05/07/15 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

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We go to Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute and Forbes magazine, forbes.com.
Sailing and sinking, the RMS Lusitania, a century of lying America into war.
Man, Doug, you get away with writing some pretty brave stuff in Forbes.
I sure like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, man?
Doing okay.
How about yourself?
Real good.
So it's 100 years ago today, is that right?
That's it.
All right, tell them the story.
What happened?
Down it went.
Down it went, and how many souls aboard?
Well, about 1,200 died.
I think 128 were American, mostly British, but a smattering of others.
But, of course, what the U.S. cares about mostly is its own.
Of course.
That's what created the controversy in the U.S.
All right, so tell us the story and assume that some people really don't know anything about World War I for a minute.
Well, yeah, World War I gets going.
You have two competing imperial blocs, and neither of which, frankly, had a lot to say for itself.
And the U.S. was officially neutral, and no surprise, the Brits used their navy and wanted to starve the Germans into submission.
The Germans don't have a big navy.
They rely on U-boats or submarines.
And it's a new form of warfare, and the British basically played games where if you surfaced a sub to see if there were innocent people on board, they'll ram the sub or shoot at it if they had guns on.
A lot of these liners were reserve cruisers.
So the Germans simply said, fine, we just sink them.
Down they go.
And Lusitania was a very famous one that went down in May of 1915.
It was a passenger liner, but they had millions of cartridges on board and probably other explosives which weren't declared.
So what you do is you have a ship of a belligerent power traveling through a war zone filled with munitions.
And no surprise, the Germans sunk it.
And Wilson in the U.S. said, you can't do that.
Even one American on board, you have to let it sail through.
So it became one of the causes for war when the U.S. got involved a couple of years later, the whole question about U-boats and whether Americans should be exempt from the shooting.
And now I think you write in the article that all the passengers knew, that the way I learned it was all their warnings were only in the papers in the Midwest, nowhere near the dock, but that all the local papers had the ad warning them not to get on the board were pulled.
Is that right?
You can see, actually you can go back historically and find there's a cunard line ad for the Lusitania leaving on May 1st and underneath is the German warning.
And of course, if you're a smart person, you realize there's a war going on.
There were passengers who asked the British, who were a little nervous about this, they said, oh, don't worry, the ship can outrun the U-boats.
Well, that's true, except if the U-boat's already there, you can't outrun it.
But there were passengers who were aware of it and were nervous about it.
I mean, this was commonly understood, ships were being sunk, so the notion you could kind of book passage on a British ship and assume you could just float across the Atlantic and not worry about anything was crazy.
But it was no secret that it was full of arms at the time as well?
Well, actually, the manifest did not hide the fact it had the cartridges on.
Now, there was a lot of supposition it had other stuff that was not declared, but that was actually openly declared, so that was known.
Now, a passenger might not know that.
That is, if you're booking passage, you're probably not asking what else is going in the hold, but in terms of the official manifest that was available kind of through the government channels, it was on it.
All right.
Now, so what about the British Navy?
I mean, you don't seem very shy about pointing your finger at Winston Churchill here.
Well, this is one of those where, I mean, good old Winston.
I mean, if I was the first Lord of the Admiralty, my job would be to get America in on America's side.
I mean, I'd look at it on Britain's side.
You know, what he was doing was in Britain's interest.
I mean, if you were at war, you'd love to get the big neutral power in.
I mean, a week beforehand he wrote to the head of the Board of Trade saying it's important to draw neutral shipping to our shores in an attempt to try to embroil America with Germany.
And the Royal Navy, I mean, had destroyers nearby.
They were just a few miles off of Ireland, so it was actually approaching the British Isles.
They knew you boats were in the vicinity.
They had destroyers close by.
They didn't send anything out.
Now, that doesn't mean they wanted it to sink, but at the very least they were pretty careless.
You know, if they actually cared about safeguarding a ship like this, they made no effort to do so.
All right.
And then so how badly did they exploit it?
I guess when I learned about this when I was a kid, I was thinking that this was what led to the declaration of war.
I didn't really realize, oh, no, it was still another couple of years before they finally got us into the war.
But just how bad was this exploited by the Democrats at the time?
Well, the British were really upset because they thought this should bring us in.
I mean, they were quite happy.
