09/27/07 – Eric Garris – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95992.7 in Austin, Texas.
Introducing my guest today, the captain, the founder and managing director of Antiwar.com, Eric Garris.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Yeah, it's good to talk to you on the radio in front of everybody for a change.
Yeah.
We hardly ever talk.
Yeah, barely ever, it seems like.
Hey, so, lucky for me, I missed the Democrat debate last night.
I had...
Oh, you don't know what you missed?
I had planned to watch it and somehow it just completely skipped my mind over and I just didn't see a single bit of it.
Was it exciting?
Was it wonderful?
Well, it was... there were exciting parts of it.
I wouldn't say that any part of it was wonderful.
The most notable part of the whole thing is it starts to become obvious, as you watch these, that the candidates, especially the top three candidates, don't want to be pinned down on anything.
They are very, very slippery.
I mean, this is not to say that the top Republicans are also the same.
They obviously are.
But what was amazing last night was that all three top Democrats admitted or declined to say that they would get troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term.
Isn't that incredible?
So they are saying that at the end of their first term, in 2013, we are still going to have U.S. troops in Iraq.
Now, let me ask you something here.
Why didn't they just lie?
I think they are lying.
I think that they have no intention of getting them out, even by the end of their second term.
Well, yeah.
Here's the quotes for the audience here from the... is this the Associated Press here today?
Associated Press."'I think it's hard to project four years from now,' said Senator Barack Obama."'It is very difficult to know what we're going to be inheriting,' added Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton."'I cannot make that commitment,' said former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina." Correct.
Unbelievable.
Only, it says here, Christopher Dodd and Bill Richardson were willing to tell the audience at this Democratic debate that they could guarantee the troops would be home by the end of their first term.
Yes.
And then, of course, Kucinich and Gravel said long before that.
Right.
Kucinich jumped the gun, he said he'd have them out by April of 2007, but he actually meant 2009.
So that's not bad.
I have to give him credit for that.
He said he'd have them out within three months.
And I'm not sure what Gravel said, but I'm sure it was something similar.
Wow.
So, how did the audience react to this, to Hillary Clinton saying, oh, geez, you know, troops out of Iraq by the end of my term in 2013, I don't know.
That event, I don't remember much audience reaction in either direction.
It may have been discouraged, I don't know.
Well, now, so you're kind of a rubber meets the road, electoral politics kind of guy.
Is this good politics for the Democrats?
Are they proving that they're responsible or something?
I think that they are, as most politicians are, they're afraid.
They're afraid of the people, they're afraid of real positions, and they're afraid of action that could have consequences.
And this is one of the problems with the war that we have now.
It's very, very difficult to stop anything started by the government, whether we're talking about the rural electrification project or whether we're talking about the Iraq War.
So getting into the Iraq War, once it was started, it's virtually unstoppable.
At this point, I really think it may be unstoppable by anybody but the Iraqis in terms of driving us out.
I think that the only way that we're going to see U.S. troops exit Iraq in the near future is if the Iraqis tell us to leave or make us leave.
Let me ask you this, Eric.
If I was somehow tricking these people into giving me a job as a Democratic strategist and I advised all these people, hey, listen, the reason your approval ratings are all so low in the Congress and so forth is because you won't stand up to the president, not because you are standing up to him, and you people have got to put your balls on and get out there and be tough and stand up for what's right.
Would I be advising them electoral suicide?
No, absolutely not.
I think you're absolutely correct.
However, there are other factors, and the intensity of the other side, somebody higher than Bill Richardson needs to break with that position.
And it looked for a while like Don Edwards might actually do that.
But he has gotten too much criticism from Hillary Clinton, and he's backed off.
He clearly backed off with last night.
Wow, so I wonder what's a Democratic grassroots activist to do in a situation like this?
I guess there's Bill Richardson.
Well, if I were a Democratic activist at this point, I would register Republican temporarily just to vote in the primary for Ron Paul, because Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, they're just not taking off.
They're just not going anywhere.
And Ron Paul is.
He is the leading anti-war candidate in either party.
Yeah, I wish Kucinich and Gravel would just quit at this point.
They're just wasting everyone's time.
Well, it's important for them to stay in in their own party.
They need to be pressing the debate.
And Kucinich's performance last night was pretty good.
Yeah?
Did he take him to task?
He did.
He did.
He captured Hillary, and I thought it was one of his better performances.
Did Hillary do the fake laugh thing?
She did, over and over again.
I couldn't believe how many times she did that.
Really?
