07/01/14 – Gene Healy – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, sorry about that.
I'm bad on the clock today, boy am I bad at...
I'm bad at doing radio, but I got a good taste in guests, so you gotta let me off the hook.
My clock ain't set to the radio clock.
Hey, check out this great article.
It's in the Washington Examiner.
It's called First Gulf War in 1991 was America's opening Iraq mistake.
Well, that might be letting him off the hook a little bit there, but it's Gene Healy from the Cato Institute.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Gene?
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
So yeah, take us back, summer 1990, and there are a lot of people listening to the show, I think, who are quite young, or maybe they weren't paying attention at the time, and don't really know what happened other than America bombed Iraq back then.
So maybe take us through how all this came about, if you could.
Well, in August of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and for the rest of the year, you had an effort by George H.W. Bush to build a coalition to repulse Saddam, and get approval at the Security Council.
And he did that, he actually, and he went to Congress against the advice of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to get a resolution for authorizing the use of force.
And January 15th, 1991 was Operation Desert Storm.
And this is, you know, in history, because, you know, we won a quick battlefield victory, because the first Bush administration decided it wouldn't be prudent to go on and continue to Baghdad and occupy Iraq, history has looked on the first Gulf War pretty positively.
People tend to remember things like Storm and Norman Schwarzkopf, the Scud Stud, Arthur Kent from CNN, and the last ticker tape parade for victorious soldiers in Manhattan.
But I think it's incumbent on us to look at the unintended consequences of this war.
And even though it was a famous victory, even though the battlefield victory was swift, it deepened our entanglement in Iraq.
It led to years of periodic bombings, no-fly zones, and punitive air raids against Iraq, along with the crippling set of sanctions.
And these not only deepened our entanglement, but became the, you know, major planks in al-Qaeda's declaration of war against the United States.
And it's been described as the 20 years war with Iraq.
It's going on a quarter century now.
And I think it's important, as, you know, we're told by the neocons that we shouldn't re-litigate the Iraq War.
It seems to me we should go back and re-litigate the Gulf War a bit, and dispel this myth that a swift battlefield victory means that going in in the first place was a smart idea and led to positive results.
It seems to me that the unintended consequences of that war are things we're still dealing with today.
Yeah, you know, I think this is why when Ron Paul got in that fight with Rudy Giuliani in the debate in 2007, why people just across the country just rallied to the fact that he was telling the honest truth.
And I think for most people, they kind of knew it back in their head somewhere, but they never heard anyone say it in English out loud before, and certainly not a Republican politician.
Just go ahead and be straight and say, hey, look, we'd been bombing them for 10 years straight over there before 9-11.
They knew that was true.
I mean, come on.
You don't have to pay attention to politics to know that there was a giant war in 1991 over there and that there had been some kind of foreign policy since then, even if they didn't pay close attention to the sanctions and the no-fly zones.
They knew that Clinton wasn't completely at peace over there or whatever.
And so they just rallied to the truth of that, not that he was saying it was America's fault or that they wanted to blame themselves or whatever, any of that weird stuff, like in the accusation by Giuliani, for example, but just saying, yeah, like, hey, let's be honest about this.
Our government got us into this mess.
They went over there and poked a hornet's nest, as you said.
Part of it was, how do you start a war right over Kuwait?
So they had to build up Saddam Hussein into being the new Hitler.
But then if this guy's Hitler, how are we going to come to the table with him ever?
Even after we defeated him, there's still no coming to the table with him.
You know, he's a mad dog, so damn insane and all this propaganda.
And so it was that easy to just keep up the containment policy and just keep the sanctions and the blockade on.
And definitely, as Madeleine Albright said, that we'll never lift the sanctions until Saddam is gone.
That's it.
Regime changes the policy.
They could never go back after that.
Right.
Look at our policy now.
We're going to...
You know, the war was sold by George H.W. Bush because it wasn't an inspiring goal to say, let's restore the Emir of Kuwait and protect the Saudi royal family.
George H.W. Bush sold the war as it will lead to a new order for the ages.
It'll end the threat of terror and, you know, make peace and justice possible.
Well, look at our policy now.
