06/30/16 – David Bromwich – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at Amazon.com, stop by ScottHorton.org first.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at ScottHorton.org or go to ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
Okay, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
ScottHorton.org for the archives.
More than 4,000 interviews now going back to 2003.
Sign up for the podcast feed there and all that.
Follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
All right, introducing David Bromwich.
He is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and the author of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke.
His latest is Moral Imagination.
And usually we read him at the Huffington Post, but this one is in the national interest.
They've been running a lot of good stuff there lately at the national interest.
This one is called The Roots of Hillary's Infatuation with War.
Well, that's easy money, right?
Nah.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, David?
I'm fine, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Very happy to have you back here.
Well, so go ahead.
What is it do you think?
That's not my title.
And the title I put into the paper edition, The Wings of the Hawk, isn't my title either.
But mine was so unsexy, Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, that I think they had to dig something better.
I think that Hillary Clinton is a believer in American power, never was not a believer in American power and American hegemony.
And it's one of the reasons why she could start as a Goldwater Republican to the right of her family and end up as an LBJ Democrat to the left of her family, but preserve that continuity in her thinking.
And one of the details I mentioned earlier, which is not hard to extract from her biography, is that she seems to have been a non-participant for somebody on the left liberal side in anti-war protests against the Vietnam War.
Whereas her husband-to-be, Bill Clinton, was closely associated with that movement.
It was possibly to some degree opportunist for him too.
Having the beliefs helped him to rationalize getting out of the draft.
But Bill Clinton, I think, has tended to be less, what to say, interventionist, less aggressive in his attitudes about US power in the world than Hillary Clinton.
An early sign of this, again, in Bill Clinton's presidency, came with the pressure to bomb Yugoslavia.
Oh wait, hold up on all that for a sec.
Let's talk about Vietnam some more.
I guess I had heard it told that she had been against the Vietnam War, but you quote her contemporaries saying, yeah, not so much.
She did...
Yeah, it's not a matter of Hillary Clinton being pro-war.
I think for a member of her generation in the milieu she kept to, which was already on the liberal side, that would have been almost impossible by 1968-69 when she was entering law school.
But she was not interested in it.
That was not the form of political activity she cared for.
She was more involved with the help for the needy, for kids in the inner cities, and prosecuting bad people in government like the Nixon administration, and so on.
The use of authority both to assist and to punish.
And I see her, I guess, as somebody with a pretty strong authoritarian temperament.
I'll go further.
I don't think she has a libertarian bone in her body, and it came out in some of her pronouncements on, for example, Edward Snowden, which were unnecessarily strident.
So that's the background.
Not that she was in some way a hawk in the Vietnam War when she had no power anyway, but I would even draw a shade of distinction between her and Bill Clinton on the Vietnam War, and on further into, as I mentioned, Yugoslavia.
It's said that Hillary Clinton's strong advocacy for bombing Yugoslavia, for going along with Tony Blair's plan for the use of NATO in this new century, as it was coming, that Hillary Clinton took the balance for Bill, and as she later did for Obama on Libya, and by, you know, the strength of her resolve and her belief, was a major cause of those two interventions.
God help us, if we're going to have to rely on Bill to restrain her.
The Mad Bomber Bill Clinton is what I used to call him before George W. Bush came around.
Yeah, I think we can agree Bush did more harm than Bill Clinton, but there is a liberal myth of the good intervention that, you know, takes the Kosovo instance as the prime example, There was an attempt to build up a neoconservative myth with Iraq, that didn't work, but the neoconservatives have now blended into the, you know, camouflage background of neoliberal advisors, and they formed sort of conglomerate organizations, some of that visible in the so-called dissenting memo from the State Department on Syria.
The people from the Bill Clinton administration, and people from the George Bush, and, you know, the people who think Obama has not been belligerent enough, all are together in wanting the U.S. to be stronger, in building up defense reserves in East Europe against a supposed Russian threat, and in, again, counting the Russians, but also supposedly building up democratic institutions by overthrowing Assad in Syria.
