All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Anthony Gregory, the plumb line, the litmus test, where you disagree with Anthony Gregory, you're just not libertarian enough, that's how it works.
He's a fellow at the Independent Institute, independent.org, he writes for lourockwell.com, at lourockwell.com, the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, you can find them over at Strike the Root, and today he's got one on antiwar.com called Worse Than a Third Bush Term.
Welcome back to the show.
Anthony, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
Welcome back to the show.
It's always great, man.
It sure was great to see you and Larissa and everyone else this weekend, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was cool.
For those who don't know, there was a giant nullification conference in Los Angeles, and I got to speak along with Anthony and Thomas Woods and John Dennis, who ran against Nancy Pelosi as the anti-war Republican up there in San Francisco, and a bunch of great other speakers.
Perhaps you should tell them more about a little bit what it was about and who else was there, Anthony?
It was just an event about the 10th Amendment decentralizing the government, opposing the federal regime, and we all had...
Your talk was very good about the empire.
Oh, thanks.
I talked about this when Tom Woods brought the house down.
All right.
So yeah, nullifynow.com, right?
And I guess I saw Tom Woods' speech is on the internet already, along with Stuart Rhodes from the Oath Keepers, I believe, and Michael Bolden's speech, and I'm not sure if yours or mine are up there yet, but sooner or later, they'll be online there.
Yeah.
And it's a good cause, for sure.
Sure.
All right.
So now let's talk about this article.
How is it that you really measure Obama and George Bush?
What is it that you're comparing and contrasting here in your piece today at anti-war.com, Anthony?
Well, I wrote a whole policy report for the Independent Institute on the cost of these wars, and I wrote an article based on that.
It's on anti-war today.
And I looked at metrics such as troop presence, boots on the ground, fatalities, American fatalities, and how much money is being spent on these wars.
And I looked at a little bit more.
You can get the whole report at independent.org.
And I find that, you know, the Iraq war has been winding down, as Obama said that it would, but the Afghanistan war has been skyrocketing in activity since he took power.
And if you look at the entire trajectory, these wars are costing about as much.
More Americans died last year in wars than in 2008.
And as I point out in the article, the drawdown in Iraq was going to happen anyway, as you point out often, Scott, that Bush signed the status of forces agreement when he was a lame duck president.
Obama hasn't really done anything other than continue the Bush path on Iraq and make things worse in Afghanistan.
To say nothing of Pakistan and Libya and his excursions in Somalia and so forth.
Well, sure.
And his administration in, you know, the military and the civilians at the cabinet level have made no secret whatsoever of the fact that they're trying to do everything they can to twist Nouri al-Maliki's arm to get us to quote unquote, to get him to quote unquote, invite us to stay.
And it's really only the power of Muqtada al-Sadr that serves as the counterweight to that in effect right now.
But otherwise they would stay forever.
Absolutely.
I mean, Robert Gates is saying so.
That's not, you know, some theory or whatever.
That's in the New York Times.
They want to stay.
They figure they stole Iraq fair and square.
Belongs to them.
Sure.
And I don't get that deep into this, but it's possible that even in Iraq, the drawdown would be more, uh, we could rely on it more under, uh, under a Republican, not because Republicans are, are any better on war.
I would never say that, but because it's kind of just like Nixon had to go to China, uh, maybe it would take a Republican to withdraw in Iraq after a mere eight years, you know, maybe the democratic desire to make the world right through military force, which I really think that we got to remember that part of the whole Bush doctrine was borrowed from the Wilsonian Democrats.
This idea that the U S military isn't just there to break things and kill people, but to save people and build things.
And in the long term, this is a very destructive ideology because of course the military doesn't build things on balance.
It's destructive.
It's costly.
It's murderous and keeping it in play until everything is better is even more naive and, and, uh, unleashes even more horror than just going in there and killing people and leaving, not that I would come close to advocating either approach or right.
Well, um, and I guess we won't get too far into the surge, although you mentioned in the article, what a bogus slogan that was that the surge worked.
And, and then Obama's words beyond her wildest dreams, um, it worked for all solder, the same guy who's forcing us out.
So it seems like a giant failure from David Petraeus his point of view, if he would be honest, but maybe that's just me.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just, yeah, that's absolutely right.
I point out that, you know, as we, as we like to point out, Scott, um, Obama was always a warmonger on Afghanistan.
He and most of the Democrats always attacked Bush for being soft on Afghanistan, but there was one.