For those in the audience who haven't seen Eclipse lately, Jon Stewart did a thing on The Daily Show the other day where he played a little montage, where Hillary Clinton has this thing where if somebody asks her something that she doesn't want to answer, it takes like six seconds for it to kick in or something.
It's like watching Bush stutter.
It takes a good few seconds to kick in, and then she goes into this maniacal, completely fake laughter.
It's ridiculous.
Right.
It's kind of a Dr. Strangelove-sounding laugh.
It's very evil.
Yeah, something like Vincent Price would do, one of his characters.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
It's insane.
In fact, one of the clips I saw, it was Bob Shafer on Face the Nation, and he's asking her about numbers and stuff.
He's like, well, you know, your health care plan, and it's so inappropriate.
And all of a sudden, she just goes, bah, ha, ha, ha, ha.
It seems like the people who advised her to do that would have had her practice more in private before putting her on TV that way.
Right.
You know, the whole problem comes down to the fact that people have accepted the inferiority of politicians.
Politicians are not leaders.
These are the kind of people that most people would vote for.
They would not be friends with those kinds of people.
They would not hire them for a job.
But their standards are so much lower for politicians that they will end up electing somebody who is not going to do what they say and not going to do what the people who are voting for them want.
Right, yeah.
It's like George Carlin said, we liked Bill Clinton.
The American people in general liked Bill Clinton because he was blatantly and obviously and honestly full of it.
He was an honest liar.
Whereas we didn't like Bob Dole because Bob Dole pretended he was an honest man and nobody believed that for a second.
Yeah, well there were other things about Bob Dole too, but...
Yeah.
All right, well, so tell me about this guy, Bill Richardson.
You know, he was the ambassador to the UN and the Clinton years and stuff.
Do you think he's being genuine when he says he really would prefer to get the troops out of here immediately or is this just positioning of an underdog?
Well, it seems to me that he is more genuine, but again, you wonder, as he moves up in the polls, he's probably going to soften his position.
And that's one of the problems.
People view taking more radical positions as something you only do when you're desperate.
In fact, it has helped him.
If you look in the polls, he is creeping up a little bit since taking a harder core position on Iraq.
But he's a very undynamic speaker and that's one of his big problems.
He also has problems thinking quickly on his feet, you know, which is why, you know, when he was at the gay forum, they asked him whether homosexuality was a choice or not.
And he said it was a choice, kind of probably confusing it with abortion.
How does a politician keep his talking points straight?
Exactly.
I just don't think he's going to get anywhere because of his own personal failings.
In terms of his resume, it's the most impressive of anybody running.
Yeah.
And from a libertarian standpoint, he is better than most Democrats.
He's a member of the NRA, pretty good on gun control.
He just signed the second most radical medical marijuana initiative in the country.
Really?
I don't know about that.
When you told me before that you see him as a guy who really is a diplomat and really does see a way that people can compromise out of conflicts rather than going to war over and that that's really the way he looks at the world.
Yes, he does.
And he may be actually a little naive to some extent, but I'd rather have that in the presidency.
Let's talk about Republican voters here for a minute.
I'm sure this is a concern of yours as it is of mine that the Ron Paul revolution out there is not registered Republican and may not turn out to vote Republican.
So what I really want to know is what could possibly be done to get the people who do vote Republican, who are Republican voters, to realize that Ron Paul's their guy, seems to me he's the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton in November since the American population is so overwhelmingly anti-war that in the general election the Republicans will really need a clean break with the Bush chain of years if they're going to even have a chance.
But how do we get average Republicans to consider that on primary day, that they need to be thinking ahead to November and how to keep Hillary out of the chair?
You always wonder how much of voting is strategic as opposed to issue-based or based on something else and how many people actually vote thinking about who is in the best position to beat somebody.
Now they definitely will in terms of ignoring candidates they know have no chance, but in terms of getting them to elevate somebody from the level of Ron Paul, based on that I can't say.
I wonder whether, I mean it's September, we're now 14 months before the election, and I wonder 6 months, 8 months from now what people are going to be thinking when we are still in Iraq as strongly as we are now, perhaps stronger, when we are maybe at war with Iran, how is this going to affect the voters?
I don't know.
Because it's an unprecedented situation.
Even Vietnam was never this unpopular.
Really?
I don't think so.
Wow.
Well, see, I wasn't born until after.
I may be wrong about that, but certainly Iraq is getting into the area where people just don't see the youth.
But yet, if somebody tells them that we can do something good, people are optimistic, and so they think, well, our leaders are telling us they can make it better if they stay longer.
