeymen who are coming to get us all if we don't do X against them now or first or something like that.
So you want to take us back through some of that history to start here?
Yeah, it particularly focuses on the World War II, but particularly since the Cold War.
And the argument basically is any international threat that has sort of risen to real consciousness then has been substantially inflated.
And in many respects, I want to apply that lesson to terrorism.
So I go back and look at all the threats that have been seen.
Some of them are quite real out there.
But the question is, how threatening are they?
How bad are they?
And find that they basically all were very exaggerated.
The idea that the Soviet Union, for example, is about to invade Western Europe, fears about imminent nuclear catastrophe, concerns about what I call devil's du jour like Castro and Gaddafi and Kim Il-sung and so forth, in retrospect, proved to be considerably greater than actually was justified.
And so my argument is that the current boogeyman, of course, is a terrorist.
And it seems entirely appropriate and likely that that threat has been exaggerated as well.
And the book argues that, indeed, it has been.
Well, now going back to World War II for a second here, I was really educated by your book on this subject.
Of course, we have perfect 2020 hindsight now.
And we know that virtually the entire war in the Pacific between America and Japan was fought to the west of the Hawaiian Islands from here.
It was in their sphere of influence is where the whole war was fought.
And yet it goes kind of unremarked, I guess, because it didn't come true.
We are never really educated in school here about what the threat from Japan was told to be during that time that that, you know, they had the American people believing that California and maybe much more than that could fall to Japan at any time.
Yeah.
And a lot of that was bottom up.
People were really afraid after Pearl Harbor.
And the course focused on the Japanese community, which eventually was put into concentration camps in California.
But the issue is impressive that the policymakers never really considered the alternative.
It's not so much that it's not surprisingly what they picked.
But the alternative after Pearl Harbor was to say, look, we've lost 2,500 troops or people at Pearl Harbor.
If we go into war with the Japanese, we'll lose another 100,000.
Is it worth it?
Now, maybe you would say yes.
And a lot of people say for revenge or whatever.
But what bothers me is not so much what they did in that respect, but that they never even asked that question.
And the other question that is never really asked is, are there different ways of getting at the Japanese?
One is to go sort of the frontal attack, which is going to be sort of maximally destructive, both for us and for the Japanese.
And another would be essentially Cold War or what at that time might have been called phony war.
Japan was extremely overextended.
It was acting out of desperation, partly because of the fiasco of its invasion into China in 1937 and went to war on a shoestring, basically, and did not have a very effective fighting force from the standpoint of the leadership.
Fighting man was pretty tenacious.
But military planning, although it was successful at Pearl Harbor, was, well, as one historian has put it, no Japanese military plans were put together after Pearl Harbor were successful.
I mean, they failed continuously.
So it was very ripe for a Cold War situation, which would be to harassment, harassing of the shipping lanes, which were very vulnerable, and to encourage various insurgencies, which they already were fighting in China and then in the areas they conquered after Pearl Harbor.
So there was another way of dealing with it.
And you could argue, obviously, that there's problems with that proposal.
But the thing is, it was never really considered.
And the essence of good decision making, obviously, is to look at all plausible alternatives and shake them together and figure out which one you want to grasp.
And that was not done.
There's also a lack of...
The idea was basically to save China.
And somehow over the course of the 30s, the United States became more and more concerned about...
They had to defend China.
And that's understandable, I suppose.
But it's remarkable in the diplomatic documents and the government discussions that no one really said, is it...
Why are we defending China?
You know, is it really worth it?
And so forth.
And ultimately, if you want to take a sort of a tragic look at the Pacific War, what the...
If you look at it as a war basically to kick the Japanese out of China, which it did, the result of that was catastrophic, because what it ended up...
They couldn't have known this, of course.
But the result of kicking Japan out of China was that ultimately the country was taken over by Mao Zedong, who then, through incompetence and madness, essentially, and monstrousness, ended up killing about seven times more Chinese than the Japanese ever did.