The idea was he was better on Iraq, but of course, once the U S was in Iraq in 2004, Obama said, you know, he agrees with the Bush approach, given that we're there in 2006 and 2000, well, in 2007, he was defending his vote, you know, because in the Senate he voted to finance this war.
The idea of course was, well, it was a terrible war, but we need to support the troops, so we need to fund them.
But of course, if he, if, if Congress has the guts to defund a war, that would be the end of it, or it would, at least that's the way to begin the end of it.
But Obama never really wanted to end the war quickly.
He just, he's really continued the, the given that Bush started the war, Obama hasn't accelerated anything in terms of withdrawing in Iraq and his tripling of the troop levels in Afghanistan, the incredible increase in, in, in American casualties, as well as Afghan casualties last year, uh, record casualties in Afghanistan, at least going back to the beginning of the war and, um, you know, all these drone attacks, Obama's using drone attacks three times as often as Bush at the height of his drone attack.
And this puts aside, of course, all of the human rights and civil liberties violations, which have only, I'd say overall, they're, they're either the same or a little worse.
Uh, some things might be slightly better, but you look at all these crackdowns on whistleblowers, the prosecution, you know, the domestic police state stuff for the next segment, we'll be back with more from Anthony Gregory, worse than a third Bush term at antiwar.com right now.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Anthony Gregory from, uh, every libertarian publication in history, I think something like that.
The independent institute, independent.org, uh, lourockwell.com, the future freedom foundation.
Of course, this new one is at antiwar.com today, worse than a third Bush term.
And, uh, it's an article based on his new study for the independent institute, what price war Afghanistan, Iraq, and the costs of conflict.
May 31st, 2011.
You can read the full policy report at, uh, the independent institute website, independent.org.
And so now, um, uh, I really do want you to categorize the civil rights abuses.
I think, you know, most people think of the Patriot act and this and that we get little pieces of, uh, expanded FBI powers here and there, but it's, it's kind of rare, maybe that people get hit over the head with a comprehensive list of, uh, how many rights we've lost just in the last decade or so, Anthony, um, and as Obama's continuing along that same path, as you said, but I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit more about, uh, foreign policy first.
Um, and especially, I mean, you gotta have something to say about, uh, Barack Obama, the so-called peace candidate and our new war in Libya.
Well, you know, one, one reason that I was reluctant for the first two years of the Obama administration to say that he was quite as bad as Bush is that although he was continuing all of this warmongering and expanding upon some of it, he didn't actually start, you know, uh, uh, a fresh new major preventive war the way Bush did.
Now, I still don't think the Libya war is as bad as the Iraq war, but in principle, here we have a presidential war where there's mission creep, where he first says it's just to stop, you know, to, to stop these, uh, impending massacre that was supposedly going to happen in Benghazi.
And then it turns into this entire project to, uh, have Gaddafi step down.
And then they say, there's never going to be ground troops.
Well, now it looks like we've got, uh, uh, ground forces, but, uh, the fact that he didn't even ask Congress, I mean, we, you remember when even left liberals throughout Bush years were saying, Hey, this Iraq war wasn't declared constitutionally, well, that was correct.
But at least Congress, you know, at least Bush had Congress go through the motion of inappropriately, you know, giving their authority to the president to declare war, Congress approved it in something resembling an official process.
That doesn't make it legal.
Certainly doesn't make it moral.
But if you're, if you care about this sort of procedural niceties, the Libyan war is even worse because you know, Obama just did it.
And Hillary even said they've, they, they continue to do it.
Even if Congress specifically told them to stop.
Yeah.
Here, they're trying to pass this new and improved authorization to use military force to replace the one passed after September 11th.
Now that Osama bin Laden is dead and here, Obama's making it obsolete before the ink's even on the page.
Sure.
He can do it anyway.
Yeah.
And, and what's ironic was, you know, the most narrow reading of that authorization of force after nine 11 was to go after the people the president thinks is behind nine 11, presumably the people, the president actually thinks not just pretending to think they're buying nine 11.
Um, but in this case, the U S is on the side of rebels.
Some of whom seem to be associated with Al Qaeda.
So if the U S is allowed to side with the people who were siding with the people who did nine 11, then, and the U S is allowed to just go to war.
I mean, one thing I like to point out is right now, the U S has more, there are more ties between the U S and Al Qaeda.