People are willing to continue to grant them the benefit of the doubt.
Granting someone the benefit of the doubt that you wouldn't do in a personal situation, you wouldn't keep somebody on as an employee who continually screwed up as much as they do.
Right.
And now, you brought up the war with Iran, if the war with Iran happens or begins at least before the primaries, do you think that's just kind of a coin toss as to which way the American people are going to go, whether they're going to rally around Bush or whether they're going to rally around the more anti-war candidates?
There's never been a situation where a war started and wasn't overwhelmingly supported by the United States, so I would hope that the Americans could see through this, but I'm afraid not.
I mean, if you look in the Senate yesterday and in the House the day before, they just passed these new anti-Iran measures, which is clearly leading up to confrontation, yet only 16 members of Congress and 22 senators opposed that bill.
Now, that is incredible right there.
More senators opposed the new tough on Iran sanctions and resolutions than members of the House when there's 435 in the House and only 100 in the Senate.
Right.
And you have people like Nancy Pelosi, I mean, Nancy Pelosi voted for essentially ratcheting up war with Iran, and leading dove Democrats were on that list.
There were only 12 Democrats in the House that voted against it.
Dennis Kucinich was not one of them.
He abstained.
Really?
Yes.
And now, how did Dr. Paul vote on that one?
He voted against it.
In fact, this is a funny story.
Eric posed this to me as a riddle the other day.
Why would Ron Paul vote against a resolution condemning the United Nations?
Here's a guy who wants us out of the UN who every year files a bill called the Sovereignty Restoration Act to get us out of the UN.
Eric, why would he vote against a resolution condemning the United Nations?
That was a different vote, though, that you're talking about.
Right.
Right.
In that vote, Dennis Kucinich was one of the only two, along with Dr. Paul, who voted against condemning the UN Rights Commission for Condemning Israel.
And what were they condemning Israel for?
For various rights abuses.
The House condemned the Human Rights Commission for Condemning Israel.
So it was a pro-Israel vote by the House.
What do you think about the news about Ron Paul's fundraiser, where he put out this thing that said, hey, our goal is to raise half a million dollars in a week.
And so far, it looks like he's raised almost that much in less than half a week.
You know, that's great.
I am hesitant to make any kind of predictions or anything about his fundraising, because it always backfires, and I would rather be pleasantly surprised by the numbers.
Yeah, I could see that.
It's interesting how the media keeps trying to pretend that Mike Huckabee is the premier of the second tier, when clearly he doesn't have any more near the amount of support that Ron Paul has.
You know, the media always picks certain candidates who they like for different reasons, and Huckabee is one of their favorites for this year, and it's helped him a little bit, but I don't see him going anywhere.
One thing that makes me optimistic about the Ron Paul campaign, not that I'm trying to set myself up to be disappointed or anything, but it seems like the frontrunners all have serious problems.
I mean, Mitt Romney is a former governor of Massachusetts with his own Hillary health care plan, you know, former gun control advocate, former abortion advocate.
You got Rudy Giuliani, he's got skeletons in his closet, like can't even be counted.
You have John McCain, who supported this war policy to the exact opposite intention of the American people this whole time.
Seems like, eh, this is a pretty weak field of Republicans for somebody like Dr. Paul to break through.
In theory, yes, but the problem is that it's really a big hurdle to overcome, and so many of these pundits and journalists sit around and say, you know, the people who have not raised $20 million, people who are not showing at least double digits in the polls, et cetera, don't have a chance.
And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What happens is that you have many of these decisions made before there's a single vote cast.
Right.
I mean, Bill Clinton was a surprise.
People didn't expect him to do as well as he did, and they certainly didn't expect him to win.
You know, he came out of left field.
You know, Jimmy Carter was another.
You know, and if you go by who the media annoys, you know, we would have President John Connally, we would have President Bruce Babbitt, we'd have President Ed Muskie.
Well, although Clinton and Carter both had some pretty firm backing by the establishment as well.
Oh, I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying that these people are mavericks.
I'm saying they were dark horses.
Right.
But dark horses are often the best way for the establishment to solidify their hold on things.
Well, now, I saw this headline and I wasn't sure whether this was good news or bad news.
A group called the Republican Jewish Coalition has barred Dr. Paul from participating in a debate coming up, and their stated reasons is because he votes against foreign aid.
So he's not welcome in the debate.
I'm not sure whether that's good news or bad news.
I guess the publicity is probably better than what he would have got from being in the debate.
What do you think?
