06/27/07 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Glenn Greenwald.
He writes the famous blog Unclaimed Territory.
At Salon.com is the author of the book How Would a Patriot Act and the brand new A Tragic Legacy.
How a good versus evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Hi, Scott.
Great to be here.
Thanks.
And you're in Brazil right now, is that right?
That is correct.
Is that like a, I better get the hell out of America before they throw me in a concentration camp or anything?
No, it's a perfect place for sun and relaxation and after finishing a book, it's a good place to be.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
Is it true that they have paint on the roads there, but everybody drives six cars abreast anyway?
Yeah, the paint is rather irrelevant.
It's an enormous waste of public funds.
I've heard some really funny anecdotes about driving in Brazil.
I'd like to go there someday.
All right.
Yeah.
So, hey, let's talk about this.
A Tragic Legacy, a good versus evil mentality.
Why don't you just basically give us the short overview of the book?
What do you have here?
I think the central theme, there are really two purposes to the book.
One is the book at what has happened over the last six years in terms of the way George Bush has governed and where America has left as a result, what the legacy is for our country.
The other aspect of it, which I think is more important if I had to choose, is to examine how our public political discourse proceeds and what is so corrupt about it, the way in which there are these very pressing debates that our country has about what kind of country we are and what our role in the world is, and it all gets obscured by these very simplistic, good versus evil cartoons that substitute for rational debate.
Well, it's funny.
I've always been a Star Wars fan my whole life, and it's probably why I was so receptive to the idea that it's not a good idea to let your republic turn into an empire and that kind of thing.
But I have a friend of mine who hates Star Wars, hates it, because he thinks that the American people, especially because of things like that, they will never understand that their country runs an empire unless the president or the vice president is wearing a black cloak and shooting lightning out of his hands.
It has to be cartoonish supervillainy or it's not villainy.
You know, I wonder about that.
I actually think that if you look at polling data and other things, that there is a sentiment that exists among the large portions of the population that's growing that America ought not be this military super force around the world or a recognition that a series of endless wars really does have great cost.
At the same time, everyone looks at situations from their own individual perspective, and I think a lot of Americans have a hard time wondering or figuring out why it is that there's so much anti-American sentiment around the world, because they look at their own lives and they see themselves raising their kids and going to work and being entertained and not seeking to harm anyone, and there's a real disconnect, I think, between their perception about what our country is doing in the world and what we in fact are doing, how many countries we're militarily involved in, how many invasions we're leading, how much more militarized of a country we are then than the entire rest of the world, and I think that's because those facts really aren't very present in our political discussions, and that's what accounts for that gap in terms of how Americans perceive of their own country and what we're actually doing in the world.
With the legacy that we have of the American Revolution and the Constitution and all the different fights for individual rights that have come through the last couple of hundred years, and especially with our foreign policy that's based on the premise that we're the best at this, we're the best at self-government of anybody, we're so good at self-government, that's our excuse for invading your country.
And yet, how is it that we have self-government when, well, for example, we started this show Monday morning with 41% of the American people think Saddam Hussein did 9-11, and we have a situation where people are dealing strictly with emotions and slogans and there's no real rational discussion whatsoever in the larger sense.
You know, exactly right, I mean, to me the most amazing political fact is that six months after we invaded Iraq, six months after the summer of 2003, a USA Today poll revealed that 70% of Americans, 7 out of 10, believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the planning of 9-11 attacks, and you're right, it may be even more amazing that five years later, a huge bulk of the population, 40%, still believe it is an obvious myth.
And that's why, you know, when I first began blogging, I would write much more about substantive matters.
I wrote a lot about the NSA eavesdropping scandal and about some of these law-breaking issues, and my focus has shifted to some degree onto how corrupt and decrepit and barren our political discourse is, and specifically how corrupt our media institutions are, because unless and until there's some way that the guardians of our political discourse change their behavior or are replaced, very little else matters, because it isn't really the fault of Americans, per se, that there's such ignorance and such a lack of rational examination.
