04/03/17 – Andrew Bacevich on CENTCOM’s mission of overseeing the unofficial US empire in the greater Middle East – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archives at scotthorton.org.
More than 4,000 interviews going back to 2003 for you there.scotthorton.org and also the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Alright, introducing Andrew J. Bacevich.
He is the author of a great many books including The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, and the latest.
And whenever anybody on Twitter says, hey, what's the one good book I should read to kind of get me up to speed?
This is it.
America's War for the Greater Middle East.
A Military History by Andrew J. Bacevich.
Came out, I think, right around this time last year.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks very much.
Am I right about that?
The book came out about a year ago?
Sure did.
Yeah.
Really great stuff too.
Alright, and of course, regular at TomDispatch.com, former Army colonel and professor at Boston University and all of these things.
Okay, so you got a couple of very important articles here.
I guess one more important than the other.
This one's at Tom Dispatch.
Well, I don't know.
They're both equally important, just different.
This one's at Tom Dispatch.
Prepare, pursue, prevail, onward and upward with U.S. Central Command.
And a very eye-opening thing, in a sense, a profile of the new head of Central Command, General Votel, Joseph Votel, or is it Votel?
Do you know how to say it right?
I think it's Votel.
Votel, right.
And his view of, well, I dare say the world.
His area of responsibility as commander of Central Command.
So I guess, first of all, could you break down for the audience just exactly what is Central Command and what is Votel's area of responsibility here?
Well, I mean, to put your question in a slightly larger context, really going back to the early days of the Cold War, the Pentagon has been in the habit of slicing and dicing the planet into regional commands.
And we've got a regional command focused on Europe, one focused on the Asia-Pacific, one focused on South America.
And back in the early days of the Reagan administration, President Reagan created something that we call United States Central Command.
And that is the regional command, four-star general in charge, that is responsible for what the Pentagon calls an area of operations, or AO, that stretches from really the northwest corner of Africa all the way over to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And as the current commander of Central Command, General Votel is assigned responsibility, as the Pentagon's term, for this vast area, which tends to mean that General Votel looks for ways to employ American military power to promote what he believes, what the Pentagon believes are the interests of the United States.
Do these men, I mean, I guess, you know, I don't, I've read enough of your writing that I wouldn't lump you in, but the rest of your former colleagues, they all really just think in PowerPoint.
And this is kind of the depth of their thinking is all this sort of, as you described, sort of sloganeering, right?
Here's what we're going to do, boys.
And it's all just a bunch of corporate speak and jargon and nonsense.
Well, I don't know that I call on my former colleagues, but the article that you referred to is one that tries to examine in some detail, Votel's description of his mission and what he sees as his approach to accomplishing his mission.
And it is an approach that places a premium on using military power.
That is an approach that is based on the assumption that there are ways to employ American military power that can bring peace, order, stability, democracy to this part of the world.
One of my points in writing the article is to highlight the extent to which Votel himself is utterly oblivious to what our efforts to use force in this region have produced up to this point and at what cost.
So he is looking forward and has no time to be looking back, even though the record of what we have actually achieved over the past 30 or so years since Central Comm was created has been one of repeated failure.
Well, yeah, it's almost like, I mean, I don't know what all the guy knows, but it does sound like, as you're saying, with the whole refusing to look back thing.
In other words, refusing to even try to understand what is the context of his current situation.
Here he's getting the job in the middle of the 20-teens when, well, the U.S. government is up to its eyeballs in a lot of different projects over there.
And it seems like, boy, this guy better really lock himself in the attic and read up on some stuff and get up to date.
And yet, nah, he just gets a couple of briefings and on they go.
In other words, it sounds like a recipe for failure.
Yeah, I mean, I think you may be slightly overstating it, but only slightly.
I don't know if the explanation is a lack of creativity, a lack of imagination, a lack of self-awareness.
But, you know, he doesn't even have to go lock himself in the attic and do a lot of studying.
All he has to do is to sit down and reflect on the trajectory of U.S. policy in the region over the past 30 years.
I mean, he himself, as a four-star general, has been a participant in these events going back probably at least half of that period of time.
He himself is a veteran of the Iraq War.
He himself is a veteran of the Afghanistan War.
And it seems to me that what's missing here is the willingness on his part as the current four-star commander to simply ask himself the question, hey, how's it going?
How are we doing?
Because to seriously and honestly address those questions has to yield an answer that says, well, it's not going well.
And if you're willing to make that admission, then it seems to me that the follow-on question that almost automatically presents itself is, well, is it possible that we should be doing something differently than we've been doing?
And that willingness to go down that path is simply absent from his thinking.
But again, I'm not trying to blame Votel.
I think it's absent from the thinking of the senior officer of corps generally.
I think it's absent from the thinking of either the past administration or the present administration.
And there are changes.
Trump does things somewhat, slightly differently than Obama did.