The National Interest, the journal that my article is printed in, has been skeptical on these issues, especially on Syria, and it's an honorable position they've had.
Well, now, on the Kosovo war back in 1999, it should have meant more to me.
I mean, obviously, I was against it, but I should have understood in the context what a big deal it was that they were doing this over Russia's dead body, literally, that you can't stop us, and I had thought that, nefarious as they were, that there were grand strategies behind American imperial foreign policy, but now, really, yeah, no more, it seems like.
The president's wife hectored him into it.
Well, and not to forget Tony Blair.
He was not discredited at that time.
He was at the height of his rhetorical power and his apparent political leverage, not just in Britain, but in Europe generally, and Tony Blair had an optimistic, fervent, messianic idea of the role that Europe, in the form of NATO, aided by the US, could take in building up a new world of democracy, civil society, and all the rest.
It was just the beginning of that, and I, you know, I'm as culpable, if that's the word, as you are.
I thought the Kosovo war, the bombing of Yugoslavia, was bad, and I thought it was bad that it went on for 77, 78 days, whatever it was, and that it kicked up more problems than it solved, but I didn't see it as the beginning of a whole new drift in US policy, which it has turned out to be.
Well, and it's amazing, as you say, that the myth really has stuck, though, that, yeah, well, what about Kosovo, where everything worked great, if only that's what we had done to protect the poor people of Rwanda, but we learned the lesson in Kosovo that you've got to do it, and, of course, they never had to, no one ever held them to account.
Who was going to hold them to account?
Christian Amanpour, Jamie Rubin, the State Department spokesman's wife, was going to hold them accountable for the fact that there were no mass graves, there were no 100,000 murdered men, women, and children, Kosovo Albanians.
It was a lie.
I would believe it was the Wall Street Journal that did the expose on that, but these follow-up stories are forgotten, and, of course, a more recent follow-up that I cited in the article by the excellent reporter, the New York Times reporter, Carlotta Gall, about the present state of Kosovo, which is now yet one more haven for ISIS, for the new terrorist militants, and these are ethnic, you know, Serbians, people from the Balkan states, they don't look like the American idea of Muslims, that is to say, they're not exactly Arab, and yet they, because of poverty, because of conditions that make them hostile to the West and so on, and also just to have something to do and feed themselves and have a big cause, that's become a popular rallying point in Kosovo of all places.
So, you know, there's a state really run by drug lords, the Kosovo Liberation Army was discredited, even by the time we decided to make it into a state, but it's another, we call them failed states, but they're failures partly created by intervention and violence coming from the U.S. and our allies.
So, yeah, it's a terrible myth.
The Iraq War narrative, in a way, is harder to turn in favor of U.S. imperial expansion.
I mean, the Iraq War just looks very bad.
You can't say the surge made it have a happy ending now, because the second ending came with the rise of ISIS.
But people do go back to Kosovo and the terrible supposed lost chance of Rwanda.
And the idea that America must be the, what to say, centripetal power that holds together what's good in the world and organizes the energies of people of goodwill and all the rest.
I could think we might play a role in reducing the results of climate disruption if we join some international organizations concerned with that.
But, in fact, U.S. strategists are war-gaming climate change and talking about whose advantages it's going to be to and who we should be willing to sacrifice and so on.
Everything turns into a matter of defense, security, elimination of the weaker and so on.
And, of course, it should go without saying, but for the other reason that everybody knows it, but the Pentagon is, what, second or third place for the greatest polluter on Earth after just the U.S. government itself, you know, the rest of the U.S. government and maybe some of the other major Western powers.
Well, I think China, too.
There's lots of blame to go around on climate disruption.
But it is extraordinary that, I suppose, the United States is the country that is on record as thinking best of itself, constantly speaking of itself.
And it cuts a cross-party line.
Bush did it.
Obama does it.
