06/09/11 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and now I'm happy to welcome Doug Bandao back to the show.
He's a fellow at the Cato Institute, has an archive of old stuff at antiwar.com as well.
Uh, and I'm going to ask him about Libya, I think, at least to start here.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How's things?
Happy to be on.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Let me ask you this.
First of all, are you personally surprised, shocked, uh, taken aback or anything like that about the current abuse of the war power by President Obama in the case of the war in Libya?
No, I mean, most every president does that.
I think you have to go back to Eisenhower to actually find somebody who seemed to respect Congress's role, you know, in terms of foreign policy and declaring war.
You know, he was a former general, a pretty significant one.
You know, most of the presidents since then have basically figured they want to be kind of armchair generals and off they go without Congress's assent.
You know, it's really frustrating.
This president, of course, was a lecturer in constitutional law at a law school, but that didn't, you know, still hasn't made him any more willing to, uh, you know, abide by the constitution of the law either.
Yeah.
Well, you know, George H.W. Bush and his administration said, well, we didn't need a, uh, authorization from Congress.
We had a authorization from the UN security council, but we're more than happy for them to go ahead and approve what we're doing anyway.
And they did right.
And George Bush basically made the same thing, the same claim about, uh, Iraq, but he went ahead and went to Congress anyway.
And, um, I'm trying to remember, I guess Bill Clinton did not when it came to Kosovo, but, uh, Bush's father, George H.W. did essentially the same thing on his Iraq war.
He made the claim I could do it anyway, but in fact they had congressional votes.
So, you know, I'm willing to give the guy something, even if he's out there claiming he has the right to do it by himself, if at least he does go to Congress and Congress votes, at least we have somebody we can now try to hold responsible.
Well, and Reagan bombed Libya, but just for a day or two and then quit.
That's right.
I mean, you know, there, of course he told us, you know, yeah, it wasn't gonna last very long.
And then he said, well, it comes into war powers, but then he said, well, it's just so small, you know, it doesn't really count, you know, while they're overseas telling everybody how much we're doing and demanding everybody else do more because we're doing a lot, you know, so they're talking out of both sides of the mouth.
Well, and you know, that's the thing too about this is I guess the part about it to me that gets me the most is just how ridiculous and stupid this is.
I mean, how in the world do you get us into a war in Libya?
One where the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said yesterday, oh, we have no idea how this is going to end or when or what.
We're just hoping it works out for the best.
Yeah.
And this is really bad.
So you said there's no vital interest at stake.
So you just, you wonder what on earth are we doing there?
Who knows?
Well, I mean, you could see how the French and the British have oil interests there.
And I guess Obama made the mistake of saying Gaddafi must go too early, but I don't know.
How do you see this thing ending?
Well, that's a really good question.
I mean, I, you know, I think over time, you know, it's harder, you know, it's harder for, uh, Gaddafi to survive, but so far he's proved to be fairly resilient.
I mean, you know, they keep ratcheting things up just a little bit, you know, they're desperate.
They thought it was going to be merely a matter of saying, we're going to do something and he would fall or go away.
He didn't, you know, so then they send in a few military advisors and then they send in a half dozen helicopters and then they shoot a few more missiles.
I mean, this sort of thing is not working.
I mean, it's amazing.
You know, they essentially lie and they say it's all just to save lives.
So they get UN approval for that.
And then they admit, well, we want to get rid of him, but they won't do what it takes to get rid of him, which means more people are dying.
I mean, civil wars are bloody, so they're making it drag on and more people are being killed.
It's ludicrous.
Yeah, it is amazing.
And you know, there was that piece in, and I really should talk to this guy, but I forget his name.
He's Jonathan something.
I think, uh, writing for the New Yorker said, Hey, look, there's a thousand armed men.
That's the rebellion.
That's right.
I mean, the problem is they're not organized.
They're not well-trained, you know, and, you know, so we've, we've seen some trainers go over from Europe and that might help a little bit, but this is still, you know, to take over a country is not easy, especially one like this, where they're fairly significant distances.
