07/10/08 – Alan Bock – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is my first guest.
When I first started the weekend interview show here on Chaos Radio in 2003, the first guy I interviewed was Alan Bach, Senior Editorial Writer at the Orange County Register and author of the column, Eye on the Empire, for Anti-War.com.
Welcome back to the show, Alan.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Good to be here.
Well, it's good to have you here.
How are you doing?
I'm doing better than the country is, so what the heck.
Better than the country is.
Well, I guess, relatively speaking, that means at least you're alright or something.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
I guess that could mean that you're in dire straits and you really need a hand, but you're still better off than America.
Well, it could be that.
Yeah, alright.
No, no, okay.
You sound like you're okay to me.
In fact, I'm very alright.
Yeah, there you go.
Hey, listen.
One of the reasons why I've always loved your column so much is because you're such an optimistic guy, and you've been one of the most skeptical at Anti-War.com about the possibility of war with Iran for quite a long time now, and your current essay on our page is called, Will the U.S. Attack Iran?
Weighing all the recent hype from all the different directions as it's been coming out over the last couple of weeks, and weighing the possibility of whether there will be a war with Iran.
What's your basic gut instinct on this question as of today, Alan?
I still think it's unlikely, but you can never underestimate the irrationality of the Bush administration.
How's that?
Well, that's pretty fair.
I think it's pretty clear that the Cheney cabal is still pushing for it.
Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney apparently still want this thing, but I guess the question is...
That seems to be the case.
The interesting thing is that it seems to be mostly the military that's pushing back.
Yeah, that is interesting.
Aren't they the ones, the standing army, the ones we're supposed to be the most afraid of, that they will go and find things to do, and that's why it's so great we have civilian supremacy over the military, to prevent them from going wild?
Well, you know, it's a good theory, and in a lot of cases it worked, but the military, I think, is upset over a lot of things, for starters.
The war in Iraq is really...
It's an open question whether the army is really hollowed out, or whether it's salvageable, and the military leaders know this very well.
They know it much better than almost anybody else, but with extended tours, stop-loss, so that people who were scheduled to come to the end of their stint in the army are told, sorry, you can't.
There was this little bit of small print in the contract.
We can keep you as long as we want.
Reducing morale.
You've got all kinds of mid-level officers that would normally expect to sign up in fairly large numbers for another stint with the army have decided, nope, two, three tours in Iraq, getting shot at and hated.
I think that's enough.
And it is.
People like Mike McConnell seem to be leading the charge against it.
We thought, oh no, Admiral Fallon is gone.
Now what do we have?
Well, we've got the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apparently agrees with Admiral Fallon, and is willing to come out publicly and say so, as he did last week.
Pretty strong words from him, right?
Not very good, because they have to, yeah, top brass can be arrogant and sort of blind to what's going on down at the lower ranks, but they have to be, at least they have some concern about the long-term health of their institutions, and those institutions are particularly the army.
If you want to put boots on the ground, where are you going to find them?
You know, they've lowered the standards for recruiting, done about everything they can short of a draft to keep the Iraq war from totally destroying the army.
They've got a problem, plus all the equipment that's going to have to be replaced over the next several years, assuming we don't get sensible and decide to adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy.
Well, yeah, then we wouldn't have to replace them at all.
We could just, as Ron Paul told the Washington Post, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines, which I think is my favorite Ron Paul quote of all time, actually.
Yeah, I like that spin, most people would leave out the, well, unless, you know, we just don't replace the tanks, which would be okay.
Most people don't have that at the end.
But, you know, most of the talk is not about putting boots on the ground in Iran, it's about doing airstrikes and destroying their nuclear facilities and their Quds Force bases and things like that.
Maybe bomb them for a week or two.
What do you think?
We know less about Iran than we knew about Iraq before we decided to do that invasion.
But there are some things that we do know.
It's a bigger country, it's got a bigger military, and insofar as they have nuclear facilities, we know that most of them are buried deep underground, and we're pretty darn sure that there are facilities that we don't know about.
So you can go ahead and bomb nuclear facilities, but, you know, that could be replaced.
That could, you know, delay, if they're really interested in getting a bomb, which I still think is an open question.
If they're still interested in that, you know, it will delay them for, what, half a dozen years, maybe?
You know, how is that a long-term anti-proliferation policy?
Well, it doesn't seem like one.
You look at the example in Iraq, which I guess is the best example.
