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But not quite.
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First guest on the show today is Steve Breiman.
He served as William C. Foster Visiting Scholar Fellow at the U.S. State Department in 2011 and 2012.
And he's been writing for antiwar.com off and on anyway for quite a while now.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
It's going great, Scott.
Glad to be here.
And I'll do my darndest to speak in stereo.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, you're coming in fine here in the office, so I'll take it.
Forget everybody else anyway.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right, so why the war on terror endures.
I like the topic, and I like your complicated answer.
It's a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, you say.
Yeah, I think many of us want to default to a conspiracy theory about the war on terror because it is so complex.
It has been going on so long that it's occasionally contradictory and confused.
And it's clear that there are certain interests in this country and elsewhere that benefit from the war on terror.
No doubt about that, Scott.
But at the same time, careful monitoring of it from the get-go leads one, I think, to the inevitable conclusion that, no, there's not a conspiracy at work here.
Much of the law, many of the decisions, the budgeting, the deployment plans, and all the rest, these were decisions that were taken by presidents and presidents recently and or Congress that were out in the open and subject to debate.
Well, that's what's funny, too, especially about this era, is that it really was a conspiracy.
It was just right open in front of everybody.
It was Cheney versus Powell.
It was Richard Perle versus Robert Zolich or whatever.
Yes, that's right.
And again, that requires persistent attention, which I don't need to tell you, Scott, is perhaps not many Americans' strong suit.
Well, you know, I actually used to be a lot more of a conspiracy theorist than I am now, and a big part of that is because I thought that, regardless of kind of Republican window dressing, that ultimately the Iraq war would be a U.N. war and that even if they had to make a deal with the Russians and the French where they get to keep all the oil in the north and we'll get the oil in the south, that kind of thing, that they would do it in order to get that second Security Council resolution in order to kind of make it a baby blue helmet occupation and I was just wrong.
My whole model for explaining American foreign policy did not take into account Dick Cheney and the neocons and their much more nationalist, imperialist view where they didn't even figure the U.N. was worthwhile for window dressing, much less the core of their policy.
I was just wrong.
I had to admit it.
I think that's a fair reading, Scott, and, you know, Dick Cheney, of course, has been in the news again lately for some obscure and mostly obscene reasons.
It amazes me how those guys, maybe neocons is the right label to capture this school of thought, have been consistently wrong over the last 10 or 11 years about any and everything important that matters and yet somehow the media and others continue to pay attention to them.
Yeah.
Well, see, this is the other thing that made me less of a conspiracy theorist, too, was the more I do this show, which is really just me interviewing journalists and professors and asking all my own follow-up questions, and I'm, you know, like on a never-ending Ph.
D. course here, you know, on a daily basis, basically, and what I realized was, even though I don't even have an associate's degree or the slightest thing, I actually understand a lot more, say, for example, about what was going on in the Iraq war in 2006 than most of the people involved in the decision-making because I was reading Bob Dreyfuss and they weren't, and really there are so few people who actually had their act together in identifying which groups are which and what are their interests and why do they fight and which side are we taking and why.
It was really that obvious that the U.S. Senate didn't have the first clue, not a one of them had the first clue about the kinds of subjects about, you know, Sadr versus al-Hakim or whatever that we were talking about on the show every day.
Yes, that's right.
You know, there's more evidence for the ignorance, your claim regarding the ignorance of our top-level decision-makers just in the news the other day.
I don't know if you saw the thing about Dianne Feinstein and her misunderstanding regarding U.S. drone policy, but she was called out by a number of critics who suggested she and or her staff don't even read the New York Times.
Again, the stuff's out in the public domain.
You just have to pay attention to it, which, you know, again, we're busy, we're overworked, you know, we've got low energy or whatever it is.
I understand it's not easy, and thus your advice to find somebody like a Dreyfus or, you know, another really good guy these days, it seems to me, somebody like a Tom Englehart, you read their stuff regularly.
You're not only up on developments, but they provide context and frameworks through which to understand this stuff.
So, you know, it is possible.
I'll admit it's not easy and it takes work and energy, but is that not the duty of a citizen of democracy?
Yeah, well, although, I don't know, it seems like the consensus more and more, at least around here, is that this empire isn't coming home until if and when the dollar completely breaks in some very horrible crack-up boom-type thing.
Otherwise, it's going to go on for a long, long time still.
I mean, the American people, as broke as we are, we can still afford to conquer Africa for the next 15, 20 years at least, you know, that kind of thing.
And the people in D.C.
