All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Our next guest is Tom Editor, Tom Dispatch, Tom Englehart.
TomDispatch.com is the website, and you can also find him, of course, at AntiWar.com/Englehart.
Him and his ever expanding crew of incredible, gifted, and talented writers.
I ought to tell you about a few of his books, The American Way of War, The World According to Tom Dispatch, The End of Victory Culture, and the brand newest one is called The United States of Fear.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good.
Well, you know, I've been doing a show all day about scary Iranian nuclear weapons and frightening Islamo-fascist, Hitlerian caliphates and creeping Sharia law to enslave all of our daughters here in North America.
And I'm scared to death.
I was wondering if your book has anything to do with how scared to death I am.
Yes.
I think you've been promoting my book all day because basically...
Okay, I've been debunking all this fear-mongering all day on the show.
But anyway...
No, that's what I'm saying.
You know, exactly.
You've been promoting my book because my book is, it's really about how, after 9-11, fear got shot like a drug into the society and how that fear, on that fear, the largest national security state in American history, a completely paranoid security state, got built, locked, stock and barrel.
And it's a pretty frightening story.
And in the process, the other part of the book is about how the United States, weirdly enough, after the fall of the Soviet Union and after stopping, stunned and taking a look at what had happened, took the Soviet path, weirdly enough.
It took it in this very specific sense.
It, the Soviet Union had dumped almost, I mean, all might be an exaggeration, but tons of its money into its military.
It had gotten stuck in a ridiculous war in Afghanistan and it went down.
The United States took a look at this defeat and then what, what did our leaders do?
They dumped our money into our military.
They went abroad.
They got stuck in ridiculous wars.
They got stuck specifically in Afghanistan.
And the truth is we're going down.
And just the same way, you know, when I was younger, I've said this before on the show and I'm kind of embarrassed, but then again, it's true, so who cares?
I used to think that this was all treason, you know, like the John Birchers say, they're trying to bring America down.
I don't know if the Birchers even say this anymore, but back in the 90s when I was in high school, this is all treason.
Those who would, who would bring down America and replace our hegemony with that of the United Nations or some other global federal government, they're the ones behind this.
They're destroying America the only way that they can, by making it such a top heavy imperial force that it collapses the same way as the Soviet Union.
And then they'll build their real new world order after that.
And then I came to realize that no, really, D.C. is just run by very narrow minded people, the kind of people who destroy every empire.
It doesn't have to be treason.
They all go the very same way.
Exactly.
And they and they cannot make their way out of the kind of metal box they're in.
I mean, they might as well be traitors.
I mean, if my conspiracy theory was right, this is pretty much how they would do it.
You know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Only they did it without they did it in that in the sense that you mean they did it without knowing it.
I mean, they they knew what they were doing, but this was not what they meant.
It was exactly the same path without without a kind of consciousness to go with it.
And I mean, the truly striking thing to me in these years, looking back and it's just a big piece I just wrote, I just wrote a big piece on American defeat at that.
That's the spotlighted and I wore dot com today.
And and it's up at my own site, Tom Dispatch dot com.
And and and, you know, just to take the word defeat for a minute.
I mean, I mean, our our world, because it is changing so fast, our American world has become comfortable with the word decline, which is a more polite word.
You know, the the the the slow decline of American power.
If you ask Americans, the latest poll I saw, 69 percent of Americans believe the United States is in decline.
And if you're a critic, you can say, in addition, that the U.S. is suffering defeats in, say, Iraq or maybe Afghanistan.
But to put defeat without specific events, without specific words, to put defeat next to America, that's still kind of un-American.
And yet I think this is the reality of the direction we're heading and we're heading towards a true American defeat.
And the striking thing is that that defeat, that defeat started, of course, with our our favorite guy, George W.
Bush and Cheney and all his pals, deciding that they they really could that for the first time in history, they could do what what Americans had always thought evil people did, which was to to run a global empire.
Well, it was really that was really the the first part of step two.
Right.
I mean, the unipolar moment was at the fall of the Soviet Union.
And as George Carlin said, we just couldn't wait to go play with our toys in the sand.
And they went ahead and they decided they were going to dig into the Saudi desert and stay.
And that's how we got into the whole mess leading up to George Bush.
I mean, I mean, you can trace it all the way back to Carter and his, you know, and his and his Gulf doctrine.
