Introducing Chris Floyd, the author of Empire Burlesque High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and the blog of the same name, available at chris-floyd.com, one of my favorite bloggers and writers.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
Hi, glad to be here.
Good to talk to you again, and I was very interested in your article that you wrote about Admiral Fox Fallon, I guess right before he got fired, but based on this new article in Esquire magazine, and your point was, I think it was, you titled your latest entry, War Crimes Accomplice Canned for Insufficient Groveling.
This is no hero of the anti-war movement, but an administrator of American Empire who got just a little bit out of line.
Yeah, well that's been my basic take, that was my take from reading the Esquire story, which was, as you know, it had a lot of interesting information in it, but it was written in a complete hagiography, you know, life of the saint sort of thing.
Well yes, the idea that Fallon was some sort of hero, I thought, what's been remarkable was that this has come even from some very strongly anti-war voices, you know, some of the same people who have been so rightly vociferous in their denunciation of Iraq as a clear war crime, what's going on in Iraq as a war crime, have been some of the ones depicting Fallon as a hero and lamenting his fall.
But, you know, Fallon has been the man in charge of this war crime for more than a year, he's the commander, he's the leader of U.S. Central Command, he's directing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, and in all these places thousands of innocent people have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes, vast human suffering all under Fallon's command for the last year.
And so now, you know, aside from the point of perhaps he was opposed to the timing, whatever, of an attack on Iran, I mean, this seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, it was lost before his resignation and I think it's being lost a little bit after his resignation.
Yeah, well, and I think, you know, some of us who've discussed, well, you know, Fallon's been a topic in interviews that I've done with Gareth Porter over the last year, for example, and I think you're right that sometimes, even though I'm sure Gareth Porter and I know I recognize that, you know, any head of CENTCOM who's in charge of this thing certainly has all his own problems, as you mentioned, but we sort of get caught up in the relativity of the situation and think, well, at least he's making life difficult for Dick Cheney, and so in that sense he's, you know, more of an ally than Stephen Hadley.
I see the point, I mean, you know, what's happened, of course, in our governance, we've all been turned into criminologists, you know, we all, you know, the guys that used to sit around and try to figure out what was going on behind the scenes in the Kremlin, where the Soviet leaders were standing on the Presidium and where they were standing over Lenin's tomb, you know, we all have to try to read these tea leaves and we all, you know, and I mean, it's not unimportant, we have to try to figure out what's going on, but as I said in my story the other day, before Fallon was fired, Fallon was appointed by Bush, and as we've seen, he served Bush, you know, very well, and he served as long as Bush found him useful, and as soon as Bush didn't find him useful, you know, found him a pain in one way or the other, either because he was, you know, getting too big for his bridges and talking out of turn, or because they just wanted to get him out of the way for this attack on Iran, whatever the point I made the other day was that, in one sense, Fallon doesn't matter, you know, he didn't matter, I mean, yeah, it was good, anything that tweaked Bush's nose a little bit, or was seen in the press to tweak his nose, that was fine, but, you know, it's just obvious that when they wanted Fallon out of the way, he'd be out of the way, he was just sort of there on sufferance, they were doing other things, you know, and that's what happened, that's what happened.
I guess, I don't know, I think I put it the other day, I can't remember now exactly how I put it, but, you know, the point was being that if Bush wants to invade Iran, he's going to invade Iran, it didn't matter if Fallon was there or not, if Fallon wouldn't do it for some reason, and I made the point also that one thing that came out of this Esquire article was that, yes, Fallon had some disagreements with the Bush administration, but these disagreements seem to be entirely to do with timing and tactics of an attack on Iran.
Now, there's this one quote in the story, which I thought was most telling, when, you know, Fallon is talking to Thomas Barnett, who wrote the article, he's talking to Barnett about, well, you know, we have a lot of pots boiling over in the region right now, we have to keep careful not to have too many pots boiling over, and, you know, it's obvious that he doesn't want to go leaping into a war with Iran right now, because he's got so much on his plate, you know, he's conducting a war of aggression in Iraq, he's conducting a war in Afghanistan, he's helping the Ethiopians kill civilians in Somalia, he's got a lot on his plate, he's a busy man.
