For Pacifica Radio, November 29th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Again, this month, celebrating 10 years here on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Stephen Zunes.
He is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, and he wrote a piece on Biden's Iraq record for the progressive.
And, of course, you all know Stephen.
He's been great on all of the wars for at least 20 years.
Actually, that's not true.
I know he was good in the 1990s, too.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Stephen?
Good to be with you again.
Very good to have you here.
And, man, we got a problem, which is a return to normalcy.
And normalcy means a state of permanent war, a state of permanently losing wars, lots of them.
And all the guys who got us into the last ones that are all still going on.
Donald Trump famously hasn't started any new wars yet, but he didn't end any of the wars that he inherited from Barack Obama and Joe Biden just four years ago.
And now Biden's hired all the usual suspects to come and run his war cabinet.
Stephen?
Exactly.
I mean, naming Tony Blinken as the new Secretary of State is disappointing.
I remember when he was the Democratic staff, he had the Democratic staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was head of the Foreign Relations Committee.
I remember how Senator Barbara Boxer and some of the other more liberal members of the committee had asked that I testify, that Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector, testify, Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
Others testify about the Iraq war, about how Iraq had achieved at least qualitative disarmament, how they were not a threat, how invading Iraq would be a total disaster amid sectarian violence, solifist extremism, increased terrorism, a bloody counterinsurgency war, etc.
All the things that people really need, that senators really need to hear before voting on the war.
But Biden and Blinken decide to only have a day and a half worth of hearings, a day and a half of the most important foreign policy issue of a generation, only a day and a half of a hearing.
And they stack the committee list with war proponents.
I mean, these sketchy exiles that Dick Cheney and Ahmed Chalabi had coached to say, oh, I've seen these stacks of chemical weapons with my own eyes.
Oh, of course, American soldiers will be greeted as liberators.
Blinken and Biden even brought in Caspar Weinberger, former secretary of defense under the senior Bush, who had been convicted of perjury for lying before that very committee during the whole Iran-Contra scandal.
And then Blinken went on to Biden's top national security guy when he was vice president.
Actually, wait, stop right there.
Stop right there for a second.
Let's belabor the point here about Biden and Blinken and Iraq War II for a second here.
You know, I already know this story very well.
I remember you being good on it at the time.
People might not be familiar for you and me.
This was the day before yesterday.
But people might not remember in the 1990s, Scott Ritter was a pretty hawkish U.N. weapons inspector, former Marine captain, intelligence officer, who was Republican.
Yeah.
And Republican.
Absolutely.
Who, you know, was absolutely a hawk on whatever deception was going on or whatever obstinance that Saddam Hussein, you know, was putting up in or resistance that he was putting up to ending the weapons inspection regime.
And then but he came out hard against the war because he just said, listen, I mean, I'm the first one to accuse Saddam Hussein of all the things that he's actually guilty of.
You all know me.
I'm just saying it's just not true that he's producing chemical and biological weapons and all these things right now.
He can't.
I know enough about this to know that what they're saying, it's just not true.
If there was any man and they had gotten along Ritter and Biden in the 1990s, when Biden could use Ritter's statements, you know, to bolster his hawkish positions.
And so now here Ritter and he made the point then, too, that he wasn't turning around.
He wasn't changing his mind.
He wasn't moving left.
He wasn't becoming anti-war.
He was the exact same him he'd always been.
And as mad as hell as Saddam Hussein as he'd been in, say, 1998, he still didn't think that any of these lies were true and that there was a justification to start a war over it.
So if there was an authoritative voice in the United States of America to testify in front of Joe Biden's Foreign Relations Committee, he was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and tell Joe Biden and Tony Blinken that we can't do this, the cause is not true.
It was him.
And they knew that.
And that was why they banned him from testifying.
Exactly, exactly.
This is very much of a cover up.
I mean, it's so disgusting the way, you know, Biden and his supporters are rewriting history, you know, to act like there's no way they could have known the truth.
And he goes as far as saying, oh, my vote for the war was just to get the inspectors back in.
That's baloney.
The vote for the war was after Saddam had agreed to get the inspectors back in.
And furthermore, three months after they had arrived and had been engaging in unfettered inspections, Biden supported Bush's decision to invade anyway.
