All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is Doug Bandow.
He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties.
Worked as a special assistant to Ronald Reagan.
I wonder if I ever used to know that.
I certainly forgot it if I did.
And was editor of the political magazine Inquiry.
He writes regularly for very important publications all over the place, including The American Spectator, where his new piece is called Whiners at War.
And at the Huffington Post, Libya, resisting the siren call of creeping intervention.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How have you been?
Pretty well.
How about yourself?
I'm doing good, man.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Sure thing.
All right.
So, well, I'm kind of sorry for being so open-ended here, but basically tell me everything that you think about Libya.
Well, we're in yet another catastrophe.
I mean, it's typical.
You get a feeling that folks in Washington can't imagine, you know, that there's a war going on, which they're not involved in.
I mean, how else to explain why we're involved in North Africa in a conflict that, I mean, there's just, we have nothing at stake.
I mean, why on earth are we there?
I don't know.
Yeah, I have to tell you, I mean, I don't even think that I'm crazy enough to think that they ever would have done this, invade North Africa.
Come on.
I know, and I mean, it's just, well, what's so irritating?
I mean, John McCain is over there kind of playing heroic in Benghazi, and a lot of people recognize, I mean, Andrew McCarthy, who's a hawk, but he's over at the National Review.
He's opposed this crazy adventure into Libya, and he's pointed out that, I mean, John McCain two years ago was in Libya talking about providing military aid to Gaddafi.
I mean, these people kind of switch on a dime.
They're utterly shameless.
At one moment, they say we should intervene and help the dictator, because, well, we kind of like what he's doing now, and then they suddenly decide they don't like what he's doing, so they want to go to war with him.
It's extraordinary.
Yeah, it's amazing.
In fact, you know, there have been some reporting here and there, and I was trying to keep track of it.
UPI had some things about, you know, not just Bush, but Obama, too, working to do these arms deals, or at least, you know, non-arms military equipment, armored personnel carriers, buy your bullets from the British or whatever like that, training for Gaddafi's special forces and things, and it wasn't for a couple of weeks that I saw a blog entry.
Hey, is anybody remembering that John McCain went to Libya to shake hands to solidify these deals only a year and a half, two years ago?
That's right.
It's amazing, you know, and I haven't seen, you know, it's gotten some attention outside the mainstream press, but we don't see it in the mainstream press.
Why aren't they asking about this?
I mean, this is outrageous.
You know, the guy is out there, you know, saying let's help the dictator, you know, and yet now he, we, you know, feed him as being somehow some great guy because he wants to have us involved.
This is ridiculous.
All right, now, are you buying this thing that Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton talked Obama into this thing saying that, you know, it's going to be a great humanitarian mission and what have you, because it seems like Robert Gates, of all people, saying, Mr. President, we really should not get into this thing, would be enough to convince him otherwise.
What was really going on up there?
Well, to my mind, it doesn't matter who did the convincing, you know.
Well, it kind of does, right?
I mean, the question is, whose war is this?
Is it just the White House's war?
I mean, the White House ultimately makes the decision, you know, I mean, ultimately the blame goes to the president.
I mean, so I really don't care that Samantha Powers is there and what she said.
I don't care.
You know, like, I mean, Hillary Clinton was around and wanted us to get into the Balkans.
I mean, Kosovo, you know, that crazy conflict was one of her wars.
You know, she played a role in that.
She's, she apparently was a real hawk urging her president, her husband, you know, to get involved, but it doesn't really matter.
The point is who's in the White House, who's in the Oval Office, you know, it's his decision.
And this president, you know, liked to talk as if he was different, talked about a change in policy, you know, was critical of the Iraq war.
So what's he doing getting involved in this whole new war?
Yeah, well, and especially based on, it almost seems to me like if there's anything systematic to this, and it's probably just coincidence, but it seems like if there's anything systematic, it's that each one of these post-Cold War interventions, they make the excuse thinner and thinner to do it, where it's these civil wars and massacres that never happened.
And, you know, he's like David Koresh, he's bad to his own people, so we have to go liberate them, that kind of thing.
But here in this case, it's a massacre that woulda coulda happened, we swear, if we hadn't intervened in this civil war.
And that to me is pretty incredible.
I wonder, you know, the Obama doctrine, is this a new thing where like really Burma's next and wherever they want based on just the Koresh model?
Well, that's a very good question, because, you know, my argument is that, you know, this is kind of the humanitarian equivalent of George W. Bush's weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, all the left poo-pooed him when he said, oh, you know, how about, you know, mushroom clouds around America and whatnot.
But we have the same kind of stuff in terms of, you know, what likely, you know, massacres in Benghazi?
