All right, everybody, welcome back to Antiwar Radio and Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our guest today is Ira Chernus.
He is the author of American Nonviolence, the History of an Idea and Monsters to Destroy the Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, and I kind of love that morality-based foreign policy.
He wrote recently an article for TomDispatch.com, and of course we run all of Tom Englehart's joint and singular articles at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
This one is called The General and the Trap by Ira Chernus and Tom Englehart.
Welcome to the show, sir.
All right, let's talk about General Petraeus and his performance before the Imperial Senate yesterday and that of Ambassador Crocker as well.
Last week, all hell broke loose in the south of Iraq as the Badr forces fought the Sauder forces and the Sauder forces seemed to come out on top.
How accurate was General Petraeus' portrayal of last week's violence before the Senate yesterday, Professor?
Well, of course, he's always putting his spin on it, and I don't think that accuracy is the crucial issue here.
I think there are people far more expert than I am who can give you all the details about why Petraeus' testimony was not accurate, why it's all trying to make things, of course, look much better than they are.
My concern is how does this come across to the American people, this debate where Democrats and war critics think they have Petraeus trapped because his testimony is so much at odds with so many of the facts.
But my concern is that for an awful lot of Americans who will vote in November, the facts are not really the crucial issue.
This is all a kind of symbolic drama, and as war always is a symbolic drama, and that behind all the talk about the facts, an awful lot of people hear just one question, is America winning or is America losing?
And all this talk about levels of violence and the surge and such, for an awful lot of people it translates into a very simplistic kind of question of are we winners or losers?
And my concern is that by just focusing on this pretty narrow debate about the level of violence in Iraq, that the Democrats are trapping themselves in a position where they end up sounding like they're saying, hey, we Americans are losers.
And there's an awful lot of people in this country that just don't want to hear that.
And from the other side, they've got John McCain saying, no, no, when they've got Petraeus to think, we are the winners if we just stick with it.
And you know what?
McCain is doing surprisingly well in the polls.
And I think that part of it is because he's the one who's touting America as a winner, and the Democrats end up, even though the Democrats have their facts right, and are closer to the truth, certainly, of what's going on in Iraq, the Democrats end up sounding like they're just saying America is a loser.
And McCain is doing pretty well on that, in that debate, I'm afraid.
So it all comes down to the narrative and Americans' self-esteem.
Well, of course, that's not the whole story.
But it's a part of the story that isn't getting very much attention.
And I have the good fortune that I was trained as a historian of religion.
That's still my profession.
And I do political commentary kind of as a sideline.
So when I bring those two together, I see a kind of an angle on it that other people, I think, are not paying enough attention to.
And of course, you know, we read over and over again that this has been the Democrats' problem for a couple or three decades now, is that the voters always agree with Democrats on the policy issues.
But the Democrats do not have a compelling narrative.
And the Democrats do not wield the symbols of American culture and American history, particularly the patriotic symbols.
They don't use them nearly as well as the Republicans do.
And when it comes right down to it, people will vote against their own policy views and against their own interests in favor of a narrative that feels good to them.
Not everybody votes that way, of course.
But enough people that it can tip an election.
That's what happened in 2004.
And the polls indicate that there's a possibility that that may happen again this November.
Well, and this is something that we often talk about on this show, is criticizing the media for never following up with, for example, John McCain, when he says, no, we have to have a victory and so forth.
No one ever, or they even define the goal itself as victory.
But nobody ever follows up and says, yeah, but what does that mean?
Does that mean backing the Baathists or does that mean backing the Iranians or both like we're doing now or what?
No one ever follows up.
And what you're saying is that's because the facts on the ground really don't matter.
That's why John McCain doesn't ever bother learning them.
That's all he has to say.
The goal is victory and anything less is unacceptable and on and on and top gun.
And people are still buying this crap.
Well, it's true that McCain's playing fast and loose with the facts or not even knowing the facts doesn't seem to hurt him.
He does get away with it.
And I think that's one indication that so much of this is being played out in this symbolic level that the literal facts are kind of swept aside.
And you're right, generally, anybody who is talking in the traditional language of the patriotic American narrative of triumph and goodness and order and stability tends to get a free ride from the media because there's something kind of sacred about that language.
