All right, y'all, Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm delighted I finally get to interview Tom Dispatch.
Check it out, everybody.
It's Tom Englehart.
He writes at TomDispatch.com.
He's Tom Editor.
You can find much of what he writes at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
Oftentimes he writes a great little introduction to somebody else's great article.
And we also run the articles just by him, like the one we're running today, The Greatest Story Never Told.
The books are The End of the Victory Culture and the brand new one, The World According to Tom Dispatch, America in the New Age of Empire.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
Scott, thanks a lot.
Well, I'm really happy to have you on the show here.
And this is a great article today, The Greatest Story Never Told.
I love the thing that jumped out at me most out of this article was the part about how oftentimes American TV reporters will report from American bases in Iraq, but the cameraman never pans to the left and right and never shows the American people just what is being constructed with our tax dollars in that country.
Yeah, it's an extraordinary thing.
I mean, you know, we've been talking about the president's surge, that is the surge of ground troops into Baghdad and the environment since, what, January 2007.
But when it comes to these bases that we've built in Iraq, we've been surging since April 2003, when we took Baghdad.
And these things are now, I mean, Americans who haven't been on the bases, and obviously hundreds of thousands have, I mean, troops, congressional delegation, Defense Department operatives, mercenaries, all sorts of people.
But Americans who haven't been on these bases have no idea.
These are small American towns, 15 to 20 miles around their perimeters, you know, highly fortified, state-of-the-art with PXs.
There's one out in the western desert of Iraq that the soldiers call Camp Cupcake.
It's officially Al-Assad because of its amenities.
I mean, these are extraordinary, multibillion-dollar structures.
Our largest air base in Iraq has traffic supposedly at the level of either Chicago's O'Hare International or Heathrow.
We have built these, I call them American ziggurats.
Ziggurats were those Mesopotamian temples, you know, and there we are in Mesopotamia and we've built our own ziggurats.
But Americans don't know they're there, and yet these are the facts, these are the occupation facts on the ground in Iraq, these huge things that are obviously meant to be.
They just reek of permanency, and in a sense, talking about Iraq policy makes no sense without taking them into account.
Obviously, the Bush administration has made them central, and yet they have, until the last week or two, been almost no part of any American discussion, and in fact, although a few reporters have written about them every now and then, I think you can bet I've met who can watch all of American television or all of American television news, but I think it's a reasonable bet that there's certainly never been a show on them, and Americans have basically never seen what their tax dollars have bought.
Yeah, you know, the thing is about that too, is it basically puts an absolute lie to all of the discussion up until this point, in a sense.
It's not even a half-truth with this omission.
I mean, Tom, we've had years and years of benchmarks this, and they'll stand up, and we'll stand down, and of course, we all want to withdraw, and an entire debate has taken place for years on end while occupying this country that completely omits the fact of the permanence of these bases, and in fact, even the people like you and I who pay close attention, the kind of reports we'd seen, I remember the one that sticks out in my mind, it was the only one to link to for years, was at globalsecurity.org, 14 enduring bases set, and that was from 2003 or something.
Right, that's right.
And I mean, probably the most striking piece on this, and it's the only one the New York Times has ever done as far as I know, is on April 20th, 2003, I mean, just our trip to Baghdad for just a few days, the place was being looted and so on and so forth, the Times reported that the Pentagon already had on their drawing board, so to speak, four, they didn't call them permanent, but in essence, permanent bases in Iraq, four of these what I call megabases.
Rumsfeld basically denied it, they denied, they've never used the word permanency, permanent since, at the time they used to call them, charmingly enough, enduring camps, which was the military term, but kind of has that summer campy feeling to it.
And in the meantime, they went and built these things, I, for instance, in an obscure, it's not an obscure engineering journal to engineers, but to us would be an obscure journal.
In late 2003, I came across the guy, the Army Corps of Engineers guy tasked with overseeing the building of these facilities.
He said that at that moment, just months after Baghdad was taken, that there were several billion dollars had already gone into American bases in Iraq, and he, at that point, he said he was proud of it, he said, you know, the numbers are staggering, that was his quote.
That was 2003.
By 2005, we had large and small, according to the Washington Post, 106 bases in Iraq, and the most recent under-the-radar negotiations that the Bush administration's done, been doing with the Iraqis for a so-called SOFA agreement, status of forces agreement, that would basically embed these bases forever.
