All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And I'm very happy to welcome back our regular guest, Dr. Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and investigative journalist, writes for IPS News.
You can find all his IPS articles at Antiwar.com slash Porter.
Welcome back to the show.
Hey, glad to be back on your show, Kyle.
Well, I'm glad to have you here.
All right.
So let me tell you this, Gareth.
I think this ties in with your new article here.
I was just sharing with the good people, if I can find the link, here it is, I was just sharing with the good people here this quote from a man named Carol Quigley, who was a foreign policy studies professor at Georgetown University.
He taught our mutual friend, John Utley, actually.
Anyway, and so here's something that he wrote in his book, Tragedy and Hope.
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the right and the other of the left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
Instead, the two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can throw the rascals out.
He's got his little ironic quotes there.
At any election, without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy, either party in office becomes, in time, corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless.
Then it should be possible to replace it every four years, if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things, but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies.
Now, I think probably most of the analysis of Tragedy and Hope over the years would say that he's referring simply to the old, what they used to call the liberal eastern establishment, the WASP establishment, that runs America.
But I believe, in my discussions with you, that you have at least a take that if this does apply, which it would seem to with the selection of Joe Biden for Barack Obama's running mate and so forth, that perhaps it's a different set of interests that both parties are now beholden to.
I do indeed, and the story that I just published that you have on anywhere.com today, I think is really a nice lead into that whole theme that I'm so interested in, which is that the national security bureaucracy really does hold enormous power to frame the issues and then to carry out the programs and policies that really serve the self-interest of the national security bureaucrats and their bureaucratic organizations, rather than the interests of the nation of the American people.
There's really no connection at all between the policies that they follow and the interests of the American people in terms of security in any objective sense.
And I think the story about the attempt by the Bush administration to extend NATO membership right up to the borders of Russia, particularly in the most controversial, most violent area of Russia's border, which is the secessionist territories between Russia and Georgia.
This whole story, I think, illustrates perfectly the way in which bureaucratic self-interest predominates over any attempt to serve the objective interests of the American people.
Okay, now let me stop you there, because I'm a libertarian, and I don't believe there's such a thing as the interests of the American people, because everybody's an individual.
So it's pretty easy to see, I would say, I would argue that all along the government, maybe there are a couple of occasions here and there or something, but all along, everything that every politician does is to satisfy a certain interest at the expense of the rest of us.
Whether we're talking about foreign policy or whether we're talking subsidies for farmers or whatever it is, it's stealing from some of us to give to somebody else.
And so even before it was the neocons and their buddies at Lockheed and their buddies in the Air Force or whatever, it was the bankers and the oil men and those people who are getting over on the rest of us, never the national interest, because, well, basically, it's a fiction, right?
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, my only objection to the framework that you present there is simply that it suggests that there is nothing that could be done that would serve the interests of the rest of us, and I don't think that's true.
I mean, I think, in other words, that there's a rational policy that would certainly make Americans more secure than the policies that are being followed by the bureaucrats in their own self-interest.
So that...
Well, yeah, I guess I don't mean to suggest that it's absolutely impossible.
I think, of course, the vast majority of us, at least, would benefit from ending the empire, for example.
Right, exactly.
But I guess I just mean to say that politicians are just individuals, too, and all through American history, they've been Morgan partners and, you know, wherever they found these scumbags from.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's no doubt that this fits into a larger pattern of, you know, individual self-interest prevailing over the interests of those who put them into power.
Right.
Now the difference is, you're saying that all these different, you know, groups of people with power throughout the years who have built up the American empire, that the state itself now is so big, it's just a giant, dirty snowball rolling downhill, and this think tank or that think tank can have some influence, but basically it's the Pentagon that's running this thing.
Well, yes.
I think the point is not just that the national security bureaucracy is so big, it certainly is big, and it has amassed enormous power in terms of the amount of money that it disposes, and that's certainly a major part of its power.
