All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great Tom Englehart, AKA Tom Editor, AKA Tom Dispatch.
TomDispatch.com is the website.
And of course, we've pretty much cloned the whole thing at original.antiwar.com/Englehart.
And that means you get all of Tom's great articles as well as those of all of his in-house writers there with a great introduction by Tom pretty much each time.
Original.antiwar.com/Englehart.
And if you go to TomDispatch.com, you can see the link right there to Tom's new book, The United States of Fear.
And if you donate to Tom Dispatch, you get one, too.
That ain't so bad.
You can get an e-book or the regular kind.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you?
Good to see you, Scott.
Fine.
Or hear you, anyway.
Yeah, well, close enough.
You wouldn't want to look.
No.
All right.
So here's the thing.
I was just sort of guessing, proverbially throwing darts in the dark, and I thought, you know, who probably has some interesting things to say about the end of the Iraq war would be Tom Englehart.
And now it's kind of a cardinal rule of this show.
I pretty much only interview people about a thing they wrote that I want to question them about.
But this time, I'm pretty confident that you're going to have all kinds of wise things to say about it.
Maybe I could prompt you a little bit if you could maybe describe for the people how you see it, how we got into this war in the first place, this war in Iraq, because it was kind of abnormal for a start of a war to say we're going to war a year in advance and then going to war.
Oh, you're so right.
But you know what I'd actually first like to focus on is the getting out, because I want to you know, I was struck by something.
I live in New York City.
My hometown paper, The New York Times, had a piece on the last unit to leave Iraq.
And this tells us something about, you know, it tells you something about beginning the war when when when when you end it this way.
I mean, what what's really happened?
The last unit to leave left Iraq at like two thirty in the morning in the dark.
And before they left, according to the Times, they sent their interpreters out to the the Iraqis they had been working with, the Iraqi military people and so on and so forth to make appointments for the next day.
I mean, in other words, they the last unit to leave Iraq from this glorious war of ours snuck out in the middle of the night, leaving the Iraqis they had been working with, not with a goodbye or anything else, but but with the thought that they would wake up the next morning and see the Americans.
And they weren't there.
I mean, I think if you want to talk about a symbol of here are two words that you just don't see right now connected to Iraq, but are accurate, a debacle and a defeat, you know, the U.S. has now slunk out of Iraq with its tail between its legs.
I mean, this is the story of Iraq.
What?
Nine years later, something like that.
And of course, you know, the getting in was it was to be glorious.
It was to be it was to be I mean, the reality of getting into Iraq was the Bush administration was convinced and not unreasonably that to use an old image of of Mao Zedong that that Iraq, that that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a paper tiger.
And there was a classic word that they used for the campaign they were about to have.
There was there was a guy named Adelman who was one of the you know, one of these neocon supporters.
And he wrote in The Washington Post, he said beforehand, he said it was going to be a cakewalk now.
And they knew they knew that Saddam's military was incredibly weak, that it would it would collapse, that it could be crushed.
And they were right.
It was functionally.
I mean, I don't want to say it was, you know, I'm sure there was some tough flooding, but basically, functionally, it was a cakewalk.
They imagined that the beginning of this war, that this was just going to be the start.
This was Iraq was just to be it wasn't the last stop, as it turned out to be.
It was the first stop.
Once we were in Iraq, they already had plans on the table for giant military bases, which they built, you know, huge American towns, you know, the largest of them surrounded by 27 miles of barbed wire and walls and so on and so forth.
I mean, all of these now left behind, they were going to they were going to they would be greeted as liberators.
They would put troops, a la South Korea, 30,000 to 40,000 of them in until the end of time.
They would be right in the heart of the middle of the oil lands of the Middle East.
And of course, Syria would be in a crunch between between Israel and and and U.S., the U.S. and Iraq.
It would go down.
The Iranians, of course, they would be in a crunch between the U.S. and in Afghanistan and the U.S. and Iraq.
They would go down.
I mean, the the the neocon joke at the time, the quip was something like everybody wants to go to Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
Real men want to go to Tehran.
This was what they thought.
They thought this was the beginning of what was going to be.
