05/29/07 – Charles Peña – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and introducing Chuck Pena.
He is the author of a book called Winning the Unwar, and is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy.
He's a senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, and he's an analyst for MSNBC.
You can find many of his writings at antiwar.com/Pena, P-E-N-A.
Welcome to the show, Chuck.
Thank you very much.
It's good to have you on here.
I was very interested in your most recent article about the Fort Dix Six, and their relationship with America's mayor's arguments about terrorism.
So I guess if I could get you to just basically give us a short retelling of the headline, what happened here at Fort Dix in New Jersey, there was a terrorist plot?
Well, I guess it's almost three weeks ago now that a plot was uncovered that six people, six men in New Jersey allegedly were going to attack Fort Dix, which is an army base, and a whole lot was made of it on the news when the news broke.
I remember even seeing it as the news broke, and you would have thought that we had uncovered the next 9-11 plot based on the rhetoric coming from various officials, but what it amounted to was that these six men were supposedly going to gather up a whole bunch of fully automatic weapons and try to storm Fort Dix, which quite frankly, if that's the extent of the terrorist threat to the United States, it's a pretty dumb terrorist plot for six guys to try and storm an army base, and not just any army base, a training base, so it has real-life soldiers on the base, in fact, probably several thousand at any one point in time, and most of those soldiers are either going to actually have in their possession firearms or have ready access to firearms, not to mention the security surrounding almost any military installations of all the potential targets that terrorists might try to attack.
A military base is the last target they would really want to attack because the odds of them getting even past security are relatively low, and even if they had managed somehow to do that, they wouldn't have survived too long, probably, once they got onto the base.
So I think, once again, what we've managed to prove is that it's really easy to catch dumb terrorists who engage in really dumb plots.
The harder part is getting the smarter ones.
And there's an aspect of this particular plot that we've seen in past plots that have been uncovered by the FBI, is that there was an informant on the inside, and that's a good thing.
Any time you can try to get...
Let me stop you right there, Chuck.
Before we get to the inside of the mechanics of the plot there, about the target, choosing Fort Dix, is this necessarily an indication that these guys are complete idiots?
Or perhaps, assuming that this plot was real at all, which is a big assumption at this point, but assuming that it was, perhaps maybe they were trying to make a point with that?
That look at us, we're not shooting up malls and innocent people.
Our problem is your military policy, something along those lines?
Well, I guess you could try and read into it any number of interpretations.
Certainly on the ideological side, that is, I guess, one possibility, that if the problem is with U.S. foreign policy and U.S. military intervention around the world, if that's the source of the grievance, and certainly it seems to be a source of grievance for many Islamic extremists, then attacking a military base may be one way of making that point.
Certainly Al-Qaeda has, in the past, overseas anyway, attacked military installations, and other terrorist groups have tried to attack military installations, the barracks in Lebanon being one of those cases.
Sure, well, and the Pentagon on 9-11.
Right, and the Pentagon as a symbol of our military power.
So there is, I guess, some logic there, but in terms of practical application of, if you're the terrorist, which means by definition you are the weaker power going after a fully guarded and armed installation with what amounts to small arms and light weapons, and only six of you, you know, this is not like they had assembled an army of hundreds to storm the base.
I mean, just from a practical operational standpoint, it's a pretty dumb idea.
I mean, if they really wanted to kill a lot of people, assuming that was the goal of the operation, there are a whole lot of other better targets to go after, you know, shopping malls, schools, any number of unarmed, unguarded civilian targets.
Well, see, I kind of think that that's always been sort of a misnomer, that their point, the terrorist point, has always been to cause the most number of casualties.
Obviously, you know, knocking down two towers full of people is a lot of casualties.
But if they had been simply going for casualties, they could have crashed all four planes into the Hoover Dam or something and killed a lot more people.
It seems like it's always symbolism.
Well, I mean, we assume that there is symbolism involved with many of these attacks.
I mean, if you look at the attacks in Iraq that are going on, for example, the ones that are attributed to Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda affiliated organizations, they're pretty random, and they're going after civilian targets as well as, you know, military targets.
