10/06/08 – Jon Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today is John Basil Utley.
He's associate publisher of the American Conservative Magazine, a Robert A. Taft fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, former correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers.
He's written for the Harvard Business Review on foreign nationalism and was for 17 years a commentator on the Voice of America.
He's the director of Americans Against World Empire.
Welcome back to the show, John.
Hi.
Hello, Scott.
Good to hear you.
Well, it's very good to have you back on the show here, sir.
And by the way, I should mention for people who aren't familiar, John is the son of Frida Utley, who is one of the greatest anti-communist writers of the 20th century, author of some of the most important history, The Truth About Communism, on this planet.
All right.
Now, so speaking of communism, seems like we have more and more a centrally planned economy here, and most of it based around funding the military.
And it seems like as, well, Garrett Garrett said it, I think, back after the end of World War II, that in the American empire, unlike all the other empires in world history, everything goes out and nothing comes back except hatred.
And we're just wasting our money.
You have this article, The Cost of Boots on the Ground in Iraq, where you go through and kind of break down the costs of what it really takes to keep our soldiers on the ground in Iraq there.
So I was hoping maybe we could just start with the cost per soldier, per sergeant, and comparison and contrast with the cost per contractor and that kind of thing, John?
Sure, Scott.
Thanks.
This came out of a Congressional Budget Office study, which was just released less than a month ago, a few weeks.
And not many journalists picked up on the details in the study.
The purpose was to compare the cost of hiring bodyguards in Iraq compared to the actual cost of using Army personnel for these jobs.
And the study comes up with some amazing numbers, namely, when they hire guards from like Blackwater, the U.S. government is paying $500,000, half a million dollars for each guard per year.
That's the cost to the government.
And so the study was, they wondered, what does it cost to field American soldiers?
And this information has been sort of hard to find.
What's it?
What's the real cost?
Well, a sergeant, based on the cost of a sergeant, $51,000 to $69,000 per year is his actual pay.
And then they add, you roughly double that for the benefits he gets.
He gets housing allowance.
He gets the discounted goods like the PX.
He gets insurance, of course, and all, very many, actually, child care, professional child care, medical care, they're all the benefits in the military, which more or less doubles that amount.
That brings it up to about a bit over $100,000 per year in actual costs for the sergeant.
But what was surprising is you add in the overhead, and you add in that the military has to keep back up, because they rotate the men.
For example, if it's once a year, if a man's assigned to Iraq once for a year, he's then backed up by another man in the U.S., another sergeant, and more, in fact, about one and a half sergeants who take, where you think when he gets out of Iraq, he's got his vacation time 30 days per year for the two years, one year in Iraq, one year out, it's 60 days pay.
He gets retraining, recovering, et cetera, et cetera.
And so that more or less doubles the cost.
And you come, so we're already at $200,000, and then you add, in fact, about $250,000, and then you add the cost of the overhead to keep the sergeant there.
They use the cost of a headquarters battalion, a certain percentage of that, and that's where you get up to about half a million dollars.
And it's all detailed, and this is on our article.
If you go to antiwar.com slash utley, U-T-L-E-Y, you come to the article called The Cost of Boots on the Ground in Iraq.
And we have links to the study, the Contractors' Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq.
And the second study, also the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, is evaluating military compensation.
And between those two, then there's other costs not even included in that.
The average retirement benefit for a soldier, according to this study, is $2.6 million is what they will make over, remember, they're in the service 20 years and then retire payments for 40 years, more or less, or more.
And now, not all the soldiers stay in for 20 years, but that still is a factor.
Well, and you also talk about in the article that the cost per year per sergeant, as calculated there, doesn't include equipment, and it doesn't include the bonuses to keep reenlisting and that kind of thing either.
And that's got to be, I mean, the equipment alone, just the guns and the 500 pounds of stuff they've got to carry around on their back, that's got to be, I don't know how much money each.
And that's very much a factor.
Also, if you add the war costs, I mean, tremendous amounts were outfitting armies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, it all adds up to astronomical amounts of money.
And it's sort of, you know, now here we are bailing out the banks and the credit structure in the United States.
