All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My friend Anthony Gregory's on the line.
He's a research analyst at the Independent Institute, policy advisor to the Future Freedom Foundation, and columnist for LewRockwell.com.
He guest edits Strike the Root.
His writings have appeared in such places as the Christian Science Monitor, the San Diego Tribune, Antiwar.com, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Counterpunch, the American Conservative Magazine, Liberty Magazine, the Mises Institute blog, and the Stress blog, the Libertarian Enterprise, and Liberty Empower, as well as in textbooks, journals, and other outlets.
It's been translated in several languages.
My man Anthony, welcome back to the show, kid.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
I guess I can't really call you kid anymore.
It's kind of been a few years.
Yeah, I'm 30, you know.
Oh, geez.
How will that make me?
All right.
Well, hey, so welcome to the show.
I'm glad to have you back.
It's great to be back.
So here's the thing.
I was hoping that you and I could sort of attempt to quantitatively, possibly, assess the presidency of Barack Obama so far, as compared and contrasted to, say, for example, that of George W. Bush.
What do you think?
Well, it seems like a lot of people would say that it's night and day.
Isn't that true?
I mean, it seems that you've got all these Tea Parties who hate Barack Obama, and yet two thirds of them, they like George Bush.
And you've got all these people who like Barack Obama, and they hate George Bush.
But I mean, the policies are basically the same.
There's some differences.
Certainly on the war issue, we could say that Obama isn't quite as bad as Bush was in his first term, maybe, because, you know, Bush did start these wars.
But I think you can make a very strong case that Obama's worse than Bush was in the second term, that Obama, that the trajectory of foreign policy under Obama is even worse than we might have had with a third Bush term, which is, by the way, in 2008, that was what I was hoping that we would get, that we could suspend the Constitution, and Bush would be president another four years.
I think that would have been a little better than either Obama or McCain.
But, of course- Well, if only because his poll numbers were already so low.
He was a president on the ropes, a lame duck, and that's what we want, is a president who can't get things done.
That's right.
Well, you want that, I want that.
People who really understand that the U.S. government and empire are a force for great evil in the world, they might want that.
They might like to see the presidency taken down a notch.
And some other people might want it, too.
But I think that, in general, people like Americans want the government to do something.
I mean, do you remember when Bill Maher was going on and on about how the problem with Obama is he's not enough like Bush?
He doesn't go out there and really force his policies through.
But I would argue that on some of the war-type stuff and on the presidential power stuff, he has done it.
It's just that he hasn't been as loud about it, and it hasn't been as controversial, like all the drone attacks where he's detaining less and just outright killing more.
Well, you know, Bush had 40,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Obama put 60,000 more on top of that.
That's true, yeah.
He more than doubled.
It's getting close.
And then when you look at the contractors and everything else, it's almost triple, but not quite.
And, you know, people are giving Obama some credit for this gradual drawdown in Iraq.
But as you point out kind of often and something that most Americans seem to forget, this was U.S. policy before Obama took office under the Status of Forces Agreement that Bush signed.
The U.S. was going to withdraw on the same schedule.
Obama has really done nothing to expedite withdrawal.
Meanwhile, he's ramped up war in Afghanistan.
Yeah, well, he's lengthened his timetable to fit the sofa, actually.
His original, you know, what he promised in the campaign was shorter.
And he went, well, we're going to go ahead and go with this sofa, which is a little bit longer.
That's right.
That's right.
But it was, you know, it's kind of in the ballpark, isn't it?
I mean, even yeah, 16, 18 months.
Right.
And what's two months in government time.
And then the government under Obama has expanded its war more in Pakistan.
And it's, you know, he's bombed Yemen.
He had that very small type of invasion of Somalia and also pumping money in there, weapons.
And now it looks like right now the administration's reluctant to intervene.
Thank goodness for now in Libya and so forth.
But it's clear that this is not a peace presidency if there is a difference.
But if you know, I could see arguments on both sides as to who's the bigger warmonger, the Democrats or the Republicans when they're actually in power.
But what I can't really what I can't really see is any any serious argument that there's a huge difference between them.
We're talking about rounding error.
Yeah, well, and, you know, one place where they're certainly equivalent is lying straight to our faces, you know, and in fact, you know how the military is considered, you know, our modern day idols and whatever.
And they're so much more precious than us because they're willing to risk their lives for our freedom and all that.
Well, he goes to West Point and gives a speech and says we're going to start ending the war in Afghanistan in July of 2011 will be the beginning of the end.
We're going to fight them between now and then.
And then we're going to start withdrawing and have to work it out from there.
Well, that's just a blatant lie.
He might as well have said that they have a secret nuclear weapons program.
We have to go and prevent weapons of mass destruction from defying the United Nations or whatever.