In our initial demand of the Iraqis, we asked for access to at least 58 bases and facilities, which is really startling in our world today.
I mean, 58, you know, there's no other country like that.
I mean, we have bases all over the world, but this is remarkable in a hostile nation in the middle of a war, in the oil heartlands of the planet.
Of course, when they had these things on the drawing board back in 2003, they did expect to withdraw.
That is, they thought that this was a slam dunk.
This is the neocons of the Bush administration in particular.
They thought that they would have these bases set up pretty quickly, and they would basically withdraw.
Most American troops leave about 30,000 to 40,000.
Paul Wolfowitz said this, for instance, the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
They'd leave about 30,000 or 40,000 American troops, you know, in, by, by, they thought by even August or September 2003, 30,000 or 40,000 out of the major cities, except maybe for this huge base we have, the ill-named Camp Victory on the edge of Baghdad, and of course all would go swimmingly, and they could have then turned to Iran, Syria, whatever.
Of course, we know all this was fantasy, not that it ever happened, but in the meantime, the bases got built, built, built.
And to this day, the interesting thing is, while we're discussing in this country withdrawal and timetables and everything else, these bases are still being upgraded.
You know, I always thought it was funny that enduring bases was the euphemism for permanent, because that just sounds like permanent to me, and during what, all time, and efforts to get rid of them, right?
Yeah, they're called enduring camps, actually, which I think somehow had, that camp has a like a, a slightly less, you know, more ephemeral quality to it, you know, it can't.
Yeah, more like a MASH 4077 that you can pack up and leave with.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the thing is, these things, in a country, in a country that, where the traffic lights don't work, some of our big bases, they have traffic lights, sidewalks, you can get speeding tickets.
I mean, this is remarkable.
There were, there was one reporter, Guy Raz, of, he was the NPR defense correspondent who visited Balad, and this is the big air base, holds about 40,000 troops and contractors and so on.
And then, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, he visited in October 2007, and his description was very striking.
He said, again, in a country where electricity delivery to the civilian population has been terrible to nil, he said that the base was lit up like Las Vegas.
He said it was a huge construction site, and it looked at night like Las Vegas.
Well, you know, it's funny, the movie War Ink, the John Cusack movie, has the Emerald City instead of the Green Zone, it has the Church's Chicken, even has Church's Chicken signs on the tanks and stuff, it's hilarious, but anyway, this is something that really comes across in your article in a way that I very rarely, if ever, have read before, which is the, like you say, the small town aspect, the streets and the traffic lights and the speeding tickets and the Church's Chicken and all the different Burger Kings and everything else where Americans, they've brought their own little America to Iraq, it's this aspect, the kind of unavoidable conclusion here is that these things are meant to be there for 50 years, for 100 years, for 10,000 years, as John McCain said.
They're the Bush administration's monuments.
They were meant to outlive it and everything else, and certainly Barack Obama or whoever came next, that was for sure.
Now, whether they will is, of course, another matter.
We've been through this once, and it's easy enough to forget that we had bases like this in Vietnam, Cam Ranh Bay, Da Nang, they were somewhat different, but they were enormous.
They were enormous.
They were meant forever, too, and of course, they're now being used by the Vietnamese Army.
Well, now, here's the thing, too.
The reality in which these bases are being constructed is no less at odds with the plans than they were back in 2003.
I mean, frankly, it seems to me that unless we try to reinstall Saddam Hussein's clan, which their leader just got truck-bombed to death last week anyway, there's nobody in Iraq who wants to be America's puppet or needs us enough that this is going to work over the long term.
There's too many factions, too many just natural-born nationalist tendencies and that kind of thing where this is all impossible.
We're going to have to either dynamite these things and leave, or just leave them and leave.
Yeah.
I don't even know how this is going to play out myself, except that I agree.
I mean, there is no way in the really long term that the United States can occupy a hostile country in the oil heartlands of the Middle East, period.
It's just not going to happen.
Now, how it will get to that not happening, I don't know.
It would be much more reasonable.
I mean, the interesting thing I might add is even though the American people largely don't know that bases of this size are there, and many Americans don't really know, say, on Iraqi casualties, I mean, there was a point at which people were asking, when asked by pollsters how many Iraqis they thought had died, for instance, you know, gave an average figure of about 9,000, you know, instead of in the hundreds of thousands or the million plus, depending on what figures you look at.
