03/06/07 – John Mueller – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Is Iraq a distraction from the real war on terrorism?
Is there a real war on terrorism?
What exactly is the threat to the Heimat land that's homeland in the original German?
Well, to help discuss these questions is John Mueller.
He's the author of the new book, Overblown, how politicians and the terrorism industry inflate national security threats and why we believe them.
He is a professor of political science at Ohio State University.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Nice to be here.
Really excellent book.
I really got a kick out of it.
And it's a very funny, entertaining read as well, I should say.
Great.
And now, I have to say, this book sounds just like me, only smarter and in paragraph form.
Also has a lot of footnotes.
Yes, tons and tons of footnotes, although I got those.
Oh, okay.
And I've always thought that what George Bush should have done on September 11th and his speeches shortly thereafter was say, look, this is serious.
A lot of people died.
There's a lot of, you know, sorrow and grief and our hearts go out, et cetera.
Now, look, for the rest of you, you are not in danger, okay?
We have a $10 trillion economy, the most powerful government in the history of mankind.
No one can really threaten America itself.
Will we get the guys who did this?
Yes.
Will we go crazy?
No.
And basically, that's your point in this book as well is that our policy was this massive overreaction rather than just dealing with the threat for what it was.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good thumbnail sketch that the danger from terrorism is there.
There are real bad guys out there that probably can do some damage.
But the amount of damage they use seems to be pretty limited unless there's a massive increase in their capacities.
And they should be treated basically as mostly a limited problem, mostly can be handled through policing.
And also, it's important to keep in mind that fear and outraged fear can be very costly.
I'll just use one example between 9-11, 2001, and the end of that year, about 1,000 Americans died because they drove in automobiles rather than taking comparatively safe airplanes.
So the fear itself not only costs lots of money but also can also cost lives.
Right.
And of course, what Bush told us was we have nothing to fear except a lack of fear.
If you're not scared enough, then something bad might happen again.
Basically, when you have your approval ratings go up 40 percentage points in one day, you want to keep milking that if you're a politician.
And Bush, of course, has done that pretty successfully, at least particularly for the first two elections.
Right.
But you point out in your book quite well, I think, that it is absolutely politically acceptable for a president, particularly one with bulletproof approval ratings, to take a moderate reactive type stance or even to back down as Ronald Reagan did in 1983 and get away with it.
That the American people, if George Bush had given the speech I would have him given, the American people would have accepted that too.
I think that's probably pretty much right.
No politician seems to want to try it, however.
As you point out, in the two most important destructive attacks of terrorism against Americans before 9-11 was the one you mentioned when the troops in Lebanon were killed by a suicide bomber in 1983.
And Reagan's reaction basically, I mean, he went to the public and said, you know, I'd like to bomb something, but what do you bomb?
There's nothing to bomb.
And people said, well, I guess that's right.
And then he eventually withdrew troops from an overextended position, as should have been obvious even earlier.
And he was reelected with Asia hardly even coming up in 1984.
And then there was this horrible crash of the airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 at the very end of his administration, just coming into the first George Bush administration.
And the reaction there was, this is obviously horrible, disgusting, all the kinds of things you said about 9-11, which is certainly true.
But the way they reacted was just to try to go after the guys who did it, and eventually apparently caught them.
And that was, again, some compensation to the victims and things like that.
So it's not unacceptable.
One of the problems with politicians is that they're right that Americans, people are generally not policy wonks.
They don't spend all their time worrying about public policy.
But they are grown-ups, and once in a while if politicians treated the public as grown-ups, they might come to a very pleasant surprise.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think that people are looking to be scared, and if it bleeds, it leads, because that's what people buy and that kind of thing.
But at the same time, they're looking for truth, too.
They'll take truth just as well as a scary story.
Yeah, I think the politicians ought to try it from time to time, and so should the press.
Now, we ought to get to one of the points you bring up over and over in your book, is that terrorism is a tactic.
Terrorism is not a thing, I think, and here you said you could declare a war on arson, and that would make just about as much sense.
And particularly, terrorism is the tool of the weak.
When we're talking about stateless actors, we're talking about people who don't even control as much as a single country, who are trying to fight a war without a base.
And the reason terrorism works is because of the reaction.
Isn't that what the commies used to say, is the internal subversion kind, that the action is in the reaction?
Yeah, frequently, guerrillas and terrorists frequently use that.
They certainly use it, say, in Algeria against the French.
They couldn't do very much, but the French, in overreacting, could play very much into their hands.
And Osama bin Laden actually said that.
In 2004, he had a statement saying, he said, you know what, our goal is to bankrupt the country, but the way the United States, which is a pretty extravagant idea, I must say.
But anyway, the way it would be done was we'd go someplace and we'd wave a flag that says, al-Qaeda, and they send troops there and bankrupt the country chasing after this guy with the flag.
And he was also very gung-ho about fear right after 9-11.
He talked about how the United States is filled with fear from north to south, east to west.
Thank God for that, he said.
So that's exactly what they want.
When people talk, for example, that terrorism is an existential threat to the United States or that our survival is at stake, the only way that could possibly be true was if we did it to ourselves in reaction.
So in some respects, what they're saying is not only the terrorists are suicidal, but so are we, that if we get provoked enough, what we're going to do is tear up the Bill of Rights, tear up the Constitution, you know, become a totalitarian state out of fear, and completely reorganize society just the way this is what terrorists would more or less want.
And it seems to me that that's highly unlikely, but nonetheless, the dynamic is basically that the enemy in the biggest sense is us, not the terrorists.
And when you talk about the terrorists wanting us to reorder our society, it's not so much, you know, so that they can come rule our police state as an Islamic caliphate.
It's so that to make our government clamp down so that you and I feel like we've been infringed and turn us against our government.
That's what Robert Pape says, that the terrorists' easiest targets are democracies because, you know, well, for example, the Chinese have a war against Muslim extremists, but they don't bother with the suicide bombing in China because the Politburo wouldn't care.