And anybody who directly criticizes that language or calls it into question, you can pretty quickly get in trouble in this country.
I think that's a lot of the reason that the Democrats backed off in Congress.
You know, the Democrats could have pushed for some serious legislation that would have made it much harder for the Bush administration to prosecute the war.
And the Democrats said openly, we're afraid of backlash at the polls.
And I know that all the people on the left and the war critics, oh, you're cowards and you're a bunch of wimps.
But I think we should take what what these congressmen and women say really seriously.
Their job is to read public opinion.
And I think maybe they their job is not necessarily to cast votes that are going to get them defeated the next time around.
Yeah, well, and the Democrats, not that I support them in any sense, but, you know, for the sake of argument, so forth, they basically are trying they're always trying to live up to the Republican ideal of being a tough guy, which they never can.
They can't find an alternative narrative.
So they can only fail at trying to follow George Bush's.
And that's exactly the problem.
And the alternative narratives are out there.
They're available.
But it would take a lot of courage and a lot of skill to run on those alternative narratives.
And that's why I am urging Democrats to consider that, though, because as long as they're stuck inside this kind of traditional patriotic narrative as the basis for the political debate, then all this throwing facts back and forth.
I mean, it's certainly important to keep those facts and those truths in the air.
But in the long run, they may not be able to overcome their disadvantage because the Republicans do work with this patriotic narrative so much more effectively.
And so the Democrats, I mean, we've got to wait and see what happens in November.
You know, if a Democrat wins, all well and good.
But now, given the serious possibility that McCain may win, I think Democrats have to reconsider whether they shouldn't be reframing the debate.
You know, the political experts will tell you that the first thing you got to do when you're a candidate is to control the terms of the debate, right?
You've got to control the frame.
And that's what the Democrats are not very effective at doing, even though on policy issues they always come out winners.
You know, Chris Matthews once said that basically the American understanding, and I just hate the fact of how accurate this is, I think the American people see the Republicans and the Democrats as the daddy party and the mommy party.
And who do you want to have in charge, the mommy or the daddy?
And in times of danger, you need daddy.
And let's give credit, Chris Matthews took that from George Lakoff, who is one of our most astute analysts of political language.
And Lakoff has been saying this, telling the Democrats this for years and years.
And yet we see Hillary Clinton's campaign putting so much, pinning so much of their hopes on that famous phone call at 3 a.m. commercial, which is all about trying to tell us that a woman can be just as good a daddy as any man.
And that's the commercial that probably got more attention than any other commercial that's been run in the campaign so far.
Yet one more indicator that all these questions about who will take care of us, who's tough, who's the John Wayne look-alike that we can put in the White House, these are still the issues that get so much attention in the media and in the public.
Yeah, and again, that's what people like, even though clearly the policy is wrong and there are a thousand great arguments that could be made in a very patriotic, pro-America kind of way that, you know, I mean, hell, 81 percent told the New York Times last week that we're headed in the wrong direction.
And any politician ought to be able to get up there, list ten reasons why and ten reasons to go this way or that way instead or whatever, and, you know, all this, the fact that it all comes down simply to martial posturing, I don't know, in a sense, I can't help but think that this is just an indictment of mass democracy in the first place.
I mean, this is supposed to be a country full of adults, not a country full of little kids who get pushed around by a stupid 30-second advertisement on TV.
Well, I think the truth is that we all have the little kid inside of us.
Some of us try to be more adult, more rational, more analytical, but deep down, we're all susceptible to those emotional appeals.
And one of the fundamental problems that we're dealing with in a poll that says, you know, we're headed in the wrong direction, is that even though people will tell the pollsters, oh, I want change, right?
Everybody's for change.
But, you know, they really mean, so many people mean, I want things to change so that they'll get back to the way I imagine things used to be.
And this, again, in the study of religion, we find over and over again that religious myths and rituals and symbols so often speak about a sense of certainty, a sense of an unchanging reality that people can use as a kind of foundation for their lives.
And we, so many people now look to the political process, as well as religion, or sometimes even instead of religion, they look to the political process for symbols of stability, symbols of certainty, of an unchanging truth.
I think that's the wrong place to look.
I don't think it's very healthy for us to build our political life on some sort of a quest for certainty, when in fact there isn't any, but people do it.