And yet, on this issue where there is a scientific consensus and a consensus of educated people, you know, on this issue of climate disruption, the U.S. lags behind.
Well, even if all that stuff's true, I certainly don't want them to do anything about it.
I don't want them to do anything at all.
But, still an important point, you know, as far as just who's, you know, if that stuff is true, look who's behind the worst of it.
You know, look at how much they waste, look at how much fuel they waste just transporting fuel to the guys in Afghanistan.
Oh, yeah, with the old zombies.
And I would feel wrong, Scott, if I didn't put myself on the record that it is true.
And I don't think either of us knows anybody qualified who would be able to refute that.
But we don't have to get into that argument if you don't want to.
Well, like I say, it's beside the point because I still want the U.S. government to cease to exist, not to do anything about climate change or anything.
Well, and in any case, these wars are a distraction from any possible beneficent action of government or any possible, you know, gradual dismantling of the worst of the powers of government that might have a good result.
The wars are a complete distraction and close to being, I don't know, what would they call it in psychology now?
A syndrome, an addiction, an obsession?
It's a track of thinking we can't get off.
And you see an organization like the, you know, Project for the New American Century gradually dissolve and then it gets replaced by something called, you know, Better for New American Security or whatever it is.
And people who are ambitious to be in the next administration.
In this case, they imagine it's going to be a Clinton administration.
Angle for positions by writing policy papers or, you know, leaking memos about how we need to be more aggressive in Syria.
We need to somehow counter Russian power without any sort of threatening confrontation.
They don't say how exactly you cut that very fine difference.
You know, you're going to create a no-fly zone but make sure you don't intercept any unfriendly Russians and create an incident.
It's a crazy policy and yet it's presented as judicious.
That's their own word about themselves.
These, I think, aspiring Clintonites in the State Department.
A judicious use of force and they think that Obama has fallen short of that and of course he has.
He referred to Syria as a cluster you-know-what and decided after he was almost led into another intervention by the same people led by Clinton that he wasn't going to do what he did in Libya yet again.
That only made things infinitely worse.
Well now, let's put off Syria for a second because on Libya Oh, Libya, David.
I bet you probably we can find interviews of you and I talking about this in 2011 as it was all going down.
This is just, it's too crazy for words, man.
They call it smart power sort of like intelligence.
Instead of calling it educated guesses, they call it intelligence which is sort of flattering and it defines itself as true and smart even though it isn't necessarily.
Sort of the same with smart power.
That's a great slogan for use of power in some way but what's smart about it when anyone by we're at the end of June here anyone by June 2011, five years ago knew for sure that this war was benefiting veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Guys who were loyal their last leader was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and, oh my god we're fighting a war for them and then they just kept doing it anyway and all reports out of the New York Times and everything is that Hillary met with the Libyan Chalabi once at some hotel and he said, oh yeah trust me lady, it's going to be great and then they did it.
Jibril was his name.
Yeah, that's why I'm tempted to call it a syndrome.
They take these more or less western educated reminds you of ourselves leaders at face value when the leaders claim that they are in a position to command power in the country when in fact they have nothing like that.
In the report that came out from the Republican led committee on Benghazi when was that?
Yesterday or the day before I saw the committee head Trey Gowdy presenting some of the information about Benghazi and one of the most curious features of it not emphasized in newspaper reports but it's there and even the Times did mention it is that it's not only the four who were killed but we managed to get out into safety out of Benghazi.
38 other Americans who were under serious threat of kidnapping death whatever from the rogue militias who were our allies our presumptive allies against Qaddafi and you know who got them out?
It was officers from Qaddafi's armed forces whom they finally called on and who assisted the Americans.
