06/18/15 – Andrew Bacevich – The Scott Horton Show

Yeah, check it out.
Y'all want to win a free vacation to the jungles of Costa Rica this summer and help support the Scott Horton Show?
You can.
Joshua Hughes, peace activist and permaculturalist, runs Verde Energia Pacifica, an intentional community in the mountains of Llanes de Periscal, Costa Rica, and he's offered a raffle off a week's stay to listeners of this show.
Airfare is on you, but transportation to and from the airport, as well as a seven-day stay for you and a guest in your own private house with three meals a day is covered.
You can learn and practice some skills, or just go for a swim in the river, pool, or waterfall, walk jungle trails, enjoy the views, do yoga or dance in the studio, make art, play music, check out a local soccer game, or simply relax in a hammock by the river and read.
Raffle tickets are just $50.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash raffle for details, and anyone who enters will get half off on any future stay down there. scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Okay guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
On the line I've got Andrew J. Bacevich, writing again at tomdispatch.com.
He's the author of a great many books, very important ones, The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, and the latest is Breach of Trust.
And, geez, I think the last I knew, professor at Boston College.
Is that still right, Andrew?
Welcome back.
No, I was at Boston University and I retired from teaching.
Oh, okay.
I didn't realize.
Well, congratulations on your retirement then.
Thank you.
I'm glad you're still writing.
So here, The Theology of American National Security.
You're very frustrating to me, I think, or I get very frustrated reading what you write because I think that maybe you're right, that the people that run American foreign policy are actually, my words, a bunch of boobs who really have no idea what they're doing and don't care that much about knowing what they're doing.
They have their own little pet agendas, mostly concerning their own advancement, etc.
And their view of Middle Eastern foreign policy, for example, in this case, is just as absolutely paper thin as you describe it in this article.
I mean, could that really be true?
That that policy is based on such superficial kind of platitudes, the kind of thing, the slogans that they would tell the rubes are actually the things that they believe?
Well, I wouldn't go as far as you do.
I mean, by many measures, the people who make policy or whose views on policy get taken seriously in in the mainstream are intelligent.
They are seasoned.
They are wily operators who understand the way Washington works.
My gripe with them is that they have a very limited capability to examine some of the first-order assumptions that provide the basis for policy.
And to my mind, the direction of events in Iraq today offers a prime illustration of that.
The piece you refer to, in the piece you refer to, I talk about a TV show I was on a week ago with some people with fancy credentials in which we were asked to talk about ISIS and what to do about ISIS.
I found myself outnumbered three to one by people who basically said, in effect, ISIS is a big problem for the United States of America and we need to dive back into Iraq and try harder.
The conversation showed, to my mind, a remarkable absence of any awareness of the fact that, guess what?
We've been in Iraq trying to sort the place out for a very long time now.
We have expended very considerable resources.
We have next to nothing to show for our efforts.
So the problem, it seems to me, is smart people who don't have the wit, the creativity, the guts to question their own assumptions.
Well, it seems oftentimes, not just with power, but oftentimes intelligence is a curse to people because they are so smart that they think they're so smart and they don't recognize that, hey, there are real limits on what one white person in the middle of North America can know about what to do with the Middle East, Well, and I mean, what you just summarized, I think, is the imperial mindset, the conviction that somehow we here are smart enough to be able to understand others and to dictate the course of events on the other side of the world.
Imperial powers have always adhered to that point of view, and as long as you've got enough power available, whatever your level of ignorance, you can get away at least partly with pursuing your ambitions.
I think an element of the problem here is that we don't possess the power, as much power as the architects of US policy seem to imagine, and that's a charge I would put against Democrats as much as I would put against Republicans.
Well, and it's true, too, like you say, that, hey, these are very capable people who graduate from our very best schools and do very well on their IQ tests and this kind of thing.
They're not completely ignorant, but they have a lot of incentive to ignore certain things, too, where, you know, probably if you waterboarded Panetta and asked him whether we'd have ISIS if we hadn't done the invasion of Iraq and then turned around and supported the resistance from the Iraq War in their rebellion in Syria, whether we wouldn't have got into this mess, he'd admit that that's true.