So, but even given that, on the rare occasions, I've been following the polls pretty closely and I found one or two occasions where pollsters, for unknown reasons, asked people, do you want permanent bases in Iraq?
And of course, Americans, by a large majority, said no, you know.
That's why they don't show them to us.
Right.
And I mean, this is a large part, I'm sure, of why they fly under the radar screen.
I mean, another version of this is happening right in the green zone in Baghdad.
And it's always called the new American embassy in Baghdad.
It's referred to as the embassy.
It's in fact a citadel, a giant, another base.
It's always said that it's on 104 acres inside the already fortified citadel at the green zone.
This so-called embassy has its own anti-missile systems.
In a city where water and electricity don't work all the time, it has its own completely independent water and electric systems.
It has, you know, recreation centers, pools.
It's quite an extraordinary number of bomb-resistant offices or blast-resistant offices.
It is supposed to be, for a thousand, you have to put this in quotes, diplomat.
This is probably the largest embassy on foreign territory anywhere on the planet.
And it is, in fact, again, just as with everything else the Bush administration does, it reeks of permanency.
It reeks of occupation.
Who puts in the heart of somebody else's capital an embassy with a thousand diplomats and, you know, that means, you know, a couple of thousand more hangers-on, cooks, guards, whatever else they are.
This is another permanent base.
This thing has cost three-quarter of a billion dollars so far.
It's supposed to cost $1.2 billion a year to run.
So what is this embassy?
And again, I'll tell you a funny little story.
I mean, that gives a sense of, I think, the Bush administration and these big things they're building.
About a year ago, maybe a little less, I was at home, you know, basically I'm a guy in a room.
I'm not a journalist.
I'm an editor in real life.
I do books.
I do a thing called the American Empire Project.
And by the way, I recommend that your readers take a look at my new book, The World According to Tom Dispatch, which has people who are on your show all the time, like Chalmers Johnson and so on and so forth.
And it's a good history of the missing stories like this base story of the Bush years.
In any case, I was wandering around home muttering about this so-called embassy, and my wife said, she said, I wonder who built it, meaning what architecture firm designed it.
And I thought, that's interesting.
Of course, architecture of everything is designed by someone.
So with my assistant, Nick Terse, I went looking.
It took about five minutes to find the architecture firm, which was in Kansas City.
They had a website, and they were proud as heck of this thing.
And so they had done little kind of crude sketches, like little watercolor paintings of what the pool looked like, or a guard in front of the ambassador's court.
And I took people at Tom Dispatch on a little guided tour of the embassy based on these little crude sketches.
I mean, they were nothing, actually.
But I thought it was kind of funny that they were there.
The next day, somehow they started running around the web, antiwar.com picked them up and started printing up the pictures.
They started running around the web.
AP did a little story about the fact that these were on the web.
And the next day, the State Department declared a security breach.
Now, imagine, if you were a Shiite or Sunni insurgent, these would be completely useless little things, whereas you could go to Google Earth and take a perfectly good look at this thing.
Or you could see it going up in your own city, because it's gigantic.
It's called, the Iraqis evidently sardonically refer to it as George W.'s palace, which is, you know, like Saddam, I mean, a reference to Saddam Hussein's palaces.
They declared a security breach, and they forced the architects, they pulled down the whole architect's website.
So that's my little story about, I mean, obviously the security breach was the American people weren't really supposed to see.
Yeah, well, Tom, I have my own side of that, which was Eric immediately put me on the task of setting it up.
And if people just go to dissentradio.com, which they'll recognize the URLs where we keep the mp3s of all these great interviews, dissentradio.com slash embassy slash embassy dot html, there's all the pictures that Tom Englehart wrangled up.
No, I was just going to say, at that point, my site, which now can take illustrations, couldn't take illustrations, so I could only show them by linking, so, you know, so it was great.
I mean, antiwar.com was the first place to put these photos up, and that was, I mean, to put the, not photos, but these drawings up.
Right, yeah.
Great.
And, by the way, I was going to say, you know, when Ron Paul brought this up in the debates, he would say the embassy is going to be bigger than Vatican City and that kind of thing.
That was notable if only for its kind of echo or, you know, ringing, the ringing silence that sort of followed it and preceded it, you know, as you said, not part of the debate at all, but you pay so much attention to media, as you said, you're an editor, you edit all these great journalists and columnists on all these things.
