11/18/15 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, Sheldon, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is our friend Sheldon Richman from SheldonRichman.com.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Good to be with you again.
Good.
Yeah.
It's been so long since we've spoken.
Hey, you wrote this article.
It's called How to Respond to the Paris Attacks.
So, how should we respond to the Paris Attacks?
I guess I could have called it How Not to Respond.
Yeah, well, okay.
What should we not do?
You want to start there?
That's fine, too.
Well, we shouldn't, well, maybe it would be quicker to say how we should.
Get the hell out of the Middle East.
Yeah, but, but, but.
Respect civil liberties at home.
Next question.
Yeah.
Okay.
But, but, but.
Come on.
Bad guys.
Terror.
Fear.
Strike.
Kill civilians.
Well, look, as you have pointed out in recent days and in recent years, actually not so recent years anymore, this has been going on quite a long time, and as your guests have been pointing out over the last few days especially, but again, routinely, this is not, what happened in Paris, you know, was not a bolt out of the blue.
It's always looked at that way.
Robert Fisk had a very good piece the other day in The Independent that got picked up in a few places, I guess I found it at Counterpunch, where he says, you know, whenever something like, oh, you know, Paris happens, or some big spectacular act of terrorism in the West doesn't happen when it's, you know, something in Beirut, or even when a Russian airliner is down, because I guess the Russians are part of the other also, but any time it's one of us, one of our cities that is a victim, the memory banks get wiped clean.
So we forget anything that happened, you know, the day before, not to mention weeks and years before or even a century before.
So at least as far as the US media is concerned, there's very little discussion of how the US-led NATO coalition, which of course includes France, has been pounding areas in Iraq and Syria for quite a while now, what, a year and a half.
France has specifically moved into Syria with air power since September.
And so this is, you know, again, this is not a bolt out of the blue.
Terrorism, you know, my next article is probably going to be, are terrorists madmen?
And by that, I mean, are terrorists irrational?
And by that, I mean, are terrorists, is their conduct unrelated to the means ends framework that we understand as human action?
And the answer is clearly no.
Yeah, but you're just saying surrender to the bad guys.
Well, you want to cut to the chase, I see.
No, I don't want to surrender to anybody.
I want us to defend what liberties we have left and expand them rather than let them shrink anymore.
We're on a path to shrinking our liberties because war, you know, it's a cliche now, but it's true.
I mean, that's why cliches tend to be true because they get repeated so often because they tend to have some truth value.
War is the health of the state.
If we intensify the war in Syria and Iraq and the Middle East generally, our liberties will suffer.
And one way they will suffer is that this will provoke new terrorist attacks, which against which are, you know, when they're against civilians by almost by definition, I'd say.
And I don't justify them.
I don't think it's immoral to to go and kill people who are going about their business, walking down the street or sitting in a concert or cafe.
That's immoral.
You know that we shouldn't have to even have to say that.
But of course, we do have to say it.
But nevertheless, it's an inevitable, as inevitable as things can be in human affairs, consequence of the West, the U.S. making war on Arab and Muslim populations in the Middle East.
And when that inevitable response occurs, the governments will crack down and it will seem plausible to most people that it cracked down, that they crack down because they're going to say, please help us do something, do something, which is no coincidence, because I think the planners understand that that will be a response.
Now, I'm not saying that's the reason they make war in the Middle East, so that there'd be terrorism so that they can expand government.
I don't know that that's how they think about it, but that is certainly a consequence.
We know this from the great history written by Robert Higgs, and it's not surrender at all.
All right.
Well, so what about this now?
I think probably you could go back three years, four years, four and a half years, maybe even certainly in the last three or four, you could find interviews of the two of us talking about the serious situation and talking about how with this unbelievable policy of our government being willing to, you know, and along with NATO and the GCC, willing to back the American people's enemies as long as they're attacking Assad in the form of the Al-Nusra Front, whatever.
