08/09/12 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, Sheldon, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website where I keep all my interview archives.
More than 2,500 now, going back to 2003.
And quite a few with our friend Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation and SheldonRichman.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Thank you, Scott.
Great to be with you, as always.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
This latest piece, I think it's the latest one, in the Future Freedom Foundation commentary section here, fff.org, Obama-Romney, a reckless on Iran.
It begins, you will strain your eyes looking for a significant difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney's positions on Iran and the prospect of an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic.
Is that really true, or is one, or either of them worse than the other at all, or no?
Better?
It's really hard to say.
I mean, I really do think that Obama wouldn't want a war with Iran, not only before the election, but even after the election.
That's just the subjective hunch I have.
But as I also point out in the article, policy can sometimes lead to war, even if the policymaker himself doesn't really want it.
I mean, as I put it, there have been games of diplomatic chicken in the past that have led to wars that nobody really wanted.
So, you know, at the level of intentions, maybe he's a little different from Romney, because I think Romney may actually, along with Israel, want a war against Iran.
But that really doesn't matter, because intentions are so often irrelevant to policy.
They can be leading us to war, even if that's not their intention.
Well, you know, it's really the same story as with the occupied territories, where this guy came in talking about, you know, with his big Cairo speech and his whole turning over a new leaf and all this.
Now, let's face it, this is why the American people elected him in the first place.
It was to say, look, we're really sorry about that George Bush thing that we inflicted on the entire rest of the world for the last eight years, and this is how we're going to try to apologize for it, basically.
That was his mandate, was to undo what Bush had done wrong over in the Middle East.
And particularly on the Iran issue, he was out in front saying, we're going to make peace, we're going to negotiate, there's plenty of room to come up with a deal here, and we're going to do that.
And then what has he done?
Nothing but fail, nothing but sabotage his own damn negotiations this whole time.
Well, you know, I think you have to always separate the rhetoric from underlying factors.
I mean, I really do think there's a permanent regime in the United States that is there no matter who's the president.
And while there may be, you know, changes, differences at the margin, whether a hawkish Republican or at least allegedly dovish where the Democrat gets in, the bulk of the policy never changes.
I mean, it may change a little at the edges, and the rhetoric may be different, but as we've known now for how many years, since World War II, let's say, nothing much changes.
So, you know, a Democrat can come in and talk about the occupied territories and how settlements are illegal, but does the policy change?
Do we end the aid?
I mean, we're the facilitators, the U.S. government, the American people are forced to be the facilitators with money and other things, and yet that never really changes.
You know, words, you know, talk is cheap.
But we never say, okay, if you don't stop this by, you know, midnight, you know, next week, Monday, next Monday night, midnight, we're cutting off all the money.
That's never going to happen.
Politically it's impossible, especially with an election coming up, and that's why there can be such a wedge between what's said and what's done.
Yeah, I guess it's true.
Well, now, is it very meaningful to you when you talk about the permanent government like that?
It occurs to me that I just read this the other day.
In fact, it may have been in your article.
Somebody wrote, you know, pointing out that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is kind of the walking definition of the establishment, right?
He's the Democratic Party's Kissinger, you know, foreign policy wise man or whatever, and certainly an imperialist, but seemingly a more patient, more reasonable one than a lot of the ones who are actually on the job right now.
And he's tried to, you know, really push the idea that we need to go ahead and make a deal with Iran, a real deal, and I don't know about necessarily be allies or anything, but at least, you know, ratchet down all of this tension.
And it seems like that point of view is completely frozen out.
I mean, if you're talking about the difference between Obama and Romney, Brzezinski's view is nowhere to be found there.
That's true.
He's at least got a foot in the realist camp, and so he says more reasonable things, and he seems to understand that a war with Iran would be a terrible thing for basically, you know, all parties with a few exceptions, war profiteers and others, but some politicians maybe.
But so he's been saying some decent things on that, but you're right.
I don't hear this from anybody else.
Nobody else gets on the news programs to say things like this.
I wonder whether if he wasn't Mika Brzezinski's father, would he ever be on Morning Joe on MSNBC?
Because you don't see anyone else arguing this on MSNBC.
