08/13/09 – Chris Floyd – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show Chris Floyd.
He's the author of the book Empire Burlesque, High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium.
You probably have an expanded Obama Imperium era edition coming out soon or something.
The blog is also called Empire Burlesque.
It's at Chris-Floyd.com.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
I'm doing real good.
And your phone sounds great compared to usually.
Hey, let's talk about the drug wars, the Afghan drug wars.
Now, here's my thing.
The very first stuff I really learned about how evil and corrupt the American Empire was, was about the CIA running drugs at the same time they were mounting a massive war on drugs in the 1980s.
And, of course, not long after that, I learned about all the Golden Triangle and all the CIA covert heroin smuggling in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, that kind of thing.
And ever since we invaded Afghanistan, we, this government, invaded Afghanistan, and the poppy crops, as the news keeps reporting year after year, are record crops and more and more heroin being produced out there.
I just sort of assume, Chris, that the CIA is running the whole thing and that the American Empire, again, is in the drug business.
And yet I don't think I really have anything to hang my hat on other than, well, it's going on under the occupation.
But I wonder if you can maybe teach me some more about who's running the drug trade in Afghanistan and what's going on with that.
Well, I don't know.
You better be careful.
You're talking about the good war there, you know.
Everything that happened in Afghanistan is noble and good, so I really can't say anything about that, as we all know.
Anyway, what's happening in Afghanistan?
Well, as you say, I mean, anyone who knows history, as you just put it, can see it happening over and over again.
But, you know, the CIA is sort of metamorphosed into about 5,000 other agencies, secret armies.
The CIA is the government.
Using the CIA as a handy term, the security state, the security apparatus, just like KGB or whatever, they are their own shadow government.
And so if you say the CIA is helping run the drug trade in Afghanistan, I mean, that's true.
There's elements of the Pentagon in it.
There's elements of...
In fact, I put it in there somewhere.
As you know, I wrote a column about it recently that was in antiwar.com, which I appreciate that.
You know, there's this whole sort of shadowlands area out there.
It's the same sort of shadowlands where, you know, security agencies and criminal organizations, I mean non-state criminal organizations, terrorists, however you want to define that term, and high finance and the underworld meets, where the upper world and the underworld meet in these shadows, and you have all these sort of shifting alliances.
And sometimes, you know, you're on your own.
Sometimes, well, Afghanistan, sometimes we're on the jihadi side, sometimes we're against the jihadis, you know.
It just depends on what the shifting needs are for the American elite, as far as that goes.
But obviously, I mean, you mentioned the Vietnam, you mentioned the Golden Triangle, you mentioned the drug running and the contra thing, you know.
There's the BCCI scandal, which also involves a lot of stuff about drugs, which was probably the primary conduit for which, you know, the American militarist factions, however you want to define them, helped give Pakistan a nuclear bomb.
But, you know, all these things, as you said, they go on and on.
And at this point, I mean, they just sort of take on sort of an autonomous power in their sense, you know, because these things run on.
And there's no break on it.
There's no reform of it.
And each year, each year, the security agencies, they get more and more powerful.
They get more and more secretive.
They have more and more military and paramilitary power given to them, although they've assumed that for many years.
And so, I don't know, it's hard to say.
I mean, it's hard to, because, you know, as you pointed out in bringing up this history, it's like, it's very difficult to write about these things, because if you start writing about it, as I wrote in this last column about, you know, this new directive to, this new hit list they've drawn up of alleged drug dealers in Afghanistan who can be just killed with impunity any time you see them walking down the street, or more likely, you can drop a drone missile on them any time they sit down with their family or they go to a wedding or a funeral or, you know, they're taking their grandmothers to sleep or something, you can just kill everybody within a 20-mile radius and that's fine.
But if you start talking about these things, you find just as you did there, you start going back and back and back and back until you're all the way back to the late 1940s and the creation of this national security state, you know, and the creation of the CIA.
And so that you have within 10 years, so within 10 years of the creation of the CIA, by the late 50s they'd already penetrated, you know, every element of our government, every department of our agency would, you know, any key department or agency would have the CIA man in there.
They're all through the military.
You'll find all these things in Vietnam memoirs where officers, you know, not just the grunts, but the officers will say, you know, well we knew that this guy in our unit was a CIA guy, he never did anything, he said over there, he wrote reports, he never did anything.
So it's like a total pervasive penetration.
And so, of course, all these guys deal in, they deal in mirrors, they deal in smoking mirrors, they deal in, you know, shadows, they deal in thought puppets.
I mean, so it's really hard to piece out the specifics.
So what you have to do is exactly what you just did, is that you follow the money, you follow the result, you know, you follow the old, you know, who benefits, you know, who whom.
As Leonard once said, you know, and of course the old Roman thing, you know, who benefits.
