02/15/08 – Jonathan Schwarz – The Scott Horton Show

All right, folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And our first guest today is Jonathan Schwartz.
He's the author of the great blog, A Tiny Revolution, and he's the author of a book, which is, I forgot the name of it, but I'll ask him to tell me in a second.
And he's got a great new article at Tom Dispatch, and we're running it today on Antiwar.com.
The Lost Crystal Tapes.
Welcome back to the show, Jonathan.
Hey.
Good to talk to you again.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm very good.
Thank you.
And I'm very excited to talk about this Bill Crystal masterpiece.
Yeah.
Wait.
First, tell me the name of that book you wrote recently.
My book is a humor collection by myself and Michael Gerber.
It's a bunch of our stuff from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, Saturday Night Live, a bunch of other places, and it is called Our Comp.
Our Comp.
Very nice.
I need to get a copy of that.
And yeah, I guess I should have said that in the introduction.
I knew that, but I had forgotten to say that you're a writer at Saturday Night Live, right?
Well, some time ago, I contributed a bunch of stuff, my friend Mike Gerber and myself, to Weekend Update.
So yeah.
Oh, to Weekend Update.
Yeah, good.
I like that chick.
The one with the glasses.
What's her name?
Tina Fey.
Yeah.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Let's talk about the Lost Crystal tapes.
You found an old video of Bill Crystal and Dan Ellsberg on Washington Journal on the eve of War 2003, and apparently it was a riot.
That's right.
Now, Bill Crystal, he's the editor of the Weekly Standard, the leading neoconservative journal in America.
That's right.
For people who don't know, William Crystal is maybe the most prominent voice in all of America for war.
He's a leader of all kinds, certainly invading Iraq.
He is the son of Irving Crystal, who you refer to by many people as the founder of neoconservatism.
He is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which is a publication that Rupert Murdoch created basically on Crystal's recommendation, as I understand it, after the end of the first Bush administration.
He is on Fox News, of course, on Rupert Murdoch's television network, and now he has just been hired after his catastrophic performance over the past five years as a columnist for the New York Times.
So he is all over the place, and as I say, he loves all kinds of war, but particularly he was a loud voice for the invasion of Iraq.
And this is an appearance with William Crystal sitting down and talking across a table with Daniel Ellsberg, of course famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
And it took place just after the war had started back in March 2003, as you say.
And I had heard people say that they'd seen it, and that it was incredible, but it didn't appear to be available anywhere.
There was no, you know, nexus transcript of it.
I couldn't find it anywhere online, and I was finally, five years after the fact, able to dig it up, and it is just as great as everybody says.
Well, you know, the thing that came across kind of overall in the article is the difference between the characters, or not just the characters, but even just the entire approach taken by Crystal on one side and Ellsberg on the other.
Crystal is weaving myths, and Ellsberg is saying, these are the facts.
And the contrast just couldn't be more stark, I don't think.
Yeah, the funny thing is, on the exact same day this debate took place between the two of them, The Onion actually published the exact debate, in a sense, which was in their point-counterpoint, where, you may remember, other people may as well, the position of one person was, this war will destabilize the entire Mideast region and set off a global shockwave of anti-Americanism.
And then the counterpoint was a guy saying, no it won't.
And so, you know, the guy saying, no it won't, they say, this war will put an end to anti-Americanism, it will fan the flames of hatred even higher.
It won't.
A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster?
Sorry, no.
I disagree.
Yeah.
And so what you had was Ellsberg, who really knew the history both of Iraq and American foreign policy generally, telling it to Kristol, and Kristol, much of the time, had no idea what Ellsberg was talking about.
A lot of the rest of the time he pretended he didn't know what Ellsberg was talking about.
Yeah, well, and you talk about, too, how Kristol actually wrote a book about Iraq, and here's Ellsberg explaining how, no, really, the CIA supported Saddam Hussein ever since the 60s, and the CIA gave him lists of intellectuals to kill, and, you know.
And Kristol acted, or actually was shocked, do you think there, Jonathan?
