04/30/13 – Jon Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
ScottHorton.org is the website where you can find all the interview archives.
And again, we're here live every weekday, less Thursday, from 12 to 2 Eastern on NoAgendaStream.com, NoAgendaGlobalRadio, TalkStreamLive, et cetera, et cetera.
Our first guest on the show today is the great John Basil Utley.
He is associate publisher of The American Conservative, a longtime conservative activist, keeper of AgainstBombing.org, Americans Against World Empire.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you?
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks for the intro, the introduction.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I forgot to say, but I'm very happy that I remembered to say now that you also are the son of Frieda Utley, the great anti-communist writer.
And if people go back to the archives and listen to my previous interviews of you, they can find out that whole story about where you come from, which is such a compelling narrative.
I highly recommend that people go back.
Thanks, Scott.
If I can add how great it is today that there are other voices getting out in the media.
I remember my mother's friends, if anyone ever got a letter in The New York Times or Washington Post, they'd be proud for a year.
That was oh, there were so few ways to get contrary information out compared to like the work, the great work that you do.
Well, thanks very much for that.
I sure appreciate your appreciation a lot.
All right.
So let's talk about this great piece that you have at the American Conservative Magazine.
It's called The Untold Story of Anti-War Conservatives, mostly dealing with the post Cold War era.
And then, you know, obviously, especially the Iraq War.
But I wanted to say, first of all, I'm sure you saw Dan McCarthy's great piece about the damage that especially the Iraq War has done and the George W.
Bush administration has done to the conservative movement from a couple of weeks ago.
And I just wanted to point out that I saw on the Internet some liberals saying, oh, my God, an American conservative against war.
I've never heard of such a thing.
Why would a conservative be against war?
They were absolutely amazed.
We think we're the real conservative values going back to Edmund Burke, that war being pro-war does not make you a conservative, a non-conservative or whatever.
You know, there are arguments against it.
The whole point with James Madison and the Founding Fathers was always recognized that war is the greatest detriment to liberty.
England grew up in a way that our founding fathers and the English ideas came because England is an island with less subject to the wars that raged on the continent of Europe.
They were able to avoid some of them.
Right.
But well, isn't the question simply whose side are you on?
Well, we're on the side of the good guys, of course.
I'm kidding, but we want to keep our freedoms.
And going to war is the tremendous risk.
First, you add there about the homeland security and, of course, the money, the money, the money that Tom Paine had a great line way back in the 18th century.
Tom Paine said, I know not whether taxes are raised to fight wars or wars are started in order to raise taxes.
Right.
That's funny.
That's what Lew Rockwell and I are always talking about, whether they wage war to inflate or inflate to wage war.
It's kind of both.
Now, and he may be paraphrasing that he's a lot more educated than me.
Anyway, Tom Paine.
Yeah, yeah.
In that article, you talk about first of all, you go back 10 years before you go back 20 to the end of the Cold War.
And you talk about how the conservative media, the established conservative media really blew it.
They really let themselves be captured by the neocons and by the neoconservative narrative.
But now for for the uninitiated, could you explain a little bit about, you know, how an old con like yourself considers a neocon?
What exactly is a neocon?
And then as contrasted against, you know, you and Pat and Charlie Reese and the others you cite in your article who got it right.
I think the point is that with the end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of, of course, communism, the foreign policy was never a great concern to most conservatives.
They focus on domestic issues.
And there was something of a vacuum about running foreign policy.
And the neoconservatives actually come from the left.
They were Trotskyists.
Their parents were in the left.
And they came over in the, well, Reagan, in effect, brought them over partly.
Scoop Jackson, there was a neoconservative wing there.
But on the whole, they have a leftist tradition.
And what they proposed was very much on the left.
I've said they're going to spread the revolution, or in this case, American.
I mean, what they said was to spread American ways and all that.
Personally, I think there's a there's a strain among many intellectuals that Peter Virik, a writer, a famous writer from long ago, had pointed out the lust for violence, the vicarious lust for violence among many intellectuals who have been in a fight, certainly not regularly.
And it's so easy, that satisfaction going to war, of course, let's remember it was not their sons and nor the congressmen.
Very few had their sons involved in the wars or daughters.
But they took over, sort of.
And they had fantasies, partly.