I mean, no two ways about it.
It was going to be a Pax Americana, whether we were going to have the greater Middle East.
I mean, we would reorder the world.
I mean, this was this was this was really what they thought.
And and and they were they were kind of visionaries.
They just were mad visionaries.
But that's what they were.
That was the beginning of the war.
We went in.
We went in.
Remember, shock and awe.
We sent our cruise missile missiles in our planes, actually got none of the the Iraqi leadership, not one, but killed, according to Human Rights Watch, dozens of Iraqi civilians.
That was the beginning, of course, the nightmare for Iraqis.
And that was really where it began.
It began in dreams of in in in in delusional dreams of glory.
And it's it's ended with us slinking out.
But in this country claiming that it was, you know, a stalemate that we stabilized Iraq.
I mean, and so I mean, I mean, I mean, we certainly made it sound slightly more glorious.
Nobody says defeat.
Nobody says debacle.
Very few.
I mean, a few critics like us, but not many.
You know, your guy, Ron Paul, would say it was a defeat.
He wouldn't even blink, you know, but most of them, they're playing a different game.
But it is it is a defeat, a debacle, really a kind of catastrophe for everybody, including, of course, the Iraqis.
Well, yeah, of course, the Iraqis the most.
But, you know, one of the real ironical things about this is and, you know, maybe this, you know, obviously Cheney was one of the hawks in ninety one and probably I don't know, maybe, you know, specifically whether he said go all the way to Baghdad then or whatever.
But there's a great clip that was not that many people have seen.
It was sort of the tongue clucked around the world where there's Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute in nineteen ninety four rationalizing why the Bush senior regime did not go all the way to Baghdad back in nineteen ninety one.
And that is because, well, the majority would be in line with Iran and the Sunni factions might be more aligned with the Syrians and then you'll have problems with the Kurds.
And there's, of course, Kurdish movements in Syria and Turkey and and everywhere else that could cause a problem.
And basically we would have been occupying a hostile land with no good end to it.
And it would be basically impossible to try to build up a new what we want in the place of Saddam.
And so we decided it wasn't worth it.
In fact, in previous years, he had given the use the language that how many more lives is how many more American soldiers lives is Saddam worth?
Not very damn many.
And so this shouldn't be done.
But then somehow, do I have this right, Tom?
Oh, yeah, I mean, convinced him that it's going to be fine.
We'll build a pipeline to Haifa and and we'll overturn the Iranian regime from there and it'll work instead of what you already know.
Yeah, well, I think they were pre convinced.
I don't even think they needed to lobby.
I mean, I mean, I think that, you know, the the before before they they took the government in 2000, they they they set up something that was kind of unique in our history.
They they they, you know, a bunch of these guys, including Cheney, set up Panak.
It was the, you know, of course, the whatever for a new American century.
That was rebuilding America's defenses.
Yep.
And it was it was probably the first administration in waiting, masquerading as a think tank, you know, and and and from the moment they did that, they were they were ready to go.
And I mean, they wanted to go into Iraq.
They saw us.
I mean, and Cheney had changed his mind in his tune.
He he he had he had between ninety one and ninety seven.
Of course, we also have to go back a little earlier as well.
And remember that the weird part of this whole story or part of the weird part of an endlessly weird story is that before Saddam wasn't our guy, he was our guy.
And before before we accused him of being a monster, you know, dedicated to aggressive war in Kuwait, we supported him in he invaded Iran, who which was our enemy, you know, what was back in what, 80 and 1980.
And we supported that.
You know, we supported him when he invaded Kuwait.
April Glassby, the American basher, sure didn't try very hard to talk him out of it anyway.
Exactly.
We were.
And I'm sorry, we'll have to hold it right there, Tom, and go out and take this break.
But when we get back, we'll get more wisdom about the horrible, good for nothing Iraq war that I'm not going to let y'all forget as long as you keep tuning in here, no matter how bad you want to.
All right, shouts antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with the great Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch, Tom Editor, author of the United States of Fear.
Yeah, that's what we all have in common.
That's what makes us Americans.
We're deathly afraid of at least something.
