For Pacifica Radio, August 17th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Bronco Marcheteach again.
And here he is writing last year for In These Times.
He's also, of course, at Jacobin, and he wrote the book Yesterday's Man about Joe Biden attacking the left from the left, of course, here.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Bronco?
Hey, great.
Great to be with you, Scott.
Happy to have you here and issue Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's pick for vice president.
And now we know all about the police state.
She helped run in California back when she was in charge of that.
Here she's been in the Senate for a little while and has somewhat of a record, but also, like you write about in this piece from last year, she's made some friends and has found a clique to run with, and they're not the good guys.
The article is called Meet the Hawkish Liberal Think Tank Powering the Kamala Harris Campaign.
And I know every listener to this show right now already knows what you're going to say.
Go ahead.
Well, it's the Center for a New American Security.
Of course.
Of course.
Okay.
So, well, go ahead and dive in and tell us, obviously, again, she's had some limited experience in foreign policy, but she's left somewhat of a paper trail and plenty of indications about where she's going here, right?
Yeah.
I mean, so just to explain what the CNAS is, it's basically the foreign policy equivalent of the Center for American Progress.
So this is a nominally liberal, corporate-funded think tank that is meant to be kind of the in-house vehicle for an establishment democratic foreign policy.
It was really created at the end of the Bush years for the incoming Hillary Clinton regime.
Yeah, exactly.
And then when she lost, they seamlessly transitioned to being in the Obama administration.
And Michelle Flournoy, who was one of the co-founders of SNAS, she ended up being in the Obama administration until 2012.
She was in sort of the Secretary of Defense and waiting for Clinton in 2016, and she lost, kind of made her way into the Kamala Harris campaign as a possible way to get around this setback.
Harris, obviously, lost or dropped down in a very embarrassing way.
But Flournoy is still being floated for the Biden administration as a Secretary of Defense.
So you're likely to see her come back.
And, you know, there's other SNA asylums in the Biden campaign.
For example, Julianne Smith, who was also one of the people that Biden nominated to write the Democratic platform.
She's also his foreign policy advisor.
She's a senior fellow there.
So this think tank and the worldview of Michelle Flournoy that was coloring Kamala Harris's foreign policy during the campaign.
That's going to be a big part of the Biden administration, most likely, if it happens to actually win power in November.
And if it kind of rings a bell, but you're scratching your head, their first big project was COIN and the whole fad of the counterinsurgency doctrine as implemented by King David Petraeus and how it was going to save Afghanistan if only we would triple the war there.
And that was Flournoy's job.
She was secretary, undersecretary of defense for policy, Doug Feith's spot in charge of winning the Afghan war, which she lost.
Yeah.
And, you know, you can look at the CNAS report in 2016 that they put out, which I believe was called Extending American Power, to get an idea of what Flournoy and, you know, her ilk want to do with American foreign policy.
And it's basically exactly what is a carry on from, you know, the Obama years and before, you know, aggression against Russia and China.
She was a big advocate for sending lethal arms to Ukraine, which Trump has obviously done at this point.
She wants a more extensive war against ISIS and terrorism in general.
She also wants to, you know, double down on things like the U.S. exploitation of fossil fuels, even at the same time as she's saying that climate change is a major global threat.
This is one of the things that she said, you know, that the U.S. for its own security needs to actually export more fossil fuels.
Slightly contradictory.
I'm not really sure how that's squared.
You know, I would say, and probably the more cynical among us would say, she's probably just saying the climate change is a threat stuff to sort of win over, you know, liberals and to sort of, you know, make the right noises to make the Biden administration sound like it's going to be aggressive.
Right.
And now I notice here in your piece, you mentioned the presence of former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry.
And I wonder if you know if that's anything more than ceremonial, because that would actually make me feel a lot better because, you know, he is a guy who in his retirement has decided to become a real crusader against nuclear weapons and for nuclear arms control.
And I wouldn't feel too bad if I thought that he was going to be around badgering these people from that point of view.
Well, I think he was on the board initially, whether he's on it now, I'm not sure.
