11/20/15 – David Bromwich – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, all, Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
And you probably prefer it tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darin's Coffee, a company at DarinsCoffee.com.
Darin Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darin's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darin gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade, with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
DarinsCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and get free shipping.
DarinsCoffee.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I've noticed, as I'm getting older and older, that at least the weekends come quicker.
Right?
Trying to look for a silver lining there.
It's my beard turns gray.
All right, hey, check it out, man.
I got a chance to talk with David Bromwich again.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
Good, good to be with you.
Good, good, very happy to talk with you again.
So, yeah, you wrote a thing about Hillary Clinton's Libya, is what it's called there, and that's what it's all about, the Democratic debate.
And when Libya came up, I'm not sure exactly how it came up, but when it came up, Hillary gave a rousing defense of the Libya war that I actually laughed out loud reading your take on it, but anyway, I'll let you take it from here.
Well, she used all sorts of euphemism saying that Gaddafi was deposed, saying when, in fact, the Islamists, the militias went after him, they captured him, they abused him, tortured him, and killed him.
That's not what normally is in people's mind when they hear the word deposed.
She said that he had threatened genocide.
That suggests that there is one race of Libyans that he meant to slaughter to the last man, woman, and child, but what he said, if the report can be trusted, and that's only a report, was that he would hunt them down like rats in Benghazi, that is, the rebels.
Well, for a military leader to say he's going to kill all the rebels in one opposition group is a very bad thing to say, undoubtedly, but he didn't even say he was going to kill non-soldiers, let alone say it was genocide.
So, I mean, there were a series of exaggerations like that, and she presented it as a triumphant instance of American prudence and the wise use of military force.
She had said in a previous Democratic primary debate that Libya was an ideal example of smart power.
I don't think the events themselves or the consequences bear out that description, but the other part of my short column was just saying how surprising it was that Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley had no answer for this.
Sanders talked about Iraq as a disaster, quite rightly, and he was against it, as Hillary Clinton was not, and talked about the American soldiers suffering from PTSD, and Martin O'Malley said, with extraordinary vagueness, that Libya was a mess.
But, you know, that's what you say when you have an idea that most people know there's something wrong or something unhappy about the vibes of a word, but you don't know anything about it.
So, the Republicans are spouting all sorts of belligerent absurdity about going to war against, let's see, who do most of the Republican primary candidates want to go to war against?
They want us now to be fighting simultaneously against the Palestinians, Assad's government in Syria, Iran, Russia, and ISIS.
I may have missed one or two.
So that's the Republican consensus.
And the Democratic consensus in the primaries seems to be, let's say as little about it as possible, but Hillary Clinton's nudging over towards the Republican side of things, saying big-time military force by the U.S. is in order now.
And the others, and I think particularly Sanders is the more plausible of the other two candidates, just don't care to talk about foreign policy much.
So they refrain from saying idiotic things, but they will not say very much.
Yeah.
Well, and I think part of it is, as you write in the article too, they don't know anything about it.
These are the guys running for President of the United States.
I mean, I think, David, you and I both could be forgiven if we figured that they would be at least interested in this kind of stuff if they're putting themselves up for President of the United States.
But no, they don't even read.
They don't even read about the wars going on.
Well, it takes a little reading, not between the lines, but a little extra credit homework to get the facts straight about both Syria and Libya.
I think the main suppliers of news, both cable news, the networks, and the major newspapers, have been very weak, not to say misleading, in their reporting, both on Syria and Libya.
But it is possible to know a lot, and even this President has spoken some of the truth when he said that it was always a fantasy that the so-called moderate rebels, a group of farmers, pharmacists, et cetera, could make any dent in the fight against Assad, or for that matter now against ISIS.
It's almost a completely fantasized entity.
These moderate rebels in Syria, so that our whole policy in Syria has been both, I don't know what to say, chimerical and self-contradictory, because Obama still, in some formal sense, has pledged to overthrow Assad and to defeat ISIS.
It may be that the perception of that was one of the reasons behind the ousting of Chuck Hagel.
If you read stories about that in the week or so before and the week after, one of the things they kept saying was, Hagel was bewildered by our Syria policy, and he didn't know how to pursue it or how to defend it until he had a better idea of what the policy was.