And so the sense of the candidate who comes along and says, well, I can put things right again, I can make this country head in the right direction, by going back to those old tried-and-true myths and stories and those old certainties that we imagine once were the basis of life.
They probably never were, but that's what we imagine.
And again, Republicans have been, in recent years, better than Democrats.
I mean, not always, but Franklin Roosevelt was a master at taking new policies and presenting them in the language of old tried-and-true certainties, and probably could not have gotten a lot of his new policies supported if he hadn't been so good at that language of traditional American myths and narratives.
But since Roosevelt, I'm not sure we've had a Democrat, certainly not in recent decades, we haven't had a Democrat who's been really skillful at that.
Well, it's almost like the vote is the tithe in the civic religion.
And, yeah, you know, whether there's a civic religion or not, we specialists debate about that term a lot, but certainly people do look to a sense of nationalism, a sense of national pride, but even on a global scale, what people are looking for is some sense of an unchanging truth, and the one indicator of that is how popular this word stability has become.
And this is a big part of the appeal that the Bush administration's policies in Iraq still have, even though most people know that these policies are failures.
The administration keeps saying over and over again, we want stability in Iraq.
We want stability.
And people like that word because so many people feel that they have no stability in their own lives for economic reasons, for cultural, social reasons.
And so anybody who's going to promise them stability in any way is going to be appealing.
It doesn't mean you're guaranteed to win by playing on that word, but it packs a pretty powerful emotional punch.
Right.
It's just like getting a really clever font and printing new on your package of laundry detergent.
Wow.
And again, there are, have been for years and years, specialists in political symbolism who have been explaining how it works, some of them getting paid very, very well as consultants by the Democrats, as well as the Republicans.
And yet somehow the message of the importance of these symbols never quite seems to get across to the Democrats the way it does to the Republicans.
Historically, do people ever get tired of the drumbeat of war?
I mean, it seems like, you know, the polls say that the American people are opposed to this war now.
And I guess ever since at least Hurricane Katrina, the American people aren't so gung ho behind this administration and the policy of world domination and so forth.
And yet, you know, as you explained, McCain's still in the running just because he puts out in front this tough exterior and this leadership quality.
Historically, do people ever just get sick of this?
The American people have always been ambivalent about war.
We should not overestimate how much Americans have loved war or been warlike people because there was huge opposition to the Civil War, to the Spanish-American War, to World War I, even to World War II before Pearl Harbor, and certainly to the Korean War, the Vietnam War.
You know, just about every war this country's ever been in has faced really major opposition.
But there's this great tension that on the one hand, when people use, let's say, the left side of the brain, they look at policies, they look at cost-benefit analysis, and they say, war doesn't make any sense.
But then there's that other side of the brain that kicks in, that raises all these emotions, that responds to these symbols and these patriotic narratives.
And we always end up, as a people, caught between those two.
And if we look back at presidential elections, most of the time, when the chips are down, it's that patriotic symbolism which wins the day.
And unfortunately, war is the simplest way to get across that patriotic message.
Now, as I said before, there are alternatives.
Nobody was more patriotic than Martin Luther King, Jr.
And nobody ever spoke about the virtues of America in more eloquent terms, say, than Dr. King did.
And yet he also said, my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.
So I think he's a fine example of how one can put together patriotic symbols, symbols of American greatness, in ways that lead you away from war, directly toward peace and nonviolence.
And I'd like to see more Democrats and Republicans, as well, using the tremendous resources of language and symbolism that Dr. King left to us, just as one very good example of how it could be done differently.
Yeah, I want to sneak in here.
Did you ever see that episode of South Park, where Eric Cartman goes back in time, and he sees the Constitutional Convention, and, well, and the Declaration of Independence kind of mixed into one?
But anyway, the point was, they decided that they would guarantee freedom of speech, so that they could wage war all the time, and yet let almost half the population or so oppose it.
That way, we could claim to be a peaceful country at the same time that we're killing people all the time.
And we have our cake and eat it, too.
And it's true that to some extent, we are manipulated by these symbols.
But at the same time, I think there's a lot more democracy in this country than people often let on.
When enough people feel strongly enough about an issue, they generally get their way.