I mean, this is just ludicrous stuff.
You know, Qaddafi had retaken a number of cities and hadn't massacred anybody in any of them.
He's a nasty guy, but we knew this two years ago when John McCain was off having dinner with him in Tripoli.
So the idea that they've suddenly discovered, oh my goodness, he's not a nice guy.
I mean, you want to say, what are these people smoking?
Come on.
So you're right.
I mean, you worry if this becomes the new standard, I mean, there is no place on earth that they wouldn't, you know, have an excuse to go.
Boy, isn't that a great idea?
You know, let's go to Burma.
I mean, I've been there.
I've been in those hills.
We want another war?
You know, we want to take on another failed state, another nation-building mission.
I mean, this is just nonsense.
Well, so now that they're into this thing, what do you think's going to happen?
I mean, I guess they could sort of do some sort of forced partition, maybe, or, but they don't seem, you know, they're all about maintaining the territorial integrity here, but what can they do short of carpet bombing Libya or sending in the Marines?
Look, a partition makes a lot of sense, but they hate to do that.
You look at the Balkans.
I mean, they go in and decided they wanted to chop up Serbia, but then, oh my goodness, the idea that you might let a few Serbs, you know, stay with Serbia and not be part of Kosovo.
We can't change borders, they said.
I mean, so there's, you know, the moment they've made their decision, they don't want to have any border changing.
So, of course, now it's very important that we have a united country, and you wonder, well, why?
I mean, you know, why on earth the country never made sense?
I mean, all these places were artificial.
All of these have artificial boundaries.
You know, if we're going to go in there and start doing this stuff, well, then let's really change the borders.
Let's let them have real countries instead of these, you know, bizarre political configurations, which is what they all are.
But even then, you need a hands-off approach and just, you know, assuming...
I mean, we shouldn't be involved.
I mean, it's crazy the idea that we're somewhere involved in this and are supposed to make decisions.
I mean, this is not our conflict.
It's not our war.
It's not our problem.
I'm sorry.
Some of these places are horrible places.
It doesn't mean we're supposed to sort everything out.
Well, you know, sorry to go back to this, but it is kind of the question to me about, you know, really what's behind this.
I mean, if it was, you know, Richard Perle and all of his friends who've been badgering us into this thing, working even within the administration to do it, that would sort of mean one thing.
If it was James Baker had taken a plane overnight to go meet with Barack Obama, you know, oil's lawyer there, and then he launched the thing, that would kind of mean something else to me.
In this case, it looks like maybe it's Sarkozy and the Queen over there in England are having America do this war for them, that it's their interests we're fighting for, oil and or otherwise.
Well, I tend to think, I mean, there's a lot going on here.
I think Sarkozy is pushing this in part.
He's in big political trouble.
I think he thinks gunpowder diplomacy might help him.
You know, that he's going to be a tough guy.
He's going to show that, you know, that France is now a really important power again.
He's going to be a great humanitarian, all that kind of stuff.
I'm not sure what Cameron thinks, because a lot of the Tories are critical of the, you know, Blair for having gotten involved in Iraq, and now you've got Cameron leading the charge here.
You know, in the U.S., I mean, unfortunately, the left has long had a real hawkish edge to it.
There are some real principled people who oppose war, but look at how the anti-war movements have disappeared when Barack Obama's president.
Suddenly, you know, oh my, you know, who wants to protest against him?
And then you have people like Ed Schultz on there saying you're a traitor if you criticize the president on this issue.
So I think a certain amount of this is the left likes to, they like social engineering.
So they like it when the kind of liberals decide they want a social engineer around the world, and they love kind of preening and saying we're moral, we're doing this for good people.
Yeah, finally a war I can believe in.
Exactly.
See, we're really not wimps.
We're not anti-war, my goodness.
No, no, no, no, we love war as long as it's for the right reasons.
Right, right.
Don't accuse us of that.
That's not a serious position.
Exactly.
What a horrible thought to actually be against war, my goodness.
All right, so it's Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute.
All the right there.
We'll be right back after this break.
More Libya.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Who ever heard of that?
Anti-war?
Where?
I'm on the line with Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute.
He's anti-war too.
And you know, you're really onto something there.
You know, people really cringe about that.
Oh, anti-war.
People say, well, why don't you call it pro-peace radio?
Anti-war.
It just sounds so un-American to be against permanent war, Doug.
It's a real tragedy.
I mean, you know, the founders were not in favor of war.
They were willing to fight a revolution, but they were very worried about standing militaries.
One of their criticisms, and I think this goes to the war powers issue, one of their criticisms was the king could go and take them into any crazy war they wanted to.