Colonel House, who was Woodrow Wilson's kind of close confidant, was in London at the time, and they were all complaining, you know, why doesn't this bring you in?
But, oh, yeah, they had a brilliant propaganda operation in the United States.
I mean, it was quite extraordinary.
I mean, they were headquartered there.
They put out lots of lies, atrocities, stories.
They had very good connections, especially with the East Coast and financial centers.
You think House was in on it?
Very much.
They used it in Britain as well.
I have actually a poster from the war that's British that's wonderfully done.
I mean, it shows the ocean and heads bobbing in the ocean.
It has Britannia stepping across the ocean with a sword saying, pick up the sword of justice.
I mean, they were brilliant in terms of knowing how to play to emotions.
So they used it for all they could.
You think House was in on it, the luring of the Lusitania into dangerous waters and such?
Oh, I tend not to be a conspiracy kind of guy.
I mean, I look at this thinking, you know, this was fairly normal passage.
And I think the kind of the Churchill view is the more of this stuff we get coming, the more likely something is to get sunk and that will help us.
It wasn't let's bring in a particular ship and boy, we can get it sunk.
I mean, I think this is one they just kind of thought nature would take its course.
Quite callous, not quite the same as plotting it, but still pretty callous.
I see what you mean.
I can't help myself when it comes to House, though.
Well, you know, he and Woodrow Wilson are quite scummy.
I mean, Woodrow Wilson, I think, is perhaps the worst president we've ever had in so many ways.
So certainly House plays a role in that.
But I think that, again, he's one he thought, oh, yes, we should go to war over something like this.
But I don't think that he was actively kind of plotting.
I don't think the British really trusted him.
I mean, they would look at him as somebody who might be an ally.
But, you know, would you trust Colonel House?
I mean, I wouldn't.
Yeah, no, I don't know how anybody could, even Wilson.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
And now so tell us about the Zimmerman telegram then.
Oh, yeah, the Zimmerman telegram, I mean, got everyone all upset.
I mean, the Germans, I mean, you know, the tragedy here, I mean, all the sides bear a lot of blame.
I mean, I'm no fan of the Kaiser and all of his crew.
I mean, these weren't very nice guys.
But they were just utterly stupid when it came to diplomacy.
So as you're getting closer to what it looks like war might be coming, what the Germans did is quite sensible in the sense they approached the Mexicans.
They kind of sent a famous telegram to their ambassador and kind of here's the potential deal.
If we end up at war with America, Mexico should join us.
And then if we all win, Mexico gets the territory back that the U.S. stole back in the 1840s.
I mean, the U.S. took roughly half of Mexico.
I mean, California, Texas, I mean, a lot of the territory the Mexicans viewed as theirs and America grabbed it.
You know, so when it was released, I mean, it created a firestorm in the United States and it helped push popular opinion in 1970 towards war.
But the Germans were really just saying, look, I mean, if we end up at war with America, why shouldn't we find allies?
You know, America, if it comes to war with us, is going to join the other guys as allies.
So in that sense it was fairly standard politics.
But, boy, politically it was a really dumb thing to do.
Yeah, except that it didn't matter that that was completely laughable and ridiculous, that Germany way over there that can't even sail a boat out of their own harbor is going to somehow help Mexico take back the southwest of the United States.
And then the fact that Mexico had no, I mean, the Mexicans got waxed when they went to war before.
Mexico was in no better position to take on America in 1914.
Wilson himself had already invaded Mexico twice.
That's right.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, the point is all of it, so much of this stuff is symbolism.
But that was the proximate cause of spelling, though.
He took that and took it to Congress for the Declaration of War.
Oh, absolutely.
No, absolutely.
I mean, he understood how to, I mean, the stories of when he spoke to Congress, the congressman weeping, the audience just being moved by his rhetoric.
I mean, you look back and think how horrific this is.
But he was quite an orator at the time, so he knew how to play all this stuff.
The Zimmerman Telegram goes into that.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Doug Bandow from Forbes and Cato about the worst person who ever existed, Woodrow Wilson, and the horrible things that he did to everyone right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Doug Bandow from Forbes and Cato.
His article at Forbes is called Sailing and Sinking the RMS Lusitania, a Century of Lying America into War.
And so then this is the whole thing.