Well, it sounds like Chuck Hagel was on the right track, and that's why he couldn't be kept on anymore.
But anyway, you can get the right information if you want to.
Seymour Hersh wrote an excellent article in April 2014.
Well, hell, Robert Perry writes it every day.
And Robert is quite right.
On Syria, as on Ukraine, Robert Perry's Consortium News provides lots of relevant facts and some of the research is original.
But that's the gap, I think, between sources, available sources, like what you can find aggregated on antiwar.com and Robert Perry and Jim Loeb's site, what's it called?
Loeb Blog.
Yeah, and others, which are reliable and conscientious in their reporting, but the very different balance of information you get in a paper like the New York Times where bits of the truth peek through in, you know, paragraph 17 of a 20-paragraph story.
But you have to already know what the truth is really to notice those things.
Yeah, you have to read, as a friend of mine likes to say, you have to read the Times against the Times.
You have to read their previous stories and know just how they're telling you more than they pretend.
So I don't think it's easy to get a very clear idea of what happened in Libya or Syria, but it is possible.
And if anyone should be responsible for doing such things, it's an intelligent and honest candidate like Bernie Sanders.
I'll leave O'Malley out of it from now on, because I don't think he represents much of an opportunity.
But I think this is a Democratic Party syndrome, that it is the party of domestic policy, of the modified welfare state, of the old liberalism minus much international consciousness, whereas the Republican Party is the party of more wars, anti-immigration, jail, et cetera.
And it's terrible to say, but that Republican recipe makes people memorize slogans very easily.
You get a candidate like Rubio, who is so fluent, so fast, and so full of assurance about all the things he wants to do, all the guns he wants to shoot off in the world.
And he does have some names, some dates, and think he should talk about foreign policy.
He's dangerous, shallow, and misjudged to an extraordinary degree.
But he is talking about foreign policy, and Americans are worried about that at a time after the Paris catastrophe, and just looking around and seeing that American power isn't doing what we think it should.
So I think a candidate who is going to be aspiring to the presidency ought to have an idea of foreign policy.
And this didn't come out in the debate, except in Hillary Clinton's very misleading terms.
Yeah.
Well, and Sanders and Rand are the same on either side there, where all this is just the biggest blown opportunity for them, not necessarily to get ahead in winning, but certainly to tell the truth to the people.
And that's all they have to do is tell the simple truth to show just how absurd the current policy is, and the one supported by the right-wing hawks as well, the Hillary Obama policy.
Just even for their own interests, they should be doing it, but they won't.
I think that's right.
And Rand Paul seemed on that track at the beginning of his campaign, but he got sidetracked.
One second there.
One second, David.
We'll be right back, y'all, with David Bromwich.
Hey, y'all, guess what?
You can now order transcripts of any interview I've done for the incredibly reasonable price of two and a half bucks each.
Listen, finding a good transcriptionist is near impossible, but I've got one now.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash transcripts, enter the name and date of the interview you want written up, click the PayPal button, and I'll have it in your email in 72 hours max.
You don't need a PayPal account to do this.
Man, I'm really going to have to learn how to talk more good.
That's scotthorton.org slash transcripts.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there.scotthorton.liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Bromwich.
He writes for the Huffington Post.
He teaches literature at Yale.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's Selected Writings on Empire, Liberty, and Reform.
All right, so we're talking about the Democrats and in the debate how Hillary Clinton made up a bunch of nonsense, basically, about the 2011 war in Libya and its aftermath, and the other two up there, O'Malley and, obviously, importantly, Sanders, let her get away with it, mostly probably because they never bothered to learn very much about it, to know enough about it to even take advantage of the situation.
Just think how well Bernie Sanders could have mocked Hillary Clinton.
Oh, it was all justified and would have gone swimmingly if only, huh?
Well, let me tell you about Libya, all right?
But he didn't come anywhere near doing something like that, and you've got to question why.
It would be advantage Sanders because that Libya war is an absolute catastrophe and, as you pointed out, was based on falsehoods, no different than the weapons of mass destruction from Iraq War II.
No, no different.
I agree, and I think that Libya was Barack Obama's little Iraq, and the catastrophic effects were smaller, but they were potent, and we haven't seen all of them yet.