So without being inside the loop of their command and control and their decision making, which we're not really, it's hard to know what their real motivations were and if they were specifically, in the case of Fort Dix, whether they were specifically trying to exclude a civilian target because they were trying to make a point about going after a military target or whether these guys just, you know, got it in their heads that because, you know, Fort Dix was near enough that they wanted to go after a military target.
There's also, you know, if they were able to be successful, although it's hard to see how they would have been in this case, but a successful attack, a well planned and well thought out successful attack against a military installation would make a big point about being able to breach security at a place that is much more secure than an unguarded civilian target.
So, you know, there's that aspect to it, but you would need to come up with a much better plan than the ones these guys came up with.
Which begs the whole question of whether this is all just FBI make believe anyway.
Right.
And if that's the other part of this, apparently there was an informant who had, you know, infiltrated this group and there's a sting-like aspect to what at least we're hearing about this that, you know, maybe the idea got planted to do this and certainly the means that they were carrying out the attack selling fully automatic weapons.
There's this sting aspect to it as though the FBI was maybe trying to get them to do something rather than these guys thinking of it all on their own.
We've seen this in the past with other sting operations.
The FBI has run one where an illegal arms dealer was arrested for wanting to sell surface to air missiles to FBI agents posing as terrorists that, you know, these missiles could have taken down an airliner.
But there was a certain quality of that, you know, this guy was talked into selling it rather than, you know, he really was interested in helping out a terrorist cause.
So I'm sure we'll learn a lot more as this case winds its way through the judicial system.
But there have been a lot of people who have raised some skepticism about just how real the plot was.
Yeah, it seems like, well, despite, as you say, the way it came across on TV, like it was another 9-11 plot type thing, really in print, the very first articles about it were pretty detailed about how involved the FBI informant was and really made it look like he was the center of this thing.
Well, and that's what's raising a lot of eyebrows and questions is, you know, was the informant sort of the instigator of all of this, in which case the other guys are just a bunch of dukes, you know, quite frankly.
So again, we, you know, we'll hopefully learn more as this goes through the judicial system.
But I think, you know, we ought to look at this, you know, one, with a sigh of relief that if it was a real plot, and if these men did intend to kill people, regardless of whether they were talking to civilians and soldiers, that if it was a real plot, it was stopped before they could kill anyone, but we ought to also be at least a little bit skeptical until we learn all the details.
Well, if I can help with maybe helping that little bit of skepticism into a lot bit, a giant, I'm thinking some kind of basket or container that you'd have to carry on your shoulders because it's so full of these lies, the Lodi case where they paid this guy hundreds of thousands of dollars to put words in this kid's mouth, the Miami guys who suppose you're going to blow up the Sears Tower, but they needed their FBI informant to buy them shoes so they could get to Chicago, the Brooklyn, the kid who was supposed to, supposedly was going to set off a bomb in the subway station in Brooklyn, who was completely entrapped, the guys in Detroit who were convicted and then set free by the judge because they were entrapped and framed up, the guys in Virginia who pled guilty because they were told if they didn't plead guilty, they'd be turned over to the Navy to be tortured, and so they pled guilty.
They were conspiring to play paintball guns in the woods.
You had the Lackawanna Six who also were told that they would be turned over to Donald Rumsfeld to be tortured if they didn't plead guilty.
I don't think there's been a single terrorism case in this country since September 11th that wasn't complete lies from beginning to end.
Well, certainly many of them that we've seen in the news that we know about because not everything clearly makes the news.
There are a lot of questions about the validity and veracity of the charges being brought against the individuals.
In fact, most of the people who have been charged with actual terrorism, real-life plotting to commit an act of terrorism, to the extent that they've been found guilty of anything, they have been found guilty of lesser charges unrelated to terrorism.
Certainly, I think the track record of the government is not that good when it comes to actually uncovering terrorist plots and catching people who represent real terrorist threats to the United States.
Yeah, it seems like they only have so many counter-terrorism guys in the FBI.
