01/23/17 – Doug Bandow on ending the decades-long, counterproductive US sanctions on Sudan – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our good friend Doug Bandow.
He's from the Cato Institute, of course.
Used to write for a time at antiwar.com.
And he has a regular column going at Forbes Magazine, forbes.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you, sir?
Happy to be on.
Very happy to have you here.
And hey, what an important article.
You know, you pull far more than your weight in our great libertarian movement that we have here.
Because not only are you as libertarian as can be on all these foreign policies, you really have traveled the world and can really speak from a very first-person point of view as a real expert on regions and conflicts and nations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and all over the place.
It's just really great.
And so now here you are schooling us all about Sudan and, of course, American policy toward it.
The article is Time to Lift Sanctions Against Sudan to Battle Terrorism and Improve Human Rights.
Please do tell.
Well, I appreciate what you said there.
I mean, my view is it's really important to actually go to places, talk to people, get a sense for them.
And Sudan is a country we've had various sanctions on for a quarter century with various objectives.
We want to democratize them and all sorts of other things.
At the end of the day, you can't really change their political system that way.
The good news is they've evolved on a lot of issues.
The nasty conflicts we were most concerned about have pretty much burned themselves out.
There's still some fighting going on, but that's the way it is in a lot of other countries.
And to my mind, you realize if things don't work, you change them.
And what we found is we don't have anything more we can threaten them with or offer them.
I mean, if you simply isolate them, what can you do?
And there are a lot of people there who want change.
And I think this is a great opportunity, where what you do is you kind of bring them back towards the West by indicating there's a market out there, there are opportunities.
You get people in there.
And there are a lot of people there who want change as well.
Well, you know, I wonder, what's the point of the sanctions anyway?
I mean, other than the career people at Treasury who need some sanctions to apply to somebody, is it supposed to, like in the days of the Bill Clinton blockade against Iraq, is the stated purpose to make the civilian population so miserable that they'll overthrow the government for us?
Or it's just to punish the government for engaging in activities and alliances maybe that the American system doesn't approve of?
Or do they even say what the purpose is supposed to be?
Well, I think the theoretical purpose, at least, was that you want to punish the government.
You want to weaken it.
You don't want it to have money.
You know, you think if you punish the population that somehow the leaders are going to be upset.
I mean, you go there.
Almost everyone I talked to said, you know, there's poor people who suffer.
Everybody understands that if you have money, you go to Dubai for medical treatment.
You know, I mean, there are plenty of luxury cars there.
I mean, they get them and they buy them in third countries.
You know, we've turned it into this weird cash society.
Even the embassies have to rely on cash.
Well, even the U.S. Treasury Department admits that means it's harder for them to fight money laundering because everything's in cash.
So there are all these perverse consequences.
But Sudan's been targeted by activists who, I mean, they are right in the sense that, you know, look, Sudan, like many other places, it's a dictatorship.
It's not very nice.
But yeah, there's a long list there.
I mean, we ally ourselves with Saudi Arabia.
They're far worse.
Turkey's turning into one.
They're a NATO ally.
I mean, the idea that the way you solve a problem of repression of poor people in foreign countries is to victimize them yourself, you know, always has struck me as being a pretty stupid approach.
You know, I recall old arguments from the 1980s.
I mean, I was young, but I was interested in this kind of stuff.
I was really a child, but I was interested in this kind of stuff.
And so the argument was then that, you know, we shouldn't engage with the Soviet Union at all.
We should isolate them.
We should boycott them.
And, you know, we'll bankrupt them as fast as possible and force their disillusion.
And which I guess we got the disillusion without the first part.
But then, so that was kind of one model.
It was, in fact, kind of the more right-wing nationalist way of looking at it.
And then the other way was Nixon goes to China and said, you know what, whether the regime falls or not, let's just change them from communists into capitalists.
Let's just open them up and split them off from the Russians, of course, in the Cold War, you know, strategy and all that.
But the idea being that the way to stop them from being Maoist communists all starving to death is to open up relations with them.
And hope that they'll follow our example and they'll see that to get rich is glorious and everything will be better.
And then I had thought that that argument, that model at least, of seeing things had mostly won out.
But it seems like we really treat Sudan under that kind of right-wing nationalist approach of just keep boycotting them and they'll go away or turn into something we want them to turn into.
Well, there was a lot of celebrity involvement, say 20 years ago.
I mean, what we found is once things get in place, it's hard to get rid of them.
I mean, the irony was, you know, they were along with Cuba, which is kind of next door, Iran and North Korea, which are building nuclear weapons or people claim they were doing so.
You know, it's on that list.
And you look at that and you think, well, that doesn't really fit with any of the others.
But once you're on the list, it's really hard to get you off.
I mean, they're on the state terrorism list.
Everyone admits that, in fact, they are helpful on counterterrorism.
They don't like ISIS any more than we do.
Yeah, but they're on the state sponsor terrorism list.
Well, it's stupid, but it turns out that list no longer has anything to do with terrorism.
