Alright y'all, welcome back to this here thing, it's the radio show, anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Jim Bovard, author of most books written.
Actually, all the books that Tom Woods didn't write, I think James Bovard wrote, Farm Fiasco, Freedom in Chains, and Feeling Your Pain, and Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, and my very favorite, Attention Deficit Democracy.
It's so good, man, you gotta read that thing.
Hey, welcome back to the show, Jim, how's things?
Hey, doing good, thanks for having me on, Scott.
I should have mentioned that you're a senior something or other at the Future of Freedom Foundation as well, that's FFF.org.
Well, senior something is a title, and by God, I wear it proudly.
Well, you should.
That's quite an honor, I would say.
Yeah, well, you know, yes, Future of Freedom Foundation does some fine work and I enjoy writing for them.
Yeah, right on.
Yeah, they're in good company.
Anthony Gregory and Sheldon Richman and Richard Ebling and what's his name, good old Jacob Horenberger himself.
A bunch of hardliners.
Yeah, Bart Frazier writes great stuff there.
Bart's a hoot, Bart's a good fellow.
Yep.
All right, so now this one here is called Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan, and you said something in here that really surprised me, something about how Afghanistan is the most corrupt government, has the most corrupt government in the world, and I just can't imagine that that's true compared to the United States.
Well, actually, this is according to Transparency International, their annual ratings, Afghanistan used to just be a very corrupt place, now it's most corrupt, except for Somalia, which really doesn't have a government, but it has a lot of other problems.
And it's interesting to see how the U.S. aid and other international aid to Afghanistan has proliferated over the last 10 years, the amount of corruption there has increased even faster.
Yep, well, it sort of seems like the same thing as all the troops surging over all these years.
They started out with a pretty light footprint, as Rumsfeld liked to call it, and a pretty low level of resistance, and then there's a little bit of resistance here and a little bit of resistance there, and the more there was, the more troops they put in, the more resistance they created, and it sort of seems like the same thing with this government, that they installed it, and maybe it would have had a chance to build up its own power from the bottom up and be a puppet government for us over there, but then they've done nothing but surge more and more and more dollars and kind of build up this bubble of power that these people have that cannot be sustained.
Well, this has also caused a bubble in housing prices in Dubai, because so much of the money that the U.S. sent to Kabul was just shipped directly on over to Dubai and other places in the Mideast, and it's interesting, the problems with this program, with the foreign aid to Afghanistan, they were obvious even nine years ago.
Our henchman there promised that he would take personal responsibility to make sure there was not any corruption in the foreign aid, and Mr. Karzai has promised that again and again.
It's almost like a broken record, and even though almost everybody recognizes that he's full of it, the billions of dollars keep pouring in there, it's almost as if it's that the U.S. prestige is on the line, so the U.S. has to spend more and more to avoid admitting the failure of what they sent, of all the money they sent before.
Well, and there are indications now, a couple anyway, that Karzai is nothing but a junkie holed up in his palace.
They used to call him the mayor of Kabul, and I think it was some of McChrystal's men joked to Michael Hastings that now we call him the mayor of his palace in Kabul, the mayor of his bedroom.
Yeah, this has been the trend for a long time.
I mean, he's simply, there's not any evidence he has popular support, there's not any evidence he's really hands-on, maybe that's a good thing, but it's interesting, it's such a facade of a government, and yet most of the U.S. media still pretends as if he actually won the election a few years ago, and that he's actually governing with some modicum of concern about the average Afghan's lives, but in most of the world, governing is a synonym for looting, and we're seeing that in Afghanistan in trump cards.
Yeah, well, and it's most of our money that's being looted, not theirs, they don't have any money to steal.
Well, I mean, some folks have got money, the drug trade is doing pretty well there, last I heard, there's some other folks who are honestly making money, but to have this tidal wave of foreign money coming in just totally disrupts the values and everything else in the country, and this is the same thing that we saw in Vietnam, we saw this in other places, and yet, partly because there are so many Americans and so many folks who are well-connected who benefit from this cash influx, it keeps on going.
