Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Andrew Bacevich, author of the new book, Twilight of the American Century.
Before that, America's war for the greater Middle East and the limits of power and Washington rules and the new American militarism and many other great books.
He writes regularly at TomDispatch.com as well as the American Conservative magazine.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Andrew?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know, I always really like it when you write stuff, your books and your great articles.
And so I'd like to start here with the one that you wrote for TomDispatch last week.
Our man in Riyadh, Abizaid of Arabia.
So this is John Abizaid, the former commander of Central Command.
And I guess that means four star general then, is now retired and in civilian life.
He is being nominated to be the next ambassador to Saudi Arabia, huh?
That's correct.
Very interesting.
And so I guess one of the most notable things about this is the way you write it is that John Abizaid is less dumb than most.
I'm thinking of his contemporaries like Petraeus, Odierno, Sanchez, Casey, who all seem to be just completely blundering incompetence.
But you say this guy actually took the time to read some books and learn some Arabic and a little bit more about his situation than some of these others.
And to his credit, is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think I call the other guys dumb, but Abizaid stands out from the other senior officers of his generation in that even before we plunged into Iraq, he had acquired some considerable expertise in the region.
He speaks Arabic.
He studied graduate school.
He spent time studying in Jordan.
So he has, at least for a military officer, some pretty impressive credentials as a Middle East hand, if we want to call it that.
But the real hook of the article was that I recalled that when he was the central command commander, meaning the big military kahuna, not long after the 2003 invasion, he had with considerable courage – this was at a time when everybody in Washington thought this whole thing was going to be a piece of cake – he had with considerable courage suggested that we were in for what he called a long war, the long war.
And indeed, it has turned out all these years later, it has turned out to be a long war.
Indeed, that phrase, the long war, is frequently used in military circles in place of, for example, the global war on terrorism.
And so I simply found it fascinating that the guy who invented the phrase the long war is now going to become the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, given the fact that it becomes increasingly clear that the genesis of our problem in the region, or at least one source of our problem in the region, is the conduct, the behavior of the country where he is now about to be posted.
There's a considerable irony in that, at least as far as I'm concerned.
And so although, by and large, ambassadors don't wield a heck of a lot of clout these days in terms of making policy, they all have to be confirmed by the Senate.
And I just was suggesting it would be very interesting if senators on the Foreign Relations Committee would use his confirmation hearings to ask him, in particular, a bunch of questions about what the heck this long war is about, where it's going, and in particular, what is the role that Saudi Arabia, the Saudi regime, the royal family, has played in this long war since its beginning.
Well, I'm sure they won't, because the first question would be about Saudi support for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II, where they fought against the U.S. side.
And then I guess the next question would be, how come America took their side after that, again, in Libya and especially in Syria, and even leading to the rise of the Islamic State?
No one in the Senate is going to ask those questions.
I don't even know if they understand their own situation well enough to form the questions correctly to him.
Because when you talk about the long war, that's the war against the bin Ladenites.
Well, what about all the wars for the bin Ladenites?
Yeah, well, I think you're right.
It's highly unlikely that anybody will ask any kind of probing questions.
And you may well be right that the members of the Foreign Relations Committee don't even know enough about what's going on to pose an intelligent question.
And in that sense, I suggest in the piece, this may well prove to be a missed opportunity.
And this long war that has become basically a never-ending war that really is a war, the purpose of which has been lost in the midst of time, is just going to continue to unfold while we worry about things that, in my judgment, probably aren't nearly as important as this strategic catastrophe that we're participating in.
And when we're talking about the long war, that is the war, as you put it in here, I guess, quoting him, is this is the war against the Salafists, which I wonder if you think that that's defining it even too broadly.
People say the Takfiris, but it seems – I just call them the bin Ladenites because it seems like there are a lot of people who have different forms of these Wahhabist religious identities that still have vastly different politics, whereas bin Ladenism is really a revolutionary political doctrine, right?
Those are the ones who keep blowing up our guys.
Well, I'm not sure I agree with that.
I guess the real point I would want the Foreign Relations Committee to explore would be who is the enemy?
How do we define the enemy?
Why are we fighting in this place, in that place, in this other place?
I mean, how at this point does Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, et cetera, fit together?
What is the big picture?
I think the honest answer to that question is that there is no big picture.
One thing we can say for George W. Bush after 9-11, he began this undertaking with what qualifies as a clear understanding.
He set out to transform much of the Islamic world.
He was going to liberate those who were oppressed.
He was going to spread democracy and women's rights.
I mean, I personally think that the entire enterprise was shot through with arrogance and hubris and was never going to work.
But at least he had some idea of what we were attempting to accomplish by undertaking all these military efforts.
I don't think there is any such understanding today.
I mean, I guess we're trying to prevent another 9-11.
It's not clear to me why we have to be in Afghanistan and Syria, et cetera, in order to do that.
But in terms of real identifiable, justifiable strategic purpose that has been lost along the way, and it just seems to me if anybody cared about that, the Abizaid hearings would be a good opportunity to explore that loss of strategic coherence.
