07/06/16 – Jim Hale – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing Jim Hale.
It's Tom Woods exclusive.
I'm just poaching.
Jim Hale, former media director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, who has now converted himself to Ron Paulian-style anti-war libertarianism.
Welcome to the show, Jim.
How are you?
Oh, I'm well, Scott.
It's good to be with you today.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, I guess most of your personal conversion story is covered in the Tom Woods interview, but we got to talk about it a little bit here to start.
You know, it's 2016, but you finally snapped out of it, huh?
What happened?
I think it was a gradual process, actually.
After the war and for many years thereafter, I kind of stuck to the talking points.
My standard response was that, well, look, we gave the Iraqis a gift.
They haven't taken advantage of it.
Now they're killing each other, and you can't blame that on us.
But I think deep down, I was never really totally comfortable with that.
I did pay attention to Ron Paul in 2008.
I think like a lot of neocons, half of what he said, I thought was great.
And then when he got to foreign policy, I just thought, oh, wow, I can't believe he's saying these things about blowback, and this is anti-American.
And so I would dismiss him.
And then again in 2012, the same scenario.
But of course, things just continued to get worse.
And I think all the while, looking back now, I can tell that I was never at peace with what I was saying.
And ultimately, I just kind of kept quiet about it and didn't even enter into the debate anymore.
None of the people in my circles that I'm with now know anything about my past.
And of course, this year with the crazy election season, I think a lot of conservatives have just been forced to reevaluate.
And I just was appalled really at what I was hearing from Ted Cruz in all the debates, Mr. Constitution saying he wanted the carpet bomb.
And I'm a Christian, I read the Bible every day.
And after a while, you're gonna have to reconcile your relationship with God and the actions that you've taken.
I couldn't do it anymore.
I finally had to be honest about it and say that not only has our foreign policy not worked, I couldn't blame it on just the Iraqis anymore or the Afghans not being able to take care of their own situation.
After listening to Ron Paul and reading his book and immersing myself in libertarianism, it's pretty clear that not only has our foreign policy in the Middle East not worked, it's actually made it worse and blow back Israel.
And of course, I'm taking heat already from some of my Christian friends and neocon friends, but I'm totally at peace with this and that's why I'm speaking out.
All right, now on that point about the Christianity and the dissonance there between following the teachings of Jesus and following this political government, you made a very interesting point to Tom Woods about how you handled that dissonance, how born again Christians, typically speaking, generally speaking, broad brush, how they handle this dissonance.
It's actually pretty easy, right?
You just shift the focus from what Jesus said you are supposed to be like to we are the Christians and they are the others.
And so we are fighting against them to protect goodness from evil and then snap of a fingers, turn the other cheek turns to you lays that target and I'll drop a 500 pound bomb on their head.
Well, yes, I think that's accurate, Scott.
It's the battle against evil and we're supposed to be able to identify evil and a lot of it has to do with just patriotism too because in the Cold War, our opponents were atheists, they were Soviets.
We had a name for the left wingers, the gullible left wingers who went to the Soviet Union and were manipulated, we call them useful idiots.
Well, I really feel like I was a useful idiot and that it's just so, it's part of the culture in the Christian world to just fall in line and to say, I pray for the troops and even if someone in the group in your Bible study will say, well, gosh, I'm not totally cool with starting wars or being the initiators of aggression, then the standard thing that we will rely on as well, we still have to support the troops.
We still have to support the troops and we thank you for your service and all these cliches and that's just not acceptable to me anymore.
All right, now, who is Randy Scheunemann or who is he to you, I guess?
Well, Randy was my boss.
I first worked for him at the Mercury Group, which is basically just the NRA's ad and PR agency.
We also did some ad work for Lockheed at the time and Randy was Trent Lott's chief aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Randy was the author of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, the stated goal of which was regime change and then after Randy left the Mercury Group, I went with him to his foreign policy lobbying shop on Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast and I was his media guy.