But, finally, Barnett keeps pushing him, he keeps pushing him, he says, well, what if it comes to war with Iran?
And then Fallon just says, this is a direct quote from Barnett's article, get serious, these guys are ants, when the time comes, you crush them.
Okay, so this is the man we're told was standing in between us and war with Iran, is a guy who says when the time comes, we crush these ants, we crush these insects.
Well, I mean, this is, you know, not to make too much out of one remark, but this is, to me, very indicative of the mindset that someone like Fallon had, and the mindset you have to have to serve a regime like this.
I think I mentioned in one of my stories on Fallon was that, if Fallon would have been a hero, if he had resigned when the United States invaded Iraq, you say, for example, you say, listen, this is a dishonorable action, I can't be associated with it.
Now, then he would be a hero.
But, you know, waiting around and then suddenly being fired and pretending like he's resigned right now, which could be just weeks before we strike Iran, I mean, he's not, you know, and having served as a year to, you know, to prosecute this war in Iraq and stuff, I mean, he's not a hero, he's just an imperial servant, he got out of line, they got him out of the way, he's gone.
So this is how important he was, this was how, this was what a bulwark he was.
As soon as they got tired of him, they got rid of him, and that was always going to be the case, it was always going to be the case.
He wouldn't be in there if he was someone they couldn't get rid of.
You know, they wouldn't have put him in there if it's not somebody, you know, there's no, you know, he's not, it's not like some old, when they get rid of Fallon, the whole people would take the straight to something like that, you know.
You wouldn't be in that position if you can be gotten rid of that way.
So, now that they would have even appointed him in the first place, if they didn't think he was going to do the main thing, you know, as he said in his resignation, Fallon said, you know, well, I have no, I don't have any disagreement with the strategic objectives of the administration.
And what are the strategic objectives of the administration?
Were they simply to impose American indominance on the central command area, that was his area, right?
All across the oil bearing regions and things like that.
So...
And throughout the administration...
That's basically my take on it, yeah.
Throughout the administration, they fired all kinds of generals and replaced them.
And at the same time, George Bush insists that he's a commander guy, which I guess serves two purposes.
One, he's attempting to distance himself from the political liabilities of running the war from Washington, D.C., as Lyndon Johnson did, which, of course, is the only reason America lost the Vietnam War.
But also, it means that the buck stops across the river at the Pentagon, not at the White House.
Yeah.
Well, obviously, I mean, yes, I mean, as I said before, the whole thing comes down to, the whole responsibility is actually Bush's.
And I do agree with the people who said that since Fallon has resigned or been kicked out, I mean, that that is an important, that's an important thing that's happened.
I mean, I think it does indicate that the, that they're limbering up for an attack on Iran more than likely, that's what they're trying to do.
And it was obvious from the article that he disagreed, as I said, with the timing of it and with the presentation of it.
And rightly so, of course, anyone with any sense who, you know, was in that position would say, look, we're too stretched too far, we can't do this, this is stupid.
And also, he had some questions about going on and on in Iraq in the same way.
But...
Well, and you know, something else, Chris, in that article is that all his dissent over the last year in the Financial Times and apparently talked to Hosni Mubarak and ruled out the all options on the table thing, he defended that by saying he wasn't trying to undercut the administration, he was just trying to settle down our Sunni Arab allied dictatorships in the region to let them know that we're just, right now at least, we're just trying to scare the hell out of the Iranians, we're not really going to do it, so relax.
No, absolutely, I thought that was a remarkable bit of the, that's come out since then, that was his reasoning, you know.
Well, I'm just trying to, yeah, I'm trying to chill out our dictators, you know, it wasn't a, of course it's all just smoke and mirrors one way or the other.
Again, it comes down to, it comes down to the White House, and it comes down to, this is the system we have now, you know, when the President decides to launch a war, then that's what's going to happen.