Was it Matthew Ho that wrote about all the brothels and all the foreign, you know, U.N. aid workers and NGO people and diplomats and how all they do is just hang out in their giant mansions and go to whorehouses and live in their tiny little diplomatic bubble in Kabul while the rest of the country completely goes to hell?
Was that Ho that wrote that?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
Was one of these guys Kirk Cullen or one of them?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are some U.N. folks, there are some U.S.A.I.D. folks that are out there trying to help in Afghanistan, but the system which has been created, partly by the U.S., partly by Karzai and his cronies, basically guarantees that the efforts are going to be self-defeating, or that they'll actually make things worse.
I mean, it's hard to believe, here we are slightly more than ten years after the U.S. is toppling the Taliban, that the Taliban have come back with a vengeance, and even though they were widely hated ten years ago, and collapsed like a house of cards, Karzai and his cronies have done so much to make themselves hated that the Taliban are rolling back.
Yeah, well, and you know, I think a big part of the PR about this would be, yeah, but, you know, at least they believe, our guys believe in freedom for women and all this, and the Taliban are so backwards, but wasn't it just last week or something that this rape victim was put in prison for adultery, and then her only chance at a pardon was if she married her rapist, like, these are our guys, this is the government in Kabul.
Um, well, it's, let's see, what's the positive spin on that, um, you know, I don't recall that coming up at the question of the White House press spokesman.
Well this is a scripted, uh, that was my favorite George Bush quote right there.
You're not supposed to ask that, there's a script to this press conference.
Okay.
Yeah, that's a good line, but, you know, uh, it's interesting, while I was doing some of the reading for this article, something which came up often was that part of the reason people have turned to the Taliban is because there's no system of justice at all with the, uh, Karzai and his cronies, and it's so overtly corrupt, um, and there's a horrendous amount of all types of abuse, including sexual abuse tied to that, um, whereas at least, you know, at least the Taliban did not rape young boys.
That was the thing which has, uh, come up again.
Well, and they threw rapists down the well, that was a thing, they killed them.
Yeah, um, I don't know.
And the same for the heroin dealers.
Yeah, I don't know, uh, I would not have any faith in the processes, uh, the procedures of the Taliban to use, but at least they were not, you know, um, encouraging that kind of thing.
Right, I mean, that was the story of the Taliban, was, they were harsh as hell, and, you know, I certainly wouldn't support them to be the government of anybody, but they weren't corrupt.
They believed in their own, uh, you know, I don't know, their faith or their ideology or their own slogans or whatever it was enough that you couldn't just bribe them.
They were, uh, you know, hardcore law and order types, but they really meant it.
Yeah, and, you know, it's onerous to be under someone like that, horrendously onerous.
However, it's worse if you're just under a bunch of bandits who are backed up by, uh, you know, a foreign military and can do or rape or, you know, seize anything that they choose.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not taking their side.
I'm just saying it's pretty easy to see how it is that the average Afghan might, you know?
Yeah, and there are so many things the Taliban has done which should have got them banned from any consideration anywhere, but yet, uh, the, um, the, um, pseudo-government that the U.S. has been backing up there has created so many enemies that they have, uh, that they've undermined their support in spite of all the aid and all the, uh, military propping up.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just read, uh, it was, uh, Michelle Flournoy this time and Doug Feitz chair at, um, at, uh, the Pentagon, the, uh, policy department at the Pentagon, uh, saying that, uh, well, you know, 2014 is just our midway point or something like that.
I mean, they really think, they really want to just stay forever and ever.
Uh, I guess these folks are hoping for pensions.
Yeah, I guess so.
I don't know what they aim to get out of it, but I guess we can talk a little bit more about that on the other side.
It's, uh, James Bovard.
Uh, check out his website, it's jimbovard.com, I think, actually, and, uh, you can friend him on Facebook and you can look him up at fff.org, we're running, we're running his article Dying to Corrupt Afghanistan today at antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking to my buddy, Jim Bovard, jimbovard.com.
He's got a whole giant pile of books that he wrote really great ones, but the most important is also the latest it's called Attention Deficit Democracy.
And yes, he knows it's supposed to be a limited constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
Give me a break, dude.
It's just a title, but the book, man, it's so good.