I mean, I guess we've had, oh, a journalist now and then, you know, Jeremy Scahill, for example, but I'm not sure he's been on talking about Iran.
They don't even bring an Iranian on.
We never get to see an Iranian person, right?
And I think it goes to a theme you constantly sound.
They don't want us to know these are people.
So keep them off TV, and that way we won't realize that these are flesh-and-blood people with families that they care about, and look what we're doing.
We're making hardship for average Iranian families through these sanctions, which get toughened all the time.
You know, passing new rounds.
AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, keeps pushing Congress to pass tougher sanctions, which Obama would be afraid to veto even if he thought there was something wrong with them.
So look at the hardship we're imposing on average Iranian people.
To what end?
What do we think is going to happen?
We're just making people hate us.
Well, now some people, I guess, would argue that Obama has been having these meetings with the Iranians.
Do you think it's possible that, well, maybe they're just going to wait until the 6th or 7th meeting to finally go ahead and work something out?
Everybody has to strut around and do their stupid peacock diplomatic crap before they finally get to the point?
Or do you think it's just dishonest?
It seems to me like, I mean, if you look at the situation around the so-called outing of the secret com facility back in 2009, when Israel's using Jandala to kill people inside Iran, right at the time America's trying to negotiate the thing.
But then Obama went right out and accused, you know, took center stage and accused Iran of making a secret atom bomb factory that they had declared four days before.
He was the one who brought out this lie and used it as the excuse to delegitimize their attempted acceptance of his offer, as hard as it was for them, with Israel killing their military men at the very same time inside Iran.
Yeah, I mean, as far as these talks go, I really think Obama is walking a tightrope.
He wants to look like he's giving diplomacy a chance, because there are some people that want that.
Again, we're in election year.
On the other hand, I can't envision him before the election signing some agreement with Iran, because no agreement with Iran is going to be acceptable.
No feasible or imaginable agreement with Iran is going to be acceptable to Netanyahu or America's supporters of Israel.
So he can't sign something that the Iranians would be willing to sign.
And they have shown some willingness to compromise on enrichment, even though they say, and no one else who seems to be an expert on this believes, that they're developing a weapon.
So he's got to go through the motions of talking.
At the same time, he can't have them reach a fruitful conclusion, because that would get him in political trouble.
So he's got to walk this tightrope, at least until the election.
Isn't that amazing?
Because just think about the politics if, say for example, the Israel lobby didn't have free reign the way they do, and they had to operate just like the rest of the foreign government's lobbies in D.C.
And just think of the politics of Obama, if their role was that much more limited, of Obama saying, hey look, I made peace.
The Romney camp may want a giant conflict with Iran, but I don't, and neither do you, do you voters?
But instead, it's the politics of the power of the Israel lobby counts a lot more than the mass votes of the American people on something like this.
The day he makes that announcement, the first words we're going to hear out of the other side's mouth is Munich.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Even though they don't know.
Did you ever see that episode of, there's a clip of hardball where some right-winger tried to use the Munich thing against, I forget, it was probably John Kerry or something like that.
And Chris Matthews says, oh yeah, what's Munich?
Oh, I don't know.
He didn't have any idea.
He didn't even know it was a town in Germany, much less, or wherever it is, much less what happened there.
Anyway, hang on, we're over time.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Sheldon Richman right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org.
Talking with Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
That's FFF.org.
And check out his blog, Free Association, at SheldonRichman.com.
Latest piece at FFF.org is Obama-Romney, a reckless on Iran.
And before we move on, we've really been focusing on Obama for the first segment here.
But before we move on to Romney, I wanted to bring up something that happened on the show last week, Sheldon, I'm not sure if you heard.
I was talking with Ray McGovern from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And he and his fellow VIPs had signed this letter urging the government to create a hotline between, I guess, America's politicians and the Iranian ones at the high levels, and also between the navies.
The navies, he said, are using hand signals to communicate with each other that they've worked out there on the ground.
They can't talk to each other in order to say, hey, hey, hey, everybody cool it, kind of thing.
And that this is a very likely, or at least possible and easy to prevent tripwire for war in the Persian Gulf, which you would think is an American lake since it's full of American boats.