I wanted to add to where we left off before the break something about Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders and the missed chances that they both seem to embody.
I think one has to put it down to a kind of timidity, though neither of them seems the most timid of personalities, that Rand Paul, for example, went with his party in turning against the Iran deal that the president made, the most clearest ray of light there has been in the Obama years, and Rand Paul, I think, just didn't want to go that strong against the current, and Bernie Sanders had a previous missed chance in the last debate where, concerning the personal emails of Hillary Clinton, he said, oh, everybody's tired of that, which is to say we won't talk about that, but one of the things that have come out of those emails is that Hillary Clinton was using sources disputed by and looked on very skeptically by Admiral Mullen in the Pentagon, and that Army intelligence thought that her sources on Libya were poor, and that the stories of imminent slaughter in Benghazi were extremely unlikely.
So she, going on the advice of people like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sidney Blumenthal, and to some extent Susan Rice and Samantha Power, other so-called humanitarian interventionists, Hillary went all out to convince the president against the advice of the Secretary of Defense and against Obama's initial apparent inclination.
That intervention in Libya was a good idea.
I suppose one of the motives behind it was a supposition that America should be seen to be doing something constructive in the Arab Spring.
There were high hopes for that then.
The Muslim Brotherhood was getting stronger, and they might be elected, as indeed they were in the November-December 2011 elections.
So if the United States had some sort of counterweight, some sort of presence in North Africa, that's making a good statement about our concern for the Arab Spring.
And the same misguided logic, I suppose, was behind trying to find, vet, and insert into the Syrian civil war a force that could represent our values.
Both of these were just deeply deluded ventures, not based on any ascertained fact.
And Hillary Clinton was the ringleader of that tendency within the Obama administration, just as much as the Project for a New American Century lobbyists and propagandists were the leaders of it in the Bush and Cheney administrations.
So she bears considerable blame for what's happening now in Syria with the refugee population all over North Africa and the Middle East.
And it needs to be laid at her door, as well as that of her predecessors, Bush, Cheney, and the others.
Yeah, and it's really too bad Sanders and Rand both, because I think neither of us could overstate the opportunity that they have here.
And, of course, from my angle as a Ron worshipper, I hold a grudge, especially against Rand, because his mission here that he apparently never understood was not to become more popular by selling out and pandering and becoming mediocre and running as Jeb Bush because everybody loves Jeb Bush.
His mandate was to continue to sell his father's libertarianism to more and more people from his bigger and better bully pulpit in the U.S. Senate, and yes, even possibly a presidential campaign where he could be changing the world.
And again, look how easy it is, audience, to hear when you hear David Bromwich say, hey, here are some facts about Libya.
It's the world's greatest facepalm, especially after Iraq War II.
You know, do the same damn thing again in Libya the way they've done.
And Rand and Sanders both could be absolutely humiliating Hillary Clinton over this right now, and instead they let it skate.
Well, I agree with your contrast, the contrast that you just drew between Ron Paul and Rand Paul, but I'm afraid the difference is ambition, and ambition is a very corrupting thing.
Ron Paul had a particular principle, and there was a kind of truth he wanted to tell, and it was the truth about the horrible misguidedness of our wars and of turning a republic into an empire, and he has kept telling that truth.
Rand Paul seemed on the way to be a candidate who would be doing that when he made his criticisms of the warrantless mass surveillance of the NSA, and when he did his filibuster on drone strikes.
There were early and interesting demonstrations like this, but ever since he's become a presidential candidate whole hog, that has faded, and he's become less and less distinguishable from the others except for certain eccentricities.
In the case of Sanders, you're dealing with a more considerable and tested and honorable political figure.
I mean, you can't, he's been driving in Vermont for a couple of trips recently, and you can't talk to anybody in Vermont, whether they knew him in Burlington or as a member of Congress or a senator, who's ever had any contact with Sanders who doesn't respect him hugely.
He is that rare thing, a civic-minded, conscientious politician, but he is a left-wing social democrat in his political orientation, and he doesn't concern himself with foreign policy.
So I give him more credit than Rand Paul for honesty, but the net result is very similar, that we don't get criticism of the mendacity at the very top, and the bloody wars it's getting us into.
Yeah, no, I'm not so sure I buy that.
