08/07/07 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
For those who aren't familiar, I'll go ahead and tell them Anthony Gregory writes for the Independent Institute and the Future Freedom Foundation, for LewRockwell.com, Mises.org, Antiwar.com, StrikeTheRoot.com, The Libertarian Enterprise, Liberty Magazine, and probably a few that I forgot to mention.
You can find everything that he puts, well, I won't say on paper, but, you know, type on webpage at AnthonyGregory.com.
Now, yeah, the article is The Effects of War on Liberty, and you begin by pointing out this horrible article by Randy Barnett in the War Street Journal, neo-conservative central, everybody's so worried about Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal, what, they're going to get more neo-con than they have been all this time?
I don't understand, but anyway, the Wall Street Journal printed this article by this guy, Randy Barnett, saying, oh no, don't get the wrong idea from this guy, Ron Paul, libertarians are imperialists too.
Well, yeah, that's right, and actually, I've had, you know, since that article came out, I had some ideas of how to refute it or rebut it, but I've seen so many libertarians did a good job in addressing his article that most of my article was meant to just kind of give a positive case for why we support peace, liberty and peace go together, and also to kind of go on the offensive on this issue, and to say, no, war is, you know, war is the ultimate government program, it's the negation of the principles we hold dear, and even putting aside, see, because Barnett's article, you know, tried to make a case that the Iraq War could be seen in self-defense, but I, you know, I don't, I hardly think that argument's worth addressing.
Unfortunately, I guess it is, because many people still buy it, but that argument just seems to me kind of silly on its face, you know.
Well, of course it is.
The Iraq War was self-defense.
Of course it is.
But, you know, as a libertarian, of course, I think even the Afghanistan War wasn't self-defense either, it's not self-defense to drop bombs on neighborhoods.
It's just not, you know, it's not, because self-defense is supposed to describe the force you're using as being against the aggressors.
But of course, you know, in modern war, they kill a lot of innocent people, so.
Well, and, you know, when we look at the war in Afghanistan, it's pretty easy to see that, and in fact, Tommy Franks admitted, this is, you know, in the words of the general in charge, Osama bin Laden is not really the target here, the Taliban is.
I mean, they diverted, they conflated the two groups together, and then abandoned one in favor of fighting the other.
And even, you know, many people who supported a bigger military action in Afghanistan than I would have, you know, such, you know, bona fide establishment types as Michael Schur, he said that the way that the war played out in Afghanistan, played into Osama's hands, just like Iraq did, though, probably not to the same degree, but that war wasn't defensible either, you know, it's sad that we're to the point where four years after the Iraq War started, or Gulf War, the second installment of it started, and it's been such a disaster, and now, you know, neocons are jumping ship even.
It's a sad thing to have to discuss among other libertarians, if the Iraq War was defensible.
I want to go back, you know, right after 9-11, and challenge the whole war on terror, you know, the fundamental principles in play here, collective security.
Right.
Well, you know, in this, I don't know if you saw this Human Events interview with Ron Paul, that's what they keep saying is, okay, okay, so you're against the Iraq War, but what about the war?
What about, you know, the terror war?
And, of course, he argues for, intelligently, and with principle, he argues for the most limited response, because that's the best way to handle it.
Well, in the words of Philip Giraldi, who was quoted in this Washington Times article today, the best way to fight the war on terrorism is to ramp this whole thing down.
That was his phrase to me, was you keep this thing as absolutely low-key as possible, you attack the Al Qaeda terrorists one-on-one, one at a time, as individuals, wherever possible.
If, you know, you can only get in there and kill 10 of them at a time, then you do that, too.
But, you know, cops and intelligence agents, occasionally special forces types if you really need them, but we're talking about a band of pirates here, not the Soviet Union ready to conquer the world.
Well, yeah, that's absolutely true, but of course, if you look at the years since 9-11, and despite the influence of Rumsfeld, who supposedly wants this small, lean, mean military, much of the fence establishment build-up since 9-11 has just been Cold War-type build-up.
