02/03/16 – Ira Chernus – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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For all the archives, more than 4,000 interviews now, going back to 2003.
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And I thought it was real nice, so I just wanted to say thanks to her for writing such a nice thing.
Okay, on to our next guest.
It's Ira Chernus.
I really like it when Ira Chernus writes things.
This one is called The Peace Movement's War Story.
And, well, you know how it is with the Tom Dispatch articles.
There's always two titles.
America's New Vietnam in the Middle East.
It ran at TomDispatch.com and also under Tom Englehart's name at AntiWar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Ira, how are you doing?
Thank you.
Always a pleasure to be here.
Very happy to have you here, and I'm sorry because I forgot to say your things.
You are a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of Mythic America Essays, and that's your website, MythicAmerica.us.
So, sorry for neglecting that for a second.
Now, I love this whole thing about Vietnam and the antiwar protests.
Oh, I guess it's Tom's intro that talks about the antiwar protests in 2003 in February and March, and everybody tried to stop the war there for a minute.
But you get right into Vietnam, and it actually goes right to something, and I'm sorry, everybody, I've said this on the show before, but one of my very first experiences of learning anything about Vietnam when I was a kid was a friend of mine's mom got really mad and slammed her fist down on the table and said it was a civil war and it was none of our damn business, and her friends had died in the thing, of course.
And so that, you know, I was born right after it ended, basically.
That's my era.
But, so, you take us back to Vietnam and the challenge over the narrative of just exactly what was happening there and how, depending on which narrative you believed in to explain the facts, that almost entirely dictated your point of view of the war.
Of course, I've heard it said the exact opposite, that there really was a country in the south that wanted to be free of the evil commies, and they were overmatched and they needed our help.
So, anyway, take it from there.
That's what I thought.
I had the same kind of experience that you did.
It was a friend of mine.
I was in college at the time, and he said, no, it's a civil war.
It took me a little while to figure out that he was right, and it took Americans a few years to figure out that, yes, it was a civil war there.
And the point I'm making in this article is that now we're looking at another civil war.
The Islamic State is one part of a huge civil war that really is running through the whole world of Islam.
In Islam tradition, they call it Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam.
That means all the lands where Muslims dominate, where Muslims live.
And there are many, many different factions fighting with each other.
It's not like Vietnam, where there are only really two factions.
You've got all these factions fighting with each other.
My main point is that the Islamic State is not really at war with us, with the United States.
They haven't declared war on us.
They certainly aren't going to attack us.
And President Obama understands that.
They're involved in a Muslim civil war, and just as we learned painfully that we should stay out of foreign civil wars during the Vietnam era, we've got to learn that lesson all over again now, that we're looking at a civil war that we're involved in now, over there in Syria, in Iraq, who knows where else more secretly, in Yemen certainly, and we ought to stay out, because we just make things worse when we get involved in foreign or civil wars.
That's why it's important to look back at what happened in Vietnam, because it's a real lesson for today.
All right, now, so go back to Vietnam then again, and the difference, because it even took, and I've known this forever, but it still took, I think maybe it was Noam Chomsky or somebody else just had to hit me in the head with a hammer to get me to finally really see it as, no, the U.S. invaded Vietnam.
They set up a puppet government to quote-unquote pretend to invite us, and that was it.
They were trying to conquer the south of the country and keep the north out of it, and it was a pretension that they were there really helping any real side stay independent from the north.
We created an artificial nation called South Vietnam.
It never really existed, but sure, you know, people, there's a saying in the advertising industry, you got to hear something seven times before it sticks in your head.
I think in politics, sometimes it's 70 times, and that's why people like you and me got to keep saying these things over and over and over again.
You know, that's what we were born for, is to do that, but eventually people do get the message, and actually people have been writing about the Islamic State really being, waging a civil war against other Muslims, but the peace movement has not yet picked up that story.