But I mean, you know, if you look at the CNAS's, you know, the papers it puts out and just its website, its foreign policy is very clear.
You know, it's regardless of who is on there, I mean, it's, you know, it's very much that kind of liberal interventionism that has been a disaster under Obama and really under Bush as well.
Yeah.
And well, and since Bill Clinton, it's that's who it is, right?
It's the DLC, Bill Clinton, third wave Democrats from the 1990s still, right?
And who's Joe Biden other than Bill Clinton's wife, right?
He's the same guy, the same group of all of these guys.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's kind of depressing doing these interviews because people often ask me, you know, bright spots and, you know, what kind of thing can we can we can we expect from Biden, whether on domestic policy or on foreign policy?
And, you know, I can't lie.
I mean, unfortunately, there's not really that much, I mean, especially on foreign policy.
This was saying that, unfortunately, you know, the the left or the progressive side of democratic politics does not really have very robust or influential institutions that they built around this.
So the the matter of foreign policy was completely left up to Biden, you know, Sanders foreign policy.
I'm not sure, you know, how much you covered or your your lessons were aware of it.
But, you know, Sanders foreign policy was was above and beyond better than every candidate that had run, would have been better than every, you know, president for, you know, I don't know how far back I would go, but decades if he had been had the chance to implement it.
But unfortunately, he didn't make any attempt to pressure Biden on foreign policy.
Those uni task forces that we heard about so much foreign policy was left off completely.
And so on the platform, you know, all these planks on Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, they were defeated, you know, for example, they're not even referring to the Israeli occupation that was defeated.
And you know, there's a thing in there, there's a language in the platform that says something around, you know, ending endless wars, which is encouraging.
But unfortunately, the platform is only one piece.
And it's, you know, unfortunately, the weakest piece, because Biden himself is really someone who spent his career saying one thing and doing another, just say telling people what they want to hear.
And so it's really going to be yes, it's great that they want to end forever wars.
But you know, there was a piece from Michael Hirsch and foreign policy, I was just reading, where he talks about how Biden boasted to him privately that he was the one who got Obama to kind of hedge his language on withdrawal from Iraq when he was elected vice president.
So, you know, is this is this the guy, especially if Michelle Forno ends up Secretary of Defense, is this the guy who's really going to make that platform plank about ending endless wars a reality?
You know, I hate to say it, but I'm skeptical.
Yeah, you know, there's this narrative that it kind of makes sense that he was a bit, you know, chastened by the role that he had played.
He really was the most powerful senator leading the Democratic senators into Iraq war two.
And that was such a disaster and people and his son died because of it.
It was only years later, somebody finally beat it into his head that, you know, your boy's brain cancer came from the burn pit from the war you started.
And so finally, I guess that was what it took for him to realize that, oh, gee, maybe I shouldn't have done that after all or something.
I don't know.
But then they say that he advised Obama.
Well, I know that he advised Obama against coin and the surge.
He wanted to leave 20,000 troops in Afghanistan to ignore the Taliban and just fight invisible, non-existent Al Qaeda forces there or some kind of thing like that.
The minimal option was the Biden plan, and he supposedly advised against Libya.
I don't know.
I don't know what he really told him about Syria, but he did kind of give that speech or that talk to at Harvard where you could tell what he thought about Syria there, where he explained what we all knew, that these Al Qaeda guys ain't moderate rebels and it's not all the CIA.
It's our allies, too.
But they're backing some really bad guys there and all of that kind of thing.
But then, you know, at the same time, he sure didn't stop Obama from going to war in Libya.
He didn't stop Obama from backing Al Qaeda in Syria.
He was unable to restrain him from launching the genocide against the civilian population of Yemen in 2015.
And so, you know, sort of, I think, like what you were saying there, geez, if his staff really wants to do something, is he really going to resist them?
I mean...
Yeah.
And I think it's also important to note that Biden was also, according to reports, behind the basic foreign policy modus operandi of the Obama administration, which is drone strikes and special forces strikes.
We won't put too many boots on the ground.
We won't invade.
We won't do regime change.
