01/29/16 – Stephen Zunes – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And next up on the show today is our friend Stephen Zunis.
And this is funny.
I just realized I'd lost the link.
So I hit search site on antiwar.com for Zunis and Hillary, and I got 2,930 results.
Haha.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
Pretty good, thanks.
Yeah, the first few here are Hillary on Iraq, Hillary's Iraq lies, Hillary's nightmare, Hillary a proven warmonger, Hillary's illiberal belligerence, the troubling implication of Hillary, the five lamest excuses for Hillary Clinton's vote to invade Iraq.
This is the one I was looking for.
That's my latest one, yeah.
You must be some kind of right-wing Donald Trump-loving extremist to attack Hillary Clinton like this, huh, Stephen?
It's funny.
I'm actually a registered Democrat.
I think her overdue for female president, and I think she'd be less bad than virtually all the Republican contenders.
But having said all that, I do think it would be very dangerous, frankly, to have her as president.
First and foremost, I think it's illustrated by her vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and it's been interesting to hear a lot of otherwise liberal on foreign policy people whose issue by issue would be closer to Sanders or O'Malley or Rand Paul, for that matter, on foreign policy issues, um, bend over backwards to try to rationalize and justify her votes to authorize the war.
Yeah, it really is sad and amazing.
And, you know, the biggest thing, of course, is just the attempt to ignore it.
It's the same thing with Obama's foreign policy this whole time, is, you know, the entire partisan dynamic has really been working against us, since the right doesn't want to give him up.
As you know, and I've been quite critical of many aspects of Obama's foreign policy, and we've talked about it on this show a number of times before.
Sure.
But, you know, Hillary has been criticizing Obama from a more hawkish position.
You know, under Obama, we have bombed seven countries in the greater Middle East, and she says we need to reassert ourselves militarily in the region.
She's been criticizing Obama for not being tough enough.
And so that kind of gives you an idea of what we can expect in a Hillary Clinton administration.
Yeah.
Well, now, I was actually pretty surprised when she attacked Sanders for being weak on Iran in January of 2016.
Right, you know, what, four or five days after Implementation Day.
And not only all the liberals celebrating what the one or the second good thing that Obama had ever done was getting this Iran deal done.
They were in the middle of defending it from the right.
And then Sanders, he didn't say like, yes, let's invite the Ayatollah to dinner.
He said, no, we should not open an embassy there tomorrow.
But yeah, should we tend toward normalizing relations?
I think that's reasonable or something like that.
And she went right after him.
And I guess I don't know if there was a poll number drop correlation to go along with that, but that seemed to me to be really lousy politics for a Democratic primary.
I think she's having a risk of attacking him the way she's doing.
It's going to sort of expose to a lot of potential supporters where she's really coming from.
I mean, Iran, you know, Iran is a horrible, oppressive, bureaucratic government.
But the Obama Republic has been in existence for nearly 40 years now.
And they are, whether you like it or not, a major international player.
They're a middle power.
And just recognizing that reality seems to be pretty reasonable.
But, you know, she's just kind of, you know, jumping.
And so she's fighting, you know, whatever she can, you know, to fire at him.
And of course, it's important to remember that she supported the Kyle Lieberman amendment on Iran, which many people, and she was the senator, many people interpreted as a call for war against that country.
And, you know, she's been really, you know, even though she kind of reluctantly went around supporting the Iran deal, she's been bending over backwards to try to, you know, push her kind of hawkish line.
And I just saw that incident where they had a bunch of State Department, Defense Department officials talk about how Sanders is weak on defense.
We need some experience by Hillary Clinton.
They criticized Sanders' call for cutting military spending and the like.
And it ends up over half of the people who signed that letter have ties to military contractors.
Yeah.
It's just I can I can understand her trying to cover her right flank in a general election.
But I mean, this is just, you know, presidential politics, not even 101.
This is you can't even get into the door to room, you know, to not only room 101.