All right, the website again is Tom Dispatch dot com.
We're talking about Iraq.
Tom, you have the floor.
Yeah, you know what I was thinking about?
Well, the the the in the intermission, I was as far as the Iraq debacle, I was thinking of a couple of other things.
One was, you know, when we go to war and when we went to war in Iraq, I mean, we went planning to stay.
And one of the striking things about that is we moved everything in with us.
You know, so, you know, now that now they're kind of reverse, they well, I mean, it's done now that they had to reverse engineer all of this stuff.
So so the U.S. military had to move two million items.
I mean, this ranges from computers to port-a-potty, you know, body armor to whatever out of Iraq, you know, two million items.
It was about twenty thousand truckloads of stuff.
And then they left piles behind.
They left maybe six hundred million bucks worth.
It's estimated behind for just gave it to the Iraqis.
Of course, we've also given the Iraqis these these huge bases that we built.
I mean, we only as we were leaving, did we even know how many there were ranging from little combat outposts on up there were at the height of of our building excesses.
There were five hundred and five American bases built in Iraq.
That's the official figure we have now during the during the war years.
The figures we got were maybe more than three hundred or something like that.
I mean, this is kind of this is like a staggering way to not just make war, but spend money.
And the other thing to keep in mind is that, well, all of this, all of our money went into this catastrophe and we left tons of it behind.
We're not done.
You know, I mean, it is true.
The military is really largely except for the, you know, very small contingents in the embassy out.
But we have this gigantic embassy left behind.
I mean, I mean, it's ridiculous to even call it an embassy.
We still call it an embassy.
We built a billion dollar embassy, giant cost overruns.
That was the story of the war.
It's in the middle of Baghdad, twice the White House compound, the size, they always say, of Vatican City, of the Vatican.
We are now going to have I mean, I've seen various estimates, but somewhere between 15 or 16 and 18000 people in this mission.
Now, obviously, just a few of them are diplomats of those 5000 odd are our mercenaries, higher guns and thousands more are the privatized part of the military.
You know what used to be the military.
But now, you know, the people who are who are going to clean, cook, you know, etc., etc., etc.
There are military missions.
There are undoubtedly plenty of spooks.
We don't know exactly who's been left behind there.
The mercenaries are are heavily armed.
They've got their own little air force.
It's not an army.
I don't think it functions that way, but it's it's a staggering leftover disaster.
It's good that that embassy is going to cost three point eight billion to operate and do its programs supposedly for the Iraqis next year.
Three point eight billion dollars.
I mean, this is staggering stuff.
And of course, out of that embassy, they're also going to be selling the Iraqis piles of weapons, you know, five or six billion in F-16s.
Thank you, Lockheed Martin, for somebody at least made something off this war and so on and so forth.
But it's an enormous it's just I mean, you know, you could leave behind, I mean, an embassy, you know, you know, 50 people or 100 people, whatever it is, they could do visas and whatever.
But but we're leaving this giant thing behind.
It's not actually big enough to do anything significant, but it's big enough to create to to cause further trouble for us in Iraq, to make the Iraq war in some unpleasant way continue.
It's like they just can't quite give up.
That's it's a very strange thing.
I mean, this is like the strange ending of a disaster.
And it is really a scary place because, of course, it was put there under the assumption, like you're saying, that they were going to have all these giant permanent bases forever.
Now they're holding on to the one last base, Hillary Clinton's State Department base.
There was a detachment of Marines and some mercenaries that you can't trust farther than you can throw.
So they're kind of risking it, occupying that thing there in the center of Baghdad, if you ask me.
I think they are.
I think it's an actual risk.
And I think it also represents the degree to which in these years everything about the U.S. government or not.
I mean, everything that's an exaggeration, but but significant things about the U.S. government were militarized, including the State Department.
I mean, if you now read, I mean, the other day, for instance, the the the you know, we're never tired of of warlike activities.
So the the the the Obama administration is now, having gotten out of Iraq, is now pivoting to, you know, to look at that new enemy, which was also the old enemy, the enemy.
It was the Bush administration enemy before 9-11 hit.
And that's China.
