I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, check it out, On the Line.
I've got David Swanson, and man is he an antiwar guy, and he wrote all these books, including War is a Lie, and I'm sorry, refresh my memory on the name of the last World War II book he put out there.
Oh, it was called Leaving World War II Behind.
Yes, that's the one I couldn't remember the name of, which is excellent.
And War is a Lie does not exclude World War II, as a lot of members of America's civic religion might have preferred.
It's the full blasphemy version there, War is a Lie as well.
And listen, always great stuff from you.
Let's try democracies, the name of the website, davidswanson.org, and isn't this an interesting thingy that you wrote?
War Powers Reform Bill, Far Better Than Feared.
Huh.
All right, so give us the lowdown.
What kind of war powers, what do you call it?
This is an actual update of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, is that right?
If it were to pass, it would abolish that law and create a new one in its place, as well as abolishing various other laws and quasi-legal things.
And I feared it would be awful.
I don't know if most people pay the slightest attention to the whole subject and whether anybody else had similar fears.
But I watched these announcements from my senator in Virginia, Tim Kaine, about how he's going to restore war powers to the proper place in Congress.
And then you read the bill, and it basically abolishes the War Powers Resolution without replacing it with a darn thing, and it seems like a scam.
And then you watch these movements over the past six months where people are talking about, you know, repealing various AUMFs, and they're all avoiding the fact, mentioning the existence of the AUMF from 2001, these being the authorizations for the use of military force.
There's several of them out there and running, and the House, but not the Senate, has been repealing them, but not the one that they and the activists and everybody have made the most noise about for decades now, the one from 2001.
And so I've become very cynical.
And plus, I was hearing about this bill before it was introduced and made public, and, you know, insider advocates were trying to make it better in various ways, but they wouldn't show it to me or tell me what it said, and I didn't want to, you know, tweak a bill and make it better when the whole thing could be catastrophically bad.
And so when it was published last week and looked to be, you know, on the whole very, very good, I, at least, was pleasantly surprised.
All right, well, do tell, then.
Well, it would abolish all of the AUMFs, all of them, including the one nobody would mention for the past six months, the one that started the endless wars in 2001.
It would abolish them.
That's good.
It would also abolish the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and that's scary, unless it's replaced with something at least as good or better.
And you know, this is, this is all admitting that nobody even used the thing, really, until the Trump presidency, when both houses tried to end the war on Yemen, knowing they could count on a veto since when they've dropped it.
And, you know, some of us have been pushing since day one of Biden for Congress to do the same thing again, for goodness sake.
And just this week, a number of organizations are coming on board.
So the point being, these laws are only as good as the people who use them.
But this one would replace the War Powers Resolution with something that, that for the most part is better and stronger.
And this new one from, not from Senator Kaine, but from Senators Murphy and Lee and Sanders, and I don't know if anybody else has signed on yet, would shift from 60 days to 20 days the amount of time the president gets to wage a war without Congress, that that, you know, would be an improvement on the War Powers Resolution.
It would automatically cut off funding for unauthorized wars, that having to be a second step in the, you know, in the current state of affairs.
It would put restrictions and limits on what could be created as any future AUMF.
They would have to be specific about who you're attacking, when and where.
And they would, they would die after two years unless recreated.
So that's all good.
They would also, this new law would also deal with the hostilities problem.
You may, you may recall Obama's lawyer going into Congress and saying, oh, hell, we can bomb every inch of Libya and you guys have no say under the War Powers Resolution because that's not hostilities.
And people are scratching their head or these are going to be non-hostile bombs, friendly bombs.
What are those?
But I think they said, hey, look, as long as we're bombing people who can't possibly hit back at us and it's all a one way street, then that doesn't count.
Right.
It doesn't count.
It doesn't count under the War Powers Resolution because it never defines what hostilities mean.
And it's all worded about US troops and inserting US troops into some physical location.
And much of the new bill just carries over much of that language.
But it also specifically, if maybe contradictorily, defines hostilities to include attacking somebody from a distance.
So you couldn't bomb a country anymore and call it not hostilities.
And so this would change not just the congressional understanding since 1973, but the US media understanding if it followed along.
You know, we hear all about, oh, we're going to end the war on Afghanistan, but keep bombing it and you scratch your head and try and figure that out.