That's different.
You can't get into politics 101 without understanding you run to the left in the primary and to the center in the general.
If you're a Democrat, you run to the right in the primary to the center in the general.
If you're a Republican, that's just how it goes.
You know, I mean, for her to attack from the right, never even mind what's right and wrong or what's true.
It just seems like really like completely tone deaf kind of politics on her part.
But anyway, so let's get back to 2002, because I think this is a very important point that you're making here.
And I'll use my words instead of yours here that she did not make a mistake when she voted for this war.
It was a it was a cynical calculation.
What she thought was good for her and John Kerry and Joe Biden made the same calculation that they were not going to screw up and make the same mistake they did in 1991 and vote against a war against Iraq, which made them look like a bunch of sissies.
And this time, George Bush was so sure that this is going to be great.
They calculated that they would go with the mood of the bandwagon for the war and get on it for their own gain.
And if all the Iraqi people got to lay down and die or get exploded to death, more likely they don't care.
And that was why she voted for the war.
And the irony that I point out is this is this is an excuse that people use for her.
Oh, she's not really this right wing militarist who says the hell with the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, and let's have aggressive war and let us have these endless foreign military interventions.
No, she just did it, you know, for political purposes.
So you're telling me that a reason to vote for someone that you voted to send forty five hundred Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths destabilized the Middle East.
It's a huge reason we have such enormous federal deficits in the cost of this war.
And she has a reason for voting for it.
Come on.
And of course, it backfired in that she lost the race to the nomination in 2008, largely because Obama had spoken out very forcefully against the war and she had been just doing the Bush-Cheney talking points.
And but, you know, the country was hoping that maybe they'll forget it so many years later.
But, you know, we've got to say we can't we can't forget this.
We can't forgive this.
Again, this is and in this article, I'll go down a number of the points.
The one is that, oh, everybody supported it.
That's not true.
The majority of congressional Democrats voted against it.
If the Democrats who had controlled the Senate at that time not crossed the aisle to support Bush, we could have prevented this war.
This was not, you know, again, this was not just a mistake.
This wasn't like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 1964, which got us into Vietnam, where there was no time for debate, no time for reflection.
People thought they were just voting to give President Johnson the right to retaliate for a specific alleged incident, which never actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that he did instead used as an open-ended authorization to get us heavily involved in that tragic war.
She knew what was going on.
People told her.
People briefed her.
And here's the thing.
She would have voted for it, thinking it would enhance her political electability.
She would have had to assume that we would be welcomed as liberators.
We would find all those weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, she said we had.
We would not be bogged down in this long, bloody counterinsurgency war.
And, you know, they were being fooled to think that we would be able to get away with it.
Right.
So, you know, even...
Hold it one second.
Hold it one second.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Stephen Zunis after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
We're talking ancient history, man.
2002 with Stephen Zunis and Hillary Clinton's decision to climb on board the bandwagon for the invasion of Iraq.
And on the first couple of points here, I wanted to ask you about this, Stephen.
You point out that most Democrats were good on this.
And I thought it was just the majority of the Democrats in the House were good, but a majority of the Democrats in the Senate were bad.
Am I wrong about that?
Yeah, no, no, yeah.
I talked about the majority of congressional Democrats.
Right, right.
All together.
All the Democratic members of the House and all the Democratic members of the Senate, it's the majority.
Yeah, I just want to be clear on that.
But here's the real point, though, is that Hillary Clinton was the wife of the last president.
And when she was saying, oh, yeah, everybody knows this is true.
That was certainly taken by the right and used in the media.
And Bill Clinton, of course, went on David Letterman and said, this is great and it'll be over in two weeks and it'll be wonderful, Dave.
And so everybody ought to get on board.
And he made other signals supporting the war.
But on the other hand, if she had tried to lead the opposition in the Senate and say, there's just not a case for war here.