They wouldn't react and the people in China don't have the power to put that kind of pressure on their government.
But Americans do, and if he can't make us feel bad for Arab and Muslim women and children being bombed, at least he can make us care about our own liberty and turn us against the government, and I have to say it's working.
I hate this government and they violate my rights and everybody else's every day.
Yeah, well, they're also spending a huge, you know, wasting a huge amount of money going after trying to protect everything that you can conceive that a terrorist might attack.
And since everything is a potential target, let's say there's an infinite number of targets, this scurrying around in Washington to try to protect everything is, you know, quixotic, to say the least.
They've got an official study indicates there's something like 80,000, they figured out there's 80,000 targets in the United States, so I understand it's been updated to another 300,000 targets in the United States, including miniature golf courses.
And, you know, my favorite is an old water park in Florida called Weeki Wachee Springs.
Basically, any place a few people get together could be a target, you know, any McDonald's.
And so we basically have this incredible amount of effort, bureaucratic effort and expenditures trying to chase all over the place to figure out what a target might be.
And then the people who happen to be in the targets love being targets because if you get on the target list, according to the Department of Homeland Security, you might also get some money from them.
So they're busily working on improving their target profile so that they can gouge more money on the federal government.
So it's not just the security and intelligence complex that's grown up, but just, as you say, completely unrelated things like miniature golf courses, they get to get on the dole as well.
Yeah, in Ohio, there's the Department of Homeland Security thing in the state office, and I looked at their, you know, every state has their own department thing, which is mostly funded by the federal government, actually.
And so I looked at their website about, you know, why Ohio might be a target, and it says, well, it has all these important commodities like, you know, railroads and power plants and roads, you know, like no other state in the country has those.
And so basically, you start thinking what could be a target, you know, you don't need much imagination to find just about everything.
My biggest fear is they're going to find a couple of terrorists someplace who are, you know, playing with matches, and they have a map of Oregon in front of them.
And I say, oh, my God, forest fires, and they're going to send somebody out to protect every tree.
It's really ludicrous.
It won't be long now either.
I could see it coming.
And never mind the fact that it's always federal government employees who start the massive forest fires every year anyway.
Yeah, that's true.
And now you brought up a very important point there that these state run departments of Homeland Security and obviously then the local police departments below them in jurisdiction are now heavily dependent on these federal dollars as well, which, you know, if I can get strict constructionist on you here is kind of contrary to the separation of powers.
And checks and balances in our federal system.
Yeah, well, it's, you know, the local governments are always trying to gouge as much money as they can out of the federal government.
That'd be unnatural if they didn't.
And they do it in all sorts of ways.
But there's also, by the way, a downside to that that some police chiefs are worried about because the federal government is requiring them and often or they're doing it because of their own concerns.
They're spending a lot of time chasing after terrorists who don't seem really much to exist.
And the result of that is that they've relaxed some of their efforts vis-a-vis crime and the rise of violent crime, at least in some places in the area some police chiefs are claiming is because they've diverted too much attention to terrorism.
Even in the case of the FBI, after 9-11, something like two-thirds of all the agents who are working on crime started working on terrorism.
There's been a lot of crime since 9-11, but not very much terrorism in the United States.
And, you know, it's really a real question of priorities there.
And particularly when you're talking about on the national level, most of the kind of crimes that are prosecuted by the FBI are the kind of crimes that, well, frankly, Republicans get away with.
White-collar crimes.
Yeah, well, they're going after gambling and they're going after, you know, kidnapping and they're going after organized crime often.
And so if you're in any of those businesses, terrorism is pretty good because it's taking some of the heat off you.
And, you know, so the more you read about some of the things with the FBI and the National Security Agency as well is just a massive amount of confusion.
They've spent hundreds of millions and actually billions of dollars on new computer systems, most of which still don't really work very well.
And, you know, it's been sort of a total hysteria.
One of the purposes of my book, I hope, is coming out now five years after 9-11, after this election, because I hope people will be willing, you know, in the aftermath of 9-11, obviously, a lot of panic and concern and, you know, emotion was obviously there.
But I hope now maybe people will be willing to sort of, you know, try to look at this as a reasonable policy issue, one in which an awful lot of monies and effort and in some cases lives has been wasted and to try to re-evaluate it from the ground up.
The biggest consequence, of course, has been that they made politically possible the war in Iraq, which has proved obviously to be a massive disaster and has killed far more Americans than died on 9-11.
Yeah, I think it's taken far too long for it to be, you know, quote-unquote, okay for us to have this kind of debate.
I have to admit, when I saw your article in Foreign Affairs, I guess, last fall, I begged Jeremy to make it the spotlight article on antiwar.com.
Oh, my God, I can't believe that Foreign Affairs is publishing this article basically calling the war on terrorism bunk.
Yeah, but did he buy it?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, indeed, we ran it as the spotlight.
And I blogged all about it and said, see, everybody, it's what I'm trying to tell you.
You know, people say that the Iraq war is a diversion from the real war on terrorism.
Well, you know, Robert Dreyfuss, the great reporter, I think, in a Rolling Stone article called it the phony war.
Yeah, that's right, the article around that time.
Yeah, I've got a website on the overblown at my state and I try to list a lot of the articles that are in the same ballpark.
By the way, that same article got a very favorable notice on the John Birch Society website.
And so it's not only, you know, from the left that this is coming, there's also one of the people, Veronique Derougie, who works at the American Enterprise Institute, is very much on the same wavelength.
The way that John Stossel did a thing, who's not exactly known as a left-winger, on ABC a couple of weeks ago on fear, generally, and worry, generally, including that about terrorism, she and I were on that.
And the American Spectator, there's just a thing on the American Spectator online of one guy sort of waiting in similarly.
He doesn't like the fact that I said some nice things about Michael Moore, but, you know, we can handle that.
So it's not just from the left or, you know, there's plenty of disagreement against him in my position.
