06/15/10 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, the third hour anti-war radio on the Liberty Radio Network here every Monday through Friday from 9 to noon, West Coast time, because that's my time.
I'm in Los Angeles.
That'd be noon to 3 in New York.
And I'm happy to welcome Kelly Vlahos to the show.
She, well, let me pull up her bio officially.
I'll start off with telling you she writes for us at antiwar.com, where her latest article is awesome.
It's called Coin Think Tank Jumps Shark.
She is a Washington, D.C.
-based freelance writer, a longtime political reporter for Fox News.com and contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today Magazine.
Welcome to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Thank you for joining me.
What a great article.
Coin Think Tank Jumps Shark.
Now, just a little while ago, we talked with Gareth Porter about the disaster that is Afghanistan and the complete and utter and total failures that are Stan McChrystal and General David Petraeus at carrying out this coin strategy that a year ago was all the rage.
And now this article has it where you went and sat in the audience through the local coin think tank headquarters there in Washington, D.C., and heard these idiots all tell each other that they don't believe in themselves or each other or their stupid ideas anymore at all.
Huh?
Pardon me if I overstate things a little bit, but they sure sounded like they knew they had guilty consciences to me.
Correct.
By reading that article.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, and I'm not even going to give them that much credit to even say that it was entirely clear that they were feeling low and admitting that things are going badly.
But there was definitely quite a different sense than there was the year before.
I had sat in on the annual conference at the Center for New American Security a year before, and this was just a scant few months after the Obama administration had taken office.
And there was a lot of confidence, a lot of swaggering about the newly democratic administration taking over the reins of the war.
It very much implied that Iraq was Bush's war, Afghanistan was now Obama's war, and that they had the magic formula to resolve things there, and they were going to prove it.
And I don't know if the readers, your listeners, are very, very familiar with the Center for New American Security, but it was started in 2007 by Democrats, led by Michelle Flournoy, who is now the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith's old job at the Pentagon.
And it's worth pointing out, probably, that according to the Wall Street Journal, it was seeded with Rockefeller money from the beginning.
Right.
And in terms of its philosophy, most of the people who had started this think tank were of the, I would call, the liberal interventionist mind, the sort of muscular foreign policy type who had been sort of at the edges of the democratic politics since the Clinton administration.
The same people who brought us Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, who are very much willing to intervene in world affairs, but using the humanitarian reasoning for it, as opposed to just the bald-faced interventionist policies that we had seen during the Bush administration.
So these people were ready to go, and they had seen a window of opportunity just before the last presidential election to basically, on one hand, denounce the Bush administration's policies, the neoconservative policies, but on the other hand, say that the left had sorely dropped the ball in terms of foreign policy, and that they needed to be more muscular, show more might, and basically become a more, I don't want to say, a military-oriented party once again.
So with that message, they won lots of friends in Washington, because that meant defense contractors were quickly on board, other think tanks, other funders, and they reached out to the military.
So if you go on their website, there's a lot of former military officers, very recently former officers, who have come over, including their president, John Noggle, who was an officer in the Rumsfeld, he worked with Paul Wolfowitz for a time, and so you have this real military streak there.
So you find the nexus between the military agenda and the political agenda in Washington, and it's pretty creepy, and I've talked to many people who have been around for a long time who've said that they've never seen this nexus or this politicization of the military and military affairs in Washington, ever.
And that might sound a little melodramatic, but if you look at David Petraeus and McChrystal, General McChrystal, and how they have managed to bully the president into going forward with another surge and this whole coin strategy, and using members of Congress and coming here and doing dog and pony shows for think tanks, and using all their surrogates, whether in politics, to push their agenda, you realize that that's not altogether too melodramatic.
It's pretty much true.
And what we're seeing with the Center for New American Security is that they have spent the last year pushing this war and pushing counterinsurgency.
Things aren't going too well.
So I covered their conference last week and found that, you know, unfortunately, they're not willing to sit out, throw it on the table, and talk about all these mistakes.
But what I found is a more somber mood, but a lot of denial.
And I think that's what I try to convey in my account.