I worked on some anti Castro Cuban campaigns.
I actually came on board for this thing called the Congressional Cuban Political Prisoners Initiative so I got to meet a lot of former Cuban political prisoners and to me, that was very inspiring to be able to try to bring attention to their plight in Castro's gulags and that was all centered around President Carter's visit when he went to Cuba and we wanted President Carter to raise the issue of political prisoners to Castro, which of course backfired, but so I was already in place when Randy and Bruce Jackson and Bill Kristol got together to form the committee, which those guys were already together in a group called PNAC.
It was, gosh, I forgot the actual name of that.
The Project for a New American Century.
There you go, Gary Schmidt.
So they were the natural go-to guys for that and I came on board as the media person.
I had a pretty good Rolodex at the time.
I had a direct line into Christopher Hitchens and I served as his booking agent throughout the whole buildup to the Iraq war and I basically just handled the media for the committee.
Yeah, boy do I got a grudge against you for all the Hitchens I had to suffer through in 02.
Grr, all right, now, Shoineman, am I right?
He's actually not a neoconservative.
He's just a conservative like you from the right and I think I'm only assuming that because of his work on the gun issue.
That's not really a neocon issue.
Was he ever a leftist, a lacunic?
No, so yeah, I mean, that's right.
A pure definition of a neocon, I guess, is the Charles Krauthammers and guys like that who had been leftist and then basically became neocons based on foreign policy, typically based on Israel, right?
So no, I don't think Randy would apply as far as that is concerned.
He's more like a John Bolton character who was just always kind of a Goldwater, right-wing nationalist type.
Yeah, I think that's probably more accurate.
Randy was probably one of the most influential lobbyists for the NATO aspirant countries as well.
He represented Latvia, Macedonia.
He had done some work for Pakistan, which is kind of a separate issue, and their oil pipeline.
But as a person on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Lott was the Senate Majority Leader, so Randy obviously had a lot of influence.
Yeah, all right, now, of course, Bill Kristol is Bill Kristol, Irving's son, and the Fox News commentator, Cheshire Cat Grin, editor of the Weekly Standard Magazine, neocon kingpin, and Bruce Jackson.
Tell us everything that you can about who Bruce Jackson is and his role and how he became the guy to set up these committees.
Oh boy, well, Jackson is a name that not many people know.
That Playboy expose that you sent me, I think is the best in-depth, accurate analysis I think I've seen.
In fact, it revealed many things to me I didn't even know about Jackson because he's not a guy that you see that goes on network television, but he worked for Lockheed.
He has an Ivy League background and extremely influential.
He had a direct line into the Pentagon, and that's basically who the committee, we were more allied with the Department of Defense.
The State Department and the CIA, I think, didn't really like us very much because our go-to guy for all of our information about Iraq was Ahmad Chalabi, and I heard Chalabi speak with disdain about the CIA, but yeah, Jackson is a major player in all this stuff.
And by the way, that article, and you guys can find it all over the place.
I don't think it's actually on playboy.com anymore, but it's called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Richard Cummings.
I try to recommend that as best I can.
I actually interviewed him about it back in 07 as well when it was brand new, but yeah, very interesting article there.
It's funny because, in fact, the way Cummings has it is we look at all these neoconservatives and we go, oh yeah, well, they're all Likudniks, and they have their ties to these various different interest groups, and Cummings says, hey, wait a minute, everybody.
What these guys have in common, even more than Israel, is Lockheed, and where he goes through to where almost to a name, all of the neoconservatives, not Kruthammer and Crystal and all the ones who write for all the papers and magazines, but all the ones who were actually in the government during that time, almost to a man, Libby and Fythe and Wumser, and all of these guys were tied to Lockheed one way or the other, and the one who was least was Hadley, but he was a lawyer for Lockheed, so I mean, it almost seemed like the entire world I mean, it was just, it almost seemed like the entire Iraq war, that was the way he kind of argued it, was for all the different little not good enough reasons that there were to invade Iraq, like get Bush reelected, or make him look tougher than his dad, or make Ariel Sharon feel good, or whatever it is, above all, it was get rid of Lockheed product, sell Lockheed stuff to the Pentagon at all costs, and if we can have a war in the Middle East, perfect.