Can you explain to me your sense of how this actually works at, say, I don't know, MSNBC or CNN or ABC News or whatever, where they decide that they're going to go along with what the Pentagon wants because the focus group says that we don't want to show these to Americans, how it is that they've apparently convinced themselves and each other that this is acceptable to leave the American people in the dark about this, Tom?
You know, I wish I could really explain this to you, Scott.
It's one of the completely, I'm completely fascinated by this.
I used to say, I taught for a while, I mean, just this was, I became an editor to a group of, because I'm basically an editor, to a group of journalism students out at the UC journalism school.
I don't do this anymore, but I did it for a while and I used to go listen to the reporters, you know, these often from Iraq or wherever, often very good reporters, as they came through.
And I used to say, if you were to put three CPAs and three reporters on stage, and no disrespect intended, my father-in-law from Texas was a CPA, the CPAs would be the introspective ones.
Journalists are remarkably un-introspective, I think, about their profession.
And I always like to say that, unlike, say, the old Russian propaganda, the thing about the old Russian, USSR, Soviet propaganda system, was if you worked in it, you knew what you were doing.
You knew what the party line was, you knew what you were supposed to say, you knew you were part of it, you in essence knew you were a hack or you were a true believer or something like that.
I like to say about our system that it's a conspiracy in which all the people who are a part of it don't know that they're a part of it.
So now how does it actually work?
I mean, if you turn on your TV, as I often do, you know, I'll click at 6.30 in New York time for the primetime news between, say, Channel 7 and Channel 4, two of the networks, and you can get to the fifth story, and it's the same, the grading of the stories is almost the same.
You know, they're all sitting there, they've obviously grown up in the, they breathe the same air.
You know, conspiracy originally in Latin meant conspire, that is, just to breathe the same air.
This is what they did, they grow up in the same world, professionally, they're sitting in similar kinds of newsrooms, CNNs probably, and MSNBC are probably flowing in all day, and they kind of, I think, I mean, there is a certain amount of corporate pressure that goes on, there's some probably governmental pressure that goes on, I mean, the Bush administration certainly applied a lot of it in those first years, but some of it just has to be almost literally atmospheric.
You somehow learn, and I wish I knew exactly how you learn, I mean, to take another example from Iraq that completely fascinates me.
Air war has been the American way of war since World War II, with rare exceptions, and yet I followed the Iraq war very closely, and with rare exceptions, reporters don't look up.
I mean, we've had for a year, people continue to talk about the President's surge, but the surge of 30,000 troops, and they're only talking about the ground surge, really ended months and months ago, and it's slowly ebbing, it's really over, but, or partially over, it reached its high tide.
However, for the last year, there's at least a year, there's been an air surge, in fact, in Iraq, we've been bringing in, you know, fortifying air braces, bringing in extra planes, they brought in a lot of extra unmanned aerial vehicles, and, you know, to just give you an example, in the Washington Post finally dug a few stats out, and recently, on the fighting in Baghdad, and in May and April, those two months, the airpower, US airpower had dumped 200 Hellfire missiles into basically Sadr City, this heavily populated Shiite slum.
This is becoming increasingly an air war, and yet, there's almost no coverage of this.
The only person who looked up of significance, it was the fantastic reporter Seymour Hersh, our greatest investigative reporter, I think, of these years, and he was sitting in Washington.
He looked up from Washington, just as he did in the Vietnam era, he looked again from Washington about the My Lai Massacre, you know?
Now, up in the air is the article you're referring to, wasn't that back in December 2005?
Yeah, yeah.
In that article, he made the simple point, it was really a Vietnam point, because this is what happened in the Vietnam years, which was, we, quote, began to withdraw, we began to draw our forces down, but as we did, we ramped up airpower.
This was so-called Vietnamization.
And he simply said, look, as this war changes, airpower will come to bear.
It will become much more of an air war, and indeed it has, even though we haven't really withdrawn at all.
Well, and Robert Gates is telling the Air Force, hey, knock it off with your emphasis on all these great, super-sophisticated fighter jets for the next war against China in 20 years.
We need you to help us fight the counterinsurgency in Iraq, as though that's how to win over a population you're trying to subdue, is to bomb them from the air, which by necessity kills the innocent guy who just happened to be nearby?
Exactly.
It's insanity.