We used to say, imagine then after we take over these countries, they would have the ruling, the ruling jobs, as some did in Iraq, although they didn't have enough.
So they were recruiting interns from the Heritage Foundation to come be part of the occupation.
I mean, there's so many cross veins here.
I was a student in Germany in 1952.
I'm an old man.
And the American army had tremendous preparation for occupying Germany.
What would be done?
And this, like going into Iraq, it was like children that, oh, we'll we'll go in and we'll win and kill, get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they'll all live happily ever after.
That was about the way, the attitude.
And the State Department did have an occupation policy, but it was rejected by the Defense Department, by the aid, you know, the guy who was the far left.
I'm sorry, you're talking about a Rumsfeld aid?
Yeah.
Wolfowitz or Pearl or Fyfe or?
Fyfe, Douglas Fyfe was in charge of this.
And we had an article in the American Conservative long ago by James Benkerton of Fox about Douglas Fyfe.
He was being proposed different people to be the ruler of Iraq, the American Occupation Authority.
And he didn't want anyone who spoke Arabic, who knew the Middle East.
He brought in these names are all going, you know.
Yeah, Paul Bremer was the viceroy.
Yeah, Bremer, who was a nobody.
And except he went around in yellow boots that looked like hiking boots.
But anyway, that's a long story.
The point, however, of the article was that there was a lot of resistance among conservatives to going to war.
But remember, Robert Novak was perhaps the best known.
But they could not get published.
You had a network of the conservative high ground, high command, if you will, with National Review, the Heritage Foundation, the op-ed of the Wall Street Journal and a few of Fox, of course, and the anti-war voice, namely not going to attack Iraq, could not get published nor voiced basically.
Yeah, you cite in the article that the only conservative who could write an anti-war piece and get it published really was Brent Scowcroft.
In the Wall Street Journal.
And he's not even really a conservative.
Right.
The wall.
He was he was a national security.
I mean, but he was just speaking for Bush senior is why they published that.
He wasn't speaking for you guys.
National Security Agency is and he had a very good article laying out the same arguments we had.
And the Wall Street Journal published him.
I followed it carefully.
I believe that was the only article that ever came out in the Wall Street Journal questioning going to war.
They were so enthusiastic.
And anyway, in the article, I named some of some of the people on our side who could not get published about beginning Pat Buchanan.
The Washington Times would no longer take him because he was anti anti-war to Charlie Reese, who you mentioned, one of the great writers, Paul Craig Roberts.
Paul Gottfried is one of the real historians of the conservative movement.
Doug Bandow over at Cato.
Bill Kaufman is one of our writers.
He wrote a great book, Ain't My America.
The Long History of Noble Anti-war Conservatives.
Sheldon Richman is one of our old timers with the editor of the Freeman for years.
Leon Haddad, Alan Brownfield.
I mentioned some of the names.
And anyway, we have links in the article.
It's it really got around the article.
There's a lot of links to different.
And then what we have also is two videos.
And one of them is showing Phil Donahue, who was taken on.
He was one of the most popular, one of the top TV programs at MSNBC and was taken off in direct orders by General Electric.
But after all, it was their business selling weapons.
And he was embarrassing.
He was so, you know, the anti-war arguments were absolutely very strong.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, if people go back and look at Pat Buchanan's article, Who's War in the in the founding issue of the American Conservative Magazine.
I mean, just forget about it.
He had 2015 vision on that.
Absolutely nailed Buchanan.
Wonderful.
And he was shut out of Washington when the Washington Times wouldn't publish him anymore.
And then with our magazine, he had a voice here.
And as did others.
The point with the American Conservative Magazine really started as an outlet for all the well-credentialed conservatives to write who were opposed to the war and could not get published elsewhere.
Right.
And now, well, a minor note here.
Sheldon is actually a plumb line libertarian, left libertarian, not very conservative.
But you're right that he goes way back on being very good on this stuff.
And you mentioned in here, y'all's group that you had helped organize back in 1991 for the first go for the committee to advert to avert a Mideast Holocaust.
I've seen video of Pat Sheldon, Joe Sobrin and someone else doing kind of a presentation.
It was so good.
We have it on the article that I found on C-SPAN in their library.
Oh, you linked to it here in the article.
Great.
Yeah.
And there's a link in the article to it.