Well, you know, it's always impossible to tell for sure with these guys.
I think part of the time he really was surprised, and I think part of the time he was pretty straightforwardly lying.
That's one of the very most important and worst-known things in the United States, what you just mentioned, is that Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll from the time he was a young man.
He was...
He was, like, 58, wasn't it?
59?
That's exactly right.
He was born, I believe, in 1936, and was a sort of rising young enforcer and stud for the Baathist Party in Iraq.
And they were not in power, his party was not in power, but they were trying to overthrow the then-ruler of Iraq, and was supported in this by the United States, because the then-ruler of Iraq had kicked the British out, and was no longer doing everything that we wanted people to do in the Middle East.
You know, was making noises about controlling Iraq's oil, and so forth.
So we wanted this guy gone, the Baathists wanted him gone, Saddam was a young Baathist, we involved Saddam in an assassination plot that we organized to kill this guy.
And that was 1958, 1959, Saddam had to flee because the assassination plot failed, but he was back in 1963, when a coup was organized, and it was successful.
This was during the Kennedy administration.
Now, there was some falling out between the various parts of the new regime over the next five years, and the Baathists were kind of being edged out of power.
So the U.S. supported another coup then, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, and it was at that point that the Baathists really took over.
There was a second bloodbath, there'd been one in 1963 that we'd helped out with, we'd given Saddam and his buddies lists of, nobody knows how many people, hundreds, thousands, communists, leftists, anybody who we didn't like, in Iraq.
And Saddam was one of the people who was in charge of, you know, killing them, not in the sense of getting orders, but in a hands-on, you know, take-them-out-and-shoot-them way.
So by 1968, the Baathists had pretty much intolerated their control of the government, and by then, Saddam was in his early 30s.
He was not the official ruler of Iraq, but he was very much the power behind the throne, and he became more and more the unquestioned ruler through the 70s, until it was formalized in the late 70s, there was another bloodbath connected to that.
During the 70s, we were not as allied with Iraq as we'd previously been.
Iraq was cozying up to the Soviet Union.
But they saw which way the wind was blowing, the Iraqis did, and they got the go-ahead from the United States again in 1980 to invade Iran, and then we started up our close relationship again in the 80s.
Right, and it's right around this time that Bill Kristol, the guy who is the number one cheerleader for the war, is at least feigning complete ignorance, and probably legitimately is completely ignorant of this history.
This is the time when he actually joined the Reagan-Bush administration that was doing all the supporting of Saddam during the 1980s.
Yes, and this is one of the things that Kristol lied about.
Of course, during the Reagan administration, we gave Iraq a ton of loans, we gave them munitions, we helped them get cluster bombs, all kinds of things to be organized.
We gave them intelligence, gave them satellite photos so that they could use chemical weapons and regular weapons on Iran more efficiently.
And then it sort of shifted after the Iran war ended, and we were still allied with them, still giving them money, still trying to lure them into our camp.
And then, through various miscalculations on both sides, Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.
But the thing that Kristol lied about was that he said, well, you know, we were not supporting Saddam when I was in the administration.
First of all, as I say, he was in the Reagan administration, so that was absolutely happening then.
And we absolutely supported Saddam during the first Bush administration.
This is Bush Sr. being elected in 1988 and then taking office in 1989, and our support for Saddam lasted pretty much right up until the brink of the invasion of Kuwait.
So that is something that William Kristol absolutely knew, and it's something he unquestionably just straight up lied about.
And he was the chief of staff to Vice President Quayle at that time.
Exactly.
So there's no way, you know, you're at the very top or near the very top of the U.S. government.
If you're the vice president's chief of staff, you are in the vice president's office, which is just across the street from the White House.
So if I'm remembering that correctly, in any case, you know, you're in all the most important meetings.
So that was just a preposterous lie on his part.
But the previous stuff about what happened in the 60s, I think he may have really not known.