I bet you we could find in those interviews where we predicted these kind of consequences.
Thousands, I know that I've been saying on the show, I assume it must have been part of the discussions with you over this topic over the last few years too, that there are thousands of Europeans going to Syria to fight against Assad and at least scores, if not hundreds of Americans.
And we know that our government's attitude is, oh, they're the good guys fighting against Assad.
So they're not even trying to really keep track of who these guys might be.
And or if they are, they're doing a half-assed job of it.
And so at the time that bin Laden was killed, you know, Al-Qaeda, core Al-Qaeda basically had been reduced to almost nothing.
But that was four years ago.
And Obama might as well have been the cartoon Islamic terrorist out of the right-wing ridiculous theories about him, to the degree to which he has built up the Al-Qaeda forces across North Africa and the Middle East.
And of course, it's because he thinks he's smart and getting American goals accomplished and whatever.
Not because he's a Muslim terrorist.
That was a joke.
Point being, he's done more for Al-Qaeda, even than George W. Bush has done, had done for Al-Qaeda.
And so maybe, Sheldon, the question now is, what about now?
Maybe what you're saying made sense a few years ago.
But now Obama has been so successful at building Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State into such giant movements with tens of thousands of members that could be turned against the West and have motive to try to keep attacking us, to draw us further in.
What are we supposed to do about those guys?
Well, don't give them what they ask for.
I listened to your interview with Robert Pape the other day, and he's very good, but I like you disagree with what he's recommending, which is that we sort of continue on doing what we're doing.
He doesn't want some big all-out war, because that's what ISIS apparently would like, to have the US poor troops in there, which would help radicalize more Sunnis.
So he wants the sort of middle position that Obama's taking.
In fact, he praised Obama.
But I asked the same question you asked him.
Even if in some very abstract way that was a good idea, what makes you think, what makes anyone think that the guys in charge, Obama all the way down, know what the hell they're doing or will carry it out?
I mean, that's the Nirvana fallacy we talk about in economics, right, where you propose some ideal solution and say, hey, this ideal solution is better than any real-world solution you can come up with.
Yeah, great, except you're never going to get the ideal solution.
So we have to choose among realistic solutions, things that are actually on the menu.
That's not on the menu.
So that's the answer.
I don't believe that if we were to declare a Ron Pollyan, not a Rand Pollyan, but a Ron Pollyan foreign policy today and withdrew all troops and all special ops and diplomats and everything else from the Middle East, I don't believe that the toothpaste would thereby return to the tube.
It's out.
There are people who have scores to settle.
So I don't want to make this, I don't make this naive promise that if we just do what I'm recommending, all will be well.
And we're an open society, fairly open.
And so therefore, they're always going to be soft targets.
But I believe it will cut down the chances, minimize the chances, and make things safer than they would be by any other path.
All right, hold it right there.
Let's take this break.
We'll be right back.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
Talking with the great Sheldon Richman.
Donate 100 bucks to the show, I'll send you one of his books.
Your money or your life.
We're talking about what to do, what the government should or should not do about the threat of the Islamic State in our post-Paris attack era that we now live in.
And yeah, Sheldon, you got cut off by the break there and everything, so I want to let you go ahead and say, you were saying that you're not saying that if America adopts a non-interventionist foreign policy that the terrorism problem will just dry up and go away.
What exactly is it you're saying then again?
Well, not overnight it won't, because look, the U.S. has been at this a long time, a very long time.
Pre-911.
Look, pre-Gulf War I, therefore pre-the 90s when Clinton was starving Iraqi kids and bombing in the north and the south because of the no-fly zones, and not permitting their infrastructure to get rebuilt so the people could have clean water and whatnot, it goes way back.
Support for Israel goes very far back and that means oppression of the Palestinians and refusal to either keep hands off or lean on Israel to deal fairly with the victims of occupation.