And so anyway, military ones.
So the point being, there was one Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity who he didn't name, but who refused to sign the thing.
And her explanation was, it's way too late for this.
The buildup in the Persian Gulf that's going on right now is the prelude to war.
Simple as that.
It's too little, too late.
There is no hotline that's going to stave off war now.
This is the policy.
And I guess, in other words, considering the current presence of navy ships and plus the installation of anti-missile missiles in our Gulf-allied countries and that kind of thing, that this is all just sort of a covert, not very covert, but under-the-radar kind of military buildup in preparation for a war that is coming.
Forget about it.
What do you think about that?
Well, it's hard to know.
I mean, I could be way off on this.
I still have sort of this gut feeling that Obama doesn't really want a war, even just politically, and I'm thinking of after the election as well.
There is war fatigue.
I think people would like to get out of Afghanistan, and they think Iraq went on too long.
I just don't think Obama believes there would be political success, other issues aside, from a war in Iran, which he has to realize won't be quick and clean and easy.
I'm sure he's getting advice from military people.
We know that military people in the U.S. have expressed grave reservations about attacking Iran.
So, you know, I don't know.
This person who refused to sign may be unduly pessimistic.
I still think there's some hope of averting it.
I think there's less hope if Romney gets elected.
Romney's going to have, you know, they're bringing John Bolton and other people into the administration.
Bolton could end up Secretary of State.
Who knows?
Maybe Condoleezza Rice will be back.
And I think the chances are much higher of an attack on Iran with Romney in the White House than with Obama in the White House.
Now, why is that?
Because I look at Mitt Romney, and I think this guy doesn't know nothing.
So he could just as easy sway, not necessarily my way, but a little bit more Nixonian and reasonable.
Well, on some things, obviously Nixon killed millions of Vietnamese.
But, I mean, like on China and Russia issues, he was kind of a moderate.
Well, yeah, he didn't want a worldwide nuclear war.
That would have, you know, crimped his ability to do other things he wanted to do.
But Romney, it may be precisely because Romney doesn't know much, he would turn things over to the Boltons and people like that, and other people.
Plus, he's got this close bond with Netanyahu, right?
They go back to the 1970s.
He probably is telling the truth when he says they're actually friends and not just saying that as a political thing.
They seem to have some, I don't know, brotherhood link or something.
And I don't know if his religion figures in this or not, but he sounds like he's willing to defer to Netanyahu on what is the wise thing to do.
And he's surrounding himself with foreign policy experts who I think take the same position.
So that's why I think there's a greater likelihood.
I think he'll be less sensitive to the fact that people are sick of war and just fed up with it and want to see this end.
Yeah, well, it won't be his constituents that are over it.
Not that much anyway.
They could be easily talked right back into it.
And this is my thing about Obama too, is that I'm not trying to encourage him in a bad direction or anything, but I guess he probably doesn't listen to this show.
If he wants to be a great man and a great leader, then the thing to do is start up a draft and make the war the center of all activity in America and turn himself into an FDR world hero.
He'll go down in history.
The more millions of people he kills, the greater a leader he'll be, considered by all the Democrat history teachers in America from now on.
Why not occupy all the land between Israel and India and make a giant, great, make-work project out of it?
Chris Matthews would love it.
Now, finally, we're all being included.
We all have to sacrifice for this great project for the future of our land.
What's stopping him?
Yeah, well, I think the days are a little different since Roosevelt's time.
Again, people are war-weary, and even though the economy is crappy, I'm not sure people are in the mood to have their minds taken off the economy with a big war in the Middle East.
I'm just not seeing that.
So my hunch is that that's not the way he's thinking.
I sure hope he's not thinking that way.
Yeah, I have to say I agree with you.
I just can't figure out why not.
I think he's got nothing to lose.
That's what I would do if I was a Democrat president.
I would kill millions and millions of people, just like Wilson and Roosevelt and Jackson.
Well, I don't know if Jackson killed millions.
I think Romney is going to be much more of a national greatness president than Obama.
Well, they both claim that Robert Kagan is their light and inspiration when it comes to foreign policy, right?
His new book about the indispensable American empire.
All right, well, then we've achieved bipartisanship.