But further than that, I think they have managed to kind of monopolize legitimacy, in a sense, politically.
And that's really a big part of the problem that, at some point, I hope we can address on your show, but I don't want to get diverted into that too much.
But I think, you know, there are multiple sources of power that they've appropriated since the early Cold War.
And of course, it began even before that.
I mean, it begins during World War II when the U.S. military, you know, changes dramatically in terms of the amount of money and bureaucratic tools that they have available to them.
But the Cold War really is what changed the nature of the national security bureaucracy forever in this country, and that's, I think, a big part of the story that still remains to be told in terms of the history of U.S. foreign policy.
And of course, you know, there's always been, ever since Alexander Hamilton, there have been people in our government who were imperialists and wanted to conquer this, that, or the other thing.
But after every major war in American history, we demilitarized, and, you know, we had plenty of wars, ask the Mexicans, ask the Indians.
But when we were done, basically the factories went from weapons of war back to making productive things.
And what was different about World War II was they didn't demilitarize.
They just decided that the Soviet Union, which had just lost 50 million men, was about to take over the entire world if we didn't stop them.
And so they basically kept on that World War II footing, a war in preparation for war ever since, simply because those were the people who had the most influence over the Pentagon and Truman at the time, right?
That's right.
And of course, what they then had to do was to begin to mold public opinion in a much more systematic way to, as Harry Truman once said, to scare the hell out of the American people in order to be able to assure that the programs that they had in mind would be passed without any difficulty in Congress.
So that really becomes part of the system as well.
Okay.
So we have this, you know, Nick Terse wrote this book called The Complex.
The military, industrial, congressional, scientific, academic, media, entertainment, absolutely everything complex.
But what you're really trying to drive at here is that the military part, that first word in this complex is what really goes in bold.
All those other people, even the Congress at this point, become the bit players in their movie.
Well, I'm not suggesting they're bit players, but I do think definitely the military leadership, the uniform military leadership is at the center of this structure of power.
They do in fact mold the broad outlines of U.S. military policy from one year to the next, from one presidency to the next.
And you know, I think that that has had a much greater sort of influence over the decisions about war and peace and about, you know, who's the enemy and who isn't than has generally been appreciated.
And I would trace this again back to the early Cold War years.
You can show, I think in one instance after another, that military leadership has essentially pulled the debate in one direction very heavily and excluded certain options and put much more weight on other options by its influence on policy, military policy and thus foreign policy at large.
Can you give us some examples from previous wars?
Well, I mean, I would, first of all, to go back to the very early Cold War period, that this does not involve a war that was actually fought, but it was certainly a war that the military, particularly the Navy, had in mind.
They were quite fond of the idea of going to war against China from very early in the Cold War, and it was the Navy that more than any other service was pushing for war against China.
And so military leadership from very early on coveted the idea of a naval base in China.
And they had been promised that by Chiang Kai-shek, their World War II ally and immediate post-war client.
And when the Chinese communists took power in China and that option of getting the naval base from the existing Chinese regime disappeared, then the Navy said, well, we're not going to give that up.
We're going to continue to press against China.
We're going to push China and provoke China in the hope that we can have regime change either through a war or otherwise.
So that's just one of the classic examples of how the military did, in fact, influence U.S. foreign policy, because the U.S. policy did fall into line with that relatively early on and really never got out of that groove.
And of course, that was a fateful decision, a fateful policy decision that really shaped U.S. policy in East Asia from that time on and certainly was a very strong contributor to the fact the United States went to war in Vietnam.
It seems to like, you talk about that from right there, they wanted that base.
I don't know.
You probably have the anecdotes in your pocket or something, but I would just hazard to guess that with a policy like that, that would preclude the possibility that there's such a thing as a Sino-Soviet split to be exploited, right?
Well, it certainly did bring the Chinese and the Soviets together, the fact the United States was bent on a sort of regime change in China, which was the official policy, sort of like, just like Iran later on.