You know, it could be worse, but to a large extent, they still have this mentality that we're up against this huge, monolithic enemy.
So, I guess in other respects, they do act like the enemies everywhere and nowhere, you know.
So, we kind of got both, we got the worst of both worlds on that.
Now, that's true, of course, you know, I know right after 9-11, Ron Paul supported having the, you know, going after the bad guys, because, you know, as a constitutional libertarian, that was the correct position, but, you know, he had proposed the letters of mark and reprisal, which would have been a real, you know, of all the ways to do it, would have been as close to ideal as I could imagine for government work here, right?
In fact, I understand that he's reintroduced that bill.
Oh, has he?
Yeah.
Well, actually...
Well, maybe they...
Yeah, I read that.
Maybe if they took him up on it, they'd actually catch them.
And now, for the people who don't understand and don't know, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, Congress has the power to declare war, grant letters of mark and reprisal, and make laws concerning war on the high seas.
And that's pretty close to the quote.
Anyway, so a letter of mark is when the Congress puts a bounty on somebody's head.
Basically, it's a bill of attainder for a foreigner.
It says, you know, we are hiring 007s.
Here's your license to go kill this foreign enemy that is less than a state.
If it was a state, then Congress would declare war, and our Army and Navy would go and overthrow their government, whatever, mash them into a million pieces.
If it's a group of pirates, like the Barbary Pirates, or Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, you do a letter of mark and reprisal.
Basically, it's a 007 license to kill, is what it is.
And they used private tears a lot in the War of 812.
And nothing I'd necessarily endorsed everything the horrible Madison administration did.
But it was a mush.
There's a tradition of this, of understanding more of a pinpoint approach to certain aggressive forces.
Yeah, that seems to me a relatively reasonable way to respond to 9-11.
Of course, at the time, you know, 9-15, 9-20, that whole month, the whole fall and winter, back then, if you had advocated such a measured response for some combination of diplomacy and law enforcement and very limited kind of police action, people would think, no, that's not realistic.
We've got to do this because we've got to get them, well, you know, millions of dollars later, hundreds of thousands of dead people later, you know, a totally solely reputation on the international stage, our civil liberties and tatters.
What do we have to show for it?
Right, nothing.
A strengthened, decentralized Al Qaeda, maybe?
Yeah.
Al Qaeda in Iraq?
Well, maybe Ron Paul's proposal, maybe it wouldn't have succeeded.
But it would have been a much cheaper failure than the failure that I've just given her.
Yeah, indeed.
And frankly, I think that if George Bush had, say, for example, had Ron Paul as his national security advisor instead of Condoleezza Rice, and instead of being surrounded by these neo-cons, he was surrounded by some, I don't know, independent institute guys or something, that if George Bush had come out and said, listen, as horrible as this atrocity is and as high as the body count is, what we're dealing with here is a stateless enemy and we have to deal with it in a limited fashion to keep it limited.
Otherwise, we're falling into their trap.
Trust me, I'm smart.
I'm George Bush.
I know what I'm doing.
I promise you the people who did this, you know, will get theirs.
But we're going to be very careful and measured about our response.
I think that people would have gone along with that.
I think that, you know, he could have rallied the American people to accept a much more limited policy.
So I'm reminded of The Onion when you talk about, you know, the mood that week or, you know, that month.
The Onion did a point-counterpoint, which one side said, we must lash out with blind, unfocused rage, and the other said, we must lash out with clear-eyed, focused rage, you know.
Yeah, I remember that.
I think, was that the one where it detailed how we should shoot Osama and the kneecap?
Yeah, I think so.
And how we should put all our energy against that guy?
Yeah, I remember that.
And, of course, at the time, I had some rage myself and I sided with a focused rage.
But the unfocused rage has been such a disaster.
And I think you're right that Bush would have been able to rally people around a more limited response.