And now you also talk about during the run-up to the war, where Kristol feigns ignorance of the military, Admiral William Crowe testifying before the Senate that if we just, you know, put some tough sanctions on Iraq, they'll probably get out of Kuwait within a year or so, and that the vice president, Quayle, you found where Quayle acknowledged this testimony back then in an official statement at the time that Kristol was his chief of staff.
This is really good work on your part, by the way.
Well, thank you.
You know, it could never be done without computers.
You know, everybody who does this kind of stuff now has, you know, the equivalent of thousands and thousands of Silicon employees who will go out and research things for you.
Yeah, it makes me seem smart sometimes.
Yeah, no, it's great.
It's like having a giant supplemental brain.
And so this is what happened.
Iraq invaded Kuwait in the very beginning of August 1990.
And the UN slapped extremely harsh sanctions on Iraq immediately.
And the idea was that they would be so painful for the Iraqi economy, would be so destructive for Iraqi military power, that Saddam would realize that it was really not worth his while to try to hold on to this, even without a war, and would leave.
Now, in the fall, as you were describing, of 1990, there were very, you know, well-known, respected, basically apolitical military figures, retired chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several of them, who came and testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And they said, we don't think we need to go to war right now.
We think that wars are incredibly destructive.
We think we're much better off if we can get them out of Kuwait without a war.
We say we put the sanctions on and give them, say, a year to work.
And if they don't work, then we'll still have the opportunity, the ability, certainly, to go to war.
And that's a far better option than saying, well, we can't wait.
And...
Would have been a lot better for Bush Sr.'s reelection campaign, too, if he'd put it off a little while.
Yeah, in retrospect.
And the interesting thing, and I didn't really have the chance to include this in the piece, is that that was, in fact, right.
The sanctions, combined with the threat of eventual war, most certainly had caused Saddam to think that he had to get out of Kuwait.
And what nobody knows, even Ellsberg really didn't talk about this on the show, is that towards the end of 1990, the very beginning of 1991, before the war started in mid-January, the Iraqi government was frantically trying to come up with some sort of face-saving way of getting out of Kuwait.
Why don't you tell us more about that?
Well, the calculation within the Saddam regime we know something about now, because we captured all their top people in 2003.
We have a bunch of their government documents, so we know pretty much what they were thinking.
And one of Saddam's reasons for wanting to take Kuwait was that the Iraqi military, with the war in Iran ended, was gigantic, and was sitting around, and didn't really have anything to do.
And Saddam knew very well that armies in Iraq had long been, because he participated in this, breeding grounds for coups.
And Iraq had been defeated, Saddam had cost Iraq billions of dollars, an enormous amount of people had been killed, an enormous amount of people had been crippled, the economy was in shambles.
And he was thinking, well, you know, I'm in trouble now, you know, if I just leave these generals alone, without anything to do, they're going to see an opportunity to knock me off.
And it's something that Saddam said, as best we can tell, although the US government has not been very forthcoming about his precise words, is that that was part of his calculation, that he basically wanted to send the army off to have something to keep them occupied.
And that is part of why he went into Kuwait, and it's part of the reason why they needed to find out some sort of formulation that would allow them to get out of Kuwait, without it being such a gigantic defeat for Saddam, that the military would then say, okay, this guy's definitely got to go now.
So they were trying to just, you know, just to come up with some sort of thing where they say, okay, well, we're going to get out of Kuwait, but the international community agrees that someday there's going to be some sort of conference about who really owns these two tiny little islands that we've always argued about with Kuwait.
And Saddam said, people now know, the US government is giving me a choice between leaving Kuwait and being overthrown, or staying in Kuwait and being kicked out militarily.
And from the perspective of somebody like Saddam, you know, you're going to stay in Kuwait if the only other option is that, you know, you're going to be killed in a coup.
Well now, did George Bush know all this, and Dan Quayle and James Baker and all the guys back then, that Saddam, were these really good faith efforts to make a peace deal before he got bombed?
Well, you know, of course, there's never any way to know in such situations, because it was never tested.
I think that we can pretty much say now, given what we know, that yes, you know, I mean, if you want to attribute good faith to Saddam, it's not really the normal way that normal people have good faith, but he saw the choice in front of him, and he understood and respected overwhelming power.