In 1981, the Israelis bombed the Osirak nuclear facility there, which was safeguarded by the IAEA, and it was after that that Saddam Hussein said, wow, I better make an underground nuclear weapons program in order to, you know, keep things like that from happening again.
And it was only then that he tried to make nuclear weapons, not that he ever got very close, but still.
But still, by the time of the first Gulf War, what they did discover is that he was closer than anyone had any notion that he was.
Right.
That the weapons program was more advanced than any of the Western intelligence agencies had figured.
Right, and this was a policy that hadn't begun until the Israelis had bombed their above-board, safeguarded IAEA nuclear facility there at Osirak.
You know, and beyond that, you know, Iran rattled its missile sabers yesterday, which ought to be a reminder.
They can close the Strait of Hormuz and put a choke hold on the world's oil supply, or at least on a great portion of it.
They have either total control or tremendous influence over Hamas in the Gaza Strip and over Hezbollah in Lebanon.
They could use those proxies to create all kinds of trouble for the United States, Israel, and the Sunni Arab countries as well.
And you know, Muqtada al-Sadr has said multiple times that if America bombs Iran, his guys will go back to war in Iraq.
And in the American Conservative Magazine, William S. Lynn quoted Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who's basically the power behind the throne of Nouri al-Maliki at the Supreme Islamic Council.
And he's, I guess, you know, basically the real commander of the Badr Corps.
And he has also said, I think the quote was, we will do our duty in the event of an American war with Iran, which means take Iran's side.
And again, there's some controversy over to what extent Iran has been aiding the Shiite militias or actually sending people into Iraq to kill or harass Americans.
But it seems pretty clear that they've done that to some extent.
And they certainly have the capacity to increase that activity.
And how can you not be sure that they would?
So you would end up with a whole lot more American casualties in Iraq.
And what seems to be almost a situation where we're on the verge of, if there were an inclination in the U.S. government to do so, that we could declare victory and start to leave.
Because we've got Maliki saying, be a pretty good idea to have a timetable for withdrawal for this status of forces agreement, isn't it?
And, you know, the Bush administration, you know, sort of views a timetable sort of like kryptonite and recoils in horror from the idea.
But what we've got is an Iraqi government that is increasingly impatient with the American presence and increasingly thinking they're able to sort of handle things on their own.
They may be right, they may be wrong.
But one of the top American commanders in the papers today just said that, you know, he expects Iraqi troops to be able to handle almost everything by early 2009.
Well, we've heard that before.
But still, I mean, you're right that this would be a great opportunity to say, you know what, Maliki, you're right.
We did win.
Congratulations, pal.
You're the dictator of Iraq.
Now let's all get the hell out of here.
No, no.
The Democratic leader of Iraq.
Oh, pardon me.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
We've got to keep the pretense up.
Right, right.
That's right.
That's what al-Dawah has always been about.
Democracy.
As long as they win, I guess.
Yeah.
But here's the other thing, though.
America's already at war with Iran by way of financial measures.
And as Andrew Coburn and Brian Ross and Seymour Hersh have reported, covert action inside Iran.
Are you worried that something's going to blow up there and the Iranians are going to do something stupid?
A little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, that could happen.
Although in some ways, the standoff with Iran is a little like the Cold War with Russia, you know, back in the old days.
There will be incidents.
There have been incidents.
You know, they may capture some special forces guy and parade him around Tehran to prove the perfidy of the great Satan.
But while either side would want to exploit incidents, I'm not sure they really want to get into a shooting war with the United States.
Well, I'm pretty certain the Iranians don't.
The one thing you can say is that the Air Force and the Navy have not been that severely decimated by the Iraq War because they haven't been that active in it.
Right.
That's true.
So, you know, our our neocons can say, well, you know, still got the Navy and the Air Force and that's all we need.
Bomb them back to the Stone Age.
Yeah.
Well, and there are some people, too, who say that it's the Air Force who are basically the only ones telling Bush, yeah, it'll be great while the rest of the military, particularly, I guess, the Army and the Marines, who fear that they're going to have to get stuck cleaning up the mess, so to speak, are the ones opposed.
Yeah, that does.
That does seem to be the case.
Strange incentives in the military.
You know, you you advance by being involved in in in combat and showing your leadership and your capabilities that way.
So that's how you get promoted and get the fast track up toward the top.
So the Air Force people are going to want to have more action.
Yeah.
Well, and they have really been left out because they've spent all this time preparing for war with China or something.
And Robert Gates has even publicly chastised them.