Well, I haven't seen any publicity about it outside of the Ron Paul circle, so I'm not sure how significant this event was to begin with or how significant the Republican Jewish group is, because I have never heard of them before.
But I just joined Jews for Ron Paul myself.
Oh, good.
Well, I actually saw where the group Jews for Ron Paul has protested to this Republican group and said, hey, we want our guy in your debate.
And it may have an effect.
As I said, I don't know anything about this group, and I don't know whether they're open to influence from the outside or not.
That's really too bad, that attitude that so many people have in this country now that they would rather shut out debate that they don't agree with, rather than win.
And if they're right, then they ought to be able to entertain any ridiculous argument and walk out of their triumphant, right?
Right.
It's the same sort of thing that we showed with President Iran the other day.
And even the people who supposedly were allowing him or in favor of allowing him to speak were certainly no defenders of his right to speak, really.
I mean, on MSNBC, they had a debate between two people on the issue of whether he should be allowed to speak.
And the one who was in favor of letting him speak said, well, of course, he's a mass murderer.
And where do they get that?
All of a sudden, you know, he's a mass murderer.
It's like everything gets ratcheted up now so quickly.
You can go to Guantanamo for reckless driving.
You can go, you can get tasered for asking too long a question.
Yeah, even Jon Stewart for the past couple of days has basically just made fun of Ahmad in a job and not made fun of the Americans in the way they've acted at all.
Completely toe the line.
Yeah, I know it's really atrocious.
What the president of Colombia did in his introduction was essentially say, we are going to let this horrible, horrible person speak.
But let me tell you, before he says anything, this is what you need to think about it.
So he's telling people ahead of time what they should think.
And I mean, his job was absolutely correct when he said that this was insulting the audience.
Yeah, you know, Jesse Walker pointed out in an article on Reason that all through the audience were American Jews, students of Colombia who came to hear the Iranians speak.
Presumably, none of them thought that they would be empowering him just by showing up.
You know, they all have their skull caps on and everything, and they came to see a discussion.
That's not an endorsement of the people doing the discussing, I don't think.
No.
They certainly didn't think so, apparently.
Well, the goal of the neocons at this point is to create something that doesn't exist, Islamofascism.
It's not like an ideology that actually exists that you can argue against or fight.
There is no person in the world that says, I am an Islamofascist and here are the tenets.
It's a smear.
It's something that has been invented to lump all the people you don't like into that group without defining it.
Right.
Oh, yes, he's one too.
Oh, and him also.
And that's what they always say is, well, Iran backs international terrorism, but they never say who.
They always, I guess the implication is we're supposed to picture those towers being crashed into.
Well, of course, of course, they want you to think about that.
What we're talking about a long time ago in all of these cases, when they talked about Saddam using gas against his own people, we were talking about something that happened a dozen years earlier or more than that.
And when you're talking about Iran taking our hostages, which, by the way, we've now admitted that many of them were CIA agents as accused.
But that's something that happened in 1979.
You know, there have been some other things that happened since then.
For example, we downed one of their airliners.
People forget about that.
Sold them a bunch of tow missiles through the Israelis.
We've done, again, all of our criticism of past events is very disingenuous because we never mention our complicity with them.
Right.
Bringing up the halabja master, Saddam Hussein's gassing at the Kurds at a time when he was on the American payroll and using American military satellites to help target his enemies and so forth, a bit disingenuous there.
And from 1953 to 1979, Iran was ruled by an American, essentially.
We overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 and installed a lesser house that had never been in power in Iran and made Shah Pahlavi the dictator of Iran from 1953 to 1979.
Right.
And people don't realize that.
This was not somebody who had been the king that came back into power.
This was somebody that the U.S. found that would do what they wanted.
And we put him into power.
This was somebody that drank openly, that was a playboy, that was offensive to most Muslims.
And who's secret police force, the Soviets, was one of the most brutal in human history as well.
Well, we trained them.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny because in the American mind, you're right, I think people don't really understand that.
Ronald Reagan just, you know, put ourselves in their shoes for a minute.
What if Persia had come and overthrown Ronald Reagan and installed a right wing military dictator and, you know, here we are 25 years later, would we be over it by now or something?
Would we have forgotten that our military dictator was, you know, put there by the Persians?
We would not.
And we would not be over it at all.
Here's another thing I don't understand.
I don't understand.
I am totally for nuclear disarmament.
I'm for unilateral nuclear disarmament.
I think the U.S. should simply start disarming their missiles and try and get the other countries to do the same and follow our example.
