06/17/14 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, how's it going?
Welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show here on Liberty Chat.
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I've got a good show lined up for you tonight.
Doug Bandow is here from the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine.
A little bit jet-lagged, but still going to talk about this great article with us tonight.
And then Major Todd Pierce, former defense attorney at Guantanamo Bay, is going to be on to talk about David Addington's theory of executive power and just how much influence it still has over the way our government is run to this day.
So, thank you very much for joining in.
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Join in the chat room, questions, comments.
For Doug, I will pass on your questions if they're good ones and try to make a good conversation out of it.
So, thanks again everybody.
And now to Doug Bandow.
Welcome to the show, Doug, how are you doing?
Okay, how about yourself?
I'm doing great, I really appreciate you joining us here tonight.
And I know that you've been traveling around the world and need some sleep, so I extra special double appreciate it.
Okay.
Happy, lucky, wish, appreciate it.
Okay, so here we are at Forbes Magazine.
I really do like what you write, man.
It's always great stuff, Doug.
You're not as hard-line as I am, but you're so well-informed on all this stuff and you still take such good positions on everything.
Here at Forbes.com, U.S. meddling inflames Middle East conflicts.
It's actually the spotlight today on Antiwar.com as well.
And so you just go down the list here.
It sounds like the Middle East is absolutely in crisis.
Obviously, the biggest and most important story is what's going on in Iraq right now.
What's your take?
Yeah, I mean, what you find is, I mean, dominating the news, of course, is Iraq.
But then, of course, we have Syria.
We have Egypt.
I mean, you kind of look at one place after another.
We have conflict going on.
We have repression going on.
We have, I mean, kind of a mess after a mess, most of which the U.S. has been involved in one way or another.
And frankly, America's role has generally been bad.
What we've managed to do is stoke conflict and create conflict.
I mean, it really is a disaster if you look throughout the region.
All right, now, so what do you make of what's going on?
Because, you know, right now on the ground in Iraq as far as ISIS and this and that, because, of course, the guys with the black banners get all the headlines.
But some reports are that, you know, really this is the same old Sunni-based insurgency as before, and the al-Qaeda guys maybe get the headlines, but they're not really the core.
This is still really the same old Sunni insurgency, and maybe the final break from the Shiite, American, and Iranian-installed government in Baghdad there.
Well, look, a thousand guys, no matter how well they're trained, can't take over major cities in Iraq if they don't have support.
And the point is, it looks to me like, you know, the kind of Sunni tribal leaders, they don't like the national government that's dominated by Shiites, so they find the ISIS group as kind of convenient.
But it's not as if these folks can take over Baghdad.
It's not as if they can conquer the country.
You know, this strikes me as being part of what is turning into kind of a sectarian conflict that is going to, you know, if it keeps going, it'll be bigger, but it's not really an ISIS role.
This is kind of a spearhead.
You know, but these guys are out there because it's convenient for the Sunni leadership.
These guys themselves pose no threat to America.
I mean, they're a nasty bunch, but it's not like they're going to take over the country.
You know, they've done well simply because they have backing behind them, and they've done well primarily in Sunni areas, not in Shia areas.
Right.
Well, and, you know, but it doesn't seem like the Shiite government and their army can really, I mean, they just melted away, right?
What, 30,000 or 60,000 soldiers?
You know, the headlines say turntail and ran, but really they just withdrew because what's the point?
They can't.
They don't really have the might to hold on to Mosul and Fallujah and the rest of it.
They've been just kind of shelling Fallujah angrily for six months now.
Well, that's right.
I mean, the problem here is that what you have is, again, a divided country.
So if you have kind of an occupying Shia military in an overwhelmingly Sunni Mosul or Tikrit or what have you, you know, the people themselves want the national government folks out.
You know, hostilities evident, and ISIS has been pretty effective in kind of launching ambushes and this sort of thing.
They're well-trained.
They've done well.
But, again, it's not like they're going to conquer.
It's not a conquering army that's out going to take over the Middle East.
I mean, it really has been set up in some of the stories as if it's huge.
It's not.
This is a sectarian conflict, and it's one, of course, which the U.S. helped stoke because we pulled the lid off.
Saddam Hussein was a nasty guy, but he kind of prevented this sort of conflict from blowing up.
We put in stall this Maliki who has run a very sectarian government.
The Sunni tribal leaders hate him.
So the rise of ISIS is kind of part of that.
It's kind of understandable.
It's a nasty business, but this is basically a civil war.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, did you get a chance?
I know you've been traveling, like I said, but did you get a chance to see Barack Obama's statement on the White House lawn the other day in front of the helicopter about what to do about all this?
No.
From what I've read about me, he's kind of, you know, we want to do something, but no ground troops.
So considering all options, it's kind of the usual Obama statement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the part that I was that I thought was unique and worth commenting on really was.