So I mean the very government you depose becomes the one you rely on to fight the guerrilla force you've created by this by smashing yet another government Well you know the Washington Times series the Shapiro and Riddell series there have it that the DIA well the military in general I guess and the CIA they wanted to negotiate they were talking with Qaddafi's son I mean after all the war took nine months ten months to finally lynch the guy on the side of the road and so they were trying to come to some kind of deal and call the war off even after we know from the emails that Sid Blumenthal was telling Hillary Clinton that yeah man they're our jihadists and they're doing summary executions and this kind of thing and they kept the war going for months even after that when they could have stopped short what do you think is my obsession and what I get it they're a bunch of lunatics I don't disagree with you about that but there must be something else I'm missing just lunatics I think that the habit of one line of conduct in individual lives as well as in a group in a state that habit becomes something that has its own inertia and this is what the American establishment looks like with its current that is the foreign policy elite with the convergence of people like you know Michelle Flournoy who was you know a named possibility to succeed Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and has been high up in Democratic Party defense advice circles for many years somebody like her somebody like Robert Kagan who was a leading propagandist for the Iraq war and a co-founder of the project the new American century but he he's very likely to have a role in a Clinton administration I would think his wife Victoria Newland is someone Hillary Clinton moved over from the office of the Vice President under Dick Cheney to her own State Department gave her enormous power and the degree to which Victoria Newland is implicated in the coup in Kiev that led to the disintegration in Ukraine that still is an interesting question so these people are you might even say again together they were almost together at some phases of the Bill Clinton administration and then they separated out under Bush really a lot of people thought Iraq was rash and a step too far and those who didn't think it initially thought it later people like Kagan or William who went on defending the Iraq war through 2007, 2008, 2009 are actually relatively rare but none of them who are in government are discredited by any of this and they keep being absorbed back into the machine and Hillary Clinton is very friendly with them she sees them as important allies she doesn't have any there's been nothing in her revolting against the bad results that have come from her policies and the ones that that Bush is responsible for before her Hey y'all, Scott here.
Check out Jacob Hornberger's great new book, The CIA Terrorism and the Cold War, The Evil of the National Security State.
They swear we need them but the Future Freedom Foundation Hornberger is having none of it.
Hornberger shows how from the beginning Empire has diminished American's freedom far more than our enemies ever could and all while undermining everything we profess to believe in and dealing with other nations.
The CIA Terrorism and the Cold War, The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger Get it on Kindle for just a dollar at Amazon.com Well you know that New York Times piece it ran a couple of months ago about what a hawk she is talked about they really kind of framed it all in sort of like social psychology and what have you right where if she for political reasons she needs to get along with Jack Keane then she just is kind of a chameleon and she just sort of takes on whatever it is Jack Keane thinks, yeah let's do a surge or whatever.
That was a plausible treatment of the subject, the one in the Times that you're talking about and it suggested that Hillary Clinton's a bit of a mystery.
What she would really do if she had power is up in the air.
But I don't I think the plausible it's misleading ultimately and a little too comforting She was Secretary of State and she used her weight to back Petraeus and McChrystal against Robert Gates, you know the person held over from a Republican administration to Obama's administration with his silly idea of a team of rivals.
So Gates becomes the moderate on escalation not on escalation in Afghanistan but on bombing Libya and Hillary sided with all of those people against Obama against Doug Lute and Biden and others who were urging a much more careful future course in Afghanistan.
Hillary sided with the generals and on that occasion she sided with the Secretary of Defense too against what were visibly Obama's hesitation and you know he's not strong he's not I think as mean spirited and as what to say ugly in his moral character as many of the people around government but he's not he's never been strong on these things and I think she played a key role in that too.
Both the escalation in Afghanistan and in Libya she played a crucial role.