And no one's going to stop it, you know, no one's going to stop it.
Yeah, you know, Chalmers Johnson in Sorrows of Empire points out about how the Pentagon has basically replaced the State Department, and you know, as you say, all this does come down to the President and the Vice President and what they want, but how they go about dealing with the world is, you know, a big part of, I guess, revealing what it is that they want.
And basically, the State Department doesn't really count anymore.
Generals come in, and they're the real ambassadors.
They're the ones who come ashore from their giant battleships and tell the dictators what to do, and what to think.
Well, absolutely, I mean, this is what, this is what I, as I mentioned in my first article about Stalin, this is what came out most clearly from the Esquire piece, this is what I got from it mostly, was not that, you know, Stalin was a bulwark against war, but was that what it showed unwittingly was that it showed our imperial system in action, and that was that we have these generals, we have these, you know, these far-flung commands, which are just like the, these guys are just like the Roman Empire's proconsuls who used to go out, and they'd command a certain region, and they, you know, there was no difference between what Stalin was doing and what these proconsuls did for the Roman Emperors.
They went out, they, you know, they dictated the foreign policy to the places, they dictated their economic interests, they dictated who was there, you know, who was, you know, who was in power and who was not, but, you know, just like it came out in the story, and just like the Roman Emperors, you know, you know, they didn't just snap their fingers and everything fall into place, they had to cajole someone, they had to, you know, mollify this dictator, and maybe make some compromises, and maybe have some setbacks.
But as I said the other day, and this is what you said, you know, this is why these generals are taking over, because behind everything that they do lurk the power, lurk the threat of Roman military power, and the promise that these places, you know, would be destroyed if Rome's interests were not accommodated in the end.
And that's exactly what Stalin was doing, that's what his replacement would do, that's what all these guys do.
And you're right, I mean, the State Department has simply disappeared, it's just, I don't even know what they do, I guess they handle some PR every now and then.
Which is really remarkable, because if you, as you know, I'm sure in the early days of the American Republic, the State Department was the most powerful, one of the most powerful offices, and the Secretary of State was considered almost the Prime Minister of the United States, you know, he was considered a very important role, and now it's just, you know, as you say, they're just errand boys or whatever for the President, you know, they just snap their finger and say, you know, do this and do that.
Right, well, they've been reduced to, as you say, public relations, their job is to teach the people of the world who apparently just can't seem to understand that we only mean the best for them.
Well, I think in all these things, I think by now, even the people of the world, even the people of Washington realize that all this stuff the State Department is doing and all these PR things that they were actually aimed more at the American people than the people overseas, you know.
Right.
I mean, the Egyptian people who were on the spear point of Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship, they know what's being done to them, the Syrian people know what's going on, the Iraqi people know what's being done to them, you know, the Iranian people know what the effect of these sanctions, these people know what's actually being done to them.
I think more and more of this propaganda, these trips, you know, Condi Rice goes over to the Palestinians know what's being done to them, and she goes over and, you know, we do all these sort of, you know, a lap around the Middle East talking about peace or something.
I think that's aimed almost totally now at the American market, you know, because, like, one of the few populations in the world whose majority of people don't know what's going on in the world are the Americans, and so this is, you know, it's all sort of aimed to keep them that way.
Right, yeah, I've heard foreigners say that they're just astounded sometimes when they watch American TV and realize, oh, my God, this is what the American people think.
Well, no wonder, then.
Yeah, absolutely.
What happens to me every time I go back to the United States is, you know, I'm living in England now, and whenever I go back, I went back over Christmas for actually the longest stay I've been for quite a while, and when I first go back and I look at the news, I mean, it takes me about, it takes, I remember looking at the news, I came in on the airport, or I came into Chicago Airport, we were transferring, and I had to watch, you know, there's the CNN news, which you are forced to watch in every airport because you can't get away from it, and there's some big report on the election, it was the Iowa caucus or something, and I just couldn't believe these people.