But it means if there are not US troops admittedly on the ground in a place, then it's not a war and it's not hostile, even if you're bombing it.
That would change under this.
Now, there are various concerns, various smart observers and analysts have dissected this new bill and found other potential loopholes.
For one thing, it excludes coverage of any war that the United States is helping some other government wage unless the United States becomes a party to that war.
But then it never defines what the hell a party is.
And so this seems this seems, you know, directly intended at taking the war on Yemen, the war that Congress at least pretended to try to end under the existing War Powers Resolution last presidency, out from under the coverage of the new War Powers Resolution.
Same thing for troops and better with the Iraqi army to fighting against ISIS there.
Sure.
Anywhere that the United States, you know, they're not going to be in a combat mission anymore.
I just this morning I read this email, this at war email that The New York Times sends out and they admitted, you know, very clearly that this ending the combat mission is just meaningless verbiage.
Right.
So I went and searched The New York Times website for ending Iraq combat mission, and I found straight faced, you know, straightforward reports from about four days ago and also about 11 years ago and various other occasions.
The United States is ending the combat mission in Iraq.
You know, so any of these any of these missions, assistances, advising, arming, facilitating any time the United States is helping some Southwest Asian dictatorship or, you know, anybody in the world with their war, well, now it's out from under, just like if it's a NATO war, it's out from under congressional oversight and under this new law, but not under the current War Powers Resolution, if anybody were to ever use the thing.
And so that's that's a weakness that ought to be fixed if these people are actually serious about what they claim to be serious about.
But this new bill also does additional things unrelated to the War Powers Resolution.
It puts more limits on or at least allows Congress, should it choose to, to more easily stop and restrict weapon sales to foreign governments and also gives Congress greater ease and power to end so-called states of emergency.
There are like dozens of states of emergency currently running, whether anybody knows it or not, that give presidents outrageous powers.
So it seems like a well-intended piece of legislation.
But then, you know, there are bits and there are others besides the, you know, the party thing that, that look worrying.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, it is still Congress, but it sure sounds like overall that this is a superior replacement for the War Powers Resolution itself.
I think so.
If I had to choose which one do we get, even as it's worded now, I would take the new one.
But you know, of course, you would want them to actually use it, you know, it doesn't do a darn bit of good.
I mean, they've got the UN Charter, which makes wars a crime.
Nobody uses that, right?
So you'd have to have a Congress willing to pass the thing, a president willing to sign it, and they'd have to actually mean it and, you know, want to follow through and use it.
Yeah.
Isn't that funny, the way the UN Charter's ban on war is taking us, yeah, of course, and we're the cops.
It's our job to enforce that law by waging wars, to stop anybody else from waging wars, if that's what we say we're doing.
Yeah, it's incredible to me.
I mean, the reason I try to remind people of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, you know, which is a treaty the U.S. and 80-some countries are party to and have been for decades that bans all war, period, full stop, is not because there are any wars that are legal under the UN Charter, but because everybody thinks there are wars that are legal under the UN Charter because it has these silly loopholes in it.
You know, it has one for UN-authorized wars, which has never been used.
The UN doesn't authorize wars, but people imagine it does.
And it has one for defensive wars, and, you know, the UN has never recognized, you know, any recent wars, and certainly no U.S.-led recent wars as being defensive, and no reasonable person would.
And they're all prosecutable now under the International Criminal Court, but everybody imagines it.
I mean, people, the best peace activists in the world imagine that various U.S. wars are either UN-authorized or defensive.
And the UN facilitates this in some cases by passing resolutions that it knows will be misinterpreted and abused, like it did on Libya, passed a resolution that didn't say you can go bomb and overthrow the government of Libya, but everybody pretended it did.
So if you would get rid of these loopholes and these pretenses and just acknowledge that war is illegal, you know, then you wouldn't, then war powers debates would be as outrageous as, you know, congressional rape power debates and congressional child abuse power debate.
I mean, who the hell cares whether it's the president or Congress abusing your child?
It's a crime, you know?
Well, and listen, for all the FDR haters out there, I'm with you.
Forget the UN Charter or any of these treaties or anything like that.
How about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 says that only Congress can authorize the executive branch to go to war, and that the president's not even elsewhere in Article 2.
It says that the president's not even the commander-in-chief until he's called into the actual service of the United States by the Congress.