And they didn't like that.
I mean, today, of course, the president takes us in any war he wants.
Nobody cares.
He just does it and Congress kind of says, oh, gee, and then that's the end of it.
But I mean, this is part of American history.
I mean, the American Republic was not supposed to be a war-oriented republic.
It was a commercial republic.
People were supposed to achieve their ends peacefully.
You went to war if you really had to do it.
But their view was that's not terribly often.
You want to do your best to stay out of it.
You don't look around the world for wars to get into like we seem to be doing.
Yeah, well, and, you know, in Ron Paul's new book, he begins his chapter on empire by saying, you know, I think most people don't know America is an empire.
And I think that's probably because nobody ever used that word empire, not very much, or they use it in kind of weird other context, but not really, you know, for what they're talking about the lily pad bases all over the world, hundreds and hundreds, thousands, over 1000 of them now, apparently.
And, and yet, that really is at the root of everything that's going wrong, it seems like to me is that it's, it's a big dirty snowball rolling downhill, nobody can stop it, the more generals you got, the more generals they train, the more new ones we have, the more land we got to occupy, the more ribbons got to get, you know, awarded at some ceremony for some nitwit, you know?
Yeah, no, it is.
It is amazing.
I mean, we build up this huge apparatus, we put troops all over the world.
And the question is, for what, that, you know, and the more you do, the more likely you are to get into conflict.
And you know, at this point, you know, it just politicians seem to believe that what we just we have to be involved.
I mean, imagine having something happening where we're not in charge.
Yet, of course, we aren't in charge.
I mean, that's the thing.
You look at what's happening in Libya, while Qaddafi was supposed to go, well, guess what he didn't.
So several weeks later, we're still now trying to figure out what to do.
You know, in Afghanistan, this has been 10 years, we were supposed to kind of wrap everything up.
Well, guess what?
It didn't happen.
So now we're still there 10 years later.
I mean, in Iraq, we're over there.
We want to keep troops there.
Why?
I mean, we're trying to convince them to let us keep troops there.
For what?
I mean, what on earth are we doing?
You know, it's this crazy notion that we can't just be peaceful.
Why don't we just defend ourselves?
Let's go bring our troops home.
You know, somebody bad shows up, okay, deal with them.
But the notion that we have to spend half the world's military spending?
On what?
All right, well, now, then, obviously, the subject is oil.
They're not growing carrots over there, they're pumping oil out of the ground, and we need that energy.
And so that's what this hegemony is about, right?
That's who's interesting Cheney represented was Halliburton.
And, you know, I don't know if he did exactly the James Baker plan.
But ultimately, you know, even that Oliver Stone movie probably pretty much did it right, all the little red dots on the map and Cheney saying, see, we got almost the whole place locked up.
Isn't it important that we secure that oil, Doug?
Why not?
That's part of it.
I think the problem here is there's so many different reasons people want to go to war.
And so one of them is this weird illusion that if we don't have troops over there, we won't have oil.
I mean, people sell us oil because they get money out of it.
I mean, it's crazy.
I mean, you know, I mean, do people really think that I mean, what, if the rebels take control of Libya, they'll sell it.
If Gaddafi's in control, he sells it.
You know, the notion of being there for oil is the dumbest reason possible.
I mean, the point is, this is a marketplace.
We don't have to have troops.
I mean, we're contributing to instability.
So I never quite understand, you know, even if you think you get your initial oil contracts, there's no way to guarantee you have them forever.
I mean, we found that I mean, the OPEC countries changed their pricing.
A lot of them have thrown out U.S. companies.
That happens.
And we can't stop that.
So the problem is, I think there's far more than oil.
It's big problems.
We have a kind of an ethic, this imperial ethic that we have to do something.
I mean, you kind of hear that.
Well, if we don't do it, who will?
Of course, the answer is who cares?
I mean, why are we worried about that?
I mean, why on earth do we care?
Well, you know, I think ideology is a lot of I think ribbons in the military account for a lot, too.
But on the subject of oil, is it simply a distinction between the national interest, which I think in the mind of the average American means his ability to pump some gas and be able to afford it and get to work on time and the interests of specific oil companies that want those contracts, however short term they are?
Is that really what's going on here?
Well, I think this is where it gets complex.
I think the oil companies are really happy with Gaddafi.
I mean, they had no problem dealing with him.
I mean, once the West took sanctions off, they didn't have a problem.
So what you got?
Well, how about the empire in the Middle East in general?
Yeah, well, I think the I think the point is, in general, you know, there's a feeling that, my goodness, if we don't have oil, the world will end, you know, I mean, this.