He just likes to leave that out of his answers most of the time because it doesn't serve him well, but, you know, he's no fool, right, or maybe isn't in some ways, but all these people recognize the things, what you're saying about what got us into this mess, it just doesn't serve their purpose well to get into that right now.
Yeah, I think you make a very good point, that because they are basically intelligent and well-informed people, there are truths that, if they're confronted with, they will acknowledge, but they are skillful enough simply to dodge the issue.
So this television conversation that I participated in was very narrowly focused on right now and, to my mind, rather carefully avoided any discussion of the events leading up to the here and now, even though those events would, I think, illuminate the predicament that we find ourselves in far more than just talking about, you know, what happened the day before yesterday.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, conversations on this show, and I think we're going to get into a bit more of this in the next segment.
When you really go through who all is on whose side in this thing, a lot of times reasonable people will decide that maybe throwing up our hands and just backing off instead of trying to choose winners and losers in this would be the best way to go.
Yeah, perhaps I disagree with you here because, and indeed, going back to this TV interview, Panetta in particular basically was making the point that either we got to dive back into Iraq or the only alternative is throwing up our hands.
And I think that that notion, which is constantly peddled by people in Washington who are committed to what they call American global leadership, this notion that there is no alternative, I think betrays an absence of creativity.
And that may well be the central failing of American statecraft right now, that there is no ability to identify that third or fourth or fifth option.
We're stuck with the only two, one of which is America the indispensable nation that has to do everything, and the other one ostensibly an isolationist America that turns its back on the world.
Now I'm not going to tell you that options three, four, and five are necessarily easy to devise or without risk, without their own downside, but I do think options three, four, and five exist.
In the specific case of Iraq today, my own notion is that the better course for the United States is to try to engage other countries in the region that have an interest in stopping ISIS, to examine the possibility of these other countries being able to do a more effective job of dealing with ISIS than we've been able to do.
And quite frankly, whether people in Washington like it or not, one of those countries that might be better at dealing with ISIS is Iran.
Right now, I'm sorry, I got to interrupt you here and take this break.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Andrew Bacevich.
He's writing at TomDispatch.com, Washington in Wonderland.
Hey, Al Scott here.
If you're like me, you need coffee, lots of it.
You probably prefer it.
Tastes good, too.
Well, let me tell you about Darren's Coffee, company at Darren'sCoffee.com.
Darren Marion is a natural entrepreneur who decided to leave his corporate job and strike out on his own, making great coffee.
And Darren's Coffee is now delivering right to your door.
Darren gets his beans direct from farmers around the world, all specialty, premium grade with no filler.
Hey, the man just wants everyone to have a chance to taste this great coffee.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Use promo code Scott and you get free shipping.
Darren'sCoffee.com.
Hey, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Talking again with Andrew J. Bacevich, author of a great many books, including The New American Militarism and the latest is Breach of Trust.
And here he is at TomDispatch.com, Washington in Wonderland.
It'll be running on Antiwar.com for you tomorrow under Tom Englehart's name there.
And so we started off with, you know, a criticism of kind of the very thin discussion as it's held by our national security professionals and in the media about what the situation is in Iraq and how important it is that we talk about the past as context so we can understand what the situation is now instead of maybe just as his interlocutors were doing on PBS the other night, just assuming that America must go put on our Superman uniform and go save the day when, you know, the historical facts might muddy that up a little bit.
And I understand what you're saying, Andrew, about how, oh, yeah, just be an isolationist then is sort of kind of the argument ad absurdum and the, you know, the peace position as pretty much just forget it, kind of out of the question.
And it's sort of the it's the straw man argument of the Lindsey Graham's of the world where, you know, even Ron Paul wasn't an isolationist.
He still wanted world trade and global engagement and diplomacy, just an end to the wars.
Right.
There are no real isolationists.
Even at the American Conservative magazine, there aren't isolationists.
But it does make kind of a great straw man.
But then.
So as you're saying, options one and two are full scale invasion or just carpet bomb them from now on again, you know, like the last 25 years and and options three, four and five are excluded.