Okay so now on Syria this is something that's come up with Peter Van Buren a few times on the show because he worked in the State Department for a long long time and so sometimes I complain to him too about how Peter how come when we're talking about this stuff and I say man this is really crazy this is what seems to be happening how come you always say yep that's a pretty accurate description instead of no I'm crazy how can it be so crazy we're talking about grown adults the most powerful people in the history of the world frankly making these decisions how can it be that they're just so damned careless it's like a comic book or something you know and Van Buren's answer is hey at the State Department if Hillary wants to do Syria then everybody's job is agreeing with her and making doing Syria seem like the right thing you know like we're talking about George Lucas making a prequel here or something it's no one's job to say actually Jar Jar's not funny and actually Al Qaeda's the enemy not Assad and this is crazy the person who's been saying that as much as anyone and it's the best thing I know about him I don't know that many entirely positive other things is Joe Biden on Libya on Afghanistan escalation on Syria and he's the one who you know leaked in a speech at Harvard details about the Syria disagreements that nobody else around the White House or the State Department has come forward with but Biden's given your best explanation of why Obama almost lunged for the bombing of Syria and then pulled back and means to stay pulled back but I think you know there's a line in a poem by Marianne Moore about New York which goes something like one must stand outside and laugh since to go in is to be lost and you know on the inside I think these people who are ambitious for their careers want to be lost in the crowd and it takes nerve or it takes confidence or whatever sort of cussedness Joe Biden has as an associate of Obama to say no this is a bad idea this has been tried before and it's not a good idea the tendency just to conformity I guess even more in a great power that has a myth of its own success the temptation is too great for a lot of them to get past and I think they come to believe it they come to believe this time it will be right this time we know more or they believe that Assad is completely responsible for the worst atrocities in modern war and for the United States who have overlooked these and done nothing will be a black mark beside us throughout history but the fact is Assad is a tyrant he's a tyrant of the sort that uses power mercilessly to keep himself in power and yet the results we've seen it we've seen it in Iraq and we've seen it in Libya the results of using enormous violence in order to overthrow such people without any grasp of their language their country what the forms of stability are that are possible afterwards creates even worse troubles even worse suffering than these tyrants do and it's just not a message that people in the American policy elite seem to get or want to get well it's sort of like you know in the neocons Richard Perle and all Christopher Hitchens in and out of government all of them in the march to the Iraq war Hitchens to be fair was never in government oh no I'm saying in and out all the way the whole spectrum of the former communist turned right wing Bush loving warmongers then you know from Kruthammer to Wolfowitz their whole thing was that you know mean old Kissinger why he just didn't care whether people were slaughtered or not well we do we're gonna we're gonna go and help you and it seemed like you know on one hand obviously they're being cynical when the only dictators they target are the ones that they don't own and we can see what they mean by export democracy they mean you know force America friendly governments on other governments but on the other hand they seem to believe it enough to think that they're right and moral in what they do but just enough yeah no I would agree with that and the what to say the solidity of their belief in themselves makes them at times say the most crass and heartless things I mean Hillary Clinton this was apparently rehearsed with her advisor Sid Blumenthal when it was felt that Obama might be stealing the credit for the overthrow of so she goes on whatever TV show that was and says we came we saw he died and then laughs that sort of cackling rehearsed laugh terrible terrible you don't say that about an assassination but Americans have grown inert to this even Obama the relatively gentle Obama you know after he orders the assassination of Bin Laden speaks of it again and again going into the 2012 election as delivering justice to Bin Laden we delivered justice to Bin Laden no you didn't deliver justice is something with a process it doesn't come down in a helicopter and shoot you alright now so let's talk a little bit about Russia too because if anything going on in Eastern Europe is not Putin's fault then it could be hers she was in charge of the Russia reset and it didn't work out so if she's president there's I mean we're talking about Hillary Clinton here too not some TV president there's virtually zero chance that she could even entertain the possibility that you know maybe it was kind of her pushing a little too far in Libya and Syria and Ukraine that maybe might have provoked them a little or anything like that yeah those are the reasons for one's gravest reservations about Clinton becoming president I mean just to get the chronology clear the Ukraine turnover happened at the end the 