11/07/12 – William S. Lind – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Okay, first guest today is William S. Lind.
He is the director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation and is author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook.
Here he is writing in the American Conservative Magazine, Why Conservatives Hate War.
Now don't you snicker.
Listen to his case.
He's got to make first.
Welcome back to the show.
Bill, how are you?
I'm doing very well, thank you.
Well good.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
I think that you can get away with saying conservatives hate war because I think that you actually have the authority to declare what conservatism is and write pro-war people right out of that movement if you feel like it because you've got that kind of conservative credential under your belt already, don't you?
Well, after working 22 years with Paul Wyrick at Free Congress Foundation, we co-authored his last book, The Next Conservatism, I think I can claim a reasonable conservative mantle, plus I write a regular column in the American Conservative.
I'm also on their board, which is the only nationwide conservative as opposed to neocon magazine.
And as we all know, the neocons aren't really neocons.
They're anti-cons.
They are jacobins.
They are what conservatism arose in the late 18th century to oppose.
So I think I can claim that mantle, but more importantly, I'm talking from history.
This isn't something I just sat down and came up with out of a crystal ball.
Historically, conservatives have been anti-war, and not for touchy-feely reasons.
It's not because we like flowers and growing things.
It's because war threatens our most fundamental objectives, particularly social and cultural continuity.
That's what conservatism ultimately is about.
It's not about free markets.
It's not about freedom.
It's about social and cultural continuity, and nothing threatens that more than war.
Although the number one sales pitch from the war party, of course, is that that's what all the wars are for, to preserve everything that we cherish about what we already have.
Well, if you believe that, then I own this great bridge up in Brooklyn, which I'll sell you real cheap.
The fact of the matter is that the threats which have us fighting halfway around the world don't threaten our social and cultural continuity.
But both world wars did enormous damage to them.
And our entry into World War I by President Woodrow Wilson, who had just been re-elected on the slogan, he kept us out of war, within a month of his second inauguration he'd taken us into it, was because the progressives, who of course wanted social and cultural change on a vast scale, which subsequently they got, knew that they could not create the instrument for such change that they sought, a vastly powerful federal government, except by demanding the powers in wartime as military necessity.
Well, you know, I think when people, in current terms, when they think of a conservative in terms of foreign policy, they just think of, well, they might think of some egghead when it comes to, you know, who in DC is coming up with some, you know, alleged master plan.
But when they think about people in their neighborhood, they think about people who are all for kicking butt, the kind of guys who would send their son to go join the army to fight in one of these things.
And so why is it that the appeal to kicking butt works so well on people who otherwise would agree with you about what conservatism is and why they call themselves conservatives?
Because again, we've lost our understanding of history, and of course this has been deliberate on the part of the cultural Marxists.
If you can cut people off from their past, you can do anything with them you want, because they have no basis for comparison.
In fact, what history tells us is that conservatives have always been patriots.
They have not been nationalists.
The people you're talking about are nationalists.
They see the country as an abstraction for which they will sacrifice anything.
This started with the French Revolution.
It began on the left.
It was the French revolutionaries who gave us this kind of nationalism, which Edmund Burke, writing in opposition to the French Revolution, because he's generally considered the founder of modern conservatism, though in fact it goes back a bit before him, what he opposed, what he represented was patriotism.
But patriotism isn't abstract.
It's concrete.
It's real.
It's my town, my farm, my valley, my people.
It's not belligerent.
It's about wanting to preserve, protect, and continue all of those things.
It has nothing to do at all with an abstract, flag-waving kind of nationalism.
And again, it's bizarre that this is now connected with the right, and it's only because the right has forgotten its own origins.
So then, to your eyes, Ron Paul's anti-war position is a very consistent conservative thing, rather than a deviation, where most people look at his stand as a deviation from where he tends to agree with the right on so many other things.
Oh, he's absolutely representing the conservative position, unfortunately, as one of the very few in Washington who does.
The left, of course, even when it's anti-war, isn't anti-war because it wants social and cultural continuity.
So, no, Ron Paul is in the mainstream, and these howlers for war on the right, they may be on the right, but they are not conservative.
They are right-wing nationalists, which is something very different.