I mean, look what happened to the Bush administration's proposal to privatize Social Security.
It didn't last very long at all.
That was supposed to be a centerpiece of Bush's second term, and it disappeared real fast, because the people didn't want it.
So if enough people don't want something and don't want it badly enough, politicians' job is to get votes.
And they will, in fact, go with the way the political wind blows, if it blows strongly enough.
On the other hand, you have Cheney having said fairly recently that, I think he said, as long as you get about 30% support for a war, you can keep up the war.
What that tells you is that the 70% who oppose the war, their opposition is shallow.
Did he say that out loud?
I believe he did.
I can't give you the exact quote, but I believe he did say it.
I think he said about 30%.
Oh, that's great.
I've got to find that quote.
Now, you wrote this book, Monsters to Destroy, which is paraphrased from John Quincy Adams, saying that's what America doesn't do, is go abroad seeking monsters to destroy.
It's Monsters to Destroy, the neoconservative war on terror and sin.
Certainly, the arguments in the book are along these same lines, only specifically in regards to the neoconservative.
So I guess, I haven't read the book, but I guess that's part of the narrative of the anti-war forces about the neocons, is that the neocons believe that in order to make a man out of everybody, you've got to send them off to war, that our society will fall apart if they can't get people to rally around these symbols of nationalism and that kind of thing, that this is actually a big part of their motivation, is exactly what you're warning against.
And what I found is that if I did research on the neocons, that they originated primarily as people concerned about our own culture here at home.
The foreign policy was a kind of secondary issue for them.
They're always looking for these symbols of, as you say, manliness, symbols of people being obedient, following authority, and it was all a response to the 60s.
They were afraid that society was being torn apart by radicals who rejected this tradition of hierarchical authority.
But I do have one chapter in the book about liberals.
And increasingly, I wish I had paid more attention to the liberals in my recent writing, more focused on them, because the liberals, going back to the Cold War liberals, Truman and Dean Acheson, and then Kennedy and George Bundy and Rusk, and all the people who brought us Vietnam, they are using the same kind of mythology of patriotism, of John Wayne, macho imagery, of the virtue of the warrior.
I don't know if they believe it or not.
I think the neocons tend to take it more seriously.
I think the liberals tend to use that imagery, because they do want an American empire.
They think it's benign, they think it's for the good of the whole country.
But they can't come out and say that directly, because the American people won't vote for empire on a kind of multinational, capitalist, triumphal basis.
They need the language, the traditional language of patriotism.
And so they're kind of caught, the liberals, having to try to use that language, because they don't have any other language to support their imperialist policies.
But again, we come back to that they don't use that language as well as Republicans.
Yet they're afraid to try any new language, because they're afraid that it will undermine the actual policies, the global economic and military policies that they're so attached to.
Yeah, well, you just want America to be defeated.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
I was just playing.
I assume you're joking here.
Yeah, yeah, I am.
Actually, I just went over this article by Fred Kagan, the author of The Surge, there from the American Enterprise Institute.
And he specifically cited the glee of the anti-war forces every time there was a setback in Iraq, as though that really is what people like you and people like myself, that's what we do all day is we sit around taking pleasure in everything that goes wrong.
And I guess that's convincing to the readers of the Weekly Standard.
I don't know.
Unfortunately, there's a thread of truth in that.
I think you, I'm sure, know people and I know people who do actually take some joy in that.
And the sad thing about this is that we fall into, we on the left, so easily fall into this kind of trap of the kind of us against them thinking as though Bush is our enemy, as though Bush is some kind of a demon.
And this makes me very sad, because what we need to be creating a model of a different kind of thinking that doesn't divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys, doesn't call for the good guys to defeat the bad guys.
But it's true that those of us on the left, those of us who are against the war, we're also tempted to fall into that kind of dualistic thinking.
We have to be really careful in our guard to avoid that.
Certainly, people like Kagan overstate that.
And we know that those of us who have opposed the war from the beginning, when things get worse in Iraq, our overwhelming feeling is sadness and grief for the tragedy that's going on there.
I'm a libertarian, actually, not on the left.
And my way of attempting, I don't know, to me, this is the best way, but other people might disagree, but it seems to me the best way of breaking down the us versus them mentality is individualism.