So that is very much looking in retrospect.
They couldn't have known that was going to happen.
But the question is, was it worth it to have done that?
You know, was it worth it there?
The war did obviously end the Japanese threat.
It also helped transform Japan into a country which we really enjoy having in the world.
And so that was a liberal and progressive and generally highly civilized and cooperative, friendly, if somewhat competitive, neighbor and a trading partner.
So that was definitely a benefit.
But you also have to look at some of the things that happened elsewhere, not only in China, but also in the rest of Asia, where there was a fraud with various forms of civil warfare for several decades after World War II.
All right.
And now, well, we're almost out of time for this segment, but in the next kind of minute or so, we can, I guess, begin to get into the overreaction about terrorism.
It seems to me my worry about terrorism is not that, oh, you know, America could be brought down by any of this existential threat or whatever paranoia, but it's the overreaction is what I'm afraid of.
One guy screaming jihad shoots up a mall somewhere and we have a whole other war in the Middle East again.
It's that easy now.
A little mini September 11th is all it takes to shock the hell out of the American people and make us easy for our government to manipulate.
So, yeah, anyway, I'm sorry, John, the music's going to start playing here in just a second here.
Okay.
So we can pick that up on the other side of this break, the overblown fears of terrorism and maybe justifiable ones.
If I can find a way to split the difference in there.
It's John Mueller.
He's at the Cato Institute.
The book is overblown and the articles are terrorism poses no existential threat to America.
We must stop pretending otherwise.
And then also what terrorists are really angry about.
We'll be discussing both of these when we get back from this break in just a minute.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with John Mueller from the Cato Institute and the University of Ohio.
Oh, is it Ohio State?
I got it wrong.
Ohio State University, sorry.
And we're talking about overblown threats to the republic that our government's always pointing to from the Japanese and World War II through today.
So now about, I guess I was trying to set up a question here, John, with something about I'm a bit paranoid.
I think that the ISIS guys, they don't have much of the means.
They do have the motive and they could come up with the opportunity to do some attacks or al-Qaeda too in order to accomplish the same thing they've been trying to accomplish this whole time, which is to get America to spend so much money trying to fight them that we end up bankrupting the empire and bankrupting our whole country the way that they take credit for doing to the Soviet Union back in the 1980s.
And so I'm not worried that I'm going to die in one or that America is going to cease to exist in one, but I am worried that a couple of small attacks and the Congress will pass that many more laws and the Pentagon will launch that many more attacks of their own and down further, the spiral will go.
What about that?
Yeah, well, I definitely share your concern.
There's just been a constant overreaction to the terrorist threat, starting obviously at 9-11, even before in some respects, but certainly after 9-11.
And I actually published a book, it came out in 2011, called Terrorist Security and Money, Balancing the Benefits, Risks and Costs of Homeland Security, in which a risk analyst and engineer by the name of Mark Stewart and I try to apply risk management analyses to counter-terrorism expenditures.
And if you look at what the threat is, and certainly it is not zero, obviously, and then compare it to the expenditures, it's just a wildly cost ineffective for the money that's been spent.
One way of putting it is that we point out in the book that in order to justify the increase of terrorism expenditures since 9-11, just the increase, not the whole month, but just how much has gone up, which is about a trillion dollars total over the time since 9-11.
In order to justify that, you would have to demonstrate that these increased expenditures have deterred, prevented, or protected against about three large attacks, Times Square type attacks every single day.
And that's a good way of sort of putting it in a fairly vivid way.
And we look at various other measures.
Some measures seem to have been pretty sensible because they're not very expensive and they do enhance security.
Other measures which are very expensive, for example, the federal air marshals on airliners, which don't help security much at all, if any, and cost a lot, maybe a billion dollars a year, are decidedly not cost effective.