So far, no one seems to care much about spending, but you add to this the cost in the military budget of all these other things, which we can't go into all that, but of course, equipment and the airplanes, the ships, it becomes more or less a rule of thumb is, was calculated by Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute.
You double what the military budget that's in the newspapers, if they're saying it was six to 700 billion in the paper, the true figure is probably doubling that.
Because a lot of that does not show, homeland security is a very big expense.
All the nuclear stuff is under the Department of Energy, doesn't show.
And then you're not showing all sorts of expenses.
There was another big study of the cost of the war, there's a book called A Three Trillion Dollar War by Stiglitz, you know, a Nobel Prize winner, S-T-I-G-L-I-C-H.
And he came up with a cost of, when reaching his three trillion, he came up with the same cost, interestingly, as the CBO.
He came up with about $400,000, it's a 20% difference, in the cost per soldier in Iraq, but that wasn't a sergeant, that was an average soldier.
Well, and that was a conservative estimate compared to the CBO, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's more or less, 400 includes enlisted men, and the CBO was 500, but it's a sort of corroboration of that.
And that does not include, one of the ways Stiglitz, with a three trillion dollar, he's including interest on the debt, because we're borrowing the money from China, basically, to fight the war.
And he's including medical care for the wounded, which is sort of hidden away, nobody knows, but there are tremendous numbers, actually, people losing limbs, but there's all sorts of concussion damage, you know, from the, so much explosions.
It's new, in a way, on the, to the brain, over long terms, and stuff like that.
Well, one thing, when you talk about doubling the cost of everything, I mean, we already know that they pass the war budget separately from the defense budget, and they're each about half a trillion dollars a year, almost, right?
No, the defense was around 600, 700 billion, six something, I think.
And then the war budget, it doesn't really show much, because they're only taking the actual costs of the men, and the transport, and stuff.
One of the big costs they don't include is the cost of rebuilding all this equipment.
And you think military equipment is not really designed to be used day in and day out, especially in the desert, where it wears tremendously, and all the training and focus of the American Army is still to fight the Second World War over again.
They study Patton, and in Europe, and it's all over in a year, we were on the ground in Europe for a year, year and a half, I think.
It's over, whereas this equipment is being used day in and day out.
It's interesting, a jet fighter, that they have them flying all over the place, bombers, is not designed to fly every day, it's designed for high, high maximum performance, and flying once a week or something, not this gun.
So everything's wearing out, the equipment, there's tremendous money involved there.
And that's how you get to those higher numbers, but really, it's pretty hard to tell.
And that's why that rule of thumb I mentioned to Higgs at the Independent Institute, which we have a webpage also called Military Industrial Congressional Complex, I think it's number one on Google, and that has links to these different articles.
And another factor, I think, in understanding the military budget today is the earmarks.
There's 15,000, according to Arnaud de Gauche, a conservative anti-communist writer, an old-time anti-communist, 15,000 earmarks, the congressmen have a way now that they can put special projects in the budget for their congressional districts.
And that provides jobs, and then later campaign donations back to the congressmen.
And all that is hidden, because, you know, remember the famous bridge to nowhere?
Everybody could understand that, they showed pictures of nowhere, and you understood in Alaska where the bridge was.
If you build, I say, a missile to nowhere, because once it's fired, many of the costs are hidden.
Who knows if a particular electronic part is really vital, if it's really worth $100,000 or whatever they might be charging, etc.
Remember that scandal with the toilet seats in the airplanes?
They were paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for one, and it got in the newspaper, because we know more or less what a toilet seat costs.
But some electronic part in some weaponry, my God, if you question that, you're not wanting to defend America.
You're against the army, you're against our guys in the field.
So no one questions these things, and it's been a tremendous impetus to the budget as well.
Well, you know, Chalmers Johnson calls it military Keynesianism, where basically it's kind of demand-side economics, but all through the military, basically, and it really points out how it's militarizing our whole society.
I think it was the B-52 was the one that had the great anecdote, where they made sure that at least one tiny little part of the B-52 was being made in every single district in this country, to make sure that every congressman had something.
That was B-52s a long time ago, but the best example now is the F-22, the modern fighter, and that's in 40 states, out of 48, where manufacturing is done, in 40 states there is something being produced.
And these planes are 200 million or more, 200 million apiece.