Our system relies upon a healthy, functioning political press, because they're protected under the First Amendment, to inform citizens about what the government is doing, and it's that profound failure that really does lie at the heart of everything else.
Well, yeah, I kind of almost hope that the people around the world who watch American television on their satellite kind of feel sorry for us and say, oh, no wonder their country is at war against ours.
It's because their people have no idea what's going on.
Look at this.
You know, I mean, I watch occasionally, and I'm sure you've noticed this before, occasionally if something really important happens, like, say, Israel invades Lebanon or something like that, CNN will switch over and show Americans CNN International, never for more than an hour or two.
But occasionally the regular CNN will show a CNN International as, like, you know, night and day.
It's the difference between, well, cartoonish super villainous reporting and actual journalism.
It's incredible.
Yeah, you know, one of the I mean, you know, I would say that if you look, for example, at what we're doing in various African countries and supporting Christian governments are basically invading countries that have Muslim governments that we don't like, like in Somalia, the number of people around the world, in the United States, who know that our government is doing that and our name is is minuscule.
And yet, obviously, it has a fundamental effect on how the people in that region perceive our country and what it is that we're doing.
And yet, that is barely mentioned in the American press.
And, you know, there's some, I guess, you could call it a cliche or a saying that Americans never know about any other foreign country until it's time to go to war with them.
And then suddenly they become experts, sort of the way we have a lot of, you know, Iraqi experts running around now, who never knew anything about that country previously, including our own involvement in propping up that regime.
And so so much of it is is based upon what is just objectively speaking, a corrupted public discourse where we're enormously important facts about what our country is doing, are simply nowhere to be found.
And when that's the case, you can't really expect the electorate to be anything other than misguided, although, you know, I do think it's worth pointing out that, you know, if you look in the first chapter of my book documents, the the extent to which public opinion has has shifted from 2002 to 2003 as compared to today on fundamental questions about the Bush presidency and whether the war in Iraq is morally justifiable and and whether they trust Republicans and the Bush movement at all to our government generally to do anything in terms of telling the truth is a monumental shift.
And, you know, I think people have have begun to reach these conclusions largely on their own.
And that, I think, at least is an encouraging sign.
Yeah, but that's nothing a change of political party description of the next president can't change.
I mean, that's the same thing that got people got the Republicans elected in the big revolution of 1994 and what have you was that same kind of anti-government sentiment.
And it all went away as soon as they replaced Bill Clinton with George Bush, all those very same people, well, ninety nine percent of those very same people told themselves, oh, all that I just said for the last eight years about government, what I really meant was Bill Clinton.
Government is wonderful as long as George Bush is the president.
And it'll be the same thing in another couple of years from now.
Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or whoever will take office and all the Democrats will be the biggest fans of the national government, of anybody.
And it'll take them a day to switch back.
I mean, look, I think what you're describing is absolutely what has happened in the past.
And I think what you're describing is a real danger in terms of whether or not this anti-Washington sentiment will result in any real change.
Even the movement that has supported George Bush is visually trying to find a substitute who will be faithful to his neoconservative and militaristic worldview, while at the same time casting the appearance cosmetically that he in fact is different and that the way to express your dissatisfaction is by embracing the successor who will become the Bush critic on the surface and not a reality.
And so you're right that that is how things have progressed and there's reason to believe that they could progress that way or will progress that way in the future.
And so then the question becomes, well, what can be done about that?
How could that course be disrupted?
And my book is an attempt to look at those questions and to figure out a way how to communicate through all of the instruments that are used to keep these structures in place.
And I mean, it can be done.
You know, any system that is built by human beings can be torn down or changed by other human beings.
It's just a matter of figuring out how to persuade enough people and to reach them that what's going on is in fact what's going on.
And you know, I don't mean to sound too panglossian, but it should be any way that the truth will beat out a lie, at least eventually.
Well, I mean, one can make the argument that what has happened with the war in Iraq, in fact, is an example of that.
And you know, when we went to war, two thirds of Americans, the majorities of both Democrats and Republicans and independents overwhelmingly supported that war.
And now the opposite is true.