Well, do you remember sort of the amazement and almost admiration that many in the media had when we started seeing shock and awe and those massive explosions that went off, and there was like almost a carnival atmosphere of like, wow, look what we can do, and I have to tell you that when I read that article, it was eye-opening for me, because of course, the major critique at the time was this was all about oil, but I think Cummings' case is a slam dunk that when you make all these connections, and I can say that not that I was an insider for all the strategy of this, look, I was the media guy, and in some ways I was naive, but Hadley called our office a lot.
I can tell you that.
Well, and it's according to that Cummings article, it was Hadley who asked Bruce Jackson, hey, I need you to create this group for me to help drum up public support for the policy.
Yeah, and that's exactly what we did.
You know, when you have 435 members of the House on the Hill and they know that a big vote is coming up and 100 senators, most of them don't know anything about Iraq, well, that's where we came in.
And now, when you mention Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and all that, and this is something that you mentioned in your article, and I'm sorry, I meant to mention this, Confessions of a War Propagandist is running at the Ron Paul Institute website, ronpaulinstitute.org, and I think you mentioned in here about how the CIA had a burn notice on Chalabi, I think ever since 1996, and you talked about, you mentioned a minute ago about how Chalabi had this open disdain for the CIA.
I wonder what you made of that, or what was the maybe Bill Crystal, Randy Scheunem in line about how to explain why the CIA is so opposed to these sources of information that you guys are using and that the Pentagon was using at the time?
I think there was a tremendous arrogance that we had Chalabi, and he was the true Iraqi source, and you have to understand that Chalabi is an extremely impressive guy.
He looks like he just stepped off the set of a James Bond movie.
He's always immaculately dressed, and he's a big man, speaks perfect English.
I think he has a PhD in mathematics.
He has all the- He's dead now, but yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that.
He had all that Arab charm.
When you were in his presence, he filled the room.
I mean, this was a man who commanded almost immediate respect, and he just had an air of authority about him, and at the same time, did a great job of selling the cause, and that cause for us, at least, we tried to make it seem like a real human rights cause.
Yeah, and yeah, that's another thing that's really emphasized in the Cummings piece is that there was sort of a division of labor in the public relations, and while others were really pursuing the ties to Al-Qaeda and the weapons of mass destruction, you guys had a particular shtick, which was remember Halabja, and remember the Anfal campaign, and he's sort of like on the David Koresh model.
He's too crazy to negotiate with, so we just gotta kill him.
That's right, that's the way we sold it, and it worked.
Now, so give us some examples.
Was it just besides Anfal and Halabja, I mean, there was, can you, do you remember off the top of your head like some anecdotes, crystal calls, and says, ooh, ooh, here's a talking point, go use this one on him, or, you know, give us some stories here.
We used the UN.
The UN had described Saddam's atrocities in detail, of course, and I think the number that we typically use was 300,000 people, and Randy was fond of saying that, look, according to the UN, Saddam has been even more genocidal than the North Korean regimes, so we really pushed that angle over and over, and then just reminding them that he had gassed his own people, he had killed his own people, and that chemical weapons, the same sort of stuff that you hear about Syria, that chemical weapons remains a threat, and that that threat, that we were somehow threatened, that the goal was to, I think, make a chemical weapons attack or a biological weapons attack a real threat to Americans somehow, and look, we read the Coburn brothers who wrote extensively, they were writing about Saddam back in the 90s about what a monster he was.
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Oh, so that's interesting.
You guys were using Andrew and Patrick Coburn to say, hey, even the Coburns say, this guy's the worst guy ever, that kind of thing, huh?