So now just kind of in a stalemate, each side holds a bit and they're not able to do anything to the other side.
Well, and, you know, we saw in Egypt, Mubarak tried to say, Hey, this is a CIA plot to unseat me.
And the entire country laughed out loud in unison and said, no, dude, you're a CIA plot.
And that's why we're getting rid of you.
And they did.
And, you know, right now, um, the king of Bahrain is trying to accuse the Americans of being behind the protest to unseat him when of course the Americans are behind him and have been, but you see what an effective talking point that is the Americans are the bad guy on the so-called Arab street over there.
And we probably couldn't have done a thing better to prop up Gaddafi in power than this intervention.
It seems like to me, we're, we're proving that we are definitely on the side of the rebellion, which only makes him the good guy, at least among the people who, you know, tended toward him in the first place.
And the point is, we don't really know who all these people are.
I mean, some of these people look like they're fairly nice people, but those are not often the people who win revolutions.
You know, it's the people who have the guns and the toughest people.
So we don't know who's going to come out of this.
I mean, there are defectors from the Gaddafi regime.
Well, if you're telling me that Gaddafi is an evil, horrible guy, well, these defectors probably aren't very nice people either.
Well, what role do they play in a new government?
I mean, you are like the interior, former interior minister.
I mean, this is a nasty character.
This is the guy whose job it was to jail everybody before.
Well, he's now supposedly one of the good guys.
I mean, you know, we can't we don't have any reason to assume that the outcome here is going to be pretty.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what's fun for me and this we can only speculate, but I like to imagine the conversation in the White House on the National Security Council that got us into this thing in the first place.
I mean, how could they have blundered into a war so badly?
Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, said, oh, we should not intervene here.
There's no such thing as just a no fly zone, guys.
Two weeks before it started.
Well, that's right.
I mean, apparently State Department people have acknowledged to, you know, some journalists privately that they really thought that all was going to happen is, you know, NATO would announce it was going to do something.
The U.S. would announce it and Qaddafi would either fly into exile or he'd be overthrown.
And would they be done with it?
I mean, they they didn't learn anything.
We had this in Kosovo.
You know, the Clinton administration thought, well, we just kind of bomb a couple of days and he'll he'll give in.
But instead, it took 78 days.
You know, they didn't know what to do.
All they could do is keep bombing.
They had no plan B.
They didn't expect him to resist.
They didn't know what they were doing.
And that's where we're at now.
We're after we're more than 78 days now.
Nobody knows how to end this.
You know, we're eating up costs.
We're bankrupt.
We're spending all this money and we're killing people.
And the question is, for what?
And it's very hard to explain what on earth we're doing.
Why do we care who rules Libya?
Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I can see why the Europeans want a better deal on the oil they're pumping out of the ground there, that they get a higher percentage or whatever.
But I ain't sure why Americans got to pay for that or die for that.
But now.
So what's Obama's choices here?
All I see are land invasion or Bay of Pigs.
Well, he has no good options because the one thing which, you know, most Democrats and certainly and even most Republicans, other than, say, go crazy, John McCain, you know, they don't want a ground war.
I mean, you know, this John Boehner resolution, which is really a sellout.
But still, it affirmed that the House certainly didn't want ground troops involved.
So the one thing there's no support for in the U.S. is ground troops.
But there's no reason to think that what they're doing now is going to have any impact.
We could be doing this for another six months.
So and I think for that, for Obama, that's a disaster.
I mean, right now, he just hopes he kind of stays off the front pages.
Nobody pays attention.
But if it's going on from six months from now, people are going to be screaming about the cost and saying, what on earth are you doing?
And we're heading towards a presidential election.
So but he doesn't want to use ground troops.
So maybe at that point, he really unleashes air power and hopes that does it.
He's in a very bad situation.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know.
It seems like no matter what happens, they refuse.
You know, Gaddafi's offered, let's let's work out some kind of peace over and over again.
They refuse to meet with him or acknowledge that whatsoever.
They're really painting themselves into a corner here.
