Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and welcoming back to the show for the first time in quite a while, it's Robert Dreyfuss.
He's one of my favorite investigative reporters, writes for The Nation, and at least used to be Tom Payne in all kinds of different places, I forget, Rolling Stone magazine.
Welcome back to the show, Bob.
Thanks, it's a great, great pleasure to be here.
Well, I'm really happy to have you back on the show, and the website is robertdreyfuss.com, right?
Thanks to all the important stuff there.
I've moved my blog over to thenation.com now, so you can follow my ramblings over on The Nation website.
That's funny, it's the same blog, right?
The Dreyfuss Report.
It's been at, what, three or four different websites now.
Yeah, it's making a pilgrimage through the web here.
Very good.
Listen, well, I've got a ton of stuff that I want to ask you about, but first of all, I wanted to tell you how much I liked your article about Zimbabwe, which I think, in a nutshell, basically said, boy, yeah, that's rough, huh?
But what are you going to do?
This is an important issue for the next president.
One of the things that concerns me about Obama is his seeming willingness to want to get involved in helping to fix failed and failing states.
It isn't just Zimbabwe, but there's probably a dozen or fifteen of these countries around the world where you could argue that, you know, they're falling apart or otherwise weak and the centrifugal forces involved and so forth, and potential, you know, verge of civil wars, and Zimbabwe is now on the front burner, but, you know, by next year it could be Sudan or Burma or, you know, a lot of other places, Somalia, Yemen, that we could name.
And I think the United States has to resist the tendency to want to go into these countries and fix them.
Yeah, I noticed the comment section there was, oh, I see, you just don't care about them if they're black and African, Mr. Dreyfus.
Well, I mean, I think there's some people, you know, who might react that way, but it isn't obviously about anything to do with race, and in fact, you could make the argument that, you know, by going into these countries, we could make things worse and not better.
And certainly, you know, the clearest shining example of that is Iraq, where the Iraqis, you know, many of them had a difficult time in Iraq up until 2003, but I think you'd have to be insane to argue that we made things better by invading that country, not just because several hundred thousand of them are dead, but because the country is still a mess and on the verge of civil war, and so even a full-scale invasion doesn't necessarily make things better, and a half-hearted intervention is not, in my view, going to help either.
Well, you know, I think the problem is that to a lot of people it really is simply a matter of caring or not, that if you do care, then you support intervention, period, right?
Never again, and all that.
Well, you know, the case that everybody is used to, at least in recent memory, is the slaughter in Rwanda, and it's true that when, you know, 800,000 people are killed in the space of a few weeks, it's pretty hard to make the argument that the world shouldn't step in and stop that.
And I don't know whether, indeed, in Rwanda, once the killing had begun, any force, including the United States, could have mobilized quick enough to get in there, never mind whether it could have been effective.
But clearly, none of that happened.
The problem is that most of these cases, I would say all of them, compared to Rwanda, the number of people suffering or dying in most of these so-called failing states is, you know, several orders of magnitude smaller than what happened in Rwanda.
So pointing to Rwanda and genocide, and then saying, therefore, you know, we gotta look into these other 15 or 20 countries, in my view, just doesn't make any sense, and something that we should avoid, or if we don't avoid, it clearly has to be fully sanctioned by the international community, and not involve the United States as the primary sort of military backbone of that kind of intervention.
Well, you know, there's a couple things.
First of all, you're right about how kind of silly it almost seems.
That's my words, not yours, but that people would ask for American intervention in these kinds of situations, while the Americans, we, us, we have the Hutus beat by at least a few hundred thousand in Iraq right now.
And we got, what, a couple hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand refugees in our proxy war in Somalia right now.
That's the biggest humanitarian crisis in Africa.
It's not Zimbabwe or Sudan.
It's our war in Somalia.
Well, I would say far bigger than those is what's been going on in the Congo the last few years, especially on the border areas over near where Uganda and Rwanda and Burundi are, and then kind of north and west of that.