I wrote a piece at Time Dispatch called something like nine propositions for an air war, not on terror, but for terror, because, you know, there's something about attacking from a distance, which I mean, I think it gives people godlike feelings, and there's this whole aura of precision weapons, and yet every time we, I won't say every time, but time after time, we attack from a distance from these unmanned aerial vehicles, or whatever it might be, B-1s, it could be a variety of things, we attack from a distance, and civilians die, and every time in one of these societies you kill somebody like this, you know, there's a family, there are tribal or kinship links, I mean, people are angry, you know, as they would be, you know, in Texas or New York.
If this happened, I've kind of, one of the things I sometimes do at my site, although at some level it's absurd, is to try and flip these things that seem so normal to us.
We don't even think about air war as a kind of barbarism, and yet, if it were happening over American small towns, and missiles were landing, and, you know, to kill, quote, terrorists, but actually killing peasants, you know, because you're relying on very unreliable information from the ground, you know, I mean, we'd be going crazy, we'd be declaring war.
Well, we saw what happened with an attack on September 11th, where they had to steal our airplanes, even to wage the attack, that's been the carte blanche for all this since then.
Exactly.
I mean, God, we'd blow up the whole world if somebody was actually bombing our neighborhoods.
Absolutely.
And we have, in essence.
I think the air war is, again, incredibly important, just like the bases, and again, you know, when you reference that survey that said that the average American assumed that somewhere around 9,000 Iraqis had died in this thing, when the lowest credible estimate is over 100,000, and I thought that Alan Hyde, from Opinion Business Research in England, was extremely credible when he came on this show to explain how he got the figure of a million.
It turned out that I interviewed him six months after I originally tried to interview him, or something like that.
And that was because he said, you know what, I'm sorry, I am perfectly satisfied with this, but I want to do it again and do it better this time, and he sent his team back to work, and he did it again, and he came back and said, okay, yeah, it was a million.
You know, I was always struck that the people who did, you remember that, and it's old now, the Lancet, the British medical journal, published a report that came out of Johns Hopkins, I think, Columbia, and an Iraqi university, and that was based on, they used a methodology to do that report on casualties.
They did actual door-to-door checking in Iraqi cities, but they used a methodology that actually the State Department, they had used it previously, like in the Congo, and the State Department had praised them for it, but when they came up with somewhere, and this was in 2006, between 300,000 and 900,000 excess deaths above and beyond those who would have died without invasion war, et cetera, et cetera, you know, they were dismissed out of hand.
George Bush at that point said that he offered an estimate of 30,000 dead, and we really have not come to, and it's amazing to think that this country, I mean, you're talking about a country with maybe 27,000 people before the war, we don't know exactly, but something like that, so if, let's say, a million were dead and wounded, maybe, you have somewhere between four and five million who have been uprooted from their homes, maybe two and a half million estimated to have gone into exile, most in Syria, Jordan, but other countries.
You have another couple of million who were uprooted in the Civil War that we set off, the sectarian Civil War, and no longer live in their own homes, they're internal refugees, so you've got, you've already got in the range of maybe five million people, dead, wounded, refugees, and, you know, if you added in people close to starvation, the kids who have lost their dads, I mean, these are extraordinary figures for a little country.
This is a kind of ravaging that we really can't imagine, and that was the thing I lost the point of, which was that we are still on an imperial one-way planet where we cannot imagine quite what we're doing in the world, and we can't imagine in reverse what it would feel like, and if you try and flip it, it's kind of a fascinating exercise.
Yeah, well, it'll make a non-interventionist out of you real quick.
Yeah.
I think it was Bill Hicks where he would say, yeah, people say to me, well, if you don't like it, why don't you leave?
And he'd say, what, and be the victim of this foreign policy?
I'm safer where I am.
You know, I used to be, in the early days of Tom Dispatch, the earlier days when the Bush people were ascended, I don't get letters much like this anymore, but I used to get letters saying, you know, they were the go-back-where-you-came-from letters, which both, I thought they were the funny letters that I got, and they made me immensely angry at the same time, but their problem was, it was post the Soviet Union, so they couldn't say go back to Russia.
So either they said, the two most, the two favorite odd countries were either go back to France, because, you know, that was the period of, you know, the French being weasels, and so on and so forth, or go back to China was the other one that I was amused by.
I think, you know, give me a break, Guy.
Right.
Yeah, if I want to go to China, it would be to invest in some private property and make some money these days.
Or have a little Peking duck or something like that.
All right.