And, you know, from their standpoint, what might be even worse is, say it takes another three months, but Gaddafi's finally overthrown.
And then there's just another civil war, because then it's a struggle within the rebels and what's left of Gaddafi's forces for control.
So then the U.S. is stuck with now.
What do you do?
I mean, we're already you know, if the rebels are mistreating people, we said we bombed the rebels.
I mean, this is insane.
Right.
Well, and as we know from the British press, a lot of these rebels are veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, where they practice or string suicide bombings against Americans.
So once we win for them, we're going to have to hold purple finger elections and make sure that they're not the ones.
That's right.
And we'll see.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
It's Doug Bandow from Cato.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Doug Bandow's on the line.
We're predicting the worst, more of the worst to come from this fiasco.
In Libya.
And I guess, you know, Doug, somebody could get lucky with a missile strike.
This is pretty much where we left off.
Somebody could get lucky with a missile strike and kill this Qaddafi character.
But then as soon as we ask, then what?
All of a sudden, we're back in Iraq 2004.
That's right.
I mean, the point is you get rid of him who succeeds him.
You know, it's not as if this is Thomas Jefferson is obviously there.
It's not as if these people have a history of democracy.
You know, it's not as if that we still don't have important regional and tribal divisions, which, of course, you know, no one in the White House has any idea about.
I mean, this is typical of the White House.
You know, Brussels, you know, these people jump into a conflict without knowing anything about it.
And the cheerleaders are people like John McCain, who two years ago was in Tripoli, you know, having dinner with Qaddafi, talking about giving him military aid.
You know, so I mean, he was, you know, for autocracy before he was against it.
I mean, it's outrageous to listen to these people.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and he wasn't just there talking about he was there twisting Qaddafi's arm, telling him, are you going to sign this thing or not?
And talking about military aid.
I mean, it's crazy.
You know, you apparently somewhere along the line realize that Qaddafi is not a nice guy.
Well, great.
You know, thank you for waking up.
Right.
Well, you know, he was anti-Qaddafi before he was pro-Qaddafi, before he was anti-Qaddafi.
He was pro before he was anti or whatever.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, so I don't know, Doug, you're supposed to be reasonable.
And tell me now, Scott Horton, you and your hyperbole, tone it down here.
We're not going to have purple fingered elections and a decade long occupation.
And yet you're telling me you're afraid.
So sounds like.
Well, it's hard to imagine how they can walk away.
I mean, assume, you know, the NATO was just out there saying, oh, don't worry, we're not going to put any troops on the ground.
But look, you know, Qaddafi goes and then there's still civil war.
You know, Qaddafi goes and they're still fighting.
Assume Qaddafi goes, now the rebels are killing each other.
It's hard to imagine how we would stay out.
We say we want to save people.
And what if it looks like al Qaeda and radicals are ready to take control?
What if it suggests that some triple is going to be ruled by guys who we view as terrorists?
I mean, you know, how can they stay out?
And how can you tell the American people this is worthwhile if the whole thing blows up, you know, after your alleged victory?
So I think, you know, it's very likely we're going to be involved.
Well, and here's the problem, too.
And this something I've been saying since before they blundered in here is, hey, guess what?
This is another Sunni Arab country, another place where Americans are doing exactly what bin Laden, you know, accused us of doing and predicted we would do and is trying to get us to do overextend ourselves in their part of the neighborhood where we run out of money and radicalize all the locals.
Yeah, he may be dead.
But the point is, you know, he's won.
I mean, he got us to do precisely what he wanted us to do, which has been a disaster.
We've spent trillions of dollars, got gotten thousands of our own people killed, you know, killed hundreds of thousands of other people, you know, because he was able to stage a terrorist attack.
From his standpoint, this has been great.
We've completely overreacted.
We've given him what he wanted.
We've created enormous numbers of enemies.
Yeah.
Jeff Huber wrote a piece the other day last week or something two weeks ago called Bin Laden Dead and Loving It.
Yeah, he's got to be the most fortunately, the most successful military genius in the history of the world.