Our children's and our grandchildren's dime, Scott, right?
We don't even pay for it in real time.
There's no war tax.
Right.
And so, I mean, that's the thing.
As horrible as it all is, they only fail upwards.
As you say in your article, I think you put it, we do a lot of times, you know, like you look at Hillary Clinton or something, she thinks she's doing the right thing for somebody anyway, and yet she can only fail.
But that's okay too, right?
There's just more for John Kerry to do.
And no, I mean, I've meant to write about this.
I avert to it here and there in pieces over the last decade or so about what I call the culture of impunity.
In any other business, these bunglers would have got the sack years ago.
But in running U.S. and defense, foreign and defense policy, you can be consistently wrong.
You can squander, you know, $2 trillion and thousands of young lives and, as you say, get booted upstairs to the next position.
Yep.
Well, and, you know, the American people always get off the hook too because especially, like, if you take the Iraq War or something, it's so obvious that the agenda really did come from the very top.
And even the Republican Party was like, really, we're doing this?
Okay, you know, everybody cash in, come on.
But it was clearly the White House was leading the entire thing.
And, you know, even, I mean, obviously Wolfowitz and those guys had their agenda already, but Junior did too, I think.
And it was pretty clear.
But the American people, they loved it.
They rationalized it.
They came up with whatever ridiculous excuses.
And then even when there weren't warehouses full of sarin and VX gas, they didn't care.
At least half of them were like, okay, good, we don't care.
Whatever new lie is good enough.
And then six months later when it came out that, oh, yeah, and they're torturing people all over the place, and here's the pictures of it.
Well, that's all right.
We'll excuse that and rationalize that.
And, in fact, that's the American way, torture, after all.
That's what we're here for.
And the American people are as bad as Dick Cheney.
It seems like at least half of them when it comes to mass murder.
Well, you know, I'm glad that you added the clause, you know, approximately half of them right there at the end, Scott, because I think it's complicated.
It's the other half now that the Democrats are in power.
Well, and, you know, the Democrats are as ready to make excuses for Obama policy as the Republicans were for Bush policy.
So, again, that's just transparent, right?
Had Bush been escalating the drone warfare in places like Pakistan and Yemen in the way that Obama is, you would have had tens of thousands in the streets of big cities across America, and we don't see that at present.
But, you know, on this question of public opinion, it's complex, right?
It's messy.
You know, March 2003, when we went into Iraq, public opinion was split, just as you say, right about 50-50, and then it kind of went up and down as the war went up and down, right?
So at mission accomplished moment, everybody thought it was a great thing, and as the, you know, insurgency ramped up, approval for the war went down.
And so, you know, it is a complex phenomenon, U.S. public opinion about our foreign policy, about our interventions and the like.
But, again, you know, the role of the media here I think is so central.
You mentioned the WMD ruse.
Even years after the early days of the war, 2003, 2004, when it was clear there were no WMD, something like two-thirds of Fox News viewers still believe there were, right?
So if you live in a bubble and limit your information sources to those with stakes in the game, don't be surprised that you end up being ignorant, misled, and ultimately perhaps victimized by the war on terror.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and that was a deliberate strategy of Karl Rove, I think, in the Bush years, that they just have to, you know, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's the constituency they're going after.
And so accentuate the stupid.
Just go ahead.
If people want to be critical thinkers, we're not even talking to them anyway.
Go ahead and go to hell.
We're focused on the people who are lapping it up because they're all we need.
And they've kind of really done their entire movement down to the very dregs at this point.
Yeah, that's right.
There's no doubt that there's some significant percentage of us who could be fairly described as sheep and led merrily along not-so-primrose paths.
You know, it's then incumbent upon the rest of us and important figures like you at this radio show to put out contrary views on what we consider the truth.
You know, the thing of it, though, is when you look at it, you know, like I'm not sure if you're familiar with Nick Terse, the great journalist, but he calls it the complex.
Yes, one of Engelhardt's colleagues.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, he's the editor there now or something.
He calls it the complex because you can't call it the anything-anything complex anymore because there's too many things to put dashes on from the universities and all of science and so much of industry and everything, the interests in it are so wide.
And you think about just, you know, and it's been like this for so long.
So many people have internalized so many of these fake truths about the perilous world our government is protecting us from.
TV is never going to stop telling us those same lessons.
Movies are never going to stop teaching those same, you know, so-called truths.
That's what Zero Dark Thirty most recently.
Yeah, I mean, what we're up against is, you know, I think only a complete breaking of the dollarware.
Sorry, you just can't afford it.