I said, who are these people?
And these talking heads, they were jabbering about absolute nonsense, and the candidates would come on, and they would, I mean, it was like, I don't feel like it was a sort of an insane asylum or something.
Well, you know what's really funny is the CNN that they have at all the airports is the actual, that's the good CNN.
I was just going to say, there was, I forget if it was when Bhutto was killed in Pakistan or one of these imperial misadventures had gone, and for some reason the guys in Atlanta just couldn't get their act together in time, so they switched over, and they actually let Austin, Texas watch CNN International for a while, and the lady behind the counter, she was pretty and blonde, but you could tell that she actually, you know, knew something about what was going on and was able to ask questions and stuff.
It was incredible.
I was astounded at the quality of CNN International compared to what I usually get on channel, what, 46 or whatever around here.
Well, no, CNN International is much better than CNN, but either way, you're talking at a very low, low level.
Very low.
When I came in, I just couldn't believe, you know, day after day I'd watch the news and read the newspapers.
I just couldn't believe the kind of information the American people were getting and the narrowness of the information, the narrowness of the viewpoint.
I mean, it's a, this is a cliché for people who know about these things, but, you know, the extremely narrow range of opinion from far right to center right, you know, this is the only thing that ever appears on American television or in the news basically.
So, yeah, it was quite a, it's quite a, quite a revelation.
Well, you brought up Admiral Fallon's characterization of the population of Persia as ants.
I guess then you disagree with that?
You see those people as people even if there's, you know, I don't know, a lot of distance and salt water between here and there?
Oh, you know, they're so far away, I guess they look like ants, you know.
Maybe that's true, I don't know.
But, no, of course not.
I mean, this is the whole thing.
I mean, of course they're human beings.
This is, but, I mean, again, this is an old game.
Anyone that we're opposed to, they lose their humanity, absolutely.
I think Johnson Swartz writes about, Johnson Swartz says it's a tiny revolution.
He writes about this a lot too, you know, how suddenly, how fortunate America is that all their enemies are subhuman and people who like to die, because he goes back and he finds all these old quotes where, back in Vietnam, they say, oh, well, you know, your Vietnamese has a different idea of life and death than we do.
And you can find that all the way back.
You know, the Indians, well, they don't, they don't treasure life as we do, so it's okay to kill them, you know, by the bucket full.
They're never as human as we are, so that's, we're always fortunate that that's true.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny because, you know, the Germans now who are our close allies and are considered Western Europeans and just like us and mostly Christian and all that kind of thing, well, why they were the evil Huns and always have been back just a couple of generations ago.
Well, of course, yeah, I know, that's true.
I mean, but what's the Bob Dylan but the Germans now too have God on their side, you know.
Yeah.
But you know what's funny though?
You, as far as I can tell, are the only Western journalist who cares about what's happening in Somalia at all or bothers to investigate at least that I can find anywhere.
And something that really brought the individual humanity of the Somalis to my attention last week when the first, actually I believe there were two, but in the first missile strike, a Tomahawk missile was fired from a Navy ship at a house in Somalia and killed six people, three women and three children and missed the so-called Al-Qaeda terrorist who was the target.
And it sort of seems like, you know, if you launch a war and you send the Ethiopian army in and you push everybody out of Mogadishu and you have these big battles and lots of people die, well, it's lots of people die, like Stalin said, it becomes a statistic.
But when it's just six people, just six women and six children, why, those are individuals, really even if they're in Somalia, it's kind of inescapable in that sense, you know?
When it's a smaller number of casualties like that.
No, of course, I think it does come across that way.
And of course it's true, I mean, there's six people in a house, just like the people living next door to you.
And no, this thing in Somalia, I mean, there are a few people writing on it, and of course there are a lot of African journalists writing on it, and a lot of good English language sites of African journalists.
I mean, that's where you can find a lot of information about that.
But, yes, this thing in Somalia, as we're talking about Admiral Fallon, you know, this is also his ballpark.
And those missiles were sent at his command, ultimately.