They really ought to be focused on actual terrorists instead of just provoking and making terrorist groups where they didn't exist before.
Well, this does raise the question of sort of bureaucratic behavior here on the part of the FBI.
Because the FBI has been, I think, rightly criticized of its past performance in terms of counter-terrorism, has the bureaucracy unleashed itself to become successful by prosecuting or catching people and then trying to prosecute people who have been more the targets of sting operations rather than really being real-life terrorist threats as a way to make the FBI look like it's paying attention to the problem.
Okay, now, just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that there's actually something credible about this case.
Does it prove Rudy Giuliani's point, as he maintained in the last couple of weeks, that we can't leave Iraq because of this terrorist plot in New Jersey?
Well, you know, the former mayor of New York and someone who's running to potentially be a presidential candidate, you would think that the people on his campaign would do their homework and inform Rudy Giuliani about the facts surrounding the so-called Fort Dick 6-6 so that he wouldn't make a major, major faux pas during the Republican presidential debate and then even repeat it as he did interviews with the various television networks afterwards.
The reality is that these guys, again, assuming that they are real threats to America, they've been in this country a long time.
In fact, three of them since they were children, less than 10 years old and for more than 20 years.
So hardly the people who, because we're fighting in Iraq, wouldn't follow us here at the United States.
I mean, these guys are not here as a result of the Iraq war.
They've been here quite a while.
So even if we weren't in Iraq, if you believe the rhetoric that we're fighting them there so that they can't come here, even if we weren't there, these guys would still be here.
So it hardly proves Rudy Giuliani's point.
In fact, quite frankly, he discredits exactly what he said.
Also, it shows that, well, who busted these guys?
Police, not soldiers.
And this is something that I'm afraid I haven't read your book, The Owned War, although from what I've read about it, it seems like it's right up my alley there.
And particularly with the way you end this article referring to all the most high profile terrorism busts have been by police around the world rather than soldiers.
But George Bush says that we tried that in the 1990s, treating these guys like criminals and prosecuting them, and that that didn't work.
And that's how we learned the lesson on September 11th, that we have to go on the offensive militarily against these guys.
Well, you know, to give the president some degree of credit here, he's right, as long as you're going after the right targets.
And that's the problem.
There will be times when the military is the proper instrument to use going against terrorist targets.
They will be the exception rather than the rule.
And it won't be large scale application of military force, as we've seen in Iraq, it will be much more selective use of the military and all likelihood special operations forces going after discrete targets.
But you better know who the right targets are to go after.
And, of course, you know, the big question is, okay, to the extent that the military should be used, why aren't we using the military to go after, you know, Osama bin Laden?
I'm also a hairy and what's left of al Qaeda's leadership that we all believe is hiding out in Pakistan, which is supposed to be a country that is an ally in the war on terrorism.
So the, you know, the one place where you think we might be able to use the military is the one place where we're not.
So, you know, the rest of fighting what, you know, we call the war on terrorism, what I call the unwar in my book really is a law enforcement and intelligence operation and cooperative law enforcement intelligence with many, many countries around the world.
And that's how you catch most of these people, not by using the military.
And really, the reason you would use the military in Afghanistan or Pakistan to go after these guys is because those places really aren't controlled by local governments with any real monopoly.
And so we can't ask them to use their cops to take care of our problem for us.
We have to go ahead and use our soldiers in those circumstances.
But if we were talking about, I don't know, Kazakhstan or something, the local dictator there will take care of al Qaeda for us.
We don't need our soldiers there.
Well, certainly in the case of Pakistan, they're, you know, the big concern is that, you know, even we just don't want to destabilize the Musharraf government because we're, you know, rightfully concerned that a successor government might be a much more, you know, radical Islamic government, and they would have their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
So there is a reason to why we couldn't at least be as overtly active in Pakistan.
And there's a reason why Musharraf himself isn't as active as we would like him to be.
But at the same time, there are other ways that you can do things covertly, much more discreetly, without having, you know, to make the headline news, but, you know, we do essentially ignore bin Laden, while making all these other, you know, rhetorical state flourishing statements about, you know, the war on terror and fighting the terrorists over there so that they can't follow us home, I mean, is to ignore who attacked us on on on 911.