Well, you know, there's certainly some truth in, I think, the reaction to Ron Paul, maybe especially four years ago, rather than this time, you know, when he was brand new to most Americans, that he really, the way I always phrase it, was he was handing out permission slips to self-identified conservatives, that they can now change their position on the war, and it's okay, because here's an evangelical Christian Texas conservative Republican congressman telling them that it's perfectly okay to be anti-war.
In fact, the more anti-war, the better, and that kind of thing, whereas before, they had been led to believe that they would have to be like Michael Moore, you know, some big ridiculous socialist hypocrite, in order to be against the foreign policy.
Again, this only shows that conservatives, too, have lost their own history.
Senator Robert A. Taft, Mr. Republican, probably the last real conservative candidate for president, he lost the nomination disastrously to Eisenhower in 1952, was vehemently anti-war, and his view was, we should only go to war if the United States itself is directly attacked.
I mean, he would be one of the leaders of the anti-Iraq war movement.
Most of our opposition to getting into both World War I and World War II came from the right, not from the left.
Edmund Burke, when he was a member of parliament, again in the late 18th century, he's the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, again, generally considered, although from a scholarly standpoint it's not quite correct, to be the founding conservative work.
At one point, parliament was debating a war to keep the River Scheldt closed in what was then the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium.
Why?
Because if the Scheldt opened, the city of Antwerp became a major competitor to London.
And Burke said on the floor of parliament, a war for the Scheldt, a war for a chamber pot.
That would have been his reaction to the Iraq war as well.
And so all of conservatism's history gives conservatives permission to oppose war and still remain conservatives.
Think of it this way.
Conservatives are about the small government that doesn't spend much money.
No activity of the state is as expensive as going to war, and this has been true right back to as far as we can go in history.
Similarly, no activity gives the state more power than war.
Again, the progressives, what we now call the liberals, created the vast federal government that they wanted through going to war and saying, we must have this power as wartime necessity.
When peace comes, needless to say, they keep a good chunk of it.
Conservatives have known this in the past.
Unfortunately, conservatives too have been caught up in this great dumbing down of our culture, our society, to where they don't know their own history.
Now, it seems like the Cold War had a lot to do with what confused all of this, because conservatives had a left-wing enemy in the Soviet empire over there that had to be contained at all costs and that kind of thing.
And then during the Vietnam era, especially, the only anti-war movement, it was basically just left to the hippies to be against.
I guess the John Birch Society turned against the Vietnam War, but then they were written right out of legitimacy by the National Review types anyway.
Other than that, there was no anti-war right, I don't think, during Vietnam, was there?
You're correct.
And it is precisely because of the Cold War and the threat of communism.
And of course, communism represented the pinnacle of the international left.
And you had a brief historical situation.
It really should only have lasted about 15 years when the United States had to intervene heavily overseas, particularly in Europe, to prevent the Red Army from overrunning what was left of Europe.
This, however, proceeded from blunders that conservatives had opposed first getting into World War I, which essentially wiped all the conservative Christian monarchies from the board and created a huge international spectrum shift to the left.
If we just stayed out of it, we didn't have to go in on the German side.
All we had to do was remain true to our tradition and not go to war in Europe.
And it would have ended with a compromise peace and maintain the balance of power in Europe.
Similarly, in World War II, we demanded Germany's unconditional surrender.
Churchill didn't want that.
He wanted to tell the Germans, look, we'll give you a reasonable peace if you'll get rid of the Nazis, which would have happened if we had made that offer happen very quickly.
By insisting that we go for the complete destruction of Germany, half of Europe got turned over to Stalin.
So we then get drawn into Europe after World War II because of the mess we made violating our own traditions earlier.
But by the time the French had developed an independent nuclear force, we were no longer needed there because a war in Europe became impossible for the Soviet Union.
They could easily have had a situation where they end up on the English Channel, but they've lost all their large cities while we're untouched because we weren't in it.
Well, that, of course, was an impossible strategic situation from their standpoint.
So at that point, we could have and should have gone home.
Eisenhower said when we signed the NATO treaty that if we're still in this 10 years later, it will have been a huge mistake.