And that way, the people of Iraq aren't them at all, but they're just individual human beings like we are.
And that to me seems, I don't know, that's what makes me opposed to war, right?
What we're talking about is mass violation of individual human rights.
Well, here, I think you and I would have some philosophical differences and differences in our theories about society.
And one of the most interesting things that's happened during this tragic Iraq war is the fact that people like you and people like me, who come from very different political places, can talk together.
And we can talk together in a civil way, because I've had these kinds of conversations with other libertarian folks before, and we can say, look, here's where we agree, here's where we disagree.
But we're actually creating a kind of model of a kind of civil discourse between people who come from very different places on the political spectrum.
And that may turn out in the long run to be one of the most interesting, most important developments of the early 21st century, because I'm not sure it's happened before in quite as powerful a way.
The fact that you've got a special place on your web page for Tom Englehart's site, for example, is terrific testimony to kind of alliances and partnerships, I think, among people who previously would have kept each other at a distance.
Yeah, I'm really proud to be part of antiwar.com, which is really just the shining example of how to do this, where we'll literally run articles by Pat Buchanan and Daniel Ellsberg right next to each other on the same day.
And this is actually the narrative that I'm trying to sell.
Somehow the narrative stuck in my head in community college.
When I learned about FDR, they talked about the political realignment that, you know, this party wins, that party wins, et cetera, et cetera.
But there are a few times in American history where you really have a realignment of forces.
And that's what happened, obviously, in 1933 or 1932, 33, and the rise to power of the New Deal coalition and that kind of thing.
And that's what I want, is a realignment of, well, the Jeffersonians on one side, which can come from the right and the left.
And obviously the libertarians, I think, would be, I guess, considered the center of the right and left Jeffersonians.
And then let all the Jacksonians and the Hamiltonians and the Wilsonians, you know, form the party, the Republican Democrats or whatever, and they can be the party of taxes, tyranny and death.
And then we'll have people who actually care about liberty, want limited government and decentralization of power.
I think, you know, that's actually some real progress, I think, on the left in the last few years is people taking a second look at the idea of states' rights or it's really states' reserve powers.
States don't have rights, but you know what I mean.
Where people are looking again at federalism and saying, you know, maybe turning everything over to D.C. isn't such a good idea after all.
And I've talked with a lot of the guys from Counterpunch and places like that about this kind of thing.
And that's what I really want to see, is, you know, William Norman Grigg, formerly of the New American Magazine, and Noam Chomsky and Lute Rockwell and all of us people who are genuinely opposed to the warfare state and the police state to, eh, maybe put aside our differences on the welfare state and the regulatory state for a while and try to get this country back on the right track.
Well, I'm not sure we need to put aside our differences, because when you get these realignments, as you had to say in the early 30s and then again in the late 60s, what happens is that you get new arrangements of people talking with each other and sometimes disagreeing with each other inside the same party.
Because every political party is a big tent.
Every political party is really a big debating arena.
And maybe the important thing is that, as I said, you and I get to talk to each other.
I listen to your point of view about limited government, but then I expect that you're going to listen to me about my views on why, in some ways, I'd like to see government have more power if the government were using that power for humane, constructive purposes.
And then because we've become allies over our opposition to the warfare state, maybe that opens us up to listening to each other on these other issues.
And out of these kinds of discussions, nobody can really predict.
And that's why I said earlier, politics is not the place to look for certainty.
Because in our political life, which is really our civic life, our shared life together, the one thing I think we have to do is always remain open to new ideas, new viewpoints, and understand that our political life is going to be constantly changing.
And there may not be any eternal truth that we can rely on.
And I think that's a good thing, because it means that we're always in dialogue and we're always open to hearing each other's points of view.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, I would say that if there are any eternal truths to any of this, it's the, well, frankly, bogus argument put forth without any evidence whatsoever in the Declaration of Independence that says, hey, well, it seems to us self-evident that we were all born free and you're not allowed to violate us and take that which we justly acquire and search our houses with your writs of assistance and that kind of thing.
I think that's basically what we all hopefully have in common.
If we all believe in natural rights, then a lot of these agreements can come from there.
It turns out that when we try to pin down that slippery word freedom, what does it mean to say we're all free?
