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All right, Shel, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the phone is Ira Chernis, Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Peace Activist.
Teaches at the University of Boulder, I think, and he's got this blog at the History News Network.
That's HNN.
US.
The blog is Mythic America.
And oh, I don't want to give away the title yet.
Welcome back to the show, Ira.
How are you doing?
Oh, good.
Thanks.
Nice to be here with you.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
And now, I'm sorry, I kind of blew it on your introduction there.
You teach Religious Studies at the University of Boulder, is that correct?
University of Colorado at Boulder, correct.
I hear you.
Okay.
Well, I'm very sorry for not getting that right.
I didn't have it in front of me.
Anyway.
So, hey, looks like John Kerry gave away the whole game.
Well, it's hard to know what was on his mind, but he said in his confirmation hearings, he said foreign policy is economic policy.
Now, I think there's actually more to foreign policy than that, but normally our political leaders never say that economic goals or the profit motive really have anything to do with foreign policy.
They tell us, as Obama told us in his inaugural address, that foreign policy is about spreading our ideals, about bringing democracy and freedom around the world.
They don't say anything about the economic aims of foreign policy.
And yet, here was Kerry saying, you know, foreign policy is economic policy.
So, and then he talked about the importance of the U.S. having access to raw materials and to trade around the world and to keeping the world's economic house in order and that sort of thing.
So, at least he was opening up that subject in a much more public way than we hardly ever hear from top government officials.
Right.
What's funny about that, too, is, you know, even if he means well at all for the interests he's representing and speaking for, I think, the entire political class in D.C., he's completely economically illiterate.
America wastes so much more money securing all these markets than we even spend on any of the things we buy in these markets, and everybody knows that.
Adam Smith debunked mercantilism back in 1776.
Well, you know, these folks have their particular theory.
It's not really a mercantile theory, though.
It is in part, of course, about the economic interests of the rich in the United States.
That's a significant part of it.
But we go back to the 1930s.
I'm writing a book now, it won't be published for quite a while, in the middle of it, on Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy.
Franklin Roosevelt and the Secretary of State Cornell Hall, right, they really came up with this idea that America would create and safeguard a global free trade market, and they really believe this.
You know, obviously you can argue for or against it, but it seems like they really believe it, at least in all their conversations and letters, they never leave any doubt that that's going to make the world better for everyone, you know.
And of course, I know you know all the arguments against that, too.
It's not quite the same as a mercantile theory, because the idea is that if the whole world is trading more freely, then America is bound to profit, because America is the strongest economic force.
It's the same reason the British promoted free trade back in the 19th century.
No, it's not really free trade, because of course we always have tariffs and we always have rules and regulations that we try to rig to our advantage, just like every other country does.
But the idea of a single global market was really their ideal, and it's still, of course, a fundamental ideal of the foreign policy establishment in this country.
Yeah, sure.
Well, you know, I come from a pretty libertarian standpoint, so I'm all for, you know, as advanced a division of labor as we could possibly have, and the more trade among the more people in the world.
I don't even really believe there's such a thing as Chinese or Americans, you know.
It's just individuals who want to do business.
As far as that goes, that to me is all to the good.
And when the Bill Clintons and George W. Bushes and Barack Obamas of the world tell me that they agree with me about that, I know that it's just a thin pretext for them having an excuse to buy aircraft carriers from Lockheed, which is a nice way of saying they want to put Lockheed executives on welfare at my expense.
Yeah.
Well, right.
I mean, there's no market force in the world that would have spent the money on 22 carrier battle groups or whatever it is that's spread around the world right now.
Well, it's true that there's a lot of ideology involved, a lot of good guys against bad guys.
I'm writing a little article now.
Last night after I watched the State of the Union address, I was watching some old episodes of Homeland, you know, the CIA against the terrorists.
And that kind of thinking, even though it's not maybe as pervasive as it was back in the good old days of George W. Bush, it's still very much with us, too.
So there's a lot of different motives that go into go into foreign policy.
But again, I'm going back to Roosevelt and Hull, the guys who created this system.
And what they seem to think, at least what they say, right, is that this global market needs to be protected against bad guys who want to disrupt it by creating protected markets in their own countries, in places like Iran or Iraq or Serbia, I'm thinking of our recent enemies, who were really enemies because they didn't want to participate in the global marketplace dominated by the United States.