I mean, other than, you know, his expressed sort of kind of reluctance that, you know, I can think of worse precedents on issues like this, I guess.
But the thing I was going to mention was the part where he said, and, you know, oh, because it was it was one follow up question.
That was sort of worth a damn was, well, is this sort of spillover from the civil war in Syria?
He didn't seem to have much more of a factual basis for the question.
Then maybe he got that impression somehow.
The reporter asking it, but it was enough.
And so Obama said, well, you know, yeah, this is part of the problem.
Isis has all this ground in Syria.
And that's why we need to support the rebels there even more.
And everybody, I guess, just nodded and smiled.
They're going to go support the moderates, Doug.
And I and I will say in favor of the president's argument that I've spoken with Jonathan Landay and Mitchell Prothero of McClatchy newspapers, and I respect both of their journalism.
And the way Landay put it, hey, I've seen these guys training in Jordan with my own eyes.
There really are such a thing as the moderates there.
And Prothero said, yeah, there are.
And, yeah, they really don't fight that much.
They're mostly gangsters and that kind of thing.
But there is, you know, a non-Islamist rebellion there.
So what about Obama's?
I mean, the implication, I guess, is that if we arm up these moderates enough, then they'll be able to beat Assad and Isis.
And then they'll create a pro-Western democracy there.
Well, I mean, it strikes me as it's the triumph of hope over experience.
The U.S. government officials are kind of smart enough and discerning enough and thoughtful enough and competent enough that they can show up and find exactly the right people and give exactly the right people the right arms.
In just the right amount.
And that those people will win and they will kind of do exactly what they should to create a united government.
They'll be reasonably liberal and, you know, they will be nice enough not to slaughter people who are with the old regime.
And, you know, the end result will be everybody kind of holding hands and singing kumbaya.
I mean, I'd love to have that happen.
I mean, Bashar Assad's a nasty guy.
So if there are kind of sweet Democrats there who would take control, I'd like to have them take control.
But, I mean, it's just hard to believe that's the way it's going to turn out.
Among other things, historically, whether it's places like Nicaragua or Iran, you know, it's the tough guys with the guns who win.
So you find kind of moderates allied with kind of more rougher, nasty folks.
It's the rough, nasty folks who win the ensuing struggle.
You know, and there's, I think, this just kind of assumption of social engineering.
We find the right folks, give them the right weapons.
They're the guys who win.
Well, I mean, what experience do we have in that kind of an operation working?
You know, in Afghanistan, you know, we helped arm people.
And there was an argument there.
Look, you're arming Afghans against Soviets.
That's a pretty good thing.
The only problem is we armed all the wrong people.
We gave arms to the – and we did it to the Pakistanis.
The arms went to people like Osama bin Laden.
So I'm just very skeptical that we can kind of walk in there and control this.
Once you throw weapons out there, once you get involved, then, of course, the U.S. is committed.
You know, and what we've seen within that context is the nasty guys tend to do better.
They've been the better fighters.
They've done better on the ground.
And my guess is they will be the ones who are likely to win any struggle that results afterwards.
Well, and the thing of it is, too, is that it's June of 2014 now.
So we've got three years straight of experience with this.
And, you know, it's not like there's all that good of journalism coming out of Syria.
It seems like most of the reporters that go there get killed or something.
And I don't know if there's great estimates on the numbers and who all is who.
But, you know, even the most official regime-type reporters like David Sanger at The New York Times ran a thing two years ago saying, hey, look, the bulk of the money in the arms end up in the hands of the extremists.
They talk now like the al-Nusra Front are the moderates compared to ISIS.
But those guys crucify their enemies, too.
Yeah, there's a lot of brutality there.
I mean, the problem is we have no control over this stuff.
Now, you sit down and say what we want is a moderate force to win, and then they can be nice guys and promote reconciliation.
Well, where has that ever happened?
I mean, that goes back to the problem in Iraq.
Our guy took over, and, of course, he hasn't promoted reconciliation.
He's basically said it's now our time to rule, that is the Shia.
And while he hasn't gone out of his way to kill, you know, kind of Sunnis, I mean, the point is he's made it very clear it's a sectarian government.
So the question of who wins in Syria, I mean, one, you know, the argument is always, well, if only at the very beginning we'd given all the arms to the right people.
Yeah, but, I mean, the government forces remain very strong.
You prolong the struggle.
I mean, there's no obvious outcome that promotes what America wants, and there's no reason to think it will turn out the way we would like it to turn out.
Yeah, much more reason to think if they had just given way more weapons to the so-called moderates two and a half years ago that the ISIS guys would have got those, too, the same way they're driving around in American Humvees and tanks right now that they got in Iraq.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, there's a presumption, you know, and a lot of these are the most avid advocates of kind of arming and getting involved in Syria are people who wanted to get into Iraq.
