For Pacifica Radio, March 9th, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all, and welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 in L.A.
And all the repeater stations in the region, too.
Full archives are available at antiwar.com/radio.
And tonight's guest is Daniel Larrison, contributing editor to the American Conservative Magazine and keeper of a blog at their website called Unomia at theamericanconservative.com/Larrison.
Welcome to the show.
Daniel, how are you doing?
I'm doing just fine, Scott.
Thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us tonight.
And I guess especially if we're going out on KPFK tonight, I should clarify for the audience that it's perfectly consistent for a guest from the American Conservative Magazine to be on a show called Anti-War Radio.
You're not a hypocrite who became anti-war once Obama took power.
The American Conservative Magazine was actually founded in opposition to the war in Iraq.
Isn't that right?
Yes, that's right.
It started in the fall of 2002 in an effort to make the conservative case against the invasion of Iraq and against the Bush administration's foreign policy more generally, which we viewed, I think, correctly and presciently as being contrary to the interests of the United States and contrary to the best interests of the entire Middle Eastern region as the subsequent developments of the Iraq War proved.
And so, yes, the American Conservative has been consistently arguing against most forms of foreign military intervention by the United States since its founding.
I would qualify by saying that we did support the, especially the early phase of the war in Afghanistan because we saw that as a war for self-defense.
But any sort of humanitarian intervention or unnecessary war, a war of choice, we've been consistently against that.
The main objections that we would have to the way that the so-called war on terror has been waged for over the last 10 years is that it is going to be provoking an endless amount of additional resistance and violent opposition to the United States and creating new threats to the United States through the sort of indiscriminate use of force and the excessive use of force that we see all the time, whether it's through the so-called drone wars that are being waged in Pakistan and Yemen or, obviously, the war in Iraq, which generated an enormous amount of anti-American sentiment throughout the region and the world.
And so the practical adverse consequences to the United States and to its security are very great.
And the other obvious reason why the war on terror is such a disaster is that it is an open-ended form of essentially perpetual war that's going to be, and it already is, corroding the institutions of our government and vesting enormous power in the executive branch without any sort of checks or controls by representatives of the public.
Well, you got that right.
And, you know, as they said, I guess it was the Seattle Times called it Cheney's grim vision, war unending, decades of intervention, as Condoleezza Rice announced right after September 11th.
Well, you know, Al-Qaeda, which I guess could mean one person, according to Condoleezza Rice, is in 60 countries.
So they pretty much wrote themselves an open prescription for, and even as we've seen last week with the Attorney General justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen, he basically said Yemen is far enough away that we can pretend it's a battlefield, even though we're not at war in Yemen, at least not officially anyway, not even semi-officially.
That's right.
And that's another example of how the nature of perpetual war and the idea of this endless conflict against quote-unquote terrorism would eventually undermine all of the protections against abuse of power by the government that have been put in place under the Constitution.
Once U.S. citizens are no longer allowed to have any sort of due process, it really does become a matter of the arbitrary choice of those in government whether or not the power of the state is going to be used against them.
So even in cases such as al-Awlaki, where you have someone who was I think associated with or was in cahoots with a branch of al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, you still have someone who is being essentially arbitrarily executed on the face of an unaccountable government panel.
This is contrary to all of the things that we believe about due process and constitutional liberty.
And al-Awlaki may have well deserved to be punished for what he had done, but he's simply being executed on the face of people without any sort of judicial review, which is contrary to everything that we believe in.
By the way, do you happen to know who's on that government death panel?
No, I don't, and I don't think anyone else does either.
It hasn't been published, am I right?
Not as far as I know.
So we sort of assume that it's the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA and maybe the Secretary of Defense, that kind of thing?
Or it could be the deputies, right?
We don't even know.
No, we don't.
And that's just one of the many problems with what's being done here.
Maybe we could get people to care about it if we put Rush Limbaugh on the panel.
Then it would matter to Obama supporters who was getting whacked with Hellfire missiles.
Well, it might, although in that case they might suddenly discover that they don't have such a problem with Limbaugh after all.
Right, yeah, exactly.
One of the real discouraging things is that these sorts of arbitrary power grabs by the executive branch that Obama has started, he's going beyond what Bush has done in terms of ordering these sort of quote-unquote targeted killings.
He's going well beyond anything that Bush did in terms of his claims about basically unchecked executive power.
And the depressing thing is that so many of the people who made so much noise about the Bush administration's excesses, and rightly so at the time, have of course become quiet now that someone from their party or someone representing their side of the political spectrum is doing the same things that outraged them so much in the past.