And that's the case despite an anemic press that has continued to really be completely malfeasement in exposing the extent to which we were deceived, how bad things truly are, how much of a gap there is between government claims about the war.
And the reality, that's why I say I think people have reached the conclusion on their own that they were tricked into the war, that they were duped into it, that all along there was no justification for it, and that it was motivated by things other than what they were told was the real motive.
And you know, they may not know exactly what happened or have detailed and developed theories about what did, but public opinion polls reveal rather conclusively that they're not only against the war, but feel that they were deliberately deceived into supporting it.
And I think that's a significant trend, one that ought to be encouraged.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and you know, the people have also been deceived about the motives of Nevermind Iraq, because obviously it has nothing to do with it.
But the attacks on the American people on September 11th, well, I guess Iraq has something to do with it in that the motivation of the terrorists in part was the American bombing of Iraq and the blockade on Iraq maintained from the bases in Saudi Arabia.
But that has been obscured from the American people, in great part, at least one big needle popping that bubble lately for many people was Ron Paul in the second Republican debate, where he said, no, they don't hate us for our freedom.
They hate us because we've been over there, and it's a problem.
If you think that we can go around the world doing whatever we want and not have consequences from it, then that is a problem for us.
We have to be realistic about the consequences of what we're doing.
In fact, really, that's what you write in your article that we ran, or the section of your book that we ran on antiwar.com yesterday, is that, look, if you want to have unending wars for Israel in the Middle East, if you want to expand the American footprint in order to secure our oil resources forever and so forth, well, maybe there's good arguments for that and maybe there's not, but we've got to at least have the debate instead.
We don't even, as you said, even the people who don't believe Bush and Cheney anymore, they still don't know what the real answers are, and it's because, again, the media just won't tell them.
I think you're exactly right.
If you look at the argument that Ron Paul was making, not only is it the case, as he pointed out, that it's just a classic theory of the CIA, the blowback theory, that if you act outside of your borders in a militaristic way, there's going to be consequences.
It's really just a matter of basic common sense of just facts, and if you say to Americans, imagine if there was another country that was bombing our country, invading our country, bombing our neighbors, the most militarized country in the world seeking to dominate this region, how would you feel about that country in response to when they wonder why it is that some Muslims are angry and hostile towards the United States and want to attack it?
I think people can then start understanding that a little bit better because it's just rational, but that viewpoint is never presented.
In the media aftermath of 9-11, it was basically embargoed.
I mean, anyone who raised the question of why the terrorists attacked us in a way that was honest and candid was basically shunned with a viciousness that was unkempt in the McCarthy era.
Even now, look at how Ron Paul is treated as though he's some kind of an extremist or even a wacko for doing nothing other than pointing out the undeniable causal connection between our own behavior in invading, bombing, and interfering with a whole host of other countries and the anger which the citizens of those countries feel towards the United States.
And the fact that you can't even point out that causal connection without being attacked the way Rudy Giuliani attacked him as though he was sympathizing with evil is pretty reflective of the problem.
That, you know, is just the main focus of my book.
And you know, with Giuliani, for one example, the question really comes down to, and none of us can read his mind or whatever, but I guess we can try to analyze him as best we can, is, is he really that stupid or is he a liar?
I mean, he said, I've never heard of such a thing.
You know, it's interesting, that's one of the questions that, you know, the subtitle of my book is How a Good vs.
Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush President.
And just in response to the title, there have been people objecting or arguing that there really is no good vs. evil mentality that motivates Bush.
It's all just an instrument of deceit.
Right, that's for the rubes.
A separate agenda.
Right.
And, you know, I think the truth is not quite that clear when it comes down to certain individuals.
I mean, I think, you know, you could say that George Bush probably does have a component of his worldview that is evangelical and religious and messianic and does believe that he's doing God's work in bringing his conception of freedom to the world.
And that, therefore, anything is justified that he does because he's on the side of good against evil.
And I think anybody who observed Rudy Giuliani for his eight years as mayor and prior to that as a very aggressive and jealous federal prosecutor would say that he is absolutely, while much smarter than Bush and quite intelligent, just absolutely, that he is a true believer.