We already have supremacy in the air, and these planes are, you know, it's nice to have them, so now they talk, well, we need it if we have a war with Russia or China, we need it.
Well, that's such an important point that, and you know, I'm not a veteran, I don't know, I don't have the real expertise, but I've watched a lot of weekday wings on the Discovery Channel, and I know some people who are Air Force veterans, and every time I meet an Air Force veteran, I ask them, hey, is it not the case that a flight of F-15 Eagles could take on any combined Air Forces in the world in an afternoon?
And they all say, oh, yeah, a fleet of F-15s, that's all you need, they have so much electronics in the nose cone, they can kill you from 400 miles away, and there's no fleet of MiGs anywhere that could take on our F-15s, we don't need F-22s or F-35s at all.
Of course, and that's where the money, there's an estimate of $100 billion being spent on things that are really irrelevant to the war on terror.
I mean, the money, no one cared, really, what anything costs, and this is partly the financial crisis today, is that we're going bankrupt, and, you know, it's other factors, like buying oil overseas instead of drilling in our own country, and things like that.
So, that's, yeah, and the day of reckoning seems to be coming.
To what degree do you think that the spending on the war is part of the current financial crisis?
Everybody else says, oh, it's just the mortgage market, you know.
That's a bit complicated, because it does seem to be different, but our spending on the war has resulted in tremendous outflow of dollars overseas, which was beginning to affect the currency, et cetera.
But it's some other factors.
First is the focus.
The government is focused on winning the war, and they're very busy with that.
All of Bush's meetings every day, and remember Lyndon Johnson years ago picking bombing targets in Vietnam.
They're very focused and busy on it, and all these other things are pushed aside to be later, and if anyone's really critical of the way the government's running, they're condemned as, oh, you're against supporting our troops, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
So there's a question of focus, that there's not any concern.
But above all, then, when you're fighting a war overseas, the government starts spending more and more money domestically.
That's why it's called a warfare-welfare state.
They go together in order to get support for the war, and if you're spending $100 billion on something that's really not necessary, how can you object to spending a billion here and a billion there on the domestic economy?
And so one thing, the biggest thing was the increase in Medicare costs, of course, that Bush pushed.
But it was the same with his father.
When the father had the war, the first war in Iraq, that's when he went with a tax increase.
And so these foreign wars have definite effect internally with us.
But it's something I'm writing about.
Not much has been written on this.
How does the war affect, cause the financial crisis?
And so far, it's somewhat indirect, except for this immense money we send overseas, you know.
Well, the national debt is now over $10 trillion, and it's just...
Yeah, it nearly doubled under Bush.
It went from $6,000,000,000, was it, to $10,000,000,000, I think.
And you know, it was funny, I actually got this wrong in an interview, and I thought, well, wouldn't...
Isn't the interest on the debt about $40 billion a year?
No, it's $400 billion a year we spend just paying interest to the bondholders.
Sure, sure.
I mean, this...
Eventually, there's a day of reckoning, and one of them is today, with the market.
But the general decline in confidence in America is part of it, when you say how it caused the market crash.
There's the concern that the United States is just unending.
And remember that the Congress almost started another war.
Just a few weeks ago, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, was pushing to have a naval blockade of Iran.
Well, a naval blockade is an act of war.
Read your history books.
And the U.S. Congress, it was tabled by their leadership, fortunately.
But most congressmen, the majority, had gone on record to support this law, demanding a naval blockade of Iran.
I mean, that's madness in the Gulf, in the Persian Gulf, with all the shipping for oil for the whole world.
And Iran, you push a country to the wall, it's going to fight.
And the fighting, the way they would fight, is blocking the straits where all the oil comes out, or trying to.
They were ready, all the fuss about the $700 billion bailout, so-called, for the banks or liquidity.
They were perfectly willing to set off another war that would have cost hundreds of billions more.
They're escalating all the conflict in Pakistan right now as well.
Yeah.
They don't know what to do.
Pakistan, of course, Afghanistan is another disaster in the making, because we can't go into these countries to change their whole culture.
And with it, what do we have, 40,000 troops?
And they look at it.
Remember, the way we fight, it's historically, the way American army fights, is to go in and destroy everything in front of it.
It was done in the Second World War, et cetera.