What instead we'll do is we'll do these, you know, minor, in scare quotes, which you can't see, minor incursions into other countries' borders and violating their national sovereignty, you know, kill wedding parties and farmers and children and so on and so forth.
You know, drive that anti-American anger that's been fueling anti-American terrorism, but without doing it in the regime change way, where people start protesting and they get angry and they oppose it.
So that was, you know, Biden was apparently a big proponent of that.
And that's really, if you look at Michelle Flournoy's writings, you know, she used to be one of these people who, she actually drafted the policy document that set up the two war doctrine, you know, made it official policy was the U.S. has to be able to fight two wars simultaneously.
Really?
What year was that that she did that?
That was in 1998, I think.
Okay.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
And, but then she, you know, that's been criticized and I think she came to kind of turn away from it as well.
Not because, you know, it's insane, the idea of why is it that a country needs to fight two wars simultaneously?
I mean, think about what that actually means.
There's no country on earth that has that need.
But she turned against it because, you know, in the more modern style of warfare, you know, she argued that it wasn't necessarily something that was needed.
You know, it's increasingly sea and air power that's in modern wars, it's the main thing.
So, you know, that all fits very well with this Biden policy of, you know, drone strikes and, you know, special forces, killing people on the cover of night.
Right.
And, you know, part of this is his senility too, I think, where when Trump's making noises about pulling out of Afghanistan, he immediately, this just goes to show the political tone deafness too, he immediately criticizes that and says, that's wrong.
Not only will I keep 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, I'm going back to Pakistan.
And the Obama-Biden drone war in Pakistan ended about halfway through Obama's, basically a first term war in the in the later, I mean, it was horrible at the time.
But in the last four years or at least the last three years of Obama, it was over.
They did maybe one or two strikes here or there, that kind of thing.
When Trump came in, I think he did one in Pakistan.
The CIA isn't fighting a drone war in Pakistan.
And Biden is talking about the whole situation like it's still 2009.
And we're going to do the Biden plan, 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and increase the drone war in Pakistan when that's crazy.
There's nobody let the bomb there.
All the Arabs, they either kill them or they escape back to Yemen or Libya, wherever they were from, where America could call the moderates and take their side.
Well, you know, war as launched by the D.C. foreign policy establishment is never about anything rational.
It's a profoundly irrational project.
But, you know, I'll be careful with that because I don't know if you know, but it's not OK anymore to point out that Biden may be a little bit past his prime, you know, when it comes to some of his thinking.
Does that make me ableist?
Is that the new ruling?
Well, the line now is that pointing out, you know, the fact that Biden kind of does these long rambling sentences that go nowhere and that he seems to forget about halfway through.
That's actually just criticizing his stutter.
That's the kind of line that they've been running on.
So just keep that in mind.
Look, you know, any fair observer of this, if you don't have a dog in the fight and you don't really care that much, it's obvious to everyone that Trump is as stupid as Biden is senile and that it's essentially still an equal arm wrestling contest there in terms of mental facility.
You know, Trump, I don't think, is really going senile and losing his mind.
He just doesn't know what the hell he's saying at any given time.
He never did in the first place.
Yeah.
I mean, it's an incredibly bleak prospect that these are the two men that are going to be competing for president, that there's actually going to be a debate between these two guys.
He was saying the other day that the Spanish flu of 1917, which is a year early, but that helped to end the Second World War, which, you know what, look, he went to government school.
A lot of people went to government school.
And if you're not really interested in history, you might not know when the Second World War was.
I don't know.
Back when in black and white days or something.
I don't know.
Right?
But he's the president of the United States and he doesn't know when the Second World War was.
Yeah.
I mean, between that and the speeches about, you know, toilets and showers, there's a lot going on there.
No, I'm for legalizing toilets and showers again.
You know, all this regulation is just insane.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Back to the nominee for vice president.
Can you tell us about Kamala Harris, other than palling around with these CNAS folk during her failed campaign last season, what is her voting record in the Senate?
What did she promise Israel in her big AIPAC speech?
What can you tell us about her real foreign policy record here so far?
In foreign policy, for example, she backed the coup in Venezuela.