And yet you have, as you just mentioned, the war in Libya where they refused to authorize it and the war just continued for eight more months after that, seven more months after that.
And then you have the war in Yemen, which no one's pretended to authorize at all, which Congress has never, the only time they voted on it at all was to pass the War Powers Resolution and tell the president to stop it.
And then he didn't, and they didn't impeach him.
He vetoed it, and they said, OK, well, we were hoping you would veto it.
We were just grandstanding thanks.
And then that was it.
And the whole thing goes on.
You say FDR haters, meaning people who hate presidential power?
Oh, sure.
Well, you know how us crusty old libertarians and right-wingers are about all of the New Deal and World War II and the aftermath of it all.
And I'm just saying, no matter how much you hate the baby blue flag, well, forget all that then.
Just how about James Madison and the boys and their work from 1787 says you can't do this.
You know, it was the one thing they got right.
It was the thing that has held up the best.
Right.
I mean, you you can criticize these these rich, old, cynical, hypocritical, old white male slave owning, oligarchic, anti-democratic, you know, founding fathers.
Well, Nelson Rockefeller wrote the U.N.
Charter.
Right.
So same different.
And and, you know, there if it weren't for FDR, Congress might have passed an amendment to allow public votes before any war.
It was FDR who put the stopper on that.
And if you had had to have public votes before any war, you would have had few, if any, wars from that day to this.
It was also FDR who, trying to figure out how to prosecute the losers of World War Two, finally noticed the existence of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, had it pointed out to him by a couple of lawyers and said, well, let's twist this thing.
Let's distort it.
Let's pretend, as the Senate pretended after after ratifying it, that it banned aggression, not war.
And we'll accuse the other side, not our side, of aggression and we'll prosecute the losers and we'll prosecute only the things they did that we didn't do, too.
And we'll call it evenhanded justice that we will stand before and suffer along with everyone else on equal ground from this day forward.
That was that was FDR.
And that's where you got this this notion that that war isn't banned.
Only, you know, aggression by the wrong people is banned.
Right.
Yep.
And we could go on, too.
Well, look, you know, I always like to joke and we may have talked about this before that, especially with Americans, very short term, long term memories that you could completely forget Madison and Jefferson and Washington and even Lincoln that really it's FDR and Truman who are the founding fathers of America now and the modern American empire and, you know, our unending neoliberal global state and at on a perpetual precipice of complete and total disaster.
I think that's absolutely right.
And as much as I might criticize FDR, although I actually praise him for many things you would criticize him for, Truman is Truman has got to be the worst president the United States has ever had.
I mean, in terms of of of damage caused up to this point in time, I think there can be very little question.
This is the person who created the Cold War, the military industrial complex, the spying industrial complex, the the the war madness, the presidential monopoly over war powers.
I mean, this was this was Truman.
Yep, absolutely.
That National Security Act in 1947 was like taking a cyanide pill for the whole society right there.
Or strapping on a bomb or like it, you know.
Yeah, and he supposedly regretted parts of it.
He supposedly regretted the CIA getting out of control under Eisenhower.
But, you know, it's it's important to get it right when you're when you're in power, not when not just when you're campaigning and when you're in retirement, you know, it seems to be so much forgiveness.
You know, you're seeing George W. Bush, you know, in New York Times op eds for, you know, let's make him a special ambassador.
I mean, this is there's so much forgiveness for the crap these people say when they're campaigning and after they're in office.
It's when they're in office abusing power that that counts.
And Truman, you know, got just about everything wrong.
All right.
Let's talk about the fact that in the first couple of words of your article, you got the name Mike Lee, a Republican senator who's co-signed this thing with Murphy and Sanders.
Is that important, you think?
I hope it is, of course.
You know, the Democrats, even when they have the majority, are steadfastly refuse to use it.
They will not pass anything unless it has Republican support.
And no matter if, you know, 85 percent of the country screams and yells for it, they just won't.
And of course, they continue down this path they're on for a little while.
They're not going to have the majority anymore.
The Republicans are.
So, you know, and they're going to have a very slim majority, too, although they'll use the hell out of it.
The question is, you know, can you get more members on board and pass the thing?
And, you know, the Democrats won't do it unless they have both Joe Biden on board and Republicans on board.