That he believes he is capable of dividing the world into good and evil.
And that once that happens, there should be nothing that limits his power in battling against evil because the mission is so pure.
And I actually think he's probably more of a good versus evil moralist even than George Bush is.
And that's what makes him so dangerous as a presidential candidate.
This whole good and evil narrative is for the rubes, and that includes Bush and Giuliani.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, there was a luncheon at the White House about three months ago that I wrote about.
And it was attended by maybe 10 or 15 neoconservatives from the Weekly Standard and National Review and other places, including either Irving Kristol or Norman Perdure.
I forget which was there.
And one of the participants, Erwin Stelzer, wrote an account of that luncheon in the Weekly Standard.
And he described in unbelievably explicit detail how these neoconservatives presented the world to George Bush.
And the purpose was to host a luncheon by the historian, Andrew Roberts, who is one of the New York Times favorite historians.
And they were very explicit about, you know, essentially arguing that his presidency was one of the upper proportions because we are faced with the ultimate battle of good versus evil and that all he needs to concern himself with is history's judgment about whether or not he was sufficiently resolute in defeating evil in the world, which coincidentally enough for them happens to be the Arab and other Muslims in the Middle East who they've been at war with for decades as a result of Israel.
And you could really see how that process works.
So in such exquisite detail as a result of these accounts, and, you know, I think that's you're right that this framework gets applied first to people like Bush and Giuliani to become believers in the agenda, and then they start to use that as the justification.
Am I buying into their comic book view if I say, no, it's Kruthammer and Podhoretz who are evil.
They're the ones who promote preemptive war.
They're the ones who want to nuke Persia.
They are the genocidal maniacs.
They're frankly traitors to this country.
And that's evil.
You know, I mean, I recently wrote a column about a week ago actually called The Face of a Psychopath, and it was about Norman Podhoretz because I had heard an interview of his.
He wrote, of course, an article a few weeks ago called The Case for Bombing Iran, which The Wall Street Journal then published, that argued that we should begin bombing Iran immediately.
But in the interview, he elaborated on that even more, and he was asked what should the British have done in response to the detention for two weeks, so 15 of their sailors.
And he said the British ought immediately to have told the Iranians that the sailors need to be released that day, and that if they weren't, that Iran would be bombed into smithereens.
That was his exact phrase.
And to so casually call for the slaughter of what would in essence be, you know, millions if not tens of millions of human beings, innocent human beings, over something that is so petty really is the mind of a criminal, of a psychopath.
And to deliberately work in our political discourse to deceive the American people and to signing on to an agenda that has nothing to do with the justifications that are offered, you know, is that treasonous in a legal sense?
I mean, you could debate that, but it's certainly something that I think is unpatriotic, and one can consider him to be working against the interests of the United States, and I don't think there's any question about that.
Yeah, now, see, I guess I wouldn't really try to call it treason in the legal sense, because as far as I know, that's the only crime defined in the Constitution, and it's specific that has to be aid and comfort to an enemy.
And Israel's not an enemy, but I mean, this is some kind of espionage or agents of foreign influence or some sort of thing that it's not okay to continue to, over and over again, lie the American people into wars for the interests of a foreign country.
There's gotta be a law against that somewhere.
Yeah, you know, there are, you know, all sorts of groups in the United States that maintain the heightened interest in events in the world as a result of their ethnic origin or their ancestors or, you know, whatever.
I mean, Irish Americans were always more interested in the dispute over the Irish Republican army than the average American was, and, you know, Asian Americans are more concerned with things in their region, and I don't think there's anything uncommon about having a heightened interest or anything wrong with it either.
But to so plainly attempt to deceive Americans into supporting an agenda for another country, and what's interesting is, as Israel perceives Iran to be a greater and greater threat, they become more explicit about their real agenda, and they talk very openly in Israel, the right-wing elements in Israel do, about how the immediate priority is to persuade Americans to perceive of Iran not just as a threat to Israel, but as a threat to the United States, and to make it a bipartisan obligation to view Iran accordingly.