I think you've had, you know, two or three million people killed there or die of disease over just the past few years.
I don't know that there's a, you know, ready answer.
And by the way, it isn't like people are calling for immediate interventions into these places, but it's troubling that we could end up kind of stumbling into an escalating intervention that ends up doing more harm than good.
And by the way, Scott, I think your analogy with Iraq, I mean, I have to say that I reject it.
I mean, it's one thing when eight hundred thousand people are killed, you know, literally hacked to death in the genocidal rampage by machetes, and it's another thing when a lot of people die, as happened in Iraq, as a result of a war most of whom, I've got to tell you, weren't killed by American soldiers.
They were killed in a whole extremely complex set of national, ethnic, sectarian, militia-style violence and assassinations and everything else.
And it's a much more complex and difficult situation than the slaughter that happened in Rwanda.
So I think it's a way of mixing apples and oranges when you say that we're ahead of the Hutus in Iraq.
Well, it's twice the number, at least, right?
Well, no, I don't think that's true.
I mean, the accepted figure of eight hundred thousand dead in Rwanda...
Oh, I thought it was...
I'm sorry, I thought it was four hundred thousand died in Rwanda.
No, it's more than that.
Far more than that.
And I think the number of deaths in Iraq is a lot more disputed.
I mean, it's...the low end of it is, you know, in the low hundreds of thousands, and then you have some people saying up to a million.
No one has really done an effective count.
So when I talk about Iraq, I usually say, you know, several hundred thousand dead, and we don't really know what the true answer is.
I don't, frankly, think it matters, you know, if it's more or less.
It matters to the people who died, but it...
The killing in Iraq has been so awful and astronomical that, you know, you don't improve your case by saying, oh, it's only two hundred thousand.
You don't make the case stronger by saying, oh, it's a million.
I mean, this has been a catastrophic misuse of American power in Iraq over the next... over the last five years.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I didn't mean to imply that the Americans are just lining up the Iraqis up against a wall and executing them kind of thing, or, you know, hacking them to death with machetes kind of thing, but it does go to the credibility of America as humanitarian peacemaker when we're not peacemakers.
Oh, yeah, well, you know, there's nothing about Iraq that smells like being a peacemaker.
And now...
Oh, also, I wanted to bring up the idea, and, you know, I don't really know that much history of Africa, to be perfectly honest, but it seems like in the example of Rwanda that it was Western intervention there that created the crisis in the sense that, I guess it was the Dutch, right, who had propped up the minority over the majority, and then when they left, the big genocide that happened was the majority getting their revenge.
Well, I think maybe the the French and the British were more involved in that part of Africa than the Dutch, but, you know, I have a little bit of trouble assigning blame to the aftermath of colonialism when you have more proximate, you know, bad guys who are actually directly responsible for the killing.
I think it's more a question of neglect and mismanagement by the former Western powers in that part of the world.
Certainly, though, these conflicts, you know, have deeper roots, but you can point to the legacy of colonialism in many, many areas, whether it's the India-Pakistan dispute or the Israel-Palestine conflict or many, many other clashes all over the world where the British, in particular, set up divide-and-rule situations where they found some tribe or some ethnic group to become their proxies, and they set them up against the other ethnic groups or tribes in order to, you know, rule the country.
The French and the British both did that in Lebanon, and a great deal of the conflict in Lebanon derives from that sort of hand-me-down conflict that goes back to the nineteenth century.
But, you know, as policy makers, I think we've got to look at the current players and figure out who the bad guys are and who the good guys are, if there are any.
Well, see, and that's really the problem is all colonialism aside, if we accept that Obama and all of his advisors have hearts of gold and that if they intervene in a crisis in Africa, it's only for the purest reasons of trying to help people, still.
Now they have to decide who America should prop up, and then there are consequences that flow from that that are, you know, probably unpredictable if they can even find somebody that they want to support at all.
