08/18/15 – Gene Healy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
On to our next guest, our first guest today on the show.
It's Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute, author of the book The Cult of the Presidency.
Welcome back to the show, Gene.
How are you doing?
Good, thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
So the news is, well, there's a lot of news, but Donald Trump has explained that he gets all his foreign policy news from his advice.
Not his news, his foreign policy advice.
Everything he knows about foreign policy he gets from watching TV.
He likes John Bolton.
He's a very no-nonsense kind of a guy.
Really like him.
And that's it.
That's what he knows.
He says he would not have invaded Iraq in 2003.
He was against that war.
But as long as we did it, we ought to steal all their oil and I guess just starve them all out until everybody quits opposing us.
And that goes for the Islamic State and their deadly enemies, the Iranians, too, he says.
And yet you say that it's just a lie when Donald Trump brags that he is the most militarist man in the race.
Yeah, he just can't compete with not only the Republican field, I'm not sure he could compete in terms of bellicosity with the current Democratic president or the most likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, look, Trump is a clown and a bore and an embarrassment and many of the bad things that people have said about him.
But when we're supposed to think that he's the most militaristic person in the race, good luck, you know, to borrow his phrase.
Most of the GOP field in particular has blood coming out of their eyeballs.
Yeah, he's a loser compared to them.
Well, you know, when you're talking about militarism, you've got Scott Walker who said that he may very possibly have to bomb Iran on day one of his presidency.
You've got Marco Rubio who got out in front of the administration on the Libyan misadventure and who's actually made his campaign slogan a new American century.
You know, I think that Donald's going to have a tough time being more militaristic than these guys.
Not even a mention in the JV level, Lindsey Graham, who said that he'd literally use the military to keep Congress in session to restore a bigger defense budget.
You know, he's a piker compared to some of these guys.
Yeah, I mean, and you know what?
I don't really doubt that he means it when he says stuff like that, that Lindsey Graham.
But yeah, and in fact, you know, it's not that Trump hasn't gotten around to addressing these things either.
I mean, he actually has said that he would not rip up the agreement with Iran, you know, he would police the hell out of it.
And boy, would he catch him if they ever tried to cheat it or anything like that.
But so, yeah, I mean, you're right.
Walker's position, for starters, and for one, and really the rest of them too have been, or I don't know if they've all been as specific as Walker, but they've all come out much more strongly against the deal than Trump has, I think.
Even some of the candidates who you get the sense want to take a slightly more restrained attack on military intervention, like Jeb Bush, are quickly forced back in the line.
You know, I point out in the piece that a guy named Elbridge Colby was in line to be the campaign's foreign policy director, but it turned out that he'd written some skeptical pieces on the wisdom of bombing Iran, and, well, that's just enough that you balked in this sort of race.
Jeb was made to understand pretty quickly that it wouldn't be prudent to hire somebody that doesn't want to attack Iran.
Yeah, well, and it was really instructive, I think, the whole controversy over James Baker III there, where, you know, this is a guy who's at the very highest levels of the American establishment, you would think, the lawyer for every oil company in the world, pretty much, and he dared to give a talk to Jay Street, and that got Bush in major trouble.
He was crawling on his belly for weeks after that.
Yeah, it looks like whatever realist strain was left in his father's administration, he's been told that that's not going to fly in the 2015 Republican Party.
And, you know, you look at the others, Rubio, Walker, you know, he ran.
Paul was backed away pretty heavily from some of his past non-interventionist positions.
So I really don't see a guy like Trump being able to compete with the level of militarism that's par for the course in the Republican field.
Yeah, well, and, you know, it's funny, today there's a piece by Michael Brennan-Doherty in The Week talking about how all these guys are contradicting themselves all over the place about, you know, fighting against Iran and for Iran and all these wars all at the same time, and how they can't make up their mind.
Probably most of them really don't know what they're talking about.
They often speak as though the Islamic State is an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Iraq or something like that.
And then in Syria, you know, if you really do pin them down, then they say, yes, we need to create a whole brand-new army to take on al-Nusra, ISIS, Assad, Hezbollah, and, you know, anybody else who dares to resist us, too.
And that's their plan.
Like Walker said, full-scale reinvasion of Iraq if we have to, to drive the Islamic State out of Mosul, etc.
Yeah, that's right.
He was given, it was about a month ago, a reporter gave him several chances to say, I'm not for a full-blown reinvasion of Iraq, and Walker wouldn't take the bait.
You know, there's no getting around the right flank on some of these guys.
And it's very odd, because militarism isn't something that, you know, was supposed to be a competition.
It wasn't something you were supposed to brag about.
Like they said in the piece, you know, these guys like to quote the Founding Fathers.
They're not getting it from the Founding Fathers.