Well, I would certainly drop justifiable from the descriptors.
But other than that, I think I can help you.
I think you already know.
You've written about this in your book, and maybe more than one of them.
I don't know if you refer to this article, but the famous Seymour Hersh article is the redirection from 2007.
And that is basically that they realized that they had really just fought the Iraqi civil war for the pro-Iran side.
And then to make up for that, they were going to tilt back toward the Saudi kings and back what they meant to do in the first place, was to make things easier for their allies over there, not worse.
And so now ever since then, they've been making up for it by taking the Saudi side.
And everywhere they do, of course, there's no Saudi army except for al-Qaeda.
And so where they take Saudi side, particularly in Syria and in Yemen, it means that we're bolstering forces of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and AQAP there.
And so it's not just that it's incoherent.
It's that what Bush did was a huge Wolfowitzian blunder, and they've been trying to make up for it ever since in ways that directly benefit the Salafist jihadists at the expense of Iran, even though it in fact ends up empowering Iran even more, as we've seen in Syria and in Yemen.
Yeah, you probably see a clearer line of logic than I do.
I tend to think that at this point, the accumulation of blunders, and there certainly has been a large number.
And frankly, the blunders didn't begin in 2001.
We had been blundering for a couple of days earlier with regard to our policy in the region.
But I think the accumulation of blunders has now become so thick that there is no longer any real logic.
Whoever is the president, surrounded by whatever mix of advisers, that group of so-called decision makers cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the extent of our failure.
And since they cannot acknowledge the extent of our failure, they become paralyzed into simply staying the course.
It's one of the striking things about the Trump presidency.
To say that I dislike Trump would be a considerable understatement, but recall that Trump said as a candidate, elect me and I'm out of Afghanistan.
All these wars are nonsense.
We're going to get out of there.
He became president.
We're not out of there.
The wars go on.
He's escalated.
I read the other day that I think we've dropped more bombs in the past year in Afghanistan than at any time since the invasion of 2001.
One would have to begin, for a change of course, a change of direction, one would have to begin by willing to say publicly, we really screwed up, that we have totally screwed this thing up.
And only by acknowledging that does it become possible to begin to think of a way out.
But very few people in Washington, whether the civilian leadership or the military leadership, is willing to make that admission that we screwed up, we failed, we have, if not militarily, we have politically been defeated in the sense that however we defined the goals back at the outset, those goals haven't been achieved and will not be achieved no matter how long we continue on the path that we're on.
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Well, and look at even the occasion for the discussion is John Abizaid, who, you know, was in charge.
Maybe he didn't get to call all of the shots or whatever it was at the time.
Blame Cheney or blame Casey or whoever else instead, I'm not sure.
But you might think that this guy, having been in charge during a major portion of Iraq War II, would have to get a real job at the grocery store or something now, rather than being even on a long list for possible ambassadors to Saudi Arabia.
Well, you know, that's not the way the system works.
I mean, once you are a member of the elite, it's like permanent irrevocable membership.
So you may screw up.
After you screw up, you go get yourself a fat position at the American Enterprise Institute or out in Stanford someplace.
Nobody ever from a position of real authority in our system, again, whether it's civilian or military, screws up and ends up washing dishes, you know, in a restaurant.
That's just not the way it works.
There ought to be some accountability in our system, but there is really next to no accountability in the way things work.
Well, you're certainly right that his confirmation hearing ought, in the whichever sense of the word you call it, to be interesting.
It probably will not be.
But as you say, here's a guy who knows enough that if they asked him the right questions, he at least should have something to say worth hearing and probably will be a lost opportunity.
Which brings us with the same discussion of the failed accountability here to David Brooks.
And I think, you know, I like the way you put it, New York Times and his weekly appearances on PBS.
It not just exudes respectability in his tone of voice and his mannerisms and everything.
As you say, he seems always reasoned and thoughtfully expressed.
And I would reckon to say that he has an incredible amount of influence, probably more than we even understand.
I'm thinking of, you know, regular people in my regular life who aren't very political people who think of him as the definition of reasonable.
And it certainly has a lot to do with the way he carries himself and, of course, the way he's presented as the voice of the center right who debates mildly with the center left on PBS every week and that kind of thing.
And yet, as you write here, this is a guy who when he's wrong, he's wrong about the very worst things and has this very same portrays this very same lack of accountability in his writing as well.
Well, it's true.
I mean, I was chiding him for a column in which he made a reference to our post 9-11 efforts to spread democracy.
And as he described it, they didn't work out.
And I remember when I read that phrase, I said myself, you've got to be kidding me.
Didn't work out?
They yielded a catastrophe that continues to unfold.
You know, trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of people killed.
It didn't work out.
Somehow it doesn't quite capture the extent of the of the American failure.
This is an enterprise that he himself was strongly in favor of after 9-11.
And frankly, that dishonesty stuck in my craw.