2013 into 2014 Hillary Clinton was no longer Secretary of State then but John Kerry seems to have inherited some of this aggressive streak that was so pronounced in her and certainly inherited the people it's possible that some of the people running things there are very aggressive very resourceful and maybe very convincing and so they are we know people who are confrontational toward Russia who have been responsible for you know what they can achieve of a new form of press treatment of a Russian leader that goes back to the anti-communist days I mean Putin again there's another bad man a strong man if you will Dick Cheney without a constitution that's Putin but nevertheless he's a leader of a power nuclear power and we're doing these you know kicking up dirt in his backyard in a way that would never be allowed in the Western Hemisphere by the United States in our Hemisphere let alone on our borders and without any idea that that might have something to do with the fact of Russia annexing Crimea and the fact of Russia wanting to defend Syria as an asset more strongly than we anticipated they would and all the rest but Putin actually shows some signs of prudence that have been absent in American leaders he went in and got out of Syria in a way that doesn't seem possible for us to have done so Hillary Clinton seems reckless about that and it seems to me to be the neoconservative side of her foreign policy advisorate that's contributing there and it's highly possible she finds this satisfying whether to view herself as a particularly tough all-American leader of a new reassertion of American both power and hegemony and it suits her to call it smart power because it points to the fact that she's a brainy woman yeah it's quite dangerous and on the other side you know in this coming election you have Trump who is the unknown unknown incarnate who's some of whose utterances on foreign policy actually have been heretical in an interesting way saying that NATO is a relic of the Cold War what are we doing supporting NATO so much refusing to demonize Putin but Trump is so all over the map so incoherent that people are naturally averse to him too so it's a truly terrible choice him being slightly good on Russia some of the time when he's not saying that we should be shooting down their fighter jets over the Baltic Sea yeah he's basically it's just another way to differentiate himself from the common narrative it doesn't mean that he means anything by it at all exactly I think that I think that's right he now claims to have been against the Libya war he claims to have been against the Iraq war there's very little evidence of either of those things so but Hillary Clinton's on the record I mean she is the known known well she compared Putin to Adolf Hitler said hey look he took Crimea that's what Hitler did yeah she went one step ahead of the neoconservatives there or ahead of most of them because all but the most demagogic of them would say well this is like Munich they love to invoke Munich and so you must not you must never give in to another power you must never give an inch even though it's an inch you have no interest in so that that comes up often but the actual comparison of Putin to Hitler was striking she did that in at a moment which was making in the fall of 2014 when she was really starting to run for president and trying to differentiate herself from Obama and marking out a place for herself very much to the right of Obama that was the first move by Hillary Clinton then when Sanders challenged her on the left mostly on social policy and later a little bit on foreign policy saying that she was too much into regime change Clinton moderated her presentation a little and we don't know what it adds up to now but I mean the tendency of the record is towards a self-confident assertion reassertion of American power and that's a that's a what to say a little fable shared by the foreign policy advisers on the right and the left that somehow you know under Bill Clinton first we missed the chance when there was this magnificent opening that Wolfowitz talked about to become the world's sole superpower we didn't make enough wars under Bill Clinton when there was no chance of Russia opposing and then in the aftermath of disappointment with Iraq the Obama administration is just a horrible lost opportunity that's where you should have finally made our move and they don't they don't say how we should have done it any more than they used to say how we could have won the Vietnam war and we used everything we could in Vietnam except nuclear weapons that's the only thing we didn't use and the same question ought to be asked about these strategists on Syria and Ukraine and the rest what do you want you wanted to actually cross into Russian territory with with NATO tanks it's not what they want so let's talk about sexism a little bit on which I'm an expert of course well I think all of us are we have to be now so listen I mean here's the thing if you're a democrat and you're a president then by definition you're a wimp and you better prove that you're not a wimp and it just seems as plain as gay almost incontrovertible that if you're a woman and a democrat and you're a president then you have to be extra tough because what if they call you a weak woman democrat and and now if she's as brainy as you say or well I know you're just kind of kidding with that but if she's as brainy as she would like us to think then she would know that hey come on you don't have to go along with that you can stand up to