That certainly forced the Chinese into alliance with the Soviets, absolutely, no question about it.
And of course, it was as soon as, just as soon as the prospect of some sort of lightening of the pressure on China took shape in the late 1960s, early 1970s, particularly early 1970s, then the Chinese began to move away from the Soviet Union.
So, you know, this is very predictable.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to divert you too far off the subject at hand, which is NATO expansion, which really, you know, we have to at least go back through the 1990s.
Pat Buchanan and people like that at the end of the Cold War said, all right, let's abolish NATO and bring all our troops home from everywhere.
And that didn't happen any more than it happened at the end of World War II.
And so we went to war, we've been waging war in the Middle East and occupying, but even more than that, we've been buying off governments and making deals and installing bases all throughout the old world, and especially even expanding the war guarantee, the NATO pact to the Baltic states, some of the actual former Soviet republics and so forth.
So this leads us up to Georgia.
They were planning, right, to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO.
They were going to try to get that done this December.
That's right.
And of course, this is, this is not a new policy.
It's not a sudden, you know, shift in policy at all.
This was something that they began to talk about internally, as soon as Saakashvili took power in 2003, the Rose Revolution took place.
And so in other words, as soon as they had somebody in power in Georgia, who was ready, willing and able to join NATO, they were right on it.
And that became then the default position within the bureaucracy.
And I cite an interview that I had with James Townsend, Jr., who was the Pentagon's main official in charge of relations with Europe during this period.
And he was, of course, involved very heavily in the whole NATO expansion issue.
And he told me that, you know, there was great enthusiasm, not only within the Pentagon, but in the State Department, for expansion of NATO right up to Russia's border, with this very, not just unruly, but aggressive and historically imperialist Georgian regime, Georgian state, I should say, if you're talking about historical context, in terms of Georgia's relationship with the Ossetians and Abkhazians, who were people, minority peoples, you know, on the Russian border between Russia and Georgia, who were colonized or imperialized by Georgia, and they were independent from Russia in the 1917 and 1921 period.
There's a whole history there.
But that did not seem to matter at all to the NATO expansion enthusiasts.
I mean, they were just hellbent on getting this done.
One of the things about joining NATO, you have to have all your borders settled and no problems is one of the conditions of joining, right?
That is the theory.
That is exactly right.
And indeed, I called the NATO headquarters to ask them precisely this question, wasn't there concern within NATO members, that membership for Georgia was in fact, this would be destabilizing, that it did not, in fact, fulfill the usual, the normal requirement for NATO membership that that these kinds of problems should be settled and not be a live issue remaining to be, you know, something that could explode in the faces of not just the country itself, but NATO in terms of being its partner and sponsor.
And they said, well, that's true.
You know, they admitted that that was true.
And you know, they didn't really want to comment much further than that.
But it was very clear that, you know, there was a great deal of unease on the part of a number of NATO member states, particularly Germany, of course, France and Italy as well were strongly opposed to this idea.
And that was the case from the beginning.
But the Bush administration, and again, with the very active and enthusiastic involvement, and I would say even initiative by the bureaucrats themselves, the ones who are responsible for European relations and NATO relations, they were the ones who were pushing this forward.
This is a case.
And this is why I think this is such a good story in terms of getting into this broader theme.
This is a case where it's not a matter of just the White House or Dick Cheney, who are at fault.
And we can sort of say that it was a kind of conspiracy of a handful of people or one or two people in the White House.
This is a policy that had broad support within the national security bureaucracy.
And that's because, you know, the NATO constituency within the US government is quite large.
It involves, you know, all the people in the Pentagon who have something to do with NATO, as well as people in the State Department who regard NATO as an instrument of US influence in Europe.
So there's a much broader problem here, which I think illustrates the point that I would like to continue to hammer away at in the future, which is that we have a big problem with a national security bureaucracy, primarily the military, but also the civilians in the Pentagon, as well as the State Department, who have a vested interest in a whole long list of programs that they are responsible for, that they are involved in day to day, which really define who they are as human beings in a way.