I mean, these are people whose record of predictions is not very good.
Got that right.
Not that that's keeping them off the TV telling us what to do next or anything.
No, exactly.
All right, now, I'm very interested to hear your take on Egypt as well.
You give a great little one-paragraph rundown of a lot of people's frustration in the case of American policy towards Egypt in the past, well, decades, but especially the last few years here.
Well, I mean, you know, you go back, I mean, as long as we've been really involved directly when Sadat essentially changed sides, dumped the Soviets, and moved to the U.S., you know, we have subsidized a military dictatorship, and that's what it always has been ever since Nasser overthrew the king.
You know, what this place has been is a military dictatorship, and we wanted stability, and that's all we cared about.
We kind of, you know, chattered away occasionally about democracy, but in practice nobody cares.
We just, you know, they made peace with Israel.
That's kind of what we cared about.
They kept the lid on things.
The fact that they arrested people and tortured them was kind of a small price, you know, for the people to pay.
So, you know, that's basically continuing now.
I mean, there was just this very tiny break with Mubarak being overthrown, I think primarily because he wanted to change a military dictatorship into a family dictatorship.
He wanted to turn it over to his son.
Well, that's not what the military had in mind, so when demonstrations started they were happy to let him take a fall.
You know, they were embarrassed because they kind of had to allow an election, and Morsi won, but Morsi didn't have that much power.
I mean, you know, kind of the deep state still controlled the security forces, the police, the bureaucracy, the judges, and, you know, they decided to topple him last year.
We've basically moved back to military dictatorship.
So the administration has been in this embarrassing position of having to act as if there wasn't a coup and to talk as if democracy is being restored, where, you know, the government's handing down 600 death sentences at a time, you know, shooting people in the streets of Cairo, is arresting activists who helped overthrow Mubarak, and we're supposed to believe that this is a restoration of democracy.
I mean, it's an absolute scandal.
There's nothing particularly good that we can do there, but the administration's made it worse by kind of lathering on hypocrisy.
Yeah.
Well, and the problem is the blowback.
I actually just read today, and I had assumed this all along, Doug.
I mean, it's so obvious, but I just found a quote that turns out, predictably enough, also is from last summer after the coup, and the quote is from Ayman al-Zawahiri saying, I told you so.
The Americans will always cancel any elections for as long as come to power, and so you ought to do things my way, and it seems like, you know, there's, I guess they don't have the right to bear arms in Egypt, so there's not much of an insurgency there.
They're somewhat in the Sinai, but it seems like the young and angry branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is, what, more likely than not, right, to react quite violently to the shutting out of them from their, you know, at least quote-unquote justly acquired, duly elected power.
No, I think that in the long term there's a very real danger there, because what the regime is insisting on is taking a whole group of people and saying they have no legitimate involvement in the system.
Basically, I mean, today they were, I mean, I was over there a couple months ago.
They arrest students who demonstrate.
You know, I mean, anybody.
They just sentenced to 15 years several people who were democracy activists against Mubarak because they had one kind of sanctioned demonstration, 15-year sentences.
You know, I think what that will do is drive people to, you know, kind of harsher and more violent means.
We've already seen some of that with bombings and stuff.
My guess is that that will continue, because the kind of military regime, I call him the pharaoh, you know, pharaoh al-Sisi, won't allow the simplest criticism of him or the regime.
The result will be people will find other ways to express their anger, and that's going to be violence.
And if they're tragic in the way they can really mess things up, use violence against terrorists, you shut off that mechanism of bringing in money, then economically the place is going to have much greater trouble.
You know, I think Egypt's going to be a mess for a very long time.
All right, now there's a question in the chat room.
Oh, now there's a few.
But anyway, the first one there, which I'll kind of add to, was what's the probability, do you think, that the Arab Spring was engineered for just what's happening now, this whole kind of destabilization?
And I guess I would add a corollary to that about just, you know, what seems to be such an incoherent policy.
Doug, we back military dictators in Egypt.
We back revolution by Bin Ladenites in Syria.
We back the Iranian Dawa Party and Bata Brigade factions in Iraq, after all this time still.
And it all seems like such a damn mess, but maybe it's supposed to be such a damn mess.
What do you think?
Well, look, I mean, I've worked in Washington for 30 years, and the one thing I've come away with is an absolute skepticism that anybody here is competent enough to carry off some really deep, you know, kind of thoughtful, interesting strategy of, like, we will sit here, engineer the Arab Spring.
I just don't believe that people here are not competent enough.
They weren't expecting it.
They didn't know it was going to happen.
I mean, the idea you can go over there on the ground and start this stuff.
I mean, Arab peoples were angry for good reason.
You know, they were being looted and pillaged and repressed by these thugs who had been supported typically by the West and others who just wanted stability.
So I think that, you know, this stuff started as genuine grassroots.