Right, there you go.
See, that's the whole thing about the neocons.
They always were centrist because they used to be Democrats.
So they only moved to the right on war.
But they're still, you know, Richard Perle, they say, still votes Democrat, still registered Democrat, always was.
Well, he's probably a welfare statist, and he wants to bring the welfare to the rest of the world, welfare state to the rest of the world.
So there's a consistent plan there.
Let's at least give him that.
Plus, he's getting rich in the process.
Let's not ignore that point of fact.
Yeah, I actually read a great article about his awesome copper cooking pot collection and all this stuff.
A reporter was invited over to his house, and it was just all about how he's living high on the hog from his Northrop Grumman and Lockheed investments and kickbacks and whatever.
I just thought it was funny when Obama went to, I mean, when Romney went to Israel, you know, Senor is one of the top foreign policy people who was a Bush advisor on foreign policy.
You know, they said that he got out ahead of Romney by saying that, you know, we support Israel's, if they make a unilateral attack on Iran, we would support it.
And then they quickly had to clarify, because you're not supposed to say stuff like that on foreign soil when the president, when it's different from the president's policy.
We have this taboo that politics stops at the water's edge.
And I always like the answer.
I read this in the article.
I always like the answer from Felix Morley, who was an editor of the Washington Post and a great old, one of the old right classical liberal anti-interventionists who said, well, politics should stop at the water's edge only when policy stops at the water's edge.
And of course, policy did not stop at the water's edge when you're an empire.
That exactly means that policy extends beyond your borders.
So, you know, this idea that you don't criticize the president on foreign soil is kind of silly, really.
But of course, since both of them are playing with fire when it comes to war and Iran, it's not a substantive criticism.
Romney's trying to show some daylight between him and Obama.
But like I said, it's not a lot of daylight.
They both have said all options are on the table against Iran.
All options.
That includes nuclear weapons, logically, because that's one of the options at the disposal of an American president.
So it's almost like a comic book.
I mean, these guys are so alike each other.
You and me and a lot of other people make the mistake of calling Romney Obama and Obama Romney all the time.
We don't even mean it.
It's not like, you know, we're that cheesy.
We're just going to sit there and deliberately do that.
It's just a Freudian slip thing.
You can't even tell.
Look, look, we're so different from each other.
I'm way more devoted to the interests of this foreign country than my opponent.
No, look at all the money I gave him and all the people I killed for him.
No, I promise to kill way more people than that.
And that's all they can fight about is who's more willing to sacrifice the interests of the people of this country for Israel.
Yeah, well, politics are silly when it's obligatory to go to the Western wall, put on a yarmulke, even if you're Mormon, and look like you're praying.
And then it also shows how silly it is that we actually discuss whether there's something wrong with the fact that Obama hasn't been to Israel during his term.
If that's what we're talking about, politics really is in the toilet and not worth really thinking about very closely.
I remember Lou Rockwell on his website.
You know how he'll do the title, it'll be something sarcastic, and then it'll have a little thing written underneath.
And it was a Jim Loeb piece about whether David Wumser or Robert Zoellick will be Connelly's new right-hand man.
This is like in 2006 or something like that.
So Wumser is just the straight-up Israeli agent, friend of Dick Cheney, his foreign policy advisor, and a friend working with Bolton over there at the State Department in the first Bush Jr. term, really the principal author of the Clean Break paper for Netanyahu in 1996.
And then Robert Zoellick is more the Council on Foreign Relations Brzezinski type.
Lou titled it, it's a heck of a note to have to root for the Rockefellers.
And that really is where we are, right?
We're like, man, David Wumser is so bad, we'll be thankful and wipe the sweat off our brow if we can get Robert Zoellick, which in fact is what ended up happening.
And that's like, here I am missing Zbigniew Brzezinski.
I see him on TV, and I think now there is an imperialist who is at least casually acquainted with reason.
You know what I mean?
He might be evil, but at least he's not plain stupid.
Look, there's no reason to look ahead to this election in the next four years with any sort of optimism.
It's not going to be pleasant either way.
I guess I would say that Romney scares me a little more than Obama.
That's the best way for me to state it.