And not only that, many months later, when it was discovered that there were indeed none of these weapons, weapons programs, weapons systems that Biden and Bush and the others were insisting that Iraq had, Biden still defended his vote to invade.
He only started backtracking when the polls shifted, and it showed that the war was unpopular.
And the thing is, people say, why are you obsessing so much about Iraq?
That was years ago.
Well, first of all, people are still suffering as a result of that war.
And, you know...
And it's still going on.
I mean, we're in Iraq war three and a half right now.
We still have troops.
We still have troops in Iraq.
But even putting that aside, what does it say about your judgment?
What does it say about your judgment that you were willing to ignore the people who knew the actual situation about Saddam's military capabilities at that time, which were very minimal, and just ignored, that you ignored 90% of US Mideast scholars who said that invading Iraq would be a disaster, that you were ignoring, not just the Catholic Church and the Pope and the Catholic bishops, but every single mainline positive denomination that said this is an unjust war, and you threw your lot with a right-wing fundamentalist?
And what does it say about your judgment when the majority of Democrats and independents and millions of peoples in the street and 85% of the world's governments saying, no, you can't do this.
This is wrong.
And this is the thing that people act like, oh, everybody supported the war.
No, no, no.
These guys are really, really hardcore.
And Biden and the people who supported this war are the ones who are going to be coming back into power.
And I happen to know that Biden was coming to Austin, Texas to visit Governor Bush during the campaign and during the transition and palling around with all the neocons, and the issue they all had in common was Iraq.
This is what was going on.
A friend of mine was Biden's limo driver at the time, is how I know.
One of the crazy things about all this is that you heard about all these Republicans that ended up supporting Biden.
Now, a lot of them did so just because they recognized how dangerous and crazy Trump was and they had the integrity to, despite their disagreements with Biden, that are willing to support him anyway.
But some of these guys who endorse Biden are doing so because he didn't think Trump was hawkish enough, that they were shifting from Trump to Biden, not because they thought Biden was more knowledgeable and more emotionally stable and less of a loose cannon and a more responsible person, a capable person of being president.
They were choosing him because he was more likely, in their view, to pursue these foreign wars that Trump, at least partially, was reluctant to do.
Yep.
Well, and of course, the thing is hawk, hawk, you might as well call him hawk.
Donald the Hawk Trump was as bad as anybody on especially Israel-Palestine, which is, of course, the center of the war party's attention at all times.
Horrible on Iran, which is, you know, tops of the list for them.
But Donald Trump cast doubt on America's mystical destiny to lead the world into the future.
And that's what they hate about him, is that he pops the bubble of this religion of American exceptionalism that we're supposed to believe in.
Yeah, I mean, he had his own form of exceptionalism that was pretty, pretty bad, but at least he had some constraints on the imperial reach.
Yeah.
And he's just a cynical guy.
Right.
He just Donald Trump doesn't really believe in anything.
And so.
Except himself.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Just like Saddam Hussein, who was supposedly in bed with Bin Laden.
But anyway, I mean, like if you read Biden's foreign affairs article and he knows exactly, you know, which choir he's preaching to here.
And he talks about how it is America's sacred duty to remain in the NATO alliance.
And then he goes on to use also, you know, mystical type terminology to talk about America's role in leading the world.
All of this and that.
He's a true believer in the project.
And that's something they could never get out of Trump.
And I think that what they really panicked about was they were afraid that Trump believed his own BS about peace when really he just talks out of both sides of his mouth about everything.
Very, very much so.
I mean, just to mention about Israel-Palestine, I mean, Biden says, you know, at least he's willing to restore humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and at least talk to the Palestinians and that he doesn't want to formally endorse Israel's settlements as part of Israel, you know, as Pompeo did in his recent trip.
But, you know, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, people like Blinken and Biden are very much into the idea that, oh, well, we don't necessarily support settlements, but we're not going to force you to stop expanding them.
We're not going to condition military aid.
In fact, Blinken and Biden are very, very clear.
The $30 billion of aid given to Israel over the next several years is unconditional.
Unconditional.