Well, that's right, and we had Hitchens.
We had Hitchens on our side.
Although the Coburns never supported the war.
They just told the truth about Saddam, right?
Well, that's right.
There's a difference.
So, yeah, he's a bad guy.
Well, so are the North Korean dictators.
Are we gonna invade them, too?
I think Andrew and Patrick both would have pointed out that back when, during the Anfal campaign and the Halabja massacre and everything was when he was the loyal sock puppet of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
Well, that, of course, was mentioned by a lot of people.
Boy, but it just got dismissed automatically.
And the other thing.
The current president at the time, his father was the vice president at the time.
His secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, worked in the House of Representatives to help cover it up, et cetera, et cetera.
And I remember at the time reading about that and thinking, boy, this doesn't sound right.
But, you know, let's go with it.
Let's just go forward.
That's kind of insignificant at this point.
But the other thing, I think, that really demonstrates a great ignorance is that we forgot about what Saddam did to all the Shia during and after the Gulf War.
And our, of course, our standard line, and I think that the committee can probably take credit for about the Iraqis greeting us as liberators.
Well, the Shia certainly didn't feel any great debt of gratitude to us.
Right, and if anybody would, it would have been them.
I mean, besides the Kurds, who really had been autonomous since 1990 anyway.
But yeah, if any Iraqi Arabs were going to welcome the invasion, it would have been the Shia for at least, hey, get rid of Saddam for us.
And yet, you know, again, Bush's father had urged them to rise up and then betrayed him and let Saddam murder 100,000.
Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary about that?
Oh my God, go watch that sometime.
No, I actually haven't.
Oh, that is one of the most powerful war documentaries I think ever made.
I highly recommend it.
I don't even know the name of it, but do it.
Yeah, I'll find it.
I got them on the IMDB right here, so I'll figure it out.
But yeah, I mean, the great stab in the back or great Bay of Pigs of the Desert in 91 is what I call it in my book that I'm writing right now.
Have the audio here where Bush Sr.encouraged the Shia to rise up.
And then I think what really happened was they realized, oops, if we do this, then we're importing the Iranian revolution that we just spent eight years backing Saddam to contain.
And so all of a sudden they got Bata Brigade guys running around all over Southern Iraq and they panicked because they weren't thinking about what they were doing in the first place and then they thought better of it.
And then they spent a decade saying, yeah, should have gone all the way to Baghdad without even recognizing.
And of course there's the famous clip of Dick Cheney explaining exactly why that was a bad idea and why it was the right thing to stop and not go all the way to Baghdad in 91.
And then he turned around and implemented the same damn policy anyway.
Yeah, well, I'm so glad you're writing about it because this is a story that most people just don't know.
And it's really crucial to understanding why we weren't greeted as liberators by thousands and thousands of people who had just been slaughtered.
Well, and of course, the other thing is after the big stab in the back, that became the excuse to stay in Saudi Arabia for another decade in order to wage the blockade and the no fly zones to keep Saddam from continuing to slaughter the Shia.
And that's what provoked Al Qaeda's war against the United States, American combat forces on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
So it's all just- Well, you asked why I've had my conversion and that I think is why is the understanding that those are the policies that have inflamed and escalated all these horrible suicide terrorist attacks.
That is what I really think is the cause of it.
And that's what the terrorists themselves say.
And I think another motivation that I wish I had said earlier when you asked me about it was Syria.
Look, this memo that 50 State Department employees sent urging that we have to topple Assad.
I mean, I truly think that that situation would be worse than all the others combined.
And it's unbelievable to me.
We haven't learned our lesson and there remains just more enthusiasm for going in and wiping somebody out and to really think that we could actually install another regime to replace Assad and that would be a good thing is beyond belief.
Yeah, unfortunately, I really did try, I was Googling it and there's just too much muddy water.