Those missiles that killed those three women and those three children for no good godly reason on Earth were sent, of course, not at the direct order of Admiral Fallon, because he was out swatting around with Hosni Mubarak somewhere, you know, sipping martinis.
But, you know, he has the ultimate responsibility for that.
And so that's when we go around, we're talking about this great hero who's going to save us from war.
Well, what war is he famous for?
He just murdered three women and three children last week who were just sitting in their house.
The whole point about the Somalia regime change war that the United States green-lighted and has helped every step of the way is, I mean, it's an unbelievably important story, and it's a horrible story, and it's an atrocious story, and it's completely ignored, as you said.
It sort of drives me crazy, because people just don't care.
I write about it, and sometimes I write about it, and my traffic goes down.
People just don't care.
But, you know, it's the U.N. now says, the U.N., the Red Cross, I'm sorry, the Red Cross says that the humanitarian crisis in Somalia is worse than the one in Darfur, you know.
Right, hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Clinton is not there, and Angelina Jolie is not there, because nobody cares about it, and it's just not sexy or whatever.
But it's a horror story.
It's a true horror story, and it goes on and on and on, and it's much worse now than it was last year.
And as you say, we launched these missile attacks, and there's no reaction.
There might be a story on page 17 of the New York Times, an AP story, saying, oh, a missile attack was launched, and they missed the Al Qaeda guy.
And that's it.
It's just normal.
That's just life.
Life goes on.
And I think it's just one of the things that is just maddening, actually.
It's just maddening.
This can go on, and no one cares.
You know, where's Obama?
Where's Hillary?
No one talks about it.
No one says anything about it.
It just goes on.
Well, and you know, if you pointed out to them that Somalia is a worse humanitarian crisis than in Sudan, the Democrats would just say, well, we ought to invade that place then.
Send some peacekeepers to go straighten things out.
Well, yes, of course.
Both Obama and Hillary are surrounded by these, what are they called, liberal interventionists.
You have Samantha Power, and of course she's gone, supposedly now, and who Hillary has, she has, isn't O'Hannon with Hillary and all these people.
Yeah, of course that's what they believe in.
But it's just a horrible situation, as you say.
And somehow, I think, as you write, because it's more on a smaller scale, it somehow brings home the humanity of it more, or the inhumanity of it more.
Yeah.
You know, another thing that has to be mentioned in talking about the regime change in Somalia is that, according to the Washington Post, anyway, I guess I don't really have any way to verify this, but according to the Washington Post, the literal, official excuse the so-called Cossus Belli for this American regime change in Somalia is that three Al-Qaeda operatives were suspected to be there, including two suspects, wanted, and this is in the official quotes, wanted for questioning by the FBI in relation to the Africa Embassy bombings of 1998.
Three!
Yes, I know, I've been writing about this for almost, what is it now, a year and a half now, since it was invaded, helped Ethiopians invade in late December 2006 it was.
Yes, absolutely, you know, this was the cause given at the time.
Three, they're tugging for three guys, and so they roped in the army of this brutal, torturing dictatorship in Ethiopia to invade this already shattered nation, which had come to some measure of stability for the first time in 15 years.
I mean, not a paradise on earth, I wouldn't want to have lived under the Islamic court system, all this kind of stuff, but anyway, I mean, that's up to the Somalis to decide, isn't it?
But anyway, they had the first bit of stability, so they shattered all that, they came in there, and yes, their excuse was the three guys who may have been tied to Al-Qaeda.
I mean, this is ridiculous, I mean it's ridiculous on its face, I mean, this is a, to hunt down three guys is a law enforcement operation.
You don't invade a nation and destroy it to find three guys.
Of course, we did that already, right?
We invaded Panama to get one guy, Noriega, who's still sitting in our prison somewhere, you know?
They killed thousands that day.
Yeah, I mean, thousands of people died and we had to get that one guy.
But, yeah, of course, it's just what's so maddening is not that government will put out these sort of bald-faced lies and these ludicrous things, what else are they going to do?