And we do that to save the lives of our soldiers.
So it's a question to discuss, maybe, but we do that.
The idea is maximum effort to save the lives of our soldiers.
And our way is to bomb things.
And when you bomb in this kind of a war, you're always killing civilians.
The bloodlines and the tribal culture of Afghanistan, and Iraq too, is if somebody kills your family, you are obliged to kill one of them, one of their family.
And so when we go and kill Afghan civilians, we are creating more enemies all the time.
And that's the only way we know how to fight with our high tech, with the Air Force, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's interminable.
And there's an analogy when the British were fighting the American colonialists, and it was costing the British more and more in 1776 to fight the Americans.
And finally, Sir William Pitt in the British Parliament said, explain to the British what it was costing them every day to keep their boots on the ground, to use the expression.
And the British said, this costs too much, we're leaving.
And that's how they gave up.
Right.
Well, we also see in the American Revolution that at first, it was, you know, the guys up in Massachusetts and things like that, and the war spread and spread and spread because the more the British fought, the more enemies that they made here.
Well, our guys were guerrillas fighting a dirty war because the British would complain we didn't fight honorably.
And you read that Americans complain the Afghans don't fight honorably, which is lining up so we can kill them easily.
That's what we mean by fighting honorably, you know, we're using our high technology.
And of course, they don't, they're terrorists or whatever you call guerrillas, terrorists, and they're ruthless.
And in these countries, you have to think that the local guy, even if he's pro American, is afraid he knows one day we leave.
And then he's going to be killed by these by these guerrillas and terrorists.
They they have a long memory, the collaborators, you mean, yeah, the collaborators, anyone who works with us is marked to be killed, no people are afraid to be with us.
And this happened with the Algeria.
When the French finally left Algeria, the Algerians killed, tortured and killed 100,000 of all the French, all the Algerians who had been helping the French army were all murdered.
And that's what's ahead for these people.
You know, the US, we tell them we're going to stay, don't worry, be work with us.
And you see, the end result of these wars is people who worked with us are desperate to get out of the country and immigrate to America.
Hmm.
Yeah.
In fact, that's really kind of the only thing I like about our empire is all the people who come here from all the fringes of it.
You know, they're going to look at the Vietnamese and the Cubans, right?
The dynamism they brought to our economy.
I mean, right.
And it's the best part of a strange way we benefit.
Right.
And, you know, I think really, as the more we abandon what makes America great here at home in terms of our free economy, our Bill of Rights and that kind of thing, the less it'll be the case that all these new entries to our society from the fringes of our empire will really be loyal.
I mean, I think probably in the past, America was, in most people's view, great enough.
They were more than happy to leave their or maybe not more than happy, but they were willing to leave their homeland behind and really become an American.
And I think that, you know, the more our country goes around acting like a bunch of Europeans or whatever, the less likely that's going to be and the more kind of, you know, balkanized and isolated new populations to our society will become.
I think absolutely that's true, but there's something much worse on the horizon.
And that's this.
We are perceived as enemies of the Muslim world by millions, hundreds of millions of Muslims see us as invading them, killing, you know, whether it was for the oil or for Israel or because of President Bush's complex about his father's and our editors complex about his father, whatever it is, it's what we've done in these countries.
And the fear now in the homeland security is that many Muslims don't look like Arabs.
So in fact, the Europeans, many who can come into the U.S. with without visas.
And you've got more and more people.
If we when we kill over there, there's more and more vengeance wanted against us.
And the people, as Homeland Security says, the potential Muslim terrorist today looks like a European.
He looks like us.
He's not going to be an Arab looking type, etc.from the desert of Saudi Arabia.
And so we should unwind this war.
We should pay reparations to the tremendous misery we caused in Iraq.
Particularly, you know, there are two.
What is it?
Two million refugees outside of Iraq now in the neighboring countries to say with this surge is working as a stretch.
It works with us staying there forever, forever, spending hundreds of billions and keeping a top on the pot.
But we should not be making enemies all over the world like this.
And we should mind our business.
And America was loved.
You can't say that.
No one can remember that.
But it was in the Muslim world.
We were admired for our revolution, for the freedom we gave people, for the rule of law.
We were admired by them.