Yeah, it's a crying shame too.
Although there are bright spots.
We do see some of the hard core of the old left anti-war movement from the Bush era that still remain, but it is true that they're a lot harder to find in a lot of places.
I'm talking with Daniel Larrison.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Daniel Larrison is a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
Theamericanconservative.com/Larrison.
And you've been writing quite a bit about Syria and the degree of American intervention and the possibility of American intervention.
I guess, first of all, before we get to all the critiquing, could you please tell us what's your best understanding of the situation as far as the war there?
I mean, it seems like the opposition already got their clock cleaned in Homs and we're after the fact now, but also if you could address to what degree do you think the Defense Department, the CIA, et cetera, have been working with, say, the Free Syrian Army in Turkey and the rest of this kind of stuff?
To the best of my knowledge, U.S. government involvement in supporting the armed opposition in Syria is, for the moment, nonexistent, or if it is existing, it's so covert that no one's admitting to it.
As far as I know, there's right now no appetite for the United States to be funneling weapons to these groups.
However, there is a clear interest on the part of Qatar and Saudi Arabia to be doing that in pursuit of their own regional agenda against Iran.
My guess is that the recent announcement that the administration made that they're going to be providing communications and humanitarian assistance to the opposition is, for the moment, as far as they're willing to go.
But having opened the door to any sort of aid, it's always possible that they could then escalate that to include shipment of weapons and greater U.S. involvement down the line.
What do you think is the possibility that Hillary Clinton and Obama maybe thought twice about this and have maybe made the right decision?
I saw Hillary Clinton saying that, well, you know, Hamas and al-Qaeda seem to be supporting the revolution in Syria, and so maybe as much as we dislike Assad, maybe we should be careful about whether we are accidentally helping Ayman al-Zawahiri with our foreign policy.
She didn't say, like we've been doing for the last ten and a half years.
Eleven and a half.
So, yes, Secretary Clinton did say that, and I think what you're saying is that there is a bit more reluctance or hesitation on their part to jump into another conflict, especially as we're coming up on the presidential election in the fall.
They don't want to be in the middle of a new shooting war in the Near East while the election is coming up.
That said, I think invoking Hamas' support for the opposition and some of the evidence of al-Qaeda activity inside Syria is part of this pattern that we've seen from the Obama administration where they will throw up all of these obstacles that they say prevent them from getting involved, sort of like they did before they got involved with Libya, and then as the situation in the country appears to get worse, they then throw all of those obstacles aside and rush forward, almost as if they had never made those arguments in the past.
So I think there is clearly some more caution being expressed on the part of administration officials, but they're still not really willing to rule out finally and absolutely that we're not going to get involved in this.
So to some extent I see this as almost a kind of foot-dragging rather than a clear statement of rejecting U.S. involvement.
As for the involvement of al-Qaeda in Syria, certainly there has always been a case of al-Qaeda operatives or al-Qaeda sympathizers transiting through Syria, which they did during the Iraq war, and now of course they're trying to exploit the situation inside Syria for their own purposes.
I think it's certainly the case that if we were to stoke the conflict or try to build up the conflict into a more evenly paired sort of faction that would lead to a greater civil war, al-Qaeda would profit from that by sowing chaos and unleashing all sorts of havoc and destruction the same way that they did during the occupation in Iraq.
And so the civilian population of Syria will be the one that ends up suffering the most as a result of that.
Well, and now, I'm sorry because I should have broken it apart into separate questions from each other there, but isn't the revolution already over?
Didn't the, you know, as brutal as it may have been or may not have been, I don't really know whose numbers I trust or anybody's, but it seems like the government really solidified their power in Homs and they didn't pull their troops back out of there or anything, right?
They have taken the one big city that was in revolt, no?
Well, certainly Homs was one of the most important centers of the uprising or the rebellion against the government.
There are still some pockets of resistance scattered elsewhere around the country in the north and in the southeast.
Idlib and Daraa, for example, these are other places where there are still some anti-regime forces holding out, and those are the ones that are going to be targeted next.
But what we do know or what we've just heard from this one research firm, research think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies that I mentioned in my column this week, is that they say that the armed opposition in Syria has no realistic chance to threaten the regime's survival.
So while it's not the case that the armed opposition is completely defeated right now, it doesn't seem very likely that they're going to be able to achieve any of their political objectives in terms of overthrowing the government.
And so in that way, the government will probably, at least over the near term, hang on to its control of the country.
Well, you know, it's funny to hear people on TV talking about, well, yeah, we'll just do it on the Libya model, when the aftermath of that thing, I guess it's a whole other interview and discussion.