But of course, it created the giant military-industrial-congressional complex, which was the original phrase in his speech that he warned against.
And now all supposed national security, defense, etc. about in Washington now is the money.
It has nothing to do with defending the country.
It's just about keeping the swill flowing to the biggest trough on earth.
Now, what year was that when the French got their own nukes?
It was around 1960.
And then tell me this.
Did a lot of people back then say, oh, well, the French have their own nukes.
Now we can call it off.
Was that a big movement then?
No, unfortunately, because people didn't realize that at that point, our situation and the Soviet situation were asymmetric.
We still only faced one nuclear-armed opponent.
The Soviets faced several.
The British, of course, had their own deterrent, and the Chinese were developing theirs.
The problem, again, from the Soviet perspective, if it got into a war with any one of those that went nuclear, and French doctrine said, as soon as the balloon goes up in Europe, we go nuclear, and it's pure counter-value.
It's cities we're aiming at.
There's not going to be any of the shooting at your missiles.
We're going straight for your cities.
And the French meant it.
They were in an asymmetric situation that blocked them with us essentially doing nothing.
But by then, you had this huge establishment that was living off the NATO game.
So even if you'd gone for the first part of the Cold War, there were still 30 extra years of it.
Well, we still have troops in Germany today.
What for?
Protecting Germany from the Czech Republic?
No, because every soldier stationed overseas requires a rotation base of two to three soldiers here, which is a huge budget justifier for the army.
The whole game is, the Defense Department at this point is pure Soviet industry.
It is not about producing a product.
It is about acquiring and justifying resources.
Well, and still picking on the Russians and encircling them, right?
Right.
And the single dumbest move we have made since 1945 was not welcoming Russia back into what used to be called the Concert of Powers after communism fell there.
And indeed, we went to war, unprovoked war, against Serbia, Russia's historic ally, just basically to stick it to the Russians.
Many Russians said to Paul Wyrick, because he spent a lot of time over there trying to teach the rudiments of democracy and free markets, your attack on Serbia convinced us that as far as America was concerned, the communists had been right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, they weren't right about their own economics, but they were right about the American empire.
That's what Chalmers Johnson said, too.
He said he was a conservative spear carrier for empire, teaching at USC through the whole Cold War.
And then when the Soviet Union fell apart and the American empire didn't, he said he went back and checked and realized that he'd been wrong all along.
And that really not that the Soviets were good or purely defensive or anything like that, but that America had been aggressive and had been using the Soviet Union as an excuse to build a world empire like the British before us.
That happened at a certain point.
But again, remember, we did have to take up the burden of protecting the world from communism from the end of World War Two up into the 1960s.
But at that point, things changed enough.
The Russo-Chinese split, of course, was a huge factor in this as well.
Well, I'm sure I'm oversimplifying Chalmers Johnson as well.
It was along those lines.
He revised his own opinion, looking back.
And understandably so.
I think what real conservatives all expected is when communism fell, we would return to our historic strategy, which was minding our own business, a defensive grand strategy, a small military focusing not on empire abroad, but on liberty at home.
And the problem is, again, we had created this vast Soviet industry, which we call the Defense Department, that has bought every member of Congress through what's called strategic contracting.
It doesn't matter party.
I mean, people think, well, the liberals in Congress are against the Defense Department.
No, they're not at all anymore.
Everybody has got their snout in that trough.
Everybody in Washington.
Strategic contracting.
It didn't happen.
And it's not going to happen until, thanks to the Fed, we have an economic collapse that leaves the Defense Department with more money than it could ever dream of.
The problem is, it will be worthless money.
It won't buy anything.
That's funny.
Strategic contracting sounds like the true definition of the word democracy to me, you know?
Yeah, in many ways.
I mean, I remember this was years ago when I was at Senate staff walking in on a class at the JFK Center down at Fort Bragg, which is where they train the Green Berets, the special forces.
And I found myself listening to a class taught by a captain for other captains on how to make your unit look good to get money out of Congress.
It was a formal class in institutional corruption.
Yeah, amazing.
All right, now, well, let's see.
I want to ask you a little bit about chasing Islamic militias around the world.
But first, I wanted to give you a moment to comment.
