09/05/13 – David Bromwich – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, so our guest today is David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale, and he's written on politics and culture for the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's Selected Writings on Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and is co-editor of the Yale University Press Edition of On Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Pretty good, and good to be with you.
Well, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Good to talk to you again.
It's been a little while.
You wrote such a great piece here.
Your most recent one for the Huffington Post is from the 29th of August, The Crossroads on Syria.
And, of course, there have been some developments since then, but you even updated the column since then, too.
So that's good.
I updated it after, I guess it was on Saturday, the president made his statement that he was referring it to Congress.
Right.
So it doesn't reflect the testimony, so-called testimony, anyway, by Kerry and Dempsey and Hagel before the Senate and House committees since then, etc.
But anyway.
So, listen, I love reading what you write here because it's always jam-packed, first of all, with the most relevant information, the things that even I miss, and man, I consume news like crazy, but you pick up the stuff that even I miss and always the most important facts that need to be brought to bear.
And then, you know, it's a truck full of wisdom, too, and I think you bring a very, at least, unique intelligence to these kinds of questions, usually.
You come at them from angles that other people don't see.
And so I really like reading what you write here.
Once again, it's TheCrossroadsOnSyria, HuffingtonPost.com.
And it starts out with this that I had missed, where the president actually threatened the American people that we could be the victims of Syrian chemical weapons if we don't let him do this.
We can't let this smoking gun be a barrel of mustard gas.
Yeah.
It was a statement somewhat comparable to, and I compared it to, Tony Blair's, what they called dodgy dossier line in England in 2002 about the danger of Saddam Hussein getting hold of chemical weapons and being able to deploy them in 45 minutes.
And as with Blair, it was an implication that this was an imminent or almost imminent danger, though if you look at the grammar of it, Blair didn't quite say that, Obama didn't quite say it, but Blair took some pains to put very near his assertion a mention of nuclear weapons so that people, remembering dimly what he said, actually thought, oh wait, Saddam Hussein could shoot a nuclear bomb at us in 45 minutes.
And Obama, in the same way, took pains not to say quite directly that this was an imminent danger, but he used the word devastation and target and United States in such close proximity as to try to sow that fear.
Now, I don't think that was a particularly important element of the things Obama has said in the last week or so, very contradictory things when you add them up.
And I don't think it actually had an effect of causing a panic or even converting many votes, but it shows the parallel process of sort of disingenuousness of careful planting of implicit untruths.
Right.
Yeah, it goes along with kind of the broader narrative here that doesn't seem to get much attention on TV, I guess, I don't know why it would, that the American people have nothing to do with this, really, other than you can threaten us from time to time.
But I was listening to NPR News this morning, and the American people's opinion on this was brought up only in the context of the G20 meeting and how Obama has to shore up support at home before he moves forward with the thing where.
Right.
So that's the argument from credibility, which is a very different thing from the, you know, unimpeachable elemental political argument from self preservation, self defense.
And, you know, I think he felt he had to mention self defense in some way, but it was a very, very long reach for him, just as it was for Condoleezza Rice when she came out with her line about, you know, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Right.
Well, you know, at least the Bushes, they were trying to scare the hell out of everybody enough that they could get a real majority of people that supported them on the eve of the attack.
So when you say at least, you're sort of, you're suggesting a certain grudging respect at least for their consistency in lying along one line of lies, where the Obama people are inconsistent and flail and go at everything.
Right.
Yeah.
Or at least, you know, being patronizing enough to pretend like my opinion counts at all, that they think it's important to really lie to me well and get me on board for the thing.
Obama seems to think, you know, if I can scare him a little and get my percentages up two or three points, I guess I'd be good enough to shore up support a little bit.
But he's not coming to the American people and and really making the case why this has to be done.
Oh, the difference in character between the two men, Bush and Bush, Jr. and Obama and the two administrations really shows in the difference of approach on getting an authorization for use of force.
Bush had simply decided to do it and had decided clearly on all out war.
And we now know, I think, with pretty fair certainty from such sources as Richard Clarke's memoir that people in the Bush administration well placed there, such as Paul Wolfowitz, were keen on going to war with Iraq from the first days of the administration.
It was not merely a consequence of the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
They wanted war with Iraq.
They wanted boots on the ground.
They wanted an invasion.
And Iraq was the first of a several stage operation in the Middle East, if they could have done it.
Syria was the next stage, probably.
And Iran was on their path to whereas Obama has never been sure that he wanted to overthrow any of the governments.
He has now had a part in overthrowing, I'll refer specifically to Libya and now Syria.
He has betrayed uncertainty about both.
And I suspect that even now he isn't sure what he wants to do or how much he wants to do to assist in the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria.