I couldn't find the quote anymore, but there's a great quote I still remember anyway, a TV interview of a Republican congressman from probably back in 2014 or so.
And the CNN, I think it was CNN, but the anchor actually bothered to ask, well, once we get rid of Assad, well, then what?
Who are we gonna put in power after that?
And the answer was, well, hopefully at that point, someone will come to the fore.
And that's all you got.
And these are the people, these are the masters of the universe.
These are the people who run the most powerful empire in the history of the world.
Well, Scott, all I gotta say is that it's good to be on this side of things now.
I wish that I had done this earlier, but I really appreciate everything that you guys at antiwar.com are doing and Tom Woods and those in the libertarian world because it can get a lot worse.
Yeah, absolutely it can.
Well, I hope you're gonna write a book or at least some insanely long in-depth article for the Atlantic or something.
Tell people what you know here and cause some controversy for old Randy Scheunemann, for Bill Kristol.
These are the guys who were hell bent on getting us into this war that even now they have trouble defending.
The closest they can come to defending it is trying to exploit the fact that Trump went too far in his statement that at least Saddam killed terrorists.
He was a bad guy, but at least he killed terrorists.
But of course, Trump had to go too far and go, yeah, he murdered them without any due process at all and act like a maniac to give them room to pretend that actually the people who were for the regime change were right after all because look on the other side is Trump who would praise Saddam Hussein.
And they don't have any other point that they could possibly make to try to defend themselves or what they've done here.
It should be embarrassing, but I just saw a report recently that in June alone, 662 Iraqi civilians were killed.
And I saw that the Obama administration had after careful study, estimated that between 60 and 100 innocents had been killed in drone strikes while human rights groups say it's over 1,100.
I mean, why is there not more awareness that that is the kind of thing that causes terrorism?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that was especially insulting since you have Obama regime loyalists like the New America Foundation who their estimates have been the most conservative estimates of those drone war civilian casualties.
And still their estimates are far greater than what the government put out.
They could have at least tried to match it up to Peter Berg and, you know, but no, they come out with numbers that you couldn't possibly believe, you know, numbers that couldn't possibly be right.
And, but we're supposed to just accept it anyway and accept that, well, geez, I guess if the numbers are that small, then the Yemenis and the Pakistanis and the Somalis must not mind.
Well, right, because, you know, they're kind of all part of the evil as well.
And if a little collateral damage happens, then, you know, that happens in war because war has been declared on us.
So we're making war.
And if that's the case, then unfortunately some innocents will be killed.
That's kind of the way I think the reasoning goes.
Yep.
And, you know, that's why I think it's so important to talk about how we got into this mess in the first place, because I think, you know, the guy that you were back a few months ago or whatever, a typical conservative can always rationalize even blowback that, yeah, okay, so when we, you know, kill Al-Qaeda guys in Pakistan, maybe we'll accidentally get a little bit of collateral damage here or there and provoke a Faisal Shahzad attempted attack on Times Square once in a while.
They might even be able to concede that, right?
But then they say, well, yeah, but they started it.
What are we supposed to do?
Not defend ourselves?
When the truth is no, actually we started it.
The truth is the terrorists were perfectly good friends of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush until George H.W. Bush betrayed his other friend, Saddam Hussein and occupied the Saudi desert and Bill Clinton kept them there.
And only then did they become our enemies.
And so since we started it, then we can just call it off.
But as long as the theory goes that, well, we were just minding our own business when all of a sudden September 11th happened.
And so now, yeah, I mean, obviously if you kill the German army, that makes them mad and makes them wanna fight back too.
But what are we supposed to do?
Not fight our enemies, right?
That's the kind of rationalization that people can engage in as long as they refuse to grapple with how we got into this mess in the first place.
Yeah, and I think that there's almost like a weird sort of romanticism that goes along with having somebody to fight.
Almost like the way the left idealizes the hippies and the protest movements.
On the right, we idolize war and we wanna have someone to fight all the time.