Yeah, well, that's true, and that's why, you know, I always come down, at least as my default position, against American intervention overseas, at least in any military sense of the word.
Well, that's actually refreshing.
I think a lot of people, I guess I'm worried that a lot of people who I've found to be my favorite writers and reporters over these last few years, that I fear I'm going to be disappointed when Barack Obama's in power.
But it doesn't look like you're going to let me down, Bob.
Well, I have two things to say about Obama.
One is, compared to John McCain, there's no contest.
He would be a vast improvement over Bush and McCain and the neoconservative line of thinking.
But, and here's the big problem, at the same time I think Obama is not so much an original new thinker about foreign policy, but as my piece in The Nation this week makes clear, I think it would be more about a restoration of the pre-neoconservative, bipartisan consensus that ruled foreign policy during the Cold War and the 1990s, and that Obama would reach out to moderate Republicans, people like James Baker, people like Chuck Hagel, people like Robert Gates on the Republican side, and to establishment Democrats like Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrook and Tony Lake, who is one of his chief foreign policy advisors, and try to forge a, you know, the bipartisan consensus again, which was represented, let's say, by the Baker-Hamilton approach to Iraq.
And I think, you know, that involves maintaining the strength of the Pentagon.
It involves building up and expanding NATO.
It means adding more countries to NATO.
It means expanding our Navy, keeping our military bases around the world.
And it also means viewing the world from the standpoint of what's best for the American interest, whatever that is supposed to mean, rather than what's best for the people who live in those various parts of the world, which is how I like to approach foreign policy.
And I know he's an American politician, and he's got to talk in this way to get elected.
And I know he can't go around dismissing American interest, but whenever I hear people talk about, you know, America has an interest in this or that part of the world, I have to wonder what that interest really is.
What is our interest in these countries?
And that's what I think doesn't often get defined by American politicians.
Yeah, well, you know, when you bring up Robert Gates, and I forget where I read this, but somebody floated the idea that Robert Gates would be...
Oh, and it is here in your article, too, the idea that he would be brought in to stay the Secretary of Defense under Barack Obama.
That's certainly the Clinton standard there, as he brought in William Cohen, the Republican senator from Maine, to be his Secretary of Defense.
Yeah, it isn't just that it was floated.
There was an article in the London Times quoting Obama's top military advisor, Richard Danzig, who praised Robert Gates as a fine Secretary of Defense, and he said he'd make a good Secretary of Defense in an Obama administration as well.
And apparently, according to the London Times, several of Obama's advisors, besides Danzig, are pushing for Gates to be brought on as Secretary of Defense.
Now, I have to point out, you know, as you and your listeners know, Robert Gates is not a neoconservative.
He certainly is not pushing for an attack on Iran, for instance, and quite the opposite.
He chaired a task force with Zbigniew Brzezinski just, I think, two years ago that called for a major diplomatic opening toward Iran and a grand bargain that would establish U.S. and Iranian relations.
And on Iraq, as you may remember, he was a part of the Baker-Hamilton task force in 2006 that called for something very close to Obama's policy on Iraq, the steady withdrawal of the combat forces, something like, you know, 80,000 troops being pulled out of Iraq over a year or so period, which is pretty much what Obama says.
So, it isn't that Gates is a neoconservative, but he's an establishment figure who represents that consensus, which I think is a failed consensus.
It's the American Century consensus of the post-World War II generation in which America was a global superpower.
It's coming at a time when less and less the United States can claim to be a global superpower.
We're faced with the emergence of, if not equals, certainly rivals in many parts of the world.
And in economic terms, we're becoming less and less of a superpower, although in military terms we have no competitors at all.
And so the danger, what I worry about, is that future administrations, whether it's Obama's or McCain's and the ones that come after them, will try to use American military power to sustain what can't be sustained, namely American hegemony, American preeminence.
And that's something that could lead to, I think, significant conflicts down the road.