And we had Phil Nicolaides was our chairman.
We were opposed to the first Iraq war for a number of reasons.
First, the lies, which I'll mention again.
But secondly, what do you do after you win?
It's Americans for many Americans.
It's sort of like a football game.
You win and go home.
I don't know.
But the objective in the first Iraq war was questionable because of the consequences.
Once.
And, of course, 9 9 9 11, remember, came bin Laden's three reasons for attacking America.
One was the our occupation army, our soldiers in the holy land of Saudi Arabia.
Second was the conditions of the Iraqis under our blockade.
Remember, in the first Iraq war, we bombed their electricity, their sanitation, their irrigation, and then we blockaded them so they could prevent rebuilding.
And hundreds of thousands died.
It was a famous TV interview with Leslie Stahl asking Madeleine Albright, was it worth half a million children?
That was a number that came from various U.N. reports to die from our blockade.
And her answer was, well, yes.
Sorry, but yes, it was.
So those were when bin Laden attacked us.
One was the soldiers, American soldiers on holy ground.
It was the condition of the Iraqi civilians under our blockade and the Palestinians under Israel's occupation.
Those were his three reasons for attacking us.
And, well, it came from the first Iraq war.
But also there was a famous story.
The first war was based on lies, just like the second Iraq war.
The two big ones were the incubator babies story.
I think we have a link in the article to it where the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, who's one of the richest families there, came pretending to be a nurse who had been in the hospital and seen Iraqi soldiers dump babies onto the floor out of incubators to steal the incubators and take them back to Iraq.
And this story went over and over.
And it was all lies.
An American public relations firm did it.
The girl was the daughter of the Iraqi ambassador who pretended to be a nurse.
And tremendous publicity.
And the second big lie was that the Iraqi army had assembled on the border of Saudi Arabia.
So we were naturally afraid they could occupy Saudi Arabia.
So we sent our army, it's forgotten, went there first ostensibly to defend Saudi Arabia.
Well, it was untrue.
I have links to that, too.
That was lies about the satellite photos.
The Bush, this is the first Bush administration, never released those photos.
They kept talking about them as a secret.
Well, they didn't exist.
And this came out as a link to a U.S. paper that finally got the data.
And so it was lies also that Saudi, that Iraq was going to attack Saudi Arabia.
The army was not on their border.
Anyway, you know, you go on and we know the lies about, of course, the second Iraq war.
But it does get a little tiring.
Yeah.
Well, and see, this is the thing is the tiring aspect.
I think they're trying to tire you out, John.
And there never has been accountability.
You got to not let them.
You know, with Iran, who knows?
We own, we do know it's the same.
Many of the same liars are telling us now to start a war with Iran.
Right.
And that's because they never said in 2000, never mind 1991.
They never said in 2003 or 2004 that, OK, you know what?
The consensus was wrong.
And the consensus leaders now have to go get real jobs.
And the people who got it right are now going to get their spots on TV.
That never happened.
There are spots in the newspaper that never happened.
Fox, Bill Kristol, a lot of the people promoted all these lies right there.
Now it's just saying Fox is full of them.
Are telling us about Iran or whatever their opinions are, the rest of the world.
Oh, Syria.
We should go and start a war there, too, I think.
I mean, we the point is for America.
We there are things that we are unable to do.
We have great wealth.
We at least used to have a great image in the world and all that.
But there are things we cannot do.
Personally, I stay out of the stock market pretty much because I'm unable to sell.
It's just my psychology.
I have a great trouble selling.
So if you can't do certain things, you don't do them.
Right.
Yeah, fair enough.
And rule the world is that might be a bit more than we can.
Well, running the world.
I used to joke that the many conservatives would say the government can't run a nursery school, but it can run the world.
Then they favored policies to have it try to run the world.
I mean, we're incapable of it.
Who knows all these tribes and all these hatreds going back hundreds of years and all these little, little items?
How can we get involved?
I think like in North Africa, we don't know which tribe is most powerful, which hates the other one most.
Who who did what to whom?
And we don't have people that want to learn that.
And if they do, I mean, there are a few who learn it.
They don't.
Their voices don't count much in when we go to war.
Yeah, well, I mean, I just think of all the little hatreds will never understand that our policy just created.
I mean, for the first time in a thousand years, the Shiites control the capital city of an Arab country.