So you have scores, people will want to settle scores, and I don't believe everyone's going to say, everybody over there who wishes ill to Americans is going to say, okay, they've adopted Ron Paul's foreign policy program and they're pulling out, so let's just forget about that now.
I'm sure a few people might want to still do something.
So I'm not making any kind of promise, I think it would be naive to just say everything will be fine if we make this declaration and actually begin to implement it.
But I think we would – first of all, we won't stimulate new animosity by killing kids and bombing hospitals and wiping out wedding parties and this kind of stuff that tends to make people pretty pissed off.
If this was happening in the United States, I think we'd see a lot of anger at whoever was doing this.
Well, it happens over there almost routinely, and I hesitate to even put the word almost in there, innocents are getting killed all the time, and we don't pay any attention to it.
I don't mean just the general hoi polloi.
It's not our – it's like it's not our business, especially if it's being done by drone where Americans are not at risk because they're sitting in Nevada, right, under some mountain or something, playing a video game essentially.
But people are dying over there and living with the fear, even if they're not dying or getting injured, they live every day with the fear that they could be next.
That's going to make people mad.
So if we stop that, at least we stop producing new people with grievances, and we can begin to reverse it.
I would do things – I agree with what Justin Raimondo wrote this week and also what Andrew Abasevich has written.
We need to turn our attention to our society, keeping ourselves safe, not by violating civil liberties of course, but that's where the concentration should be, and I'd go a step further and – not that I think this is going to get adopted anytime soon.
We need to begin to privatize and decentralize security.
Property owners have the greatest stake in keeping their assets, their factories, their movie theaters, et cetera, their airlines, their airports safe, and I would move security from a bumbling centralized bureaucracy, namely the US government or even the state governments, I would move that down toward the property owners and let them network with each other and have entrepreneurship come to the service of keeping the American society safe.
And otherwise, leave the Middle East alone.
Well, and people got to understand too that what you're talking about is privatization, not quote-unquote privatization, which is spelled entirely different, it has ironic quotes around it, and that's the one where government hires a private company to carry out the government business.
That's not what you're saying, you're talking about getting government out of it and letting the owners themselves have to do the hiring.
I want competitive privatization, not just government contracting out for monopolies.
It should be like one with an S and one with a Z or some kind of thing so that people can tell the difference between that, because even libertarians get caught up not being able to differentiate, oh, privately run prison, that sounds efficient, and miss the point about all the horrible, perverse incentives that come baked into a fascist arrangement like that.
I guess we need to coin a word like competitivization.
Yeah, okay, there you go.
We don't want just private management.
You see everybody, this guy, Richmond, is a genius.
I like hanging around with you, man, you're smart.
All right, so, but now there's the political problem of, we see, you know, Obama pulled the last tens of thousands of troops out of Iraq on Bush's timescale because the Iraqis kicked us out, the faction that we helped win the war there kicked us out.
And it doesn't matter that he escalated the entire surge war in Afghanistan and then the entire drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the regime change in Libya, the support for the al-Qaeda guys in Syria, just like the Republican Party wanted him to do.
None of that counts.
Obama has shown weakness.
Obama is a peacenik, Obama is Ron Paul, and that's why we have an Islamic State, because Obama reduced America's military footprint in the Middle East the slightest bit, and then look, a bad thing happened.
Lesson, can never leave anywhere again.
And then we see that playing out.
Obama announced in October on the 15th that, oh yeah, by the way, we're staying in Afghanistan forever, because I'll be damned if I'm going to let them say that about Afghanistan too.
So the 10,000 troops are staying indefinitely, and special forces too, etc.
So how are we ever supposed to, I mean, I guess if it was Ron Paul, he would say, I don't give a damn about your argument.
I'm right, and I'm still doing it anyway.
But no Democrat is ever going to get us out of there, as long as the right is going to argue that every bad thing happens whenever they withdraw the slightest bit, is, you know, got the perverse cause-effect relationship there.
So what are we going to do?