Yeah, well, and it sure looks like, even besides the conflicts, even if we only pick on states that can't fight back, like Iraq or something like that, it seems like in this empire everything goes out and nothing comes back.
It costs us far more than we gain with all these wars anyway.
Well, that's true as far as Iraq goes, but, you know, the Iraq story isn't over yet.
And if we end up staying in Iraq for five or seven more years, you know, it's not out of the question that we could end up owning the place and owning the Gulf, for that matter.
And if that happens, I think that's going to set us up for a more strategic confrontation with countries like China that depend far more than we do on the Persian Gulf.
I mean, the idea that there's some inexorable law of fate that requires us to leave Iraq is just ridiculous.
There's no reason, if McCain is elected, there's no reason why we couldn't stay in Iraq for eight more years.
And maybe the country will, you know, look like it does now.
Maybe it will stabilize a little bit.
There's no predicting, you know, which way it's going to go.
But certainly we could end up being largely in charge of Iraq and the rest of the Gulf and setting ourselves up for a confrontation with Iran, which is the other big, you know, regional power, for control of that really crucial real estate.
And that's what this is all about.
It's controlling the Gulf, controlling the oil, and making sure that no other power, you know, can horn in on that American control.
So, you see, the Iraqis awarding oil contracts to American, British, Dutch, and French oil companies and shutting out Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and other oil companies, some of whom you would argue have a much greater stake in the future of the Iraqi oil industry than the United States does, because we don't get a lot of oil from Iraq, and China does, or would like to.
Well, before I ask you about Iran, because I want to ask you all about what you think about the danger of war with Iran, I want to focus on what you're saying about the superpower status and all that kind of thing.
Iraq notwithstanding, if we left out the Iraq invasion and that kind of thing, does it seem to you, as it does to me, that basically the rising powers, for example, in China, India, even probably Brazil, places like that, that basically power is just sort of naturally spreading out and growing up in different places, you know, besides the Iraq war, that it really is a multipolar world, that trying to dominate it with military force, whether it leads to a particular conflict with China or not, really just seems a losing proposition, because the natural flow of things on earth is just spreading exactly the other direction.
Well, the issue is, can the United States enter a world as an important, but not all-powerful partner with all of these rising countries, or is there some reason why the United States has to go into the world as a country seeking to be number one?
You know, this is not a sports contest, this is not where we hold up one of those styrofoam hands with the big finger sticking up, saying we're number one.
We're not number one, and the rest of the world doesn't like to look at the United States and see a country full of people holding up these big styrofoam hands and saying we're number one.
We need to have a humble foreign policy.
We need to have a foreign policy that's based on a simple notion, that the economic security of people in the third world is directly related to our security.
And so if those people have clean drinking water and access to health care, and decent housing, and if they have decent education and jobs, then they're likely to be both stable and happy, and they're not going to pose a threat to the United States.
That doesn't mean we have to invade all these countries to, you know, fix them.
And it certainly doesn't mean that it's our responsibility to, you know, give away money to help these countries get, you know, to right themselves.
But I think the United States does have a moral obligation, along with the rest of the world, to create banks and agencies and funds that can help these countries modernize and develop and provide basic levels of care and education to their populations.
And not to insist that just because they have a preference for, let's say, state-owned industries, that they have to, you know, privatize and deregulate and sell off their industries to private companies, where they have to open up to American oil companies and other companies coming in and owning these resources and so forth.
These are sovereign nations that get to determine what kind of economic system they want to have and what kind of political system they want to have.
And it's not the American interest to, you know, go in and tell them what to do.
Right, yeah, Stephen Kinzer calls it the kick-open-the-door policy.
Euphemistically called the open-door policy that we have with the rest of the nations of the world.
And while all that talk about democracy under the Clinton and Bush administrations of the last sixteen years, it's not really democracy that they care about.
It's free markets that they care about.
And they're not the same thing.
Well, and they're not really free either.
I mean, what you just were referring to was like when the IMF and the World Bank say you have to turn over your infrastructure to American multinational corporations.