I mean, this is huge.
This is like you could write a Bible over the the trauma, you know, like how severe the changes of the Iraq war are for the you know what I mean?
Like if this was back in in olden days, you could have a brand new religion come out of the trauma of the Iraq war.
I think it's just, you know, I make to make light of it.
Partly I did write something sort of funny about the I called it the Second Children's Crusade.
Yeah.
And going back to the 13th century in medieval times, the wise men of the church thought that could not understand that Christians trying to take over the Crusades, trying to conquer Jerusalem, were obviously doing God's work, God's will.
And yet they couldn't win.
And the idea then was, well, perhaps children who are innocent, God would favor that the children could go and conquer Jerusalem.
And when you read, I have quotes there, but then you read Bush.
It was like a fairytale that we'd go in, conquer them, win, kill the wicked witch Hussein and live happily ever after.
The whole concept of what you do afterwards.
And of course, we set up Iran now.
But Iraq was the balance to Iran's power because Iraq was destroyed.
So it goes on and on.
Well, and, you know, there are a lot of parts of conservatism, aspects to conservatism that really no longer apply.
Right.
I mean, you look at all the well, look, I mean, doesn't conservatism sort of mean in the first place that go slow with the changes in your society, whatever they are, because you might regret them.
And yet whenever we get into a war, it's like grabbing the whole society by the lapels and shaking the hell out of it.
Now everybody hates each other more than ever before.
They're picking sides over issues with such import.
They're just at each other's throats.
You know, even even we're in Dagestan and Chechnya, people there now hate us.
I mean, you know, it's a Muslim thing, of course.
What's not understood?
It's important.
Let me say is that we don't see in America the media that goes out in the Muslim and Arab world, particularly the suffering at the time of Iraq, Iraq and others.
We see it's very sanitized.
American big television does not like to show a lot of dead bodies and it's and it's very light.
So we don't know what the rest of the world sees.
The Muslim world is 20 to 25 percent of the population of the whole planet.
And it's not all Arabs, as we learned from from the Boston massacre, the Boston bombing.
There's all sorts of Muslims that hate us because they see us as killing Muslims.
And you jump around.
Well, I can go on on that.
But well, it's an important point, creating more enemies.
It just leads to more and more empire down the road.
And, you know, this is, I think, the real point of Americans against world empire in the first place.
This group that you created around the time of the Iraq war is that we just can't afford this and that really trying to make the world right for American interests or American ideals or American anything else is really just going to destroy the U.S.
Because, like Ron Paul, I say we just don't have the money to do it.
And it doesn't work.
What I call a policy of bombs and bribes, basically, is the two things where you see how we spread money, the story of the CIA, millions and millions of cash in Afghanistan.
And then we bomb, of course, in other places, other parts of Afghanistan.
And it doesn't work.
There is a way you have to get into the minds of men and women.
I donate and work with something called Atlas Economic Research Foundation that supports think tanks in the third world where we try to promote the ideas of a rule of law and property rights and what we'd call the real conservatism.
And that's a very slow process.
It takes a generation.
You only really change with the young people.
And that is, I do want, I do think America has great ideas and great values to impart.
But the way we do it, killing people and, you know, I say bombs and bribes, is disastrous.
And we are hated, as we see from the Boston.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time.
We'll have to leave it there.
But it sure is good to talk to you again.
Scott, thanks for doing these programs.
It's wonderful.
You're wonderful.
Well, thank you very much for joining us, John.
And it's very important to me that people hear it from you.
You know, thanks.
You know, I was born in Russia.
I come, I'm a survivor of communism.
Yeah, well, my father died in the concentration camp in the Soviets.
So I do come from all that.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the thing is people do need to hear it from more right than them.
Right.
That has its act together.
That can explain, you know, the, well, the obvious utopianism and folly of the current foreign policy.
So it's great stuff.
You're worth your weight in platinum.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is the great John Basil Utley.
And he is associate publisher of the American Conservative magazine.
And I beg you, I beseech you.
To go to the American conservative dot com and read the untold story of the conservatives against war.
And here are three clips that he just mentioned for you to for your archive later.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died when in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice.
But the price we think the price is worth it.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators.
Took incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
They had kids in incubators and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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Peace and freedom.
Thank you.
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