Yeah, and hey, like George Carlin says, if you can't do anything else right, at least you can kill people well and feel good about yourself for that.
Yeah, I mean, he was being sarcastic.
All right, now one last thing.
I'm sorry I skipped this back on the substance part, but can you tell me a little bit about the role, kind of the, there seems like there's a bit of a merger here between the old committee for NATO expansion and the committee for the invasion of Iraq and how through some of that overlap, this is what people might remember what Rumsfeld called New Europe.
Forget Germany and France who won't go along.
We've got New Europe and we've got our coalition of the willing.
And I think as you write in here, there was sort of a quid pro quo here.
You come along with us on the Iraq war, at least in name, and we'll help you get some Lockheed fighter jets at American taxpayer expense.
Is that about it, NATO membership?
That's exactly right.
I mean, I don't think it's any coincidence that my boss represented Latvia and Macedonia.
And Latvia, I remember the Latvian ambassador came by our office one day.
It was a Friday afternoon, I think.
And it was kind of a, they like to party, okay.
And I remember he looked at a map of Iraq that we had on the wall and he pointed at it and he said, look, there's our three soldiers right there.
He was laughing about it.
But yeah, I mean, I think that being able to get people into NATO is profitable.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, for somebody at everybody else's expense, it sure is.
And by the way, I found your documentary you recommend here, Lessons of Darkness.
It's on kick-ass torrents, kat.cr, Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog.
Can't wait to watch that.
I just wrote about the aftermath of the first Gulf War and I had no idea this documentary even existed.
So thank you very much.
Oh yeah, you're gonna be knocked out by that.
And I would say that the two other movies, I'm sure you're familiar with Restrepo and Korengal.
And then that British movie called Kilo Two Bravo, which is a drama.
I would say that those three movies right there also were big influences just in demonstrating the horrors that our military has to go through when they're over there.
Yeah, especially the Korengal Valley story.
It's like Khe Sanh or something.
Like, what the hell are we doing here again anyway?
What's so important about this valley where these people have never even heard of the new world before?
Where our soldiers go in there and they go, oh, are you Russians?
Because they're so isolated, they don't even know the Russians left in 1989 because they don't even know what 1989 means.
Yeah, these are primitive people.
And we set up there on the mountaintop and start fighting the Taliban and they don't know which way to go because they know as soon as we leave that they're gonna be under the thumb of the Taliban.
And I think that, and have you seen this British movie, Kilo Two Bravo?
No, it's on the list now.
Oh, that is shocking.
It's just a shocking movie that so dramatically demonstrates the utter waste and pain and suffering and complete insanity of our policies.
And I guess the British didn't pay attention.
Who was it?
Harold McMillan who told, who said when he was leaving the prime ministership, said, I only have one piece of foreign policy advice for my successor and that is never invade Afghanistan.
Yeah, got that right.
That one's on kick-ass torrents too, everybody.
Yes.
Kajaki, Kilo Two Bravo, 2014 says here.
All right, well, listen, Jim, welcome to the side of the good guys trying to create some peace in the world.
I really do hope that you'll write a book about what you remember, especially what you can prove about what went down back then and help add to that understanding of how we got lied into war back in 2003.
Well, Scott, really appreciate what you're doing and it's been an honor for me to be on your show.
All right, well, thanks very much again, Jim.
You bet.
All right, so that is Jim Hale and he's got this piece at Ron Paul's site, Confessions of a War Propagandist.
Wow, and whoever did that cartoon of Bill Kristol, that is just beautiful.
Confessions of a War Propagandist by Jim Hale.
We're running it today on antiwar.com.
Go to rightweb.com and read up on Randy Scheunemann, Bruce Jackson and the U.S. Committee on NATO Expansion and the U.S. Committee to Liberate Iraq and check out the great article.
I have it on my website, scottwharton.org by Richard Cummings, Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels from playboy.com back in 2007.
Thanks, y'all.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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