But of course, that's that's gone now.
Well, do you think that?
Well, of course, I'm certainly not pushing for any presidential candidate here or anything like that.
But do you think that with a serious change in policy, an understanding by people in our government that when people picture Abu Ghraib instead of the Statue of Liberty, when they hear the word America, that that's got to change, that that we need to get on a path toward, you know, reviving at least people's belief in in what made America great, that kind of thing.
Do you think that we can really turn this around?
Like you said, a lot of these cultures of blood feudal last five generations.
You know, I don't know, frankly, because you've got to think we call it the war party.
And there's some websites to go to ask for war party dot com.
The point is that war is such an intricate part of the Washington establishment.
There's tremendous money involved in this going out to the congressional districts.
As I said earlier, the government sends earmarks and then that brings back money to help the congressman reelect, get reelected.
There's several factors.
And you see that Obama, who was the anti-war candidate, is no longer so.
He has gone along with McCain on on Afghanistan, on Iraq, virtually said the surge worked, which is really a stretch because the surge works as long as we're there keeping up the top down and spending hundreds of billions, et cetera.
And we have it didn't work in that sense and it can never work.
And you have this tremendous you've got the base of the Republican Party, the Southerners, all that.
We are good and pure and wonder God is an American or close to it.
And we have all the right and no one else, no other foreign country.
Look at Russia has any right to defend its territory, its nearby interests.
Look at the Georgian case.
That's our business, too.
I think it would be less with the Democrats, but that's not assured.
And Biden, by the way, has been very aggressive foreign policy, too, is not Senator Biden.
So it's it's not sure we some of us assume that Obama might be less so.
But he hasn't he backed off on all his anti-war stuff, really good to win.
He had to be pro-war, if you will.
Well, now let's break down this war party, because I think, well, as best I can tell, it's a different war party from in the past.
It's so interesting.
And I don't know how familiar the audience is with this, but one of the greatest historians of the war party in, say, the first half of the 20th century, maybe first two thirds of the 20th century, was your professor at Georgetown, Carol Quigley, author of Tragedy and Hope, an Anglo-American establishment.
And it's so interesting to me that page nine hundred and fifty is the one that people always love to quote, where he says, listen, I'm part of the Anglo-American establishment.
I've looked at all their secret papers and records.
And my only real disagreement with them is that I think their role in history should be known where they wish to remain in secret.
And people always quote that.
But if you flip to the page before that, this is written in 1966.
And on the page before that, he's actually quite worried that the new rising establishment, based on the military industrial complex money after World War Two that coalesced around the Goldwater movement in 1964, that this terrible aberration of the Goldwater movement could actually grow up to challenge the old Anglo-American establishment.
And in reading your recent article, it's not only the Israel lobby.
It seems like the old Anglophiles are sort of the last ones on the list in the current war party.
Now, it really is the military industrial complex, the neoconservatives at the forefront of this imperial scheme, at least at this point.
Is that about right?
Yes, I'd say that.
And of course, now we have the rise of China and India and other countries, which was not in his day.
But there's another article there.
If you go, as I say, antiwar.com slash Utley, you come to my articles.
And that was a review of the Mershimer book on the Israel lobby.
And I'd argued that in his book, he didn't even mention the military industrial complex, that it tends to be blamed on the Israel lobby because they're known as being so powerful, all powerful, etc.
But it's many other interests that promote this actions for war overseas, as we say, the military industrial.
But you have many others.
I think the intellectual community in Washington, if you think that today, foreign policy is made by think tanks, it's not by ambassadors and State Department people in the field who write long reports that come back to Washington and are ditched in a file, hardly ever read.
It's the think tanks, which are these are sharp intellectuals from the best universities with the top training.
They're tremendously good on television talk shows.
They're called upon whenever there's a crisis.
You have people and many of these as intellectuals, you know, intellectual lives a pretty pacific life.
And there's this many like American Enterprise Institute have a real lust for violence.
You know, the psychiatrists go into that, at least some violence vicariously, somebody else at least watching it.
And Americans love war.
If you look at war for an American is sitting at home with a with a drink, looking at your television and seeing tanks and ships and missiles in the distance and explosions, you never see what the misery that where the explosion explodes and war is something it's not a cost to us.