He would have been able to do it in a way that Democrats wouldn't have.
Right.
After 9-11, I was kind of grateful we didn't have a Democrat because I thought, well, first of all, Democrats love just bombing foreigners.
We know this from Clinton and LBJ and Truman and FDR.
They have this long tradition of killing lots of people.
So I've never had this illusion that the Democrats would be peaceful.
Since many people think of them as wimps, you know, they're the ones who don't know how to fight war or whatever.
At 9-11, had it been Al Gore, I think the pressure on him from both left and right would have been for violence.
Right.
Whereas I thought I was, to tell you the truth, a little hopeful that Bush would have been.
Because, you know, before 9-11, he had shown some signs of being less neoconservative than some people.
And less diplomatically aggressive than I feared the Gore machine would have been, of course.
Hmm.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that.
I mean, they carpet bombed Iraq when they were in power for, what, three weeks?
Oh, yeah, that's true.
That's true.
You're right.
You're right.
Okay.
Well, okay.
Maybe I was too naive for that first day or two.
Yeah.
Certainly, by the time they went to war with Afghanistan, it was fairly clear that this was business as usual.
You know, this isn't...
Well, it was even worse than that.
It was even worse than business as usual.
You know, Colin Powell came out and said, you know, we're going to work with countries around the world to stop these terrorist groups.
And then the next day, Paul Wolfowitz came out and said, we're going to end states that are associated with terrorism.
And Colin Powell, the next day, said, oh, well, geez, I don't know about all that.
You'd have to ask George Bush, but I don't think so.
And so it was not just business as usual.
It was the neocon coo.
It was business as usual on steroids.
Yeah, that's true.
Of course, I really think that the realists, the Cold War types, the Cold War liberal types, the Clintons, the Clintons, I think that it was very likely after 9-11, given the economic interests, the nationalist fervor, given everything, I think it's very likely that whoever was in power would have probably, you know, attacked Afghanistan, or done at least something that I would have not approved of, violent and destructive.
So, yeah, it's true that some of the language that they used right after 9-11 was very intimidating because they started already advocating nationalizing this bureaucracy.
I remember even back then, the Republicans, I seem to remember they were saying, no, we don't need to nationalize airport security just yet.
That's crazy.
Right.
But then they did.
Yeah, and then they said, well, we'll create an office of homeland security, but we're not going to make a department.
And then they went ahead and did that.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, Future Freedom Foundation, LouRockwell.com, and, well, every other place where libertarians write things.
This article today on LouRockwell.com, the effects of war on liberty.
And, Anthony, in this article, you have a great paragraph where you just sum up 80 or 90 or something years of history, beginning with the First World War and following the chain of events and explaining how each intervention sets up the circumstances for the next intervention and the next intervention and the next intervention all the way up into 2007.
Why don't you rehearse that for us?
Well, when the U.S. entered World War I, the idea that was advertised to the public who, before that, had been hesitant to embrace a full-blown American empire, though, of course, the U.S. had been very expansive for a century before that.
And the idea was to make the world safe for democracy.
When Russia had, of course, this is a somewhat longer version than my paragraph, when Russia had, when they had overthrown the Tsar and been replaced by the Kerensky Revolution, all of a sudden the allies over in Europe were all democracies, or ostensibly so.
And the enemies of the allies had been non-democracies, though a case could be made, actually, that Germany had many democratic aspects to it.
But this further buttressed the idea, the Wilsonian idea, that the U.S. was going to come in on the side of democracy and everything would be great.
Well, interestingly, the fact that the democracy in Russia had stayed in the war after, and when the Americans entered the war and the war was going on, the Russian people really didn't like this, because, you know, many people don't like war.
And unfortunately there, the only people who were really offering peace were the Bolsheviks.
So this bolstered the Bolsheviks in Russia.
