All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is our old friend, Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the journal The Freeman, put out by the Foundation for Economic Education, and he's also a senior fellow at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
You can also find his great blog, Free Association, at SheldonFreeAssociation.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
You can get to the blog, the shortcut, SheldonRichman.com.
SheldonRichman.com.
I knew that, but I forgot that.
There you go.
The shortcut, indeed.
You know, you ought to have the other one redirect to that one, if you ask me.
But anyway, maybe it's too late.
All right.
So you got this great article at FFF.org.
Drone warfare is fraught with danger.
Nuh-uh, because drones don't have pilots.
And so nobody's risking anything.
We're not only bombing them from miles away, we're bombing them in a way where even if they could shoot back, no American life is at risk, Sheldon.
And therein lies the danger.
I didn't mean danger to pilots because pilotless drones wouldn't have that, like you say.
And I doubt if anybody in Libya could hit Nevada, where the I guess they play their Atari games.
The danger, of course, is a different kind of danger.
Namely, that everybody is celebrating or not everybody, but you know what I mean?
Most people are celebrating with Libya's so-called success because it was cheap.
They're saying it only cost, what, $1.1 billion, I think.
And no American casualties and no, quote, boots on the ground, although I hear that there may actually be a few boots on the ground, special op types.
But the danger here is that they're going to say, well, this is the right way to intervene, not the way George Bush did it.
So let's do a lot more of this.
And then, of course, we're getting in all over the place.
And the other problem is, of course, you never know how these things are going to come out.
You may begin with just drones, but you don't know what events on the ground will prompt then an administration to say, whoops, we better follow up by putting in troops.
So we're not home free.
This is really bad news.
You know, it really is amazing this soon after the debacle in Iraq, especially at the same time where it's clear that we lost, we helped our enemies win, and then now they're kicking us out as opposed to the whole plan to stay forever and all of that.
And yet people are still acting like, hey, well, Gaddafi's dead.
So mission accomplished in Libya.
Everything's going to be fine there now.
Well, that's right.
We don't know.
I mean, again, that that show is not over.
And maybe things will work out fine.
But, you know, look, I have no I'm not missing Gaddafi, let's put it that way.
I don't like I don't like when rebels or states kill.
I'd rather he had been brought before some judicial proceeding.
I don't think the U.S. should have been involved with that, but that should have been done there.
What happened is all little.
We don't you know, we don't know what happened.
You know, he's buried in some secret grave.
And I read in the New York Times that the the rebels are not exactly open to investigation when the charges of massacres have been leveled.
So, you know, I don't know what's going to happen there.
It may not be very pretty at all.
The U.S. shouldn't have been involved at all.
But, you know, once you start one of these things, you don't you don't know where it's going to go.
I mean, the op-ed you mentioned has a quote from Randolph Bourne, the great Randolph Bourne, who not only said that the war is the health of the state, but he said getting to war is like trying to ride and control a wild elephant.
You don't know where it's going to go.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there's all these old adages about, you know, the battle plan never survives the first engagement and never mind the first casualties.
The truth.
I mean, here's a war that was started on the premise that, oh, there was going to be a massacre.
Not there already had been a bunch and we had to stop it from continuing.
But there would have been if we didn't start.
They didn't go to Congress.
They go get a U.N. resolution for the thing that authorizes a no fly zone to protect Benghazi, which then the president writes a joint op-ed with the leaders of Britain and France in the Daily Telegraph, where he announces that the new policy is regime change, as though we didn't see that coming all along.
I mean, that to me is the most, you know, I don't know.
Well, other than all the dead people and all the horrible consequences still to come on this.
But that just seems like one of the most outrageous parts of this.
I mean, even the Bush's had the respect to pretend to go to the Congress like it mattered, you know.
All right.
And this this conclusion the other day, if it is a conclusion with the end of Gaddafi has enabled everybody to just forget all that's going on, all the constitutional issues, all the legal issues.
I mean, it seems to me there are still grounds for impeachment of Obama in violation of the War Powers Resolution, not to mention the Constitution.
He, you know, he was the one who came up with the or somebody in his Justice Department that, hey, this is not hostilities.
These are not hostilities we were involved in.