You know, I heard one time, I forgot who it was, somebody saying on the radio that it's so easy to tell the story of World War II to a little kid, never mind the Soviet Union, but there were some bad guys and the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists and us and the other good guys, the British and, you know, sometimes the French, teamed up to beat them for the good guys and democracy and freedom and all that kind of thing.
It's really hard to explain World War I to a little kid because there's not a simple cut and dry black and white narrative like us good, enemies bad, that kind of thing.
And the problem with that is, to me, is that World War I is the one that's packed full of so many lessons about, first of all, as Eric Margulies is always trying to harp on this show, about how humongous, horrifying, terrible wars can start accidentally.
They really can.
And don't go messing around because you could trip a wire that you're not even really, you know, thinking about.
But then also in all of just the decades of consequences that our so-called leaders have basically chased down the timeline ever since then, trying to correct the catastrophes left in their wake from last time.
And it seems like American entry and breaking stalemate in World War I was the real original sin of the 20th century.
Not even World War I itself, but American entry into it is what ruined the rest.
What do you think?
Well, I think, to me, that war really explains the rest.
World War II is the unfinished business of World War I.
In World War II, there were a couple of really, really horrific opponents, in a way that World War I just had a lot of idiots, in a sense.
Most of the folks who fought in World War I, these probably aren't people I'd want to sit down at dinner with, whether it be the Kaiser or the Tsar.
Nevertheless, these were not the kind of moral monsters of an Adolf Hitler.
And them going to war was tragic and stupid, but you could imagine the outcome of that being something more of a compromise than worked out.
The US is what completely unbalanced that.
And I think then that's what got us into World War II, is you have this utterly unbalanced outcome, and so much comes out of that.
Woodrow Wilson got into this not with any kind of a sense of rationality or reason, but it's this kind of megalomaniac, I'm going to reorder the world, I'm going to end war.
And you come up with, frankly, that kind of nutty stuff, and you just imagine how badly it's going to turn out, and that's exactly the way it turned out.
Yeah, it really was like the public choice theory or whatever, where he's running down the street in his cape, prancing and strutting and acting, basically.
Look at me, everyone.
Exactly.
I'm believing that if only I can redo all this stuff, everything will be wonderful.
And frankly, what that does is that encourages him to do the dumbest things.
And America had to get into the war for him to be able to do this.
He was never really this peacenik who was reluctant, oh, I don't want to get in.
I mean, this is a guy who understood his agenda required the U.S. being a combatant.
Yeah.
Even though he ran on the slogan, he kept us out of war.
Now, so what were the politics then in 1916?
Were people really buying that?
Jeez, at least he's not T.R. in them, right?
Well, that's what I mean.
The problem is what you had at that time was the great mass of Americans had absolutely no interest in this war.
You had a fairly small number of folks who were very much Anglophiles.
Look, if you were a bank that had lent money to Great Britain, you sure wanted it to win.
If you're one of the munitions makers who's supplying them and getting stuff on credit and whatnot, you want them to win.
The point is they had a fairly active and influential base of people who really wanted this.
But the broad mass of people had no interest.
So they really wanted a peace candidate.
I mean, the idea of getting involved in this lunacy overseas, you look and say, and for what?
You know, that for most Americans, I mean, there was no reason at all to get involved.
And then, you know, it's interesting because I think, you know, I learned even in government school, probably in junior high or something about the Treaty of Versailles and not so much about the territory stripped away, but at least about all the war reparations and how unfair it all seems, some of the hyperinflation maybe, that kind of thing.
And then I guess later on I learned about how the rise of the Soviet Union also had something to do with this, since even after the Tsar was overthrown, the interim government stayed in the war.
And if only they had gotten out of the war in time, they could have prevented the creation of the USSR and the coup by Lenin and Trotsky and all that.
But then what I never learned until much later, I guess, in context, was what this all meant in the Middle East since the Ottoman Empire was destroyed and the British and the French, but mostly the British got it all and all the chain of consequences that we're still dealing with from that.
Yeah, it's all the line drawing.
I mean, again, they had these empires that, you know, were not places we'd probably want to live, but which were not totalitarian horror shows that we saw so often after that.
Well, the Ottoman Empire was run, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, all these things fall apart.
And then, I mean, so the Brits go in and, I mean, the whole Sykes-Picot, you know, that you just draw lines, and the lines have nothing to do with tribes or with peoples or languages.
You just kind of draw them around and, you know, let's create Iraq, let's create Kuwait, let's put Syria here.