They're not getting it from James Madison, who said, that war is the true source of, true nurse of executive aggrandizement, and that no part of the Constitution was more wisdom to be found than in the clause that gives the powers of war and peace to Congress and not to the executive.
That's viewed as old thinking in terms of the modern GOP.
Yeah, and you know what?
The funny thing is, too, is, well, it's just like we could have had this same conversation four years ago, even, but they're really behind the times, man.
If they just think they can get up there and Giuliani us by saying 9-11 over and over again, even Republicans are over that.
And I think in the first debate there, it really showed that Rand missed an opportunity to bash the war and to say, yeah, that's right, the Republican hawks destabilized the whole region.
That did help lead to ISIS.
He backed down from that, but then left it to Trump.
And Trump said, basically, damn that war.
I was against it then, and I was right.
And how do you like that?
And the crowd wasn't upset at Trump for that.
And they didn't, you know, stand on their feet and rise to applause, because they were the ones who were wrong about it back then when he was right.
But they didn't hold it against him.
Even Republicans got to concede now that, come on, man, if Saddam Hussein was there, none of this would be going on.
Right, but for some reason, the Republicans, you can't, you know, a month or so ago, when they had that round of questioning for all the candidates about was the Iraq war a mistake, I mean, it took enhanced interrogation to get any of these guys to say it was a mistake.
You know, three or four rounds with Rubio before he gave up the ghost on that.
And Bush, just last week, I believe, after having admitted it was a mistake, came back around and said, I think getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a pretty good deal.
Well, no up for Saddam Hussein, but it's not looking like the best deal in the world right about now.
Yep.
All right, everybody, hold it right there.
We're talking with Gene Healy about the cult of the upcoming president and his warmongering ways.
Whoever it is, he's vice president of the Cato Institute and Hillary.
On the other side of this break.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Which president will you worship next?
That is the question.
Gene Healy's got this article at the Federalist.
Trump's biggest lie.
I'm the most militarist person in this race.
No way.
The centrist moderate candidates are way more extreme than him on a lot of things.
It turns out.
So here's what's going on here.
And you kind of alluded to this in the article a bit here, Gene, is that they're pandering to people with power and money who are all completely right wing lunatics and especially on Middle East issues.
And so it really doesn't matter whether the rank and file Republican voters are really excited about sending, you know, the son that they have left off to go die in another one of these things.
They'll worry about fooling them with TV ads later.
Right now, they got to raise the money to buy the TV ads.
And so they're willing to just, you know, as you describe, they're all just trying to one up each other.
You know, I'll nuke them.
Then if you want to send a third infantry division, I'll send the entire Marine Corps.
How do you like that?
And just, you know, going completely nuts.
But I wonder how far do you think they can go before they, you know, have to start tracking back toward the middle again here?
Well, none of them have really, you know, we have Obama has perfected this form of apparently low cost warfare where, you know, where he bragged in his speech defending the Iran deal the other week that he's bombed seven countries.
I think he said, you know, and actually it's eight.
There was a bombing in the Philippines in 2012 that the most transparent administration in history hasn't acknowledged yet.
But the costs are not, you know, since Iraq and Afghanistan, the costs, the upfront costs, at least, of drone warfare aren't that salient to the American footer.
But there's definitely a drive to show that you're more militarist than thou.
But none of these guys have really come out and said they're for a massive ground troop presence in Iraq and Syria.
They've sort of alluded to it, but, you know, when they're pressed on it, you don't see even any of the Republicans proposing something that would be that unpopular.
Instead, they sort of just demonstrate toughness by trying to one up each other in terms of, you know, where they're willing to let the bombs loose.
And, you know, that that's something that's on both sides of the aisle.
For some reason, Barack Obama still enjoys this reputation as a reluctant warrior when he, by the time he took the stage to deliver his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he'd already launched several times the amount of drone attacks that George W. Bush did.
And, you know, you mentioned in the lead up to the break, Hillary.
I mean, there is, I, Donald can't begin to compete with her, and I'm not sure some of the Republican candidates can even compete with her long career of never fighting a war that she didn't like.
Yeah, starting with, what, at least Bosnia, do we know about her?
I guess Bill opposed Gulf War I from the governorship of Arkansas, not like anybody cared or was listening.
But do we know about her position on anything, on any of the conflicts before Bosnia in 95, 94, 95?
I don't know what she said about Gulf War I, if she said anything at all.
The famous story from the biography for, what is it, Gail Cheehy biography in 2000, Hillary's choice, was that it was war in Serbia that actually got Bill and Hill back together.
She had, after the Lewinsky scandal broke, Hillary wasn't talking to Bill for about eight months until she called him in March of 1999, and as Hillary put it later, I urged him to bomb.