I must say, by the way, one of the things that's really surprising to me is that when I wrote that article on foreign affairs, and of course it's developed more in the book, I was arguing that maybe one of the reasons, a possible reason, for explaining why there hasn't been an attack since 9-11 in the United States is there aren't any terrorists here.
Now, I mean, who knows, it's possible that's wrong and so forth, but everybody was sort of surprised that this could even bring up.
Now, it fits the evidence perfectly, and it's one that you might want to dig into and you might end up disagreeing with it.
But why should it be a surprise that someone should say that?
Why should that be so shocking?
Because it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to explain an obvious event that's been rather surprising.
There are other reasons why, which I try to, you know, I try to evaluate those in the article as well and in the book as well.
But what's striking to me is that these ideas are so strange.
You know, I think they should be part of the public debate, even part of the conventional wisdom, and that doesn't mean they're right.
Obviously, conventional wisdom is frequently wrong, but they ought to be out there.
And the fact that, you know, I've been called a heretic.
I'm very happy about that by Governor Keene of the 9-11 Commission Report, because I love that, because it implies that the orthodoxy has become a religion.
But it really shouldn't be heretical.
It should be, you know, a reasonable policy issue that you may end up deciding you don't agree with, but one that should be part of the public debate, and so far it really hasn't.
Yeah, well, and especially when Governor Keene basically confirms your thesis.
He said publicly in press conferences that he doesn't believe there are any sleeper cells in America at all.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, the FBI says that, too.
As of 2005, they had a report which is secret.
Why it should be secret, I don't know.
Well, I have some suspicions, of course.
But in 2005, they came out with a report which has leaked ABC News, which said that they have been unable to find any true al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States.
They have found a few flakes and, you know, problem people, many of whom it's probably good to get off the street, but no really true terrorist cell.
That's a big change.
In 2003, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, was saying that although we haven't found any, we know they are here and they have the ability and the intent to commit major tasks, major disasters, and that the propensity to do that is increasing.
In his most recent statement before the same committee in 2007, he just doesn't say anything like that at all.
So, I mean, they just haven't been found.
Yeah, well, and there's been no attacks.
I mean, there hasn't been so much as the Lubis massacre, which that was a big deal down here in Texas.
In Killeen, this crazy guy drove his truck through the wall of the Lubis restaurant and just started shooting people.
It seems like any half-wit jihadist could do something like that, and yet not even that.
Yeah, that's right, and nor has there even been much in the way of attempts like that.
There haven't been anything in the way of even attempts like that.
But they've come up with a number of people who seem to be plotting it or thinking about it.
Most of those guys probably would never have pulled off anything anyway.
They probably mostly hurt themselves, not other people.
But, yes, I mean, when you think about how easy it is, the country, of course, is vulnerable.
People say, are we vulnerable?
Well, any society, certainly any free society, it is, where, you know, we have crime and we have other bad things that happen.
There's a certain amount of risk that tends to living in a society, particularly a free one.
But nothing happens with these.
Somebody could just walk into a McDonald's and start shooting one person.
And that's about saying, you know, God is great.
And even that hasn't happened.
Right.
And, you know, you say in your article that what's happened here, and our government obviously has deliberately encouraged this kind of mistaken thinking, but the society at large has seen 9-11, you say, not as an aberration, as, you know, Al Qaeda's last best gasp, Hail Mary attempt, but instead as a harbinger of things to come.
This is the new world we live in now, where there could be a 9-11 at any time.
Yeah, we've been standing here for five and a half years now.
We're coming up on the five and a half year anniversary in a few days.
Yeah, and if you look, I mean, one of the things I do is sort of look at Al Qaeda's capabilities and what they've actually done.
I mean, I certainly do not discount the idea that they do exist and they are up to bad things.
But 9-11 in many respects is counterproductive from their standpoint because it really turned huge numbers of people against them, including radical Islamists in many places.
Furthermore, if you look, there's two studies out of Washington on different think tanks, one RAND, one CSIS, in which they just sort of list all the terrorist attacks that have taken place since 9-11 outside of war zones throughout the whole world that were perpetrated by Muslim extremists.
And it doesn't make a very pleasant reading.
That includes obviously London and Bali and Madrid and all that.
But if you add up the total number of people killed in all those horrible events, it still comes out to be maybe a thousand or so over five years.
So that's about 200 people a year.
Now, that's 200 too many, obviously, but it's not an existential threat to much of anything.
Just by contrast to a comparison, the number of people who die drowning in bathtubs each year in the United States is somewhere between 300 and 400.
I don't want to trivialize the deaths from the terrorism, obviously, but it does put it in a bit of context.
At any rate, to think that some guy sitting in a cave with, you know, sharing a cave with a goat in a well-thumbed caram or something, as one person has put it, can declare war on the United States or on the whole Western world or whatever the hell he's declaring war on and to really take that seriously is bizarre, it seems to me.
Yeah, well, and I like how you make the comparison to Japan in the book.
The Japanese had an actual empire and a navy and a monopoly of force and a particular geography and everything, and yet there was no chance whatsoever, none, that they were going to invade the mainland of the United States.
I think after the war, one of the Japanese generals said, Are you kidding?
There'd have been a rifle behind every blade of grass.
Yeah, and just the logistics of just getting there were impossible, and basically Americans knew that at the time.
Nonetheless, there was this concern that they'd have these Japanese citizens or Japanese people within the United States who would work with their friends overseas to, you know, to do this, and we imprisoned 120,000 of them.
And there were fears continuously, and even people like Walter Lippin, you know, one of the great political columnists of the time, was writing in 1942 after Pearl Harbor, Well, they haven't attacked us yet on the mainland, but that only proves that they're waiting for the right moment.
So if they had attacked you, you said, See, it proves that they're attacking.
If they don't attack, it proves they're going to attack.
You can't win on that.
That's the way of looking at things.
Truly Rumsfeldian logic there.
That's right.
Absence of evidence is evidence of existence.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now another thing about the tactics of Osama bin Laden and James Banford's great book, A Pretext for War, he quotes Ayman al-Zawahiri as saying, What we're trying to do with this attack is, or what we were trying to do with this attack, is lure the Americans to come and fight the war personally in our sand where they're within rifle range.