They're just making stuff up.
They're not leaving.
They're not beginning the ending of anything this summer.
And they admit it now.
They talk 2014, 2015.
And then how many troops will we have after 2015, do you think, was the question for Jim Miklaschewski, the NBC Pentagon reporter on TV this morning?
Well, yeah, of course, we see just as much feet dragging on Guantanamo.
I don't think there's any real pretense they're going to close that down under this first term or even if Obama had a second term.
Do you think he'd close it down?
If he did close it down, it would just be because he found some other dungeon to put people in.
But no, of course they lie.
And, you know, Obama, I think that some of the stuff he said about Iran when they supposedly were caught red-handed with the Qom nuclear facility, which, of course, they weren't caught.
They disclosed it as they promised they would, the Iranians.
And offhand, I can't remember exactly what Obama said about the incident, but he sure, it was sure deceptive, wasn't it?
He sure implied that Iran was caught red-handed.
Right.
Yeah.
Four days after they declared it to the IAEA, he said, we busted them with this secret facility.
And, of course, it was the New York Post had its secret atom bomb factory as their cover.
But all it was is the empty building.
And they declared it far more than six months before they were to introduce nuclear material into it.
And it was all a big scam.
And in fact, you know, he did that in order to thwart his own deal from going through.
They had basically accepted with two minor caveats, I think, his offer on the third party uranium enrichment deal.
And yet he wanted to make sure that they didn't have a resolution by the end of 2009, which was his deadline for we better have a resolution or else more sanctions.
He wanted to do sanctions.
So he came up with that calm nonsense just to thwart their acceptance of his offer.
Sure.
And yeah, I mean, you could say smarter than George Bush because Bush couldn't come up with that, but still, you know, it wasn't good.
Yeah, I think he's probably a bit smarter.
Well, I like how Chris Floyd in his article today keeps calling him Oh, cool and smooth and progressive and hip and whatever, because that is what it is.
That's why everybody loves this guy so much because he's tall, dark and handsome.
Unlike that bumbling, so called Texan.
Anyway, we'll get right back with Anthony Gregory right after this.
Sorry, I always gotta have the last word on.
All right, y'all.
It's anti-war radio talking with Anthony Gregory.
He's from the Independent Institute, the Future Freedom Foundation and Lou Rockwell dot com.
How do you like that?
You know, something to strike the root to an anti-war dot com from time to time.
We're comparing and contrasting Obama's policies with Bush's and trying to figure out who's taller, darker and handsomer and what's the big difference between these two?
I know one has a R by his name, the other a D. One supposedly is from Texas, even though he's from Connecticut.
The other supposedly is from Hawaii, even though he's a secret agent of the Kenyan Special Services, I think.
Anyway, other than that, they seem pretty much the same.
How about that?
You mentioned Guantanamo, Anthony.
How about the Bagram wink, wink, nudge, nudge prison in Afghanistan, where they're still at least using torture?
The military is at least using torture up to and including all the stuff and perhaps beyond what's described in Appendix M of the rewritten Army Field Manual.
So that makes them a torture of Afghan prisoners and others who apparently have been taken to that base from around the world, just like George Bush.
Well, sure.
And, you know, I haven't seen in the last few months how what's going on in Bagram, because last time I checked, they were talking about kind of handing it over.
You know, they're always talking about that.
But at first they expanded Bagram under Obama because they knew they were going to expand the war.
And Bush had sent all of these people to Bagram after the Supreme Court said, if they're at Guantanamo, you need to give them, you know, certain procedural rights.
So he did his whole shell game.
And Obama continued that shell game.
And then when a federal judge ruled that at least in many cases, habeas corpus does extend to Bagram, just as it does Guantanamo, because it's under effective U.S. jurisdiction.
Of course, the Obama Justice Department appealed and said, no, we don't think that's right.
We need to have a free hand.
So certainly morally, and I would say in terms of international law, Bagram is probably worse than Guantanamo.
And Obama has embraced it.
So, you know, what really gets me about all this is there really was, it seemed to me, an opposition to Bush that went beyond the R&D partisan nonsense.
You know, didn't it sound for a while that people really opposed him because there were human rights on the line, because aggressive war and occupation seemed offensive to a lot of Americans?
Well, it was certainly substantive criticism of him.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing about, well, you just hate Bush.
You know, it didn't that didn't seem real.
I mean, it certainly didn't apply to you or me.
But, you know, as far as the left wing anti-war movement, that did not seem like a real criticism of them at all, because after all, they knew what was going on.
They they were opposing things that were real, not just him.
They were just talking about, you know, nonsense about his character or whatever.
They were talking about the wars, the torture, the lawlessness, the rest of it.
Yeah.
And even the partisan Democrats even move on was was got kind of radical in its criticism.