And it's almost certainly the case, you know, we could have gotten him out of Kuwait without a war, but in fact, the United States very much wanted a war.
And it was during this period, during fall of 1990, they were trying to head off any discussion in which people would say, from other countries, from the United States, you know, this can happen without a war.
Dick Cheney went to Saudi Arabia, said to the royals there, you know, we must have a war with Iraq.
And their reasoning was that Saddam had gotten too big for his britches.
And it was pretty much what happened, it went on for the next 13 years, until 2003, which is that we could not allow Saddam to demonstrate that he had defied the United States in some way.
You know, he had disobeyed orders by going into Kuwait, or so we felt it looked like, you know, there really weren't any orders.
Saddam didn't understand that the United States was going to object to it.
But we could not allow somebody to be seen to defy the United States on the world stage and survive.
And he had this big army they developed.
And so we had to take him down as much as possible, do as much damage to the militarily, and hopefully get him overthrown in the process by the Sunni military elite in Iraq.
And we wanted war, you know, and we would not allow the crisis to be settled peacefully.
And so now back to what Crystal was saying.
Hey, wait, hold on one second, everybody, it's Jonathan Schwartz from A Tiny Revolution.
I wanted to play you a couple of soundbites here that I found the other day to, well, in a sense, add a little levity.
They had kids in incubators, and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
Now see, the thing is, it's really the Bush senior one is the funnier one than the girl.
Let me play that one again.
They had kids in incubators, and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
So it seems to me that he knows he's lying right there.
They had incubators, and they threw the kids, the kids out of the incubators?
What was he talking about?
Yeah, he knew he was lying when he said that.
Yeah, you know, unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to get to this in the piece.
But, you know, probably people listening to this know that was one of the greatest, most useful propaganda atrocity stories in history.
It had a huge effect in mobilizing public opinion behind the war.
You might have heard the Germans cutting the arms off the Belgian babies, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, for the people who don't know, that woman speaking there was probably from the hearings that Congress had organized, in fact, by the late Tom Lantos, who just died.
And they were held in front of the Human Rights Caucus, which meant that they were not under oath, which was important because the people there were lying.
That woman probably was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
Right, that's exactly who it was, yeah.
That's right.
And, of course, that was not known to anyone at the time, because, you know...
Well, and that's a really big deal, too, because that was the one that turned the editorial pages of the newspapers across this country in favor of the war.
People were really skeptical, and it was that piece of propaganda that really pushed everything from, you know, 45 percent over to 55.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
No, it was huge, and the Bush administration understood how useful it was.
They sent out Bush to say that, you know, not just in that recording.
And congratulations, by the way, for digging that up, because that's great stuff.
I hope that's online somewhere.
Yeah, well, in fact, one of my guests brought it up the other day in the interview, and I quickly turned my mic down and typed in, babies, incubators, YouTube, and bam, it came right up from some documentary, just a short clip that had both of those sound bites in it.
Yeah, no, that's fantastic.
It really goes to show, as I say, you know, it's like all of us have a million silicon research assistants that we can send out and get this stuff.
Isn't it great?
Yeah, it's fantastic.
You know, before, you would have had to, like, work for the government to, like, dig up these obscure pieces of videotape, these weird facts.
Hey, let me ask you about Bill Kristol and what he had to say about the second great American Bay of Pigs in 1991, when George Bush's administration, George Bush personally, Bush Sr., told the Kurds and the Shiites to rise up, to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and that we would back them up, and then left them high and dry.
What was Kristol's take on that in this Washington Journal episode?
Well, this is some tremendously fancy footwork by Kristol, because the case he's trying to make in 2003 is, yes, we did allow this popular uprising at the end of the Gulf War, when Saddam was most vulnerable, this uprising in both the south and the north of Iraq, the south by the Shia and the north by the Kurds.
We allowed him to crush this uprising.
We didn't support them.
And Kristol is saying, in 2003, you know, I think that was a political mistake.