But but the thing about the Bush people that was fascinating was they were kind of mad.
They really had a vision of the world.
They were kind of mad visionary.
Yeah, it was Richard Perle.
And then, yeah, yeah.
And and and and but what's interesting is and and they went they took the U.S. military, which they thought could do anything.
And they basically drove us over a cliff in what they call the greater Middle East through the arc of instability.
But what's truly interesting is, you know, they went down, they left, you know, this new guy came in, Barack Obama, with his new set of people.
And what's fascinating is that in many ways, the Obama administration has been such a continuity, more of a continuity than Bush was with Clinton, I think.
Obama, you know, the Obama people don't have that same they don't have the same sense of confidence.
They don't have the same faith in the U.S. military's ability to do anything in the world.
They there are a lot they lack a lot.
They don't have it there.
They're really managers.
They're not visionaries in any way.
And yet they've they've they're on the crucial issues.
They've opted for more or less the same path.
I mean, they're still stuck in Afghanistan.
They've pumped Afghanistan up.
They are still stuck on the global war on terror.
They've actually pumped the global war on terror up the very same national security state, the the that that that Bush had such a hand in creating the imperial presidency that went with it.
I mean, he didn't create it at all, but he created such a large version of it.
They've simply gone right along with and and and aided and abetted.
They I mean, they have been aiders and abetters in that sense.
I mean, there's in that sense, it's startling to see a bunch of people who really don't have a vision of how the whole world works.
Not not not a real vision.
Nonetheless, changing almost nothing and asking none of the questions that even a smart imperialist might ask in this world about about about what's possible, given American, you know, you know, you know, given America, the American Treasury is the start.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, this week, with all the hype about Iran and this is your article, we'll have to get to this part of the article, really, probably on the other side of the break when we get back.
But the part about Iraq here and how we've lost Iraq and we've lost Iraq to a bunch of people who don't need us because they're the majority and because they're aligned with the power next door.
Iran and talk about not asking questions.
I mean, this is actually how I dropped my conspiracy theory was I saw Richard Perle, the likes of people with such narrow vision as Richard Perle, pushing us to war with Iraq as though we could just do this every day from now on and have no consequences, never face economic challenges from it and whatever.
And I realized all empires fall because of people like Richard Perle who are so narrow minded and believe in in, I guess, themselves so much that they're willing to bring a whole society down and talk about not as you know, how narrow the vision is.
They didn't ask the question, what's going to happen after we overthrow the minority Sunni dictatorship that's been backed by foreign powers this whole time?
Well, the majority Shia are going to take over.
That's what which means there's going to be a big civil war over Baghdad, too.
Just wait.
Exactly.
And that's not a very difficult question to ask.
I actually read a Tom Clancy book, Tom, that began with an Iranian assassin shoot Saddam Hussein in the back of the head.
And Iran takes over the south in two days.
Yeah, that came out in like nineteen ninety nine or something.
Exactly.
I was amused recently because when they were when they you know, when they were discussing our withdrawal from Iraq, which is seems to be more or less happening, they were the the Obama administration was also talking about the fact that proudly about the fact that we were bolstering our power in the Persian Gulf.
We were getting you know, we were going over the horizon, but into Kuwait and so on and so forth.
And in the midst of this, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a made a wonderful statement in which she said that we were doing this.
We were bolstering our forces, particularly in the Persian Gulf, in order to prevent outside interference.
Now, you know, you know, only if you are blind.
I mean, the Persian Gulf is not called the American Gulf.
It's the Persian Gulf, you know.
And and and and the idea that that we are the non-interfering force in the Middle East and the focus, the mad focus on Iran.
Well, we can discuss Iran afterwards if you want.
Well, they call it the Persian Gulf for your for a reason.
And you're right.
She must be deaf to her own words.
She can't hear herself talking, saying, yeah, you can't.
They cannot hear.
None of them can hear themselves talking.
All right.
Tom Dispatch dot com for all of Tom Englehart.
We'll be right back after this show.
All right, y'all, we're going back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Tom Englehart.
He's the author of the brand new book coming out real soon here in like a week or something like that.
The United States of Fear.
Is that right?
A week from now?
About a week.
Yeah.
OK, good deal.
And his article today is called This Is What Defeat Looks Like.
It's at antiwar.com/Englehart.
And you're such a great writer.