Now, one thing I wanted to get to was, I interviewed Patrick Coburn last Wednesday about this, and the archives are on anti-war radio, and he was basically saying that, hey, at the end of this debate over this treaty, non-treaty thing that they're trying to push through here in the guise of a status of forces agreement, that basically the Maliki government and the Supreme Islamic Council and the Iranians can hem and haw and publicly protest all they want, as you point out in your article, they absolutely have to.
But Patrick Coburn said it looks to him like, at the end of the day, they're going to have to acquiesce to this, at least the Iraqi government is, not necessarily the Iraqi people, but Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Supreme Islamic Council, Maliki and the Dawah Party, their alliance, they need us.
Without us, they're doomed, and Muqtada al-Sadr becomes the leader of Shiastan in southern Iraq, not them.
And so that basically they're going to have to try to go along with this.
I guess the real question then, perhaps, is what of the concerned local citizens, aka the Sunni insurgency?
You know, I'm not even completely convinced.
I think this remains to be played out.
I know that Coburn has been the single, I would say, most foolhardy in the sense of going alone into danger, or relatively alone into dangerous situations in Iraq, of any Western reporter, and he's been absolutely the best.
And he broke this story.
I mean, he did force this story, which was remarkable, into the American media.
As he has so many others.
Yeah, yeah.
And he did it basically because, you know, Paul Woodward of a website I like a lot, The War in Context, wrote recently that, you know, the Americans thought that the Iraqis, the exactly the people you were talking about, were weak, which they are.
They're not a real government with sovereignty over the country or anything like that.
But he said there's a difference between being weak and stupid.
And in fact, they weren't stupid.
And so, when they really grasped what the Bush administration was trying to force on them, and it's an incredible sovereignty grab, they began leaking like mad to Coburn and then to other people.
So this stuff's been coming out everywhere.
And I think that's a sign that they aren't between, well, you can't quite say, you could say Iraq in a hard place, Iraq in a hard place, I don't know.
But they can't sign on to an agreement that really looks so baldly like a sovereignty grab.
And I don't think, given the Bush administration, that it's a given that this is going to work out for any side.
They've been known to blow one thing after another.
So I don't assume that if a Maliki were to sign on to anything too terrible, much as he needs the Americans, he could, you know, he could be signing his own, in essence, his own death sentence, literal or figurative.
And if you look, to take an example of another thing that you would think would have had to be signed, but hasn't, look at the oil law that the Americans wanted.
They've wanted it for years.
They've been in negotiation for years.
It's never, it's been, it was dictated and written in Washington initially.
It's never quite happened.
They have stalled and stalled and stalled.
And I can easily imagine Maliki and the others somehow figuring out how to just stall and stall and stall until, you know, you end up with a new administration.
So I don't actually think it's a given.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, this brings up the problem of Barack Obama, because even if we assume, in fact, it was Patrick's brother, Alex Coburn, in his great speech at the Future Freedom Foundation conference, talked about the secret Obama that everybody believes that the secret Obama is actually just like them, and he'll reveal himself once he has all the power, and then he'll do everything right, just like they imagined.
It was like the secret Bill Clinton.
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly.
We found out who the secret Bill Clinton was.
Yeah, yeah.
He was the kind of guy who, you know, sent the Army Delta Force to attack a church full of women and children.
That was the secret Bill Clinton.
The guy who, in fact, George Bush has only recently matched Bill Clinton's record for slaughtered Iraqis, if you count the million murdered by the blockade and the sanctions there.
But assuming, if we assume that there's a secret Obama who sees things our way, Tom, he's going to be in a real hard position in trying to, oh, say, I don't know, dynamite all these bases and get our troops out of there, because then he's a soft, wishy-washy Democrat who's a secret Muslim and all these terrible things.
All of his incentive is to be as tough as possible.
Yeah, actually, if I, you know, I'm not him.
I do not expect too much, honestly speaking.
But if I were him, I would say that the really tough thing that he should do is to get out of there with all due speed, not even in Iraq terms, in American terms, you have maybe a honeymoon period of, what, four months, five months, six months, during which this remains George Bush's war.
And then we saw this with Lyndon Johnson.
It's your war.
It's your war.
And so, in other words, if he can't do it fast, and I don't think he can, it will be his war.
And that's a true nightmare.
So if he wins the day after the election, I'll write something called, Don't Let Obama Break Your Heart.
Not because I wouldn't prefer him in anti-imperial terms to John McCain.
I would in a nanosecond.
But, you know, his plan for getting out of Iraq is not really, you know, if you look at it, it's not a full-scale plan for getting out of Iraq.