And that was, you know, al Qaida, you know, represented by bin Laden and Ahmet al-Zawahiri in the top leadership.
You know, there's author named Peter Lance, whose book 1000 years for revenge is, it's a great study really of the from the point of view what was going on with the FBI, or the war on terrorism throughout the 1990s, Omar Abdelrahman and Ramsey Youssef and Abu Alimah, and the guys who blow up the World Trade Center the first time, and then of course, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is Youssef's nephew, and I mean, uncle.
And, and it basically tracing the whole story of these guys through the 1990s, from the point of view of the federal cops, and he points out very well, I think he documents just extensively how the FBI never really gave it a shot because they screwed up the first World Trade Center bombing investigation.
And so they had to cover that up.
And so therefore, they didn't do a good job in stopping the next one.
So they had to cover that up.
So they had to cover that up.
So they had to cover that up all through the 1990s.
As, as, as you said, the barracks are being bombed in Saudi Arabia, the embassies are being bombed, the coals being bombed, and the FBI is never really allowed by their bosses to be unleashed to go and do their job and fight this problem in a quote unquote, law enforcement manner that whole time.
So when Bush says that that notion is discredited, he's talking about a notion that never really was put in practice throughout the entire 1990s.
Well, and the other thing it points out, I mean, you know, it's, it's fashionable.
And I'm one of those people that you know, that has been very critical of the Bush administration.
And it's very fashionable now, given everything that's going on to be critical of the Bush administration.
But one thing should be pretty clear is that that doesn't mean that that the Clinton administration did any better job, you know, going after the terrorist threat certainly not to America.
And so, you know, we do have to look at this historically and see what was done or not done, as the case might be and, you know, understand what it is that we need to do.
But I do also think we need to understand, you know, that part of the motivation, and I would argue a large part of the motivation for people to become terrorists and and therefore threats to the United States is, you know, our interventionist policy, particularly in the in the Middle East and Arab world.
And that didn't begin with the Bush administration.
I mean, they, you know, the Clinton administration was just as guilty of interventionist policies, as was the first Bush administration, as was, you know, the Reagan administration.
So this is a bipartisan problem that has historical precedent.
Unfortunately, you know, President Bush, the current President Bush has taken this to an extreme and made things even worse than they were before.
Well, yeah, we know, Michael Schoyer has said that the CIA gave Bill Clinton eight chances to kill bin Laden with, you know, surgical strikes, lays a target and have a plane drop a bomb on him kind of situations, two different chances to capture him, and that Clinton turned down all 10 of those chances.
Right.
And, you know, again, it was a different world, then, I mean, 911 hadn't occurred.
I mean, there were plenty of people like Mike Schoyer, who were very concerned about the potential threat that bin Laden would pose to the United States.
But at that time, we weren't talking about, you know, Osama bin Laden as the guy behind 911.
And so, you know, the urgency to go after him was a lot different then.
And, you know, it's, you know, we can all wish that we, you know, would have done something about it.
And I write about it in my book about how different the world might be had we taken advantage of one of those opportunities that Mike Schoyer talks about, to take out bin Laden, you know, the reality is we didn't.
And but now the question is, post 911, why is it why is it that we are not, you know, going after bin Laden with the same same kind of zeal that the administration decided to go after, you know, Saddam Hussein?
I mean, you know, one guy was, you know, behind the 911 attacks against the United States.
The other the other guy was just somebody that, you know, we didn't really like, but but not a threat to not a threat to us.
And so why, why so much zeal to take out a dictator in Iraq wasn't a threat to the United States and had nothing to do with with 911?
And why aren't we pursuing bin Laden, you know, with the same kind of vigor?
Right.
And, again, the Bush administration and the Clinton administration is perfect mirrors of each other, both of them refusing to go after the enemies they've created in any meaningful way.
And and also both of them continuing the interventionist policy that gives us this problem in the first place.