And what bothers us is that analysis, which is very straightforward and is used for natural hazards and it's used for, you know, radiation, citing nuclear plants, and it's used for safety measures, should you put seat belts in the back seat of a car, for example.
That kind of analysis is done routinely, has not been applied to the terrorism standard.
Instead is, you know, somebody got on an airplane with a bomb in his underwear, therefore we have to do something about underwear or about shoes or about liquids or whatever, without that kind of analysis.
And so it's pretty clear that the threat has been massively exaggerated and the expenditures, as you point out, have been very high.
And if you add into that, we will only talk about domestic counter-terrorism expenditures, but as you pointed out, it's also involved the United States in several catastrophic wars in the Middle East that has destabilized the situation in not only Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Syria and in Pakistan, even without direct military intervention in Pakistan.
In fact, now 74% of Pakistanis see the United States as an enemy, although they do still accept the billions of dollars in aid that goes to that country.
That's really a remarkable non-achievement, you might say, of foreign policy.
And on top of that, of course, over 100,000 people have died because of the American policy that would not have happened had 9-11 not happened, as well as well over 6,000 Americans have died in these ventures, twice as many as died on 9-11.
And now, let me ask you this, because, you know, it seems like the consensus on the security measures and the consensus of all this, there's plenty of, you know, obviously plenty of room for just groupthink, where, you know, everybody in D.C. apparently, you know, we all kind of agree, at least on these issues, we must always spend more and more on security and never less.
Well, I don't know.
It seems like some of the, maybe there's some regret over the full-scale invasion of Iraq.
I don't know if D.C. as a whole really regrets the regime change there, maybe just the way it was carried out.
Maybe there's a little bit of a lesson learned there.
But it seems like, that basically they're all happy to kind of go through, it's almost like a 1984 double-think levels of cognitive dissonance here, where, you know, they all kind of know that you're right.
You know what I mean?
That this is ridiculous.
And yet they persist.
And then another example is one from your other article, which is the motive of the terrorists in the first place, where on the right wing, they say Islam is evil.
Islam is Satan.
Islam, once you believe in it hard enough, it makes you want to suicide bomb innocent things and whatever this lie.
And then the Democrats answer is, no, we just need an LBJ Great Society program over there to give everybody a nice job.
And nobody wants to admit that it's the violence that the Americans cause over there.
But I guess so what I'm trying to get to is whether you, the degree to which you think the people with the power in D.C. know good and well what they're doing and the degree to which that, no, really they are like a bunch of kindergartners and just cannot accept the truth.
And so they persist in, in the falsehood and then the folly policy based on the falsehood.
Yeah, well, it's sort of, you're right in terms of this sort of rolling consensus that just keeps going.
You're certainly right in the absence of remorse about the disastrous decision which resulted in the death of over 100,000 Iraqis to invade in 2003.
As Steve Walt put it once, being a neocon means never having to say you're sorry.
And so there's that.
I do think, however, that it's pretty clear that the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other places, even, of course, Libya, which looked like a success for a while, it's not turned out to be a disaster, have led to the idea of an Iraq syndrome.
Let's not do that again, very much like after Vietnam.
And so even though you have proposals about doing more against various factions and stuff and problems within the Middle East, including using military force, just about everybody is very careful about wanting to get into a ground war.
But they don't seem to appreciate very much is that the United States seems to have progressively made it worse, whether it's sent in ground troops or not.
The case in Lebanon is, I mean, the case in Libya is very clear in that respect.
Now they got rid of Qaddafi and then what came after Qaddafi was worse than Qaddafi.
And that's not to be seen as some sort of suggestion that Qaddafi was a wonderful person or a good leader, but just it is possible to have things that are even worse.
And you don't really get that.
You do get a restraint since we don't want to send American ground troops in.
And that may be weakening some of that attitude, but it's still pretty much in place.
But there's still the idea that, for example, we can train combatants, moderate Syrians.
Well, what we did was spent a few trillion dollars basically training a 300,000 man army in Iraq.