And then when the U.S. came in on the side of the allies and crushed Germany with much greater force than they would have been able to without the U.S. entry, this led to a much more humiliating and rough defeat for Germany, and the Versailles Treaty was very hard on Germany, and also Wilson demanded that the Kaiser step down.
And this led to kind of something resembling democracy in the short term, which, of course, you can accomplish that if it sounds familiar, but this led to the conditions in which fascism and communism came to power throughout Europe, and of course that led to World War II.
And in World War II, the U.S. entered World War II again in this crusade to support freedom, but also because of Pearl Harbor.
That's why Americans were convinced to embrace this war when, before Pearl Harbor, most Americans opposed war because they had seen how futile World War I had been, with all its sacrifices leading just to totalitarianism.
So they were very hesitant, but they came in after Pearl Harbor, and it's true that the Axis powers were destroyed, but the Soviet Union expanded and was befriended during World War II as a great ally, even though Stalin actually killed more people than Hitler.
So the end result of World War II was this huge Soviet empire that the U.S. supposedly had to be in another permanent war with, and so we had the Cold War, and it's during the Cold War, of course, that the U.S. really began a lot of its meddling in the Middle East.
We had overthrows, and then the worst of these interventions for long-term American security was probably the support of the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan as well as the Gulf War.
But the fact is that it's just like Ludwig von Mises, the economist, said in regard to economic policy, the government intervenes to fix something, but it causes distortion.
And so then there's more problems, and then the government has to intervene yet again and again.
And with war, we see this insight played out, perhaps to an even greater degree, and to the cost of even more lives, liberty, and prosperity.
We see a war leading to another war.
And now, of course, the U.S. has de facto supported the Shiites in Iraq by having overthrown Saddam and leading to a situation that ended up strengthening our enemies from yesterday.
And now, again, Bush claims that the ideas now were friendly again with the Saudi regime.
Well, we were friendly before, but now Bush is even warming up to them more now.
And at Reason magazine, they had some unfortunate article about how this might work.
But I'm not so optimistic.
I think it's just more of the same.
Isn't it about time they renamed that magazine Excuse?
Well, you know, I don't want to pick on them just for this one article, but it just came to mind because it was not a good article.
But they have some good stuff in there.
I like reading them.
Oh, I still like Jesse Walker and Brian Doherty and David Weigel and some of the other guys.
They're all right, but there's a lot of pro-totelitarian stuff in that magazine sometimes.
They ran one not too long ago about, ah, the real ID card, what's the big deal?
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
All right, I'm sorry, I'm off on a tangent.
No, but yeah, the fact is we're still fighting World War I.
Right.
And, you know, it's just that some of our enemies are different, but these enemies are our allies that we had in the past to support our crusade against other enemies who had been our allies.
It's really, you know, if it weren't really horrible, it'd be funny because it's just so, you know, Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com, I think you know who he is.
Yeah, I've read a couple of his articles.
He likes to talk about the tear in the space-time fabric after 9-11 and how this is a bizarre world.
I think there's a lot to that, and of course when we were talking about the aftermath of 9-11, we see a lot of strange irrational shifts where we're like, wait, we're supporting them now?
Now they want to, now they're thinking about the Ba'athists again, what's going on?
But there's a sense in which there's been insanity in our foreign policy for much longer than that, and of course it was this insane, horrible foreign policy that led to 9-11 and put us in this place.
And I think what you were saying earlier about Hillary being someone the neo-cons could support, that's true, you know, the neo-cons supported Clinton's war, Kosovo war.
Yeah, William Crystal famously said, let's crush Serb's skulls.
Yeah, and these, you know, so they'll support Democrats, whatever, many of them came from the Democrats, and so I think Hillary is kind of a right-wing dream candidate, because the neo-cons like her because of her policy.
And then, you know, the shock jock type or the right-wing radio type, the Rush Limbaugh type, they'd love to have Hillary be the one bungling up the world, because, you know, it's starting to become very hard to defend Bush.