They wanted more of a protectionist, nationalist kind of economy.
And that's a lot of it.
It's not the only reason that wars start, but that's a lot of the reason that the U.S. goes to war and the U.S. builds up this military as a kind of way of signaling to others who might have that sort of idea to say, no, no, you guys better play this global marketplace game.
What was it that Thomas Friedman famously said, right?
He said that McDonald's, his symbol of international corporate capitalism, right, McDonald's needs McDonald's.
Back in those days it was McDonald-Douglas, right, in other words, that the multinational corporations need a powerful U.S. military to protect their interest in being able to go anywhere and buy and sell wherever they want.
Right.
So...
A gun to your head, join our free market or we'll blow your brains out.
You know, it's not quite that blunt, but there's a kind of implied message there that is along those lines.
I don't want to say that's all that foreign policy is about.
There's a lot of other things going on, but again, to have the incoming Secretary of State with so much focus on economic issues was a real surprise, very unusual.
And I really agree with you the way you keep emphasizing that there's so many different interests involved in here.
It's too easy to come up with a unified field theory for who's responsible for all our wars, but the war party is a very large and diverse creature and sometimes different factions take the lead in it.
And you know, even the Republicans, some of them opposed Kosovo, you know, for a minute and things do change, you know, from time to time.
But basically, I mean, it sounds like really what you're saying is it all does come down to domestic politics, right?
So in one war, you might have the bankers who really want to serve some debt.
And in another war, the policy is pushed much more by Lockheed's committee to liberate Iraq.
And in another war, maybe the Israel lobby are the ones who are really pushing for strikes on Iran rather than oil companies or even arms manufacturers on that one.
And it's a free fall.
It's a democracy.
So the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
And if there's a domestic interest that can be satisfied, even Dick Cheney's Halliburton, they didn't even really care so much about the oil.
They wanted the contracts to build the basis for the Americans.
If only for 10 years, what they made a zillion billion dollars, right?
But, you know, there are certainly plenty of instances where domestic pressures here in the United States get overridden because other countries around the world don't want to play our game.
Just the first example pops into my head, you know, I did a lot of writing.
I published three books on Dwight Eisenhower and his foreign policy.
And back in 1954, when the French withdrew or lost their rule in Vietnam, Eisenhower was perfectly willing, the record shows, to use nuclear weapons to protect French and American interests, to prevent the communists from hoaching in and taking over in Vietnam.
Eisenhower was willing to use nuclear weapons, but he knew that he would lose the support of the British and the French and the West Germans, because they would be horrified by the use of nuclear weapons.
And so he said, no, use nuclear weapons unless I get agreement from our allies.
And we can point to lots of examples throughout, ever since then, where U.S. foreign policy really has been shaped by a kind of struggle between domestic interests and the concerns of allies and other countries around the world.
So it's not just domestic, but obviously those domestic interests do have a significant role to play.
You know, I'm interested in what you would say about British pressure for the first Gulf War, because it seemed like, and I was only in ninth grade at the time, it seemed like George H.W. Bush was sort of taking his time, and then Margaret Thatcher accused him of going wobbly, and then he really doubled down and said, we will secure Britain's access to Kuwaiti oil.
Yeah, but you know, that's a complicated issue, because I was talking this over with a prominent foreign policy historian just the other night, and he brought up that example, that the George H.W. Bush administration, they were trying to build up political support here at home for a war against Iraq from the summer of 1990, when the Iraqis first went into Kuwait.
And it wasn't working very well.
They weren't getting the kind of political support they need, which is a good reminder, by the way, that the president can't do whatever he damn pleases.
He does watch public opinion.
He's got to have enough public opinion behind him to give him that political support.
Well, so how are they going to get that political support?
Well, the first thing they did is they sent out James Baker, Secretary of State, and he said, this war is about jobs, jobs, jobs.
It was a very famous quotation at the time, and as my friend, the historian, said, it didn't make any sense.
It wasn't very logical, really, to say that somehow we would get more American jobs by going to war.
But the important point is that it didn't work.
It didn't sway public opinion.
What swayed public opinion is when they made up this story about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
That's when the whole thing about Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction started, was way back in 1990.
And then they went back to, they combined that with the idea that we Americans have to protect freedom, and the freedom of the Kuwaitis has been violated.