That's not free markets.
That's just what they call it.
Well, whatever you call it, it's none of our business.
I mean, the idea that a country like Iran, for instance, which has mostly state-owned industries in the big industrial and oil sectors has to suddenly create a stock market even just for Iranians is nonsense.
They may want that, they may not want that, but it's not our business to tell them to privatize their industries, whether it's you know, selling them off to multinationals or selling them off to Iranian businessmen.
And the same thing goes for Egypt or Venezuela, and of course the big kahuna, China.
All of this is up to these countries to, you know, pursue the path that they think is best for them.
And unfortunately, the American elite seems to think that it's their job to, you know, shake our finger in their face and tell them what to do.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I have to tell you, to my ears, this sounds like a very patriotic and very anti-nationalist argument that you have here, that, you know, basically our hope lies in helping make the rest of the world rich as much as they're willing to participate in it.
And I'm kind of reminded, actually, of something I saw flipping through the channels one day.
It was Bill Gates from Microsoft talking with a bunch of college kids, and one of them asked him a question about the danger of rising China.
And he explained how, no, it's great that China's making so much money, and all that is is good for us, and it's not a zero-sum game.
The richer they are and the better off they are, the better off we are.
It's not a competition between states.
It's, you know, all about free trade and travel and as much engagement as we can possibly can.
We all benefit from that.
I would take what Bill Gates says with a little bit of a grain of salt, though, because there's a lot of big companies, whether it's Microsoft or AT&T or Boeing or Nike, that obviously, you know, can make an immense amount of money selling their product in China.
And the American corporate sector is not lobbying for a confrontation with China, far from it.
They're lobbying for, you know, making sure that America and China stay on a steady keel so that they can make money over there.
I'm not saying that there's something inherently bad about that.
The ideologues and the strategists who say that China is, you know, a rising power that can confront the United States are generally not the ones tied to those corporations that are making a lot of money in China.
The same way that the ideologues that want to remake the Middle East are not tied to the oil companies that have connections in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and so forth.
They're more than the neoconservatives who find themselves historically opposed to the interests of the oil companies and the Saudi lobby, for instance, and all of that.
But as China begins to grow, as China begins to build up its economic power, its political power, and its military power, as China develops missiles that can carry nuclear weapons as they start to build a navy, there are going to be louder and louder voices in this country saying that we've got to do something about this.
And in that case, you might find that those calls start to counteract and even eclipse the businesses who are saying, no, no, we want to have good relations with China.
And when that stuff starts to happen, believe me, the businesses end up going along.
And if not Bill Gates, his successors will be out there, the first ones, saying, you know, yeah, we've got to confront this rising power of China.
I mean, this is complex stuff.
There were many big companies in the 1930s, IBM and Ford and others, that had extremely good relations with the Nazis and did business with Hitler's Germany right up until the war started.
And, of course, once the war started, they became, you know, big cheerleaders for the American war and cut their ties to Germany, not that they had a great deal of choice.
So, I mean, you've got a very complex political dynamic starting to emerge in terms of how the United States handles these rising powers.
And I think the last thing we need is a jingoistic approach to it.
Well, yeah, I think the point about the businessmen will go along.
If that's the way it's going, they're going to go ahead as long as Microsoft can get the contract for the Pentagon computer system or whatever.
They'll get on board, but maybe that's at the end of the day.
But in the morning, the businessmen would rather have peace and trade with China than conflict.
And it seems that being the case, maybe we can sort of take the opposite angle on it as well, which is that sanctions and blockades lead to war.
And I'm very concerned this week.
I guess it has made it to committee.
It was going to say all the way through to the House floor, but it is actually in committee now and delayed until next week, I guess.
But there are these two resolutions going through the House and the Senate that seem to my reading, Bob, to indicate that they're mandating that George Bush lay a military blockade on Iran and prevent them from importing any refined petroleum products and so forth.