I think it's worthy of noting that bin Laden's original thought law came out the same year that Bill Clinton was reelected in this country.
And unfortunately, Scott, as we look forward, I mean, because, you know, we can always look in the past and it's easy to, you know, to point to where the blame, you know, lies when you look backwards.
And, you know, certainly that needs to be done.
But as we look forward and we look at who did 2008 presidential candidates are, you know, likely to be or who we think that they might be, it doesn't get any better.
You know, on both sides of the aisle, either Republican or Democratic, you know, except maybe for Ron Paul, none of the candidates seem to understand that link between U.S. interventionist policy and and the rising animosity that people in the Muslim world and the Middle East have towards the United States and how that animosity can get channeled into becoming terrorist threats to our, if not our people overseas, certainly, and, you know, our country here.
And so as you look forward to 2008, and for those of us who would, you know, definitely want to see a change from the Bush administration, and you look at who the light where the likely change is going to be, regardless of whether it's a Republican or Democrat who will be elected, you look out on the political landscape and you go, boy, it, you know, it's not going to get much better.
In fact, it could possibly get worse.
Do you think that they really don't understand or they just refuse to level with the American people that, look, we we have decided, we and your government have decided we're going to be an empire.
And occasionally some of you are going to die by a few thousand or so as the terrorists come for backlash.
But it's worth it.
Well, which is what they'd have to say if they were to be honest with us.
Well, I've heard that argument.
I have to say that I'll agree with the first part that they whether they think about it in terms of empire that most politicians who aspire to become president agree in a foreign policy that amounts to empire, whether they are thinking in terms of, you know, the Roman Empire or the past empires where.
But I don't think that I think the problem is that they don't understand the real linkage between a policy that of intervention and expansion of American influence around the world and trying to make the world, you know, in our image that it is that it results in in terrorism there.
I think what we have is a lot of just naive politicians.
I don't think they're intentionally trying to put Americans at risk and saying, well, you know, 3000 Americans dead on 9-11.
That's worth the price of of our of our policy.
I think what we're talking about is just real naivete and a refusal to to to, you know, look at the facts and to and to understand, you know, what's going on, that they have that they have this mindset of, you know, that where they disconnect our actions from consequences that arise from from our actions.
And they just refuse, you know, to to accept it.
I mean, the clinical term is called denial.
Well, this must really be a reflection of how disconnected our leaders are from the American people, because I'm here to tell you that my friends and neighbors who are not political type people at all can tell you that they hate us for foreign policy.
I thought when I saw that debate, oh, ha, that's the best Giuliani's got.
Well, there's not an idiot left in America who still believes they hate us for our freedom.
Give me a break.
And and really like people I know who pay no attention to foreign policy, no attention to politics at all, can tell you they hate us for foreign policy.
Come on.
And Scott, you know, and as I've gone around the country to talk to various groups and then the further I get outside of the beltway here in Washington, you know, the more I see that as true also that, you know, that that people of all political stripes and from and everywhere, you know, in society get it.
But, you know, our our political machines of both the Republican and Democratic parties, they don't get it and they don't want to get it because that's not how they perpetuate themselves.
And, you know, and and then there's this whole question of party loyalty as above all else, which seems to be much more of a drain on the Republican side in terms of the ability for people to come to grips with with what's going on.
But a perfect example on Antiwar.com, Representative Duncan was interviewed and he and he has been one of the most staunch Republican opponents of the Iraq War, voted against it, paid a huge political price in terms of his constituents not being happy with him, although he kept his seat in Congress.
But in this interview, he's basically said that, well, even if it's a Republican candidate who's pro war and pro intervention, that he'll still support that candidate over the Democrat, because the Republican will be better on taxes and, you know, a whole bunch of other things that are important to to conservatives.
Well, that that's a sad state of affairs, because foreign policy right now is the issue and, you know, is it worth having a foreign policy that endangers America just but, you know, it's OK to have to have lower taxes?
I mean, I quite frankly, I don't get that.
And that's part of the problem I have with many of my friends, even family members and who are, you know, Republicans, is that at the end of the day, they'll just be Republicans, even if it means voting for someone who would who would make the country less safe.