But we have almost 11,000 nuclear weapons.
And there are over 15,000 nuclear weapons elsewhere on the planet.
Who are we to tell Iran they can't have one when countries all around them have it and have threatened them with it?
The excuse is they're crazy.
They're not like the Russians who are reasonable.
But I don't understand why, how the U.N. can justify ordering them to stop enriching uranium when they ignore the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons and does not grant inspection.
They ignore the fact that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and refuse inspection.
Yet this is tolerated.
Iran, on the other hand, is a signer to the MPP and does get inspection.
That's how we know so much about their nuclear program.
Right, well, you know, just a few weeks ago, Israel got away with a non-MPT signatory state, got away with bombing Syria and flying back home again.
No big deal there.
Right.
And, of course, we've debunked on this show in the past few days repeatedly the neocons assertions that that had anything to do with a Syrian nuclear weapons program, which is a preposterous lie, but anyway, that's just a little parenthesis there.
Is it true that in the Democrat debate last night that Hillary Clinton was asked whether she would sign a law, a nationwide federal law, to ban smoking in public places and that her answer was not yet?
Right.
Unbelievable.
Is that just me because I'm a smoker, that that seems to me to be absolutely crazy?
Yes, that's just you because you're a smoker.
Because I'm not saying that it's not crazy, but it's no more crazy than so many other things that the government tells you you can or cannot do.
Yeah, it just seems such an affront to the system.
I mean, we're supposed to understand, I think, that things like, you know, even vastly overreaching draconian laws like that are a matter for the states, not for the national government to pass.
I mean, it just seems like they don't even pretend that it's federalism anymore.
Yeah, well, I'm not with you on that, except for the extent of it.
I don't see anything worse with it being outlawed at one level or another.
If you're the victim, it doesn't matter who has passed the law, it really matters who's enforcing it.
Oh, no, I agree with that.
I mean, any kind of smoking ban on public or private property at all is ridiculous.
What I mean is I'm not a big states' rights person.
Yeah, yeah.
I do believe in local control in the sense that I believe that, you know, the more decentralized the decisions are made, the better.
But the decisions can still be bad.
Yeah.
I guess I'm just trying to argue that on a whole other level, besides I don't like smoking bans, the idea that in a million years the founders of the Constitution would have thought that they were granting the national government the power to ban smoking tobacco on public property would, I mean, it's just silly.
It's not even, you know, sickening.
It's just ridiculous.
Maybe that's just me.
I don't know.
You know, they outlawed smoking on, they're outlawing smoking on some beaches in California.
Yeah.
That seems pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, and the funny thing is, is there are a lot of people out there who are opposed to the war who will probably vote for Hillary Clinton in the hopes that she will pass a smoking ban, even though she's a bloodthirsty imperialist who refuses to even make a false promise that she means to get our troops out of Iraq.
They'll turn out to vote for her anyway.
I know.
She's got a smoking ban, though.
I like that.
I don't think she really is against the Iraq war in any way.
I think she probably really thinks that having us go around and stomp all over everybody is the way to go.
And domestically, her position isn't much different.
Yeah, exactly.
She wants to wage war against us all.
I mean, you have to remember, Bill Clinton in a lot of ways was better than what we have now.
But, you know, when Bill Clinton was president, I had friends that were being prosecuted by Clinton's HUD department for passing out literature at a meeting that opposed funding for an alcohol drug rehab center in their neighborhood, because that was a violation of the disabled rights.
And so they went after people all over.
They went after this city councilwoman in the East Bay here in the Bay Area.
They fined her $50,000.
They went after three people in Berkeley who printed up leaflets and passed them out at a public meeting.
They fined them each $50,000.
You know, this is the Clintons' MO.
Yeah.
I know it stands for all of us like we're all refugees.
They ended up having to back down from that, but it showed their intent.
And what was interesting also, on the health care issue, I thought Hillary's response was very interesting, because, you know, she recently came out with her new health care proposal, which is different from the one that she introduced in the early 90s, in that it's not as draconian as last night.
But when she was asked last night, you know, why she had changed her position, it wasn't because she found out that this was a better plan.
She said, basically, you know, I thought people wanted universal health care, but apparently they only wanted it limited, so that's all I can give them right now.
She never accepts responsibility for being wrong.
It's always world events that change.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's been shown that she's a pathological liar on any issue.
It doesn't matter.
Well, a pathological liar and top politician are not really exclusive in any way.