That's, I mean, that's openly what the campaign they're involved in.
And, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu was on Fox News a few nights ago with Sean Hannity making that argument expressly, claiming that Iran views Israel only as the little state that has to be taken out, only as a prerequisite to their real goal of attacking the United States, and that, therefore, it's the United States' responsibility to attack Iran, not Israel's.
And they're obviously right-wing, you know, Israel-centric, neo-Caribbean United States who are working towards that same goal very much with Israeli interest in mind and not American interest in mind, and it is dangerous on a lot of levels, and it's way past the time, you know, to stop being so shy about discussing that movement.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I think the fear for a long time, and maybe even, well, I'm pretty certain, even today, the fear is that someone will call you an anti-Semite, and that if somebody calls you an anti-Semite, you can't really recover from that.
It doesn't matter how great your arguments are, it doesn't matter if you're part Jewish, it doesn't matter anything.
If they called you an anti-Semite, you're ruined.
And maybe that's a little bit less true now, as just, you know, the evidence is clear.
There's no doubt about who lied us into war in Iraq and who lied us into war in Iran.
It was the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the American Enterprise Institute, and the neo-con crew, who are all, or not all, but many of them are directly tied to the Likud party in Israel.
Douglas Feith's father was one of the founders of it or something, right?
I mean, this is not a secret.
One of the points I make in the book is, and I think it is important to note, is that what you're describing is absolutely a highly influential part of what has been the Bush movement.
But there are other parts.
You know, I don't attribute, for instance, any loyalty to Israel to Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld or, you know, Newt Gingrich or that strain, you know, that seeks to basically just that his interest really is in an American empire, hegemony in the Middle East and other places.
Or, you know, there is a substantial segment of evangelical Christians who, for their own theological reasons, are committed to a greater Israel and what they call a greater Israel.
And you know, they are fervent in their support for Israel, or at least their desire that the U.S. act militarily in defense of Israeli interests as they perceive them as the neo-con power.
So I think it's important to avoid, you know, inaccurate caricature.
At the same time, the theory, the argument, the propaganda, emanates mostly from these right-wing Israeli-centric neo-cons.
But I think what you're seeing is the emergence of a lot of mainstream Jews in America who are becoming bolder in their opposition to that and pointing out that they really are an extremist group, and I think that's making it easier to discuss it without those ramifications that you're describing.
All right, I want you to listen to this clip here real quick along those very lines.
There's an army of 200 million marching down the River Euphrates, coming toward the Persian Gulf.
There's going to be the meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion that is unplanned for on the charts of all of the dictators of the earth.
It's not an invasion from the north or the south or the east or the west.
It's an invasion from heaven, and he will establish his kingdom, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
I am telling you that makes this message one of the most thrilling prophetic messages you've ever heard in your life.
You could get raptured out of this building before I get through finished preaching.
We were that close.
John the Revelator says in Revelation the 19th, and I, John, saw the heavens open, and he that sat upon a white horse was called faithful and true, and in righteousness doth he judge and make war, and out of his mouth shall go a two-edged sword with which he shall smite the nations of the earth.
I have to tell you, Glenn, if I was Benjamin Netanyahu, I would think twice about being aligned with crazies like that.
John Hagee, and by the way, all those clips are from the new movie World War IV by Don Craven Jr.
Yeah, you know, it is amazing, the calculus that they've embraced, you know, the short-term benefit by aligning people, by aligning themselves with people who are friends of Israel in a sense that just is completely different from what they would want it to be, and you know, I mean, that alliance is really significant.
I mean, John Hagee and even Pat Robertson meet regularly with Elliott Abrams, and they talk about this alliance and the ways in which they lend support to Bush's Middle East militarism in a way that is unbelievably disturbing, and you know, in addition to a failure to examine these neo-cons and what their real motives are, there has been as well a real reluctance to ask to what extent Bush's evangelical fervor is grounded in these similar beliefs about Israel and the rapture and the need to reunite Israel as a prerequisite to the return of Christ, which is what John Hagee believes and a lot of evangelicals believe.