Well, you know, I think I want to ask you kind of all about what happened at the conference and who said what in the way that you detail in the article when we come back from the break.
I'd like to ask your view of the, well, I think this is what you're referring to earlier when you say that, you know, they had this precedent, they think that everything's great, they can use this coin strategy, this counterinsurgency strategy.
And their example of how well it worked was Iraq.
That was General Petraeus' great achievement, supposedly.
But it seems to me from covering Iraq on this show on a pretty much daily basis that the purpose of the surge really was, as Petraeus said at the time, to win more time on the Washington clock, to prolong the war rather than end it.
And I wonder whether that's really the purpose of COIN and all these different surges is to buy our patience for another freedom unit, another six months, another six months, another six months forever.
Right.
And that's one of the messages that was coming through to me at this conference, talking to people over on the side, but also what was being said on the dais, was that there was a disappointment that somehow the administration, as well as the American people, didn't have the patience or the stomach to stay in this war for as long as it took.
And I'm sure, as you've probably heard, that there are all sorts of theories about how long a successful counterinsurgency will take.
And I've heard anywhere between 10 to 13 to 17 years.
And it seems like everybody has a different theory, and I'm sure there are numerous counterinsurgency books that are being used as Bibles today by these guys.
But it just seems that it becomes a longer and longer trajectory.
It's sort of a challenge or a dare to the American people.
Well, if you want to win, you're going to have to have the stomach to sit in for 10 years or 13 or 17 years.
And that was the message I was getting the other day, was not, well, maybe we should take a look at whether this is working.
But do we really have the stomach to do what it takes?
Maybe Obama doesn't, you know, and you know where that's going to take us.
Yeah.
Because Democrats don't have principles.
They can't be tough for standing on their principles.
They can only be tough by killing women and their little children.
Yeah.
And they're constantly balking at the left for not coming up with alternatives.
But it seems to me that they're looking at counterinsurgency and possible failures and are going to be willing to stay on that ship as it goes down because they're afraid, Democrats that is, of looking weak on military affairs.
Right.
Which is exactly what John Nagel told Gareth Porter at that same meeting, was that he's relying on pressure from the right to keep Obama in this war.
Apparently, Nagel believes that Obama wants out, like July 2011, like he said, to begin withdrawal.
All right, everybody.
This is Kelly Blejos from Antiwar.com, and we're going to be right back after this break with some more Antiwar Radio.
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All right, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, LRN.
FM, talking with Kelly Blejos from Antiwar.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
Her article today on Antiwar.com is called, Coin Think Tank Jumps Shark.
I guess, Kelly, it was over the weekend that you went to this meeting at the Center for New American Security?
It was last Thursday.
Last Thursday.
I have to say, it was just adding to the difference between the mood and whatnot from the year before.
It was also much shorter.
They only had three panels, and they had just a lot less fanfare.
It was amazing to see the difference in attitudes.
I think what else I was trying to get to in the piece was, have these people actually learned any lessons?
I'm not so sure about that.
Another thing that I had mentioned was, this is kind of a congregation of defense contractors and policy wonks and people that are all within this galaxy of the military-industrial complex in Washington.
Their interest is in seeing the war move forward.
Their agenda is to move forward.
Their interest is not necessarily the American people and saving money, saving lives, saving American lives.
Sure, they'll do their best to give them the right equipment to fight, but they must fight, and they must keep fighting for as long as it takes.
They must buy that equipment from Barry McCaffrey's company.
Right.
Exactly.
The way you describe this meeting here is, well, of course, people like to be ignorant in their own self-interest.
I guess if I had no conscience and I was a war contractor, I would say, this thing's going great as long as you buy some more of my bombs or whatever it is.
That's fine.
I understand how that goes.
For the guys who are the self-appointed gurus of this counterinsurgency doctrine, based on the, as you say in the article, the whole, oh, we were right on the verge of winning the Vietnam War when the dang hippies stabbed us in the back and Jane Fonda and all that kind of myth.
These guys who take that narrative and have appointed themselves, as you say, the leaders of this revolution in military affairs and all this stuff, even revolution within the chain of command and how these things play out like that, they basically are in almost this comical pathology of denial here where you talk about how they just won't even ask the questions that they would have to answer that would be meaningful, so instead they just kind of sing songs about silly things like, what would you tell the president six years from now after everything's fine?