You know, what else are they going to do?
They're not going to tell the truth.
But it's that our press just swallows it all.
They just swallow it all, and no one says, you know, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense, you know?
I mean, where's the tough questions, you know?
Every time Bush appears somewhere, someone should have asked him, what are you talking about?
You invaded the whole country for three people?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, he probably doesn't even know about it.
Somalia, where's that?
Yeah, we had the press yucking it up with him at these press dinners, you know, and they all joke around, they put on their little funny hats, and ha ha, here's the president comes out and he sings a funny song, I don't understand, I mean, how could he be in the same room with Bush?
You know, Bush came into a room and some of the functionaries, they didn't have to get up and leave, you know, they just had to get going.
You couldn't countenance the presence of this war criminal with your applause and your laughter and things like that.
It's just...
You know, I just saw the YouTube of him at the gridiron dinner, or whatever they call it, with all the media sycophants.
Oh, it was horrifying.
Yeah, I know, it's a freak show, I mean, but this is what guides the discourse, and guides the policy, and guides the debate over the most powerful nation in the history of the world.
It's a little bit scary when you think about it.
You know, something that you wrote that was so interesting on your blog, it's chris-floyd.com, Empire burlesque, and you talk about this book about the fall of the Roman Empire that you've been reading, and how the Christian scholars had to come up with a way to explain why it wasn't Christianity's fault that Rome had fallen, and in doing so, they discovered this brilliant truth that ought to be obvious to anyone, that Rome was actually just another state, not blessed by Zeus or by Jesus Christ, it was just a bunch of humans going around killing people, just like all other governments in the world.
No, absolutely, that was, yeah, this was the book by Peter Heather, who's the professor over here at Oxford, called The Fall of the Roman Empire, and you look at the, yes, and he's talking about how, this was St. Augustine, he was coming up with it to try to account for how Rome had been sacked by the Goths and stuff like that, and he had a great quote that, you know, that the whole empire was built on nothing more than the desire to dominate, and this was St. Augustine's quote, and Rome was conquered by this lust when she first triumphed over Alba, which was the first little city-state that they conquered, you know, and to the proper claim of her crime, she gave the name of glory, and St. Augustine was saying that Rome went off the rails, the Roman Republic went off the rails when it got this urge to dominate, and with their first great military triumph, their first imperial triumph, you know, led them into evil, and as I said, it was a great insight that he had, and he also had the insight that, you know, Rome could fall.
It's been around for a thousand years at this point, but, you know, it could fall tomorrow, and I think these are insights, as I say.
As I say, you know, there's no hard and fast equation, you know, that history doesn't repeat itself exactly, but you can certainly draw lessons from it, and this is the kind of thing I think that we, as I said, the...
Yeah, it's much more like farce this time around.
Beat it up farce, like an old-fashioned Keystone Cop thing, you know.
Right.
With the Benny Hill music playing in the background.
Yeah, Benny Hill.
I always forget which one's the televangelist and which one's the British comic.
Well, it's hard to know, yeah.
They're kind of both alike, don't they?
Yeah.
And, you know, another thing about you, Chris, I don't mean to categorize you too specifically anywhere, but you come from somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum, and yet you hardly ever, I think, in your writings, use the term democracy.
You always talk about the end of our republic, which is the kind of language that people don't use very often, and I wonder if you can explain why it is that you choose those words.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know if there's any sort of big philosophy behind it.
I mean, our nation is a republic, and that's just what we talk about.
I mean, democracy is a...
Of course, obviously we're not a democracy.
We don't all vote on everything, and we don't choose our leaders for war by lot or anything like that, which, you know, we probably should.
We probably should, after all.
But, I mean, well, I just speak about what we're talking about.
We're a constitutional republic.
We're supposed to be.
And so that's usually the language that I prefer.
I mean, democracy is a more general term, and also it's, in these days, in this day and age, it's a completely degraded term.
What does democracy mean?