But the underlying assumptions that if we try hard enough using American military power, we can solve things, that basic assumption simply remains unexamined.
Yeah, it seems like, well, if they're going to have a big debate, it's going to be – they're going to figure out that, yeah, we shouldn't do massive invasions from Kuwait again like George W. Bush did.
So then the other option then is the scalpel, which means Joint Special Operations Command and CIA drones blowing up people here, there and everywhere in eight countries and killing innocent civilians.
And it doesn't really compare to the invasion of Iraq.
But unless you're one of the ones bombed, it doesn't seem like it's that much of a difference.
But what you're really asking is whether Votel could ever entertain the possibility that pretty much anything they're doing over there ultimately is counterproductive.
And that really, even though we have, because of our efforts, more terrorists than ever, that that's why now is the best time to stop.
I mean, boy, what a counterintuitive argument for the head of CENTCOM to make.
That now that I've created about 20,000 of these bin Ladenites for you, we better stop while we're behind.
The answer has got to be, well, we've got to kill the last, you know, 50 al-Qaeda franchises in the world first, then maybe back off.
Well, I mean, you're right.
And that's, I mean, that's just becomes the question that is off limits.
I find it preposterous.
But I mean, on the other hand, you get to be a four-star general because you're a hard charger, because you're a guy who, given a mission, says, I can do it, you know, turn me loose.
In a sense, I think the larger, my larger complaint would be with the civilian leadership or with our so-called intelligentsia that there too, I mean, there are people on the anti-interventionist right, let's say, people who write for the American Conservative magazine.
There are people on the, broadly speaking, anti-war left who point out that our military efforts in the greater Middle East have been misguided.
But in that big, wide center where people have access to power and where power gets exercised, in that big, wide center, there are no fundamental questions being asked.
So if you go look at what the think tanks have to offer or what, you know, what last year's undersecretary of whatever now appearing on the PBS News Hour, when you look at what they have to say, it's all try harder.
I mean, the methods, they may be proposing slightly different methods, but nobody in the circle of Washington power is willing to ask the first order questions.
And I find it rather pathetic.
And in that sense, it's no wonder that people like General Votel think that they ought to just keep charging ahead, hoping for better results tomorrow than have been achieved over the past several decades.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, if people ever do start getting restless, they've already demonstrated the model of how to add time to the Washington clock.
You just come up with some new project and say, yeah, but no, this will get us around the next corner and we see the horizon and whatever kind of terminology.
I think you're right.
You know, there's it's interesting to think about the wide range of methods or techniques that we have used in our various and sundry wars.
You made reference a couple of minutes ago to George W. Bush's, you know, invade, occupy, and see if you can transform the place.
But we've done counterinsurgency.
We've done counterterrorism.
We've done advise and assist.
We've done targeted assassination.
We've done nation building.
We have run the gamut of approaches in terms of tactics and methods, and none of them have yielded the success that proponents argued that we would achieve.
So, again, you sort of come back to that basic question.
You know, maybe the entire enterprise is misguided and and therefore what what what other alternatives might be available.
But that remains off limits for debate.
Yeah.
Well, of course, because all the same people who are the ones that society is relying on to bring it up are the ones whose jobs are at stake.
They go back in.
I think it was in 2012.
It was overheard on a mic on C-SPAN at a Defense Department meeting that boy, if Ron Paul wins, we're all going to have to get jobs.
Right.
Yeah.
Somebody actually said that out loud that, you know, boy, we better do everything we can to marginalize that old kook.
We might have to work for a living.
So wait a minute.
Bottom line, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, maybe Mali and Nigeria, too.
Are we are we just starting a brand new chapter in the terror war against Al-Qaeda and ISIS type groups in all these countries right now at the beginning of the Trump term?
All I'm doing is trying to understand what you what I read in the papers.
And it does appear that in contrast to one of the aspects of the Obama approach appears to have been to keep keep the military itself on a fairly short leash.
I mean, it wasn't by any means that Obama had an aversion to using force.
But he did want to make sure that that the call was his as to who would do what, where and in what way.
It appears that Trump is allowing the military itself to have greater latitude in making decisions about who to bomb and when to bomb, in making decisions about establishing ceilings on force levels.
And there are people certainly who say, well, that's the key to success.
We just need to let the generals do what generals know how to do and we'll have a favorable outcome.
I'm not buying that argument.
It is true that the generals are going to do what they're familiar with.
But there is simply no evidence that following down the path we've been in is going to produce any different results than it had for the previous umpty ump ump years.
But but that I think is what appears to be what's what what is different under this administration, allowing the military greater latitude to continue to wage this war that the past several administrations have waged unsuccessfully.
All right.
Well, so now back to the politics of it.
And as you're saying, the great silence on the part of American civil society to try to do anything about this.
And you've got this great review in the American conservative of a new book called War Against War, the American fight for peace 1914 through 1918 by Michael Kazin, which is all about the anti World War One movement, which I'd really like to read that myself.