I mean, we were dropping bombs and firing missiles in a non-hostile environment, apparently, according to him, which seems a little odd.
I think if you're firing missiles, that's hostilities, but not enough to qualify for for him, his compliance with the War Powers Resolution.
Well, it was a limited kinetic action.
Yes.
Well, that's true.
And you know, and nowhere in the Constitution can you find the words limited kinetic action.
That is absolutely right.
But the problem is, everybody can now forget about that because mission accomplished.
Right.
Gaddafi's gone.
But you're right.
That wasn't that was not supposed to be the intention.
Originally, it was supposed to be a no-fly zone so that Gaddafi couldn't fly planes and bomb his own people.
But that got forgotten after about one day.
And they were bombing his compound and doing other things that have nothing to do with the no-fly zone.
So we were lied to from the very beginning.
And I think the constitutional issues are very serious.
But no one's going to talk about it now because it seems like a success.
Yeah, well, for now, and maybe I'm the worst like this.
It would be amazing if I was wrong, because I never am.
I've been right about everything for the whole time I've been on the moon for 13 years.
I know, that's why I love the show.
I think that I think we're going to be there for 20 years.
I think, you know, probably after the election next year, there will be, you know, full scale troops on the ground.
Already, we got JSOC and CIA guys running around all over the place and whatever.
But it's sure to be chaos.
They've already announced an Islamic government over there and whatever.
An off chance that Obama loses to a worse warmonger from the right, which I think will be reelected, depending, I guess, on who they nominate.
But I agree with you.
But, you know, we can see full scale.
You know, they say they learn the lessons of Iraq and in Libya, but I don't think so.
I mean, they're going to they're going to cut and run and leave the country in the hands of a bunch of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars where they fought against the United States.
No, I don't think so.
Well, yeah, good, good, all good questions.
And I want to know who has the purple ink concession.
Is that Halliburton?
Do they own the right?
Yeah, they're going to be selling barrels of that stuff to the Pentagon, part of the military industrial complex.
Yeah.
So the question is where we are.
What's next?
You know, Syria.
The things are heating up with Syria.
The ambassador is out of there and they took their ambassador out of Washington, I guess.
So is that next?
But I I'm wondering about whether they really want to make a change in Syria because they don't know what will follow Assad.
And Israel, I'm sure, is concerned about what would follow Assad.
I doubt I doubt it will be a secular government.
Yeah, I wonder why it's taken so long.
It seems like they would have gone ahead and started bombing Damascus by now, you know.
Well, I'm just wondering if they're there.
I'm not trying to encourage them.
I'm sure they won't think that.
But but I'm just wondering whether they're a little bit concerned about who would follow and whether that might end up being worse for our client.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I guess it depends on what Netanyahu's whim is today, because, you know, on one hand, yeah, dealing with the Baathists is not that hard, you know, from his point of view.
On the other hand, destroying Syria and turning it into a giant civil war and and destroying the Baath army and all of that stuff, that could be seen as a, you know, a tactical victory, if not a strategic one for the long term.
And talk about riding a wild elephant.
That would be the perfect case of it, because you don't know where that was, where that's going to go.
Yeah.
Well, and Obama seems intent on expanding the war in Somalia.
It was funny to see them deny that they knew Kenya was going to invade last week.
But they're announcing and congratulating themselves for expanding the drone war in Somalia now as well.
And we know from Scahill that they got JSOC and CIA guys torturing people in a dungeon beneath Mogadishu and and running around financing the so-called Somali government.
So there's another one that is probably just going to continue to expand from here.
Well, I wonder, I'm still waiting to hear how things are going in Central Africa, chasing that guy, whatever his name is.
Well, we'll get right back to that after this with Sheldon Richman, FFF.org.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea.
They will be fought in space or possibly on top of a very tall mountain.
In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots.
And as you go forth today, remember always your duty is clear to build and maintain those robots.
That's the Simpsons, what, 15 years ago or something on the current state of American foreign policy.
It's Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation and Sheldon Richman dot com.
You said, right.
Yeah, man, I should have wrote that down.
Sheldon Richman dot com.
And we're talking about his piece in the Future Foundation on the Future Freedom Foundation's website.
Drone warfare is fraught with danger.