Yeah.
Wasn't it Lord Acton who said something about power corrupting people?
Yeah.
You know, and I don't know that this is as much about that, about power.
But, you know, for those people that are more politically active or, you know, affiliate themselves with one party or the other, you know, they they have blinders on a lot of times when it comes to actually looking at whatever the issue is.
But certainly, I think when when the issue is foreign policy, because I have the same conversation with with friends and colleagues who are Democrats trying to explain to them that democratic foreign policy isn't that different than than the current neoconservative foreign policy.
It's sort of just dressed up nicer because, you know, they want to have the U.N. involved and they put the term humanitarian in front of intervention.
But ultimately, it's still about, you know, unnecessary interventions that have nothing to do with American security and in fact, make make make it less safe for America because we engender so much hatred for the United States, even when our our intentions may may be good.
And so the problem is, is that the people on both sides of the aisle don't get it.
And then ultimately, for them, it comes down to party loyalty rather than trying to find a candidate, especially on foreign policy, who makes sense.
And unfortunately, you know, we just don't, you know, as I said, Ron Paul gets it.
But most most people will tell you Ron Paul's a long shot as a presidential, you know, candidate because he doesn't have any support within the political base of the Republican Party.
It's kind of reminds me of just a baseball game where the fans of both teams are yelling at the umpire and calling him blind because he's, you know, basically calling it right.
But whenever it's against them, they just refuse to see that, OK, you know, my guy really did break the rules or whatever, you know, in a football game.
Oh, he wasn't offsides.
Come on, ref.
When, you know, he was offsides.
But at the end of the day, as long as you're rooting for that team, then the ends justify the means.
And yeah, if they're pro war, that's OK, as long as they still have an R in front of their name.
Call the D, as you know, as the case might be.
I mean, and but the problem is this is not a football game.
You know, it is one thing to be loyal to your school or your hometown or whatever for sports.
I mean, we're talking about, you know, people's lives here and we're talking about the lives of American soldiers overseas, you know, deployed in Iraq or elsewhere.
We're talking about the lives of Americans who may be living or vacationing or traveling overseas.
And we're talking about the lives of Americans here.
I mean, and loyalty, party loyalty should not be placed above that.
I mean, we should be looking and demanding candidates who are serious about foreign policy and trying to put in place foreign policies that would make us safer and not perpetuate the foreign policy that we've had for, you know, since the end of the certainly since the end of the Cold War and certainly during during the Cold War and an interventionist foreign policy.
But it's and as you say, what the hard part is that that does resonate with most Americans, but it doesn't resonate with the political elites and the people running the political parties.
If we could have a do over and you could have had George Bush senior spot at the end of the Cold War, calling those shots, would you have refused to intervene in Iraq?
Well, I mean, that would be the biggest, you know, do over to that would have made a biggest difference, I think, to to where we are today.
I mean, you know, it doesn't doesn't mean that 9-11 would not have happened, because we can never, you know, never know what what would have happened if we hadn't engaged in certain actions.
And certainly, you know, the Clinton administration, just even if the Bush administration, the first Bush administration dinner intervene in Iraq, you know, the Clinton administration certainly decided to engage in a lot of interventions.
And who knows, you know, how many of those have have spurred on people to decide that they would want to become terrorists against the United States.
But, you know, the first Iraq war, again, a war that was not necessary for for US security.
And certainly, one, one of the things that happened after that war was that, you know, we ended up deploying troops in Saudi Arabia, and that became one of the main grievances of Osama bin Laden.
And, you know, one, one can never know, you know, well, how would the world be different if we had if we hadn't done that, if we hadn't, you know, intervened in Iraq and not deployed troops in Saudi Arabia as a result of doing that, maybe bin Laden would still hate America, and maybe he would still try to get other Muslims to become terrorists.
But he would have lost a very powerful recruiting tool.
And had we not made those decisions, I can sort of even imagine really, I can visualize and see the alternate world where at the end of the Cold War, America said, Oh, so the union's gone.