Yeah, well, it's always been impossible, but I can see, you're right, it's even harder to try now.
Well, it wasn't impossible, I'd say, January 21st, 2001, you could say, he still hasn't killed as many people as Clinton.
Yeah, you could have argued that then.
He's actually, I think, still behind Clinton in the running, although they're pretty neck and neck for mass murder of Iraqis right now, but Bill Clinton sure killed a hell of a lot of himself.
I really don't know how, you know, how they measure, because we look at these estimates of how many have died because of the war and how many died because of Clinton's sanctions, but I'm unconvinced that the war has actually killed fewer people than the sanctions if you count all indirect and direct ways.
Right, well, the numbers were, the Lancet and Johns Hopkins University did the legwork over a year ago now, July 2006 is when they came up with the number 600 and something thousand, so it's certainly more than that now.
But that's 600,000 who wouldn't have died otherwise, but that otherwise is still probably higher, though it would have been, though some of the reforms put in with the sanctions and when they got rid of them, I would think there'd be some cumulative effect of the devastation that Iraq has been victim to for a long time.
Right, I mean people forget that they had, their population exploded with all the oil wealth when they were an American ally, of course a lot of their wealth got wasted in the war with Iran, and in fact the war with Kuwait was over, Kuwait overproducing the oil so much that they couldn't make any money and pay off their debts and that kind of thing, but basically oil wealth paid for Iraqi society to prosper so much that the population just, I forget now, but doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc., and then we strangled them to death.
We wouldn't let them sell any of their oil.
This giant modern population, this industrial society basically, and then we strangled them and hundreds of thousands died.
Yeah, you know, what's really sad about the conservatives and warmongers who say they believe in free trade is they claim they support trade and capitalism and exchange and markets and all that, but they have very few compunctions about putting a gun to a nation's head and saying, no, you can't trade with anyone except by our very limited criteria, and I mean a blockade is a war crime.
It's an act of war certainly.
I'm almost to the point where I think war crime in the modern era is redundant, but it's a horribly aggressive act.
It stands in violation not only of the principle of free trade but of the human right that the human rights that are involved.
When a country can't live without exchanging with the rest of the world, it's a very evil act to shut them off that way, and one litmus test for anyone who says they're for free trade, if they're for U.S. blockade, U.S. flash U.N. blockade on any country the U.S. president doesn't like, they're not for free trade at all.
Yeah, well, and this cuts right to the heart of what you say in your article about, this is what distinguishes, really, libertarians from conservatives and nationalists, is that to a libertarian, there's no such thing as Iraq or Syria or Lebanon or Iran, really, anyway.
These are all pretend lines on maps.
That doesn't make us one worlders either.
It makes us individual private property rights advocates.
Iranians are people.
They're individuals, and this is something that a conservative, a right-wing nationalist, cannot understand, that it's that nuke-em-til-they-glow attitude.
It's like drawing a picture of a nuclear bomb going off on some cartoon characters.
That's how little it matters.
There's not people over there.
It's Iraq, nuke Iraq, not nuke individuals who happen to live within these pretend lines on a map.
Well, the funny thing is these people kind of actually are one world governments.
They just think the one world government is the U.S., and they think that, you know, they kind of combine some of the vulgar aspects of nationalism, which has been responsible for so much horror in world history over the last few hundred years, ever since the advent of the nation-state, to be honest.
They're nationalists, but then when it comes to respecting other nations' borders, of course they don't.
It's total internationalism, but when it comes to our nation, it's nationalism, so they're very hypocritical.
I mean, they think the U.S. shouldn't respect anyone's boundaries, but the U.S. should actually get to determine the boundaries.
Right, and you know, I mean, to me this is just a simple case of just connecting a few ideas together.
You think about all the attitudes among conservatives in this country in the 1990s about the loss of American sovereignty.
I mean, how hard is it to see that, hey, wait a minute, if you don't respect any other country's borders, why would there, you know, would-be world federal government respect ours?