I mean, you may know a lot more about the guy than me, but he just seems like a Barack Obama or a Rand Paul to me, Bernie Sanders.
He's horrible at least some of the time on Israel-Palestine.
He voted to fund the Iraq War over and over again, even though he voted against it, which, you know, a lot of Democrats voted against it.
That doesn't make him that special to vote against a real war, too.
I'm sorry to say that seems to be the case with every politician of national rank who has ever been involved in arguing about a war.
I mean, Abraham Lincoln made a great speech against the Mexican War, but he did not fail to vote appropriations for it.
Well, and on the Audit the Fed thing, you know, Ron had the bill in the House, and Bernie had the bill in the Senate to audit the Fed, and then at the last minute Bernie changed his and, you know, took all the, you know, really audit who's getting the secret bailout money part out of the damn thing and gave them the watered-down bill that they didn't really object to.
And he just seems like, and, you know, I've seen him the way he works very hard to support the F-35.
I agree.
They're temporizing in that, but I think of a small-time sort.
Anyway, you're holding up a higher standard, so I stand back and applaud.
Well, and the F-35 thing, that's the one that really does it, where here's a guy who should be on full jihad against the F-35 as the symbol for all things suicidal about American empire, this piece of crap plane that costs so much, more than any weapon system in world history here, and hey, as long as he can bring home some of that bacon for Vermont, fine.
So, you know what I mean?
Like, he's to me a lot more like Hillary or Obama than he is a Ron Paul, you know, genuine sort of character.
I take the point.
All right, well, too bad.
We have more to argue about here.
This is the problem about the ideology of social democracy.
We could go into the problem about all-out libertarianism, too.
One root problem of which, for me, is that it doesn't deal with the reality of mass society.
It's very good in a small town.
But, you know, it's true that if a bill or a proposal promises to bring home jobs, it's very hard for a social democrat to vote against it.
That is, you know, again, one of the problems about union attitudes towards environmental protection and global warming.
I mean, the unions are very bad when what's up for questioning is the possibility of jobs in the Arctic.
Well, if it's jobs for drilling in the Arctic, the unions will support it, even though they know better.
Well, you know, I mean, I'm not a leftist, but sometimes I try to pretend to be, from that point of view, just for a minute to look at it.
It seems like it could be consistent to be absolutely for private sector unions, but absolutely against public sector ones, whether it's police unions or any of the others.
Because, after all, these people have authority over us and kind of under the pretended sort of solution where they're our servants and they operate according to the law.
But, I mean, come on, they don't really have the right to those government jobs when that's up to the public to decide, you know, in a way that it seems to me you could make a different argument.
And I'm not the best at it, obviously, but the fact that...
Well, but you can cite cases of people who are consistent closer to what you're asking, somebody like Dennis Kucinich.
But then, even then, you've got the private shipyards and the private Lockheed and the, you know, pseudo-private corporations that are really part of the fascist imperial combine, the military-industrial complex that, you know, makes all the questions fuzzy.
You should add information and security to military and industrial.
Well, and for that matter, yeah, academic and media and scientific and everything.
Oh, no, you're putting me on the floor.
Don't make it so hopeless.
Hey, all we've got to do is tell the truth, Dave.
Hey, listen, you do a great job of that.
I really appreciate you coming back on my show.
Okay, good talking to you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
That's the great David Bromwich, everybody.
He's at the Huffington Post.
This one is Hillary Clinton's Libya, and really, all of his stuff is great.
You ought to go back through there and read.
Dave Bromwich teaches literature at Yale.
He edits Edmund Burke for a career.
Okay, this is a guy you need to read.
We'll be right back.
Hey, Al, Scott Horton here for NPV Engineering.
This isn't for all of you, but for high-end contractors specializing in industrial construction and end-users who own and operate industrial equipment.
NPV offers licensed professional consulting on chemical and mechanical engineering for your projects.
Tanks, pressure vessels, piping, heat exchangers, HVAC equipment, chemical reactors for oil companies or manufacturing facilities, as well as project management support and troubleshooting for those implementing designs.
NPV will get your industrial project up and running.
Head over to NPVEngineering.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented LibertyStickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still, if you're driving around, and you don't want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
LibertyStickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quotes, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.