All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is Pat Buchanan, author of a new article for Antiwar.com called Blowback from Bear Baiting.
You all know this guy.
He was a speech writer for Richard Nixon.
He's a pundit for MSNBC.
He's the author of A Republic, Not an Empire and the brand new Churchill-Hitler and the Unnecessary War.
Welcome back to the show, Pat.
Thank you, Scott.
Well, you know, they used to say that only Nixon could go to China because otherwise Nixon would have called him a commie.
And Pat Buchanan probably would have helped him.
We probably would have been right.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I would have called him a commie, too.
So it's perfectly OK.
But I bring that up because I think it's important that, well, really only Pat Buchanan could have written this article that we have at Antiwar.com today, Blowback from Bear Baiting.
Nobody is ever going to accuse you of being soft on the Ruskies just because we all know that you're a pinko.
We know you have a history of being the definition of a conservative voice out there in written form, a thinker, commentator and would-be politician and so forth.
So when you write that, hey, what's going on here with America's conflict over Georgia in conflict with Russia here is America's doing, not Russia's doing, that we've picked this fight, not them.
I think people hopefully will tune their ears in and really listen to what you have to say.
So why don't you just go ahead and and tell us what you think is going on here in the general sense.
What's happened with this conflict over Ossetia?
All right.
Before I go back and talk about the history of the last 20 years, let's take the local action that's taken place.
OK, what happened was that when when Georgia broke away in 1991 from the Soviet Union and was independent, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were pretty much consolidated into Georgia by Stalin, they broke away themselves and wanted to declare independence or autonomy.
They didn't want to be part of Georgia, which is understandable.
And both succeeded to some degree.
And they've been autonomous largely for the last 18, 17 years.
And what happened with Saakashvili, the head of Georgia, was he waited for the Olympics to open and he made a blitzkrieg move on South Ossetia.
He shelled the city, which he claims is his own.
He killed Russian peacekeepers.
He killed civilians and he drove tens of thousands north into Russia.
The South Ossetians see themselves more as kinsmen of the North Ossetians who are inside Russia.
So there was an act of aggression on his part or an act to solve a question inside his own country by military force in which he killed a lot of people who thought of themselves as Russians.
So Putin took the opportunity to go in and smash his army in 48 hours to throw it out, to throw the Georgian army out of Abkhazia completely as well, and to move into Georgia, destroy their military supplies in Gori and to occupy Gori temporarily, in my view.
And in this sense, I think the Russians are acting in their own national interest.
And I think they are justified in the attack they made in response to the Georgian attack.
And the idea that this is some brutal act of Russian aggression to occupy Tbilisi because they're democratic and free and Russia is not, it seems to me, is preposterous.
And what we've got now is a lot of neocons who want to reignite the Cold War.
I think they're unhappy the last one ended.
They need an enemy.
But if you go back in the larger case, Scott, and look at what happened at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet empire dissolved itself.
It removed all its bases in Cuba.
It pulled the Red Army back from Eastern Europe all the way back to the Urals.
It let all of Eastern Europe go free.
The Soviet Union dissolved itself into 15 nations peacefully.
The Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, Georgia, they became free and independent.
And so what happened then is that at that point, the United States began slowly and then more rapidly moving its own military alliance right onto Russia's doorstep and into her backyard.
We brought six Warsaw Pact nations into NATO and three former republics of the Soviet Union.
We've been trying to bring in Ukraine and Georgia.
We built a pipeline to cut Russia out of the oil of the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, which had been their oil, and to transfer it across Georgia to Turkey and cut them out of the action.
We put an anti-missile defense system in Poland.
We orchestrated these so-called color-coded revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia to dump over governments that were friendly to Moscow and implant governments friendly to us.
And quite naturally, the Russians began to say, what are we getting out of this deal?
We were supposed to be friends of the United States.
They're treating us like an enemy, a recidivist enemy, and they're building up all these alliances all around our country.
And so I think they reacted and they reacted, of course, to the looting of their country in the 1990s by these oligarchs.
And so Putin, a nationalist and a patriot and a hardliner, former KGB, comes to power and says, I'm going to restore the dignity of Russia and they're not going to push us around anymore.
And that's exactly the way the Americans would have reacted.
Now, when you mentioned the looting in the 1990s, you write in the article that American carpetbaggers colluded with Muscovite scalawags to loot the Russian nation in the 1990s and the Yeltsin years.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
Sure.
All the Russian national assets, their oil assets and their electric grid and power companies, all these things were so-called privatized.
And there are a lot of Americans over there working hand in hand with the so-called oligarchs like Berezovsky and this Khodorkovsky fellow who's now in prison and a number of others.
And they all wound up with an awful lot of the entire wealth of Russia in their hands.
And these guys were not well-known oil drillers.