It's been so hard for Osama bin Laden to convince people that we need to fight the far enemy when they all want to fight their local governments, etc.
And so our big challenge is to slap the Americans in the face hard enough to get them to come here where we can bleed them to death on our terms.
And we've done really exactly what he wanted us to do, right?
Yeah, within Iraq.
I think if they were thinking initially that they'd get the United States bogged down in another Afghanistan by the way the Soviets were, they were wrong, though now things seem to be getting worse and worse over there.
So maybe in the long term you'd take a different perspective on it.
But in the case of Iraq, in fact I wrote in Reason magazine in January 2003 in a debate whether we should go to war in Iraq or not.
It just pointed out that if you take over Iraq it's going to put a whole bunch of American soldiers within the essentially rifle range of terrorists who want to do kill to the United States.
And that has obviously proved to be the case big time.
It's been a disaster.
Right, now let's get back again if we can into this, the doom boom as it's called in Washington D.C.
You report in your book that the security, intelligence, homeland security, welfare complex, how big is it and will it ever go away?
I'm pretty pessimistic on the last part.
I must say it is very large.
One economist at George Mason University has calculated that roughly that if 9-11 hadn't happened you would have expected maybe over the next few years that 4 or 5 billion dollars of federal money to be pumped into the general Washington D.C. area.
Because of 9-11 it's more like 14 or 15 billion over that same period of time.
The result is that if you bought a house in Washington before 9-11 that was a really good idea.
There's been this massive wealth aggregation in that area.
So that now Washington Post reported fairly recently that the two wealthiest suburbs, two wealthiest large counties in the entire country are now in the Washington D.C. area.
And they were calling it the doom boom.
But you also get, that's Washington I think has benefited a lot.
But every city and county and whatever around the country is trying to do so.
And the Department of Homeland Security early on decided they wanted to figure out what were the most important target cities within the United States.
And so they said, and they thought, okay, and they came up with seven.
Sort of mostly usual suspects of course, New York, Washington, etc.
And then all these other cities, probably including Columbus, Ohio where I am, immediately went to Washington and said, hey, we want to be targets too.
So they reached out, okay, there's 30 cities.
And then another city is filed in and so the last I heard is up to about 80 cities are now primary targets and have to be protected.
And each of those cities, needless to say, says, well, we need some money here to protect us against all these evil terrorists that you apparently think are going to blow us up.
So it starts sending the money.
And so it's become this massive boondoggle and it's throughout the country as well.
Obviously if you're in a business of selling something, it helps with security.
So like security cameras, for example, and you find the Department of Homeland Security once they put a camera on every single person in the history of the universe, you're in Washington really quick with all your catalogs and all these cameras.
And when you get there, you're unlikely to say, you know, you don't really need this stuff.
But we'll solve it if you want.
You're much more likely to say, well, you really need our stuff because it's really important and we have to keep a little watch on everybody in every corner of the country.
And I'm so pleased by our cameras.
Here we are.
Yeah.
And I'm so glad you brought that one up, too.
That's something that hardly anyone ever complains about.
I doubt if there's many American cities anywhere in any single state in the union that don't have publicly owned government cameras up all over the roads.
And if they had somehow made it through 2001 without cameras, they all have them now.
And that's straight out of 1984.
When I was a kid and I read George Orwell, that was the big deal was when he went to meet his girlfriend in public, they had to kind of whisper out of the corners of their mouths because someone on the camera might see them talking to each other.
Yeah.
Well, it's getting that way in a lot of ways.
It's also not clear how much good these cameras do even from the standpoint of the people putting them up.
There's a little town in Los Angeles Times had a report about a little town in Alaska that now has one security camera for every 30 residents.
It's a town of about 2,400 people.
And the Department of Homeland Security is going to have these terrorists that are going to sneak evil weapons into this little town in Alaska and it's on the coast.
And then it will be within the United States and they'll smuggle them down to Seattle and blow up the Space Needle or something.
I mean, you get these fantasies, these worst case fantasies, and anybody can spin them out.
On the Ohio State University campus, we've got two towers that are twin towers.
They're only about 30 stories high, but they're fairly prominent.
They're actually kind of ugly in my view.
And you say, well, the terrorists are into twin towers.
We've got twin towers, so we have to really protect them.
You can just endlessly spew out these potential scenarios.
I'm pretty sure that radio chaos in Austin, Texas is a terrorist target.
I wonder if I can get on welfare now.
Well, work it out and check it out.
Actually, I must admit I've tried to get money out of the Department of Homeland Security myself once or twice, but it failed.
And I think the reason is what my petition says was you're going to throw money away anyway.
You might as well throw some at me.
I'm a perfectly nice guy.
I have to refine my pitch a little bit.
Yeah, you might hire an intern to help you for your grant proposal there.
I say we've hired a full-time guy here after 9-11, and his whole goal is to gouge money out of the federal government.
Yeah, ask Lesko.
I don't know how successful he's been.
Unfortunately, none has come to me, but that's the way it goes.
It reminds me of the guy on the TV infomercial with the question marks all over his suit.
Ask me how you can get welfare today.
Yeah, well, you can go to seminars paid like $2,000, $3,000 in Washington, which this isn't precisely the title, but essentially how to gouge money out of the Department of Homeland Security or out of the whole security apparatus.
It's not only them, of course, and so they tell you how to do it, where the places are most vulnerable, i.e. where you're most likely to get the money, how to pitch your pitch, and to run from there.
If you'd want to attend one of these seminars, they're on the web, but they'll be happy to take your money to explain how to do that.
Now, you mentioned earlier John Stossel picked up on this book, the article, the idea anyway, and I kind of want to make an analogy to some other John Stossel principles I learned as a young kid watching 2020 that all government agencies exist to perpetuate the problems that they're supposedly there to solve, or else they have to go away.