The Republicans won't do it, you know, unless Joe Biden's against it.
And so this makes it all very, very tricky.
And, you know, the factor that's missing that makes some of these things sometimes possible on rare golden moments, you know, is massive public outcry.
It isn't there.
So I appreciate shows like this one trying to inform and I hope energize people to push for this sort of thing.
Yeah, well, listen, I was just right before you I was talking or two interviews ago, I was talking with Nasser Araby, this reporter who lives in Sanaa, Yemen, talking about innocent people dying all around him.
So it's kind of important, you know, rather than just a hobby like skateboarding or bowling or something.
I think it's infinitely important.
I think the wars are a top cause of death and injury and trauma and homelessness and destruction and environmental destruction and government secrecy and government power abuses and the fueling of hatred and racism and bigotry in cultures.
And I think the budgets for the wars, you know, which you would like to see done away with and I would like to see put to good use either way would be a such a vast improvement on them remaining war budgets that you would save vastly more lives than the lives that are lost and damaged in the wars thus far.
I say thus far, because without continuing down this path, we could get away with the ever growing greater than ever before risk of nuclear apocalypse, which is kind of important.
Yeah.
Yeah, a little bit.
So now here's the thing that's a bit of a hang up that, you know, I don't know, this kind of thing matters, right?
That the first time I ever met someone who was sincerely anti-war, it was a beautiful hippie girl in a sundress saying, oh, everything could just be fine like that kind of thing.
And that something like that is kind of the idea in the head of the right that a bunch of people who'd be no good in a fight anyway say we shouldn't be fighting all the time or whatever.
But then, hey, at least the Constitution authorizes national defense and it's a dangerous world out there and whatever.
And then it's hard for them to admit, right, just for the sake of, you know, I don't know, maybe having to change their mind or just for the sake of masculinity or whatever that no, actually, really, the welfare state is way better than the warfare state, which is actually completely unnecessary since we have no natural enemies in the world anyway here in the middle part of North America, where everything could be fine if we would quit picking all the fights.
You know, that actually the hippie girl in the sundress is right, you know.
And in fact, she ended up joining the army, by the way, and took my friend, her little brother with her and they went to war in Iraq.
Well, maybe she was right and but her understanding wasn't deep enough or her opportunities weren't wide enough.
I don't know.
I think hippie girls in sundresses are probably usually right, more likely than Congress members in suits and ties.
But I mean, the problem is that she was demonstrably right.
The facts, the scholarship are overwhelming.
If you read something like Erica Chenoweth's new book called Civil Resistance, colon, what everyone should know, the documentation of campaigns, including resistance to occupations and dictatorships and invasions, not just abuses of power that have been principally nonviolent, have been far more successful and those successes far longer lasting than violent ones.
You want to be radical.
You want to resort to the strongest tool you have.
It's a nonviolent action, which, you know, can range from, you know, putting your body on the line up against sticks and clubs and knives and guns because the other side is always violent.
This is a rather stupid misunderstanding that a lot of people have about nonviolent activism.
They think that somehow there's this imagination that the other side will be nonviolent, too, which, of course, it will not.
Never, ever will.
But the approaches, the techniques, the tactics that have been successful have included the goofiest hippie girl sounding things you could imagine, like the people of Latvia evicting the Soviet military by singing songs.
Sounds stupid until you, you know, go watch a movie called The Singing Revolution and see them do it and try to imagine how many of them would have had their heads blown off if they'd tried to do it violently.
You know, so the denial, the nonviolent activism denial has the same relationship to facts as the climate change denial or anything else where people are willing to appeal to facts.
But in this case, it's politically acceptable to go with the ignorance, you know, to avoid the facts, to say, well, you're naive and stupid, but don't give me any books because I don't want to know anything.
But you're naive and stupid, and the only thing we have to save ourselves is the violence that's counterproductive and destroying us.
You know, there needs to be a shift to recognizing that, you know, it's people across U.S. society.
Some of them wear sundresses and some of them don't, but they're right.
And there's really no longer any possibility of disputing that.
All right, you guys, check out David Swanson at davidswanson.org and really take a good look at this piece.
And he links to the actual bill text and a couple of articles about it as well.
War Powers Reform Bill.
Far better than feared.
Thanks so much for your time, David.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for everything you do, Scott.