So they need to focus more on how they can be effective in fighting counterinsurgency from the air in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I don't know exactly how that's supposed to work, but apparently F-22 fighters aren't getting the job done.
You know, and it is true when the Cold War ended, it seemed not to affect the whole military procurement situation at all.
Right.
You know, they were they were still on track to keep on getting, you know, aircraft carriers and fighter bombers and long range, long range airplanes, submarines, too.
Yeah.
And so they they just kept on acquiring the same kind of stuff they've been acquiring all through the Cold War.
And F-22 was designed in like 86 or something, right?
Yeah.
To celebrate Top Gun success at the box office, I guess.
Well, now tell me this, though, man.
There's someone very wise who I talk politics with often who says to me, look, and he's been saying this for years to Alan, a president with an approval rating in the low 30s or worse cannot start a war.
He just can't.
His popularity is too low.
He's got no mandate.
He's got an election coming up.
It would be an absolute disaster.
Forget about it.
Don't worry about it.
It can't be done.
What do you say to that?
I guess the counter to that is if they really believe and I think maybe the the Cheney Elliott Abrams branch does believe that it's essential to at least deliver a setback to Iran.
You know, they could argue 30 percent rating.
Lame duck.
What have you got to lose?
Yeah, there you go.
Right.
You will be vindicated by history, which is what Bush really wants to believe anyway, that he's going to be viewed like Harry Truman in another 30 years and people will see him as the great visionary that he was.
You know, the very first article I wrote about this back in 2005, I said at the end there, we ought to consider being really nice to George and not making fun of him too much, because he might see this as the only way out.
There's probably something to it.
So from now on, everybody, I want you to praise George Bush and tell him what a what a great leader he's been and make him feel really good so that he doesn't feel like he's got to do this.
His last chance at vindication starting another war.
I could see that in his mind, though.
You know, mostly you can see the gears turning in that guy's brain when he's talking.
I can see him figuring that, well, you know, maybe this is a good idea.
Oh, I hope not.
I hope not.
Oh, man.
So, William Odom, you bring him up in your article here.
The guy who died recently, he was Reagan's head of the National Security Agency, called the Iraq war the greatest strategic blunder in American history.
What's so important about him, really?
Is it is it just that he's a former Reagan guy who criticized this war and proved that you don't have to be a patchouli stinking hippie?
Oh, I think I think that's part of it.
But even more than that, and I got to say, I am grateful that the last time I was in Washington, which was last September, I made it a point to go and visit General Odom because I talked to him on the phone.
Gosh, no, who knows how many times and always enjoyed that.
So I went, you know, to his office at the Hudson Institute and we chatted for about an hour.
And I think we both enjoyed it.
You know, what an intelligent and charming guy he is.
But, you know, after after he, you know, took his retirement from the military, he ended up teaching, teaching political science, taking more classes.
And he wrote a book called America's Inadvertent Empire that I think is really worth looking at.
If somebody hasn't done it, he's not entirely against the idea of us having a bit of an empire.
But, you know, he says, if you're going to have one, you can't do stupid things like starting wars that are going to predictably put you in a position of occupying a country where most of the people there want to kill you.
You know, this is this is not the way to run an empire.
Right.
Well, I think that's pretty clear that that seems to really be the emphasis of the Obama campaign, too, is we got to shore this thing up or it's going to fall down.
We're driving too close to the edge here.
We got to scale it back just a little bit so that we can keep it forever.
But Bill Odom, he's to me, he was just an honest guy who called things the way he saw them.
And, you know, his pension was safe.
He had a nice synecdoche at the Hudson Institute and he didn't have to worry about, you know, whether somebody was going to push him out of a job or not.
It doesn't really take that much courage to do that.
But but in fact, the people that do that are pretty rare.
You know, most people sort of stick with the tribe they came in with and, you know, don't stick their head up above above to, you know, for fear that it might get lopped off.
And he was a smart and a brave man, I would say.
Well, and the Hudson Institute probably doesn't pay nearly as well as if he had gone and gotten a job working for Northrop Grumman or something like that, which is what most retired generals do.
Well, probably not.
But, you know, he didn't have to worry.
But, you know, a lot of people that don't have to worry about their economic future still are conformist and stick with convention and and, you know, don't want to stir up any trouble.
Yeah, they're worried about their cocktail party future, their financial future.
And, you know, I just I just thought Bill Odom had a lot of integrity.
And that's a rarer commodity in the in these United States than than it should be.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you about America's relationship with Russia.
You wrote an article a few weeks back called Moscow Musical Chairs about the rising to power of the new guys at Medvedev.