I think it was a moral mistake.
Those are his exact words.
And so he's making the case that now is our opportunity to rectify what was a mistake then, and look at me.
I'm really a decent human being.
Part of my motivation for the war was oil.
Oh, that has nothing to do with it.
I care about humanity.
And so that's a legitimate perspective to have, if you're willing to be someone who says, you know, I think that the people in the first Bush administration in 1991 were monsters, which, in fact, they were.
I mean, this was pure power politics.
It demonstrated that all this crying about babies and incubators, you know, just several months before, was completely bogus.
They couldn't care less how many people died.
The reason that they did not support the uprising, and in fact, a lot more than not support, I mean, there's a bunch of evidence that we sort of actively undermined the uprising.
Yeah, well, you know, there's footage, and I think I have this on a videotape on my shelf somewhere.
Maybe this is available online, too.
But there's footage of Schwarzkopf at the table with the Iraqis saying, oh, the helicopters, yeah, you can keep the helicopters.
Yeah, yeah, exactly right.
We certainly could have and clearly should have said, look, you know, we control the airspace of Iraq.
You're not going to fly anything.
And we let them go ahead and use the helicopters.
We stood by really a matter of miles away, as this is something almost nobody knows, but it's been recently confirmed, as Saddam used chemical weapons against the uprising.
In 1991.
That's recently confirmed where?
That is confirmed in the CIA's 2004 report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.
The Dufour report about we can't find anything.
We can't find anything.
But what we did find out for sure is something that people had been talking about since 1991, that because there had been people coming to the US lines, you know, the US military that was still there partially occupying southern Iraq, and they had what were clearly burns from chemical weapons.
And they're saying they're using chemical weapons on us.
I wonder if the Gulf War Illness Lobby has gotten specific information about where and when those chemical weapons were used in relation to American soldiers occupying the southern half of that country during that time.
Yes, that, in fact, you are asking exactly the right question.
I have long wondered that myself.
For people who don't know, you know, a lot of people think that Gulf War syndrome was caused by exposure to chemical weapons during the Gulf War.
And the story up until now had been, well, you know, we bombed some of their chemical weapons depots.
And, you know, there are these gigantic explosions, and the chemical weapons went off, and people got sort of slight exposure to them because of the way the wind was blowing.
But it certainly seems plausible to me.
I don't have any information on this, but it certainly seems plausible to me that people may have been exposed to them because they were very close by to them not being blown up, being actually used.
Can you imagine?
All right, now, well, and I guess this is built on speculation, but, well, actually not.
I mean, whether this actually had anything to do with the Gulf War Illness or not, imagine the American government putting American soldiers occupying southern Iraq after winning the Operation Desert Storm War in 1991, and then allowing the Iraqi army that they just defeated to put down an uprising that we invited with chemical weapons while our soldiers are standing nearby.
Exactly right.
And if William Crystal wanted to say that, then my perspective would be, okay, you know, he's genuinely changed his mind.
He's willing to go on TV and say the first Bush administration acted in a way that was absolutely repellent.
People should know about this.
People should know who George Bush Sr. really is.
People should know about how little he really cares about people in Iraq, how little he really cares about American soldiers.
Now, that would be something that would be impressive.
Every now and then, somebody comes out of government and does things like that.
But here's where the fancy footwork comes in on Crystal's part.
As soon as Ellsberg said, so you're saying that it was an immoral decision, and Ellsberg was saying, you know, I agree with that.
Yes, it was immoral.
Crystal, you can see the wheels turning in his head.
I don't think these were simply immoral decisions by the president.
These were judgment calls.
There were reasons.
There were arguments.
And so you could tell, as I say, you could see the wheels turning because he needs to protect his career.
It's not very good for your career to go on TV and say, well, you know, the current president's father, he's a monster, and he doesn't care about human life at all.
That is not going to help you out when all of your patrons are Republicans.
And so Crystal straddled the fence very, very adroitly, saying like, well, you know, I'm somebody who really cares about the Iraqi people, and I think it was a mistake back in 1991.