It's unclear to what extent Bush embraces those convictions, but certainly a large part of his base believes in it, and they do have an alliance with neo-cons that leads them to support the same types of policies.
What do you think of the chances that Bush really believes in that stuff?
I saw on your blog where you were discussing Bush's religiosity and its veracity.
What do you say?
You know, I don't know the extent to which he embraces specific doctrines, and he himself has been inconsistent on this.
For example, on the question of whether he has direct one-to-one communications with God about very specific issues, there are times, and recently his answer will be that he does not have the kinds of discussions with God where he receives specific instruction.
But in the past, he has claimed that he had a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas about four years ago, I guess, in 2002 or early 2003, where he said that he was instructed by God how to strike Al Qaeda through Afghanistan, and now Assad is the same as well.
And when he ran for president, he told all of his friends and associates in Texas that he had decided to run upon specific instructions from God.
And the extent to which George Bush seems to pledge his allegiance religiously are the ones that believe in this apocalyptic vision of the return of Christ and point to a defense of Israel.
But I think, one, to be careful about going overboard with that.
I think that he has not displayed the characteristics, at least openly, of a complete religious fanatic.
I think he's more balanced in his motive and his worldview than that, and so I think it's clearly a part of it.
But I think you have to be careful about the extent to which you attribute those really, really extreme beliefs, religiously, to Bush.
Yeah, see, I guess when I see what you're talking about there, with him not acting like he's really fervent, it makes me wonder whether any of this is really true at all, or this is just, you know, his dad made the political mistake of not getting the born-agains on board and he's not going to make that same mistake.
Right.
I mean, you know, I think that, you know, look, one of the things I wrote about in my blog and I also made this point in my book is, you know, it's very hard for any of us to even know with certainty what our own true motives are.
I mean, it's very difficult to get to the bottom of that question, even for ourselves, simply proving there will be no past, let alone to do that with other people.
What truly motivates somebody in their behavior, and do they really believe in God deep down, and are these religious beliefs authentic?
You know, one of the things you can do is look at somebody's actions, and to me, one of the convincing events that suggest that there is at least an authentic aspect to Bush's born-again or conversion experience is the fact that he was able to give up what, by all accounts, was a very severe addiction to alcohol, something that people don't do very easily and are able to do only with some kind of transformation within themselves.
But at the end of the day, you know, the real issue, and the one that I focused on in the book, is what is the justification that is offered for these policies?
What is the moralistic cartoon that is being offered up as the one that dominates our political discourse?
And if Bush really believes it or not, the need to expose it and refute it is exactly the same, because ultimately that's what keeps America on this course.
Now, it seems like there's been a lot of various times in American history where people were just as deluded, and, you know, I guess I can still brag that I'm a young man, and I haven't lived through that much of American history.
Seems like in the 1990s, people were more distracted with having a good time than they were just, you know, living in an alternate reality, which is something that, as you've pointed out, is not as true today as it has been in the past few years and such.
But is this, where does this come from?
Is this like all, go back to the Puritans or something, where America's got to be the shining city on a hill?
You know, I think that's a difficult question to answer, because it's just so complex, and there's different arguments one can make on each side, but...
I'm having eloquence problems this morning, I admit.
Right.
I mean, one of the things I would say about that is that I think if I were to pick one political fact that would surprise the largest member of America, if you just sat down and told them about it and described it with them, it would be the views of the founders with regard to America's role in the world, and the dangers of a standing army, and the view that we ought to avoid war as desperately as possible, and that the U.S. role in the world should not even be to have an army, and should have battle alliances, and no ongoing conflicts.
I think, you know, if you look at what America envisioned itself to be at its founding, clearly there was, you know, people would say that the very act of coming here and taking the land was an assertion of American exceptionalism.
But you can dispute that all you want, but whatever else is true, this idea that we were going to be the predominant world power, and that our belief in our own constitution and set of liberties meant not only that we would have pride in our own country as Americans, but that we would then believe that that was a basis for ruling the world as an empire, I think that that concept would be very repugnant to the people who founded this country.
