All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Ari Berman.
He's a contributing writer for the Nation Magazine and investigative journalism fellow at the Nation Institute.
It's written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian.
And he's got a piece at the Nation called Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet from May the 2nd.
Welcome to the show, Ari.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I'm doing well.
Well, you're welcome and good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And, uh, oh man, I was very saddened to see this.
Not surprised, but, uh, it's, uh, it's a pretty sad story.
Uh, could you please, uh, go down the list?
Who are the neocons advising Mitt Romney?
Sure.
Well, when you look at Romney's foreign policy advisors, it's largely holdovers from the Bush administration.
70% or more of Romney's foreign policy advisors worked for the Bush administration, and many of them do hail from the neoconservative wing of the party.
They were the people that were enthusiastic backers of the war in Iraq and are now proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran, among other things that they'd like to accomplish.
And there are a number of people who are now advising him.
Some of them are well-known people like John Bolton, who was Bush's former UN ambassador, and there are a number of people that are less well-known who had important roles in the Bush administration, but are not household names that are also advising Mitt Romney.
People, for example, like Dan Signore, who was the spokesman for the coalition provisional authority in Iraq under Paul Bremer.
There are people like Robert Joseph, who worked for the National Security Council, who put the infamous 16 words in Bush's State of the Union speech, claiming that Iraq tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger.
There are people like Eric Edelman, who was a top aide to Dick Cheney.
And so there are a lot of very prominent neocons that have now latched on to Romney's campaign, either for ideological reasons or for political reasons.
But nonetheless, they are now the backbone of his foreign policy team.
And you know what?
I kind of I asked you to skip ahead in the story a little bit there.
Maybe it was a mistake.
We should I should give you a chance, I guess, to define neocons your way.
And then maybe we can talk a little bit about that some more before we move further into this, because, you know, not everybody was paying attention through the whole Iran-Iraq war.
A lot of people are just right now turning old enough to be interested in this kind of thing or something.
Yeah, that's that's a good point.
So, I mean, I think of neoconservatives as people who want aggressive American military posture abroad and support unilateral interventionism like we had in Iraq around the world.
So they were the people since the 1990s urging Bill Clinton and then George W.
Bush to attack Iraq.
And they are now the same people that are urging an attack on Iran.
They want a more confrontational posture towards places like China and Russia as well.
They believe that we should spend a lot of money on the military at home.
They don't believe that we should be withdrawing from Afghanistan.
They weren't that crazy about the fact that we withdrawed from Iraq.
And if you look at these people, they're different than traditional conservatives.
You know, traditional conservatism was more skeptical of U.S. interventionism abroad.
A traditional conservatives didn't believe that it was the role of the U.S. to go police the world through force.
Neocons have a very different conception of American power.
They want American power wielded aggressively, unilaterally, if necessary.
And they believe that's the best way to ensure peace at home.
Now, I think that the Bush administration proved pretty resoundingly that the neoconservative mission was a disaster.
But nonetheless, they've been resurrected in the form first of John McCain in 2008 and now Mitt Romney in 2012.
Yeah.
You know, Jess Romano at Antiwar.com pointed out that when Marco Rubio gave his big foreign policy speech, which was widely seen as his audition for the vice presidency, that he hit on every major neocon theme in there without mentioning the word Iraq once.
Let's just scrub that whole thing.
Pretend it never happened.
There's no you know, you quote Chris Preble here from the Cato Institute saying that, well, they successfully sold the mantra that the surge worked and that the Iraq disaster was some kind of victory.
I think more than that, they sold the idea that just forget Iraq.
Don't learn a single lesson from it.
Forget it ever happened at all.
Well, I do think that's true.
And I think there are eerie parallels between the debate over the war in Iraq and the debate over the war in Iran.
I mean, or the prospect, I should say, of a war with Iran.
I mean, it is very chilling how similar it is.