I mean, it's simply the way you punish people if you don't like them.
So we've got this kind of moral sense for foreign policy.
You're right, I mean, against the Soviet Union, well, they're evil, and of course, yeah, they are.
But the question then is, are you achieving your end?
And it's kind of, I think in many ways, I'd point them in the same direction as Cuba.
50 years later, the policy has failed, but kind of Republican hawks still want to carry on the policy because they seem convinced that just another year, it'll all collapse.
And I've kind of heard that with Sudan.
If we were just tougher, you know, just tougher with them.
Well, I mean, you know, there's no banking, there's no financial stuff, there's no trade.
I mean, how much tougher can you get?
Yeah, well, and then ultimately it was Perestroika that destroyed the Soviet Union, right?
It wasn't the fact that we had isolated them away from the rest of the international system.
It was the fact that they couldn't help but begin to open up, but then once they started, they couldn't stop it.
That's right, I mean, our best hope, you know, for Sudan is internal.
I mean, the point is, politicians never dismantle themselves because another set of politicians want them to do so.
You know, the thing that's most important to the government of Sudan is its self-preservation.
So the idea they're going to give that up because we want them to, I think it's just one of those fantasies.
If we've lived here long enough, you know, then we should see that it's not going to work.
I mean, if you try this for a quarter century and you haven't seemed to have got anywhere, then that should tell you that maybe that approach isn't a very good one.
Well, doesn't it seem like the real American policy was they wanted to break off the south of Sudan.
And wasn't that a big CIA plot, the independence of the southern part of that country?
I don't know if it's CIA, I mean, again, activists, I mean, there are a lot of folks in America who are absolutely convinced this is a wonderful thing.
You know, it was a very ugly kind of civil war, but it was very complex.
It was presented as kind of Muslim versus Christian, but in fact, it's far more tribal.
And so, but there was a lot of support in the US and Sudan, you know, in 2011 said, okay, fine, we'll let them go.
Took 70% of the oil.
We promised them then actually we're going to relax sanctions.
We didn't, even after they agreed to kind of chop up their country.
And the tragedy is South Sudan, perhaps the world's poorest country is now involved in its own civil war.
And people are talking about genocide there.
Well, this was the American project and the Western projects.
And to me, that should suggest at least a little humility.
You know, you come up with a new country and for, you know, it's like two years later, literally it's two years later, it falls into civil war and, you know, people are being slaughtered.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
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Well, and America is presumably backing one side over the other in the South too then, right?
Actually, no, there are supporters on both sides.
Because there's no obvious, the difference there is not ideological, kind of the free world versus communist or something.
No, I mean it's simply two different leaders and two kind of different tribal groupings.
So that's what makes it really awful.
Both of them have some supporters here in the U.S.
It's pretty hard to come up with a reason to support either one.
Well, and they portray it as an ethnic thing too, where the further south you go, the darker the skin and so somehow there's a big division there.
But isn't this really just about preventing China from having independent access to oil resources around the world in the event of a war with them?
Well, of course, one of the ironic impacts of the U.S. sanctions is it encourages the Chinese to come in.
So we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I mean, they're in there now.
I mean, in the capital of Khartoum, the hotel I stayed at at the buffet had Chinese food.
And there were Chinese staying at the hotel.
So the point is, China gets an extra access.
If we isolate countries, well, guess what?
I had Sudanese tell me, we'd prefer to deal with you.
I mean, older folks that have gone to American universities.
But they said, we don't have any choice.
The Chinese show up with money.
The Russians show up with money.
We're gonna work with them.
So we're really bringing this on ourselves.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember.
It must have been Robert Dreyfuss' book, Devil's Game, where he talks about how Nasser in Egypt was like, hey, we wanna be friends with the Americans.
You guys wanna help us with our dam and this and that.
And they basically drove him off and into the arms of the Reds.
No, that's right.
It really is a stupid policy.
If you want Sudan to kind of be with America, then what you wanna do is trade with them, get their people here to go to college, have folks go there.
You don't tell them, we're gonna ruin your economy, and then be surprised at the fact they go somewhere else.
Yeah, all right, now, but so, you know, the other side of the argument, it's always the worse hawks have the most morality to argue.
Forget national interests and this and that.
The, you know, junta there in Khartoum, well, they're a bunch of bastards, Doug, and we can't just reward that kind of thing in the 21st century and this and that.
And, you know, let's say some of them really mean it.
What about that?
Well, my reaction is, you know, foreign policy doesn't have to be truly kind of consistent on every point.
I mean, that'll never happen in the real world.
But you at least have to have some defensible reason for making distinctions.
So then you've got to explain why, you know, is Sudan is so evil, but, oh, we love the Saudis, as they're busy killing Yemenis with our support.
You know, why we love the Turks who are busy killing Kurds with our support.
You know, why we love, you know, Egypt, which is out there, you know, I mean, far more repressive than under the previous regime.
You know, persecution there of Coptic Christians.