They sort of define their self-importance by how their programs are doing, whether they're succeeding, whether they prevail or not.
And so prevailing in NATO expansion over the Russians became a kind of sort of automatic reflex on the part of the US national security bureaucracy.
And they simply refused to face the realities of what that risked in terms of war in Georgia.
Well now, in your article you talk about the Clinton administration had a notion at the beginning that they wanted to bring Russia in to be a partner in post-Cold War European security.
They created the NATO-Russia Council and all that kind of thing.
But you say that Bill Clinton abandoned that policy and they decided, no, they were just going to encircle Russia instead.
What was behind that?
When did that happen?
It happened late in the Clinton administration.
I mean, there were a series of things that caused this reaction from the Clinton administration.
One of them was that the Russians became more nationalistic under Putin than they had been in previous regimes in Moscow.
And began to have more relations with Iran, more open, supportive relations with Iran and Iraq, frustrating US policy in those specific issues.
And basically being spoilers in a way, being more aware of the opportunities that they had and taking advantage of those opportunities to block the more aggressive aspects of US policy in the Middle East, for example.
So they were at least, I guess, entertaining the idea of going ahead and putting the Russians on the dole too and making them just another NATO satellite type thing.
Well, I don't think it was.
There was never, as far as I know, any idea that Russia was going to be a member of NATO, certainly.
Or even a somehow, you know, sort of a partner, a full partner, as though they were a member of NATO.
But there were thoughts certainly being given to the idea of preventive security ideas that would put the primary emphasis on making sure that relations with Russia did not deteriorate into a new Cold War.
I mean, that was certainly a very strong tendency within the Clinton administration early on.
And you know, the Secretary of Defense, William Perry, was certainly a supporter of that idea.
That's one of the things that he had talked about before he went into the Pentagon.
So that was a serious thought that the Clinton administration did entertain and tried to work on.
There was something called the Partnership for Peace that was aimed very strongly at engaging Russia in the security architecture in Europe.
And you know, some of the people involved in that were, in a way, a counter bureaucratic interest to those who, you know, wanted NATO expansion.
But then later in the administration, they began to tip against those who strongly supported engagement with Russia.
And the containment people began to prevail in that.
And of course, when Bush came into power, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion.
All right, now, I wonder if perhaps you're confusing the tail and the dog.
I know you're not a conservative.
You're somewhere on the left.
I won't categorize you, because I don't like to do that.
And I don't really know.
What I know is you're a really great reporter on what they say about Iran and why it ain't true, for the most part, Gareth.
But I know you're not a right-winger of any description whatsoever.
You're somewhere on the left.
And yet, I don't hear you blaming oil companies or Lockheed Martin or any of these guys.
They obviously have some role.
We have pipelines going through Georgia.
This isn't just about ethnicity.
Well, it's not about ethnicity, that's for sure.
But I really think that it's not about pipelines either.
In the sense that NATO expansion is so much broader as well as deeper in terms of the interests involved than pipelines.
And indeed, if this were about pipelines, I dare say that the policy would have been much more careful.
In other words, if it was about really keeping the pipelines secure and avoiding war, and if economic interest had really prevailed, then you would not have had the recklessness that is associated with this policy.
You know, Pallas said that what they did, they got away with the Baku-Tbilisi-Cayenne pipeline, however you pronounce that, but it was the second pipeline out of Turkmenistan or something was going too far for the Russians.
Something like that.
Well, I mean, the Russians certainly have an interest in promoting the alternative pipeline that does not go through Georgia.
No question about that.
And there is a kind of duel of, you know, sort of competing pipelines, if you will.
The United States would like the pipeline to go through an area that the Russians do not have a benefit from, and the Russians, of course, have the opposite interest.
I'm not at all denying that.