See, most of the time when people write about that, I did the research here, they say, well, we ought to pick one side in this war and make that, you know, support that side, whether it's the Shiites or the Sunnis or the modernizers or the liberals or whatever, and my point is no, that as soon as we start picking sides and sending our troops to support one side in a foreign civil war, the history shows we're just going to make things worse, we're going to get, Americans are going to die, but even worse, I think, lots more foreigners are going to die because we intervene, and we got no plan for victory, we got no end game here, we don't know where it leads to except that it's bound to make things worse, and we just got to keep saying that over and over again, and eventually people begin to understand it.
Well, it's funny, because we just finished talking with Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis of the U.S. Army about how that's exactly the case in Afghanistan right now, is everyone that we helped now and added all these guns and dollars to the situation has distorted the amounts of power that these different factions have, and now it's going to take a lot of patience for it to all sift out, you know?
I finished writing this piece a few days ago, it was posted just yesterday, and then I think it was just yesterday, in other words, after the piece was written, New York Times read an article that now the Islamic State is starting to gain support in Afghanistan.
So this Muslim civil war, which we know is going on in the Islamic State, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, Libya, as far away as Indonesia, it's now spreading to Afghanistan.
And so this is just way beyond our ability to control it.
You know, you go back to Vietnam or you look today, so much of American policy and the mainstream pundit, it's based on the fantasy that we Americans have so much power that we can control what's going on all over the world.
You know, the term they like to use is order and stability, right?
We're going to bring order and stability, and we're always telling those people how they should behave to be more orderly.
Well, it's always a fantasy.
And every time we try to act on that fantasy, we just create more chaos.
And it's been going on in Afghanistan for years, and it's probably just going to get worse.
Yeah, well, now, so go back to, you kind of mentioned there quickly, the different aspects of this civil war.
Like you said, in Vietnam, it actually was much simpler with the communists in the north, with their partisans in the south, and the American puppet government there.
A little bit of a Catholic-Buddhist split between the sock puppets and everybody else.
In Vietnam, we were dealing with a relatively tiny area.
We were dealing with, oh, I don't know, a few tens of millions of people.
Here, we're dealing with the entire Muslim world.
And what they call Dar al-Islam, which is over a billion people.
But it's not just Sunni versus Shiites, as you say in this article.
Sunni versus Shiites is just one piece of it, because you have Sunni modernizers and Shiite modernizers, Sunni traditionalists and Shiite traditionalists.
And then even within one group, let's say the Sunni traditionalists, the very conservative Sunnis, you've got the Islamic State, you've got al-Qaeda, the two of them against each other.
Then you've got Saudi Arabia, which in many ways in terms of their government, their values is very similar to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but fighting against those.
I mean, you start listing out all the different political forces there, and it's going to take you your full half hour here just to list them all out.
Well, but yeah, no, that's part of the fun of it.
I mean, at least until the music is done playing and we have to take this break, too.
You mentioned the Sunni Kurds are allied with the Iraqi Shia, who are allied.
And this is where it really gets to it, who are allied with Iran, with the government in Tehran, who's at a proxy war with the government in Riyadh, which has a lot more to do with what's going on overall than Sunni versus Shia, really.
It's power and influence that they're fighting over.
But now hold it, because the music is playing.
We've got to take this break.
But when we get back, more about this great article by Ira Chernus, with Ira Chernus.
It's at Antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name here, the Peace Movement's War Story.
We're going to get back to that aspect of it, too.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
It's my show, The Scott Wharton Show.
I'm very happy to be talking again with Ira Chernus.
And he's written this piece for TomDispatch.com and AntiWar.com.
I really hope you'll read it.
It's really insightful, man, and it's really important.
And now the thing of it is, Ira, is actually we do have lots of time.
We've still got, like, ten minutes.
And I think it's really important for illustrating the real point that you're getting to about the narrative, which we can get to here in a few.