It's rather exciting.
And as I say, comfortably sitting and watching it for most of us on our TV.
So it's there are many other aspects that have and Quigley's point.
Yes, it became the establishment was more controlled about it.
Once you bring in democratic wars, there's more enthusiasm for war.
And there's always the politicians drumming up the self-righteousness of us.
Well, and, you know, Carol Quigley was this historian of ancient history and all the way through.
And I remember at the beginning of Tragedy and Hope, he talks about how all civilizations go through these different stages of rising and falling.
And he said that Western civilization had been so lucky to be able to reinvent itself over and over again, from Greek and Roman society to the Holy Roman Empire, to then through the Reformation, through the Enlightenment, the new technological scientific era and all these things.
And the West somehow stayed the West all this time.
But he's basically warning, isn't he, in Tragedy and Hope, that if you ignore history and ignore the lessons of empires that rose and fell before you, that you can make the very same mistakes.
And I believe he said the last stage before complete destruction is world empire.
And he was actually warning against the excesses of world empire rather than celebrating.
Absolutely.
Our website is called Americans Against World Empire.
And we take that term from Quigley's lectures.
And Quigley was also the history professor of Bill Clinton, I might add, when he was at Georgetown.
Right.
He said in his acceptance speech of the nomination in 1992 that Carol Quigley helped define his definition of citizenship.
Something like that.
I looked for the sound bite before the show, but I couldn't find it.
The point in all this is, as Quigley's point was, that it comes back to the government and the nation.
If there is some self-correcting mechanism, which we have had as a democracy and we're losing it because of the gerrymandering of the Congress.
When 98 percent of the congressmen running for election get reelected until this election, at least, get reelected.
There's something wrong with our system tremendously.
The gerrymandering means that the only threat to a congressman is from within his own party, usually extremists within his own party.
And so they become more polarized.
And we have a government that tends to be paralyzed more and it can't reform as it used to.
You follow what I'm saying?
That comes the earmarking I was speaking about earlier.
But the gerrymandering means that you have the extremes and in each party, more or less, are the ones represented in Congress.
And that doesn't let us reform things.
And particularly on the right, wouldn't you say, John, I've heard congressmen say, Republican congressmen say, that they just cannot cross the evangelical right, that they're so organized that...
And then the left also, on its environmental stuff, Obama couldn't come out for, they can't come out for drilling offshore because they're so enthralled, so dependent on the environmental extremists and their side.
It works both ways.
But the point is that the system in Washington tends to be paralyzed.
We are unable to correct our medical system, which is costing, you know, all the problems there, the cost and the uninsured.
We are unable to correct the military to a degree, the waste, the military.
They did come together on the bailout bill, but rarely under great pressure.
And that is the risk, the long-term risk to America, yeah.
But we are unable to reform ourselves, we used to.
Well, you know, when you mentioned the Mearsheimer book earlier, one thing that they talk about in there, Mearsheimer and Walt, is I think some of this was before September 11th, but also some of it afterwards, where Bush was actually trying to push for some sort of even-handed policy, you know, to a degree, at least, in Israel, Palestine.
Tom DeLay, the exterminator, came up from the House of Representatives and told Bush, oh, no, you don't, and basically speaking on behalf of the evangelical right, overruled Bush.
I mean, and that's the point today, the evangelical tied into the Likud, I don't think you'd even call it an Israeli lobby, it's a faction in Israel.
The Likud is the fundamentalist Israelis who want to settle the whole of the West Bank to kick out the Palestinians and in their quiet, when they're not being listened to, talk about a greater Israel from Cairo to Iraq, from the Nile to the Euphrates, and these are the people who are tied into the fundamentalist Christian in America, many of them who look forward to chaos in the Middle East because it will help bring the Second Coming, things we've written about, again, on AndyWar.com, oddly, but the fact is that it's not, the quote is, it shouldn't be called the Israeli lobby because most Jews in all the polling would like to have peace, they're willing to give back the West Bank, etc.
It's these settlers and supported by, in other words, a minority even, of Jews, certainly, in the world, and the American fundamentalist Christians have together made a very strong alliance, which is, I'd say, you can put much of the chaos in the world at their doorstep.