So we've got to be on Carter's day, it was, well, the Soviets might take control.
You know, and I mean, that was pretty loony, but at least there's some sense to it, which is, well, OK, the Soviets don't like us.
Maybe they try to take the oil and not do anything with it, just keep it off the market.
But the idea today that anybody there wouldn't want to sell it, which I mean, of all people, the Iranian revolutionaries sold more oil than the Shah.
So if there's any kind of benefit, if you want to put it in that way from intervention, it has to be for particular oil companies.
But even there, you can't count on anything.
I mean, the Shah, I mean, he was our ally, but he basically took control.
He wasn't giving extra benefits to oil companies.
He wanted the money for himself.
So I find the whole thing very strange.
I mean, there's just no obvious reason for us to be doing this.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm trying to remember who it was at the foreign policy blog.
It was probably Stephen Walt, who wrote about, you know, kind of these young State Department people, or at least they start out young anyway, these bureaucrats, they all have their pet project.
They did their little PhD on this one little country nobody ever heard of.
And then the whole goal then for all of these people is to get their boss's ear on this thing and see if they can convince him to talk to his boss about it.
And one day, maybe, you know, if the angels sing, the president will hear their idea for where to intervene and how it's all just this big competition of pet projects inside the State Department, the Defense Department, who wants to do what?
Well, there's a certain amount of that kind of, in a sense, all over.
I mean, you find that at things like World Bank and IMF.
I mean, you never get rewarded because you did a good job.
You're only rewarded because you did a lot.
You know, you had more new projects.
So that's a good thing.
Everybody gets excited.
Nobody pays attention to whether you did a good job at it.
Right.
Yeah.
And then they can just go on and on forever.
Actually, the worst job they do, the better off they are, really.
Yeah, you come up with some new crazy scheme and you get off in that.
And that's all that people care about.
All right.
So do some predicting for me, please, about this war in Libya.
Because look, Obama can't just say, oops, you know what, Qaddafi's going to be the dictator until he dies of old age.
What are you going to do and leave?
Yeah, I think the pressure is going to be very strong on him to put troops in.
They opted today with drones.
You know, drones will give them a bit more advantage.
You can kill a bunch of people, but are they really prepared to kill Qaddafi?
I mean, if they just want to kill a few more of Qaddafi's soldiers, that doesn't win the war for them.
And the question is, if you want to have a unified country, the opposition rules they have to take Tripoli.
Well, that ain't going to happen without a lot more allied support.
And I think it's going to have to be on the ground.
So, you know, the president could be sitting here in another couple of months and people are going to say, my goodness, do you want a war that runs in the next year?
This looks pretty bad.
He's going to be under a lot of pressure to put in some troops.
Yeah, I don't see any other way out of it, you know, from there.
And you know what?
It's too easy to see this.
I've been saying this.
I'm not trying to just pat myself on the back.
But I mean, come on, how obvious is this?
Even if the good guys win tomorrow, there's a lucky strike on Qaddafi and everybody in Tripoli welcomes the ragtag soldiers from Benghazi or whatever, we still have to stay and hold purple finger elections and make sure that Al-Qaeda doesn't get elected and whatever, train up an army.
We surely don't need the bad guys to win the revolution.
Oh, but that would be embarrassing, now, wouldn't it?
Right, right.
And so then, you know, we'll train up their army and when they stand up, we'll stand down and we're going to be there for 10 years.
This is Iraq all over again.
Yep, I think that's right, that, you know, we're in, it's very hard to imagine how we get out and this is just going to go on and on.
Is it really the case, though, that here on my silly little radio show, we can think in two or three steps forward, ask rhetorical questions about, yeah, and then what, in ways that they can't at the White House on the National Security Council, Doug?
Well, look, you just look again and again, predictions people made, you know, we're, you know, Iraq was going to be easy.
We were going to be down to virtually no troops after just a couple of months.
They were going to love us.
I mean, I think that this is a city of illusions.
You know, people never pay attention to the past.
They think they're smarter than everybody else and they keep repeating the same idiotic mistakes.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
You know, Dan Ellsberg writes in his book, Secrets, that it's all about access to secrets and that substitutes for being smart.
Once you have access to secrets that the average Joe doesn't know, you don't have to listen to him ever again.
Now you're automatically, you gain 30 IQ points over everybody else or whatever.
And it also allows you to shut everybody else down because you tell them, I know what you don't know.
So trust me.
Yeah.
Which is what they said about George Bush is what they're saying about Barack Obama right now.
You got it.
Good.
The USA in 2011, you heard it, everybody.
Libya, too.
All right.
Doug Bandow from Cato.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Take care now.