And you're saying that you would like to see America use diplomacy to coordinate states in the region to fight the Islamic State for us, basically, is I think where we're at at the break.
Is that correct?
To a degree.
Yes, diplomacy, but diplomacy for a purpose.
And to my mind, the purpose ought to be to nudge countries in that region of the world to take responsibility for their own affairs, and to solve their own problems.
Let me emphasize the problems are huge.
You know, cleavages between Shia and Sunni between Persia and Arab countries, not to mention the Israeli Arab conflict.
The problems are massive.
And were it were it to be the case that the United States over the past 30 4050 years, had demonstrated a capacity to manage that part of the world to solve the problems to make things better, to bring to bring peace and prosperity to all that I would favor it.
But it seems to me that the evidence of the results of our interventionism, and in particular, our military interventionism point in the other direction.
We aren't making things better, we're making things worse.
That's the bottom line.
And and we're making things worse at great cost to ourselves.
Not simply in the number of American soldiers who've been killed, wounded, had their lives unalterably affected, but the trillions, literally trillions of dollars that we have spent.
So it seems patently obvious to me that there really is a need to ask those first order questions about what the hell we're trying to do and how we're going to do it.
And that's where finding options three, four and five qualifies as an urgent priority to my mind.
And the unwillingness of people like those I was on the program with to get beyond the alternatives of global leadership on the one hand versus isolationism on the other is pretty discouraging.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm discouraged because it's all such glittering generalities, you know, right now, and I don't mean you, I mean, the the narrative in the media and in the government, you know, nowadays, they have to talk about sorta, they don't really call it this, but they they do kind of identify southern Shiastan versus Sunni stand now under the control of the Islamic State, and that kind of thing.
But that's really brand new just in the last year, because at this point, they can't deny the civil war they denied for so long.
And they never did back in 2004, five and six, explain to the American people that we've taken the side of these political factions representing the Shiite majority against the Sunnis, and they're fighting, and here's why they're fighting, and etc, etc.
And so, you know, the narrative then was just it's America's on the side of the Iraqi people trying to defend them from the terrorists who are trying to undo all the freedom that we're giving them or whatever.
But meanwhile, what they were really doing was they were fighting for the most Iran tied factions, the Supreme Islamic Council and the DAWA party, and their agenda always was to break Iraq up to use America to steal Baghdad for them, which they did.
And that was what really changed in the Iraq war was the border of Shia stand now includes the capital city.
And then to, to go ahead and break Iraq up because they didn't care anyway, they don't care about the Sykes-Picot borders anymore than the the caliph does.
And so that's why they left their retreated their positions in Ramadi and in Mosul is because that's alien enemy territory.
And so but meanwhile, as in your discussion that you had with these guys, Panetta and the rest of these guys, Flournoy, they're saying, well, we have to, the government in Baghdad has to work this out politically, to hold the Iraqi state together when I mean, that story has been over since 2006, really, and certainly it's been over for a year now.
I mean, the declaration of the caliphate was the ultimate declaration of independence of Iraqi Sunni stand, and they're never going to be ruled by Baghdad again.
And for Flournoy to pretend like that and Obama to pretend like that's the policy is to hold Iraq together and somehow reintegrate Iraqi Sunni stand to break it off from the Islamic State in Syria and to reintegrate it with the rest of the old Iraqi state is complete pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
And so because they won't talk about who's who and what America did before and why, we're talking about a policy where, you know, they could be talking about their plan to reunite the Soviet Union, for crying out loud, for as preposterous as it is at this point.
Am I wrong about that?
No, I think, I mean, you're more right than wrong, that's for sure.
And it goes back to this insistence upon narrowing the frame of discussion.
You know, I think you can make a little bit of, maybe it's a stretch, but make a comparison with the Vietnam War and the critics of the Vietnam War, of whom I was not one.
I mean, I served in the Vietnam War, but the critics of the Vietnam War, if you recall, part of their argument that the Vietnam War was unnecessary and misgotten was in pointing out that the concept of monolithic communism simply didn't exist.
You had to buy the notion of monolithic communism to believe that the Vietnam War was worth fighting, because that concept of monolithic communism said that the stakes in Vietnam went far beyond Vietnam itself.