Now, that uncertainty telegraphed to the world and manifest in his gesture of giving it to Congress, but then saying he won't be bound by how Congress votes.
That uncertainty has its own great dangers for foreign policy.
And I mean, not just in showing that America is not a credible power or anything like that.
It's important to have a consistent policy.
But I would not choose Bush's consistent policy of mendacity, brutality and war over Obama's policy of uncertainty, fluctuating signals and apparent indifference, but apparent interest in the views of Congress.
It's just it's all it's almost indescribable what we've been seeing in the last three weeks or so.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, and this is reminiscent of Iraq, I guess, if we kind of started off on the theme of Iraq comparisons here back then, 10 years ago, 10 and a half now, the theme was never mind what's going to happen the next day.
We just have to get this thing started.
So don't anybody even just discuss the aftermath at all other than to say it'll be great for the Iraqis or whatever.
But but this is about protecting Americans from weapons of mass destruction.
That's all that matters.
And we absolutely have to do it.
And and no discussion of what might happen.
And here it seems like maybe there's a little bit more of a discussion because people kind of remember that, how badly it turned out to be, how bad the Iraq occupation turned out to be.
It's not that long ago when when when the Iraq war went really bad in 2005.
Although they are kind of don't you think that right now or do you think that right now that they're doing enough to really and I mean the media to to discuss about what might happen here?
Hey, what if Assad's government falls in the suicide bombers take over Damascus or something like that?
No, they have they have.
They have barely touched the surface of the crooked and undesired consequences of overthrowing Assad, who is a tyrant and is brutal, and has that in common with Saddam Hussein.
But if you look at even our highest hopes, our most idealized picture of what would follow from, quote, victory, unquote, and victory in this setting must mean the overthrow of the Assad government and planting a client government in Syria, highly friendly to us.
What would that mean?
But for one thing, obvious, the client government can't be constituted of the Al Nusra Front of jihadists who are friendly to Al Qaeda, of anti American sects and clans and groups of warlords who will attack American assets.
And if they can reach out and attack America, there is indeed a long run long term danger there.
We can't have any of those in a desired client government well, but what's the chance of keeping them out and having a government that will be able to control all of Syria as it's now understood?
The chances are nil.
So there is a delusion right on the face of things, as soon as you think of the day after, and as soon as you think of the day after on the best possible reading of it.
And that I think isn't being talked about at all.
You know, this is a thing that I was wrong about, at least so far, I'm not trying to dare the empire and approve me wrong or anything, David, but on Libya, I said, Hey, look, we're fighting for veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
So once they do, you know, obviously, nobody doubts that NATO and their bombs will, and their special forces will eventually get their way and sack Tripoli, it took them nine months to finally get it done.
But no one doubted that they eventually would.
But then the obvious thought experiment was then what?
And then the answer was, well, they can't let the winners win.
Because if they do, that's going to be a real problem, right?
As we saw the blowback in the Benghazi attack last September 11, for example, and all the racial pogroms.
But on the other hand, that Benghazi, even as bad as that attack was and the scandal surrounding it, it still takes place more or less in a vacuum of news or even thought about Libya.
Nobody cares about Libya.
It's way over the middle of North Africa.
It's mostly desert.
It hardly matters, apparently, as far as the empire and the media are concerned.
So really, as far as we know, all those anti-black racial pogroms are still going on, horrible to this day, and it's a complete catastrophe.
But because of the blackout, they don't have to keep doing anything about it.
That was my wrong prediction, that they'll have to invade and build up a new army and Purple Fingers and a bunch of nonsense.
But in the case of Syria, there's no chance they'll be able to just ignore it away like they're doing with Libya right now.
And that's well observed, and I can't even add anything to it.
I mean, this is empire news.
We only take care of the assets that are pressing on us at the moment, and then we go on to something else.
That's the carelessness of the psychology of an empire.
But if you're talking about Libya, you know, the evolution of the political state of things in that country shows that a state of disorder, which is not eruptive, large-scale disorder with events larger than pogroms, with huge massacres that can't be concealed from the world press, a state of disorder was far from undesirable for the US.
I suspect that this had been, you know, as they brainstorm it and work out possible consequences and scenarios, I suspect that a state of disorder where Libya doesn't have a stable government and many warlords and clans, many of them al-Qaeda, are in operation, that was considered risky but bearable.
And that's what we have now.
And to begin to understand the larger calculations, and I don't pretend to understand all of them because they look so irrational the more you try to look at it as one picture, but to try to understand the larger calculations of people making these decisions, you have to consider that both, I think, in Iraq and Libya, and of course in Afghanistan too, that a state of pretty unending disorder and episodic violence that comes with having no stable government, that this was acceptable, it wasn't the desired result, but it was acceptable.