It won't get us out of Iraq completely, or not the way he imagines, anyway.
Well, and I'm scared that, you know, his centrist democratic version of equality means we have to conscript people in order to make it fair.
I don't think that's going to happen.
I think that, you know, it's funny, I think that there was an agreement made with the American people back in, after Vietnam, that that will be very, I think, again, like many other things, it'll be very hard to go back on that.
It would be such an unpopular act at this point in the United States, I believe, that I don't think it matters who's there.
I think it would be very, very tough to go back.
On the other hand, it is true, and this appalls me, that every candidate, I mean, excepting, obviously, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, I don't know what Richardson's position was, but basically all of them called for expanding the U.S. Army.
And, you know, I was just talking with Eric Margolis earlier in the show, and he has a new article that we're featuring on antiwar.com today, where he quotes General McNeil, who's now leaving Afghanistan before everything gets even worse than it is now, I guess, and he's saying on his way out the door that he thinks it would take 400,000 troops to fight the quote-unquote real war over there in Afghanistan once we stop being distracted by Iraq.
Yeah, the Afghanistan is the hidden war, and one of the worst things about, say, Obama, it was true of Hillary Clinton, I mean, in foreign policy terms, is they're all using, they're in essence using Afghanistan as one of their levers to try and get out of Iraq.
I mean, it's that same thing.
We need the troops for Afghanistan.
And, of course, like Iraq, Afghanistan is just another, I mean, it's a nightmare happening.
It's a nightmare ready to get worse.
Somebody just has to tell me what country ever successfully occupied Afghanistan, for God's sake.
It's really not complicated.
These things are not complicated.
I mean, all you have to do is look at history.
I'm an editor in real life, and I edited a book by Jonathan Schell called The Unconquerable World, and it came out before the invasion of Iraq, and it's in a way just a history of, in essence, the first Sunni insurgents who were Catholic peasants in Napoleonic Spain and defeated the greatest army on Earth back then.
It was completely clear, if you look at history, that there was no way in 2003 that the United States could conquer and occupy Iraq.
It wasn't going to happen.
I mean, it wasn't going to happen successfully.
You know, this shouldn't have been complicated any more than it's really complicated with Afghanistan.
The situations are terribly complicated now, but the basic situation of actually occupying Afghanistan, it's dumb.
Didn't we notice the Russians, not to speak of the British, you know, Alexander the Great, you name it.
Right.
Well, you know, I grew up after Vietnam, and I just learned, I don't remember when I learned it or how, but I've always known my whole life long, no land wars in Asia.
So, you know, if you want to be an imperialist, fine, but there are practical considerations to trying to conquer Asia.
It's not really doable.
And now, listen, I'm sorry, Tom, because we only have two minutes left, but I want to talk about this book.
It's called The World According to Tom Dispatch, America in the New Age of Empire.
And I just want to just read a few of the names off of the list here.
Listeners to this show obviously know that Antiwar.com and this show in particular are heavily dependent on Tom Dispatch and the great authors and writers that he brings to us.
And you will recognize these names, Jonathan Schell, Chalmers Johnson, Greg Grandin, who we just interviewed last week, Noam Chomsky, Adam Hothschild, Dilip Hero, Chalmers Johnson, again, Darja Mail.
Yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead and listen yourself.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's Michael Schwartz is here.
Juan Cole, Mark Danner.
You can't go wrong.
No, you can't.
This is great.
There are various people you probably don't know as well.
You know, writing about, you know, there's you know, there's Ann Jones writing on, you know, what really happened to Afghan women after they were liberated by George and Laura.
And, you know, there's there's a kid that you won't know because he's only done a couple of pieces, but he but he did an energy piece on how much oil was in his breakfast.
We actually broke down how much oil was used to make his organic breakfast in Berkeley.
Yeah, really interesting stuff.
But the book very simply is a combination of the missing stories of this era, not every one of them, but the ones I'm obsessed with and a little alternate history of the mad Bush years, the world, according to Tom Dispatch.
All right.
Well, on behalf of Antiwar.com in general and this show today, specifically myself, thank you very much for your time and all your efforts on behalf of peace, Tom.
Thank you so much, Scott.
And boy, I just I mean, I'm at Antiwar.com three times a day.
Well, listen, no more excuses.
You're a new regular guest on the show, OK?
OK, good deal.
All right.
Thanks.
Take care.