The fact that we don't have good intelligence in either cases about the so-called weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that there is this drumbeat from the very same people about why we need to do it.
These apocalyptic warnings of what would happen if we didn't attack them.
And so it is really chilling.
And it does seem like we haven't learned many lessons from Iraq.
I do think that neocons, while they often do ignore Iraq, when they do talk about it, they try to paint it as a success, as a way to lend legitimacy to further interventions that they'd like to do.
And so I think this narrative of the surge is really important because there was this sense at the end of the Bush administration that the neocons were tarnished and people like Robert Gates, who are more traditional conservatives, came in and kind of ran the show and tried to clean up the mess from the neocons in the Bush administration.
But what the neocons said is, look what's happened in Iraq.
This shows that we were right all along.
And that, of course, discounts the incredible amount of money we spent, the incredible loss of lives that were incurred because of the war, the just incredible, basically the fact that we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and just spent an enormous amount of money, resources and blood in a war that never should have happened and create a whole level of volatility in the Middle East that didn't exist previously.
And so it's certainly a pretty profound revision of history to claim that the surge was a success while ignoring all the other factors that went into the war.
Sure.
Well, and even as far as it was a success is just they only get away with that because no one ever asked them any details.
I mean, what they really mean is we helped the Bata Brigade win a war of sectarian cleansing against the Sunni Arabs there.
And that was actually pretty much done by the time the surge started.
And so then we bribed the Sunni Arab insurgency to stop fighting us while we turn around and waged a war for a year against Muqtada al-Sadr, who won the war and who we fought the war for.
At the same time, we were fighting against him and which was just a waste of lives for a little while.
And to just kind of confuse the issue as to whose side we were really on.
And meanwhile, he's the most powerful politician outside of the prime minister himself in the country right now.
And he's the guy that forced the prime minister to force us to leave in humiliation and disgrace.
So without any of our 56 permanent bases that we were going to use to nuke Iran from or whatever.
So, yeah, as long as we don't talk about what those benchmarks were supposed to be and what Iraq was supposed to look like now and what victory was supposed to be, I guess we can say the surge worked.
Good.
Good on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, as you say, it's a very simplistic bumper sticker.
I don't think most Americans agree that the surge worked.
I think most Americans believe that Iraq was a failed war, an unnecessary war, number one, and then a failed war, number two.
And I think that that's why they're skeptical about interventionism abroad.
Now, you have seen a lot of polls show that the public is opposed to Afghanistan.
I think one of the unfortunate things is because the economy is so bad, people haven't paid as much attention to foreign policy.
And that's allowed, number one, President Obama to stay in Afghanistan longer than I think people would like.
And then number two, Mitt Romney and the Republicans to say that we should stay there even longer than Obama wants.
And not only that, but we should be getting involved elsewhere as well.
And so I think the Obama administration has gotten away with some things on foreign policy that they would not have gotten away with had the public been more focused.
And certainly the Republicans right now.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, Obama himself said the surge worked beyond our wildest dreams and used as the basis for his surge into Afghanistan, as though we had just learned that this is an efficacious thing to do like that.
Good use of efficacious, huh?
All right.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio talking with Ari Berman from The Nation.
Mitt Romney's neocon war cabinet, it's more than right around 70 percent of his 40 something foreign policy advisers are neocons.
And now people have all different kinds of definitions for neocons.
I try to stay Jim Lobion about it and he uses it only as a biographical term.
So it means former leftist radicals or former Cold War Democrats who became right wing warmonger Reaganite types, you know, through the 70s and into the 80s.
And so somebody like John Bolton actually would just be a fellow traveler since he was always and Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, for that matter.
They're sort of lifelong right wing nationalists rather than new conservatives.
You know, they kind of always came from the right.
But these neocons who come from sort of, you know, they call it Max Boot calls it hard Wilsonianism, as though Woodrow Wilson was a wimp, right, with his tiny little wars that he waged, you know, in Mexico and and in Europe and in the Dominican Republic and wherever else he felt like.