Well, you know, even if at first glance you like that strategy, it quickly, you quickly realize it's a losing, it's a loser, because you'd have to then be everywhere, because the, you know, the idea is, well, you can't give them, let them have safe harbor in Afghanistan.
Well, fine.
So they move somewhere else.
Now you've got to be there.
Then they move somewhere else.
Then they've got to be there.
Before you know it, you need a military, and this would be unbelievably expensive, if there was no other argument against it, this should be decisive.
We'd have to occupy the world, literally, because they're going to be wherever you're not, so you can't, there can't be a place where you're not.
Therefore, we'll have to have a huge military.
I don't know, are there enough people of military age, even if you had conscription?
I don't think there are.
Is there enough money?
Are you going to, you know, are the people who want this going to want to cut everything else out of the budget?
I mean, I'm all for cutting the budget to zero, but they want to seem to put it all into the military.
This is something that Rand Paul hit the ruby on him, in just terms of spending a trillion dollars.
So it's obviously not feasible.
You know, the people you're aiming against are a moving target.
If there can't be one place, there'll be another place.
And we've seen this, right?
Bush went into Afghanistan on the grounds that they had given safe harbor, the Taliban had given safe harbor to Al-Qaeda, so we had to go.
Great.
So they moved and spread and metastasized and mutated, and they did all those things.
And now they're everywhere, including Yemen, including Africa.
History has already told us that's a bad plan.
So what else do we need?
You know, the other thing is, I thought there was a great piece in the op-ed page of the New York Times back on November 16th by Olivier Roy, called The Attacks in Paris Reveal the Strategic Limits of ISIS.
People should look this up.
But one of the things she, I guess it's a woman, points out in this is that all the people who say they're fighting ISIS, almost all of them have different agendas.
Right?
You talk about the confused agenda of the US.
Is it against ISIS or is it against Assad and Iran?
You know, some, depends on where you're standing, right?
If you're on one side of the old Sykes-Picot line, we're against ISIS.
If you're on the other side of the old Sykes-Picot line, we seem to be against Assad, which benefits ISIS.
But the Turks aren't on the same page.
They hate the Kurds.
And they're supposedly our best partner.
They hate the Kurds more than they hate ISIS.
The Saudis don't seem to be against radical Islamists or jihadis or whatever term we want to use.
They want to get Assad.
The Shiites don't want to help the Sunnis, especially in Iraq.
And so nobody's even on the same page.
How does that add up to a coherent strategy?
And that's not going to change anytime soon.
So even on these sort of more practical considerations.
Well, yeah, I mean, if they were going to, if they were going to do it, really make killing ISIS their priority, they'd have to completely abandon their allies, Israel, Turkey, Saudi, and the Gulf states, and realign with Russia and the Iranian crescent.
And say, like, that's it.
All right, we're Hezbollah's air force killing these guys.
When ISIS was going against Al-Nura...
Not that I'm recommending that.
I'm just saying, that would at least be coherent, right?
Right.
Patrick Colbert has pointed out that when ISIS was going to conquer Palmyra, the U.S. wouldn't bomb because that would have been helping Assad's forces.
Right.
So apparently they held back.
So nobody even knows what side anybody's on, including the United States.
Well, and people are saying, well, maybe there will be a change now after Paris, but there wouldn't a change after Mosul?
And we used to, we were joking about this right in 2014.
And like, okay, now that they've declared a caliphate, now they're going to have to stop the war against Assad and back in the jihadists against Assad and go ahead and slowly, somehow, figure out how to turn the policy around.
But no, it's been a year and a half and they're still stuck on, Assad's got to go sooner or later.
Right.
Sooner, sooner or later.
No, before peace breaks out, he's got to go still.
I'm no fan of Assad.
He's a bastard.
But I will add, he's not as much of a bastard as some people say.
I agree with Jonathan Marshall, my old friend Jonathan Marshall, that he did show signs of wanting to keep the civil war from exploding by sitting down and talking to people.