They just were manipulators.
And there are people that know how to work money and work with the Western, their Western friends.
And they wound up with an enormous amount of Russian wealth.
And Putin came in and dispossessed it of it and scattered them out of the country and took it back the same way a Theodore Roosevelt would have done.
And I don't blame him for doing that.
But the point is, that's none of our business.
And it's not our business whether they have an authoritarian, more centralized government.
I mean, the Russians have known only those kinds of government, except in the Yeltsin years.
And they seem to prefer and like it.
Now, it's not may not be my choice, but Boris Yeltsin, excuse me, that Putin is far more popular in his country than George Bush is in ours.
Well, and I think what the media would have us believe is that a strong leader in Russia is tantamount to the resurgence of the Soviet empire.
Well, I don't think you mean the Soviet empire.
I don't see the Red Army coming back into Poland and crossing into East Germany and into the Balkans all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
I don't see that happening.
And I don't think it is happening.
They responded to this one episode and they're in there and they're going to take South Ossetia and Abkhazia away from away from Georgia.
And my guess would be they would be acceptable to a to a plebiscite to let those people determine with whom they want to be allied or associated.
And to me, that would be a fair outcome, but it's the United States that's been provocative here.
We're the ones that brought six Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and moved NATO into the former Soviet Union and the Baltic republics and tried to move it into Georgia and tried to move it into Ukraine.
I mean, we got to start seeing ourselves as others see us.
And to see John McCain saying, you know, countries do not invade countries.
It's the 21st century.
Yo, well, you know, what do you think we did in March of 2003?
Well, I was going to say, you know, they argue about whether the 21st century starts at New Year's 2000 or 2001.
But I'm pretty sure by 03, that counts.
Exactly.
I mean, this is preposterous.
Look at that.
I mean, George Bush, the first invaded Panama.
It was the biggest drug bust in history, they said.
We went into Haiti to throw out the military, whom I kind of preferred to that crazy priest we put back on the throne down there.
And we then threw him out.
The United States bombed Serbia for 78 days.
And then we crossed the country into Kosovo, which was its province.
And they never attacked us or threatened us.
They were inside their own country.
And so this whole idea that the Russians have done something exceptional and outrageous.
I mean, we ought to look in a mirror.
The Americans are the least self-reflective people on Earth.
Yeah.
Well, as you know, World War Two analogies are all the rage and everything is Munich.
And as we discussed on this show and as you discuss in your new book, the lessons of Munich don't quite lean in the same direction as most people would have us believe.
But in this recent whatever you call it, action in the Caucasus Mountains there, the analogy has been thrown around all over the place.
I heard Zbigniew Brzezinski, no fan of the Russians, comparing what Russia is doing now to Weimar Germany, taking back the lost provinces from the Versailles Treaty.
And then I heard you make almost the same comparison from a different angle.
Pat, what's going on there?
Well, the the it's exactly right what the Germans did, although it's the Germans and Weimar Germany didn't take back anything.
But the Third Reich got back the Tsar.
Well, I guess, yeah, I should have said interwar Germany there.
Right, right.
They got back the Tsar when the Tsar voted 90 percent in an internationally supervised election to return to Germany, which was under the Versailles Treaty.
What Hitler did try to win back, he let the South Tyrol go and Alsace Lorraine go and Eupen and Malmö stay with Belgium.
What he did want to get back, and he had every right to do so for Germany, was the Sudetenland, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
These were 3.5 million Germans.
They had been placed against their will in violation of the principle of self-determination under a Czech rule they detested and did not want.
They had protested for 20 years, almost, to the League of Nations, saying they did not want this.
There were more Germans in Czechoslovakia than there were Slovaks.
And so they said, we have a right to self-determination.
And Hitler backed their right to self-determination.
And the question was, in 1938 in Munich, should the British go to war with Germany in the Second World War in order to keep 3 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised, to which they had never consented and which had been opposed upon them against their will and against the principle of self-determination?
And the British wisely at that point said, we're not going to war for a cause like that because the British Empire will not back us up.
The Americans will not back us up.
We can't win the war.
And if we did win it, what are we going to do?
Put the Germans back under Czech rule?
I mean, this was preposterous.
And this is what Munich was all about.
And people don't understand these things.
And I'll tell you what this is more like, Scott.
It's like the situation in 1935.
In 1934, the Ethiopians crossed the border into French, I mean, Italian Somaliland.
And at Walwal, they massacred some Italian troops in a bloody skirmish.
So Mussolini said, we're going to pay these clowns back.
And so he organized an invasion of Ethiopia.
At the same time, Mussolini despised Hitler, hated Hitler, was trying to work with the Allies to set up a stress affront against Hitler.
So he sets that up and then he goes into Ethiopia and the British and French stupidly sanctioned him, isolate him and leave him no place to go but into the arms of a dictator he had detested, Germany.