Okay, fine, disbanded NATO brought all our troops home, and decided to free up our economy as as good as we possibly could kick all the arms manufacturers off welfare and and lead the world by example and show them, you know, and tell them, hey, okay, Cold War, sorry about all the violence and everything, but had to contain communism.
But now that that's over, we really could have gone an entirely different direction at the end of the Cold War than the one that we've gone.
Well, we we missed a huge opportunity to let the world return to a more normal state.
But instead, there were many people and then now other forces at play that wanted America to be, you know, the world's superpower and to and to literally, you know, run the world and reshape the world.
And many people who believed that, that because we no longer had an opponent in the Soviet Union, that we were free to do that, that there were no risks involved, you know, because now we weren't worried about, you know, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, if we didn't have a Soviet Union done to contend with, but, you know, and we should have re instead, you know, put a put foreign policy on hold, or on pause and said, Hey, how should how should we rethink foreign policy?
And, you know, what makes the most sense?
Why do we need NATO if if there is no longer a Soviet Union?
And why do we have to have us forces deployed around the globe to contain what and and, but we missed it, we missed a great opportunity to do that.
And 911 should have been a wake up call to re examine foreign policy.
Instead, it became, you know, a rallying cry for for the Bush administration to engage in even more interventionist, foreign policy, unnecessary, you know, foreign policy, you know, embodied in the Iraq War.
Right?
Yeah, it didn't wake the people of America up.
It knocked us all out.
Put us all right back to sleep.
Right?
Well, but now, you know, the Iraq War.
Now the question is, you know, can the Iraq War be that wake up call since, you know, more and more Americans are, are, you know, unhappy with with the war and don't believe, you know, the rhetoric anymore, you know, when the president stands up and says, Well, we're fighting them over there, so they won't won't come over here.
I mean, most people don't believe that.
And anymore, they just believe we're fighting over there and people are getting killed.
And but you know, it's it has nothing to do with with the terrorist threat to the United States.
So maybe if there's anything good that might come out of the Iraq War, maybe it can serve as a wake up call.
And then people can get their elected representatives to to make for real change within US foreign policy.
I have two headlines here for you right along those lines.
One may worst month for US troops in Iraq since 2004.
And the second Tennessee Republican calls for end to intervention and interview with Representative Jimmy Duncan.
So, well, there you go, everybody ring ding, ding, ding, ding, wake up, there's your alarm clock.
Hopefully will, you know, more and more people will and you know, what I've always tell people, Scott, when I, you know, talk to them around the country is that they have to they can't be silent about this.
They have to talk, you know, let their elected representatives, you know, know exactly how they feel and why they feel that way and what they want to see changed because, you know, most people don't come to get a chance to come to Washington or don't know how Washington works.
But I can tell you this and is that, you know, if they don't hear from their constituents, they think what they're doing is okay.
And and politicians are funny creatures, if they think they might lose their jobs, because people might not vote for them, they'll pay attention.
So if enough people start telling politicians, you know, this is not how we want America to conduct itself around the world, I think, then and only then will they begin to begin to listen and pay attention and possibly change course of action.
I'm so glad you said that.
I think people really underestimate the amount of influence that they can have over the House of Representatives.
You know, TV talks about the president all day and night, every day.
And yet, for those of us literate in the Constitution, it's the House of Representatives that decides whether money is going to be taxed or spent.
And it's the House of Representatives that's divided into 435 little bitty districts all across the country.
And it's the House of Representatives that's up for an election or reelection every two years.
And that if people in their local neighborhoods and communities can get together and light a little fire under these guys' asses, they will move.
And that's what it's going to take.
But until that happens, if people are just unhappy, but silent or unhappy, but willing to place party loyalty, whichever party that happens to be above the issue of American foreign policy, then we will continue to do what we're doing and we'll go down the same path that we're on now.
And it won't matter whether it's Democrats or Republicans in control.
Chuck Pena from the Independent Institute, the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, antiwar.com, and he's the author of Winning the Unwar.
Thanks very much for your time today, Chuck.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Thank you.