You know, we've gone through 20-plus years of weakening Iran's major regional enemy.
And our plan now is, with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria dominating northern Iraq, we're going to aid the moderates in Syria, wherever they are.
And they're fighting Assad, who's also fighting ISIS.
But on the other side, we're going to aid the Maliki government, and we're kind of going to try to do that in such a way that it doesn't, you know, unduly empower Iran.
It's like there's a civil war in the Middle East, and we want to be on every possible side of it.
It's something, I think, that makes restraint look a lot better by comparison.
Right.
You know, I got to tell you, I'm a little bit afraid that they're going to get their story straight, and that is that the Islamic State is the threat, never mind Assad.
At least that would be a consistent, and, you know, you could state that in one sentence.
These guys are the bad guys, without a bunch of caveats about being on all other sides.
But I think if they ever got their act together there, it would just mean a new, worse war.
I'm sort of glad that they're so divided in which all sides are backing, as crazy as that sounds right now.
Well, I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing this line, you know, we don't want to re-litigate the Iraq War.
We don't want to look at, you know, that's not the issue right now.
The issue is what to do now.
But I think it's important, you know, to learn a little history to avoid rushing into making the same mistakes.
And we've got the same characters who were responsible for the Iraq War, and in some cases, as in the case of Dick Cheney, were responsible for the original Gulf War, telling us, well, we can go back three years to when Obama, you know, failed to get a status of forces agreement and didn't leave a residual force in Iraq.
But that's as far as we can go.
We can't look at whether our 20-plus year entanglement in Iraq was a good idea in the first place.
And I think it's pretty clear, although it's not a popular view, I think it's pretty clear it wasn't a good idea.
We'll be right back.
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My email address is scott at scott horton dot org.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Gene Healy from the Cato Institute about the first Gulf War.
Operation Yellow Ribbon.
Operation Vietnam Never Happened.
You love war.
Come on.
Boom.
Yeah.
USA.
First Gulf War in 1991 was America's opening Iraq mistake.
And it's a really great article and you make a lot of great points in it.
And some of them are about how we got lied into that thing in the process back then in 1990, 91.
Can you take us through a bit of that?
Sure.
So Dick Cheney's Pentagon, Cheney remembers the secretary of defense in the first Gulf War.
Now, one of the ways that the first Bush administration sold the Gulf War was by saying that it wasn't just about Kuwait, that Saddam Hussein was poised to roll across the Saudi border, take Saudi Arabia and then control something like 40 percent of the world's oil reserves.
And the Pentagon at the time claimed to have satellite photographs showing 1,500 tanks and a quarter of a million troops, Iraqi troops, massed on the Saudi border.
Well, there's a journalist named Gene Heller from the St. Petersburg Times at the time who decided to check.
And this is around the time when you're first able to buy commercial satellite photographs.
She got a couple of photographs of the border area in question, had them analyzed by former military intel people, and it didn't take a lot of analysis because the photographs showed empty desert in the area that Cheney's Pentagon said troops and tanks were amassing.
And before she printed it, she contacted Cheney's office three times, offering to spike the story if they could show her that she was wrong.
And the response she got essentially was, trust us.
And this is something that I think was lost in the aftermath of a pretty spectacular victory.
But it appears she says, she said years later in the Christian Science Monitor, that it was, quote, a pretty serious fib, which I think is putting it lightly.
So you had...
Well, I believe they told the king of Saudi Arabia the very same thing.
Yeah.
You had what certainly looks like misinformation being propagated at the highest levels.
You also had, you know, there's no doubt that the Iraqi army was quite brutal in what they did in Kuwait.
But there were stories, you know, along the lines of the World War I propaganda about bayonetting Belgian babies.
There was a story...
Oh, let me go ahead.
I have the clip right here.
Let me play.
It's real short.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
OK.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
That's the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
Lied!
We found out about a year later.
That was, I guess, no one checked at the time.
She wasn't in Kuwait.
This is the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, the complete PR campaign.
And there are a number of congressmen who said that was instrumental in their vote for the authorization of the use of force, this idea that the Iraqi soldiers were ripping babies out of incubators.