That's pretty much it.
Makes Alexander the Great look like an amateur.
That's right.
I mean, seriously, could Alexander the Great have figured out how to get the Indians to just completely defeat themselves?
You know, yeah, to kind of bankrupt themselves, make lots of enemies around the world.
It's extraordinary.
All right.
Well, so now I guess give me some good news about Syria.
Tell me that at least they're too smart to stick their nose into Syria or worse, Pakistan, worse than they are.
You know, I think they realize that military intervention in a place like Pakistan would be catastrophic.
That is military intervention directly against the government.
But of course, that's a place where we've, you know, our drone attacks continue to anger, you know, our Pakistanis.
This is a place that's kind of losing any sense of a liberal civil society.
I mean, that's a place that's frightening.
And if it implodes, who knows what the U.S. would do in Syria?
I think they realize that this is kind of one step too far.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, what do you do there?
I mean, are you prepared to take on their military?
And then what happens?
Who knows what that place looks like?
Are you prepared for purple finger elections there?
I mean, my hope is simply they know they've got too much on their plate and especially that President Obama wants to get reelected.
I don't think he sees any advantage to suddenly launching more wars and especially putting more U.S. troops on the ground.
That's the way I think to get the American people don't care if it looks like a video game.
But if guys are on the ground getting shot and coming back in body bags, they have a very different reaction.
I think Obama knows that.
Yeah, well, I sure hope that's true.
I mean, but then again, he thought he was going to get away with nothing but an air war here.
And he's bought us a decades long catastrophe in Libya.
So, you know, who knows what they could convince themselves about how easy a war in Pakistan might be or an attempt to go in there and seize their nukes.
I kind of get the idea.
You know, my gut's telling me, hey, any full scale war, you know, against the state in in Pakistan is absolutely ludicrous.
There's just no way they could do that.
And yet I'm getting the idea that there are people in Washington, D.C. who are extremely concerned that others are really convinced, you know, people with power are really convincing themselves that maybe it's time to head that way.
You know, I actually think that it's more likely that they would decide to cut off aid than that they would try to put in some kind of full scale military action against the government.
I think that there is enough recognition here that that's a fragile place, that that would blow everything up.
But at least nominally, it has a democratic government.
You know, Syria, you know, they can look at it and say, well, we'd be taking on, you know, thugs and whatnot in Pakistan.
They'd have to admit that after all this, that in fact, they really weren't dealing with the democratic government.
And then what were we doing and why were we giving them money?
And I'm I'm I'm a little more hopeful, I think, than you are on Pakistan, where I think they understand it'd be such a hideous mess that it's hard for me.
And I think, again, this president prior to an election year really can't afford that.
And I think he knows that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, certainly bribing the military and the intelligence services and, you know, the so-called parliament over there to allow us to, you know, have a JSOC drone war, etc.in their country is one thing.
But, you know, any attempt to take their nuclear weapons, which is really a declaration of war against the state that we've been bribing, seems like just immediately the possible consequences rippling out from any such attempt immediately, including, you know, nuclear war with India.
And then in that case, I guess we could probably expect China to jump in on the side of Pakistan.
And God knows what kind of horrible things we're talking about in that case.
Yeah.
And I think luckily, at least, I think the president probably understands that, you know, you want to really blow up the world.
I mean, that's that's the way to do it.
Get involved there.
Get into a conflict.
Trigger things.
You know, there's no stopping point where it all could go.
Right.
Well, and I mean, then again, though, as you say, under the the secret war so-called that we have now, we're risking the disintegration of the Pakistani state as it is.
That's right.
Yeah, it's a very bad situation.
Incredible.
All right.
Well, at least I'm happy to hear you say that reason has some sway of some description inside Washington, D.C.
Still, I guess we'll see how it plays out.
That's right.
Seems like this Libya thing would it is proven out once and for all, but maybe not quite.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Thanks very much for your time, Doug, as always.
I really appreciate it.
Happy to be on.
Take care now.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute.