08/30/13 – Patrick Buchanan – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, your radio man here.
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And next up is our old friend, Pat Buchanan.
Welcome back to the show, Pat.
How are you doing?
Doing fine, Scott.
Very good.
Pat, he's the author of Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, and a lot of other great books.
You all know that.
He writes for creators, but you can find all of his foreign policy stuff at AntiWar.com slash Pat.
The latest is, will Boehner stop our rogue president?
Well, will he or not?
Well, I haven't heard from Boehner that he's going to call the house back into session, but that's exactly what he ought to do, Scott.
The president has no authority to launch this war.
Syria hasn't attacked us or threatened us, and there's no urgency to attacking him whatsoever.
And in the absence of any such attack, the president has no authority to launch a war on a state like Syria.
And the only institution in the United States under the Constitution which has the authority to take us to war is the Congress of the United States.
And Mr. Boehner should call the house back into order and debate and decide on whether or not we should go to war.
I was going to say there, real quick, do you know the CNN reporter, is it Dana Bash or Dana Bash?
I keep saying it wrong, I think.
I think it's Dana Bash.
Dana Bash.
I saw her report yesterday on CNN International.
I'm not sure if they wrote it up.
She reported, and I believe it was White House sources kind of candidly admitting that Obama did not want a congressional vote because he was quite afraid that he would lose it.
Like Cameron lost in the UK, and that then he would lose face.
And so he would rather just go ahead on, and I guess as long as he has the leadership of the opposition party in the house on board with him, he can do that, right?
As you say, it's up to Boehner to stop him, and he won't.
Well, exactly.
Look, the president of the United States has no authority to take us to war.
He does not have that power under the Constitution.
He knows that.
He's said so in the past, as has Vice President Biden, who said it would be an impeachable act to launch a war without the authorization of Congress.
Now, I understand why the president, who's got egg all over his face for having foolishly drawn a red line in the sand, he had no authority to go.
I can understand why he doesn't want to go to the Congress.
But that does not explain why John Boehner does not call the Congress back into a session and assert his right as Speaker of the House, one of the two houses that decides on war.
And the question for conservatives is, where is John Boehner, and why is he not back here in Washington calling the House into session?
Right.
Well, do you think that Obama's right to be afraid that he would lose the vote?
I think there would be very serious doubt on my part that the Congress, those members, would stand up and authorize a war.
I think what they would do is demand more information, which they should rightly do, because my honest belief is that, first, I don't think Assad ordered this.
I find that impossible to believe.
He's got nothing to gain.
Secondly, this thing has all the earmarks of a false flag operation.
Elaborate on that point.
What makes you say so?
Well, who benefits from this attack?
Cui Bono, in the old Latin phrase.
The one that benefits is not going to be Assad.
He's going to be hit by the United States.
It's not going to be the United States, which will be dragged into war.
Who would want to drag the United States into a war with Syria?
Who would benefit from such a war?
Obviously, Al-Qaeda, elements of the rebels, the Saudis want a war.
There are others, even in this country, who would like to see a war as a backdoor to war on Iran.
I don't say those folks are responsible, but they are seizing upon this episode to drive us to war.
And Mr. Boehner has the authority to call the Congress back into session, and they have the right, the obligation, the duty to debate and decide.
That decision does not rest with President Obama.
Right.
Well, now, because in theory and practice, or not in theory, but in practice, it really does.
Since Truman, it is up to the President, and when he says things like, I have not decided yet, he doesn't get laughed right out of court.
I guess maybe we're getting a little bit better on these issues after the last decade here, but it really kind of is up to him, and yet it seems like he's pretty reluctant to do this.
He and Hillary Clinton and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Dempsey and many others this whole time, I don't know if John Kerry's ever done a very good job on this, but his predecessor certainly was good at explaining why not to back the rebels, why not to intervene in the war, even as the Obama administration really has been backing them for the last couple of years in some ways, and helping the Saudis back them and that kind of thing.
But as far as outright intervention, they've really explained very well why they haven't intervened more.
Do you think that maybe Obama doesn't really want to do this?
I think he's ambivalent.
He realizes that he put his credibility on the line with that foolish statement about a red line, and he fears that maybe Assad has crossed it and is defying him and is making a fool out of him.
At the same time, looking at the situation, he and all the rest of them have said, look, there's nothing in this war for the United States.
Let me take up your issue of Harry Truman.
That was a case of an attack across the demilitarized zone, in which Americans were being killed almost from day one.
In other words, we were caught in a war situation.
You are right, Harry Truman called it a police action, but the Congress came back and authorized money to fight the war.
With Reagan on Grenada, for example, and I was there then, he moved quickly because it was a real danger.
Americans were going to be taken hostage by these new Marxist thugs, which took over from Maurice Bishop, the old Marxist thug, all of a sudden.
And the same with the attack on Libya.
I wrote that speech for President Reagan, and the reason for that was retaliation for what they had done in Berlin, and we had to maintain the element of surprise.
But there's no argument for launching.
I mean, everybody knows the President has said how many missiles almost we're going to fire, where they're going to go, how long it's going to last.
There is no element of surprise here.
There is no threat.
There is no attack.
But the Congress of the UN and Syria will be there in a week or two weeks, so Congress should be called back to deliberate as long as they want on this war.
Well, so what should the American people do in this case?
Just call their Congressmen, send them an email, or go down there and bang on the damn door?
Or what do we do to stop this war?
It's not too late yet, kind of.
Well, don't go bang on the door, because some of them are off at the beach or abroad or some junket.
But I will say this.
They should send emails to their Congressmen.
They should make phone calls there.
And make a simple case of it.
Say, look, if we're going to go to war, we don't agree with it.
But if you're going to take us to war, debate it, decide it, and vote for that war.
The idea that you're going to let the President take up to war while you're sitting off there on vacation, and then you won't hold him accountable is an abject dereliction of duty on your part.
And if Boehner won't call you back, you tell Boehner to come back and call you back or we're going to get a new leader.
You spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C.
Don't any of these Congressmen and Senators feel at all the weight of the fact that this is the history of the world being written here and they're supposed to have some responsibility in this?
Or is it all just a junket?
Well, Scott, I'll tell you, I've only spent a lot of time in Washington.
I was born there.
My father was born there.
I was there when it was a nice town, an old southern town during World War II.
And it has changed dramatically.
The problem with the Congress, I think, and with the Republican Party, the problem with the Congress is this.
They really don't want responsibility.
They really don't want to be held accountable.
And they transfer responsibility over many decisions.
They let the Supreme Court strip them of authority to decide issues of racial integration, of right to life, of gay rights, of everything.
They just let the Supreme Court seize all this terrain from them, and they let the President capture terrain from them.
I've worked in three White Houses, and Presidents will try to seize terrain from Congress.
It is the duty of the Congress to defend its constitutional responsibilities.
The Congress is the first branch of government.
Article I of the Constitution, the longest section.
And yet they let Presidents and others seize the power.
You know why?
They don't want to be held responsible for the decisions.
This, I think, is what's behind Boehner and Reid and the rest of them.
They're saying, look, we don't want to have to vote on this war.
If we vote the wrong, suppose we vote against it, and he goes to war, and he's a hero.
We'll look like fools.
I mean, I remember talking to a famous U.S. Senator who voted against the war to rescue Kuwait, and he never ran for President because of it.
And so they don't want to make these decisions, but leaders do.
A real leader will go in there, a real Speaker of the House, Tom Reid will walk in there and see this as an opportunity to stop this war.
Now, let me ask you this, because the polls came out and said that 9% of Americans answering their telephone for pollsters that evening were willing to say that they support this thing.
The sentiment being, let them Syrians work out their own problems, wherever that is, I think, at this point.
We've been through enough.
We've put the world through enough.
And that's now the consensus.
There's no anti-war movement in the street, but now it's the whole country.
So then that leaves the question, whose war?
Whose war is very simple.
It's Obama's war.
It would be.
It's the neocons' war.
They've got another one of those letters you've seen that we had the PNAC letter before the war in Iraq.
They all get all the signatures of the think tankers and the others who want this war, and they are pushing for an attack there.
You see the Israeli lobby and Israel want an attack here, because out of this war can almost certainly come or will almost certainly come a collision with Syria's main supporter, Iran, and many people want that war.
There are people in Washington and Israel and Saudi Arabia and Syria and a lot of places that want the United States dragged into war for their ends.
But it is the duty of Americans looking out for their own country first to decide whether or not it is in the national interest of the United States.
And anyone who looks at this from a cold national interest standpoint of the United States, including Barack Obama up to now, has said, stay out.
Hey, do you think if it was you and Nixon up there right now that he would go and shake hands with the Ayatollah and work things out like he did with Mao Zedong?
I think, you know, I'm not sure about shaking.
I don't think the Ayatollah would shake hands with any of us.
I don't think he likes us.
I would tell you what I would do.
I would get two or three of the toughest diplomats and generals I know, and I would send them over to talk to the Iranians and say, let's work this thing out on this nuclear thing.
And here's our bottom line and we see your bottom line.
And I think we've got some common ground.
And I think the idea of something like that, a detente or an entente with Iran, is something that is eminently achievable.
I mean, Iran is hostile to the United States, but the hostility and the enormity of that country is nothing compared to what China was when I went over there with Nixon and I shook hands with Joe and he went over and met Mao Zedong.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like, well, of course, as you know, the Leveretts, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, that's their analogy.
They say we need a Nixon goes to China kind of a moment here.
I guess it's much harder for a Democrat to do so, although I don't.
You know, I agree with you.
I think that's what we, because I think if you look at the interests, now clearly there are interests in conflict between the United States and Iran, but neither of us wants a war with the other, I believe.
Both of us want the Persian Gulf kept open.
Iran wants to regenerate its economy and move back into the community of nations.
We have no problem with that.
I mean, we don't want them to have nuclear weapons and they want to have a nuclear program.
I think there's common ground there if we get intrusive inspections, and I think they're willing to do that.
So there's an awful lot of common ground as well as conflict, and that is natural and normal among powers that, you know, have ideological differences and disagreements.
But I agree with you.
There's no, I mean, I don't see a war as serving the interests of anyone here except for the people that want to see Iran destroyed.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like clearly the population of Iran and the government of Iran are fiercely determined to maintain their independence from us.
But if they have it, it doesn't seem like it costs us very much.
There's still a fourth-rate power with, what, one-tenth of a percent of our GDP every year, and that's without the sanctions.
And, you know, the biggest benefit going for them is our war in Iraq that we did for them, so we can't really resent them that much for their gain and influence, you know, from that.
Well, right.
They were anti-Taliban and we knocked over the Taliban.
They were anti-Saddam and we knocked over Saddam and brought the Shiites to power.
And so there, again, there's, you know, I think that given the United States, which really there are interests we have in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and I think we can do a deal with the Iranians.
I have no doubt about it.
Now, ideologically, given the Ayatollah and their anti-Western and, you know, the rest of it, it's going to be problematic, but it was problematic with Mao Zedong as well.
And so I think something can be worked out, my friend.
All right.
Now, when it comes to the neocons and this whole, you know, hey, America, fight all Israel's enemies type of a policy here, I wonder whether do you find them to be just very rigid ideologues where they just can't change their mind about things or something like that?
Because it seems like, you know, I can understand in the era that the clean break policy was written, that David Wilmes and them were sitting around telling each other, wow, we sure are smart for coming up with this great idea for regime change and everything or whatever.
But now that we've seen the practice of it, like we just talked about, handing Iraq or, you know, two-thirds of it over to Iran, that kind of thing, can't they reevaluate this policy and think, well, you know what?
We do have America, the most powerful force in the world ever here.
You know, maybe we could make some kind of peace and detente with our Arab neighbors and work things out or whatever.
Why do they persist on this folly, this Ledeen doctrine of turning the Middle East into a boiling cauldron?
It doesn't seem to make much sense, even from an Israeli-centric point of view, you know?
Well, let's see.
I think that is, I mean, if you take the point of view of Netanyahu, I mean, he doesn't speak without mentioning the mortal threat to the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles in Iran and nuclear weapons, toward which they've been moving, says Netanyahu, since 1992, racing.
They've never gotten there.
But the truth is that the neocons have got one foot in reality, and many of them were my allies or are allies during the Cold War.
They have one foot in reality, but the other foot, I think, is in the air.
And this reflexive desire to use American power to smash any and all Arab countries or Muslim countries that somehow down the road may threaten Israel, and it is clearly there, and you can see the thread run through their policies continually.
I mean, look at the list of people signing that letter.
Some of them are, you know, gay rights liberals signing up there, and others of them are neocons, and they all, what do they have in common?
The settler movement?
Well, some of them I'm sure disagree with the settlement, but there are disagreements among the neocons.
For example, on Egypt, you know, some of them think we ought to cut off aid to Egypt, and others of them follow the Israeli line and say no, that we ought to stick with the army.
But my view is that I think we've got no choice now, given the fact that it's a fight to the death, apparently, between the brotherhood and the military and the military in power.
You've got to deal with it.
We've got to deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.
Well, can't we just take a hands-off policy toward Egypt until this works out and let them work it out instead of choosing sides there?
Neither side is going to close the Suez Canal to us, right?
Well, then, as Sarah Palin said, let Allah work it out.
Let Allah sort them out.
Yeah, or let them have their street battles, if that's what they have to have until it settles down.
Somebody's going to win out eventually, you know.
It's sort of the same thing in Syria.
It's a horrible thing.
And, of course, the war party always claims a monopoly on morality and foreign policy, that, you know, if this is a humanitarian war, to oppose it is to not care about what happens to Syrians, basically.
That's their position.
Well, before they had this causus belli, their position, many of them, was to stay out.
But it is now a golden opportunity to get us into this war and, beyond that, into a war with Iran, which is one of the main supporters of Syria.
But listen, Scott, I'm going to have to get going now.
Okay, right on.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Pat.
I appreciate it.
Okay, right.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that was Pat Buchanan.
I was really running out of questions for him anyway.
But that's a good deal.
You can find him at antiwar.com slash Pat.
Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
Sick of it yet?
It's time to put America first.
Support the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org and push back against the Israel lobby and their sock puppets in Washington, D.C.
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