So they're pivoting to a new Pacific policy, you know, building up military in the Pacific and so on and so forth.
I read Hillary Clinton did a did a piece, an endless piece filled with euphemisms You know, I mean, I wouldn't recommend anybody read it, but it was in Foreign Policy Magazine.
But I found it interesting, largely because when you read this thing and particularly read to the end, it's hard to imagine this is the secretary of state.
The thing reads like it's being written by the secretary of defense.
You know, she's talking about bringing Navy littoral ships to that littoral, not littoral, to to Singapore and military missions to the Philippines.
It's all military.
I mean, the degree to which in these years this country really has, in some strange, utterly strange way, been further militarized is it's almost it's almost hard to figure out.
I mean, I was just reading another one this morning about the militarization of the cops, where they really are just like the right wing paramilitary forces of all our puppet dictatorships around the world.
Now, every local sheriff's got an M-16 and full combat fatigues and body armor and whatever.
If they don't wear them all day, every day, at least they have a team of cops like that every day and they all have at the ready and they got tanks and everything else.
Yes, tanks.
That was what I was going to say.
They've now bought they're not their tank like vehicles with, you know, guns on personnel carriers.
And, you know, we're not talking about, you know, I mean, we're talking about right in the heartland of the United States.
I mean, I mean, it's it's absolutely amazing, you know, I mean, I mean, it was just like watching that the the the pepper spraying of those those those those kids in Davis.
I mean, that was a situation that could have been handled by one cop, you know.
But but and this isn't like we're there.
I mean, the striking thing about that Davis thing, when you look at it, is that is that these aren't these aren't even the police.
These are campus cops.
In my day, campus cops, they didn't even wear uniforms.
They certainly didn't wear any kind of weaponry.
They let you into your room if you got locked out or if you were in my day.
It would they still had parietal hours.
So if you were past parietal hours, you got in trouble.
But that was what a campus cop did.
Now they go in.
They've got tasers.
They've got they've got pepper spray.
They've got, you know, I don't know.
You know, they have they I don't know.
You know, those guys say they have some kind of weaponry.
It might be a tear gas.
I can't I couldn't tell which.
But I mean, they're gone again.
I mean, this is all because of the decade of war.
That's what's led us to the situation where they're treating little towns in the Bay Area like it's, you know, downtown Fallujah's because they've been through Fallujah.
They've done this and this kind of goes back to me.
The most important part of this sort of is just how unnecessary this was and just how obvious it was to anybody who wanted to be critical that they were lying us into war.
They announced in January of 0 to the policies regime change.
We're going to feed you whatever crap we have to to convince you to do this thing.
And we're doing it.
And then, you know, the aluminum tubes had been debunked in the Washington Post, of all places, in September of 2002.
The whole thing was a bunch of lies, a pack of lies.
Anyone who wanted to could see it.
I mean, hell, half the population was against it in the whole run up to the war.
They knew better than the other half.
None of this had to happen.
A million dead over there.
Five million refugees, forty five hundred dead Americans, uncounted wounded on both sides must be in the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, Tom.
You know, and at the heart of at the heart of my new book, The United States of Fear is, I mean, when we think of these now up armored police and so on and so forth is is the fact that fear and fear of only one thing, there are plenty of things to be scared of for Americans to be scared of in our world, right in our American world.
But only one thing where we chose to be scared of and that was terror.
And based on the fear of terror, I mean, from from these ridiculous wars to everything else, they have funded themselves.
The national what I call the National Security Complex has funded itself.
And so have local police departments, the military, et cetera, et cetera.
It has been like a I mean, fear has been like a cash machine.
It's like the fear with the ATM of these 10 years and fear just of of of, you know, largely, you know, an organization.
This is Al-Qaeda that in its best days long gone could commit a major operation every couple of years.
No more.
I mean, this was crazy.
It was totally crazy.
You know, there were dangers, but not this.
Right.
All right.
So that's the great Tom Englehart.
Tom Dispatch dot com original dot antiwar.com/Englehart and check out his new book.
You can get it the electronic version or the other kind.
The United States of Fear sat Tom Dispatch dot com.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.
Bye.