She's voted for the defense budgets, the gargantuan defense budgets in the Trump.
She actually voted against the Sanders amendment just a couple weeks ago to cut the defense budget by 10% and reinvest it into health and other sectors back home.
So generally she kind of gets pointed to as a pretty liberal member of the Senate, because since 2016, because she's seen the writing on the wall, she's really comported her voting record to be one of the further left people that was going to be running for president.
But I think some of these examples show you that there's a limit to that.
And yeah, very much a big supporter of Israel, the speech at AIPAC and everything.
So foreign policy, unfortunately, there's nothing in her choice that suggests that there's going to be any sort of turn away from the last decades and decades of the direction of foreign policy.
And unfortunately, right now, I hope this is not the case in five months' time or whatever it is, but right now there isn't really any of the energy on the ground to push the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, of course, to the left in foreign policy.
It's all anti-domestic, which is understandable given the crises that are roiling this country.
But it just means that a Biden administration with Harris in the VP role is not going to have any real incentive to make a dramatic break from what's been going on for the last God knows how long.
Yeah.
Well, of course, on the right, they're saying, oh, she's a radical Black Panther from Kenya or whatever kind of thing that they want to try to spin, the secret agent of bin Laden and the devil and whatever kind of deal.
But that's all beside the point, and that'll probably actually reinforce her credibility with Democrats that she drives Republicans that crazy because they are very emotional creatures.
It's true.
It kind of reminds me of the Obama era.
I feel like we've gone a time warp because, again, we have, well, yeah, it's the right and then Democratic-aligned media both discussing and arguing furiously over the exact same imaginary person who does not exist, the smile-left Democrat candidate, you know, Obama in 2008 and the year 2016 and now Harris.
Yeah, absolutely right.
As the great James Bovard said regarding the Waco hearings back 25 years ago, but it works for everything.
Watching the Republicans and the Democrats fight is like watching drunks fight in a bar.
They swing and they miss.
And so that's the deal.
They hate each other and that's good, but it's always for all the wrong reasons and none of their makes any sense at all.
And but, you know, one thing about that was supposedly was going to have some kind of effect on Obama's governance and supposedly would be part of Kamala Harris's is all these modern day leftist identity politics and maybe to the good and maybe to the bad.
But that, depending on who you are, then your policies are supposed to, you know, completely and totally reflect that.
And she's obviously extremely late to the game, but is racing to do her best to get to the front of the whole social justice parade here and Black Lives Matter and all of these things.
And yet one of the very best parts of and there are a few very best parts, but one of the very best parts of the social justice modern day PC movement is that Palestinians count and that all of a sudden, you know, whatever different kinds of oppressed and powerless groups of people here are supposed to now include Palestinians as having lives that matter.
And as you well know, there's not much of a rational case to make against that.
And so what you have to do, the Zionist movement overall just has to lie and dissemble and omit half the truth all the time and speak of the Palestinians as though they're foreigners and not already conquered subject peoples and all of these things and the promise of a two state that will never come and all of this stuff.
And so but does or does this mean that Kamala Harris is going to have to, you know, obviously it's not because of her heart, but because of political pressure, she's going to have to bend and say that, look, I will not be tolerated if I refuse to call this apartheid like it is, which is exactly where the entire left half, at least or at least maybe the left third of the liberal socialist progressive left is on this issue.
You know, I think more than that, at least half probably.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know what percentage I mean, certainly among younger people, you know, there's Israel has really fallen out of favor and there's increasing support for Palestinian rights.
I think that the entire party is doing that way.
But I think there is a resistance among some of the older crowd of Democrats.
I mean, you know, what you're saying is I would love that to be true.
But the fact is that the way that the identity is kind of used by a Democratic Party, it's incredibly selective.
And so you're absolutely right.
I mean, if those principles that they espouse were to be applied consistently, then, yeah, we should be that the party should be talking about Palestinian oppression and Palestinian lives, which are brutalized in a remarkably similar way by Israeli forces as African-Americans are by, you know, law enforcement in the United States.
