01/27/16 – Daniel Larison – The Scott Horton Show

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This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
That's Wesley Clark talking about the days right after September 11th, what he found out about the neocons' grand plans there in the Pentagon.
But here's Barack Obama.
I've ordered military action in seven countries.
I have ordered tens of thousands of young Americans into combat.
And the seven countries, I'm pretty sure they align exactly with the very same ones on Wesley Clark's list there.
Anyway, introducing Daniel Larrison, the great Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine.
He's got a recent one, The War on ISIS Expands to Libya.
Welcome back to the show, Daniel.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
And I do want to talk all about politics.
And, of course, politics, especially presidential politics, is all wrapped up in foreign policy anyway.
So it's all kind of one big messy subject.
But you do a lot of great writing about especially the Republican side of the race here at the American Conservative magazine.
I'll recommend your writing to everyone on that.
But on Libya, well, I guess I have to say, I don't have to, but I will say that I predicted this.
And like always, I hate being right because all of my predictions are of doom.
And then they always come true.
So what I had said back in 2011 was if they do this, if they even start with the no fly zone, you can see the logical chain of dominoes that falls down.
America owns the center part of North Africa forever.
You know, as soon as the first suicide bombing happens, you know, next thing you know, America's got to train up their army and do some purple fingered elections and try to undo the fact that they turned the place into jihadistan.
And so I guess I'm grateful that it's taken them years.
It's taken them five years to get to phase two of trying to fix the mess that they created back in 2011.
But it looks like here we go.
Am I right?
Well, they're certainly looking to ramp up the war on ISIS.
And they're they're already talking about using airstrikes in the country to try to remedy some of the mess that they created with the war in Libya in 2011.
Absolutely.
I mean, do they have any kind of viable force on the ground to back?
I mean.
Well, the country is split between warring militias, rival militia groups, as it has been ever since the regime was overthrown.
And so I suppose the.
Nominally, the US doing this to, quote unquote, support the recognized Libyan government.
But they have virtually no control over the armed factions that are in their country, which has been one of the reasons why the country is so lawless and out of control.
Well, it seems like the news is that the American backed or the more American friendly government there is still out of our control and has rejected the UN plan for a unity government and some kind of sharing deal.
I guess it's possible that's because they know that we got their back.
Why negotiate when they can keep fighting, huh?
Well, and they don't they don't need to accept the unity government when they they already have de facto control.
Well, I mean, but they only have de facto control of half the country, I guess, or maybe not even that.
Right.
Right.
But they don't need to make any deals or compromises with people on the other side of this war.
Yeah.
Well, and so and you also bring up here and it is an important point, the authority of the president to do anything.
It's funny.
It sounds just like Henry Hyde said to Ron Paul back in 2002.
By this time, it certainly sounds archaic and completely moot.
Whether Congress passes a declaration of war or or even any kind of authorization for whatever the president wants to do, huh?
Certainly, well, the president operates on the assumption that he doesn't need it and he'll distort and twist whatever existing authorization there are to pretend that he's already got the authority that he needs.
And clearly, there's there are very few people in Congress.
There are there are a handful, but there are very few that are going to call him on it or even try to challenge that.
And so we are in this limbo where he can start and expand his own war without any real input or debate in Congress.
All right.
Well, then.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
There's nothing that Congress is going to be able to do about it.
Yeah.
Well, now, I'm sorry.
I know you're familiar with this.
It's worth confronting, I guess.
There's a very common understanding on the right that the problem here is that Obama, if he's not a secret commie Muslim traitor, he's at least an ineffectual liberal wimp.
And what we need is for Donald Rumsfeld to get in there and go and kick some ass and he will show them Libyans what's up or replace Trump with your favorite GOP candidate there.
And so what do you think of that?
I mean, after all, you got to admit that the worst collection of jihadists in Libya are nothing compared to our Marine Corps, right?
Well, the funny thing about the people that are complaining about Obama's handling of Libya is that they're not really willing to own up to the fact that they are implicitly calling for sending American soldiers there to occupy the country.
They keep trying to hide behind and say, oh, well, someone else will actually put the people on the ground to stabilize the country.
So they're trying to sound as if they're in favor of a more aggressive policy, but they don't want to own the costs of it.
And so you won't actually get very many of them to admit that that's what they're they're actually arguing for.