No matter what violations of international legal norms, of human rights, of UN Security Council resolutions, they're saying Israel can do the hell what you want.
We're going to get you just as much arms, just as much money either way.
Similarly, he says he's going to veto, he's going to block any United Nations Security Council resolution that might pressure Israel.
He also comes out very strongly against civil society movements like the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
In other words, he is basically trying to cut off any way, whether it be by the international community, whether it be by the U.S. government, whether it be by civil society organizations to pressure Israel to stop its occupation and expansion of settlements.
But then he pretends that, you know, I mean, you might as well endorse them.
You might as well be like Trump and make it official if you're not going to do anything to stop Netanyahu's colonization plan.
And indeed, that's one area where it's pretty clear both Blinken and Biden are probably far further removed from the attitudes of the average registered Democrat and left-leaning independents than probably on any single issue.
And another thing about Blinken I should mention was that to Biden's credit, you know, he wasn't quite as—in Obama's inner circle, Biden actually was not one of the more hawkish people.
He was actually battling Richard Gates at the fence and Hillary Clinton at state.
He opposed the surge in Afghanistan.
He opposed certain counterterrorism operations that were high risk.
And he opposed the intervention in Libya.
But interestingly, Blinken was a big supporter of the intervention in Libya.
So, you know, it's like Blinken is even more hawkish than Biden.
And similarly, his appointments for national security advisor, I mean, that guy is really scary on a whole number of areas around civil liberties and intervention.
He's going to probably get Michelle Flournoy to the Department of Defense.
She was also a big Iraq war supporter.
I mean, it's not—as this person at the U.N., she was a longtime protege of Susan Rice, who's a bigger hawk than any of them.
And so I'm—it's been real concerning.
I mean, yeah, Biden might hold out an olive branch to the more progressive wing of the party on some domestic issues.
We'll see about that.
But in terms of foreign policy, it might actually be pretty scary at this point.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you alluded to Jake Sullivan there, who's been designated the incoming national security advisor.
And the most famous thing about him, of course, is that he's the one who wrote in the email to Hillary Clinton that AQ is on our side in Syria.
And this was in February of 2012, when Reuters had reported that Ayman al-Zawahiri had given an official endorsement, all good Muslims should go to Syria to overthrow Assad.
And, you know, essentially, his point in the email was that isn't this ironic and funny, boss?
It was really all he was saying.
He wasn't saying, geez, you know what?
We essentially are committing high treason on the level of Benedict Arnold here, sending money and guns to the guys who were the bad guys in our last war.
They were al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Iraq War II.
And, geez, I don't know, boss, if maybe we should be doing this.
Instead, it was like, tee hee hee, look at what we're doing.
Aren't we cute and clever in getting away with this?
Isn't it ironic and and notable for that reason only, I guess.
It is.
It is maddening.
It is maddening beyond words that these folks with so little regard to basic norms.
And again, this is I mean, what really, really bugs me is there's a lot.
I mean, I keep getting these as feedback, you know, that you know that I'm being some kind of purist or being somehow far left or anything and all sorts of things when I when I raise these concerns.
But, you know, if you prior to 2004, there's only one major party presidential nominee who openly endorsed the idea of preventive war, you know, war like Iraq where we invade a country on the grounds that it might be a threat to us someday, you know, not because actually we're doing anything to us.
And that was Barry Goldwater.
And Barry Goldwater was considered an extremist.
It was very mainstream to talk about bang, bang, Barry and how dangerous this idea is that we could just reject the U.N. charter and go off and and have these wars of aggression, you know, like that on the grounds that maybe there'll be a threat to us someday and what a disaster the world would be if every country thought that way.
And, you know, it was a very mainstream to oppose people like that.
And now when you have the Democratic nominee for president and the Democratic president elect essentially having advocated that Barry Goldwater type position and his foreign policy appointees so far are overwhelming people who supported that Barry Goldwater kind of position.
Now, instead of being the reasonable moderates, you know, complaining about the extremists, suddenly we are the far left, you know, purist French people, you know, criticizing these supposed moderates.
You know, I mean, it's weird that, you know, a lot a lot of issues, you know, the country has moved miles from 1964 on issues of race and gender and sexual preference and environmental awareness.