them prove how tough you are by standing up to them they're a bunch of soft handed republicans what are they going to do about it right but she same as Obama could have too stood up to them and proved how tough he was in that way but instead I mean it's just a foregone conclusion that she's going to be running to the right for 8 years straight in order to avoid being called a weak woman democrat I think that's right and I think that's a difference between her and both Carter I mean the Carter doctrine which has gotten us into so much subsequent trouble was a great exception to that but Carter for the most part Obama for the most part yeah they didn't as you say stand up to the generals but they what you call it they stood still while the generals slugged away and they tried to keep their stance at least Hillary Clinton it's symptomatic that she would make friends with Jack Keane the co-author of the surge of 2007 in Iraq and you know a very interventionist type within the military very different from the vice chairman of the joint chiefs whom Obama relied on in the early days of his presidency General Cartwright Jack Keane was you know spearhead along with Frederick Kagan of that policy for staying the course in Iraq and I think Hillary Clinton has a kind of politicians you know rueful pride in her ability to get along with men of power of all sorts and her ability to satisfy men of power of all sorts and you know that story about her kicking off her shoes and saying where can a gal get herself a beer around here to Jack Keane when she's in the army barracks or whatever to me that says that says something about her and I don't think it puts her in a position temperamentally where she's likely to defy the consensus of the generals any more than say LBJ did if you assume as we now know in fact that Johnson saw the writing on the wall in Vietnam and that it was never going to work but he just didn't have he was a democrat he said they're not going to tell me I'm the one that lost when this war is lost it's going to be somebody else so you know it's you're right that's the democratic president's predicament in foreign policy you could say it's the punishment for the democrats taking no primary interest in foreign policy they'd rather get it off the table and work on welfare policies medical care things like that those are the democrats bread and butter issues but republicans meanwhile people like McCain people like Lindsey Graham people like Representative King of New York are going to be pushing forward on security and pushing to do more with our power and keep our defense up and they get imitated they get emulated by democrats like Michelle Flournoy who writes this Washington Post editorial in 2014 saying the defense department ought to be made an exception from the sequestration requirements just take that out of the deal there's going to be no cutbacks in defense because our defense has to keep expanding all right well we better stop here because I've already kept you way over time I didn't even know the time thanks well I just want when people download this thing to their phone and see 40 minutes I don't want them to see 55 and go ah forget it and skip it or anything I'm glad to stop it at a convenient point short of an hour long TV serial the truth is I got a hundred more questions and directions and topics to bring up and everything else but that just means I'll have to have you back on the show sometime soon ok bye bye thank you very much David appreciate it all right y'all that is David Bromwich Sterling professor of English at Yale University and author of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke and Moral Imagination this one is at the National Interest, nationalinterest.org the roots of Hillary Clinton's infatuation with war all right scotthorton.org for the archives 4000 something interviews there etc like that sign up for the podcast feed if you want to get them all also at scotthorton.org help support at scotthorton.org and follow me on twitter at scotthorton show you hate government?one of them libertarian types?or maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or war mongers?
me too!that's why I invented libertystickers.com well Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them but still if you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are there's only one place to go libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered left right libertarian empire police state founders quote central banking yes bumper stickers about central banking lots of them well everything that matters libertystickers.com everyone else's stickers suck this part of the scotthorton show is sponsored by audible.com and right now if you go to audible trial.com slash scotthorton show you can get your first audio book for free of course I'm recommending Michael Swanson's book the war state the cold war origins of the military industrial complex and the power elite maybe you've already bought the war state in paperback but you just can't find the time to read it well now you can listen while you're out marching around get the free audio book of the war state by Michael Swanson produced by listen and think audio at audible trial.com slash scotthorton show superior blends of premium coffee roasted fresh in zionsville indiana Darren's coffee satisfies the casual and the connoisseur scotthorton show listeners visit Darren's coffee.com and use the coupon code scot at checkout for free shipping Darren's coffee.com because everyone deserves to drink great coffee