Well, you know, when I look at the choice of Sarah Palin for John McCain's running mate, he obviously, you know, the son and the grandson of an admiral, a very East Coast establishment guy, not really from Arizona, and yet he picks this lunatic Pentecostal end times lady from Alaska for his number two spot, and it really made me wonder, not that I really miss these guys, but at the same time, is it the case that the Anglo-American establishment is just, you know, that quite a lot of that back then just has no influence anymore?
It seems like somebody would have told McCain no about this.
Well, pretty much it's out of the picture.
It's like the old Episcopalians, you know, used to run things and don't anymore.
But remember, in England, there's another factor, always.
There were Englishmen looking forward to the war, supporting the war against Iraq, attacking Iraq, because they see America to create a new empire like they were, and they would play to us the role that Greeks played to the Romans.
And the English, particularly in the conservative movement in America, tended to support the war because they want to go back to the glory days of the Anglo-Saxon running everything.
But it's certainly weakened, and all these other groups have far more, I think, control over it.
I guess we're over time here, but if I could just ask you one thing.
Are you hopeful at all that perhaps the current economic crisis will help us get our priorities straight and maybe we'll be able to reinvent ourselves, bring our empire home, rather than having it collapse like the Soviet empire, or worse, the German and Japanese empire, and get bombed?
I do think so.
I think the next step after the dust settles is a focus on where we are spending money.
I don't think we can go on with these incredible deficits.
We will look at what we're spending overseas, and this price, we started talking half a million dollars to maintain a sergeant or a bodyguard in Iraq, is so incredible, the cost.
And this money could be used in the U.S., whether rebuilding our infrastructure, our bridges are collapsing, whether it's schools, whatever, or really to defend ourselves, instead of these.
So I do think the next step will be looking at the costs, which now, really, no one seems to care.
And it's not just the military, in fairness.
Remember the agricultural spending, they just blew, what was it, tens and tens of billions of dollars in ethanol, all these things.
And we have oil and gas here in America, particularly gas, tremendous amounts.
We have a new technology for drilling, etc.
Which, by the way, you have a new article I saw in Reason, although I haven't had a chance to really look at it yet.
What's the title of that?
Again, if you go to Reason magazine and slash Uplea, look for Uplea, Reason Uplea, you'll come to the articles, and I talk about the coming abundance of energy, and this is the new technology for fracturing gas.
That's when they drill oil wells and fracture the rocks so that gas can come out.
They drill gas wells.
And there's new technology that's increasing the abundance of production of natural gas we will be having, if the environmentalists don't shut it, of course.
Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it?
The extreme environmentalists, yeah.
And, of course, oil is offshore.
It's in Alaska, etc.
There's lots of it.
It's a matter of...
It's a political shortage, not a resource shortage.
Right, as with everything.
All right, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Of course.
Scott, thanks.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's John Basil Utley.
It's antiwar.com slash Utley.
He is the associate publisher of the American Conservative Magazine, Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, former correspondent for Knight Ridder, and for 17 years was a commentator on Voice of America.
He's director of Americans Against World Empire, which can be found at againstbombing.org, and also the new group, Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
I don't know the exact site, but just throw that in your search engine, and I'm sure you'll find it.
And again, one more time, Utley, U-T-L-Y, antiwar.com slash Utley.
And we'll be right back after this.
Antiwar Radio.
There's an army of 200 million marching down the river Euphrates coming toward the Persian Gulf.
There's going to be the meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion that is unplanned for on the charts of all of the dictators of the earth.
It's not an invasion from the north, or the south, or the east, or the west.
It's an invasion from heaven.
And he will establish his kingdom, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
I am telling you that makes this message one of the most thrilling prophetic messages you've ever heard in your life.
You could get raptured out of this building before I get through finished preaching.
We are that close.
John the Revelator says in Revelation the 19th, And I, John, saw the heavens open, and he that sat upon a white horse was called faithful and true.
And in righteousness doth he judge and make war.
And out of his mouth shall go a two-edged sword with which he shall smite the nations of the earth.
I believe the Antichrist is alive and well.
I believe he knows who he is.
And I believe he awaits with glee his day of demonic reign.
This man is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx.
He will not regard the desire of women.
That means he's going to be homosexual.