I mean, a lot of areas where we really have made progress, but on foreign policy, we're going in the opposite direction.
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Well, and all of these category are really just people accounting for their own cognitive dissonance here, and trying to justify their support for a guy like Joe Biden, who if he was just one hair to the right, would be a Republican.
I mean, they used to joke about Scoop Jackson, that he was the senator from Boeing.
Well, Joe Biden is the senator from MasterCard, and everybody knows it.
This is a guy who is the most corporatist, right-wing, most Zionist, most war-mongering, most police-state-mongering Democrat in the Senate.
He's like if George W.
Bush had been a senator for 50 years.
That's who Joe Biden is.
He's the scum of the earth.
You know, I guess you must know this.
I don't know.
A lot of people on the left have been talking about this, how he made his entire career through the 80s and 90s attacking Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton from the right.
He teamed up with Strom Thurmond, the Dixie crat, who was to the right of Jesse Helms, to attack Ronald Reagan for being too soft on drugs and crime, as he used to brag.
Every crime bill passed in this country in the last 30 years has my name on it.
Billions of dollars for new prisons and local cops all across the country, and all the multi-jurisdictional drug task forces and all of that police-state stuff.
Brags that it was him and his staff that wrote the Patriot Act, what they couldn't get passed in the 90s after Oklahoma City.
And then, but so good, liberals have to somehow account for the fact that they love this guy.
So, they just say, okay, well, I guess these are all good liberal positions then.
Or, you know, at least on the wars that, you know, I don't know, I guess opposition to them is pretty extreme.
But the thing is about Biden is he is somewhat malleable, I think even more so than most politicians.
And on a lot of domestic issues, especially given where the Democratic constituents, Democratic Party has moved more and more to the left, that I see him as president being far more moderate to liberal than his record as a senator would indicate, as far as domestic issues are concerned.
But the problem is, is that while people are really mobilized in many ways to an unprecedented degree on many key issues of domestic policy, and that I really think it will, you know, and again, I really do think that Obama will be a more progressive president domestically, again, than his Senate record indicates.
I'm more concerned about foreign policy because foreign policy, unfortunately, is kind of taking a back seat in terms of people's attention right now.
What with COVID, you know, you know, what with climate, what with racial injustice and economic inequity and the depression we're still under and that kind of thing.
And so, you know, but on foreign policy, and again, people are distracted.
It's not really an issue.
Only 29 percent of Democrats running for Congress had even mentioned foreign policy positions on their website, even when they covered a lot of other issues.
I think because maybe they were afraid to acknowledge that this is where the Democratic Party is even more removed, you know, from the average Democrat than they are domestically.
And so I think it really behooves us to really push things, to really push Biden.
Because, you know, Biden often during the wars in Central America and the nuclear arms race, he actually joined with progressives in opposing Reagan's policy.
He even opposed the Gulf War, which is really kind of strange.
But he was the big champion of playing Columbia this last 20 years.
Yeah, that was a big problem.
But my point about him opposing the Gulf War is that, you know, people like us oppose both wars, both the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.
There are plenty of people who supported both wars.
You had a fair number of people who supported the Gulf War because it was responding to an act of aggression.
The UN authorized it, and it was pretty clear we'd have a fairly quick and easy victory, whereas the Iraq War was none of those things.
So you did have a good chunk of people who supported the Gulf War, but not the invasion of Iraq.
I don't know anybody, hardly anybody, who opposed the Gulf War then supported the invasion.
I mean, all the three other combinations make perfectly good sense, even if you don't agree with them.
But Biden doesn't make any sense whatsoever, unless maybe he was thinking of it politically, that maybe he voted against the Gulf War because there's a lot of pressure to do it, but because Democrats who opposed the Gulf War, which ended up being popular, ended up being hurt politically, and he figured, hell, Bush is going to invade Iraq anyway.
Maybe I should go ahead, and since I want to run for president again, be on the winning side.
So maybe it was a political decision.
No question.
For him and Kerry, too, and for Hillary Clinton, too.
It was so obvious.
And as I know you know, and I think you've pointed this out on my show in the past, that say whatever you will about her, fine with me, but Nancy Pelosi led the Democrats in the House in opposition to Iraq War II.