That to lose Vietnam to the North meant that communism, broadly defined, had won a victory, and therefore, if you took that point of view, we had to fight on.
But you could only make that claim by focusing narrowly on the events of Vietnam itself and ignoring facts like the Sino-Soviet split, which had already occurred before the first American combat soldier showed up in Vietnam.
And I think we're in a similar situation right now, that an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities, some of which you touched on, in Iraq and in that part of the world, instead to focus on ISIS as the problem of the day, makes it impossible to have an intelligent and informed conversation about the situation and about what plausible response the United States can make to the situation.
Well, and again, you know, part of my way overly long rant there was about America backing the most Iranian-controlled factions, and then that's basically what's left of the Shiite fighting forces are all the Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
And so far, in fact, there's a brand new thing just out today that I was reading this morning about more of these small towns being liberated from the Islamic State, but then the Shiite militias aren't letting the Sunnis come home.
They're cleansing and holding on to these territories as they kick the Sunnis out of them, you know, the population along with the Islamic State.
And so, I mean, that raises real questions about what happens if we do get Iran to liberate Mosul, Fallujah, if we ever could get them to invade that strongly, then what's going to happen?
We're just setting the stage for that much worse crisis.
The idea is not that Iran is going to do the bidding of the United States.
I mean, my point of view would be, and this, I think, connects to what you just said a minute ago, is that one of the perhaps we should have anticipated, but one of the unanticipated consequences of breaking Iraq in 2003 was to provide an opening for Iran to reassert itself as a Persian Gulf power.
And one can say, oh, isn't that unfortunate?
But it's a reality.
And it's a reality that we have to deal with and to try to deal with it in a way that both advances our interests and perhaps doesn't do undue further harm to the people who live in that region.
So I'm not arguing that somehow Iran is an American ally or that we should make them our friend.
I am arguing that they are part of the situation.
We made them part of the situation.
And so the challenge is to figure out how to make them part of a solution rather than allow things to continue to go downhill.
And that requires creative thinking.
It doesn't require sending another 450 American trainers and advisors to try to put together an Iraqi army that basically never existed in the first place.
And as you said in your great article here, as you illustrate so well, sending more weapons to fight guys who are fighting us with all the weapons that we gave them last time.
Exactly, exactly right.
We are arming both sides.
That's become our policy.
American foreign policy, you know, directly out of a Bill Hicks joke, you know, throwing the gun at the sheep herders feet.
Pick up the gun.
Daria.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time, Andrew.
It's great to talk to you again.
Appreciate it.
You bet.
OK, bye bye.
All right, so that is Andrew J.
Bacevich.
He writes books about American militarism.
And here he is at Tom Dispatch dot com.
This one is called Washington in Wonderland.
Down the Iraqi rabbit hole again.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF dot org slash subscribe.
Since nineteen eighty nine, FFF has been pushing an uncompromising moral and economic case for peace, individual liberty and free markets.
Sign up now for the Future Freedom featuring founder and president Jacob Hornberger, as well as Sheldon Richmond, James Bovard, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy and many more.
It's just twenty five dollars a year for the print edition, 15 per year to read it online.
That's FFF dot org slash subscribe and Tom Scott sent you.
You hate government.
One of them libertarian types.
Maybe you just can't stand the president.
Gun grabbers are warmongers.
Me, too.
That's why I invented Liberty Stickers dot com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them.
But still, if you're driving around, I want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are.
There's only one place to go.
Liberty Stickers dot com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right.
Libertarian empire.
Police state founders quote central banking.
Yes.
Bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And well, everything that matters.
Liberty Stickers dot com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
This part of the Scott Horton show is sponsored by Audible dot com.
And right now, if you go to Audible trial dot com slash Scott Horton show, you can get your first audio book for free.
Of course, I'm recommending Michael Swanson's book, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
Maybe you've already bought The War State and paperback, but you just can't find the time to read it.
Well, now you can listen while you're out marching around.
Get the free audio book of The War State by Michael Swanson, produced by Listen and Think Audio at Audible trial dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Audible dot com.