Just nonsense.
Right.
Correct.
It's hard to describe for people that live outside the beltway what a curious thing these think tanks are, and when you have a think tank that is as powerful as this one, AEI, the American Enterprise Institute was the big think tank of neoconservatism during the Bush years that held a similar prestige eight years ago.
You have all the money, all the movers and shakers, the most powerful people in the defense industry and foreign policy industry in one place at one time.
I don't think I'm overstating that at all, and to sit there and listen to them talk all the way around the war, Afghanistan, Iraq, not once really getting to the meat and potatoes of what's going on is kind of creepy, because these are the people that are making the decisions, they have the ear of the president, they have the ear of the Congress and the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Policy Committee, and yet they are in a state of denial and sitting in this echo chamber where they're at one hand patting each other on the back and on the other hand sort of just talking around uncomfortable issues, and then inviting one or two people to come in and have an opposing view, and like I point out, they had Paul Pillar, a Georgetown professor who has been a critic of the wars and the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, last year was Andrew Bacevich, but they bring these guys in, so they give us this level of sort of like, hi, we're being open-minded, but in the case of Paul Pillar this year, you know, he basically boldly, ball-facedly said, you know, the longer we stay there, the more insurgents we are creating, the more radicals we are creating.
Not one guy took him on.
They went on to Q&A, they went on to other, you know, irrelevant, meaningless questions and contractors standing up and pontificating, and it's, I'm just sitting there going, this is what's wrong with the war, this is what's wrong, you're never going to get anywhere when you're sitting in this state and inside the beltway, and this is where all the decisions are being made.
It's hilarious, it sounds like one big, like, four-hour Chris Matthews show or something where, oh, no, somebody almost got to the point, no, we've got to go to commercial.
Right, exactly, and that's how it is at these things, but this was, and I'm used to that when I cover these think-tank events, but this one was all the more frustrating because of the urgency of the situation in Afghanistan.
I mean, we're not talking about things that may happen or happened a couple years ago, we're talking about, you know, 90,000 guys still in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan, you know, our sons and daughters out there, and these guys are just either talking at cross-purposes or just talking around the 800-pound gorilla, and then privately, they will tell you, yeah, things are all going to hell in a handbasket, but they don't have the guts to write about it, to talk about it, to take anybody to task about it, because it all means their butts are on the line, their jobs are on the line, and that's more important.
Their personal prestige, their personal place, their careers.
It's disgusting, and I think that they're, you know, when people talk about being anti-government, this is where it's at, because this is where life and death is happening, and your government is letting you down.
Sure, you get mad about health care and all those other things, but this is where the system breaks down, but because, you know, this is Washington and this is where all the money is, that it's not going to go anywhere.
It's hard to penetrate it.
Well, I'm sorry, I'm trying to scan through the article here and find the rank of the guy, but I can't seem to find it.
Anyway, somebody in a hallway told you, yeah, you're right, this whole thing's a big joke.
Yeah, I didn't even elicit that comment.
It was a general or a colonel, can you say his name?
I can't say his name, but I could say he's a retired colonel, and he's a pretty honest guy, he's always been very straightforward with me, he wasn't in the event, he wasn't part of any panel discussion or anything, but you know, I ran into the first person I ran into, and two minutes later, because he knows what I write about, he was like, no, we don't have any continuing strategic interest in Afghanistan.
I said, excuse me?
Because it was surprising that it would just come out so casually, but I think that that's what goes on in Washington.
Not an admission that we're losing, an admission that I don't care if we don't stay there another day, because it doesn't matter.
Yeah, and I said, and my response was, well, some people have been saying that for years, my friend, you know, and he's like laughed and walked away.
Yeah, no credit for you.
Well, and that's the sad thing, that this isn't breaking news here.
Right.
You know, so.
All right, I'm sorry, Kelly, that's it.
We're out of time.
Bumper Music's playing.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Everybody, please go and check out Kelly's new article, Coin Think Tank Jumps Shark at antiwar.com right now.