And back to the main point here, like you were saying, it's really easy, I guess, to hire some nearsighted goofball to sit in a lazy boy chair and play video games all day in Nevada and kill people on the other side of the world.
Which just means that from the point of view of the people running the empire, it's all the more incentive for them to just continue to spread this drone war at all corners of the world, thinking that they can just get away with it completely.
Well, I can't think of anything worse than to give the state this sort of cheap and easy way to kill people at great distance.
I mean, this is this is terrible.
I had this crazy idea that maybe we should launch a movement to demand that Obama sit behind one of the consuls and launch and launch the drones and the missiles.
You know, let's let him make him do that, or at least maybe he would say, well, maybe let's not do this anymore if he had to be the one to do it.
So like that old onion piece, Bush bravely leads 3rd Infantry Division into Iraq.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
My what would their action be?
And we let them get a little hands on experience.
It's a killing.
Come on, don't just do it by order.
It's too easy that way.
If you're going to be a man about it, as a Republican candidate, sort of the mandates of him, you know, show yourself that you're really a man.
Go in there and fly those drones yourself.
Yeah, because that is the test of manhood in 2011 America.
Well, and then the Republicans, of course, have to one up him because he's doing all the things they'd be doing.
So they really can't hit him on the wimp factor, you know, because of Bin Laden and Gaddafi.
Now they're trying over Iraq now.
So if they want to one up him, they can each each of the candidates can promise.
Of course, Ron Paul would have the right position on this.
But if I am elected, I promise that I will launch the drones myself.
I will pilot the drones from Nevada myself.
Let Obama match me on that promise.
There you go.
That sounds like fun.
I think I like Saddam Hussein's proposals.
Just let him and George W. Bush duke it out.
There was a commercial years ago, you know, like a public service announcement for the UN where they showed, you know, two fat diplomatic looking guys.
I guess they were supposed to be head of state in a big field.
Just, yeah, just wrestling and fighting it out while people stood around and watched them.
Yeah, that would be a much big improvement because that won't happen.
Yeah.
Obama versus Gaddafi.
That would have been a good one or Sarkozy versus Gaddafi.
You know, I'd have done the pay-per-view for that.
We would need Howard Cosell back for this.
We'd have to bring him back from the dead just to.
Yeah, it really should be, you know, two men enter, only one man leaves.
That should be the only rule.
So I don't know what we're going to do about this because the American people didn't really seem to care much when they were actually, you know, when they're actually people, Americans, they don't care about non-Americans, but Americans, you know, on the scene being shot at and being blown up.
They didn't care that much about that.
But so how much less are they going to care if it's just, you know, pieces of machinery flying around, which don't even get shot at all?
And the more wars, the least each one, the less each one matters.
You know, I saw Ron Paul gave a great speech at the University of Ohio or Iowa or something anyway.
And he was saying, yeah, now we've, you know, Obama's gone ahead and expanded into Uganda and this and that.
And I thought, no way, Ron Paul, the line should have been who here even knows who here even got the press release that last week America invaded Congo.
And Central African Republic, who can find Central African Republic on a map?
And don't just guess.
I mean, come on.
Well, it kind of gives it away because it's a Central African in the name.
There's a tiny little round little thing there.
But anyway, you know, come on.
We're putting troops in Uganda.
Don't you think?
Never mind congressional approval.
Don't you think that Americans should have to be informed when they get four new wars in one day?
I left out South Sudan there.
Well, should they have to be informed?
Well, we don't want to be informed.
We made our choice.
Don't tell us about it.
Do whatever you think you have to do.
But please don't let us know about it.
And we'll feel better.
That's that's the way American people seem to want it.
Well, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy, Richard Mayberry.
Yes, I've heard of him.
I've never met him, but I have heard of him.
Forecaster and economist guy.
He says that there's a 90 percent chance or something that at some point someone's going to nuke Washington, D.C.
I think he probably imagines that, you know, suitcase nukes are, you know, exist or are really possible, that kind of thing.
So maybe he was off by the ease of which someone could actually get a nuke here and do it or how many of them there are on the open market out there or whatever.
But still, he was saying you can only kill so many people.