But what I am saying is that in the larger scheme of things, when you look at the kinds of policies that would be called for if your concern was to protect the pipeline itself, then you would not have been so adventurous as the Bush administration and its bureaucracies were in this case.
And I make the same argument with regard to, you know, the role of oil in regard to Iraq.
We've talked about this, I think, in the past, but I think it's worth mentioning that the oil companies, to the extent that they had an interest in this, which they did, it was to make a deal with Saddam, not to have a war with Saddam or to occupy Iraq and fight a war over the Saddam regime.
And I think there are a number of other ways in which you find there are conflicting interests rather than coordinating or reinforcing interests between corporate, major corporate players in foreign policy and the military and its associated national security bureaucracies.
And I would point to China as perhaps the most spectacular case of this, where in the Bush administration itself, you have, you know, the corporate interests very strongly supporting treating China as a friendly business partner, whereas the neoconservatives and parts of the Pentagon, certainly, would like very much to view China and have China viewed as a potential enemy and one that we need to put, treat at arm's length and arm against and, you know, publicly portray as a threat.
So I mean, these are two competing lines of policy.
You listen to William Crystal, for example, I mean, he is scathing in his rebuke to business interests for their refusal to get on board the view of China that the neoconservatives and their allies in the military have held so dear.
So really, you can even look at this as some sort of kind of major historical turning point that happened in there somewhere, where the entire establishment, which really, you know, worked hard to promote the Cold War, at least, you know, up through a certain point, that kind of thing, created this empire, sustained this empire, got on board for this empire, they created an establishment, the state itself, that is, in a sense, separate from them and more powerful from them and marginalizes them.
I don't know if I would say marginalizes them.
But I think that no question in my mind that the national security state, if you will, does have autonomy from the major corporate economic interests in this country.
And I think that it was an autonomy that was achieved during the Cold War, and which, of course, then persisted and even got stronger in the post Cold War period.
And I think one of the things that's happened is that, you know, as the national security bureaucracy becomes more adventurous, and, you know, has more wars of choice going on, you know, and it has a greater and more negative impact on the economy, you know, this has to be of concern to corporate leadership.
But as I've stated previously, the corporate leadership in this country are essentially, you know, have no cojones, politically, they will not stand up, they will not speak out against policies that I think, for the most part, not all of them, but for the most part, I think they recognize that they are seriously injuring the economic interests of the entire United States.
And that means the corporations as well, not, of course, the arms manufacturers, but certainly other mainline corporate interests are harmed by these policies.
But on the other hand, they are being bought off by various kinds of tax and other policies that are very handsomely rewarding them for their silence.
That seems like, with all the alienation and the destruction of the dollar, we're exporting our supply itself, you know, they sold out Anheuser-Busch, but they can't export the old stuff.
I know that, I forget if this was Iraq, I think this was in Iraq, where everybody always drank Pepsi, you know, they don't drink alcohol in this society, and everybody always drank Pepsi.
They'll never drink Pepsi again, America came and murdered a bunch of people.
And you know, that kind of thing counts, that's the billions of dollars, and it does seem like, you know, you have the military here, and the national security establishment itself, you know, all around, vaguely speaking, pushing their interests, and then you sort of have, I don't know, I guess it's not much of a battle, but you have the competing billionaires.
One side that makes all their money off of sucking off the American taxpayer in the form of military contracts and so forth.
And the rest are just the regular businessmen who, you know, they're in bed with the government to whatever degree they have to be, or want to be anyway.
But these are the people who would rather just make money.
It's not really much of a battle, even though their interests are very much at odds.
I think the important thing to understand is the degree to which the conflicts have been somehow kept so within very narrow bounds, by the fact that the corporate interests of those corporations that are harmed by the war policies of this national security state, they are basically bought off by all these tax and other special favors that the government doles out to them.
And now, you know, we've got to talk about, address the national security state itself.
It's a big, giant thing near where you live there in the D.C. area.