I mean, I'm not – I mean, I am the furthest thing from a fan of Max Boot, but I understand it.
I haven't read his new book, but I understand that at least Boot has the decency to say with regard to the Iraq War, boy, I was really, really, really wrong.
And again, I don't know what the rest of the book is about, but I do respect the fact that he apparently has acknowledged that he was really, really, really wrong.
Even if it doesn't sort of make him any less inclined to pontificate about any number of other issues.
Yeah, exactly.
He was really wrong about staying in Iraq the whole time, not just in 2002 and 2003 and starting the thing.
He was wrong about we have to escalate Afghanistan.
He was wrong about we got to save the people of Libya from Muammar Gaddafi.
He was wrong about we got to get rid of Bashar al-Assad.
He's been wrong about everything this whole time.
Let me know when he apologizes for that.
Well, but I mean, if he admits he's wrong with – even if he admits only that he is wrong for one thing, that puts him ahead of virtually all the other pundits.
That's true.
And I hadn't heard that, so that's actually good to hear that he took at least some responsibility for Iraq War II.
Check out his book.
I don't know if you want to buy it.
Right.
Yeah, I'll read other excerpts somewhere.
But now – and so you quote in here David Brooks, who absolutely, as far as I know, has never come anywhere near apologizing for his support, which I think was – I don't know, decisive, but it was certainly hugely influential at the time that his very – of course it goes without saying sort of way of saying things added really a lot of credibility to that.
In the same way that like Pollack and O'Hanlon writing as center-left CFR Democrats saying Bush is right, we have to do this really did help to solidify consensus in that way.
And then I love the way that you have it quoted here where he says, if conservatism is ever to recover, it has to find a moral purpose large enough to displace the lure of blood and soil nationalism.
It sounds like the next words out of his mouth are going to be war with Germany or something.
Like what project could we possibly embark on after Iraq didn't work out, as he notes, that could instill enough national greatness to make people love something other than who they are or whatever he's trying to say here.
It does make you a little bit nervous to imagine what that would be.
You know, I hear the Ayatollahs could use some regime changing incidentally.
Oh lordy.
Lordy no.
For some reason since 2003, they've had more power and influence in the Middle East than ever and somebody's got to do something about it.
No thanks.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So and then also this is, you know, as you're saying in this piece here that this is really illustrative too of the entire system, the way it works in the military, the way it works in the media, the way it works among all the consensus builders.
Here we're still talking about all the same people who pushed us into Iraq War II, in and out of government, in and out of intellectual public life on those questions.
It's the very same men.
Well, it's not just that, but it's also, I mean, increasingly I think trying to figure out why the anti-war or anti-interventionist right, which exists, which has a certain amount of energy, why it exerts so little influence.
And why it's so marginalized.
I mean, I think the anti-interventionist right is about the equivalent of Code Pink on the left.
And all these good-hearted women who are constantly disrupting congressional hearings, demanding an end to the war economy and the Capitol Hill police dragging them out.
And, you know, I don't know what they do with them, but they get them out of the way.
I think that as much as I admire and write for the American conservative as one of the main outlets of the anti-interventionist right, it's hard for me to see that our efforts are yielding much in terms of moving the needle in terms of the debate.
I guess there's lots of answers to that rhetorical question that I just posed, many of which might go to things like the military-industrial complex.
But it's frustrating, I think.
Yeah, it really is.
It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, too, because it seems like – I think we probably held out hope that with a new Republican administration, the left anti-war movement would sort of come back, figure out a way to come slinking back after their silence during the Obama years.
But instead, they've been motivated to attack Trump from the right as a traitor to foreign interests.
And so that has really helped to – I don't know that that's fair.
Well, I don't mean the real leftists, but the kind of – the liberals and progressives who were useful to the anti-war movement in, say, the mid-Bush years, they're really nowhere to be found.
OK.
Fair enough, I think.
I mean, you know what I mean about the Russia angle that – where if what's really wrong with Trump is that he's an agent of a foreign power, then it's hard to accuse him of being the instrument of American imperialism because it doesn't really jive well with the more important narrative about Putin and that kind of thing.
That's a good point.
But as far as the energy but going nowhere on the right, I feel your same frustration there too.
It seems like it would go a lot further by now, but I don't know.
If Trump would prioritize it, the right would rally to him, but he's not, and so they're not either.
No, nor – I mean the people who work for Trump, Pompeo, Bolton, those people are never going to be allies of those who favor a more restrained approach to foreign policy.
Right.
Yeah, the closest we got was Bannon, and he still wouldn't prioritize it compared to immigration or trade or any of that, so the narrative was lost.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know you have to go, Andrew.
Thank you so much for your time on the show again.
Oh, thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate it.
Bye.
Okay, that's Andrew Bacevich, guys, at the American Conservative Magazine, When David Brooks' Dreams Don't Work Out, and at TomDispatch.com, Our Man in Riyadh, about John Abizaid, and check out his brand new book, Twilight of the American Century.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