They're unlike private businesses that succeed by serving their customer, they succeed by failing.
So really, if the Department of Homeland Security is to be a success, they have to allow more attacks.
Yeah, or they have to at least justify their existence.
Michael Chertoff was actually on television about six months ago or something for public talk, and he said, you know, I never heard anybody in the Department of Homeland Security suggest that our budget is too high.
And of course, he got a big laugh because no government agency has ever thought that their budget was too high, needless to say.
In this case, however, the danger from my standpoint is that they have to speed fear in order to get the budget going.
You know, well, I suppose all agencies do that.
You know, if you're building dams, you have to build fear about breaking dams or something like that.
Or if you're building highways, you have to, you know, build fear about how highways might deteriorate or something.
But in this case, basically, they've got to build the fear of terrorism because that's what their whole budget is based on.
If they come out and say, well, you know, terrorism isn't that big a deal, maybe Mueller's right, then people say, you know, then what are we spending all this money on you for?
The FBI obviously has a similar position.
Right, and as you say, as you pointed out at the beginning, all this fear, which is drummed up by certain people for their own interests, ends up making it easier to, for example, bomb Iraq and invade that country.
Yeah, in that case, yes, what you also have is that political entrepreneurs who have policies they want to get through will leap on opportunities in Russia.
Vladimir Putin has jumped twice now, big time, has used terrorist events there from the Chechens to consolidate his own control over that country.
And, of course, the people who are in favor of invading Iraq, none of them really talked about that before.
Richard Pearl, for example, wrote before 9-11 about policy toward Iraq, and, of course, he was extremely hostile towards Saddam Hussein and various things the United States government should do, speaking for, you know, the neoconservative position.
And nowhere says we ought to invade them.
Obviously, he thought that that was politically impossible, and undoubtedly he was right.
After 9-11, of course, he's in there swinging on that, as were other like-minded people.
So that what you get is that when these disasters take place, you have people making use of them to carry out policies or agendas that were not politically possible before and now suddenly have been.
And that's perfectly natural in politics.
People do that all the time.
An event takes place and it suits your agenda, and you try to milk it for all it's worth.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's not illegal or immoral or anything.
It's the way things function.
In this case, you know, it's gotten us into this disaster.
And also, in these cases, it's tended to exacerbate fear.
As I mentioned, 1,000 Americans died from automobile accidents because they drove red and flew after 9-11.
It also has debilitating effects on the economy.
People don't travel.
People don't go to restaurants.
It took two years for Las Vegas.
You know, it's a long way from New York or Washington, but it took two years for Las Vegas for tourism to get back to where it was beforehand.
Those are businesses.
Those are jobs that are not being fulfilled.
In fact, travel and tourism apparently is the biggest industry in the whole world right now.
And so if it's held hostage by some terrorist bomb, that can be really debilitating to a lot of people's livelihoods.
Absolutely.
And, you know, the great Robert Higgs wrote the book Crisis and Leviathan about that ratchet effect where the government always grows during a crisis, and it never shrinks back to where it was before, even when the crisis is gone.
Right.
And we're seeing it now.
And it's also, I think, his thesis that all of state power from the very get-go rests simply on fear.
That is the basis for having a state in the first place.
As you say, whether it's roads or dams or terrorist attacks, it's always based on fear.
Yeah, and that fear of crying is another thing, of course.
Right.
Absolutely.
And well, I mean, states in many respects were formed to provide order and, you know, have policing and protect against foreign invasions and so forth.
And so the idea of providing order is one of the main things that they've had to be fabricated in the first place.
And there's a danger once that happens that the people providing the order then just sort of expand their grab on the society.
Now, another effect of all this fear is not just that we all get our pockets picked for all these people to move to D.C. and get on the dole, but we lose our liberty.
War is the health of the state.
And I just have my short little list off the top of my head here.
The Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the Victory Act, Total Information Awareness, TIPS, Talon, CAPS-1, CAPS-2, Advise, Matrix, NSA spying, Muslims rounded up in question, national security letters, which is basically one cop giving another cop a warrant.
This is the Bill of Rights undone in five years.
Yeah, a lot of people are very alarmed about that.
I'll give you one example.
There was a, which I mentioned in the book, a federal judge was asking the U.S. attorney, but he had this following scenario.
Suppose there's a little old lady in Switzerland who gives money to a charity that she thinks is to help, say, refugee children in Afghanistan.
But it turns out, unknown to her, some of that money is going to a terrorist group.
Could she be arrested as an enemy combatant?
The answer was yes.
So, you know, I don't think there's been a huge number of abuses of this.
There's been certainly a lot of inconvenience and pain in the neck-ness and a certain amount of persecution of Muslims in this country.
But the potential for vastly increased persecutions is written in the law.
And a lot of civil libertarians, of course, both the ACLU and places like Libertarians and Cato, are extraordinarily worried about that.
Yeah, well, another part of this is everybody getting on the bandwagon, no matter what their thing.
You mentioned Richard Perle and the neocons starting to, you know, organize to get their invasion of Iraq.
But you also point out in the book that the pro-gun control people and the anti-gun control people immediately latched onto September 11th to push their agendas.
And the breast cancer awareness and AIDS in Africa and everything in the world has to do with terrorism now, doesn't it?
Yeah, the AIDS in Africa people were really torn because the question is, do they want to say AIDS kills a lot more people than terrorists?
Or do they want to say AIDS in Africa causes breeding grounds for terrorism?
So they have to figure out which tack they want to take.
And I do want to stress that this stuff is all perfectly legitimate.
It's part of a democracy.
It's part of a discussion.
But it does not necessarily lead to good policy.
No, definitely not.
And, you know, part of this is just silly, too.
Like when you look at tips where they're saying, you know, the water bottle delivery guy and the cable man ought to call this 1-800 number to narc when they see something suspicious.
I mean, first of all, I'm glad that I don't think people in our culture are really ready to turn this into East Germany yet.
Well, also those tips, when they do get sent in, they're almost always false positives.