The problem is, you know, bad elements try to take control of that and use it, and, of course, the West is very cynical.
I think the U.S.
You know, I mean, we're happy to have democracy if they elect the people we want.
If they don't elect the people we want, then, of course, we're not very interested in democracy anymore.
And that's what's happened here.
Yeah, we want democracy in Egypt, but, of course, we don't really want the Brotherhood to win.
Oh, this is a problem, and now the military who we dealt with take over.
Oh, what the heck.
That's really not a bad thing, you know.
I mean, and I think what you see is what you described is this utterly incoherent policy.
If you look at ISIS, we are kind of with ISIS in Syria against the regime of Assad, but, you know, in Iraq we are against ISIS and for the regime of Maliki.
Does any of this make sense?
Well, of course not, but it's a policy that kind of evolves.
It's a policy where, you know, one aspect dominates here, another aspect dominates there.
There's very little coherence and kind of intelligence there, and that, I think, tells you the U.S. could not have stage-managed any of this.
I mean, our folks are just far beyond that in terms of confidence levels.
Well, and then there's also the question of, and this is kind of how you end your article, too, of just, well, maybe one more intervention, Doug.
I mean, after all, and, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems to me like as far as bin Ladenite-type movements that could actually be a threat to American civilians, which is my interest here, that actually the threat is worse than ever now.
This new creation of a so-called, you know, kind of proto-caliphate Islamic state of Zarqawi's old guys over there.
You know what?
The argument sure goes on TV, Doug.
Hey, man, what if we just sent in the Marines, who are badass, to just knock the crap out of these guys one last time and maybe even switch sides back to Assad, like the Bush policy, and back Assad against them and help the Baghdad government clean them up, and then we'll stop intervening in the Middle East.
One more intervention.
Doug, what do you say?
Now, I mean, that, of course, is kind of the argument that's always used.
Well, we made this mess, but now we can clean it up.
And, of course, again, I use the phrase, and we joke about, you know, what a second marriage is, you know, the triumph of hope over experience.
Yeah, we may have mucked up all of that previous stuff, but this time we'll get it right.
And, of course, there's no evidence of that.
I think Iran is a very good example of this.
I mean, Americans kind of go back to 1980 and say, oh, in 79, look at, oh, the fall of the Shah, they took our embassy, oh, these evil people.
But, of course, Iranians would look back to 1953 when we overthrew a democratically elected prime minister.
You know, so you get the Shah in, you have 25 kind of, from America's standpoint, good years where the dictator rules, works with you, and then he's overthrown, the bad guys take control, and a whole set of things happens.
Then you back, you know, Saddam Hussein of all people against the Iranians, and then he does everything you were afraid the Iranians would do.
So, of course, you have to go to war with him.
You have to have troops in Saudi Arabia.
And then, of course, you take him out.
And, of course, now Iran's stronger and Iraq's a mess.
And, oh, my goodness, now we need to go back to Iraq.
We can fix that.
No, we should bomb the Iranians.
Well, that would fix that.
I mean, it just never ends because every one of these actions has unintended consequences.
You've got to stop.
And what we've got to recognize is it's a mess, and we don't control it.
And every effort, you know, creates greater disorder and a greater mess.
All right.
I'm with you.
And I'm sorry because I know I promised you 20 minutes, and I'll let you go, but there's one last question in the chat room that I'd really like to know the answer to as well, which is what's behind the seeming special relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia when it seems like they would have so many interests against each other rather than in common?
Well, to some degree, both are interested in the status quo.
I mean, Israel is the dominant military power.
It's got a couple hundred nukes.
It's got the most powerful conventional military.
So while it's an unpleasant international environment, no country threatens it.
You know, Saudi Arabia is in certain ways the same thing.
That is, they've got lots of money.
The royals can live a wonderful lifestyle, shatter away about being, you know, kind of resolute Muslims, then leave the country and have a great time.
You know, so both of them want to preserve, in some sense, the existing system.
They're both scared to death about instability, especially Iran.
The rise of Iran worries both of them.
You know, and especially Saudi Arabia, it's the more fragile one.
It has problems in terms of succession.
You know, the king is in his mid to late 80s, not in very good health.
You know, this is a place that really could have internal problems.
So they're basically united of all things against Iran, and they both would like to have the U.S. take out Syria.
It's kind of in both their interests.
So the irony is that while they themselves are very different in character of regimes, there's a number of issues where they happen to agree, and they don't talk about this a lot publicly.
But the reality is that in certain ways they're working together, even if they're not exactly communicating together.
But they don't have to.
They share interests.
All right.
Well, with that, I will let you go, but also with a big thanks, too.
I sure appreciate your time tonight, Doug.
Sure.
Happy to be on.
Glad you're on and, you know, carrying the flag.
Yes, Scott.
Keep it up.
Thank you very much.
See you.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.