But anyway, it also one of the important definitions, I guess, would be, you know, to look at, say, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and their ties to the military industrial complex, basically their role as front men who come up with, you know, intellectual rationalizations basically for the arms industry.
And they've tried to kind of out CFR the old establishment by just creating their own cluster of think tanks.
As you put it in this article, I think you're quoting Ed Crane from Cato saying that the neocons are a head without a body.
They've got, you know, more think tanks than you can shake a stick at more think tanks than actual neocons.
There's really only about 50 or 60 of these guys in the whole world, probably.
And yet they write for every magazine and every newspaper editorial board.
And they have Winep and they have Jensa and they have the FBI and PNAC and AEI and on and on and on.
The Frank Gaffney's stupid group.
I forgot what it's called.
But so that's the important thing is that this is not kind of the crusty old conservatives, as you say in here, you know, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker and the Bush senior guys.
This is the new vanguard, the guys that screwed us into the Iraq war and are trying to get us into one with Iran now.
But they're kind of their own little establishment.
Yeah.
And I mean, they are the establishment, I think, in Washington now among Republicans, the traditional realists, they're very, very old at this point.
I mean, you look at Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, people like that, even Colin Powell.
I mean, they are getting up there in age and the people that are dominant right now in Republican foreign policy circles, they are much younger in many cases and they are of the neoconservative persuasion.
Now, what's interesting is in the 2012 campaign, it looked like there was going to be more of a debate about foreign policy.
Number one, you had Ron Paul who looked like he was going to do quite well in certain contests.
And it looked like Paul represented you can describe it in different ways, whether you want to describe it as as more isolationist or more anti-interventionist or more traditionally conservative, whatever.
He was certainly more skeptical of neoconservative interventionism abroad.
And then you also had John Huntsman, who represented, I would argue, kind of a more moderate form of internationalist Republican personified by people like Chuck Hagel, a former senator from Nebraska, or Dick Lugar, the senator from Indiana, who's now facing a primary challenge.
People who are more associated, I think, with the first Bush administration, the George H.W. Bush administration.
But what was interesting is that it seemed like foreign policy was a liability for both of those candidates among Republicans.
It seemed like Huntsman never caught on, that there wasn't much enthusiasm for his plan, for example, to withdraw from Afghanistan, and that he was viciously attacked by the neoconservatives.
And Paul was always treated by Republicans as basically an outlier, and that whenever he spoke about foreign policy, he was just saying crazy stuff.
That's how the Republican establishment painted it.
And so in many ways, the neocons were very successful at sidelining both Paul and Huntsman during the 2012 campaign and making it that the only foreign policy that was acceptable for Republicans to talk about was a neoconservative foreign policy.
Well, and as you point out in the article, the American people don't agree with the neocons.
You know, when they were really scared, when there was an orange alert every single day for a year or whatever in the run up to the Iraq war.
OK, fine.
We'll go along with it.
Paul Wolfowitz says it's a good idea, I guess, they said.
But now you said what it's a it's a super majority are opposed to expanding the wars that we already have.
No, absolutely.
I mean, polls show that even a majority of Republicans now want to leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.
And if you look at other measures of American foreign policy, I mean, the public prefers multilateralism to unilateralism.
They prefer diplomacy to war.
And I mean, so over and over again, you see the public basically saying that we should be spending less money on wars abroad and more money or more attention, at least focused on rebuilding the economy at home.
And actually, when Ron Paul says that, you know, we shouldn't be doing nation building abroad, we should be focusing our attention at home.
When that line is played to swing voters, that resonates better than anything else that Republicans say on foreign policy.
But that message has basically been squeezed out of the Republican Party.
As I mentioned earlier, the only thing that Republicans can say about foreign policy is that we have to have this aggressive militant militarized posture abroad.