Is that how you say it?
Yeah.
And or maybe it's Medvedev, something like that.
Yeah.
Well, me and my Russian, you know.
Anyway.
So what do you think?
It seems like American Russian relations have deteriorated quite a bit.
They're supposed to be.
I mean, I remember the end of the Cold War and this great new future with us and the Russians.
We're going to be friends forever now.
And isn't it great that the Cold War is over without ever turning hot and all that kind of thing?
And the wall came down and and, you know, the Scorpions wrote a cheesy song about it and everybody loved it.
And yet it seems like we're not such good friends with the Russians here in 2008.
No, although although it's interesting that Bush and Medvedev seem to get along personally at the at the G8 meeting earlier this week.
But then, you know, people can get along personally and still be adversaries.
Does Bush have a Russia policy?
Do we have a Russia policy?
I don't think we do, except to except to irritate them from time to time.
You know, the chief example of that is has been the expansion of NATO with the with the collapse of the communist regime in Russia.
NATO really had no reason to be anymore.
But, of course, an institution like that, which is a huge cynic here for all the overpaid people that work in its headquarters, is not going to go out of existence without a fight.
But there was no there was no serious proposal even to phase it out.
But in fact, it had no reason to exist anymore.
But instead of just sort of leaving it as a as a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels, we ended up, you know, we decided, well, we have to expand it.
And, you know, expanding it to include the Czech Republic and Poland and proposing that, as Bush did, that Georgia and Ukraine be involved in it.
Obviously, that was going to antagonize Russia.
At first, you know, Russia didn't protest too much because they were in a pretty sad situation.
But with a with a price of oil going up so astronomically in the last few years, and with the reserves that they have, they've become much more, much stronger and much more assertive.
So that was, you know, it was fairly predictable that they would want to have influence in what in what Russians before communism and after communism and during communism have always called the near abroad, their neighboring countries.
And to see the United States, and to a lesser extent, the European Union, pushing to have more and more influence in those countries, obviously, is going to get them a little bit paranoid.
Well, you know, I'm no statesman, Alan, but I'm trying to figure out why not just be friends with them and have as friendly trade relations as possible.
And rather than compete with them over, you know, which pipeline goes which direction or whatever, just all get along and make money.
What the hell's the problem?
Seriously, I don't you know, when I was a kid, there was the whole thing about, well, you know, Ronald Reagan could start a nuclear war one day or whatever.
And I'd like to just not have that even in the furthest back of my mind anymore.
The worry that there are a bunch of Russian missiles pointed at my head and that my country is run by a bunch of lunatics who keep poking them in the chest.
It's sort of like, even though, you know, we all cheered and danced in circles with the end of the Cold War, it's sort of like, we've never really gotten beyond being in the Cold War.
And we have to assume that that Russia has to be an adversary because well, they always have been.
But, you know, you're right.
Why shouldn't we just assume that they're going to be at least a trading partner?
That would not preclude criticizing some of the authoritarian things that Putin has done over the last several years.
He is certainly acting a lot more like an autocrat than that, I think, is a good idea long run.
But he's also very popular with the Russian people.
Well, you know, people don't usually talk about this, but in the 1990s, and I don't even think it's because it's politically incorrect or anything.
I think it's just something that most people don't know about.
It's just not part of any of this discussion is I don't know what exactly the numbers are.
Hundreds of thousands, millions of people who basically died of extreme poverty in one sense or another, easily curable diseases, starvation, et cetera, in Russia just since the end of the Cold War.
And I'm sure that there's probably a lot of finger pointing and external blame to be shown to the Russian people.
I would probably be a pretty pissed off nationalist myself if I thought that, well, and I don't know all the details of this, but I think it's pretty clear that basically a bunch of foreigners ran away with all their money at the end of the Soviet Union.
Well, foreigners and some politically connected Russians as well.
But, you know, they called it shock therapy, right?
Where you're not supposed to sell shares to the masses who previously owned all this stuff, supposedly under the communist theory, where you just turn it over to a couple of politically connected KGB guys here or Israeli nationals there or whatever.
And they basically just looted all the industries, liquidated them and left.
Yeah.
So instead of creating a market, they created a system of crony capitalism.
And as long as oil prices are high there, they're going to be able to pretend that they have a solid economy.
Which actually just puts off, you know, worse consequences.
Well, I guess that's assuming that the oil price will ever go back down again.
I wouldn't bet on it, but yeah, maybe.