I think that gets totally overlooked and forgotten by the American media, but certainly by the US government.
So he's terrible, but that doesn't mean he's as bad as everybody says.
Same thing with Putin.
I don't want to be on Assad, Putin's and Iran's side.
I don't want to be on the Shiite side.
I don't want to be on any side.
Anything we do is going to make enemies and that will come home to haunt us.
I want to liquidate the empire.
That's my position, liquidate the empire.
Well, and again, that last statement, that can be from a libertarian, Richmondian point of view or even just an American imperial point of view.
That it would make sense, it wouldn't be as contradictory and insane as the current policy, but it would still be counterproductive and bad policy even to align in a consistent and coherent way with Russia, Iran, Assad and Hezbollah against the Islamic State.
Because as you're saying, all these consequences then will just flow from that.
And it makes all their propaganda true that look, it's the whole Roman Empire and the Eastern Russian Empire too allied with the Israeli Jews and the Iranian Shia Safavids all against us.
And, you know, I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that?
You know what I mean?
I'm sure that'll work out.
Once we have the combination between the Americans, the Russians, the Iranians and the Kurds occupying Mosul, Fallujah and Ramadi and the Islamic State temporarily beat down after that, peace is going to break out and it'll be great.
Sure.
And the boys will be home by Christmas.
Nobody wants to admit that the exceptional nation can't do anything constructive in this situation.
We have to face that.
If that bruises our national ego, so be it.
It doesn't bruise my ego.
I'm happy to embrace that idea.
The exceptional nation, however you want to define that, is powerless to do anything constructive.
It's not powerless to do destructive things.
Oh, it's perfectly capable of doing destructive things.
Right.
But it can't do anything constructive.
Everybody's got their own agenda, as I said, its own agenda.
Israel, I left Israel out of that, but you quickly mentioned it, thank you.
Israel, as we know, from their neocon brain trust back in the 90s, writing papers about how destabilization is a good thing.
They didn't want the secular pan-Arab powers like Nasser in power.
They were secular, they were putting down the Muslim Brotherhood and people worse than that, but no, they couldn't have them because that was a threat to Israel's autonomy.
So they had to knock those out and we've been doing that.
The U.S. has been knocking out secular Arab regimes.
They did it in Iraq, they did it in Libya, they're in the process of trying to do it in Syria, without realizing that this is going to create opportunities for the people that we now worry about in Paris and Washington and everywhere else.
It's insane, and I use that word not in any technical sense, it's just insane to think the U.S. can go in there and do anything constructive.
We've got to wake up to the fact, they cannot do anything constructive.
It's going to mess things up more.
And it's hard to believe that things could get worse, but believe me, things could get worse.
Hey, let me ask you this real quick now.
Are you worried at all about domestic backlash and bigotry against Muslims and that this is going to have very much of an effect?
I am somewhat worried about that.
I mean, I still sort of have confidence that Muslim Americans who are here and have been here for a long time probably won't, I mean, there's been some bad stuff since 9-11.
I don't think that will get worse.
I hope I'm not wrong about that.
I'm concerned with the reaction to the refugee question.
What is it, 30 governors, 35 governors, Rand Paul, Cruz, Cruz wanting a religious test, and I'm very happy to see people at Reason and other places start talking about what people thought of Jewish refugees in the 30s.
Oh yeah, you saw that Jesse Walker piece?
Yeah.
It's excellent.
Yes, fear that Jewish refugees were Nazi spies.
I am concerned about that.
I hope that doesn't get anywhere, and I'm going to be writing about that.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, that was a great point, man.
Good old Jesse Walker, dude.
He's the best guy that got at Reason, for sure.
Anyway, listen, I'm late.
I gotta go.
Thanks very much for staying on and doing the show with me.
Alright, so that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's at SheldonRichman.com LibertyStickers.com Everyone else's stickers suck.
Scott Horton.
Liberty.me Be free.
Liberty.me Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com