Iraq too, in US eyes now, is under pretty much of a blackout of news, even though they're undergoing terrible suicide attacks and a threat to the government that is in place.
Well now, so what do you think about this report in the Telegraph, I'm sure you saw where General Jack Keane, I don't know how much credibility I would put on him, but he was saying that there's going to be more of an escalation here than just some airstrikes.
Well, we know that, and it's a fact about the character of this President, as it was about President Clinton too, to a lesser extent.
I mean, Obama seems able to convey to the most divergent audiences of important people, men of power, the idea that he's with them and that he's going to do what they want.
But he knows the importance of Jack Keane, who was a co-author of the so-called Surge Strategy of 2007, and he has lots of media exposure, lots of proficiency in talking about wars, does this general, and he knows the importance of John McCain, to whom he also gave similar reassurances about escalation of the war.
So, though I'm skeptical because Obama conveys to different audiences such different things, I put a lot of credit in that understanding of the general, that it's going to mean an escalation.
And of course, the authorization that the Senate Committee has now handed to both houses of Congress is an authorization to, it commits the U.S. to support of the rebel forces, which sometimes this administration, with its euphemistic habits, calls the opposition, as if we're dealing with a parliamentary democracy and this is merely the opposing party.
I mean, they mean all the rebel allies and they try to minimize the role of terrorist groups within that operation.
But we're now committed, if this vote goes through, Congress is also committed, to support of the rebels, and support of the rebels means U.S. entry into a war to overthrow the Assad government.
And of course that would have to mean escalation.
As soon as there's a counterattack against our rebel allies, we must counter the counterattack.
And so it goes forward on the psychological pattern of war, which President Obama doesn't seem to make any connection with in his own mind.
You know what, I wonder if, like Dianne Feinstein, maybe all the Democrats are actually not people, they're just armed salesmen, and they know exactly how horrible and stupid this all is, and they don't care, they just want more people dying so they can sell more airplanes, drop more bombs on people for the money.
Well, you know what you're saying about all the Democrats now, you could have said about all the Republicans in 2002, but that is Republicans and Democrats.
But I, speaking as a Connecticut patriot for just this moment, I would refer you to my great new senator, Chris Murphy, and his recent statements on this subject, which are admirable, articulate, more clear-headed, and more carefully thought through than anything that comes from the administration.
And in committee, in that 10-7 vote, he voted against allying ourselves with the rebels, he voted against an attack on Syria.
So there are exceptions among the Democrats.
You know, Udall is one, Chris Murphy is one, and we are going to see more.
Whether they amount to enough to defeat the vote for war in Congress or the Senate, it won't work in the Senate, but whether it adds up in Congress, I don't know.
But I'm not sure that there won't turn out to be plenty of Democratic defections, because as we're now given to understand, they are hearing such negative sentiment, sentiment against the war, against U.S. entry into it, from their constituents.
The calls are coming in something like 50 to 1 or 100 to 1, and if you average out the opinion polls, and they haven't varied that much, it's a rough and ready figure, but something like, you know, 42-43% are against the war, against U.S. attack on Syria now, and something in the 20s, 25-26% in favor.
That's the first time we've seen numbers like that, when you get a whole security establishment and foreign policy establishment and mainstream media and the president, a president well-liked by the media, when you get all of those lined up behind an attack, and to see popular sentiment go against it, almost as much against it as British popular sentiment was at the time when Cameron's measure to support the Americans was defeated.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's an interesting contest to see, you know, what's the phone ringing off the hook compared to the power of the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill.
Israel lobby is one factor, and...
Raytheon's another.
Yeah, I mean, the security and weapons complex is another.
What seems to me an enormous mischance by President Obama, or the part of him that is reluctant to go to war, is that, you know, and this is another first instance, as far as I can see.
Here's a president who has lots of people pushing him into war, the neoconservatives of the Israel lobby, as you say, the weapons industry undoubtedly, and so on.
And let's not underestimate Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
I mean, those countries really want to overthrow Syria for local geopolitical reasons.
But he has the Joint Chiefs of Staff against the war.
He has them lined up on his side.
He had only the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Cartwright, on his side when he wanted to scale down the intended escalation in Afghanistan in 2009.
So that would have been going with an important minority voice.
He had support for doing that, and he didn't do it.
He went with the big military guns.
But here, the military is against it, and as far as one can infer from what they don't say, and from their posture, and so on, you know, it's clear not only General Dempsey, but Chuck Hagel is none too enthusiastic about this war.
And yet, again, as happened in Libya, where Obama went against the advice of his Secretary of Defense Gates, he looks teetering on the brink of going along with all those larger aggressive forces you listed, plus the sentimental forces of ideology, the humanitarian war advocates within his administration.