And I think that this idea that this is our role in the world was really one that emerged in the 20th century, and throughout the last half of the 20th century, there was an ongoing battle between people who were more isolationist and opposed to war, and between realists, and between what was then, you know, sort of a more militarized political movement of what became neo-cons, and I think 9-11, and the combination of 9-11 with the failure of all of our other institutions to check the movement that controlled the White House made the problem far more severe than it was ever before.
Is it worse as a matter of degree or by level?
I think one could debate that, but I think clearly what has changed so much was the trauma of 9-11, and combined with that, the lack of safeguards and checks on this president.
Yeah, well, you'd never get an argument from me about whether it's just completely accelerated in the Bush years, but I kind of wonder whether this whole thing isn't FDR's fault.
I mean, hasn't Franklin Roosevelt replaced George Washington as the founding father of America, and hasn't World War II replaced the American Revolution, really, as our founding myth?
I mean, I'll tell you right now, if I flip the channel to the History Channel, it's World War II every day, every day it's World War II.
Of course, these neo-cons use that as though that's the only world event there is, as though every conflict is World War II, and every question is, are we going to be Woodson, Churchill, or Neville Chamberlain?
I think a lot of that, too, stems from historical myth.
I mean, if you have an argument now about Iran, for instance, of people who favor an attack on Iran, eventually, if you press them enough, they will admit, because they have to, that the real threat that Iran poses, if not at all, is one to Israel and not to the United States, and so to defend the argument that that is sufficient for the United States to attack Iran, the threat that it poses to Israel, they will fight World War II as though what World War II proves is that we're willing to wage war in order to defend Jews against threats, which, of course, is not the reason that the United States entered World War II at all, the population was opposed to entering World War II and never would have had Pearl Harbor not happened and Germany not occurred to Iran on the United States.
I think even the extent to which World War II is so exaggerated in our public mythology and the way it's held up as the only historical event that we can book to, as you say, until it's the beginning of the United States, even that relies upon a distortion of what happened there.
Whatever threat we faced, if any, from Germany and Japan, there's nothing remotely like that right now, and so it doesn't matter what happened in World War II, that's not our current situation.
Right.
It's just that on TV, we're always pure good, because who can argue that the Nazis weren't pure evil, you know?
So as long as they're pure evil, we're pure good, and it's just that reinforcement, all the details don't really count so much.
It's just that myth, Justin Logan calls it the fallacy of 39, like he said, it's always a question of, are you Churchill or are you Chamberlain?
Right, and are you going to be guilty of appeasement, which, you know, in the neocon, neocon lexicon appeasement means a desire to avoid war, and being strong and resolute means believing in every war, one war after the fact, and you know, I think you're right that that is the template that has been applied, and yet, you know, I would point out again, though, that, you know, Americans can be subject to manipulation, but you can only sustain that for so long, and all of that rhetoric about the need to stand strong in the face of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Al Qaeda now is the enemy that we're fighting in Iraq, and the need to, you know, stand tall in the face of the new Nazis in Tehran, it's losing its resonance, and I think that Iraq will have a very, as tragic and horrible as it's been on every level, I think it will have the beneficial effect of preventing that tool from being used quite as easily.
People now know that there are genuine and very real costs to war, that it's ugly and bloody, and that we pay an enormous cost for it, even if we're not the ones fighting it, and I think that will have a necessary and beneficial impact on how Americans think.
Yeah, and inoculating us against this kind of propaganda.
I would have thought, well, it worked on me, Waco's what did it for me, and the next time, really it was 2003, that they used the perfect Branch Davidian model.
You call a guy pure evil, you say he's got illegal weapons and he's bad to his own people, got him surrounded for a little while, and then you send in the Delta Force to kill him.
It's the same thing as, I mean, they did it, they did the perfect Waco game plan, basically, against Saddam Hussein, and the reason it didn't work on me is because I figured out what they'd done at Waco, and I saw the same thing happening again, and I said, well, you're going to have to do better than that, and now here they are trying to use the exact same excuse against Iran, well, he's a terrible person, and he's bad to his own people, and he's got illegal weapons, and so we have to send in the Delta Force to kill him.