And that's the stupidity of the French and the Brits, which we're doing right now.
We're sending weapons to Poland.
We're going to sanction the Russians.
Where do we think Russia is going to go if we give them if we block the door to the West?
Where do we think they're going?
I mean, do these people think this through?
Well, I don't I don't think that there's any long term thought other than, well, we have the Pentagon and it can do anything.
And so, well, we know it very well.
The Pentagon doesn't want any part of Georgia.
And Gates is one of the best men in the administration.
He said, look, we spent 45 years avoiding a war with these guys.
We're going to avoid one now.
There is no prospect of military operations in Georgia, period.
And now, so for all the talk, you don't think there's any real danger of war here.
I mean, I'll tell you what I do think about.
I think this foolish decision yesterday to give the Russians, give the Poles the anti-missile missiles and also give them Patriot missiles pointed at Russia, Russian aircraft basically manned by Americans was a stupid thing to do.
It's a stupid, reflexive action by the administration and by the Poles.
And my guess would be the Russians will now respond by giving air defense systems to the Iranians.
So where does that leave us?
Well, hopefully less likely to bomb them.
Well, you know, the last time we talked, it was in the news that the Russians were saying and it was right in the headline that in response to your deal with the Poles, we're thinking about reopening a bomber base in Cuba.
I don't think they'll do that, but I wouldn't be surprised to have them landing in Cuba and turning around.
I would doubt they would put a base there.
But look, they're going to put a base.
They've got that area in Kaliningrad, which is the former Konigsberg, where Immanuel Kant of a he of universal peace was born.
And and I wouldn't be surprised to see them put missiles in there.
I mean, I mean, the United States has got to ask itself, what is more important?
It used to be Reagan believed and Nixon believed that our relationships with the mighty powers, the Chinese and the Russians, were the most important things.
And managing these well and avoiding war, even though we did not like the regimes in either country.
And when I went to China with Nixon, there was madman Mao Zedong was in power right in the middle of the great proletarian cultural revolution, which was one of the most horrible purges in human history.
Yet they were men who realizes that's who we deal with in the real world.
I mean, we have these post Cold War baby boomers running the show now who think that the United States is omnipotent.
And if they shoot their mouth off loud enough, everybody's going to back down.
But the world has spotted that the United States is a lot of bluster and bluff in a lot of regions of the world.
Well, speaking of bluster and bluff, ABC News is reporting today that Rice is on her way back to the old world in order to thwart the peace deal, in order to make sure that there's something in there about the sanctity of Georgia's borders.
Well, she can talk all she wants about them, but you can write off South Ossetia and Abkhazia as far as I'm concerned, and I don't think we ought to send a single American to fight and die to keep them under Georgian control.
Especially when my guess is that given a plebiscite, neither of them want to be under Tbilisi.
And then look, if she's saying we're going to restore Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgia, I mean, she's talking through her hat.
Yeah, and there's no way to do that except, well, a hydrogen bomb war, in which case there'd be no causes left anyway.
Yeah, what are you going to send the 82nd Airborne to fight the Russian Airborne over skin volley or whatever it is?
Well, you know, John McCain said the other day at one of his campaign stops that the people in the audience, they need to understand that even though they don't know where Georgia is or why it should be important, that oftentimes wars start, big wars start, in little places.
They do, because stupid people live in big countries.
Look, there is no cause or justification.
Even if Russia marched into Georgia and occupied it and took it over, there is no vital interest of the United States that would be imperiled.
None whatsoever.
After all, Georgia was under Stalin and Lenin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Gorbachev, and we survived quite handsomely.
You don't threaten to go to war unless the lines are clear and the lines are in front of your vital national interest, which justify a war.
I mean, I'm delighted that Mongolia has a measure of independence, but if Russia and China decide that independence is gone, there is nothing we can or should do about it militarily.
Well, it's becoming pretty apparent, I think.
You can answer this however you like, but it sure seems from here that the whole war on terrorism is basically just cover for the great game, the resource war to take over Central Asia and make sure who gets to direct that oil which direction, who gets to do the pumping, which companies get to do the skimming.
Well, I think that's very true.
It used to be said that business follows the flag, but business has been leading the flag here, and you've got American troops and advisors in various countries in Central Asia, where in my judgment they do not belong, and in the Caucasus, where they do not belong.
And what is the purpose of this?
What we're doing over there is trying to get all the oil of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea and get it all steered through the pipelines of Azerbaijan and Georgia and cut out Iran and cut out China and cut out Russia, the big powers out there.
And it's not going to work, because ultimately that is their backyard, not ours, and we don't have the military to defend or protect those places, and many of the regimes there are anything but democratic beauties.
That fellow out there in Kazakhstan, he was running the show under the Soviet Empire.