Although I wouldn't say they're the same thing, of course, because as collectivists, but there are, there are more, uh, there's more legitimate case to be made that there are ties between the U S and Al Qaeda than there were between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which was one of the major, uh, you know, propaganda points behind the Iraq war.
He's got a point there.
Y'all you can't deny it.
Yeah.
The U S goes in and slaughters hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Iraq because they have these non-existent weapons and non-existent ties to Al Qaeda.
Well, you know, Obama has closer ties as did the U S under Bush.
Well, what's that mean?
Does that mean that people can come over here and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Americans?
I don't think so.
I think it's wrong to slaughter innocent people, uh, whether you're a Democrat or Republican or an American or Al Qaeda or Iraqi or anything.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, as far as America now backing Al Qaeda forces in Libya, I mean, that's not just here or there or anything that's all over, at least the British press and the fact is the guys who, you know, the New Yorker, a reporter on the ground there was the guy saying, look, there's a thousand fighting men that we're backing with our air power over there and the ones of them that have, and then it's reported all over the place that the ones of them who have any credibility as fighters have credibility because they are veterans of the Iraq war where they were the, uh, the, uh, pilgrim, uh, religious types who traveled to Iraq to volunteer for Al Qaeda in Iraq to orchestrate suicide bombings against our troops.
That's where they get their battlefield Craig to be the leaders of this revolution that the U S is now backing there.
It's insanity.
Yes, it is insanity.
It's all the insanity.
I mean, could have you imagined?
I'm not going to pretend that that's the left and a lot of, um, Democratic voters are, are not unhappy with this war, but what if Bush had started this war with Libya, I imagine almost every single Democrat would have opposed it, even though they weren't very good on Iraq in the beginning, but by 2007, 2008, I think that American became pretty sick of war in here, Obama's another war.
You know, some people want to widen war to Syria.
Americans, what are they going to get so sick of war that they just say enough?
We don't care what, what party you're from.
We don't care what your domestic policy is.
We're not going to support your killing spree.
But as Obama report kind of more dispassionately shows there's, there's quite a stark continuity and I argue that maybe, but of course we don't know what a Bush, a third Bush term would mean.
There's no such thing.
We don't know what a McCain term would have been.
Maybe he would have gone nuts and nuked Iran or something.
But if we go by what, what looked like the trajectory of the Bush years toward the end, he was kind of a, you know, he was a somewhat discredited president.
The war in Iraq was slowly winding down things.
They did have the surge and, you know, things were pumping up in those last couple of years, but I think that it's at least possible that there'd be less killing going on now if, if the fact that it's at least possible just demonstrates that Obama is not, not a peace president.
He doesn't deserve his Nobel prize.
Certainly doesn't deserve to be president.
Not that I'm advocating anyone else being president, certainly not anyone who's likely to have a chance at being president, but it's time for, for people to really look at the numbers, look at how many Americans continue to die.
I remember how much that bothered people during the Bush years.
You know, these flag-draped caskets returning.
Well, they're still coming back and we still have this death and destruction, we still have abuses and all of these, these dungeons that the US is running.
We still have the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus being abused at every turn.
It's the same.
It's just another Bush term.
Maybe it's a little worse, maybe it's a little better, but it's certainly close enough that Americans need to wake up about it.
Well, in the chat room, they're arguing about whether it's LBJ's 11th term or FDR's 19th term.
It's Anthony Gregory, his piece at antiwar.com is called worse than a third Bush term.
And, you know, I think you really have something there with, you know, by the end of the Bush years, pretty much everybody was over that guy.
I mean, he probably as a very weak president would have been better than Obama coming in with a fresh new team and everybody convinced all of a sudden that American democracy works again and all this nonsense.
And so, you know, he gets a fresh start on the exact same madness.
And now, you know, real quick, we got about a minute and a half or two or so.
Could you give us, you know, beat us over the head with the list that you can remember off the top of your head anyway, of the domestic, you know, rule of law violations, the continuation of the Bush revolution against the rule of law.
Well, we have the warrantless wiretapping, which has been completely normalized.
We have all of these, you know, detention without cause going on and on.
We have the whistleblowers being persecuted even more.
We have torturers in the government being protected, prosecutorial, you know, protection of government officials.
We have, of course, the TSA, we have renditioning, we have the Homeland Security bureaucracy.
We even have those stupid air alert, you know, that it's always elevated.
We still have that even.
All right, everybody.
That's Anthony Gregory, independent.org and antiwar.com.
What Price War is the study at independent.org.
Thanks, Anthony.
Thank you.