Of course, Kuwaiti people didn't have any freedom as a monarchy, but the soundbite of protect freedom and stop Saddam from getting weapons of mass destruction, that worked, right?
So the economic argument about jobs didn't work to sway public opinion, right?
But the fear of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, plus the appeal to American idealism and freedom of democracy and such, that worked.
So every case is different, you know?
They experiment with different kinds of rhetoric to see what will, but they do have to sway public opinion.
That's an important thing to remember.
Yeah, I think Robert Perry's thesis is that the overriding reason of all the different reasons for the first Gulf War, more than anything else, they admitted their true purpose when they bragged that we have finally beat the Vietnam syndrome.
That more than anything else, they wanted to have a good, fun, short, successful war so they could say, we can keep doing this, you're going to let us keep doing this.
That was certainly part of it.
That was certainly part of it.
And we've got to give George H.W. credit for saying it publicly, right?
We kicked the Vietnam syndrome.
But it was during that war that I first realized that this whole debate that goes on among anti-war forces about what is the true motive, you know, what's the government's true reason for going to war, we waste a lot of energy in that debate, because there's never one true motive, right?
A war is kind of like a thunderstorm.
There's so many different factors that go into creating it that you can never even map them all out.
And you certainly can't say that one is the true or the real motive.
I'm not even sure you can say that one is the dominant motive.
Sometimes you can.
But most of the time, the causes of war are so complicated, all you can do is try to flesh out as many different ones as you can, see how they interact.
My frustration is that we on the anti-war side, we waste so much energy debating with each other about, is it really about economics or is it really about power or is it really about the military-industrial complex or whatever?
It's really about all those things.
Well, the good part about arguing about this is that this is a radio show.
So you've got people who aren't too familiar with these arguments get to overhear this argument and pick which one they think is the most and then do some thinking about that later.
There's no reason to pick one.
That's the whole point.
I mean, it's good.
It's true.
Those kinds of debates bring out all the different factors involved and it's important to see them.
But there's no reason to have to pick one as a, quote, real reason for a war.
Because there's always lots of reasons.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, and it all depends who you are on your reasons, right?
Somebody could be very pro-war just because their cousin, maybe they helped invest in their cousin's new company that produces the battery that goes with the one new piece of army equipment that they've got or whatever, and he's got a very particular interest in doing it.
Obviously on CNN, they just want to sell soap.
And they want to charge the most for soap as they possibly can.
There may be very influential people at the top of the policy chain who genuinely believe that we're going to war to liberate people.
Maybe they really believe their rhetoric.
You can never know what somebody really believes.
And so it's important to be cynical.
But we also ought to be a little bit cynical or at least maybe skeptical about our own simple analyses and figure, you know, life is always more complicated than we think it is.
That's probably the best rule to start with.
Well, and you know, the more people you have agree in, the more likely that you're all wrong, too, has always been my lesson in politics is, you know, I look at terribly nefarious and unaccountable power getting away with blue bloody murder all the time, but I never forget about the power of groupthink and the ability of six ridiculous idiots to tell each other how smart they are and then implement a policy that'll get a million people killed.
Well, it's true.
And as I said, I'm right now writing this little piece about watching the State of the Union and watching old episodes of Homeland and remembering that back in the months, even years after 9-11, you know, a lot of people in this country really just felt good about being part of a nation that was, they believed, you know, on a crusade against evil.
I know we didn't use the word crusade, but that's really what it came down to.
And just that sense of being part of a group that stands for something, that whatever it is, you know, that has a common goal and a common purpose, that alone is a major contributor to war.
Well, you know, just yesterday on the show, it's the 10th anniversary kind of a thing, so I went through and I played for the people the audio of this documentary called Leading to War, and there's no commentary.
It's just clip after clip after clip of almost entirely just the principals and then just throw in Wolfowitz, the deputies, the one deputy in there, the rest, it's all the principals lying us into war with Iraq.
And it goes on for an hour and 20 minutes or something like that, worth of clips from 2002 and three in chronological order there.
And here it is 10 years later, and listening to them, I mean, not that I was ever buying it at the time, but the perspective shift from seeing it 10 years later and watching these clips of George W. Bush, of all people in the world, right, saying things like, history has called us into action, and we must, you know, turn, rid the world of evil.
I mean, to think that anyone was buying that at all, what a different era we were in, you know?
And in fact, millions of people were buying it.