And so what you have is this incredible amount of – someone has to read the tips, right, and figure out and investigate them.
And endlessly, over and over again, they've come to nothing.
An example, actually, I found out about after I wrote the book, which is that someone sent me a letter from a posh suburb in the Pittsburgh area from the water department and said, well, one thing you're worried about, terrorists might try to poison the water supply.
And so, therefore, we can't, you know, be everywhere at all times.
So keep a watch on your fire hydrants and make sure that no one is using them.
Now, the idea of trying to poison the water supply by putting poison into a water hydrant when the water is gushing out is a little bit hard to figure out.
But now those people near Pittsburgh are on fire hydrant alert and they're watching their fire hydrant stay at night to make sure there's no tampering by some evil terrorist.
Right, just like – it sounds about like flooding Manhattan by breaking tunnels that are below Manhattan.
Or the guy who's going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with an acetylene torch.
You know, they would take months or at least days to do that.
And if you were up there on the Brooklyn Bridge with your acetylene torch, even New Yorkers after a few hours might notice.
Yeah, possibly.
And, you know, this is so funny, I was actually cleaning up around here and found a pile of old notes and newspaper articles and stuff.
Apparently, I had torn out of Time magazine the picture of all the panicked bureaucrats with their arms full of duct tape and plastic.
And, you know, I'm here in Texas where even the most Republican people did not run out and get duct tape and plastic.
But apparently, if you're a government employee in Washington, D.C., this was the most credible bit of advice you'd ever received in your life.
Yeah, well, at least it was tangible.
You could figure out something to do about it.
Yeah, that became something of a laughing stock for a while.
But Tom Ridge's ads, he did these full-page ads about what you can do to protect yourself against terrorism.
And getting plenty of duct tape and plastic sheeting was in there.
I don't know if the duct tape lobby was in working on that or not.
If I were actually selling duct tape, I would be real happy, I must say.
Well, you know, Saddam Hussein was going to fly his remote-controlled planes across Israel, Jordan, the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and spray the eastern seaboard with germ weapons.
Yeah, that's right.
We're still waiting for that to happen.
Yeah, so it was a good thing.
The plastic really could have come in handy in a situation like that.
Well, actually, the plastic is dangerous.
If you really encase your house with plastic sheeting and it's really sealed, you'll die of asphyxiation.
I mean, it's really dangerous.
Which I think did happen in a couple of cases, didn't it?
It could well be.
I mean, it's really not a good, you know, it's really dangerous.
And the whole idea being, well, the whole thing is so, you know, Alice in Wonderland anyway.
Yeah.
Now, the real deal here is, in this book, you completely agree with me and, for that matter, with all the former CIA agents I've ever talked to who say that the way to fight terrorism is to, well, in the words of Philip Giraldi, the former counter-terrorism officer at the CIA, ramp this whole thing down.
Treat these guys as negligible, not supermen.
Yeah, well, lots of work on that.
I certainly would agree with that.
It's just that, you know, I've gotten a fair amount of support from this book and people, including some CIA, former CIA people, FBI people, military people writing to me, and even people in the Department of Homeland Security.
But I have not had much of a glimmer of anything from any politician.
And they're terrified if they say what you just said.
They're afraid they're going to lose votes.
And maybe they're right.
I don't know, I doubt it, but maybe.
And obviously the bureaucrats, as we said before, don't want to do that.
And the people selling stuff to the government don't want to do that.
And the media still loves, you know, the hysterical stuff because that's what sells.
I just can't imagine the situation being turned around short of Ron Paul being the president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court at the same time or something.
Yeah, well, you could, I don't know, there was, I quoted in the book the one politician I ever found who ever said anything like this, and this is John McCain, and is buried in a book of his, got something called On Courage about 2004, and said, you know, get a life, essentially, you know, you're not going to, your chances of being killed are very small.
The, you know, even if there are terrorists out there, you want to spend the rest of your life hiding behind plastic sheeting and duct tape and so forth, and just, you know, get with it.
And that was totally unusual.
I haven't been able to find any other pollsters who said that.
But he did say, right in the middle of this statement, that wait until the terror alert goes below yellow and then go out again, which is very strange because the terror alert, of course, will probably never go below yellow.
So it seemed to, it seemed to contradict the whole point of the other part of the passage because it seems to say, stay in your house forever and never go out again.
So I emailed him in 2004 asking about this, but he hasn't gotten back to me yet, so I hope I don't figure this out.
Well, look, they're smart.
But he seemed to get away with it, and people weren't saying that McCain is a coward because he's suggesting that maybe terrorism isn't the end of the world.
So maybe that will happen, I doubt it.
That's right.
I mean, if they have the courage to say it, that ought to be proof enough that it's not just a matter of cowardice that they're saying it, you know?
Yeah.
Well, instead what you get is the constant drone of stuff coming out of the media and other places.
My favorite case is on the fifth anniversary of 9-11, just last September, Charles Gibson, ABC did an hour-long program on that, and Charles Gibson at the very end of it says, now it takes us, we live in peril, and now it takes a small act of courage to cross a bridge or go to the mall.
And I thought, well, now I know I don't go to malls anymore, they're just filled with heroes, filtering through the lingerie and eating hot dogs and stuff.
Wall-to-wall heroes, I can't take it.
I mean, it's just so ludicrous, but it keeps being pumped forward sanctimoniously, and no one laughs, and they should.
Yeah, and the media is really, they're the ones responsible for this more than anything else.
I mean, the politicians are to be expected to tell these kind of lies and try to drum up this kind of fear.
But the media, rather than, you know, I don't think I've ever seen a thing on TV where they said, well, now come on, let's not get carried away here.
Yeah, it's just about, I've looked really hard for that, in case they get an op-ed or something here and there, and one thing I quote in the book is Franklin Moore actually says something like that in 60 Minutes, which was the American's chance of being killed by terrorists is very, very, very small.
And then Bob Simon, interviewing, says, but no one in the world believes that, you know that.
And most statements are true.