And and what's happened is because the public isn't focused.
On foreign policy issues right now, the candidates aren't getting a lot of scrutiny for their positions.
Romney's not getting a lot of scrutiny for who his advisors are or what he's saying.
The fact that he seems to be setting us on a course not only with Iran, but also a very confrontational posture with Russia and China, two countries that we really need in an integrated economy, but also the fact that I think the president isn't getting a whole lot of criticism for not getting congressional approval in Libya or for not withdrawing troops in Afghanistan sooner from 2014 or not seeming to have a very sharp exit strategy from that country.
So with the public focused on other issues, both parties are, I think, are getting away with a lot on foreign policy right now.
Yeah.
Well, I'm only kind of half worried about this because I just I called this back four years ago or whatever.
I said Obama will be a Bill Clinton figure, a two term president, not a Jimmy Carter, because, well, we know how the Republicans are.
They just got nobody to run.
And, you know, unless there's a major break in the dollar or some terrible scandal breaks, some kind of thing, I think Obama really is a shoe in this fall.
But, you know, this is an important reason, at the very least, why why Romney should lose.
And I'm the furthest thing from an Obama supporter.
I never have supported him for a single day.
But, you know, we found out, well, this time, too, it counts having Hillary Clinton up there in the secretary of state really counts for a lot in a lot of negative ways.
But you look at the Bush administration.
It matters so much who the deputy secretary of defense for policy is.
And most Americans just never would know the names of people like that.
But that's what this means.
What Romney's neocon war cabinet.
That means these are the guys who will be filling up those roles in the same way they did in the Bush years.
And we saw how much power and influence and what all they were able to get away with, you know, from the deputy secretary assistant of something spot, you know, like abolishing the Iraqi army, for example, came from the fact that Romney doesn't know a lot about foreign policy, just like George W.
Bush didn't know a lot about foreign policy that makes the neocons more influential because they're the ones in Romney's ear right now.
They're the ones who have a set ideology that they can tell to the next president.
This is what you need to pursue.
And Romney on foreign policy is going to take the path of least resistance.
And he is going to defer, in many cases, to his advisors on foreign policy.
He will be focused elsewhere.
And that's why I think that the same people that were influential in the Bush administration will be once again influential if there's a Romney administration.
And I fully expect, based on what they've said, that they would pursue the very same policies that they pursued under Bush if they were in power under Romney.
Yeah.
Oh, man, bad old days.
I hate to see him coming again.
I sure hope it doesn't work out that way.
And, you know, I mean, you got the wars in Africa and the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and all these reasons to despise Barack Obama.
But I can't even imagine Romney even having talks toward the having of talks with Iran over their nuclear program.
And I give it, you know, at least, I don't know, a 15 or 20 percent chance that Obama might actually make a deal with the Iranians about, you know, expanded inspections in exchange for lifting of sanctions and the end to threats of war.
I mean, there's a chance that this could happen.
And it's not because he's a good president at all.
It's just it's such the easy and right thing.
And so obviously the right thing to do.
He kind of has to do it.
But I don't see Romney doing it.
If it was Romney, we'd be at war.
Well, I think that the president Obama doesn't want to he doesn't want to attack Iran.
The Romney camp has sent very different signals.
So I do think that's one area where you could see a pretty divergent policy depending on who the next president is.
Yeah.
And of course, that's the most important thing in the world, because a war with Iran would be the beginning of an absolute disaster.
We we probably wouldn't even think of September 11th as a turning point anymore.
You know, in the long term view, it would be the invasion of Iran that started all the bad stuff that happened after that.
It's certainly it's certainly a very, very, very chilling prospect to consider.
All right.
Well, yes, very chilling.
This article, Mitt Romney's neocon war cabinet reading.
We Bolton, Sonor, Robert Joseph, Eric Edelman.
No, not Edelman.
Here it is.
It's all at the nation dot com by Ari Berman.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