Do you consider that to be an act of war, and is that the direction that we're heading now?
No, not at all.
I don't think what Congress does means a hill of beans.
Thank goodness.
The Congress can pass all the resolutions that it wants, and they've done that historically, and that certainly doesn't mean that the United States is therefore going to pack up and go to war against whatever target of congressional wrath is the latest one.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
I mean, I'm not saying that this congressional resolution isn't a good thing.
In fact, quite the opposite.
But it doesn't create any mandate for the president to go to war.
He can safely ignore it the way presidents have ignored things that Congress has done for 200 years.
On the other hand, I don't think that we're going to war with Iran.
I've been arguing for a long time now, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq make the idea of a war with Iran both politically and physically impossible.
That doesn't mean that we couldn't stumble into a war, or that there isn't a great deal of danger in terms of the United States finding itself in an escalating showdown with Iran.
But I don't think that the United States is going to attack Iran this year barring some huge and surprising provocation.
And I even more strongly don't think that the Israelis are going to do it.
I know there's a lot of bluster coming out of Israel, but the Israelis are pretty smart dudes.
And they know, as I'm sure you do, that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon.
Whatever they say, the Israelis know the truth about Iran's nuclear program, that they're years away from having a bomb.
Yeah, the foreign minister has said so.
Yeah, and the Israeli intelligence services, if they're doing anything right, they're monitoring Iran's nuclear program probably better than anybody in the world.
Your belief, then, is that Cheney has accepted your argument, if not completely come around to your point of view, that somebody has made it clear to him that you just can't do this dick, and that he said, okay, okay, or what?
No, I don't think, I don't know if that's true at all.
I just don't think that Cheney is calling the shots anymore in the United States government.
And I don't think he has anything like the political support group around him that he had, let's say, at the beginning of the confrontation with Iraq in late 2001.
And so the idea that Cheney can go into Bush and growl that we need to go to war with Iran and Bush will order it just doesn't work anymore.
You've got an establishment, including the military, which I think has made itself unequivocally clear, which they didn't do in regard to Iraq, that, as Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week, it's an unstable part of the world, and I don't want to make it more unstable.
I've got my hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan, and in fact, they don't even have enough resources to handle both of those wars, never mind having another one.
Well, I'm sure I'm glad to hear you say that, and I know that has been your view for a while now that we're past the point where the war party is going to get their way on this.
I'm glad to know you still think that in light of all the recent hype.
Although, I guess we do have, in just the last one or two minutes here, Andrew Coburn and Seymour Hersh report that there's a major covert action going on inside Iran, people being killed, terrorist groups being supported.
It seems to me like that's a let's have a war policy, no?
I read Sai's article very carefully.
You know, he's probably the best reporter there is, but I didn't see in his report that necessarily there was a lot of killing going on.
I saw that this finding that authorized U.S. covert operations in Iran was in part designed, first of all, to find out information about Iran's military and nuclear program, and second, to make political contacts with Iranian dissident groups or opposition groups.
We've seen in the Post just in the, what, last week and a half, two weeks, that Jandala's kidnapped a bunch of cops and murdered a few of them, and I mean, these are the groups we're talking about, right?
Jandala there and Balochistan?
Yeah, but, you know, those groups are not necessarily, you know, getting direct American support.
If they are, I can't see what good it would do in terms of the United States to support these marginal troublemaking groups that, you know, can't really bring down the Iranian government and, in fact, probably end up strengthening the central government because they're seen as, you know, breakaway groups that are aimed at dismantling the state, partitioning or breaking up Iran into pieces.
So, I mean, I'm certainly concerned about American covert operations in Iran, but I don't believe that these have reached the level of a serious effort at regime change.
All right, I'm sorry, Bob.
I've got to stop you right there.
That's it.
We're up against the time wall.
Happy Independence Day.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
Everybody, Robert Dreyfuss.
It's robertdreyfuss.com.
You can read the Dreyfuss report at The Nation magazine.