But suffice to say, it's not all coming up roses over there for the people of Libya now that they've had a NATO-sponsored regime change.
But even in that situation, you had pretty clear battle lines.
The Western airplanes and the special forces guys with the laser pointers were doing most of the fighting.
But you had this westward-moving line.
And as far as conflicts and regime changes go, getting the regime change done had a little bit more of an easier-to-see how this could happen sort of aspect to it at the beginning.
But in Syria, I mean, I saw on one of these Sunday morning news shows, they had, I forget her name now, but a former Hillary Clinton aide talking about her op-ed in The Post, I think it was, proposing that it was almost like the Chalabi model from the mid-1990s for Iraq, that, well, we'll just invade and take over one small space in the country, and then we'll bring people to it and call it a safe zone, and then we'll slowly build it out, and we really only need 5,000 troops, and somehow this is going to work.
And yet this is all really just neocon imagination land kind of stuff, nothing that could really actually work as far as a real general's battle plan, right?
Well, any of the safe haven or so-called no-kill zone ideas are essentially half-measures that are trying to get us sucked into the conflict without really presenting to people what the real costs are going to be, both to us and to the Syrian people.
Sounds like it's setting us up, too, for Beirut bombing kind of situations, too, where you put in a force that's not really strong enough to protect itself.
Sure, and there will be an enormous risk, I think, to those people that are going into those safe havens, too, because the numbers that would be needed to effectively protect them aren't going to be on offer.
No one wants to get involved in any sort of protracted conflict on the ground in Syria.
And so the question for all of these safe haven proposals is who is actually going to put forward the manpower, and the answer is no one.
The Turks don't want to have any part of it.
The Arab states that are agitating for someone to do something don't actually want to risk their own people, and that will leave it to the U.S. and NATO members, all of whom are very wary of doing anything that would actually get their own people killed in the process.
Why you keep hearing about the Libya model is that there is the hope or the belief that we can once again win some sort of air war without putting substantial numbers of people on the ground.
And I think in this case the difficulties of waging the air war are much greater, and the amount of resistance that we're going to get from the Syrian military will be much greater as well, which will eventually pluck us into some kind of ground operations if someone were actually willing to go that far.
And I think you see that in the past.
A lot of people, when Libya was going on, were invoking the model of the Kosovo intervention, and what most people don't remember is that the Kosovo intervention ended with Milosevic's capitulation because there was serious talk about investing in a ground invasion of Serbia.
And that's something that no one is going to contemplate here, or if they did, it would be extremely messy and bloody.
Well, I sure am glad to see the degree of reluctance, I guess, as you can pretty accurately characterize it, upon Obama.
And you know what, I don't know if everybody just laughs at this old crank at this point or what, but John McCain's on TV yesterday saying, This is genocide!
How many more tiny little helpless babies have to die before it bothers you, Mr. Secretary of Defense?
And I don't know if Democrats can put up with that kind of thing from Republicans for very long before they start the bombing, you know?
And by the way, it was McCain who wanted the boots on the ground in Serbia more than anybody back in 1999.
So I'm sure you remember.
That's right.
Certainly, there may be some people who are going to be swayed by those sorts of emotional appeals, but what's been encouraging is that the general reaction on both sides of the aisle to McCain's call for airstrikes has been very skeptical or even hostile.
There's no appetite, even among members of the Republican leadership, for getting behind a war in Syria.
They don't see how it would actually achieve anything, for one thing, I think, and they don't want to be associated for the same reasons that the administration doesn't want to be associated with yet another war during an election year.
And so in that sense, we may have lucked out because of the political calendar that only the really hardline hawks like McCain and Graham and Joe Lieberman are at all interested in doing it.
Everyone else in any sort of position of responsibility sees the enormous cost that it would entail, and whether it's only for their own self-serving purposes or what, they don't want to be associated with it.
Well, you know, if every country is so reluctant to put their forces on the ground and no politician other than these three ridiculous senators, the three amigos up there, McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, want to do it, then why is it so difficult for the president to just say, no, forget it?
It's a sad situation, but there's too many conflicts and we're not doing this one.
Is it AIPAC or Lockheed, or who's behind all the pressure to do something here?
It's not entirely a question of pro-Israel influence, I think, but you do see a lot of people agitating for doing something more in Syria because they see that as a way to undermine or weaken Iranian influence in the region by knocking out an Iranian ally.
So to the extent that you're seeing as much agitation for a war in Syria or for arming the rebels in Syria as you are, I think you have to see it as part of the larger agitation for trying to isolate and weaken Iran throughout the region.