You did such a good job in this article taking me back to 2002 and 2003 and what it was like to have the Bush crew fresh faced.
The adults finally come into power to shape up D.C. and take us to war with Saddam Hussein.
It's it's kind of fun in an ironical, tragic sort of way, you know?
I know it.
I know it.
It's it's you know, I mean, I mean, I used to call them the Peter Pans of war because most of them weren't in a war or weren't even in the military.
But they had learned their war in the in the movie houses that I also grew up in, in the in the 50s and 60s, the movie houses in which the Americans always advanced from the marine hymn came up as the end began and so on and so forth.
And they kind of they kind of took that directly into global politics in a mad way.
And and their crucial mistake, and we can see it now.
I mean, I this is something I've written about for years and I write about in the United States here, but their crucial mistake was that they mistook military power for global power.
And I mean, they truly believed that the United States military was so technologically powerful that it could do more or less anything.
I mean, I mean, their original there, as I said, you know, I said, this is my piece is kind of an R.I.P. rest in peace for the American dream and not the one that's also going, you know, the one about having your own home and a better life than your parents had and so on and so forth.
That one's going, yeah, but but I'm talking about Bush's American dream.
And his American dream was Iraq would be a pushover.
You know, they called it a cakewalk at the time.
The next stop would be, you know, Syria would have to bow down.
The Iranians would be crushed.
We would we would you know, we would be welcomed as liberators by the Shiites, as you said before, they would literally strew flowers, no kidding, at the feet of American soldiers.
They would be so grateful that we'd have 30 or 40 thousand troops there on the South Africa, the South Korean model forever, you know, and there we would be in the heart of the heart of the oil lands of the planet.
You know, it would be a global Pax Americana while we were at it at home.
They would in the process have released a commander in chief presidency.
They called it a unitary executive of the White House from from any congressional oversight whatsoever.
And the greatest thing was they would have while you would have a Republican Pax Americana abroad, I mean, a global American Pax Americana abroad at home, you would have a Republican Pax Americana and the Democrats would be the Iranians and they would go down.
I mean, this was this was his dream.
I mean, it was it was a perfectly serious dream.
They wanted all of that.
They thought it was totally within reach.
And this was the sort of thing that once upon a time and in our history, we would have associated with, you know, the most evil of of bad guys, you know, who really wanted to rule the world.
But once we were doing it, somehow it seemed great to them.
Of course, this was this is this dream is so gone with the wind.
And that's the striking story today, simply that every aspect of this dream in the course of almost no time at all, historical blink was simply swept away.
And today you have where that dream exists.
You have rubble, you have literal rubble in the United States.
I mean, you have the every kind of dream is going down and crashing.
We can see this well abroad.
I mean, Iraq, whatever spin they put on it is is is literally a straightforward defeat.
I mean, I mean, seven years later, we're slinking out of that country with our tail between our legs.
And as you say, instead of the Iranians being crushed, you know, the saying at the time was that the the neocon quip at the time was everybody wants to go to Baghdad real men want to go to Tehran.
Well, the real men didn't get there.
You know, Afghanistan is more of the same.
Even if we last another 10 years, we'll be out with our tails between our legs there.
I think that's more or less a given.
And you can go beyond that.
You know, you can I mean, I mean, around the world, our position, our situation in the world has changed.
They drove it over a cliff and that dream is gone.
And what's left is a kind of conceptual rubble, I think.
Yeah, well, now specifically on the Iraq withdrawal, I wonder whether you think they're getting away with bloody murder by keeping such a huge embassy and all the State Department mercenaries and all that and calling them anything but combat forces and whether it's Maliki and America really just kind of playing along together or whether or not really we're being kicked out in the most unceremonious way.
But then if that's the interpretation, what do you make of the allowance by them of what?
Eighty thousand American personnel, including all the soldiers?
No, it's not going to be anything like that yet.
The State Department I mean, the State Department thing is ridiculous.
It's mammoth.
You know, it goes with that mammoth three quarters of a billion dollar embassy that we built in Baghdad.
It's going to be 16 or a mission of 16 or 17 thousand people.
Now, that includes.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought it was 60 or 70.
No, no, no.
It's 16 or 17.
That's huge.
I mean, there's nothing like it on Earth.
There's no this is this has nothing to do with the State Department or diplomacy or anything else that includes spooks and some military people.
But it also mainly includes about five thousand armed mercenaries.