And I happen to know that my husband bombed the last of the weapons of mass destruction back in 1998 during Operation Desert Fox that he named after Erwin Rommel, the Nazi.
Then and we shouldn't be doing this.
And I think that the rest of the Democrats should not vote to do this.
And we should support the Levin Amendment that says only if the IAEA and the U.N. inspectors claim that they're not allowed by Hussein to finish their work first, where she could have done it.
She's huge.
She's Hillary Clinton.
I got to correct you.
The MMPs are already gone for 1998.
But no, of course, I'm just saying no, no, no.
I was just saying what she would have claimed, could have claimed, would have had an impact.
And she had to have known better.
And, you know, it's and, you know, this idea that one of the lines excuses her followers say is, oh, she just, you know, voted for this because the inspectors back in.
But Iraq already agreed to have the inspectors return.
They're just working out the final modalities.
And the and again, the Levin Amendment would have covered that without giving Bush a blank check.
And so, yeah, yeah, there's really no excuse here for her pro-war vote.
Yeah, and, you know, the other thing is and we do have to stop and remind people.
And of course, there are young people, too, who this is ancient history to them, but it's important.
And that is that one hundred and fifty million Americans or more knew better than this war back in 2002.
So no one in D.C. has an excuse when they're the ones who have the access to the actual information.
The one hundred and fifty million Americans were just going off the obvious impression that here's this other thing.
You know, I and former arms control analysts, other strategic analysts, former U.N. weapons inspectors all said this stuff about Iraq having all these weapons of mass destruction is baloney.
The thing is, even if they did have weapons of mass destruction, this is the other thing that I keep hearing Clinton's people say, oh, she thought they had WMDs.
Well, guess what?
There are over 30 countries in the world right now that have biological weapons, chemical weapons, and or nuclear program weapons capability.
They're saying that, oh, we have a right to invade every single one of those countries.
Of course, we have nuclear weapons and still have some chemical weapons, et cetera.
Are they saying that some country has a right to invade us?
I mean, that's another rationalization I really have a hard time with.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the best version of that I heard back then was, well, you know, Ronald Reagan gave them all the chemical weapons.
So now it's it's our responsibility to have to go do the right thing and go make sure that none of it's left when, as you say, of course, it was all destroyed back in 1991.
Give us a break, please.
But anyway, and then, yeah, you know, what's funny about this, Stephen, of course, is that nobody's been held accountable for this.
And I just saw a headline this morning.
I forget where.
I'm sorry, where someone says, you know, you can't ignore the fact that the the underdog front runner types in in both parties right now are getting a lot of support because they oppose this war.
It's going unsaid that here even the Republican base, you know, Donald Trump goes, the Iraq war was stupid.
And anybody who was for it, like Hillary Clinton, they're stupid and evil.
Well, he's talking about his own base there.
And yet they're willing to take that because they're taking it as a promise that he's not going to do that to them again and get their other son killed.
You know, meanwhile, Lindsey Graham is long gone, you know, to send people to war in a place like Iraq.
Yeah.
And now, on the other hand, he does contradict himself and say, yeah, we're going to go in there and completely kick their ass and occupy the royal fields forever and stuff like that.
So but anyway, it's just the point being that, you know, where the American people are at on this and where she is, you know, although I didn't see it, but I read on Twitter last night that one of the questions was, I guess, to Jeb, hey, we're still in two wars that your brother started.
And the whole crowd booed like we don't even want to hear that at all.
But anyway, and now, oh, yeah, on the supporting Al-Qaeda thing, you have you have a good thing about that in the article here about how much she should have known better and why.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's ridiculous that there's absolutely no evidence.
Pentagon itself says that there is no evidence.
And again, we're talking about very, very different groups, a secular dictator like Saddam, these Salafi fundamentalist Islamist crazies, you know, they were killing each other, you know.
And for years and the and really, it's funny.