In fact, that's part of it is that instead of having a rule of law, we have the rule of the majority, which of course means the rule of whatever the one 10th of 1% want the majority to think at any given time, such as for example, let's fight a war in Afghanistan forever until it ends up leading to a nuclear war with the Russians and the Chinese.
I guess.
I don't know what, Jim, is there a limit on this thing at all?
Um, the value of the dollar, maybe, but I don't know what the, well, the, I would hope that the limit would be the tolerance of the American people for all the BS that they've been fed over the last decade about this war.
Yeah.
But anyway, I'm talking about other real things that could stop it.
Real things.
Yeah.
That's okay.
Well, that's a hell of a qualifier.
Um, you know, it, I don't know.
I mean, things certainly haven't gone very well there.
And, uh, it seems that especially the last four to five years, as we ramp things up, things have, uh, uh, gone down the, uh, down the tubes even faster.
So, and yet it's funny how few people in the mainstream media will just call this like it is.
Instead, it's important to be, have American presence.
It's important to stand up by our allies.
It's important to live up to our word.
You know, it's all the recycled mantras we heard from 1966 onwards in Vietnam.
And there is no sign that the government in, uh, Kabul is becoming more trustworthy or less venal.
There, there is no sign that average Afghans are all of a sudden starting to rally in support of this.
And there's no sign that the, uh, people in the Obama administration have learned anything from the Bush administration except to tell bigger lies and to try to be more enthusiastic about it.
Yeah.
Well, that's about the sum of it.
And you know, one of the real problems is, you know, people like you and me, we always pay attention to foreign policy all the time because it's so important.
But for regular people in America, most of the time, they don't pay attention to foreign policy at all.
Except when, say, for example, there's a giant push to lie us into war with Iraq, then everybody gets on board to cheerlead for a little while.
As soon as the first couple of suicide bombings start taking out American soldiers, they take the flag sticker off the back of the car and quit paying attention rather than really changing their mind about it.
They just tune out.
And so here you and I have been paying just as much of attention as, you know, those people when it was at the height of all this being in the news.
But now that it's not in the news, it's just not even on people's radar at all.
I think it's just kind of taken for granted, like the sky is blue and the grass is green, but there's a war in Afghanistan and there's going to keep being one.
Well, I think a lot of people were frustrated back in 2003, because I think back to some of the demonstrations I saw, there were huge outpouring of people in the street and the media acted as if it never happened.
And it was almost as if the Washington Post reporters were saying that they had articles that show that the administration's case was full of holes, but the editors simply would not print those articles because what's the point?
We're going to war anyhow.
New York Times was even more overt.
So I think if the facts would get out there, there'd be a lot more resistance to this kind of warmongering.
On the other hand, I was amazed at how much support Herman Cain had for a while, at least until his bimbo problems brought him down.
But Cain's legacy is his line that what America needs is a leader, not a reader.
And here's someone who doesn't even know that China, well, you know, actually they do have nuclear weapons.
Right.
Well, he and Romney both just continually say, hey, look, well, Cain's line was I'll have the experts tell me, Romney's is I'll have the generals tell me.
And that's it.
That's his answer.
Everything is whatever the generals want is what my policy will be.
Yeah, well, it's a very different understanding of democracy than what we had 50 years ago, because for a long time, the Pentagon generals and others who testified on Capitol Hill would not testify in uniform because that was seen as almost like a conflict of the role of the I'm not quite sure how they characterize.
I think maybe Oliver North really helped change the pattern on that, because North showed how easy it was to intimidate members of Congress by showing up with uniforms with rows of badges and medals and this, that and the other.
And ever since then, it's it's almost like watching congressmen react to the FBI chief testifying, because often there is just a long line of congressmen waiting to kiss the FBI chief's feet or whatever.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Well, I think it's even at the point now where David Petraeus has shown up in the White House in his combat fatigues and his combat fatigue.
Like, what are you doing in camouflage, man?
Well, maybe he's dodging the press corps.
Yeah.
I feel like they got a bunch of great questions for him.
Hey, Petraeus, but how well did the surge work?
Real well.
Right.
Well, what did the surge result in?
That's the real question.