Yeah.
You know, that's really too bad, because think about how easy it would be for Ron Paul, if he was the one who'd been elected back in a way, or whatever, he would just say, no, oh yeah, no, war, no, we're not having a war, that's it.
Oh, you don't like it?
You're fired, General.
March.
Well, Ron Paul, as the last statement I saw by him showed, because it was one of the best things he ever wrote, three or four days ago, it was up at antiwar.com.
You know, Ron Paul has a completely candid and consistent understanding of U.S. foreign policy, on foreign policy.
And as you know, I don't go along with Ron Paul on everything, but on foreign policy, on war policy, Paul is an anti-imperialist.
And it's not just that he's got good principle, he really knows what he's talking about on each and every one of these disputes, too.
He reads the newspapers more closely than our last two presidents have done, for sure.
Yeah, he's really good on it.
But the thing is, I mean, the counterfactual is, you know, all this pressure would have rolled off of his back like water off a duck's back, and yeah, I mangled that.
But you know what I mean?
He would have just said, Admiral, pull your boats away from Iran, because I said so.
And everybody squawking and screaming, tough.
You elected a peacenik, you get peace.
Sorry if you don't like it.
That kind of strength comes to few politicians, and even to those few, rarely, as far as I can see, as far as I can read history on this point.
I mean, it came to Lincoln, when he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, against pretty much the sentiment in his cabinet against the advice of his Secretary of State.
He knew he wanted to do it.
It came to Kennedy with his push for the Test Ban Treaty, which came through just a couple months before he was assassinated.
We got a ban on atmospheric nuclear weapons.
Now there, the Joint Chiefs had been opposed to him.
That took much more courage than it would take for Obama to defy the forces right now who want entry into Syria.
But you know, within Kennedy's career, that's not quite an isolated act, but it's unusual.
People once in power tend to be responsive to these enormous pressures.
And it's a regrettable fact about, I don't know what to say about not just democratic politics, but politics in general, that somebody like Ron Paul, who has that kind of strength, doesn't end up on top.
Yeah, it is a shame.
But yeah, now, and again, like you're saying, you know, Jack Kennedy facing down the Chiefs on a big issue like the Test Ban Treaty is one thing.
All Obama has to do is hide behind Dempsey's skirt.
What's so hard about that?
I do not.
I, you know, if I were advising him, and I'm a million miles from advising him, that is what I would have said.
I would have said, this is your moment, Mr. President, you will never get a better opportunity.
You say, I can't help feeling ambivalence about these attacks.
We feel there is a strong probability that this or others of them were carried out by the Assad government.
But I am told by our generals, and I very, very seldom neglect the advice of my generals, that this would be a disastrous decision.
And their views have to prevail with me over the views of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, etc.
That would have been a very easy speech to make.
End of story.
But he chose not to make it.
And that, I mean, I think that reflects his, his extreme sensitivity and responsive to all the forces at work around him.
And you know, it's not just appealing to their authority to it could have gone on to elaborate why you don't want to fight for the Al-Nusra guys, their suicide bomber prison beheading and night types.
I agree.
But all that is, is shrouded in in vague, abstract, sometimes almost impenetrable obscurity of language by Obama and his spokesman until an occasional senator will speak it plain and talk about it.
Rand Paul did it the other day a bit.
But they don't they don't want to talk candidly about the dangers of the policy they're already embarked on by even supplying the rebel troops to the extent that we are thus far.
And besides which, and I repeat myself here, and I get in trouble with all my left liberal friends when I do it, but Obama has no gift for explanation.
He is not he's, you know, he's praised for his voice and for his compositional abilities.
No comment on that.
But he's, he's just not a particularly good explainer of political questions.
And this cuts across all the issues he's had to deal with for the last five years.
I mean, the competition is not very stiff.
You know, he, Clinton, maybe was a little better, but gauzy to Bush was no good at all and relied completely on his speechwriters and cliches and, you know, blunt sort of punchy platitudes, and couldn't do it on his own at all.
But I mean, we can remember you can go back, you can look at examples from press conferences and speeches on major issues by john Kennedy, or by the second Roosevelt, all the way back to Lincoln, and john Quincy Adams, and so on.
I mean, it exists, there is an art of political explanation that is related to telling the truth.
And Obama is just no good at it.
So you know, another regrettable thing.
All right, well, music's playing, we gotta go.
But thanks very much for your time, David.
It's great to have you back on.
Good to talk to you.
All right, everybody.
That is the great David Bromwich.
He's a literature professor at Yale.
And he writes at the Huffington Post.
This one is the crossroads on Syria.
And there's a lot more in there that we didn't get to talk about to really good stuff there.
And like I said, he edited Edmund Burke and all that.
Okay, see you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
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