You know, you look at these regimes and you say, explain to me why.
We not only don't sanction, but in fact, we have wonderful relations with and give them money.
Compare them to Sudan.
I mean, it's pretty hard to make that argument.
So I just say, you know, look, come on, guys.
I mean, come up with at least some consistency here.
Sudanese government is not one I like, but there are a lot of those around the world, so would we like to sanction, I don't know, you know, a third of the governments around the world, do we want?
I mean, it just doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the real dilemmas now, too, in the way these arguments, everything is so binary, where either we have to support these dictatorships or we have to support the terrorists who oppose them.
And so those are our choices, like in Syria right now.
Are we abandoning now finally the Nusra Front?
Looks like Obama bombed them on his last day in office.
I don't know what that was supposed to be about, but anyway, so we're now gonna stab them in the back, but we're not just gonna leave Syria alone.
We have to lie with Russia, I guess, and Iran now against our friends, the terrorists that our government has helped built up there, and it's the same kind of thing here, where if we're not supporting some force against al-Bashir, then that means we're taking him under our wing and bringing him in from the cold, like Gaddafi, right?
He's either our enemy or he's our sock puppet, then he's our enemy again, this kind of thing.
But it seems like it's basically as much trouble to support these secular dictators or whatever kind of Islamists, whatever sort of dictators, as it is to support rebels against them.
Either way, we're creating enemies for, our government's creating enemies for the American people.
Yeah, I mean, the only sensible policy in many of these cases is simply don't take a position.
You know, the notion that we have to be for or against dictators, say Egypt.
You know, there are reasons to deal with Egypt.
Why do we have to give them money?
I mean, there's a good reason not to try to oust al-Sisi.
I don't know what the alternative is, but why on earth do you wanna support a guy like that?
Well, Sudan is a very good example.
I think one can encourage democracy in a broad sense.
Certainly would help if the U.S. did it better itself and didn't kind of torture people and a whole sort of other things.
It's kind of hard to have that moral witness when you're busy violating those norms.
But I mean, what you can do is certainly, Americans go over their university education.
I mean, there are a lot of people, there are older people who like America.
I mean, they talk about the university they went to studying in America.
Virtually no one, say, under 40 has that experience.
And that's one of the dumbest things we can do.
They're not experiencing what I think is the best of America, living here, meeting Americans, as opposed to what all they do is experience the U.S. government punishing them, essentially, because it's mad at their government.
It's not something which they understand.
It's certainly not a policy they support.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny.
They always get all that mythology wrong about Qutb and even about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when they were in America.
They were around Americans and freedom and women in miniskirts and stuff.
And that's when they decided they hated America and to go to jihad.
But actually, you find statements of both of those particular people talking about how, yeah, the American people, they're all right and everything, but still, that's besides the point.
We gotta talk about American foreign policy and what it's doing and why we must fight it.
And that is the reality of the situation.
The part about living in Colorado, well, I don't know, that ain't so bad.
That's right.
No, I think that a lot of these folks, if the U.S. government wasn't bothering them, they wouldn't have any problem with the U.S. government.
I mean, the problem is, for so many people around the world, the face of America they see is a bomb or it's intervention, it's something, in a way that what they should see is trade.
They should see somebody traveling.
They should see a student.
They should see a university.
It would be a very different view.
Well, you know, I was saddened to see your quote of Leslie Lefkow in here from Human Rights Watch and I always liked her.
She's really good on Somalia and American intervention there, but it is hit or miss.
But it seemed like the statement that you quoted of her saying, well, you know, Al-Bashir, nothing's changed.
He's still the same horrible person as before.
Why should any sanctions be lifted in any way here?
It is just kind of a big exercise in question-begging, right?
Why should there be sanctions on him in the first place?
Well, and look, you're saying that sanctions are going to improve the situation and they haven't improved the situation.
That would suggest they aren't working.
So, I mean, I find statements like that very strange.
We put them on, we're gonna change this around 20 years later.
Well, you can't take them off, nothing's changed.
Well, weren't you the guys telling me it would change things?
I mean, it hasn't worked.
Right.
Well, I don't know.
I'm with you.
I think it's pretty easy to see another way where, you know, not to be too utopian about it, but peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations and entangling alliances with none.
It seems like you could do that.
Have a Ron Paulian foreign policy where like, hey, you know, whatever's going on bad in Khartoum, by all means, do a 60 Minutes about it or whatever, but the government isn't doing anything.
It's not their job.
Their job is protecting the lives and the property of the people of this country, full stop.
Yep, yep, that's it.
All right, well, listen, I appreciate all the work you do.
I know you're in a big hurry today, so go and get some more done.
Thanks, Scott.
I will do so.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
Wish you well.
That is the great Doug Bandow from Cato and at Forbes.
You gotta read all he writes at Cato and at Forbes Magazine here.
This one, Forbes.com, time to lift sanctions against Sudan to battle terrorism and improve human rights.
So this will be the spotlight on Antiwar.com tomorrow.
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