So basically you think this stuff comes down to like pipelines and stuff, which way they're crossing Turkey or going around Iran or whatever the heck there.
That's a good deal of it.
But but there's also, you know, the the idea of Russian national pride, which from one sense is, you know, totally irrational that anyone should have, you know, get their self-esteem from the fact that their country can kick somebody's ass.
But it happens in almost every country.
Yeah, I've heard of that before.
But you know, Russians have always felt a little a little dissed by the West and have the idea, you know, that the West considers them kind of, you know, backwards and barbarian.
And that sort of gets hackles up and unfortunately makes them want to support, you know, their state, their government, whatever it may be, just a little bit more.
And so Putin can claim to have restored some of that pride and it's undergirded by high oil prices.
If they hadn't had them, you know, Putin might have looked as inept as Yeltsin did toward the end.
But, you know, he's been been fortunate in the circumstances that he inherited.
Do you think that the Russians will have anything to say or do in the event of war with Iran?
I mean, right above Iran or just to the north of Iran, I guess I should say, is the whole Caspian Basin and Russian allies.
I haven't thought about that that much.
But the Russians have had, you know, because they have to have a closer relationship with Iran than we have.
They've supplied them with some weapons.
I would think that if it came to a U.N.
Security Council, I would suspect that they would threaten a veto on economic sanctions even against Iran unless, you know, unless they were carefully crafted to be totally ineffective.
Which happens if there were a shooting war with the U.S. and Israel on one side and Iran on the other side, would Russia be without actually, you know, a formal alliance, a sort of a de facto ally of Iran?
I think that's possible.
Well, it seems reasonable to think that even if they want to avoid any kind of outright conflict with America in those kind of circumstances, that some kind of dominoes would fall over, some kind of consequences and changes would be made, at least if not in Iran, at least with the countries around there.
I read something, I'm trying to even remember, it's no good to bring up things like this without a footnote, but what the hell, and it was something about the Russians might just take their troops and occupy all their allied countries there in the Caspian Basin all the way, maybe even, I forget if Azerbaijan is one of the members of their little Caspian alliance there or not, but that they would certainly react militarily one way or another if not, you know, outright shoot at us.
I would think they would be, and I think they would probably supply weapons to Iran, but it might just be the occasion for them to reoccupy the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union.
Yeah, well, and as you said, I'm sure that a lot of people in Moscow would really like to see that happen.
Yeah, well, and they have the oil money to finance it now, I guess.
Well, so, as far as their economic policies there, is the money just being wasted, like in the old Soviet system where it's such crony capitalism that nobody's making any real proper investments on price, that it's all kind of just artificial from all the oil money coming in?
I mean, it seems like, you know, if you were the dictator of Russia, you'd figure out a way to actually invest that money in things that will last for the future, right?
You might want to try.
I think it's probably not quite as wasteful as the communist system was.
It'd be hard to compete with that.
But still, fascism isn't that much more efficient than communism, is it?
Not that much more, no.
Getting the trains to run on time is a fairly trivial achievement.
Yeah, and in fact, you know, I think I read somewhere that anybody who tells you that the trains ran on time in Italy under Mussolini is full of it.
They didn't live there.
I did.
And those trains never ran on time.
So there's your last excuse for fascism, don't you know that?
Probably true.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so, OK, as far as Iran, back to Iran here real quick, which I guess we're still on Iran, right?
Only in terms of Russia.
But anyway, more on Iran again.
Oh, and this includes Russia, too.
They're part of the P5 plus one, the Security Council, the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany.
And apparently, Alan, Bush has backed down a little bit and they've made an offer toward the Iranians that they could have some talks about having some talks one day if only the Iranians will quit expanding their uranium enrichment, which is maybe even a full half step back from the demand of unconditional surrender before any talks take place.
I don't know.
I did a column a few years ago saying that, reminding people that years ago there were what we called Kremlinologists, which, you know, scholars and academics in the West who tried to study the various public signs that could be seen about what was going on behind the scenes in the Kremlin and, you know, would draw very great conclusions out of, you know, who was in which order at a reviewing stand of a military parade, etc.
But to some extent, you know, we have to study our own government that way, because it's so secretive that it's very hard to know what's going on with it.
It really is like that, isn't it?
Trying to guess, well, what's Robert Gates' real position versus Dick Cheney?
Is he just, you know, a supplicant and he's playing good cop or is he really trying to thwart Cheney's will here?
And where does Condoleezza Rice come down?
She sure sounds like a liar on TV.