And it fell apart as soon as ISIS sent 500 people at the city of Mosul.
Those are all crack troops trained by the great American military.
And now with that abject failure behind us, the idea is that, well, maybe we can train the next one somewhat better.
And that's obviously a really questionable thing.
The idea that you've got these very difficult, intractable problems that somehow American can do, ability will change them, you'd think would be sort of undercut somewhat by the fact that there's been abject failure in terms of foreign policy pretty consistently for the last 15 years in the Middle East.
But there's still this notion that we are still the exceptional nation and we can do things and so forth.
But it is tempered by the experience in the sense that we want to do it, but we don't want to do it with ground troops in any kind of reason, any kind of substantial number.
And we'll have to see if that holds.
OK, but if you were at a dinner with some of these think tank or mucky muck types and you said to them, come on, man, you guys all know that all the Al-Qaeda attacks all through the 1990s, all Osama's statements, all the biography of Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh and the ringleaders of the 9-11 attack, all of that says that it's American occupation and violence in the Middle East that caused the, you know, September 11th attack, which then we pretend was the first day of the war on terrorism.
And base our all our policy on, you know, the premise that we're defending ourselves from their aggression.
And you guys all know, right, that this is all a bunch of nonsense.
What would they say?
I mean, they really don't know that George H.W. Bush waged a war against Iraq, that Bill Clinton kept the blockade on and the bases in Saudi, that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, that Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber said, I'm doing this because you support Israel and their occupation.
I mean, honestly, and I'm sorry to do this to you, but it's a perennial discussion on this show, stupidity or the plan, stupid plan and misunderstandings.
I have journalists on this show and experts like yourself on this show who explain perfectly well what's going on in the world.
And then I watch year after year go by where the people in D.C. all pretend to have no idea.
And then, but so I wonder, I mean, maybe they're really not pretending.
Maybe they really, there hasn't been an honest discussion of Mohammed Atta's motives in D.C. yet.
Yeah, I think that's unfortunately true.
In other words, if they were just corruption, it'd be sort of easy.
But if they actually believe this stuff, it's really impressive.
The article you mentioned, which just recently published in CNN.com is based on a study of looking at all the terrorists who've tried to do or thought about doing damage within the United States, whether they're based abroad or whether they're based in the United States.
It's a case study book, which is available online at no charge.
It's called Terrorism Since 9-11, The American Cases.
And when we put these cases together, what really sprung out was the fact that almost everybody was motivated by hostility to American foreign policy.
They're over there, they're trying to kill my people, defending Islam against an onslaught by the United States.
And there's plenty of things that fed that, you know, things like Abu Ghraib and so forth, or an errant drone strike that kills a wedding party and things like that.
And the inability to grasp that is really monumental.
And that includes left and right throughout Washington overall.
Even though when you actually talk to them frequently, particularly specialists, they will say, yeah, the big motivating force is foreign policy.
But it's all got caught up in this idea about radicalization.
And there's some sort of ideologically, they get this ideology, and they do it because of the ideology.
Well, if they're radicalized, for example, the French guy, when we got French killers at the newspaper attack in Paris, was radicalized, if you want to use that expression, by reading about Abu Ghraib.
It wasn't, that isn't really ideological.
That's an outrage at something that he found very much outrageous.
And that seems to be the most motivating force.
The idea that you can somehow change the ideology or that by giving people a lot of jobs and job opportunities that they're not going to be outraged when you drop a bomb on a wedding party is pretty naive, I think.
Well, and I guess, you know, like you say in the subtitle here about the terrorism industry and all of that, none of these, virtually no one in DC has a real personal vested interest in ending the war on terrorism.
Everybody's benefiting from keeping the thing going.
So it really, you know, it's been since Ron Paul left office that we had anyone up there who was deliberately trying to pick and win this particular fight, this particular argument about how we got into this mess.
It seems like it hasn't really been mentioned much since then.