But the thing about all of the various different aspects of basically the entire breakdown of the previous order in the Middle East and how very complicated it is, because I think that really is a great part of the narrative, too, that you could end with and you tell me where we're supposed to tie this all up neat and clean.
Yeah, I want to say it's not just the Middle East.
We're talking about Muslims around the world.
And even here in the United States, of course, there's some tension.
I mean, look, there's a tiny, tiny, tiny number of Muslims here in the United States who have any interest in supporting the Islamic State.
The problem is that the Islamic State thinks that by turning Americans, non-Muslim Americans, against them, that they can recruit more Muslims here in the U.S.
But they're not doing very well, let's face it.
They're getting hardly any recruits here in the U.S.
But what they want to do is drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest of us here in the U.S.
That's why they would like to provoke attacks, like the one in San Bernardino.
They're not about attacking us directly.
It's a recruiting device.
I mean, it's kind of perverse.
I'm certainly not in favor of it.
But I think it's really important to understand it, that they're trying to use our fear as a tool so that they can recruit more Muslims to their side, the Islamic State side, in this Muslim civil war.
We're just pawns.
We're just bystanders.
We're not the target, really, of their goal or their strategy.
They're using us.
The tragedy is that it's working to some extent, that they're creating this fear, and they're creating this anti-Muslim backlash, which is exactly what they want to do.
And so every time that we Americans say, oh, we've got to spend more money, as I see the Pentagon wants to do now, to fight against the Islamic State, we're giving them exactly what they want.
We're helping them, really, even though we think we're fighting them.
The only way we can really help ourselves is to stop getting involved in that civil war at all, bring our troops home, bring our bombers home, and take care of business at home.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what's funny about all this, to me anyway, is the counterfactual, and I guess especially just because the coincidence of it all beginning around the millennium and everything and the symbolism of just the entire 21st century and how different things could have been.
And, you know, I'm sure this probably isn't exactly where you're coming from, Ira, but from my view it's always been would have Harry Brown, the libertarian, had won in 2000 instead of Bush, and probably 9-11 wouldn't have happened at all.
But I know what he would have done in response, because he told me, is that he would...
I don't know about whether the Green Party had won in 2000, but...
Yeah, same difference.
But, you know, and Harry Brown told me himself, what he would have done was he would have authorized the most limited mark and reprisal mission to kill bin Laden or capture bin Laden and put him on trial.
And then he would have given his Statue of Liberty speech to the world all day every day from now on while he dismantled NATO, brought the troops home from their empire bases around the world, and abolished the empire, but he would have verbally beat planet Earth over the head with the Scottish Enlightenment every day for eight years.
And he just would have been telling them that, you know, listen, the future is freedom.
And meant it, right?
Not in a Paul Wolfowitz way where he's going to kill you all in the name of it, but no, really, and demonstrate it.
This is what it's like to have a country with a Bill of Rights and really go with it, and, you know, really abide by it.
And then this is what they've done instead, is turn the entire Middle East in a...
As Michael Shoyer put it, I'm sorry I'm going on so long, but as Michael Shoyer put it, that they are completing the radicalization of the Muslim world that Osama bin Laden had been utterly failing to accomplish himself.
The USA did it all for him.
This was Osama bin Laden's original strategy, was to antagonize the United States and NATO into attacking and to mobilizing ourselves around this narrative of, oh, Al-Qaeda is the great enemy.
That's exactly what Al-Qaeda wanted, and now the Islamic State is doing the same thing.
But I don't think we have to dwell so much on the mistakes of the past.
I think what we've got to think about is how much better we can do in the future.
And one of the points I'm making in this article is that the peace movement has not been very successful in recent years, and I think that's because the peace movement spends all its time criticizing what the government is doing, what the mainstream media are doing.
The peace movement is not offering its own story, its own constructive view of what's going on, and that's why I think that this narrative of the Muslim civil war, saying this is a Muslim civil war, they're not out to get us, they're out to get each other, that's something that the peace movement can contribute to the overall conversation in this country.