And so the reason, I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing the reason Obama is unwilling to completely rule it out and simply say it's not going to happen is that he doesn't want to be accused yet again of somehow being quote-unquote weak on Iran because if he is not willing to do something to undermine the Assad regime, that's going to be cited as yet another example of how Obama has supposedly not been confrontational enough with Iran, when, of course, as you and I know, he's been very hostile towards Iran.
He's been putting in place all of the pieces of policy apparatus that will be used to propel us into war, unfortunately, unless something is done to stop it.
Well, you know, what's funny is there's not a bunch of pressure on him to prove that he's on the side of the little guy in the Arab Spring because nobody is really buying that, right?
With the big Libya example, everybody pretty much knows the Arab Spring are all revolts against American-backed dictators in the region.
Well, for the most part, that's the case because, well, of course, because most of the regimes in the region are U.S. allied or U.S. client states.
And so, sort of out of necessity, an Arab Spring, if that's what we want to call it, is going to be targeted mostly against governments that the United States favors.
Well, one of the sort of strange things about criticisms of the administration on the Arab Spring is that it's actually been, in my view, far too hasty in throwing its support behind some of these uprisings when they don't really know what they're going to get out of it.
They don't really know what's going to come out of it.
And I think we see that in Libya where, while the war was going on, there was a lot of rhetoric about how these people were clearly interested in democracy.
And then just a few months ago, we started getting some reliable polling about what Libyans actually think about democracy.
And for the most part, they're not terribly interested in having it.
And there's much broader support for some kind of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian government that can provide security.
And in the wake of the collapse of the regime there and the lawlessness that is breaking out there, we can understand probably why that's more of a priority for them.
But the sort of quick identification of the Arab Spring with a democratic movement, I think, has been one of the bigger mistakes that Americans of all stripes have made since this started last year.
Well, and I think it was so obvious that these are all American-backed dictators.
In fact, it was Michael Hastings' piece in Rolling Stone about the decision to go ahead and do the no-fly zone, which obviously meant regime change in Libya.
And part of it was Hillary Clinton saying, you know, I think we've got this whole Arab Spring thing off on the wrong foot in the way that they backed Mubarak until they absolutely couldn't anymore.
And then they went for Omar Suleiman, his head of the secret torture police there in Egypt.
And they needed to try to come up with a way to break through the narrative and confuse the narrative that Uncle Sam is the bad guy in all of these.
And so they went, well, Gaddafi, we only let him in from the cold a few years ago, and he's pretty much expendable, so we'll take the side of the little guy in that, basically for matters of PR on American television sets, you know?
Well, I think there was something to that.
And then you see the same motivation on the part of the British and the French as well.
Of course, the British and French had been far more involved in engaging Gaddafi since he had made his deal with Western governments back in 2003.
They had even more to make up for in that sense.
And, of course, the French had just been embarrassed by the downfall of the president in Tunisia, who they had supported even more strongly.
So there was definitely a desire on the part of all the three major governments behind the intervention to try to make up for the fact that they had been working with Gaddafi and that they continued to back so many of these other authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
In a way, it was an attempt to try to distract people from what was going on elsewhere, such as in Bahrain and Yemen.
Well, and TV has been pretty much silent on it, and a lot of the left media has been pretty much silent on it since Tripoli fell, but it turns out that they installed something on the order of the Mujahideen and the Ku Klux Klan in power in Libya.
Well, yeah, there have been reprisals against regime loyalists and against anyone, including migrant laborers coming from sub-Saharan Africa or black African laborers who are being targeted basically on the basis of the color of their skin, as you were saying.
So these are people who, because they were perceived to benefit from the Gaddafi regime, are now being blamed for everything that Gaddafi ever did, and so they're being used as scapegoats after the fact.
And you have a number of reliable reports from Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International talking about the lawlessness and the uncontrollable nature of the militias in Libya today that are engaging in torture, they're engaging in judicial killings, they're imprisoning people without any sort of trial or process.
And so what has been created in Libya is essentially, maybe on a slightly smaller scale, but essentially the same kinds of violence and human rights abuses that existed beforehand.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we are all out of time.
We'll have to leave it here, but it's been a great interview.
I hope we can talk again soon.
Great, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, that is Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative Magazine, contributing editor there.
His blog is called UNOMIA, The Principle of Good Order.
You can find it at theamericanconservative.com/Larrison.
That's it for Anti-War Radio tonight.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
We'll be back here next week from 630 to 7 Pacific Time on 90.7 KPFK in L.A.
Full interview archives are at antiwar.com/radio.
Thank you.