So Bill got the message that he might be half out of the doghouse if he launched an undeclared war in Serbia over the Kosovo crisis.
From there you got Hillary, of course, voting for the Iraq war, and her record as Secretary of State.
Wait, wait, wait, slow down there for a second, because on the Iraq war thing, I think it's important that we talk about, and nobody ever talks about this, about how when she was the senator voting for that war, she was also the wife of the guy who'd just been president for eight years.
And it was clear that when she was saying, okay, this is necessary to do this, and to give Bush the authority to do this, that she was, at least it seemed understood, that she was in a sense speaking for her husband too, that they had this very powerful consensus with the Clintons.
And people would argue all the time, hey, even the Clintons say we've got to do it, even the Clintons say he's got weapons of mass destruction.
And the inverse of that is, she could have stopped the war if she had gone out there and told the truth, Ron Paul style, and said, look, sorry everybody, but I'm the wife of the guy who was just the president, and this is a bunch of crap.
If they had a couple of warehouses of mustard left, we bombed it in 98.
Don't believe them, you know, and folded her arms and said, hell no, and tried to rally all the Democrats against it.
So there's a lot of responsibility on there.
She wasn't just some Democratic senator at the time, it seems to me.
Well, I don't know how much, you know, Bill Clinton certainly wasn't reluctant to bomb Iraq when he was president.
I don't think Hillary was one of the, there's only a handful of senators who actually bothered to go and read the national intelligence estimate on Iraq in the run up to the war vote.
I don't believe she was one of them.
And, you know, I don't think she was ever really against it.
Her position on the war was pretty much like John Kerry's position on the war.
They both voted for it, and then when the war started, as everyone knew it would the following year, having given the president all that power, she managed to be against it before she was for it, after she was against it.
You know, like Kerry did.
They, you know, it was very much like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, where there's a massive delegation of war power to the president, which then he uses at the time of his choosing, and people who voted for it want to, you know, be in a position where they can deny that that's exactly what they were voting for.
That's pretty much her profile and courage on that issue when she was in the Senate.
Yeah, and of course John Kerry had the same problem as Bill Clinton.
I forget about Biden, but I know Kerry and Bill Clinton both have been forever embarrassed that they had opposed the first Gulf War, which was just great.
And that was a big stain on their political career, and so they were not going to take that chance again come 2002.
Biden voted for the Iraq War Resolution, too, as I recall.
Oh yeah, no, he certainly did in 2002, but I mean in 1991.
I forget if he was trying to live down a 91 vote or not.
He might have been.
Yeah, you might be right about that.
I know Kerry certainly was.
It was a much closer vote.
I believe Al Gore voted for the 91 Resolution, a much closer vote, and then it was a giant success, despite the fact that it ushered in 20-plus years of U.S. involvement in the region in a much greater way than we had been during the Reagan administration.
But Biden, in the administration, all the insider accounts of the debates on various interventions, Biden was sort of against Libya, was against the Afghan surge, and on all of these things, Hillary Clinton was pushing the president once again, like she said about Bill, I urged him to bomb.
Right, yeah, they were even talking about, for a while now, in the emails that she and her staff were talking about, this will be the Clinton doctrine, you know, named after her, not Bill, about how we intervene.
We get the French to drop our bombs and then leave and just watch the country we just destroyed just burn.
Yeah, and now it's a bigger terrorist cesspool than it ever was under Qaddafi, the region's, you know, in the midst of collapse.
And her epithet for Qaddafi and for that intervention was, after Qaddafi got killed, was, we came, we saw, he died.
And at the time, I point out in the piece, the Donald, all he could do was brag that this one time he screwed Qaddafi on a land deal.
I don't really think he can match the former first lady in terms of militarism when you look at that kind of record.
Yeah, well, and especially it is worth pointing out, too, not for libertarian morals, but in terms of state politics, that they betrayed Qaddafi, who they had made a deal with and brought in from the cold, and he was torturing and imprisoning al-Qaeda guys for us and gave up all his centrifuges he bought from AQ Khan, and then they still killed him.
And that's, you know, sets a bad precedent for dealing with future countries as well, obviously.
No, it definitely makes people more interested in getting nukes if it's a way to prevent regime change.
It's kind of a perverse incentive.
Yep, sure seems like it.
I mean, you look at the example of North Korea, who scrambled, put together a couple of bombs, and we've left them alone since then.
You know, the Iranians are the ones, and Saddam's dead, of course, and the Iranians are the ones stuck in the middle here.
We're going to see what happens there.
Anyway, hey, thanks for coming back on the show, Gene.
It's great to talk to you.
Yeah, same here.
Thanks again.
All right, Sha, that's Gene Healy.
He is vice president of the Cato Institute, Cato.org, and he's the author of the book The Cult of the Presidency, and we'll be right back.
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