We don't always agree with each other about that.
And does it mean that you should be free to make as much money as you want while your neighbor starves?
That's a very important question that people have lots of different points of view on because I think a lot of the administration policy in Iraq and even on the Democratic side, those who would keep our troops in Iraq on these bases for forever, what they're really about is setting up a system of open, free enterprise in Iraq where some people can be billionaires and other people can starve.
Oh, I thought they were creating a system of fascism where tax money is taken from the people and given straight to the most corrupt private interests.
Well, I think it's some of both because the people who are becoming billionaires, of course, get control of the government and then siphon off that tax money.
But if there's no responsibility on the part of the whole community to make sure that everybody's needs are met, then we're on our way to the kind of corruption that you're talking about.
So the question is, we probably have different ideas about how to prevent getting to that place, but we do have to recognize that that word freedom is such a powerful word, coming back to where we started, that the debate about the Iraq war is so full of symbolic images, and that word freedom, talked about by the Bush administration so loosely, in a way becomes meaningless, but it's still like waving the flag.
It still triggers something in that inner child we all have, and not everybody is aware of what's going on or can resist the temptation to do that.
All right, well, let's nail down the narrative that the anti-war movement needs to adopt to end the war.
My best idea is to focus on the fact that, I forget if it was Tom in the introduction or you in the article here, The General and the Trap, at antiwar.com and at tomdispatch.com, but one of you in this article says, America has no right to occupy Iraq.
We have no right to do this.
Now that's my best idea for the narrative to get us out, because as you said, America is a big loser and can't possibly win, and so needs to withdraw doesn't sell very well to the average Dufus.
Yes, I think that that question of moral values is very important and could still be very powerful.
The idea that this country stands for something, for moral values.
Here, let me tell you what I wrote.
I said, the U.S. war effort in Iraq has always been illegitimate and fundamentally wrong.
The longer we stay in Iraq, the longer we perpetuate the wrongs we have done, regardless of whether we achieve military success by anyone's measure.
We're uninvited intruders in Iraq.
We invaded the country on false pretenses.
It's long past time for us to admit that truth and leave.
I think that idea, you know, Franklin Roosevelt would have said, we're just bad neighbors.
A good neighbor doesn't just walk into somebody else's house uninvited and then stay there for five years and make a shambles of the place.
We're just bad neighbors.
That's one way that you can symbolize this point.
It's a point about morality, but it's also a point about community, about how you treat other people.
And do we really want America to stand for that kind of crude, rude, bad, neighborly behavior?
So you can frame the argument in those terms.
And that takes it very much away from this kind of tit for tat argument about fact, you know, is the violence up two points or is it down two points?
I think that whole argument, this is the more basic kind of moral discussion that we're talking about here.
Well, and that's just sad, you know, in its own sense that the facts just don't matter.
I mean, I would like to believe that in the society that, you know, assuming anybody's listening, that if I can point out that, hey, listen, our policy has been to back the Iranians this whole time, that people ought to throw up their hands and say, what are we doing backing the Baader Brigade and the Dawa party up there?
And so let's get out of here.
The facts are bad.
You know what I mean?
That ought to be enough.
I ought to not have to, you know, go to my social psychology textbook and figure out how to bullshit people into doing the right thing.
And I'm not saying we should bullshit people.
I'm saying, well, you know what I mean?
I'm talking about bullshitting them with the truth.
I have to manipulate them to just even with what's right.
But we always we always get our facts framed within a story that interprets those facts.
But I agree with you that ideally our democracy is supposed to depend upon an educated citizen rate who know how to gain facts, who know how to analyze those facts logically.
And that's why I go into my classroom every day and teach my students.
It's not so much the information I give them.
Hopefully it's the reasoning skills and the skills of learning to think more clearly.
And that's a long, long effort that people are still going to be working on long after you and I are gone.
But you're right.
We got to just keep at it every day.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time, everybody.
It's Ira Ternes.
He's a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He's the author of Monsters to Destroy, the neoconservative war on terror and sin.
And he's got an article with Tom Englehart at TomDispatch.com and at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
It's called The General and the Trap.
Thank you very much for your time today.
My pleasure.
It's nice talking to you.
Let's do it again.
I hope so.
OK.
All right.