I wrote a book about that era called Monsters to Destroy, and I talked a lot there about the fact that all these neoconservatives before 9-11, their big crusade was about moral virtue here at home.
It was a battle of virtue against sin.
And then they took almost exactly the same language after 9-11 and applied it to the United States against the terrorists.
But it was the same concept, it was a kind of a moral purification, moral regeneration, cleansing us of our own evil by going to war.
That's a very old theme in American history, well, in world history, and we can find that in many of our wars as a major contributor to war, because a lot of people believe it.
And we shouldn't dismiss it as just mere nonsense, even though we can disagree with it, we should take it seriously and say, why do people believe that?
So when I talk about myths in my Mythic America blog, I don't mean just lies, but I mean myths are the narratives, the stories that we tell as a country.
That's the one thing to me that really gets me, because I think America could be so much greater if we didn't have a world empire at all.
As Ron Paul said years ago, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines, and we could spend the rest of our time trying to free innocent people from jail, and making sure, you know, doing just a little bit of housekeeping that needs done around here.
You know, think how much greater we could be, think how much better for the rest of the world we could be, by really trying to perfect our union and set a good example about this is what it's like to live in a society that means what it says about its Bill of Rights, etc., like that.
You know, but it's all just thrown away and wasted on a bunch of propaganda and murder.
We've got a lot of connections around the world, and we're all human beings, and you said earlier, you know, everybody, we don't care if they're American or Chinese or whatever, we're all people.
Maybe we should think of ourselves as citizens of the world, not citizens of the United States.
That's another kind of myth.
That's another kind of narrative that we could tell if we want to, because a myth can have a lot of truth in it, and some narratives are just more humane, more life-enhancing than others, and I think the story that says we're all citizens of the world, we're all responsible for each other all over the world, that can be a very inspiring story, too, and it's one that we can choose, if we want to, to make the leading story, the leading narrative of our foreign policy.
See, in a sense, and I don't know exactly how you mean it, but to me, that sounds like it's the kind of thing that would give credence to just larger political structures and world federalism and that kind of thing, whereas for me, I kind of want to just abolish citizenship entirely and let everybody just be an individual, not that we don't interact with each other, but in terms of our rights and our allegiances, they should all be voluntary.
Well, you know, we can also have a world of anarchy, where it's little communities, little neighborhoods that make decisions about their own lives, but they've got to worry about the neighborhood next to them, so they kind of get together and make a kind of a regional council and share their ideas, but fundamentally, it goes back to the local group, but the local group has to be thinking about its responsibility to the rest of the world.
That's another way to look at the world that lots of people have talked about over the centuries, and it's also an option that we have a story, what I call a myth, if we want to choose it, not a lie, but a narrative that we can shape our worldview and use as a basis of our actions.
You know, we've got a lot of options here, and we ought to be talking about all of them.
Yeah.
Well, very good point.
I was thinking, you know, when you were talking about the neocons there, I mean, this is, I'm no professor, you know, I got a very dumbed down understanding of this, but it seemed like basically their whole thing about the neocons and Leo Strauss and all of that, the noble lie and national greatness and all of that, is that they reject the Enlightenment, and they say, no, if you want any truth at all, you go back to, you know, Aristotle and nothing later than that anyway, or maybe Plato, not Aristotle, and I do a lot of research on this, and Strauss' influence on the neocons has been overrated.
He had influence on some of them, but not on the movement as a whole, so I wouldn't go too far in that direction.
So you don't think that he's much of an inspiration for that whole, you know, Christolian national greatness project and all that big government conservatism, etc.?
Some of them, yes, but not for the movement as a whole.
I think that the neocon movement was largely a reaction against the 60s, is what it really was, and a fear of anarchy, in the best sense of that word, a fear that if you let everybody just pursue their own desires and their own local interests, that somehow the whole world will get out of control, that somebody's got to be in charge of all this.
The human nature is too dangerous.
That was really the essential view of the neoconservative movement.
They didn't need Leo Strauss to tell them that, they had other people to tell them that.
All right, well listen, it's been great talking to you again, it's great to have you back on the show, Ira.
Okay, let's do it again sometime, thanks a lot.
Appreciate it.
That's Ira Turns, he's a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I'm sorry for getting that wrong in the intro there, a professor of religious studies there, and he's a peace activist, and churnus.wordpress.com is where you can find his blog.
I'm Ira Turns, and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