Well, you would point that out, wouldn't you?
Yeah, well, this is why you're such a good reporter, because you stay so close to them.
I'm glad that hasn't corrupted you.
Close to the belly of the beast, yes.
Yeah.
But no, I mean, this is a thing that most of it exists elsewhere in the world.
They've divided the world up into these sections.
You know, it's funny, I was reflecting earlier, although I forgot my funny way I was going to bring it up, but there was going to be a joke there, something about Admiral Fallon and how here, you and I specifically even, we're looking at this guy and saying, thank God, we have a reasonable guy in the military over there running CENTCOM who's keeping the reins on the insane civilians who are coming up with the policy in the vice president's office.
Right.
And yet, this guy, well, frankly, is a satanic killer.
And like, you look at, well, I don't know his religion, but in effect, the guy is pure evil.
And you look at his interview in Vanity Fair where he talks about the Iranians are ants and we'll crush them if we feel like it.
And this is the guy, he's the viceroy from all the land from Morocco to Pakistan, right?
Well, that's right.
I mean, he was a CENTCOM commander.
He inherited and continued to work on a set of military interests that involved holding on to and adding to military bases all the way across his empire, if you will, from Central Asia through the Middle East into South Asia, basically, and Africa.
So I mean, he was the guy who was sitting on this huge set of power interests that caused him then to, for example, to insist that the Maliki regime had to give up its demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
And he did that after he was out of CENTCOM, but he obviously was acting on behalf of the military leadership, which, of course, has a huge vested interest in the status quo in terms of holding on to every base they can.
That is the measure of their power, and they are naturally going to try to maximize that power.
And in so doing, they have to be in conflict with every nationalist in the Middle East and thus put at risk the real security of Americans.
You know, this is something that Chalmers Johnson addresses at length in his second book, Sorrows of Empire, or second book in the Blowback Trilogy, Sorrows of Empire.
He talks a lot about this, about how the military bases created around the world in the Cold War, that they have found any and every excuse, and of course we can all think of, you know, cocaine trafficking and whatever bogus excuses like that, but I forget now the litany of ridiculous excuses that these people come up with just to keep their bases open no matter where they are, at any cost.
Right, right.
And of course, the classic example of what I'm talking about here, the one that I love to talk about more than anything else, and I was able to catch Robert Kagan at a meeting in which he spoke publicly some months ago on this point, this is the U.S. military presence and bases in Saudi Arabia after the Cold War.
Now, you know, the excuse for keeping bases in Saudi Arabia, of course, was to enforce the no-fly zone in Iraq.
So one thing leads to another, and you know, you have a structure where, you know, one part of the empire justifies another part.
Of course that was why Osama bin Laden, the main reason that he signed, in fact, his fatwa, I think both of them, or at least, I forget if it was the 96th or the 98th declaration of war, was entitled, The Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
That was his biggest beef.
This was so obviously a violation of the Islamic pride and concern about their holy places that only, you know, a strong vested interest with no concern about anything else would have stood in the way of a decision to get out of those bases.
It's funny, because what he was trying to do really was not scare us away, he was trying to kick our ass, not just into gear, but into overdrive, so that not only would we come and attempt to imperially dominate the Middle East and put our combat forces within rifle range, but overdo it to such an extent that we completely bankrupt ourselves, that way we could be forced out of the entire region permanently, and we've done exactly what he wanted us to do.
You got 30 seconds.
Right, so I said to Kagan, would you still justify the decision to keep bases in Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that we know that this was the reason that bin Laden was both determined to target U.S. interests throughout the Middle East, and particularly in Saudi Arabia, but a large part of the reason why he was successful in that.
And basically said yes.
Of course.
Of course.
Empire has winners and losers.
The winners are those who have a vested interest in those bases, the losers are the rest of us.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, that's it, we're out of time.
Thanks very much.
Gareth Porter, it's antiwar.com slash porter.
Thanks, man.