Oh, but it wasn't immoral.
It was a very complicated judgment call, and, you know, we can't say anything bad about the president back in 1991.
Sure, well, and I'm sure that's the exact same argument he'd make about this war that's killed anywhere from hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people up to a million or more.
Right.
Well, you know, it was a judgment call, and we, you know, made decisions.
Yes, and if you go back through history, well, you don't have to go very far.
If you were to get Saddam on the radio, right, if you could bring him back to life and ask him about this, he would say, well, you know, these were judgment calls.
Right.
You know, there were arguments on both sides, and, you know, it's very difficult if you don't understand when you're not, you know, sitting in the office yourself, you've got to make decisions.
Yeah, you know what?
I hate to say it, well, I don't know why I hate to say it, if only maybe because I don't have my footnote handy with me right now, but there was an interview that Bill Clinton gave shortly after he left office, and I think it may have been the one in Rolling Stone where he said, oh, yeah, you know, I've always thought they should legalize pot, you know, right after he wasn't the president anymore, but where, and that may not be the right interview.
Anyway, he says, well, you know, at the end of the day, you hope you do more good than harm.
That's the, that's all that matters is that, you know, 51% of what you did, a preponderance of what you did is, in your judgment, good.
And, and all the, you know, individual rights that have been violated and whatever, that's not really the measure.
The measure is whether, to yourself, you can say that you're good outweighed you're bad.
That's exactly right, and I think that's, that's worth digging up, because that's, that's the way the world looks to all of these guys.
I bet you that you could find quotes of Saddam Hussein saying the very same stuff, you know?
Yeah, and, and one thing that we know that he did say is, when he was being interviewed by this one FBI agent after we captured him, was about the use of chemical weapons to put down the Kurdish rebellion during the 80s in northern Iraq.
And the guy asked him, you know, who ordered the use of chemical weapons?
And Saddam said, well, I did.
And he asked, well, why did you do that?
And Saddam's perspective was, well, you know, it was necessary.
There you go.
You know, it's not that Saddam thought, I just, you know, I love to bathe in human blood.
It's fantastic.
It makes my complexion so nice and clear.
No, I mean, they do it because they feel, you know, sometimes you've got to make tough decisions.
You've got to go off and kill people in order to serve a larger objective.
And Saddam would say he was serving the larger objective of Iraq.
And President Bush, President Bush Sr. would tell you in 1991, you know, he was serving the larger objective of the United States.
Yeah.
Although, you know, it's funny because the leaders are never as absurd, as bloody as their hands are.
They're never as absurd as their court jester intellectual types like Crystal.
I mean, this guy, I think you could write a book from all the different blog entries on all the different blogs documenting all the different things he's been wrong about.
You could probably write an encyclopedia of Bill Crystal wrong about everything, lying most of the time, revising history, you know, with every new sentence out of his mouth.
That guy, the guy ought to be a laughing stock.
And yet somehow he keeps getting rehired.
Well, I think that's the important thing about William Crystal.
I would actually say, even though I spent all this time writing this piece about him, that as a person, you know, as an individual, he has no importance at all.
And you really even shouldn't get angry at him.
I mean, what matters is the big institutions.
What matters is Rupert Murdoch.
What matters is the New York Times deciding that this is not some crazy man ranting in his basement, but this is somebody who really should be taken seriously.
And as the New York Times editor, whose job it was to justify hiring him, said, you know, he's a serious, respected intellectual.
And that's the problem, is that we have places that think he's serious, that think he's respected.
You know, as a person, who cares?
I mean, I don't care if he's sitting around talking to his friends about this.
What matters is the people who give him the opportunity to go out and tell the world all of these things.
And do not, you will notice, hire Daniel Ellsberg.
If you go through this two hours, he was right about every single thing.
He foresaw precisely what was going to happen.
And has he been hired by the New York Times?
Is he serious and respected?
No, of course not.
But so I think it's important not to get caught up in being mad at, like, William Crystal individually.
He doesn't matter.