But I've tried to find places like that, and you know, as I say, you do get it occasionally, but it's incredibly rare.
And it would seem to be just part of context.
If someone hits three home runs in a game, the sports page is on the first paragraph, and they're going to put that in context.
How often does this happen?
When's the last time it happened?
How does it fit into Sluggy and his batting average?
Is he likely to become the new Babe Ruth?
You know, whatever.
So right at the beginning, there's going to be context.
They're not going to simply say that, but they're going to say how often it happens and who did it last and all that kind of stuff.
And it seems to be when you're dealing with anything that is spectacular, like 9-11 or like a shooting in Columbine or whatever, that in the first paragraph, it should say, well, this hardly ever happens or that your chance of still being killed are extremely small, unless there's a massive change in terrorist capabilities.
But the second statement never gets put in and said it's all just sort of hysteria about the event.
Right.
And you know, if they were to do baseball-like statistics, I guess one of the things they'd have to include is how many innocent people have been prosecuted by this government in bogus terrorism cases.
And how many times have they told us, oh, no, Orange Alert, something's going to blow up when they were completely just lying.
I mean, even Tom Ridge said, yeah, I'm real sorry about that.
They made me do that.
The suggestion from the White House that they wanted the alert put up and he didn't see much evidence.
Yeah, one of the problems should also happen, there ought to be a website on this, maybe there is, just sort of listing all the false prophecies.
We just had one recently, by the way, in Britain, this guy John Reed, who's the Home Secretary, said that it is very, very, very likely that there'd be an attack over Christmas, a bomb someplace in London.
And this got picked up all over the place, but no one goes back later and says, you know, why were you wrong?
Actually, let me give you an example that's really striking to me.
There was an article in National Journal, very good, very good journal, in 2004, in which they were talking about, you know, terrorism, just preparing for it and so forth.
And they quoted a bunch of people, or a few people, who said that, well, we thought they were being attacked before 2004, but the terrorists are too weak to do that.
What's really dangerous now is the six months after the election of 2004.
Anyway, the article is being written around that time and, of course, nothing happened.
And about two years later, I wrote to the reporter saying, this is a really great article, why don't you go back to these guys and ask them why they, you know, made these statements.
And she wrote back, well, that's a pretty good idea, but, you know, I'm working for a newspaper and we only want hard news.
So, you know, if you make a hysterical prediction about the world is coming to an end in three weeks, that's hard news.
But to go back to the guy and say, how come the world didn't come to an end is not hard news.
That's a very strange priority, it seems to me.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think you also cite a UPI article about how few articles there are about the lack of terrorism and how that one didn't get any circulation either.
Yeah, it was really quite striking.
I was impressed to actually be able to even find the article.
But Ron Suskind did this book, a big bestseller called The One Percent Doctrine, and in it he talked about how after 9-11, there was a plot to set off muktabers, which in New York subways, which was then called off.
The idea was these muktabers were things where you basically have two chemicals, you put them together and they blow up or they give off a lot of poison gas.
So that was a big prominent thing and he talks about how you just go to a hardware store and pick up the right stuff to do this and anybody, any dimwit could do this and how terrible it was and so forth.
And then someone actually from the United Press International actually went to some chemists and explained this to them and their result was this wouldn't work.
It'd blow itself up in the process of trying to be put together.
Somebody could even try to put it together.
And if it did happen, it wouldn't have much effect.
In other words, the reason they probably didn't do it, assuming they were even planning to, was that it wouldn't work.
And so I thought, well, that's pretty interesting.
Here's somebody debunking this thing.
It was not only Ron Suskind's book, but this section was picked up and played big time in Time magazine, so it got a lot of play.
And so I checked on LexisNexis to see if anybody had picked up this UPI report by a guy named Sean Alexander, I think his name was, and nobody had.
It apparently never was published anyplace.
It was on their website as one of the things they do at United Press International.
But it was so boring, the fact that the thing that people had been hysterical about a couple months earlier wouldn't work.
But the antidote was just not newsworthy, I guess.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio and I'm talking with John Mueller.
He's the author of Overblown, How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them.
And I've got a few minutes left here.
So I want to get into the wars.
It's been reported by the FBI and the CIA and the MI6 and the CFR and the RIAA and the Germans and the French and the Saudis and the Israelis and I think every other intelligence agency on earth that the war in Iraq has made whatever degree of terrorism problem we really had before that invasion much worse.
What do you say about that?
Yeah, I'm not sure about much worse, but it certainly has caused intense hostility toward the United States and has undoubtedly radicalized a fair number of people, many of whom have gone to Iraq to oppose physically the American occupation, American and British occupation.
So I think it has been, in that sense, been supremely counterproductive.
I've got an article in The Current American Conservative about after the war.
It's not clear necessarily that these guys after the war then are going to start flooding all over the western world and over the United States to do things.
But what's going to happen, however the Iraq war ends, is you're going to have a bunch of trained terrorists who see themselves as having been successful in driving the Americans out and they may be looking for other places to ply their trade.
Some of that happened after the Soviets were in Afghanistan as well.
And the places of these guys, nobody really wanted them back.
The Saudis, for example, didn't want anybody to come back there because they're afraid they'd be dangerous probably for good reason.
So some of them did go into ongoing Muslim wars such as in Algeria or in Bosnia or in Chechnya or maybe Kashmir as well.
And so I think that's the most likely thing these guys, there aren't very many of them, but they might well join some of these ongoing problem areas such as Chechnya now or maybe Kashmir conceivably against Israel.
Though that's less likely, it seems to me, that Hezbollah and Hamas probably don't really need much outside help.
And so if there are other places that I think mostly what they do is, oh, also Afghanistan might be an area they might go.
But I think it has made it worse in that sense, yeah.
Now, again though, back to the near and far enemy, most of these guys, like I say, are probably going to be a local problem rather than come all the way to North America.
Yeah, there's a really good book on this, which I use quite a bit in my book.
It's really eye-opener for me.