Well, and really because of just that, right?
The whole neocon movement, all the job positions, just waiting for them, just like it was in the Bush Jr. years.
The Center for New American Security isn't that much better, but still, I'll take them compared to the Center for New American Century, you know?
Prager, whatever that was, being that project for New American Security.
It's always, you know, what's the alternative?
Look, Ron Paul offered an alternative, and people didn't go for it.
Their mistake, in my view, big mistake, bad mistake, and people around the world maybe will draw some conclusions from that.
They'll say, look, Americans did have the chance to vote for a guy that would have closed down the empire, but they didn't do it.
Nah, you know what?
World history is going to say that forever.
This is going to be, I don't know.
To me, it's like almost biblical level stuff, and I don't really believe in the Bible or know anything about it, but this to me is like, it's absolutely amazing, right?
The world's greatest empire at its height of, you know, thinking, you know, whatever you want to call it.
Running dangerously on the edge of a skyscraper or something like that.
And then here's this nice, kind, old doctor giving us one last chance, twice in a row, really.
Two last chances to, come on, guys.
We could have the Constitution and peace and the Bill of Rights, and it wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a hell of a lot better than this.
We can have prosperity again, and they told him no.
They told him no twice.
And not only that, he was the one regarded as the crazy guy.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like he's some scumbag, but he happened to have a pretty good program or whatever.
He's a doctor.
He's the nicest guy in the whole Congress, the whole Congress full of lawyers and lobbyists for military industrial complex firms.
He's like the kindest old gentleman, and there's just no excuse for it.
I don't care what TV told you you're supposed to think about these people.
There's just no excuse for 300 million Americans refusing to take the offer to reinstate the Bill of Rights, to end the wars, to have a free society.
It's just...
The only thing I'd say, maybe in somewhat defense of the American people, is that most of their information comes through the mass media, which basically is the stenographic pool for the permanent regime.
Absolutely true.
So it's somewhat understandable.
I mean, look, the information is out there if you want to find it.
We know this because of your show and the Internet and other things.
But it takes some effort to do that, and you have to care enough to do it.
I don't want to let the American people off the hook.
But the information they get daily is quite biased.
And like we were saying before about Iran, you don't see just on the regular news shows a fair discussion where they bring on people who can give the other side.
You just don't see it.
Yeah, you're right.
In fact, that's going to be, I think, my opening shtick in my little talk I'm going to give at the...
I don't know how little it's going to be.
I'm kind of worried it might be huge.
The Ron Paul rally in Tampa, the independent one, not the campaign one.
But that's basically going to be my whole first riff, is what if the TV had treated him honest?
It's so obvious that a memo went down saying, we don't like this guy.
He's not legit.
He can't win.
None of us think he can.
None of us will ever think he can.
And that's your opinion.
Now go out there and read that on the air.
And that was the deal, and everybody knew it.
It was so transparent, it was ridiculous.
But what if the opposite was true?
And they had just said, hey, look, here's a guy who's married to his high school sweetheart since they were 16 years old.
Here's a guy who is a doctor and has 17 grandkids and who was right about the bubble and the war and the police state and this and that.
And, you know, gives his congressional budget back to the Treasury at the end of every term because he pays for his own stamps and all the rest.
If they just shot straight with the American people on the Ron Paul issue for just a week or something, man, how different might things have been?
All right.
All you need to do is watch Chris Matthews, which I'm masochistic enough to do.
And where he said, what was it, I forget which, whether it was the caucuses, the first Iowa caucus, where he said that Ron Paul comes in second.
And that doesn't matter.
Just forget about that.
Remember that moment?
Right.
It was like, that doesn't count.
Well, they all said that about Iowa.
If Ron Paul wins Iowa, this risks the credibility of Iowa from now on.
And, you know, Karl Rove made up all these talking points and everybody all fell for it because they're a bunch of stupid idiots.
So I think they deserve what they get in the most part, you know?
Yeah.
Not to sound too much like a collectivist, but sometimes I get cranky.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to go.
We're aware of our time.
Thank you so much for your time, Sheldon.
Anytime, Scott.
Good talking to you.
That's the great Sheldon Richman from the Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
We'll be right back.