By the time the Bush people got used to using it for democracy, what democracy means, we kill a million people in Iraq, and we let Shiite militias vote for whoever they want to run, you know.
So it's sort of a degraded term.
But what I'm usually writing about is something very specific.
I'm usually writing about, you know, specific crimes against the Constitution, specific actions taken that are gutting the Constitution of our republic.
Yeah, the setting of the rule of law, the basis for all this.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the point, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you tell me your impression of Barack Obama?
He seems like the last hope for a lot of anti-war activists.
Well, I wrote a piece on that a few weeks ago.
Well, it's just hard to say.
I mean, I just don't think, I don't see Barack Obama as the great hope against the war, or more importantly, against the whole imperial system, this whole system that is dependent on continual war and perpetual war.
Where does he speak against this system?
Where does he say, you know, we've got 800 bases all across the world.
We better bring those boys home.
Why do we have bases here?
Why do we have bases in Kazakhstan?
Why are we doing this?
Why are we doing that?
I don't see him saying anything like that.
I don't see him questioning this sort of imperialist, corporate, war machine state that we have, which is now, you know, with an economy and a system that's built on war profit.
Where does he speak against that?
And his plan about so-called ending the war in Iraq is just like Hillary's plan, and not much different from John McCain and George Bush's plan.
Oh, well, you know, we'll pull out our combat troops, but we've got to leave enough troops in there to train the Iraqis and guard those troops, or train the Iraqis, and to conduct counterterrorism operations.
Well, since they call all the insurgents in Iraq terrorists, this means there's thousands of terrorists, they're going to have to retain 20, 40, 50, 60,000 troops to do counterterrorism actions.
You know, they're going to guard the embassy.
All these things like that.
We're going to help stabilize the region.
We've got to have some troops over there to help stabilize the region.
What's he talking about?
We've got 130,000 troops over there now.
In 18 months, if Obama's the president, we'll have 90,000 troops, 60,000 troops.
We'll still have an occupying army over there that's exacerbating all the problems.
You know, it'll be the same problems we've had over there.
I mean, I'm just talking about the plans that he's stated now.
Now, he gets into office, maybe he'll be different.
Maybe he will somehow be struck down the road to Damascus and have a conversion and suddenly be anti-war and anti-empire.
I doubt it very seriously, but, I mean, anything's possible.
But according to his plans now, first of all, I don't see any critique of our imperial system.
I don't see any critique of our war profiteering, militarist imperial system.
I don't see anything in his plan to end the Iraq war that will actually end the Iraq war.
He seems kind of naive, too.
I remember Denis Kucinich teaching him that, according to the IAEA and even according to our own CIA, that there was no evidence of any nuclear weapons production of any kind in Iran, live on TV during a debate, when he said nobody questions.
That's another aspect of his foreign policy and how much hope we can put into it.
He's been very bellicose about Iran.
And he's just marched, he's lockstep with Hillary on Iran, as far as I can tell.
We take no option off the table, and we're there to do whatever we need to do, and blah, blah, blah.
I just don't see him.
Now, he might not launch an attack on Iran.
Now, that might be some difference.
I mean, there might be some difference if somebody gets in there.
I think Bush and Cheney will launch an attack on Iran, or they certainly won't do.
I mean, I don't think that if Obama got in there, he would launch an attack on Iran.
I don't think he would, but that's a little bit of a difference now.
But if an attack comes before then, what's he going to do?
He's going to stand up and salute the commander-in-chief, you know, when our brave boys are in the air over enemy territory.
So, I mean, I don't, you know, I'm like anybody else.
I'd love to have hope.
I'd love to have hope in somebody.
I'd love to think about it, but I just don't.
I mean, and I'm looking for it.
I'm not trying to, you know, just badmouth everything that comes across.
But, I mean, I just don't see it.
I mean, all I can do is go by what I see and what he says and the policies that he takes and the people he surrounds himself with.
You know, Samantha Power, who was the big liberal interventionist.
You know, her whole thing was that we don't do enough, we haven't done enough.