It's by a guy named George G-E-R-G-E-S, and it's called The Far Enemy.
And he's interviewed a lot of the jihadists around the Middle East, and there's been this big debate about whether you should go for the near enemy, which would be like the regime in Saudi Arabia or the regime in Egypt, or you should attack the far enemy, which is Western Europe and particularly the United States.
And most of them think that's stupid to attack the United States.
And after 9-11, most of these people were confirmed, and they're thinking this is really stupid.
And so I think the weight of opinion is mostly on the relatively near enemy, though I think a fair enough reveal has simply gone out of the jihad business.
If you look at sort of – a lot of the terrorism that's been perpetrated since 9-11 is just spectacularly counterproductive from the standpoint of the terrorists.
A really good case in point is the bombing that took place in the end of 2005 in Jordan.
Some idiot jumped – it was a hotel wedding, and some idiot jumps on a table and blows himself up, kills 20 or 30 people.
And so the whole image of this – it's hard to imagine a stupider target from the standpoint of the terrorists if you want to cause people to join your cause and something like that.
Every hotel wedding, the whole image is people's very happy occasion, people working on this excitedly for months and all that kind of stuff.
And this guy goes in and blows himself up and a bunch of other people in the wedding.
Well, it proved to be very counterproductive because there were polls put in Jordan.
And before that, there was an explosion – suddenly 25% of the Jordanians had a warm feeling toward Osama bin Laden.
After that, that dropped to less than 1%.
I think a lot of that is happening.
Osama bin Laden and the jihadists, while dangerous, are increasingly seen as being – they're a fringe group of a fringe group and basically Islamic nut cases.
I think that's being more and more the case, the opinion within the Muslim world.
All right, and now I really like that as a good segue into another kind of upbeat point, I think.
Something you say in your book, kind of shades of Llewellyn Rockwell.
You say, you Americans wouldn't know a golden age if it came up and kissed you on the left earlobe.
Yeah, I've been saying that for a long time, and I think it's still true, particularly since the end of the Cold War.
I mean, we really are living in an amazing period of time in which economic growth is happening.
We're getting it big time in the biggest countries in the world now, both China and India.
Healthcare is improving all the time.
There are problems, obviously.
There's always going to be problems.
But the general – you know, there's the danger of an international war that was so obviously of concern during the Cold War is pretty much he vanished.
And in fact, I did a book a few years ago called The Remnants of War, 2004, and I just did an additional paper on it for a conference.
The numbers of wars, you know, real wars in the world is really dying out.
In some respects, if you use a sort of old-fashioned, solid definition of what a war is versus combatants killing combatants, pretty much the only wars going on in the world anywhere, civil or international, are the ones in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan.
What's been happening, and hardly anybody's noticed over the last ten years, is a lot of civil wars have been dying out and they have not been rejuvenated.
There's still some dangerous spots, obviously, and things that could go wrong.
But it looks like we may be on the cusp of a situation in which war, defined in a traditional sense, almost doesn't exist anymore.
But no one is paying much attention to that.
When they say this, people say, okay, it's not happening, and I show them the data and say, okay, it is happening.
And then the second thing they say is, well, it's just a glitch, and maybe that's right, we'll have to see.
And the third thing they say is, yeah, well, what about inequality in South Africa?
So when I'm telling them that wars seem to be dying out, they immediately go to something else, which obviously is a problem, but has nothing to do with war.
So what happens is you get rid of something that people think is bad, really bad like war, and they immediately go to forget about it and go on to something else.
And the other problem that was previously considered to be relatively minor is now elevated in significance.
So I call it the catastrophe quota.
There's always whatever problems go away, the new ones rise to fill up their space.
So one of the nice things about living longer and longer is we have more time to complain about how bad things are.
I knew a guy who actually could read Egyptian hieroglyphics and told me that, which he didn't find it or anything, somebody showed it to him, but it was from 2,000 years ago, 3,000 or something, and it said, the younger generation today is going to the dogs.
Right.
That's a mantra that you'll always hear forever, it seems to me.
But I really like that whole, well, the picture drawn with all these civil wars coming to an end, it's almost like we could have that after the year 2000 that we all thought we'd have back in the 20th century.
Things are all right.
Things work out okay, more or less, rather than full-scale nuclear war or endless turmoil in the Middle East.
Right.
I mean, there's still plenty of problems.
Obviously, the Middle East is one of the main problem areas in the world.
But generally, more and more people are living in free societies.
There's been a huge improvement in that over the last 25 years, since 1975 in particular.
Economic development is moving along very nicely in a large number of areas.
There's still obviously some horrible areas in that respect.
The number of tyrannies, real tyrannies in the world is very small.
It could be that huge numbers of countries, Latin America, Asia, Africa, were run by Mobutu-like tyrants.
There's still a few of those guys around, but not very many.
So there's, you know, both in terms of economic freedom and in political freedom, I think there's been, you know, in the international trade and so forth, there's been lots of improvements.
That doesn't mean that you forget about the problems, and sometimes those gains cause problems and you have to be worried about them.
But the general thrust is, in terms of human well-being, has really been very positive over the course of the last decades, really.
Yeah, everywhere except here.
Yeah, everywhere except in people's perspectives, yes.
Well, and as we discussed concrete reductions in the protections in our Bill of Rights and that kind of thing, it seems like if anybody's bucking this trend, it's the United States of America.
That's a danger that you have to worry about because those bad laws are on the books.
Though, in many respects, it's not as bad as during World War II when 120,000 Japanese were imprisoned, or it's not as bad as the Alien and Sedition Acts around 1900.
And it's obviously not as bad as slavery and stuff.
But the potential is there, and one of the problems is that if these bad provisions stay on the books as long as the war on terrorism exists, since terrorism will always exist, I mean, anybody can blow up, you know, kill somebody for political purposes.
The danger is that unlike World War II, for example, this thing has no end point.
And so that's pretty scary in itself.
All right, the book is Overblown, How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them.
Professor John Mueller, thanks very much for your time.
Thank you.