You can only make so many millions and millions and millions of blood enemies in the world before something really bad is going to happen to you at some point.
Well, it's a scary thought.
He wasn't referring to any particular group.
He was just saying, come on, man, these are the laws of physics here.
Right.
Well, it's a scary thought.
I mean, the idea of just, you know, bystanders getting hurt by that would be, you know, who wants to think about that?
Or hell, I mean, even the Democrats and Republicans responsible, nobody wants to see anybody turn to nuclear ashes.
I mean, come on.
Well, Hillary Clinton ought to die of old age in prison like the rest of her peers.
Maybe when the protesters get tired of being at Wall Street, which, you know, it's fine to be protesting Wall Street for all kinds of reasons, but maybe they ought to figure out where the drone factories are and have some protests outside of those.
Yeah, well, of course, there was something like that.
They had a drone exhibit at the Air and Space Museum.
And it was funny.
Jeremy Sapienza wrote up a great little blog entry about this, how everybody made such a big deal that it was a right wing Breitbart provocateur type who caused the ruckus.
But Sapienza's point was, well, what a bunch of cowards.
It was only the right wing provocateur that caused the ruckus.
Weren't you all there to cause a ruckus?
What happened?
Only the right winger dare go through the door and cause a problem for anyone.
And all the left wingers, I guess, just sat outside singing, all we're saying is give peace a chance or something.
Nobody actually protested the damn drone exhibit at all.
It's just another it's a it's a great exhibit, man.
This is look at just think of how much ingenuity went into creating these Reaper drones.
A lot.
Well, I would say that was wasted ingenuity, you know, at least from our point of view, was wasted.
It's obviously carrying out other people's objectives.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I saw Jon Stewart.
I forgot which numbers he used.
I think he said, you know, he took us from Barack Obama, took us from two wars to one.
And I was thinking, wow, you know how exactly do you count wars at The Daily Show?
Because I was thinking that Afghanistan and Pakistan right there is two, not one, even if you're just talking about the same war.
And then, of course, there's Yemen and Somalia.
And the Libya thing, as I was saying, I think is going to continue to escalate.
And then expanding into Central African Republic and all this.
Jon Stewart doesn't know about all that.
He Obama took us from two wars to one, he claimed on TV last night.
That bothers me.
Well, I mean, look, let's talk about Iraq.
It's is that really over?
So we were OK.
They're taking some people out and they've renamed some troops trainers rather than combat troops.
Plus, you know, I mean, the trainers are getting kicked out, too.
The question is about the the question now is about the mercenaries.
And, you know, Muqtada al-Sadr is saying they count as combat troops to me.
I don't care what you call them.
And so, as Gareth Porter was just saying on the show, actually, it remains a question as to whether Hillary is going to be able to have her private army of mercs there at all.
Well, maybe she'll resign.
I mean, without that, what's the point of even being secretary of state?
What's the point of even being alive to her?
I mean, that's her whole thing in life was to command an army like Napoleon.
And she was willing to settle for private army.
Yeah, that Muqtada al-Sadr is just a party pooper, man.
You can ask a lot of people, they'll tell you he'll ruin your whole day.
And so what's the theory for for his change?
Because I thought, you know, Patrick O'Byrne was saying that he was making this public noises about how it's OK for the Americans to stay.
Or no, no, sorry that publicly he was saying it wasn't OK, but privately he was saying, yes, probably OK.
But now now it's not OK at all, I guess, at any level.
I don't know.
I guess he found his advantage.
I mean, last week, early last week, I think it was Tuesday as what all Iraq says.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, Muqtada al-Sadr just got back from Iran again.
And it seemed to me I don't know exactly what happened there, but that must have been the final straw in the thing.
You know, he just came to make sure that when it came down to it, it wasn't going to happen.
So.
Well, I'm glad someone was pressuring to get them all out of there.
Yeah, we'll see.
You know, I'm sure there are guys at the Pentagon who still don't want to give in.
And there's always Kurdistan, Sheldon.
Don't count on Kurdistan.
Yeah, right.
Thanks very much, everybody.
And I mean, Sheldon and everybody for listening to Sheldon.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks, man.
FFF.org, Sheldon Richman dot com and FEE dot com or org or one of those two.