But.
You know, it's certainly there are a lot of great anti-war lefties still writing and still working, but it just seems like people are really tired of this.
I mean, not you and not anti-war.com.
And of course, you have lots of a great readership, but I'm just talking about the atmosphere out there in America.
Yeah, I mean, well, you know, we just had Kathy Kelly on speaking of great leftist anti-war folk.
And she was talking about how the polls really show high numbers, you know, high 60 percent are opposed to the war in Afghanistan, wanted to end sooner rather than later, those kinds of things.
And yet, you know, the where the rubber meets the road, it's kind of issue number 14 on their list of concerns.
So, you know, pretty much the society, if we had our way, everybody's against it, more or less, but just not very much.
Nobody really cares that much about it.
And that's because TV will tell us about movie stars all day, but they won't tell us anything about the Afghan war because there's nothing to tell except a bunch of dead kids, no progress, no gains whatsoever.
They're a war to prop up the most corrupt government in the whole world, you know, worse than ours.
Well, but remember when the TSA hit the news, the TSA stuff in November, and I saw so many people lined back into their partisan nonsense where all of these conservatives seem to forget what administration created the TSA and all these liberals were defending this as though we needed it for, you know, to stop terrorism.
And I just don't I how long is this going to go on, Scott, where Americans really believe that over a million dead Arabs, that, you know, the torture, the detentions without charge, the total destruction of the Fourth Amendment, the trillions of wasted dollars, the thousands of dead Americans, that all of this, the tens of thousands of wounded Americans, that all of this is actually keeping us safe?
I mean, how long is this ruse going to go on?
Now, of course, some people say, well, not all of this keeps us safe.
But none of this really keeps us safe.
We're no more safe than we ever were.
And look at what our government's doing and what it's still doing, what it hasn't relented in doing.
I don't see why this isn't, you know, I could see when the stock market collapsed or whatever, I could see for a day or two, war not being on the very front page.
Because, you know, sometimes another issue where, you know, the whole global economy being threatened, that I could see that being pushed up temporarily.
But in general, every day, it should be on the top of the on the front page, that the US, how many people are dying in these wars?
You know, what's going on?
When you look at the revolutions in the Middle East, where, you know, just the New York Times, Washington Post version of the story is that the White House is scrambling to figure out ways to protect Salih in Yemen, and King Hamad in Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet is stationed and whatever.
If we can't have Mubarak, maybe we can get the guy that tortured all the bogus Iraq evidence out of Sheikh Ali before us.
For George Bush, Omar Suleiman, and maybe we can get him to be our new torturer-in-chief there.
Well, sure.
And, you know, I think that...
But they're going to bomb Libya to help the people there, though.
Make sure and keep that straight.
Isn't it frustrating?
You have all of these revolutions and near revolutions.
This is some of the most inspiring events.
I should say, this does deserve to knock off even US wars for a day or so.
These revolutions all throughout the Arab world, which are, you know, some of the most inspiring events since the fall of the Soviet Union in terms of human freedom.
Who knows what's going to come of it, but it's certainly inspiring.
But what's really tragic is that the US is going to co-opt this stuff.
I mean, in all of these states, it seems that the US leadership is on the side of the regime, except in Libya, because Qaddafi was only a US client for a few years there, right?
So, and not that much of a client.
It's just kind of an uneasy enemy-of-my-enemy-friend relationship during the Iraq war buildup, if I understand this correctly.
So, the US establishment wants credit.
You know, the fact that people are...
I've seen, you know, the neocon saying that, to the extent anything good happens, it's because Bush says the dominoes fall.
But another way of looking at it is, what if the US had never invaded Iraq, but there was still all of these revolutions?
Maybe, maybe Saddam would have gotten, you know, come up at the hands of the Iraqi people.
Well, and on MSNBC, the way they have it is it was Obama that overthrew Mubarak, not the millions of people in the street.
Oh, sure.
It was Obama.
You know, that's the Democrats want to credit Obama.
The Republicans want to credit Bush, just like with the fall of the Soviet Union.
You know, the true positions that people hold are, Reagan did it, and the Democrats say, no, we helped, too.
Yeah.
Well, so, but here's the thing, though.
Now, Barack Obama, he's a lousy president.
We know that he must be in on, you know, firsthand in on the daily torture of the hero Bradley Manning.
The guy's the devil.
But Anthony, he couldn't possibly be spending more money than George Bush, right?
Well, in the war, he's spending more money than George Bush.
Well, your cell phone goes out right when the music's playing.
I asked one too many questions anyway.
All right.
Well, everybody, that's Anthony Gregory.
He's at the Independent Institute, Independent.org, LewRockwell.com, at LewRockwell.com, and the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
We'll be right back.