And I think it could be a way that the peace movement can rebuild itself.
Every movement needs a strong, positive narrative to describe from its own point of view what's going on.
The peace movement hasn't been doing that lately, and I think it's time to start.
That's a good thing to say, that this is a place where libertarians like yourself and more left-leaning people like me, we can reach across the aisle and work together on this issue.
And then as you were trying to teach us here before about Vietnam, this is a big part of what changed the support for the Vietnam War was the changing of the narrative and the coming around, just like happened to you personally, the coming around of the American people seeing the war different rather than we're sticking up for this group or whatever.
One of the things I learned when I switched my story of the Vietnam War is that your political views or the policies you support depend on the story that you tell, because the story is the way you describe the world.
And that's what determines how you're going to act in the world, is the way you describe the world, the way you interpret the world.
And that's always been a crucial role for the peace movement and peace activists, is to help Americans see the world differently, talk about the world differently.
And in this particular case, that's why I keep coming back to this, if we describe what the Islamic State is about, is that they're one faction in this very complicated Muslim civil war, as soon as you see it that way, everything looks different.
And then you realize how self-defeating our military involvement over there is.
Well, and of course, you know, yeah, if you want, if supposedly like the war party has it, that the enemy is, you know, fundamentalist and radicalist Islam itself, well, the number one best way to marginalize them is to create real conditions of peace and stability by butting out, letting these situations, as bad as they are, even in some cases, get solved as quickly as possible, so that people aren't so desperate that all they have left is Allah and a suicide belt.
At the very least, it's the way to keep the American people safe.
And I think, you know, the bottom line here is that, as you know, what most Americans want is just to save American lives.
It's a sad thing, and it is, but most Americans don't care as much about lives of people in other countries.
Our main goal as a people, our political goal, is to save American lives.
And the longer we're fighting over there, the more, the easier it's going to be for them to radicalize tiny numbers of Muslims here, and you're going to see more of these San Bernardinos.
If we want to protect American lives, the best thing we can do is to butt out of their civil war, to say it's a tragedy, but it's not our job to solve all the evils of the world.
We're not Superman flying around, fixing or righting all the wrongs in the world.
I think most Americans believe that it's our job to keep Americans safe, and that's what the peace movement has really been best at, is helping Americans understand the world in a way that protects American lives.
Yeah.
Well, and it's unfortunate, too, that we have to, probably, you're right, spin it in such a selfish way, and never mind the fact that it's American foreign policy that's made things as horrible as it is, under Bush and under Obama, that have just escalated and escalated so many of these different civil wars that you talk about here.
But, really, you're right.
I mean, appealing to their basic selfishness is probably the best hope we've got, as far as that goes.
It's going to be practical about it.
I would love to see us care more about lives all over the world in a genuinely humanitarian way.
But this idea of humanitarian bomb dropping and humanitarian drones, it's just a total contradiction.
So, if the best we can do is to just focus on protecting American lives, well, maybe right now that's the best we can do.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm bitterly accepting, I guess, the lessons from the political campaigns that slogans and impressions and analogies and metaphors and parables and stuff, that's the best you could ever do.
You can't teach nobody nothing.
They don't want to learn things.
And that maybe if you just give them the impression, like you're saying, it's somebody else's fight, they could understand that.
People do learn things, and you can't take the slogans and the metaphors and the stories, I would say the myths, out of politics.
That's always going to be a part of politics.
And the smart thing is to use those tools effectively.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your article, and I really appreciate your time again on the show, Ira.
Thanks.
OK.
Always nice talking to you.
Thanks a lot.
All right, y'all.
That is Ira Chernis.
And, again, he is a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Nice place, man.
And he's the author of the online Mythic America essays.
His blog is MythicAmerica.us.
He's at TomDispatch.com and AntiWar.com with this one, The Peace Movement's War Story.
Back in one sec with Jon Pfeffer.
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