And then you just kind of put a center.
Who's going to be ruler?
Well, these are our friends.
Why don't we put the Hashemites here?
Well, I mean, this just set up, you know, potentially centuries of disaster.
I mean, we're dealing into the decades of creating instability of peoples.
I mean, Iraq is a country that would never be a country normally, but it was line drawing.
And World War I gave us that.
It gave us that in the Balkans as well.
And so you know what?
Let me ask you this.
You've been at this a long time.
What is the real American interest over there anyway?
Because, you know, I know there was a Cato study.
I presume you probably wrote it back in the mid-1990s saying – and that was way before the terror war, right?
That was just back then as horrible as it already was – saying we spend, I forgot how many times, more, quote-unquote, securing Middle Eastern oil than we spend on Middle Eastern oil.
It's completely ridiculous.
It's certainly not in America's national interest.
David Anderson in Naval Postgraduate School has done some fabulous writing on this.
I mean, he writes for anti-war.
He's a wonderful, wonderful guy.
And he's looked at this.
I mean, the point is the international marketplace for energy, even bad guys in control of oil want to sell it.
I mean, the royals in Saudi Arabia wouldn't survive a day if they didn't have money to hand out.
So the point is the notion that the oil would cease if we weren't over there is silly.
And especially today, I mean, you're having discoveries all over.
I mean, U.S. with shale oil and stuff.
I mean, there's certainly a sense in which you prefer that region not to be aflame.
The Suez Canal, there is transit of some stuff beyond oil.
But the notion that somehow the entire world is kind of our future is determined by the Middle East, it's just not true.
And it's always been unstable.
I mean, we've had sales and commerce going on despite the fact it's been unstable.
So the notion that we have to be over there and can stabilize it, I mean, we just make it even less stable.
We have new wars and bombings and intervention.
I mean, backing the Saudis in Yemen, I mean, this is crazy stuff.
Yeah, well, especially the latter there.
So how widespread is the sort of little bit of kind of the most minor form of acknowledgement of this problem in D.C. where people, do they at least say to each other that, you know, we are kind of bad at this at least even if they still pretend they mean well?
Or what is it?
Well, it's almost all partisan.
That is, you know, the guys we don't like, the guys in power obviously are bad at this.
But if we were in charge, everything would be wonderful.
Yeah, never mind a few years back when our guys made it this way.
No, I mean, all the Bush people blame Obama because Obama followed the Bush policy on withdrawing from Iraq.
So obviously everything is Obama's fault even though Bush is the guy who invaded.
I mean, they forget the invasion.
That kind of just disappears into distant history.
Oh, it's all Obama's fault.
You just kind of sit there and marvel at this.
You know, I mean, all these people wanted the Libya thing, and it's a disaster.
Oh, that was a long time ago, you know.
I mean, it's very, very – it's all partisan.
It's all the other guy.
Yeah.
Well, and now so – I mean, that's the whole thing of it, I guess.
We skipped ahead here to America inheriting the British Empire and the way we administer it now.
But I guess I just wonder whether you think we're within decades of the American establishment kind of overall snapping out of it and deciding to just give this up, at least dictating that part of the world's future.
No, I think what has to happen is the American people just have to indicate they're fed up.
That, you know, there has to be a point where, you know, we need candidates.
I mean, we have a bit of that with Rand Paul.
I mean, kind of a little back and forth.
I mean, there's, you know, Jim Webb.
I mean, there's a little bit there of people who are more, you know, skeptical.
We need a couple of very strong candidates who will put this at the forefront.
They won't hide it, and are going to lead against the others, and will point the finger and say it's the other folks who have created these problems.
Don't listen to them.
Finally, I mean, don't listen to a Bush or to a Clinton or to all these other folks.
You know, they've all been in favor of all of this stuff, Rubio, the whole lot of them.
Right.
Yeah, and I think, you know, as you often do, it's very important that people, you know, attack these policies from the right for how radical they truly are.
Exactly.
And really kind of outflank these crazies, who frankly mostly are so-called moderates in the center who are the most extreme.
Exactly.
Anyway, great work as always, Doug.
You're the best.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Hey, appreciate it.
Take care now.
All right, y'all, that's Doug Bandow.
He's at Forbes.com.
Read him on the Lusitania.
Today's the 100th anniversary.
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