Now let's see if all the nukes come flying or not, but there's just no empire anymore because there's no dollars anyone's willing to take to pay for it anymore.
Other than that, I don't know what could ever stop it because it's so ingrained.
Scott, I'm sorry to say I agree with your pessimism.
It is hard to see how this ends well.
It is easy to see where it's going next, and that is Africa, as we were talking about there.
And an important part of your most recent article here, Steve, at Antiwar.com, is about this thing called the Institute of Economics and Peace, which I've never heard of.
You know, it's funny.
They were new to me as well, Scott, but they do outstanding work, including the issuance of reports around something they call the Global Terrorism Index, where they literally aim to count every terrorist attack in every country around the world and categorize these things and then analyze them statistically and other ways.
And the findings are, and again, if somebody wants links to the Institute's website or to the report, they can read my piece that Scott and I are talking about, Why the War on Terror Endures on Antiwar.com.
And it's using the Bill Clinton definition of terrorism, which is killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders.
There, I think, is the greatest limitation of their approach, that they do not include state terror, under the rubric of which I would include Bush and Obama's drone attacks.
And so there is that limitation to their data set.
But if you can set that aside for a moment, they do some really solid work in helping us understand trends over time.
And the long and the short of it is that today, the world suffers more than four times as many terrorist attacks than it did at the outset of the war on terror.
So how is that a success?
Well, it's great if you work for the CIA and you need work because you've still got a few more years before you get your pension or whatever.
That's right.
It's good for drone manufacturers.
And again, as you say, what used to be called the military-industrial complex now has more hyphens than is convenient to include.
But for the rest of us who are not part of that, don't benefit from that, pay taxes to enable it.
In other words, I'm talking about the vast majority of us.
We're getting the shaft.
And as you say, we'll continue to in perpetuity unless there's some major change in direction here.
And that could be, as you say, the result of economic catastrophe.
We could somehow miraculously come to our senses.
There might be, once again, some mass mobilization of angry citizens demanding change.
It's possible to envision scenarios.
Again, I'm sorry to say I'm agreeing with you about low probability of those things.
Yeah, I mean, well, a friend sent me a link to the extraordinary African cake, which is all about the late 19th century European colonization of Africa.
And boy, a lot of those minerals are still there.
And a lot of excuses, you know, brown people with rifles.
As long as you invade a country that has brown people with rifles in it and they dare to shoot back, damn, you have a counterinsurgency mission to win now.
And you never can.
And great.
I mean, they could send our guys hither and yon, our drones mostly hither and yon, across the Sahara from now on.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, generations.
Some of the more scholarly analysts of all this refer to it as the long war.
And it has been, and as you say, it promises to continue to be, short of some major, again, either unintentional catastrophe or some intentional shift in direction.
Now, so tell us some more about these numbers and what you've learned from reading through this recent report.
I mean, I guess one thing that I think will surprise your listeners, Scott, is that, you know, in their database they have 158 countries and there are approximately 200 or so members of the United Nations.
So it's the bulk of the planet we're talking about that since the onset of the war on terror, attacks have plunged in North America as sharply as anywhere else in the planet.
And the famed Al-Qaeda was responsible, that is, you know, the so-called core Al-Qaeda that hides out in the tribal badlands of Pakistan right where they got, well, actually they got Osama a little in a different place in the country.
But I think listeners know what I'm talking about.
They were responsible for but one of the 5,000 terrorist attacks in 2011.
In other words, you know, if we wanted to, we could say, woo-hoo, we won, the war on terror is over.
Let's have that ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York and call it quits and get serious about solving some domestic problems.
But for a variety of reasons, again, partly due to the power of the constituencies with a stake in the continuance of the war, partly due to official and unofficial ignorance, and partly due to fear on the part of decision-makers, that is, they're afraid that if they don't keep pressing forward, something bad might happen on their watch and they might get called on it.
Put those things together and you've got a perennial war.
Yeah, well, and also we want to use those guys in Syria.
Well, you know, you think, Scott, I challenge you or your listeners to find a single example from, let's call it, you know, contemporary history.
You know, you can define it the way you want.
Back 50 years or back to maybe the end of the Second World War.
Find me a single example where, quote, arming rebels, unquote, resulted in a happy outcome for anyone, including the United States.
I submit you will be unable to.
And so those of us who are calling for arming Syrian rebels, which, you know, if anybody is paying close attention understands, it's now Islamists in the lead.
These are not your friends.
You know, and I'll grant you all the horrors of the Assad regime and the fact that it's got to go, et cetera, et cetera.