Invading countries, you know, for their own good.
And who is his other big advisor?
The big new Brzezinski, who sort of gave us this whole modern world with his sucker trap that he did for the Soviet Union.
He's the one who started funding the international Islamic jihad, you know, in Afghanistan in order to bait the Soviets into invading.
You know, as you know...
Yeah, the arc of crisis.
And Brzezinski started supplying these radical violent extremists, Islamic extremists, in Afghanistan before the Soviet Union invaded.
They did it in order to help draw the Soviet Union into this invasion.
So, you know, that's so much for Charlie Wilson's war.
I mean, Charlie Wilson's war was our war.
We started with these guys.
So I don't think...
This is who Obama has surrounded.
And he's chosen these people, you know.
It's not like he's a pawn of, you know, I don't know, worm-tongue from Lord of the Rings or something.
And he chose these people because they reflect his values and what he sees, you know, what he wants to do.
Yeah, maybe Admiral Fallon would be a good fit for vice president now that he's retired.
Well, that would be a sort of masterstroke.
Because, you know, there's two things going on.
I mean, there's two things going on.
There's always two ways you can look at it.
And I'm just like anyone else.
I like to do the political, you know, insider baseball stuff, too.
I like to follow that.
And part of that, and that's part of where we talk about how Fallon has, you know, he's getting up bushes crawling.
That's good.
And there's some little political going on.
There's that aspect of politics, and I follow that, too.
But one thing I think is always bad is that this is as far as it goes for almost 95% of our media.
We just follow the horse race, the insider baseball, who's up, who's down, you know, what would be a cool thing to do.
I mean, I'm also interested in that.
I mean, that's fine.
But there's this whole other aspect about what it actually means in human terms.
And I think this is what, as you mentioned before, this is what is completely forgotten.
So while we're over here talking about Fallon and Bush and Cheney and, you know, who's up and who's down and what is, you know, on the other side, there's those three women and those three children blown to bits by a missile fired by Fallon.
And it's just hard to go back and forth.
And I think it's even worse now because during the election year, you see so many of these so-called distant blogs or progressive blogs.
That other element, that moral element, that human element, even spiritual element, the element of human beings being killed and churned into nothingness, you know, for the imperial domination of a small elite, that goes away.
And all we hear is the horse race stuff.
I mean, it's all about this, that, and the other.
Yeah.
It's really sad, too, that if there's any legitimate basis for American exceptionalism, it is that we have as our creed that everybody's born free with natural rights and natural dignity because they're a human being.
And yet our exceptionalism is our excuse for treating everyone else in the world as though they are not individuals.
Well, I know.
I mean, that's a, you know, stupid and tragic thing.
And I think, you know, I think it's a common human thing.
You say, reading that book, the Romans thought they were completely exceptional, too, and that was their same excuse for treating people like that, was that, well, we are the bearers of civilization and we come into this place, and if we have to kill 20,000 of these Gauls in order to civilize them, that's what we'll do, and then the rest of the, from generations on, they'll be civilized.
And so that was their excuse, too.
I mean, they're exceptional.
The gods are on our side, or as later on when they became, they suddenly became Christian, you know, was imposed by an emperor, then God is on our side, and it's just, you know, everyone, the British Empire was the same thing.
You know, everyone thinks that everyone's exceptional.
But as you say, you know, what is sort of bitterly ironic is that Americans' exceptionalism, you know, any idea that we could be exceptional is based on the idea of freedom and liberty and leaving people alone, and that's precisely what we don't do.
Yeah.
Sort of like, well, they hate us because we're free, so we'll just scrap the Bill of Rights, and that ought to call them off.
Yeah, right.
Maybe it's the long-term strategy.
Maybe that's what it is.
You know, Bush has made himself a dictator simply just to, you know, get up off someone's nose or something.
Yeah.
All right, everybody, that's Chris Floyd.
He's the author of the blog and the book Empire Burlesque, High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Empire.
And thanks again for joining us on Antiwar Radio, Chris.
Thank you.