And I hope you're right, that the resonance just isn't there anymore, that people are kind of yawning and saying, yeah, I've heard this one.
Yeah, you know, that's an interesting analogy, and I think you're right.
The one thing I would add to it, though, is that I think the barrier that the government has to overcome in selling that case is much lower when the target is someone very far away who books and sounds different.
It becomes a lot easier to demonize, and you know, one of the things that has amazed me the most in the last six years is, you know, the one line that I really always thought the government could never cross without a major backlash would be to start imprisoning U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil and just throwing them into prison without a trial without any contact with the outside world, and yet the government has done that.
The Bush administration has done that with nary a peep from the public, and I think that's the large part because the people who have been targeted, like Jose Padilla and John Sargent, are people who book and sound foreign, like it creates the impression that we are not endangered, we being normal average Americans, and I think the same thing was true with the President, was Saddam Hussein, who was purposely demonized in that way with the aid of the media, and so I think that it's even easier to do it when you're talking about that kind of behavior outside of the United States, but I think you're right, there is an inoculating effect as there was in Vietnam that lasted a little while to wars that are just fought for without any good reason.
Yeah, George Bush said after Go 4 One, we did it, we finally beat the Vietnam syndrome and I say welcome back, Vietnam syndrome, yay, three cheers for the Vietnam syndrome.
Well, I think you're right, I think for, I don't know how old you are, but I'm 30.
What's that?
I'm 30, actually about to be 31 here in a couple of weeks.
I'll have a birthday in advance, but yeah, I'm 40, so the only real war that formed my impression in real time was the Persian Gulf War, and that's true for a lot of people, and that war was, at least as it seemed at the time, quick and easy and relatively bloodless and cost-free.
Now, of course, the reality was different, but the way it was depicted with the smart bombs and the radar-guided missiles that were shown on television, exploding only the carefully selected target and nothing else, created this impression that war was now easy and that we could send our country to war any time without there being much of a cost, and I think you're right that this Iraq debacle has dispelled that myth, and that's a good thing.
Yes, I certainly hope so, and you know, I learned a lesson from Alan Bach.
He said you'll often hear people say that the ends justify the means, that sometimes things are so important, et cetera, et cetera, that you have to commit an act of evil in order to do the good in the end, and as you said, this is a big part of this good versus evil world view, that as long as we're good, we can't become evil no matter how evil we act, and what Alan Bach said to me was that when you ask about ends and means, you have to remember that your means determine your ends, and if you try to use violent and aggressive means, you're going to get violent and aggressive ends no matter what it was you were planning for or trying to achieve.
I think that's precisely right, and that's one of the points that I try to make in the book is, I mean, this idea that America is a force for good in the world is not a ridiculous notion.
I mean, America has certainly done bad things in the past, like every country, but at the same time, America has played an important role in the world in terms of the political liberties that we embody and the way in which we've been a symbol of hope and inspiration for a lot of people in the world.
That's just true, and that, I think, is a good thing.
I think it's important that the world's strongest power, the face of the world's strongest power presents to the world, I think, is important, so it is possible for us to do good acts and to be on the side of good, but that isn't determined by some intrinsic preordained designation.
America's not ever good because there's some decision made by a higher being that transcends what we do, that ensures that everything we do is by definition good.
We're only good if the acts that we engage in are good, and so to say that we're going to launch a war in defense of good against evil by engaging in the very acts that we have always said were the hallmarks of evil is the surest way to fail, and that's exactly what happened.
We have become exactly what we said that we were warring against, and everyone seems to recognize that, except for ourselves, and that's a major problem.
Alright, everybody.
Glenn Greenwald, you can read his blog at Unclaimed, it's called Unclaimed Territory, you can read it at Salon.com.
The previous book is How Would a Patriot Act, and the brand new one, A Tragic Legacy, How a Good vs.
Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.
Thanks very much for your time today, Glenn, appreciate it.
Appreciate it, you're having me.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.