But in this review, the bottom line is, boy, back then, really important people who mattered in this society were doing everything they could to try to stop it.
And we just don't have that right now at all.
No question about it.
I mean, and they're not simply activists.
You know, there were activists bravely and committed who opposed our entry into the war and then opposed the way that Woodrow Wilson chose to wage the war, violating civil liberties on a massive scale.
But there are also people who were within the establishment, people like Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, George Norris of Nebraska, who spoke out with a kind of candor and persistence that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist today.
There are people who are critical of – were critical of Obama and are still critical of Trump.
John McCain would be a good example.
But the critique is do more.
I mean, we're not – his critique is we're not doing enough.
He wants to escalate.
He wants more wars.
And that doesn't seem to me to be a very useful critique at this stage of the game.
Well, I don't know necessarily who all to get behind it and how to make it work.
But it seems like the fact that we have a Republican president who at least is – in terms of the outright actual relatives of Gertrude Himmelfarb and whatever, we don't have any real neoconservatives inside the administration.
And we have a left that sort of is too embarrassed to be anti-war right now because they know how silent they've been the last eight years and how shallow and stupid they sound if all of a sudden they pretend to care.
But so I think that – I don't know that I fully agree with that point.
I mean, I would say that the emerging leaders of the Democratic Party, at least those that I can – not emerging, the de facto leaders of the Democratic Party simply don't care about national security issues all that much.
They are domestically focused.
And I'm referring here to Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of my state.
I think those are the two people who, very broadly speaking, the left is willing to pay attention to.
But neither of them has all that much to contribute on foreign policy and national security questions.
So on the left, there is not that person that I can see who can and will speak with authority in advancing a critique of how stupid our policies have been.
And I think – I'm not a person of the left, but I would say we desperately need that figure who can play the role of a Robert La Follette or in Vietnam era play the role of a J. William Fulbright or George McGovern.
I don't know who that person is, but we need him.
Well, it seems to me like this is really a good opportunity to attack the right from the right and to basically say, you know, enough of all this – not to be too cynical about it, but enough of all this do-gooderism and enough of trying to be the global policeman.
We're supposed to be a commercial constitutional republic, not an empire, that sort of Pat Buchanan-esque critique, which is at least what a quarter of the time Donald Trump pretended to believe when he was running for president.
Again, he doesn't have any actual neocons there.
So I think – I sort of think almost just forget about the left because no one's impressed by the left attacking the right anyway.
But if we have all a Daniel Larrison and Andrew Bacevichian critique of the empire and that's the dominant narrative against what Trump is doing, I think we could make some real progress.
And, I mean, obviously, especially if we could get some big shots to help us.
But it seems like attacking the right from the right is the solution.
Well, you're more optimistic than I am.
I mean, I do believe that there needs to be a critique coming from that way, and it does need to be one that's sort of based on a realist, pragmatic perspective rather than an ideological one that you would get from people like neoconservatives.
But people have been making that argument.
I mean, I may be one of them, but, I mean, there are others.
And we have not succeeded in making much of a real dent.
We should keep doing what we're doing.
I think it's an honorable undertaking.
But I think I'm disagreeing with you.
I think we need to have our brethren on the left to speak up and become an important part of this project.
Well, I don't mean to discount him too much.
I just guess that it seems like for the average mom and pop listening, it seems like a conservative critique of a conservative policy is more effective for winning hearts and minds and all that.
But either way, of course, we're in agreement that we must persist, prevail, and all of this Pentagon speak.
Thanks very much, Andrew.
Appreciate it.
You bet.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Andrew J. Bacevich.
He wrote a bunch of great books.
And the latest is America's War for the Greater Middle East.
And, man, you got to read that.
I really mean it.
It's the best of the best.
This one is at TomDispatch.com.
Words not to die for about General Votel and then also the odds against anti-war warriors at TheAmericanConservative.com.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, you guys, for listening.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and at LibertarianInstitute.org.
All the shows get posted there first.
LibertarianInstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at ScottHortonShow.
Just to make everything clear again, I got an interview feed at ScottHorton.org slash show and at LibertarianInstitute.org slash ScottHortonShow.
But I'm also doing these questions and answers.
When you guys send me your questions by Twitter or by email, I'm doing questions and answers.
And those are all going on a separate feed that's at ScottHorton.org slash show.
So, yeah, get that figured out.
Sign up for both.
And patronize my sponsors.
Thank you very much, guys.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
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.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al Scott here.
On average, how much do you think these interviews are worth to you?
Of course, I've never charged for my archives in a dozen years of doing this, and I'm not about to start.
But at Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show, you can name your own prize to help support and make sure there's still new interviews to give away.
So what do you think?
Two bits?
A buck and a half?
There are usually about 80 interviews per month, I guess, so take that into account.
You can also cap the amount you'd be willing to spend in case things get out of hand around here.
That's Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And thanks, y'all.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.