We all just have to guess.
So it really is tough to figure out what our government's intentions are.
Yeah, it really does seem that way.
Well, I guess we can be sure that they want to keep killing Africans for the time being.
Barack Obama seems to have an entire list of African countries that need our help.
And of course, John McCain has promised to invade the Sudan once he gets power.
The proxy war, I guess, continues to rage in Somalia.
Any hope for the future of that poor continent under American rule?
The best thing about Africa for Africa is that there's not that many resources that the United States and Europe want to go after.
Yeah, there's some oil here and there.
And the Chinese apparently have some interest in some of the resources.
But, you know, the less foreign intervention in that continent, the better off they're going to be.
Not that not that they've done all that greatly without foreign intervention either.
But, you know, some of that's a legacy of colonialism and some of it's the unrealistic high hopes that people had after after colonial rule ended in African countries and they got kleptocrats instead of foreign kleptocrats.
But Africa should be grateful that it isn't seen as strategically significant in the great geopolitical games.
Yeah.
They're not getting great luck on their part, except, I guess, in the Horn of Africa there.
You mentioned oil here and there.
One of those places is Somalia.
Yeah.
And we have a proxy war there since December 2006, which, of course, goes unreported in American media.
But people die there every day.
You know, the tragic thing about Somalia is the UN and various other international agencies have tried and tried and tried to get a good, proper nation state put together, you know, on the Western European model.
And it didn't work.
And, you know, when they were almost completely decentralized and by modern standards didn't have a proper central government, they were actually starting to recover a little bit.
Yeah.
The Islamic Courts Union, you know, I don't know anybody who would argue that that's, you know, the best way to rule this society or anything like that.
But best I can tell about them, if we disregard the three men, the literally one, two, three men wanted for questioning the suspects in the Africa Embassy bombings, if you take their so-called presence, if they ever even existed, out of the situation, you look at just the Islamic Courts Union, it was basically the uncles and the grandfathers in the neighborhoods got together and made a deal that they would be the decision makers.
And they decided on a somewhat decentralized system, but it really did seem to come from the ground up.
It seemed like a very natural order kind of thing.
And the problem was they had the word Islamic in the name and I'm sure they weren't, you know, the most open and loving government in the world, but there's not too many of those.
And what they did seem to do was at least stop the fighting until we started again.
You recognize that in these traditional tribal societies, there are tribal customs.
They haven't brought shiny new buildings and tremendous economic progress, but they have at least kept a semblance of peace for centuries and centuries.
And so you need to respect those kinds of traditions.
Yeah.
Instead we overthrow them.going to have a functioning society in a country like that, you know, whereas the U.N. and the West seem to just want to come in and build top down, start a government that's just like every other government without any particular interest in, respect for, or knowledge about the long traditions of the country.
Well there's 700,000 refugees as of right now living on the road on the way out of Somalia or on the way out of Mogadishu, I mean to say, and they say tens of thousands of people have been killed, no end in sight.
And that's exactly what you say, the U.N. and the U.S. created a government, a central government over in Ethiopia, and they decided they would come in and install it.
It's been an absolute disaster.
I wonder when, as in if, the notion that diplomats and military people in Washington and London and Paris and Moscow know so much better how other countries should be run and are obliged to intervene because they're so ignorant and backward, how much longer that fantasy land belief can persist?
It's been more resilient than I would have expected, I must admit.
Yeah, well, you know, reality is attacking it from all angles, as Gareth Porter wrote about Petraeus' Iran fantasies in Counterpunch last week, look out propaganda line, here comes a bunch of truth, and yet the propaganda line really holds up well against facts, it seems like.
No matter what it is.
I don't know, the desire to believe is strong.
You know what's going to, here's what it's going to take, Alan, everybody in the libertarian movement is going to have to have their own TV show, and that's the only way to change it.
I would go for the TV box.
Okay.
All right, go.
I would go for that.
Yeah, if somebody gave me a show, I'll show up and do it.
Yeah, I would too.
Although, I've got to say, this is really the best of all worlds I'd go now.
I would pick Artificial Mike, too, just to get the ratings up.
All right, everybody, that's Alan Bach, he's a senior editorial writer at the Orange County Register, America's libertarian newspaper, and he writes Eye on the Empire for Antiwar.com, he's the author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge, great book, pissed me off, and also The Politics of Medical Marijuana.
Thanks very much for your time today, Alan.
Oh, thanks so much for thinking about me, Scott, and keep it up.
All right, thanks, man.