Well, I mean, granted, I think you probably have to be a pathological liar to be a successful politician, but most politicians wouldn't lie to you about any old thing, like, I mean, she'll talk about why all she had for dinner.
Right, and John Edwards did apologize for voting for the war and said that it was a terrible mistake and all that stuff, whereas she would never apologize for anything.
Right.
Is she still going around and telling the Democratic base, if George Bush doesn't end this war by the time he's done being president, then I will when I'm president?
Is she still telling people that?
I don't know.
Because I've seen her say that on quite a few occasions.
I haven't seen her say it recently.
But then, yeah, it's been a little while, but she told Michael R. Gordon at the New York Times that, oh, no, we're going to keep troops there to secure the border to fight Al Qaeda for force protection and everything else, and we'll be there for decades, just like General Meyers said at the start of the war.
And if you listen, you know, one of the things that was made by the, I think it was Richardson, I don't want to say for sure, but it may have been Obama, but somebody that was saying we should eventually pull our troops out of Iraq said, but we should always keep them there to protect, to protect our embassy, to protect any American civilians in Iraq and to be able to use as a base to go after Al Qaeda.
Now, that could mean a hell of a lot of troops.
And as more American civilians are in Iraq, this is another problem.
A lot of Americans think that it's fine to have U.S. troops go somewhere to protect American civilians.
And there have been different examples of that sort of thing.
I mean, Teddy Roosevelt went after African countries to rescue American civilians.
That can be a very, very dangerous thing, because there are American civilians all over the world.
And if we decide, for example, that Morocco is, let's say, in a Hillary administration, we decide that Morocco is mistreating, you know, put somebody in jail for being gay, an American, well, under, you know, under that sort of doctrine, we can send in American troops to rescue that person from the Moroccan jail.
Yep.
And it goes on, I mean, it's- And it goes on and on.
But here's the thing, and this is the problem with American foreign policy, is the double standard, because we assume these powers that other countries don't, and if they did, there would be instant confrontation.
If every country had that attitude that they could come into another country to protect one of their citizens who had decided to travel abroad, it would be quite messy.
Right.
And it's kind of interesting, I wonder how long you think we can go on like this, pretending that America has ultimate sovereignty and cannot be violated here, but at the same time, you know, our government basically is the world government that goes around violating the sovereignty of every other state in the world.
Does that seem like the kind of thing we can get away with for another few hundred years?
I don't know.
I think that what you'll see in a democratic administration, say in a Clinton administration, you'll see more of that being done through international bodies, you know, and the international bodies are becoming very, very aggressive.
You know, NATO, I remember that after, you know, the first few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a lot of people, including prominent conservatives, were calling for getting rid of NATO.
You know, pretty soon NATO is going to be competing with the UN.
They've got so many members and new perspective members.
And now Giuliani is saying, oh, we should have all these Asian countries and Middle Eastern countries join NATO.
And the thing about NATO is it is a mutual defense pact, which means that any time you get a new signer, all the other countries are pledging to militarily protect that country.
I mean, it used to be if they were invaded, now it's if they're threatened.
And the precedent set in the Balkans in the Kosovo war is that you can invade a country for activities solely within that country.
Right.
Yeah.
And that used to be, we'll go ahead and invade you, like if you're Iraq and invade Kuwait.
But you're right, in the 90s, the Clintons proved that they can intervene in your civil war.
Right.
Yeah, we were just talking about that actually before I brought you on about how Richard Holbrooke took the soft lines as Yugoslavia was breaking up and basically drew them with magic marker on a map and said, these are hard international borders now and left all kinds of, I don't know how many people stranded on the quote unquote wrong sides of the lines to face ultimate violence.
Well, that's something world leaders have been doing for hundreds of years, redrawing the boundaries and disenfranchising whole groups of people.
Well, and here we go with the top headlines today on antiwar.com.
Eric Garris is, the Imperial Senate has voted in a non-binding resolution at least, but the sense of the Senate, a bipartisan measure as the Washington Post reported, to go ahead and break up Iraq into three pieces.
Why pretend we're not doing that anymore, you know?
Right.
Well, you know, I wish that some of the rules that they want to apply to the Iraqis were applied in the United States, because I would certainly like to see the U.S. be broken up.
I would like to see Texas liberated from DC, but I'm not certain if I want, you know, I don't know, switch the roles around Iraq to invade America and give us our independence.
It would be interesting just for a change.
Yeah, have a war here instead of abroad for a while.
All right.
Hey, everybody, that's Eric Garris.
He's the founder and managing director of antiwar.com.
Thanks a lot, Eric.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you, everybody.