But the answer is not let's put more guns and bombs in the hands of people who just as soon slit your throat as anything else.
Well, you know, it might be part of my Texas, you know, white boy bias or whatever, just American bias.
But I do conflate modernity with secularism in a way that most people in the Muslim world don't seem to.
But it seems to me, and I kind of, well, in my imagination, they need to conflate those concepts together more.
And I kind of think that actually just in practice, if they, you know, were out from under imperial domination and the Muslim world actually had a lot better chance to just trade in peace and get rich, I think a lot of the fundamentalist radicalism and stuff would kind of die out anyway.
It seems like if the American government or the, you know, the crusaders or the neocons, whoever, if they meant what they said at all about how, you know, they want to avoid a permanent conflict of civilizations with the Muslim world, they could just stop what they're doing because what they're doing right now is basically making Zawahiri look like he knows what he's talking about instead of making him the most ridiculous man in Asia.
Yeah, I agree with you completely, Scott.
Religious fundamentalisms of all sorts seem to me to be a desperate attempt, and so it's not, you know, not just Muslims, but Jews or Christians, others, Hindus.
It's a desperate attempt to make sense of a rapidly changing and threatening world.
So, you know, why would some Tuareg rebel or some poor Malian or a Yemeni or a Pakistani join the Taliban or al-Qaeda or some local terrorist group?
Well, it's because those guys appear to have the answers.
If you look at the same period of history you were just referring to, Scott, various other approaches were tried.
They tried it, you know, and failed at sort of a U.S. or Western model of liberal representative capitalist democracy.
Various forms of Soviet-inspired state socialism failed, so that, you know, the two big competing ideologies of the postwar world did not work for much of the planet, including Africa.
And so, you know, what do you turn to now?
Well, and along comes the fundamentalist imam or rabbi or minister with an answer, right?
We've just got to go back to God's teachings, and we've got to hew more closely to the holy book.
So it's, you know, on that kind of sociological level, it's an understandable phenomenon.
Unfortunately, of course, these holy books don't have the answers for the world we're living in.
Yeah, well, and it just seems to me like, you know, a real free market system, and hey, I'm an ideological libertarian type, so maybe this is just my own religion or whatever.
If that's your opinion, it's fine.
But for me, it seems like if you let free market capitalism as a system compete in the free market of ideas, that its advantages become quite clear, and then people usually will make a rational decision to want more like that, you know?
That's what we want is, you know, as Bill Clinton called the empire, free markets and democracy.
That's all we're doing is spreading free markets and democracy to the world.
Well, if you really want to do that, sell it to them, right?
You don't appoint a dictatorship over them to give them free markets and democracy.
That is never going to work.
And like you're saying, supporting a bunch of suicide bomber rebels doesn't seem to work out either.
You know, maybe just knock it off for a little while and see what happens, or maybe just, you know, go back to all that highfalutin talk about proving the superiority of our ways through our example like John Quincy Adams said back then.
Yeah, and, you know, another piece of this that's important, I think, to talk about, Scott, you know, and especially, you know, I could focus here on drones, which are, you know, happily being vigorously debated at present around the appointment of John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism czar to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
My explanation for drones, you know, why we do this, you know, why there's the kill list, why there's the Tuesday meeting in the White House to literally draw up a list of that, weeks, names, et cetera, is because it's easy and we can, right?
The alternatives to drones require diplomacy.
They require police work.
They require, you know, non-armed intelligence.
It's slow.
It's frustrating.
It's difficult.
It's not sexy.
It doesn't end up in the explosion of a Hellfire missile.
You know, you don't as readily tick these names off your list.
And so that, you know, the ease that the technology makes available and the problematic legality that lawyers in places like the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon use to enable this, it really makes it, I think, irresistible for the Obama White House.
We can do this.
We can get away with it.
We can show we're, quote, making progress in the war on terror, unquote.
It's relatively cheap compared to, you know, other modes of war fighting.
And the polls say that people love it, too.
Well, at present, as I understand public opinion on this, Scott, that you're right, that there is majority support for continuing these strikes.
But, you know, my explanation there is because folks really don't have the full picture, right?
They have the picture handed to them by the Obama administration or by Fox News.
All right.
With that, I'm sorry we've got to go.
It's time for our next guest.
But I thank you very much for your time, Steve.
It was great to talk to you.
Scott, it's been my pleasure.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
Steve Brayman, you can find him here at AntiWar.com.
His latest piece is Why the War on Terror Endures.
Spawning terror over there.
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