I think you brought this up before, but maybe you would want to elaborate a little bit about the effects, the cultural repercussions of some of these wars over the last hundred years that are doing so much to change the society that you, by definition, want to keep from changing, especially so rapidly.
And I thought, you know, particularly when you said that, or maybe it was something I read in here, it reminded me of my very first interview that I did when I started this show back in 2003.
It was of Alan Bach, the great Alan Bach from the Orange County Register and Antiwar.com.
And one of the things that he mentioned was that, you know, conservatives, they just bury the fact that they already even know this.
They can't ignore it, or they try so hard to ignore the fact that they know that war means broken families, broken, dishonest marriages and kids with step parents that abuse them and foster homes.
And it means, you know, people have they can pretend that if you're a military family, then the degree to which the American civic religion worships you is also the degree to which your life is perfect or something like that.
But it just isn't so.
And that all the people who consider themselves the most conservatives, it's they're the ones, you know, putting their kids in the army.
It's their families are the ones most disrupted by this kind of thing.
And which, you know, when family values is supposed to be the highest of conservative principles, right?
Right.
And think, for example, of the tens of thousands of families, because we have tens of thousands of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, whose lives have been turned upside down for good because their kid has come home wounded in a way that he's severely disabled for life.
We count the dead from these wars, but we forget about these guys who are far more numerous, in many cases, because of the IEDs with limbs blown off, brain damaged, blind.
Think what that does to a family when a 19-year-old kid comes home in that kind of condition.
It was just in the Cleveland paper here yesterday about one local football player whose brother's recovering from being shot 14 times in Afghanistan, 14 bullets in it.
But I'm looking also on a broader scale, two of the movements that have done our traditional culture here the most damage in the 20th century were both heavily spurred by the wars.
The first has to do with women's move out of the home and the family into the workplace.
19th century reformers, including 19th century feminists, had argued very strongly for the family wage, something conservatives now back, and again, the federal government has made illegal at the demand of today's feminists, which is where a male head of household gets paid more for the same work than a woman or child.
The purpose was to enable him alone to support a family so the wives and the kids didn't have to work in the mills, so that they could stay at home.
The Victorians realized that there's nothing more important for children growing up than to have their mother in the home.
The culture is transmitted primarily not by the schools, but within the family, and if the wife and, in many cases, the kids in the early 19th century are in the factories, that doesn't happen.
Interestingly, the Victorians, who are now derided, if you look at the Victorian period, and Gertrude Himmelfarb's the best historian on this, through that period, all the incidents we measure of social problems, abortion, divorce, infanticide, all of it, alcoholism, dropped steadily.
Through our time, they have all increased steadily.
Well, a good portion of that is because women aren't home with the kids anymore.
A huge part of that was the wars.
Suddenly, the men were drafted, the factories were expanding with war production, they needed labor, and we got Rosie the Riveter.
This was true in World War I as well as World War II.
It was a huge factor in the movement of women back into the workplace and out of the home.
Similarly, wartime demands for labor brought a great many Blacks up out of the traditional rural South and put them into the cities where their traditional rural culture collapsed.
This isn't because they're Black.
We saw the same thing in Britain when Britain industrialized in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, as the rural people poured into the cities and into the tenements.
You had cultural collapse.
The urban Black community now is in extremely bad shape from a moral and cultural standpoint.
I mean, the Black rate of violent crime is 12 times the White rate, and so many kids there don't even know who their father was.
A guy doing a television show here in Cleveland in the inner city recently told me, with a class of 30 students, they needed to get permission from a parent or guardian to be on television.
Only nine of those children could find a parent or guardian.
This is what happens when rural people are suddenly packed into the city.
This is also driven in many ways by the wartime demand for labor.
Just a couple of examples.
Think of Germany 1914 and Germany 1919.
They're two completely different countries.
Germany 1914 is very much like America 1914.
These are up-and-coming countries.
Everything there was a perfectly normal country.
Yes, it was a monarchy, but it had a parliament, and it was elected, and they had to get the budget to the parliament and so forth.
Press freedom, all of the rest of it, perfectly normal country.
By 1919, you've got Marxist coups going on.
You've got Freikorps riots.