I mean, even people who bought the WMB myth, those people who knew anything about Middle Eastern politics knew that that connection was pretty silly.
If Hillary Clinton was the only Democrat, the only Democratic senator who who repeated that line about Iraqi ties to Al-Qaeda, I mean, would she be commander in chief?
I don't think so.
Yeah, well, you got that right.
You got that right.
And now, even on the Iran deal, she almost seemed like she was trying to undermine it before it got a vote in Congress.
But in the time between, Obama had had shaken hands with him and got his vote.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, I mean, she just her role in this industry.
I happen to know a couple of people who are in pretty high position in the White House.
And, you know, it's interesting how historically the National Security Council tends to be a little more hawkish in the State Department, you know, that has to deal with, you know, diplomatic protocol, that kind of thing.
But under Obama's first term, it was just the opposite.
That the NSC people were largely his appointees, who were on one hand, very much part of the, you know, foreign policy establishment, but tend to be a little more innovative.
They tended to oppose the Iraq war, a little more less interventionist, with one or two exceptions.
But then Clinton, in return for being Secretary of State, she got to appoint a lot of her own people, which are mostly holdovers from her husband's administration.
And so we had the opposite.
But the State Department was a real hawkish interventionist.
The hell with international law, the hell with, you know, getting bogged down somewhere else.
And the White House was a little more cautious.
The State Department of Clinton was, yeah, let's hold out and support these Arab dictatorships that their people are demanding be brought down.
And it was Obama who said, hey, let's let these democratic movements take their course.
And so it's, you know, she's definitely, you know, again, she's definitely on the hawkish right wing of the Democratic Party.
And what's funny is that's definitely the case in Egypt and in Yemen and Bahrain.
But then she took the exact opposite and much worse stance in Libya, which was don't let events take their course.
Go ahead and ally with Al Qaeda against Gaddafi.
And she was really pushing for intervention there.
And, you know, what's weird is that I don't frankly think there's much to the various conspiracy theories about the killings in Benghazi.
You know, that's Clinton's fault.
But what the real scandal is, is her pushing us to get involved in that war in the first place and helping to create the radical Islamist backlash that eventually led to the killings in Benghazi and which have been causing a lot more havoc and bloodshed and scary stuff subsequently.
Yeah, well, and they're all different kind of accusations out of there.
But it does seem telling, doesn't it, that in all the Republican scandal over it, the part they never talk about is the fact that the real worst decision she made, of course, like you're saying, is the war in the first place, but also stationing this guy and the CIA in the middle of a hornet's nest.
And what were they doing in the middle of a hornet's nest?
They were funneling hornets and guns to Syria to carry out the next phase of the war.
And, you know, it's all in Judicial Watch documents and in her emails and all this stuff now about how, you know, she's in her emails talking with her subordinates about the Qatari arms shipments and talking with Sidney Blumenthal about this.
And the CIA was overseeing this, if not running the damn thing.
And and that's what I like about it is, you know, you're right.
Like they have the fake scandal or I don't know if it's fake, but it seems like it's overblown about the so-called delay.
Like maybe it was one bureaucrat that said, wait, and they try to make it say like Obama deliberately hung those guys out to dry or something like that.
But but in the overall case, boy, did he hang him out to dry.
I mean, what are you doing?
Yeah, yeah.
And this is a thing.
And I believe in this.
Come on, close on this thought.
I've been traveling to the Middle East for over 40 years and I felt less and less safe as an American each time I had visited.
When I first went there as a 16 year old, I could go to any country in the region and not be afraid about being an American.
Think how that's changed.
And here's the thing.
People like Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush and all those, regardless of party, who support this kind of military intervention, even putting aside the moral and legal arguments, they are making us less and less secure.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thanks very much, Stephen.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, y'all.
That is Stephen Zunes.
He teaches at the University.
I got it right here.
The University of San Francisco, Middle Eastern Studies and Rights for Foreign Policy and Focus.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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