So as you've seen in a lot of other wars, you had a lot of misinformation going around.
There wasn't evidence that Saddam Hussein was poised to take Saudi Arabia.
And if he did, I cite some calculations in some of the Cato published at the time by Reagan's former top energy economist, David Henderson, who said that this oil weapon is a dud, that you're talking in the worst case scenario with Saddam Hussein taking Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in addition to keeping Kuwait, that you're talking about something like, at worst, $0.24 a gallon more in gasoline, which to my mind is a pretty lousy reason to start a war and kill thousands of people.
Now, I knew that David Henderson was absolutely great on that issue, but I had no idea.
He was great on that issue in the Bush government at the time.
Gene, holy...
Well, I think he was actually, he wasn't in the government at the time, but he had been Reagan's top energy economist at the Council of Economic Advisers.
Yeah, in other words, he was giving this advice where they could hear it, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very important.
And it was a strange thing, because at the time, while Bush 41 is talking about a new world order and eternal peace, at the same time, then-Secretary of State James Baker is saying, if you want one word for why we need to fight this war, it's jobs.
Well, Henderson's calculations showed that's a pretty lousy rationale for this kind of war, especially a war that ended up entangling us into, for the next 10 years, into low-level managerial bombings and punitive air raids.
This really deepened an entanglement that caused a lot of hostility, and we're still paying the price for that.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, there were the brutal war crimes quite deliberately in Desert Storm.
They bombed the electricity and the waterworks and the civilian infrastructure of the country, and then they kept all the sanctions on, and I guess people debate the numbers, but not by very much, I don't think.
It's pretty much settled that, you know, high hundreds of thousands, almost a million people died from the decrease in their standard of living, you know, when you compare the excess deaths and all that as they do under the blockade and the no-fly zone bombings of the 1990s, when you take, you know, the era before the war and compare it to the era of the blockade.
It's certainly something that, yeah, I have seen very different numbers on the costs of the sanctions.
You're absolutely right that some of the bombing was designed for the post-war era, targeted at Iraq's infrastructure and industry to weaken Iraq and keep it containable, and it's certainly true that, well, you know, Paul Wolfowitz, who I'm not usually given to citing on anything, you know, he said in 2003 that the nearly weekly bombings, the perception that the sanctions are killing Iraqi children in large numbers and the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil, these are Osama bin Laden's principal recruiting device.
So the idea that, you know, that you look at this war and you look at, you know, January, February of 1991 and how quickly it was won, and you compare it to the prolonged occupation of Bush 43 and the cost that entailed, the idea that you make that comparison and you decide that the Gulf War was the good war, I don't think it's tallying up all the costs for the United States and for Iraq.
You know, in a large part, we are where we are now because of that decision to intervene in 1991.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I think people like John Kerry and Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden, had never lived down their opposition to the first Gulf War.
Oh, how could you have opposed the greatest war ever?
Why do you hate America so much?
So then when it came to the second Gulf War, it was so obvious that Kerry was making that political calculation in 2002.
I'm not making that political mistake again of saying no to the war.
Absolutely.
And not just Kerry, you know, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, basically every prominent Democrat at the time looked back on, because of the authorization for the use of force in the Gulf War was a much, much closer vote than the one in 2002 for the Iraq War.
And most of the Democratic leadership, Daschle, Gephardt, on and on, made exactly that calculation that we're not going to be on the wrong side of this one.
That calculation didn't work out so well.
I mean, there's a good argument that the fact that Barack Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time and did make a speech about how he was against dumb wars helped him in the Democratic primaries, may have helped him put away Hillary Clinton.
But, you know, H.W. said at the end, right around the time of the ceasefire, you know, he was exuberant.
He said, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
And you know, the result of that, in many ways, is more Vietnams.
That's exactly right.
Two of them, at least, maybe three.
Thanks very much, Gene.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I sure appreciate it.
Thanks to Gene Healy.
He's at the Cato Institute.
He's the author of this book, The Cult of the Presidency.
I should have mentioned that at the beginning.
And he's the author of this article, First Go For It in 91 was America's Opening Mistake at the Washington Examiner.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
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