And so I think that's exactly what we're trying to do, and I think it's foolish, and I thought the initial pipeline was foolish.
My view of what we should have done is had three pipelines, or one pipeline and two spurs, one of them the present pipeline, but a spur going through Russia, and a spur going down to Iran, and cut them in on the deal, give them an incentive to keep the peace there and not to fool around.
And in other words, don't get it cut off, their own oil cut off.
And that's what you do, you include them.
You know, the Godfather always gives a little cut of the deal to the other fellows.
Well, I guess one of the major problems that we have in this society still is the fact that back during the days of the Cold War, the word empire, when used to describe what the United States was up to, was, well, mostly just thrown around by the left, and a term dismissed by the majority of the American population.
If anybody to this day says that America is an empire now, people still just dismiss it as though you must be some commie.
It's a bad word.
We can't accept this fact.
Our society as a whole cannot seem to accept the fact that what we have with our 130-something bases around the world, or 700-something bases, however many, in 130 countries, that's an empire.
There's nothing else to call it.
Well, it is.
It is.
It's more of a commercial empire, but we've got all these ties to these various countries and military relationships with them, and treaties with them.
I think we're committed to fight for something like 50 nations.
There must be 25 NATO or 27 NATO nations now, all the Latin American nations.
We've got Taiwan and Korea, South Korea and Japan and Australia and the Philippines and even Thailand, and we've got commitments to Israel and we've got non-NATO allies.
So we've got commitments to fight all over the world.
It is exactly like an empire.
And the point is, the United States is bankrupt in a lot of ways.
We save nothing.
We're enormously in debt in terms of our national debt and in terms of the trade deficits and the trade debt.
And the United States, it's all coming down just like the British Empire.
And the key thing for Americans, I think, in this election and beyond, is to avoid the great war that we avoided in the 20th century against Soviet Russia.
By avoiding that and by staying the course in patience and perseverance and staying out of the big war, we eventually prevailed and won the Cold War and the Soviet Empire collapsed.
And now we're behaving just like the old British Empire did, gobbling up pieces of their empire, moving our imperial troops into their backyard and what they had given up.
And it's the same, one blunder after another, the same thing recurs again and again and again.
Now let me ask you about John McCain, and I don't want to get you in too much trouble here, but is he losing his marbles?
Because when I think back, it seemed like that guy used to have some perspicacity.
You know, McCain, I don't know what it is, but Dick Cheney, when I knew him, there was nobody more pleased than I was when Bush picked him.
I said, I know him, I know Powell, I know Rumsfeld.
These are all level-headed guys.
They got great knowledge and they got a lot of experience and they're savvy and none of them is a hothead.
And they understand the big game.
And for the life of me, I've been astonished by what happened with that invasion of Iraq and all this other talk of what we're going to do to the Soviets or the Russians, what we're going to do to them, and this is nonsense.
Yeah, he said the other day that he speaks for all Americans when he says that we're all Georgians today.
Well, we're not.
We're all Ossetians.
No, I saw that too.
We're all Georgians.
No, we're not.
This is not our war.
I mean, the Georgians started it and the Russians finished it five days later.
Well, maybe it is our war.
Do you think that he had tacit approval to go ahead and do this?
Well, I wondered about that and I think the Congress is a very cowardly institution, but I wonder why Joe Biden doesn't call hearings back and ask Condi Rice and call Condi Rice and others up and ask them basically focus on two questions.
One, did we give these folks a green light to go to war the way we did Israel when they pounded Lebanon for 35 days?
And if we did not give them a green light to go to war, did we see this coming and try to stop them?
And what do you suspect the real answer to that is?
I don't know that we saw it coming.
We're getting reports that are leaking out that Condi Rice told them not to do anything rash.
I do know Mullen's been over to Israel and I think he's told the Israelis, look, not only do we not want a war with Iran, you are not to start one.
See, this is the problem.
We get little states dragging big countries into wars.
The Austrians dragged Germany into World War I and the Poles dragged the British into World War II and the Israelis are trying to drag us into war against Iran and the Georgians want us to confront Russia.
What we ought to look out for is the interest of the United States of America and tell these little client states they do not have any authority or any freedom to take us into war and we have no obligation to come pull their chestnuts out of the fire if they get into war.
Well, now you sound just like Joe Lieberman, America first, right?
That's not the Joe Lieberman I know.
Yeah, I saw him accuse Barack Obama of not putting America first and I thought, wow, these guys really have just a tin ear for irony, don't they?
This is not something.
They say we're putting America first, but we're all Georgians.
Yeah, exactly.
Alright, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, everybody.
Pat Buchanan, political commentator for MSNBC, author of A Republic, Not an Empire, Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War.
You can read what he writes about foreign policy at antiwar.com.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