Yeah, it's interesting about that.
And, of course, you know, this is, I guess, the same in any presidential political season.
There's never any good follow up questions about any of this stuff.
So if there's, you know, a great Libya exception to a presidential candidate statement, you know, without Michael Hastings there, there's nobody there to say, yeah, well, but what about this?
And what about that?
So it just kind of goes unremarked.
They get to just skate on with the most kind of bland sort of sloganeering rather than any real explanation of what it is that they mean.
And you see that in the Republican debate, but you also see it in the Democratic side when Clinton can get away with saying that the Libyan water was smart power at its best.
And no one really challenges her on that because nobody's prepared to challenge her.
They haven't even really given it much thought.
Yeah, you know, it's really too bad.
And this won't be a personal attack, just a political one.
It's really too bad that Rand Paul has not made, you know, proper hay out of this.
He was good on Libya in 2011, good on Syria, too.
And he does talk about it from time to time, but he could be ruthlessly slamming these guys and and, you know, mocking everybody left and right for their contradictory positions on Middle Eastern foreign policy.
I mean, the contradictions are all over the place.
He could really be making great hay of, I mean, after all, Hillary backed out Qaeda in Libya.
Let's fight about that.
What an accusation.
Let's squabble about it.
And then he's got the PDF files to prove it's all right there.
You know, he has done a little bit of that in the past.
He has linked Libya and Clinton on that issue.
At some extent, Cruz has been trying to steal his thunder on that by making similar arguments.
But he certainly could be doing more of it.
And I think he would get more attention if he were doing more of it.
But unfortunately, that's not the way he's been going lately.
Yeah, it seems to me, you know, it would all be good politics for him to to stake out those Ron Paul in positions.
But anyway, and then, yeah, you're right, I guess, you know, you could say the same for Trump, too, right?
That he and Cruz are staking out the position that, you know, they're nationalist right wing tough guys who will smash the enemy ISIS or whatever.
But at the same time, they kind of talk about, you know, even Sarah Palin.
And then I assume they discuss this.
I don't know.
Sarah Palin talked like this in her endorsement of Trump that enough of these no win wars and participating in civil wars.
And it's a crass right wing thing to say, let Allah sort them out and whatever.
But she's saying, but out at this point, pretty good for the right.
But now, of course, the music's playing.
We've got to go to break.
But I'm going to ask Daniel Larrison a question based on all of that blabbing right after this.
Check him out at the American conservative dot com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with Daniel Larrison from the American Conservative magazine about all his great coverage of the wars and the politics.
And the politics about the wars.
And so I was trying to work up to a form of a question there about Cruz and Trump, both.
And Trump with Palin's help there a little bit, too.
Staking a position that's very, you know, nationalist and hawkish and yet very distinct from the neoconservative doctrine.
And I'm interested in your analysis of what all that means, Daniel.
Sure.
Well, what all of them seem to be doing is to emphasize that the U.S. should only go to war to protect American interests.
And those interests are pretty narrowly defined as security interests.
And they're considered in terms of opposing terrorist groups or hostile states, I suppose, also.
And their emphasis on the national interest over and above anything else means that they're not a very good fit for all of these people who want to talk about global leadership or global responsibilities.
The usual tropes of U.S. leadership where we have to get involved in all of these conflicts in order to maintain our status as the hegemon.
So they are clearly dissenting from that part of interventionist foreign policy.
They're not against getting into foreign wars, but they are very much against prolonged nation-building occupations of the kind that we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so I think they'd be more inclined, if they are going to the war, they'd be more inclined to put the top of the government and then walk away from it, or maybe just destroy the army in the field and then walk away from that.
So it's not – certainly from the point of view of people that are interested in restraint and peace, it's not ideal, but it is somewhat of an improvement over these sort of open-ended, multi-decade wars that we've been seeing this century.
Now, you didn't write about this that I know of, but you may have seen this really long, in-depth piece, I think in Politico magazine, or maybe it was just plain old Politico, about how, oh no, Trump is – he might seem like he's making this all up off the cuff, but check out 25 years of foreign policy statements.
He's Robert Taft, right-wing isolationist, and he has proven over all this time that he absolutely opposes everything about the American empire, as I would call it, but the benevolent global hegemony, I guess, from the point of view of the writer of the article, that he's against all the trade deals.