But of course, in the U.S. context and even actually in European countries, for instance, identity is more likely to be invoked as a way to suppress Palestinian speech or even pro-Palestinian speech, because any criticism of Israel and Israeli policies gets kind of contorted as, well, this is actually hate speech against Israel and against Jews.
So, you know, I don't think she's going to feel a lot of pressure to do that.
She's definitely not going to do it by herself.
Yeah.
And, you know, we have to consider, you know, she herself obviously is African-American.
If she spent the bulk of her career brutalizing other other black Americans, what is the likelihood that she's going to really go on a limb for Palestinians?
Yeah.
And I sure didn't mean to sound, I'm not sure that you misunderstood me, but it occurred to me that the audience might have misunderstood me.
I sure didn't mean to imply that the Democrats are any good on this.
I meant the kind of cultural movement out there, the social justice type movement.
They seem to be pretty good and pretty consistent on this.
When, you know, after all, I mean, to me, that's really impressive because most Americans, I'm sure the super majority of Americans don't even know what the West Bank is or that it's been occupied and conquered since 67.
And what is a Palestinian authority?
Is that a government or are they trustees in an Israeli prison or how does that work?
Americans don't know the first thing about that stuff because TV will never explain it ever.
And so the fact that you have the modern leftist kind of, you know, the more agitated part of the left, activist part of the left being, you know, well enough educated on this to be solid on it to me is really great and gives me some hope because nobody else cares.
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, we should say that, you know, people involved in Black Lives Matter and, you know, the overall struggle for racial justice in the United States, I think that they are seeing the connectedness to what is happening to Palestinians and how it's all kind of part of the same system.
So I think that is encouraging, you know.
And after all, it's ridiculous, right?
To say that the black civil rights movement is anti-semitic like, oh, come on, Professor Griff says the J word once every 25 years.
There's no anti-semitism.
We're talking about we're not talking about Nazis.
We're talking about leftists.
Come on.
Yeah.
It's extremely cynical.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I like Professor Griff anyway.
I don't care about stupid crap.
But anyway, so now I wanted to point out this great paragraph in your In These Times piece.
Oh, and I'm over time, so we got to cut it here.
But it's you say, it's not difficult to suspect the link between CNAS's corporate funding and their foreign policy.
And then you list the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars that CNAS takes in from Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, BAE systems, as well as the banks.
And it looks like you've got an insurance company or two, some oil companies in Silicon Valley.
Wow.
Wow.
It makes you wonder whether Michel Flournoy or these people are actually human at all or whether they're really just corporate mascots.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, and just before we shut off, we didn't get to talk about today, but I would advise everyone to look up West Exec Advisors.
This is a consultancy firm that Michel Flournoy and other various government and national security officials set up after the Obama administration.
And I mean, this is the embodiment of Washington moneymaking, where people from government positions then leverage those positions and the connections they've made in them to make money for basically multinational corporations.
Biden's advisor, Julianne Smith, she's from West Exec, obviously Flournoy is as well.
There's a great piece of the American Prospect by Jonathan Gaia that goes into the history of it.
So I'd really recommend people to look that up.
Right.
And I'm trying to remember now, because see, I got what Biden's got, because I did just interview somebody about that.
Oh, but they wouldn't do the show.
It was somebody who wrote an article about their article and had some more stuff.
Was it, oh, I guess it was Kelly Vlahos, right, audience?
Was it Kelly Vlahos I interviewed about that?
Anyway, it's in the archives there somewhere recently.
I really am going senile and I'm only 44.
That's my excuse.
Well, it's just a stutter.
It's just a stutter.
Oh, that's right.
Sorry.
Got to go.
Thanks, dude.
Appreciate it very much, Bronco.
No worries, thanks.
All right, you guys, that is Bronco Marchteach.
And he wrote the book Yesterday's Man about Joe Biden.
And he writes regularly at Jacobin Magazine.
And here he is from last year in these times.com.
Meet the hawkish liberal think tank.
Meet the hawkish liberal think tank powering the Kamala Harris campaign.
All right, y'all.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find the full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'll see you next week.