Yes, yes.
And so credit where it's due.
The majority of Democrats, if you look at the House and Senate together, the majority of congressional Democrats voted against the war.
Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, they were in the right wing minority, the pro-Bush, Cheney minority.
But now, as I think you implied earlier, Stephen, that, you know, he was really burned by that, too, right?
He was opposed to the surge in Iraq in 2007.
And I forget where I learned this, but I think he didn't realize that it was his Iraq War that killed his son, Beau, until Sergeant Hickman put his book out about the burn pits.
And he has a whole chapter about Beau Biden in there.
And finally, he realized that he had killed his own son because he died of brain cancer from the burn pit station near the Mosul Dam.
And that is important.
To Biden's credit, of the 535 members of Congress, he was the only one, the one out of 535.
He was the only one who actually had a kid who served in Iraq.
And I think that's really what led him to take a more moderate, more dovish position in the Obama- And I should be clear, too.
I mean, he was not exactly a combat death.
I mean, he did not get shot over there.
But it's pretty clear that he died of Gulf War II illness, right?
Yes.
That's what happened.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, again, I think it's very, very important for you and I to really push, you know, remind people of Biden's record, remind people of the record of the people that he is appointing.
But at the same time, not be hopeless about it.
That, again, Biden is malleable and that we need to keep pressing the issue.
We need to point out where these guys are coming from and to do our best to minimize their damage.
I mean, Trump would be hopeless.
I mean, he doesn't care what people think.
But Biden does care what people think.
And I think it's important that we hammer on these issues.
And the interesting thing on Blanket also, one thing I would add to his credit, is that relative to most war hawks, he's much more reluctant to give all out support to right wing dictatorships.
I mean, he may tolerate Israel's war crimes on the name that, oh, they're a democracy or whatever.
But when it comes to like the Saudis, the Egyptians, he's going to be a little he's going to be tougher on them, I believe, than we've seen some of our recent secretaries of states of both parties.
And that's an area.
And also Biden stuck his neck out by saying, as president, I will not cozy up to dictators.
I don't believe him.
I'll see it when he stops all our foreign aid to the regime in Egypt.
But at least it looks like we're going to finally cut aid to the genocidal regime in Saudi Arabia that's been killing tens of thousands of people in Yemen.
I'm hoping that they'll block that huge, huge, huge arms sales to the United Arab Emirates, which is such a scam and really, really dangerous and destabilizing.
I think this is an area where, you know, we really might be able to apply some pressure.
Yeah, you're right.
And listen, I mean, I think that goes along with your previous point so well, that this can be fought.
And for whatever reason, I'm not exactly sure.
Maybe it really is just all credit due to the activism of, you know, Code Pink and the Quakers and other people up there fighting the good fight on Capitol Hill.
But there are some congressmen and senators who are really good on this, including really bad congressmen and senators who happen to take a good position on Yemen.
And they promised in the campaign that they're going to end the Yemen war.
It's the worst thing happening in the whole world.
It's absolutely the worst thing that the United States government is doing right now is a genocide.
And that is a great place for the anti-war movement to start on Joe Biden.
OK, buddy, it's three o'clock in the afternoon, January 20th.
What's taking so long?
Turn this war off now.
Yeah, very, very much so.
And I think a couple of things is kind of interesting about this is is one is that a sizable bipartisan majority voted to cut off arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.
But then Trump and invoked this rarely used national state of emergency, saying our national security is so much at stake if we don't continue sending these arms that he got around Congress.
And so Biden is going to have both parties pressuring him to do this.
And I think so I think indeed he will.
He will stop.
We need to make a lot of noise about it.
The second thing I think is interesting to point out was that in the 2016 Democratic platform, it explicitly called for increased security cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.
And the fact that the Democratic Party has switched on this and I think is a sign that the progress that the that the anti-war movement has made.
We've made some real progress here.
Yep.
All right.
Well, so everybody's got their eye on the target, then that step one is the war in Yemen.
And we'll see what happens after that.
That's Stephen Zunis, everybody.
The great anti-war professor from the University of San Francisco.
Thanks very much again for your time, sir.
Thank you.
All right, Sean.
That has been Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