Right, it's the worst of nationalism and the worst of the internationalist, busybody Wilsonianism all mixed together.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, if you're just tuning in, you're listening to Anthony Gregory from LouRockwell.com and the Independent Institute and so forth, and you know, one thing that you touched on in talking about the history of American interventionism in Europe and the consequences for, well, Europe and the rise of the Nazi Reich and of communism, these totalitarian ideologies were only acceptable to people in times of dire crisis.
In fact, I think I just read for the first time somewhere where a warmonger was accusing anyone who says that the Treaty of Versailles led up to World War II and the rise of the Third Reich as an apologist for the Nazis, when I always thought, you know, that's a perfect analogy because everyone knows and everyone understands that the Treaty of Versailles made it possible for the Nazis to come to power.
Nobody says that that somehow diffuses responsibility away from the people who implemented World War II and the Final Solution.
Nobody says that that makes Hitler okay.
It's just a statement of fact.
Totalitarianism and fascism were only acceptable to people because they were hungry and someone was promising to save them.
And so this is another thing that I think is really important, and particularly in terms of the so-called war on terrorism.
Bush and them say that, you know, we have to give these people modern democracies and all this to undermine support for radicalism, but it's the violence that our country brings to those people that creates and sustains that radicalism.
You know, frankly, this sect of Wahhabism and Salafism that wishes it was still 800 AD or whatever cannot compete in the market.
We don't have to worry about some backwards medieval caliphate taking over the world.
It's like saying that communism can take over the world.
It can't.
Mises showed they can't do their costs right.
You know, history's proven to me anyway that some two-bit theocracy based on some medieval religion is not going to be able to conquer anything.
The best way to undermine radical ideology is to not keep smacking them in the face.
Well, I think Michael Schur has pointed out that the Ayatollah tried getting Iranians to be mad at America for its culture and freedom, for our civil liberties and Western modernism and all that stuff, but it didn't really work.
The thing that they were most excited about or mad about was the U.S. support for the Shah.
And, you know, it's not like they don't have major cultural differences.
It's really true that, you know, nut cases who promise you, you know, suicide as a way of fighting back against the enemy, whose methods are murderous and aggressive and who don't really, you know, these people are going to be a lot more popular when there's some legitimacy to the grievances.
If the U.S. had never bombed anyone in the Middle East in the last several decades, had never stationed its troops over there and supported occupations and despots and what are perceived to be apostate dictatorships, it's very hard for me to imagine people flying over here or people coming over here and attacking America any more than they attack other countries now that leave them alone.
Right.
All right.
Now, very quickly, we only have a couple of minutes, but real quick, I wanted to address the Patriot Act and that aspect of losing our Bill of Rights at home.
I don't know if you saw again that human events interview with Ron Paul where he says, the Patriot Act, no, get rid of the Bill of Rights, you know, eviscerate the Fourth Amendment over terrorism?
Absolutely not.
And they said, what's the Patriot Act have to do with the Fourth Amendment?
Well, yeah, you know, I've pointed out before that the pro-Patriot Act mentality seems to be that the Patriot Act didn't really change much at all, and yet it was absolutely necessary.
It's like, we can't do this the way we've been doing it.
Oh, but all this does is let us do things the way we've been doing them.
This just lets us use the law enforcement methods we use to fight drugs to fight terrorism.
But, you know, that's not true.
I mean, of course, it did do great violence on the Fourth Amendment with the sneak and peek stuff, most especially.
But, yeah, the Fourth Amendment has been destroyed.
And it's all in the name of war.
It's all in the name of war.
Yeah, it's all in the name of war.
And, incidentally, the drug war was able to sustain to the extent it has because it kind of grew out of a war mentality, too.
But, of course, the war on terror is even a much better selling point for the proponents of bureaucracy and surveillance.
Anthony Gregory from LewRockwell.com.
The effects of war on liberty.