You know, these these these these higher guns that that the private higher guns that they now employ all over.
But but these are not combat troops.
The truth is, five thousand mercenaries do not add up to anything, even though they will have actual they will have helicopters.
They will have some planes.
They'll have a little mini air force.
Nonetheless, I think this is not it's not really a military force.
And I don't think it can act like a military force.
I think the thing that it ensures this is the leftover of the dream, which is they want to preserve this kind of command and control space to the extent they can in the midst of the Middle East.
But I think all it will do at that level and with five thousand mercenaries is ensure a kind of ongoing folly and disaster in Iraq at a lower level.
The military really do seem to be going.
I mean, maybe they'll be able to sneak up a thousand or two back in.
They're still negotiating, you know, trying to negotiate the possibility of keeping the special operations forces somewhere around there.
But but right now, this hasn't happened.
We don't know what's going to happen, but but whatever happens, it's a if you go back to the invasion moment and you remember the plans of the Bush administration were really quite clear.
It was basically going to cost next to nothing.
They were going to be able to to to put thirty to forty thousand troops based on these huge mega bases that they had already had on the drawing boards before that the Pentagon had on the drawing boards before the invasion began.
This was reported in The New York Times, by the way, at the time.
They were going to keep them there.
They would simply be there forever, a la South Korea, where we've been there for what, you know, since the Korean War.
This was supposed to be the same pattern.
This isn't happening.
It's going to be ghost towns.
They'll probably be stripped and looted by the the Iraqis.
We are slowly in the next couple of months giving up all these bases.
We just gave one up the other day, you know, so I think this is this is it is a remarkable if you think where we've come from, it is a remarkable humiliation and it's like a symbol of a larger global defeat and particularly a symbol because the because the Obama administration really hasn't turned things around in any way.
They haven't asked any large questions, including the ones you were bringing up about Iran.
I mean, I mean, nobody in Washington can dare ask the simplest large question, which is what would the Middle East be like without the American shadow, that vast shadow of of of garrisons and spooks and and and drones and everything else that's there now?
I mean, we really don't know because nobody's asked us.
I mean, you know, since since before the Brits.
But but but we're going to sooner or later, you know, a future in which we don't garrison the world will be imposed on us.
It will just be financially imposed on us.
I don't know how long this will take, but this this is the sort of thing that can't last.
And I think a lot of people in the military know this, Scott.
Well, and it's a self accelerating type process and there's always black swan events here and there.
Like you can see, you know, the pattern of inflating the money supply to pay for the war to make it look cheap.
But then all the other countries in the world have to inflate their money to match the dollar.
It'll screw up all their export balances and what have you.
And so all of a sudden people are starving and revolting all across the Middle East.
And this is right.
McClatchy the other day, how we ought to be giving Bush credit for the Arab Spring and maybe they're right after all, but not in the same way.
They mean, yeah, not those people hate our puppet dictators more and made their money worth less.
Exactly.
I mean, I think you could argue the neocons argue it in a straightforward thing.
We introduced democracy to the Middle East and, and the Arab Spring came from that, which is, which is literally ludicrous.
But I think you could make a much more complicated argument that the, um, that the two waves of kind of globalization, one of which was the economic wave in the Clinton years, which imposed kind of neoliberal, uh, economics on the world and particularly on the Middle East and ravaged it in certain ways.
And then the second wave of, of, of military globalists, you know, uh, which were the Bush people that these two waves really did prepare the way for the Arab Spring, which really the one thing it clearly does is despite what Libya may look like, what the one thing it really does is, is it puts whatever turmoil, whatever events are happening in the Middle East back in the hands of Arabs.
I mean, it, it, it, we're not going to be a realist sooner or later.
We are not going to be the player we think we are.
We already aren't.
And I think this can only accelerate.
Well, and it seems like the question is how bad are we going to lash out on the way down here as in if the unemployment rate gets too bad, are they going to just conscript 10 million of us and occupy Persia to bring the unemployment rate down and do a big FDR project and continue down the same path of remaking the Middle East to unify us, you know, to get us through the bad times of a giant stimulus package abroad, just what we need.
So we could talk about it later.
Yeah.
I guess we're out of time.
Sorry.
I ran next time with Tom Englehart.
Thanks very much.
I ran next time.
Okay.
TomDispatch.com.
Antiwar.com.
Slash Englehart.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