He's against – he absolutely resents all of our allies and sees them as sucking off of us, and I guess he doesn't really get into the United Nations itself, but basically he's against what this guy calls the entire international liberal order that the U.S. has constructed post-war, and he's a threat to every last bit of it.
Do you buy that?
Well, not quite.
I mean, there are some elements of truth to that, but it's giving Trump too much credit for having a coherent worldview on the one hand, and it's also trying to shoehorn him into a tradition that I don't think he really belongs to.
So, for instance, when he's talking about allies that sort of freeload off of us and take us for granted and accept that we're going to defend them without doing much for themselves, what Trump's really articulating there is he's just enlanced at not getting something out of the relationship.
It seems to me that the one thing that is consistent about Trump is that he thinks that our foreign policy should get us tangible benefits, and so whenever he sees anything, whether it's the Iraq war or the alliance with Japan or allies in Eastern Europe, if that's not actually giving us some kind of tangible return that he can point to or hold in his hand, then he thinks it's not worth doing.
I don't think that's the same as any sort of coherent or principled objection to entangling alliances or to unnecessary wars.
It seems to me he'd be perfectly happy with these arrangements if the allies chipped in a bit more for their own defense.
So I don't think he's anything like a Taftian or a non-interventionist type by instinct, and I read that – I think it was Thomas Wright who wrote that – I read that entire article as an elaborate way of trying to push Trump into the isolationist column as a way of making him seem more frightening to a lot of foreign policy people.
And I don't think it would hold up very well.
Yeah, it's funny because you would think the major effect of that would be to make peace-knit conservatives like yourself seem like you must be buffoons like him or something.
But no, everybody loves Trump.
If anything, this attack on Trump will end up helping the American conservative magazine somehow.
It seems to be the way all the magnetic poles are bouncing off each other in this election season anyway.
Which brings me to a question that seems – it seems like there's a lot of angst about this from the neocons and other establishment Republican types about, as one wag put it on Twitter, who should they choose, the guy that they fear or the guy that they hate?
And that's Trump and Cruz.
But I wonder, what is it about Cruz that they hate so much?
Because to me, he seems like every bit the rhino of the rest of these guys.
He just wears a better populist costume than they do.
But he's married to Goldman Sachs, for Christ's sake.
Sure.
And one, I think they are starting to – there are attempts to try to reconcile him with more of the neoconservatives in the party.
There was an article today, I think in BuzzFeed, talking about how there are some back channels between the Cruz campaign and some of these folks to try to repair some of the rifts that have opened up during the campaign, as they realize now that Cruz is probably their best bet.
And so I think with Cruz, one of the things that really bugged them about him is that they see him as being too close to Rand Paul on foreign policy.
And anybody who's even getting near Paul is therefore suspect in their eyes.
So that's really what it is about him, huh?
Because it's kind of been a mystery to me, honestly, what it is that they hate so much.
That's one part of it.
And I think another part of it really is personal dislike of his style or the way that he interacts with other people and the way that he will have a tendency to denounce them as sellouts, which they don't – of course, they don't like to hear.
And so I think it's a mixture of ideological anxieties about where Cruz actually comes down on some of these things.
And it's also, on a personal level, just a strong dislike for the guy.
Well, I can definitely empathize with the second part there.
I guess I just figured – I didn't really imagine that he refuses to even be – try to be friends with any of the other Senate Republicans or that kind of thing in such a self-destructive kind of way there, but apparently so.
Right, and the other thing that has really set them off is that he has dared to use the name neocon in his criticism of them, which in their eyes is a forbidden term.
You're not supposed to even say that.
And so if he uses it, then he's automatically in their – on their list of suspects.
Yeah, I saw where they really overreacted to that, I thought, where he just used it like hawk.
He didn't say like, let me tell you all about Bill Kristol and Richard Perl or – you know what I mean?
It was just – Right.
You know, and they – yeah, they completely flipped out on that.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry we're out of time because I love talking with you, but thanks very much for coming back on the show, Daniel.
Thanks, Scott.
Look forward to it.
All right, Shaw.
And yeah, we will do that again very soon.
Check out Daniel Harrison at TheAmericanConservative.com.
He's got a great blog there keeping up with all the politics and the wars for you.
We'll be right back.
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