Well, yeah, the problem is that there are people with power who are willing to listen to him.
And in fact, I'm sure you saw the article by John B. Judas about Neo McCain, where he says that, in fact, he kind of directly confronts John McCain in an interview about, you know, you sure do pal around with this William Crystal guy a lot.
You know how discredited he is, and how insane his ideas are considered by the rest of us, don't you?
And McCain kind of went, oh, I don't know.
I like the weekly standard.
Yeah, well, the weekly standard, in fact, has been a huge supporter of McCain since 2000.
William Crystal has been a big supporter of McCain since 2000.
And if John McCain becomes president, believe me, there will be much, much, much more William Crystal to come.
William Crystal is indeed, I think officially, he's an unpaid advisor to the McCain campaign.
But, you know, if you want more William Crystal, vote McCain.
Oh, man.
Can you imagine the American people electing the neocons again?
After two terms in a row?
It's possible.
I would...
I don't think it's the most likely outcome of this election, but it certainly is possible.
And people should understand what they're getting into.
You're voting for a lot more war.
A funny footnote about John B. Judas.
I think it's John B. Judas.
John something Judas.
Anyway, back in 1995, and you can find this online, too, he wrote a thing in Foreign Affairs called From Trotskyism to Anachronism.
And it was all about celebrating the end of neoconservative influence in Washington, D.C. from 1995.
That's great.
That's interesting.
Well, you know, I mean, the thing that we know about these guys now and he might have been correct that, you know, if we hadn't had the September 11th attack that they would have remained less powerful.
That they would have sort of been shunted off to the side.
Not permanently, but they wouldn't have had the sway that they did after the attack.
But no matter who wins, they're going to still be around.
And even some of them, it's quite possible, you know, will be part of a Democratic administration.
There's no...
One shouldn't believe that just because there's a Democratic president that there's not going to be any neoconservatives with a year of power.
Yeah, although there does kind of seem to be a war in heaven going on between the Brzezinski types and the neocons.
In fact, Justin Armando's article today is about that.
Well, I'll certainly have to check that out.
I think that's exactly right.
There's a fight that, you know, down here on the ground, and I think for most people why this matters because these two groups are actually not all that different.
Brzezinski is certainly better or rather have him be an advisor to a president than William Kristol.
But it's sort of a fight between the sort of, as I like to say, the non-insane evil people and the evil people who are completely bonkers.
Yeah, who create their own reality as they go around, as they proclaim.
Right, and so the non-crazy evil people at least will do evil things in a rational way.
And the William Kristols will do exactly what we've seen for the past five years and they really have no idea.
They're so disconnected from reality that they don't even know most of the catastrophes that they've created.
If you went and talked to William Kristol I bet he'd tell you that Iraq is going great.
Yeah, well and he does write stuff like that all the time.
To read the Weekly Standard is to kind of go through the looking glass.
It's a strange place.
Yeah, no, it's exactly right and I think it's a mistake to think that they, for the most part, don't truly believe it.
They, as you say, have created their own self-enclosed fantasy world.
Yeah, you know I interviewed Jim Lowe the other day and that was one of the things he says.
They've never been interested in convincing people on a wide scale.
Ever since they were Trotskyites way, way back in the day it's always been very small circulation magazines but with very important receiving end on that circulation list.
And basically just talking to each other.
He said, that's how the Iraq War happened.
These guys really all believed each other's arguments and they refused to hear anything from anyone else.
They only talked to each other.
And so, yeah, they were lying and coming up with what they thought they needed to convince us but to great degrees they believed their own BS.
Yeah, that's right and it's one of the reasons why I think it's important to understand this.
If you just think that they're lying then you're going to underestimate them.
What is true about them is that they are quite genuinely nuts.
Yeah.
Alright, this has been great.
Everybody, Jonathan Schwartz he's the author of Our Conf and he writes at A Tiny Revolution and that's the website, right?
At tinyrevolution.com Actually, there's no letter A.
It's just tinyrevolution.
Alright, thanks very much for your time today.
Thank you.