The Weimar Republic is never able to get up off its knees, and everything's pointing toward you being taken over either by the radical right or the radical left.
The culture and the society were shattered by the experience.
Well, and of course, you could just pick your war we've been in since then and just look at, you know, Somalia was barely eking by an existence in the world.
Then we turn the whole place upside down, and now it's crawling with Islamic crazies doing suicide bombings.
Or even Iraq.
Iraq under Saddam was a brittle state, but it was a state.
We shattered the state by our invasion.
No one can now recreate it, and it's a fictional state.
I mean, it has a government, but there is no state.
Well, and this goes into the fourth generation warfare thing.
I'll sum it up maybe a little bit inaccurately, but just to make it fast, because I want you to talk about the actual wars that we're fighting now and chasing these groups around.
But I think the way you said it was that we're fighting French tactics in World War I is second generation warfare, and that's what we're using in Iraq, fighting Islamic militias that are centered around fourth generation warfare, which basically means they're fighting only for their beliefs, and they're willing to go, you know, to the ultimate end for their beliefs.
Is that basically right?
Basically.
In other words, our approach, our second generation approach to war fights by putting firepower on target.
But fourth generation forces aren't targetable because there's no distinction between civilian and military.
They don't wear uniforms.
They don't have tanks and fighter planes.
You ask in Iraq or Afghanistan, is this guy a fighter?
Is he a civilian?
And the answer is yes.
So the two are ships passing in the night.
More fundamentally, what we see all over the world is the state is losing the monopoly on war.
It established essentially with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
All over the world, state militaries, which were designed, trained, and equipped to fight other state militaries that look very much like themselves, are instead fighting non-state opponents who don't look at all like themselves.
And virtually everywhere the state is losing, including us.
And virtually everything we're buying with our trillion dollars a year for defense can go straight to the military museum because it's all either useless or counterproductive in this kind of war.
I mean, we say, why do we need the F-22 fighter plane at $350 million a pop for a fighter to shoot down Taliban flying carpets?
It's all irrelevant.
Even Bob Gates admitted that at one point.
Yeah, Gates was the best secretary we have had since I went to Washington in 1973.
Wow, well that's saying a lot.
I was going to joke that he said we need to focus more on the F-35 because at least you can shoot a ground target with one of those.
The F-22s are good for nothing.
Correct.
And the problem with shooting at ground targets in fourth generation war is every time you hit one, you recruit more enemy than you kill, so you win tactically but lose strategically.
Air power works against you strategically in this kind of war.
All the kinds of things we consider our assets, most of them, either they don't work or they work against us in this kind of war.
So the object, obviously, is to stay out of it, since if you go in, you're going to lose.
Essentially, after Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and Lebanon, what the Pentagon can say to the president is, sure, we'll go in again and give you another defeat.
How many do you want?
Well, but then again, I'm sorry, I can't help but speculate that there are some generals sitting around at the Pentagon saying, you know, Bill Lind is right.
Isn't it great?
We can fail forever, and we can just keep chasing our failure from Iraq to Syria and on into, we'll have a war for Kurdistan, and then we can go from Libya into Mali and from Mali down into Nigeria, and just think of all the people we can kill and all the money we can waste.
You're correct, but it's broader than the generals.
What does it tell you when you see us losing war after war and there is no demand anywhere in Washington, not just in the Pentagon, but in the executive branch, on Capitol Hill, in the press, anywhere for military reform?
I mean, traditionally, when countries have lost, you get some reforms coming out of that.
We've got some, at least a tenth of serious reforms that came out of the defeat in Vietnam.
Now there isn't the slightest peep about military reform anywhere in the city.
So long as the money keeps flowing, defeat is irrelevant.
Yep.
Well, that's unfortunately, I think, exactly where we are the day after election day, 2012.
You notice neither candidate's name even had to come up in this or either party, because it just doesn't mean a thing.
It's one party, and whichever one wins, you get more of the same.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time, Bill.
It's great to talk to you, as always.
My pleasure.
Everybody, that is William S. Lind, writing at the American Conservative in the American Conservative magazine, on your local bookstand, and at theamericanconservative.com.
Why conservatives hate war.
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