And so we'll just continue on.
I mean, even though everyone knows ISIS is the result of Bush's war in Iraq and Obama's war in Syria.
Well, now we got to fight them and I guess the next one, the next one too.
Yeah, a lot of that I very strongly agree with.
Mark and I are just coming out with a new book that will be out later this year called Chasing Ghosts.
And we have about the counterterrorism venture in the United States and we have a chapter on public opinion.
But a lot of this is bottom up.
In other words, people are still as emotional about 9-11 now as they were then.
There's been very little change since the end of 2001.
And a percentage of people who say that Al-Qaeda is winning the war or that I'm worried that my kid might be killed by a terrorist or that say that I expect a big attack in the next few months.
Or that they, and there's also been no change in the percentage of people who think they feel safe.
So in many respects, the bureaucrats and the politicians are playing to that public opinion and they're afraid essentially if they say what I say, they'll be voted out of office or otherwise purged.
And so a lot of the momentum is bottom up.
And what bothers me is they never even try to put it in context.
It's one thing to say, you talk about trying to be safer, but virtually nobody ever says, how safe are we?
Now, any rational discussion of this, that's where you begin.
What's the danger?
How dangerous is it?
Well, it's easy to calculate it, even including 9-11 in the calculation.
An American's chance of being killed by a terrorist is about one in four million per year.
If you only count the time since 9-11, your chance of being killed is one in maybe 200 million per year.
And so the question should be, isn't that safe enough?
That's what you want to start with.
Is one chance in four million, is that safe enough?
But do you want to spend a lot of money to make it even lower?
And maybe we should investigate some of the things that maybe we spend a lot of money on stuff that hasn't really helped all that much in making us safer.
But the calculation is basically never there.
No one ever talks about how safe we are.
And that's where the discussion should begin.
Right.
Yeah, well, and of course, then where it ends is we have the perfect answer.
The best way to protect ourselves from terrorism is to quit fighting it, since we're the ones who picked the fight in the first place.
And then we can save money and fight terrorism at the same time by being a normal country.
Yeah, the biggest, by far the biggest consequence and cost of terrorism has been the overreaction.
Obviously, if you include, you know, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, those wars cost several trillion dollars and the increase of expenditures on just domestic homeland security has been a trillion dollars.
That's a lot more damage to the American economy and well-being than anything the terrorists have ever done.
And also, there's an unwillingness to really grasp the degree to which terrorists do damage, at least out of war zones.
And it's easy to count because there's all these databases about how much terrorism there is around the world.
And when you get outside of war zones, it comes to be maybe two, three hundred people are killed per year in the whole world by terrorists.
In fact, terrorists of all sorts, not only Islamist terrorists, and so the question is, that's not really all that unsafe, is it?
That's too bad about it.
It's tragic that anybody should have to die, obviously, from this, but it's not a very big number and people are not willing to really look at that very much overall.
So there might be some beginning changes with the Obama administration and now starting to say is that the article in The Guardian pointed out that I did, Mark and I did, that they're not willing to say that it's not an existential threat.
Now, what's really remarkable about that is that's such a banal, obvious thing that they're not going to destroy the United States, wipe out everybody in the country.
And the fact that it's taken until 2014 or 2015 before anybody in authority has actually been able to say it's not an existential threat is really quite remarkable.
It shows how far behind reality much of the rhetoric has been, almost all of the rhetoric has been.
All right, well, keep pushing that boulder uphill.
Okay.
Thanks very much, John.
Okay, thank you.
Good luck.
All right, y'all.
That is John Mueller, senior fellow at Cato and professor at Ohio State University.
And his last couple are terrorism poses no existential threat to America.
We must stop pretending otherwise.
And what terrorists are really angry about.
His books are Overblown, Terror, Security and Money, an Atomic Obsession, and then a brand new one coming out, Chasing Ghosts.
And that's it for the show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening today.
See you tomorrow.
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