And I'm amazed how easily it was for Petraeus and others to frame both Iraq and Afghanistan with these standards, with these so-called metrics that really don't measure the real impact and the long term damage that the U.S. ramp up of violence had.
Yeah.
Yep.
Well, you know, it really is.
I don't know.
It's kind of amazing.
Well, I don't know.
There's a couple of different amazings.
One of them is that, as you said, the media pretends as though the Afghan government is anything but a front for the U.S. army, that it has any real support or any future in Afghanistan without the American army doing its fighting for it.
Well, it's actually every now and then there's a really good story in The New York Times or sometimes even The Washington Post, which lays out the absurdity.
But those are rare and 90 percent of the stories, it's taken the White House line or the Pentagon line or the State Department line.
It's always great to see Hillary Clinton adding her love of truth to this mix.
And so the vast majority of stories could have been written by, you know, government press agents.
But that was the same problem in Vietnam, the same trouble we had with Waco, the same trouble we've had with Kosovo.
Every now and then somebody would, some journalist or editor would sign off and let the truth come through.
But it'd be so overwhelmed by the party line, the official line type stories.
Well, it's kind of like with anything, you know, you just repeat it and it starts sounding like there must be something to it or else how come they keep saying it all the time?
Everybody knows that, that kind of thing.
Well, it's just frustrating.
I mean, it's so many, over the last 10 years, so many people have totally lost their bullshit reflex because I think that there was a limit to the lying the president could get away with in the Clinton administration, at least on some issues.
Maybe Kosovo proved that wrong.
But since then, it's, you know, almost anything that the president, you know, pulls out of his hat, it's guaranteed to have all these people at Capitol Hill saying, yes, master, and standing up and applauding, and much of the press corps doing the same thing.
Well, and, you know, it's funny, too, because they really just use the same model over and over again.
I'm glad you brought up Waco, because I like to point out how the Iraq attack, the second one especially, was just exactly the same thing as Waco, where you have your whole storyline.
He's crazy, so you can't deal with him.
He's bad to his own people, and he's got illegal weapons, and we got him surrounded, we're going to send in the Delta Force to kill him.
It was the exact same script.
And people fell for it again, and, you know, then they can just move right on, do the very same thing to Iran.
You know, those Iranians, they're crazy.
They believe in their religion so much that a white man can't negotiate with them.
And they have illegal weapons.
And the thing that's amazing is that there's almost never any pressure to hold the people that made the false statements liable.
I mean, even morally liable, much less send them off to prison for the rest of their lives.
Well, maybe that's why we keep falling for it over and over again, because we never do have the accountability that might be, you know, maybe is necessary to get people to get the lesson through their thick skull.
To a degree, yeah.
I mean, part of this goes back to Gerald Ford's pardon for Nixon, and people forget that Ford did not pardon Nixon just for Watergate.
He pardoned him for everything he did from January 20th, 1969, until the day that Nixon resigned.
I mean, this is just a blanket absolution.
And even if Nixon had been found guilty of genocide, Ford's pardon would have prevented him from being prosecuted.
And that's the attitude that a lot of Americans and a lot of the media have had to the president ever since.
There's such a horror of any suggestion at prosecuting the people that made the torture policy of the George W. Bush administration.
It's like that would be un-American.
I mean, that's the same way that they used to feel in Honduras about prosecuting their politician criminals.
Right.
Well, you know, they just held this mock war crimes trial for Bush and Blair for aggression in the Iraq war, which is, you know, a symbolic thing.
But Greenwald, I thought, very aptly noted, what a complete laughingstock joke of a pretended little thing for them to hold in the mind of, you know, the American media, say the Washington Post types or the political class in D.C. is, oh, isn't that funny?
The little Malaysians held their little war crimes trial for show, pat them on the head kind of thing.
But it's so far from possible that the rule of law could ever be applied to leaders in America and Britain.
They just cannot perceive it as anything but a joke.
They could not perceive it as anything but a joke.
And part of the trouble is that much of the top media is bonded with these politicians.
They go to the same parties.
They have lunch in the White House and they're ruined for life.
Yeah.
Go go to pool parties at Joe Biden's.
Thanks, Jim.
Everybody, that's Jim Bovard.
FF dot org Jim Bovard dot com.