Well, you know, I was just sharing with the audience here this new article by the other Scott Horton in the Huffington Post today about Obama-era rendition.
In this case, not even a so-called terrorist suspect, but a guy on a fraud case.
And it seemed to me, you know, obviously who benefits immediately.
I'm thinking, well, whoever this guy's competition for the bid was is the one who ratted him out.
It's not like all of a sudden the Justice Department cares about corruption in military contracts or anything like that.
So I guess it sort of also goes kind of without saying, doesn't it?
As you put it in your article, I think, that whenever you hear that the U.S. Army struck some opium growers or some heroin manufacturers or drug runners or whatever in Afghanistan, you need to simply look at that as weeding out the competition who are competing against the people that our government has made into allies over there is all that is.
It's not like they're eradicating it.
Well, no, I mean, at this point, yes, that's one of the things that brought out in the article, exactly, is that we have our favorite drug lords.
They're our favorite drug lords now.
Maybe next year we'll be against them.
But these things clear out the competition.
And they know that some people aren't on the list and some people are on the list.
And so that's very much the way these things operate.
And no, it's not going to be eradicated.
As you said, every year it goes up and up and up and up because there's just too much money being made.
And as you said, it was in Vietnam.
It was in Central America.
It's in Central Asia now.
And, of course, it's still hugely in Central America and South America with our new expansion of our military presence in Colombia, which has gone under the radar under Barack Obama.
You know, we now have, what, we have seven?
We have or will have seven major military bases in Colombia.
Well, and this has always been a major issue of Joe Biden, the vice president, right?
Well, yeah, well, I mean, don't get me started on Joe Biden, I mean, really.
I mean, because, I mean, any administration that picks Joe Biden to be its vice president has already shown its hand, you know, giving away the game, you know, taking his can left under a bush or whatever you want to say.
It's already, you know, showed its hand.
I mean, you know, Joe Biden is a, you know, is a witless militarist, you know, as far as I can tell.
I mean, I've never heard him, hardly ever heard him say, you know, an intelligent thing.
And, you know, I mean, Joe Biden goes back on all this stuff.
He wants to rattle the saber of Russia.
He was, a few years ago, he was one of the top people talking about dividing up Iraq, you know, forcibly dividing it up into, you know, various divisions and things like that.
And, I mean, yes, he's behind the push in Colombia.
So all this, I mean, because, you know, the funny thing is that the drugs never stop coming.
You know, they're never eradicated.
The drug trade is never arrested.
You know, it's never squeezed out.
Just to make one more point, I'm sorry to get off the subject here, but this article that Anti-War published had a long excerpt from the first article I wrote about this, the Afghan drug war and the terror war.
And I wrote that back in 2001, and it's the same thing that's going on now.
In fact, that was the first time anyone ever called me to do an interview was after that, was from that article.
And now here we are, what, almost eight years later, and we're just talking about the same thing.
Well, what do you think is really the game in Afghanistan?
I mean, you know, Jus Ramond was on the show yesterday, and he talked about some of these.
I think it was the Center for New American Security.
One of their think tank studies, they said it would take half a million guys, 500,000 men to tame Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Af-Pak war, as they call it.
They're not doing that.
Are they just waging war for waging war's sake, just to keep a low-level thing going, to disrupt society in the surrounding countries more, for further excuses to intervene?
Is there any kind of purpose in what they're doing there?
They're not trying to create a state like they keep claiming.
No, of course not.
Well, first of all, you can't do it.
And second, you couldn't do it with a sort of, as you said, piecemeal approach to it.
Well, I think what's going on is, this is what I think becomes so confusing, and it becomes hard to focus one's anger or one's actions, is that in all these things, all these sort of shadowland operations, by which most of the United States government, certainly most of the United States foreign policy now, and has been for a long time, just totally enmeshed with all these different swerving criminal factions and security factions and everything, but there's all kinds of things going on.
There is no one thing going on.
There's no one policy of one person coming in and saying, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, you know.
But, yeah, I think, of course, a great deal of it is to keep, I mean, you have a war machine.
What is a war machine going to do?
It's going to wage war.
Now, some of that is done deliberately and cynically by people saying, you know, by God, let's keep some war going.
We'll keep that money rolling in, you know.
Watch that old money roll in, as Hank Williams used to say.
But that's part of it.
You've got people doing it deliberately, but you've got also people who just, I mean, look at what we've got now.
We have 30, 40, 50 years of this war machine just churning on and on.
I mean, there's people raised in it.
I mean, whole generations have come up in it, and it becomes, that's just a normal operation.
That's what we do.
That's what we do.
I mean, there's not even any questioning of it.
If there's a problem somewhere in the world, we better send some troops in.
We better keep going.
We've got to do the war going.
So you have these, you know, there's a cynical, deliberate, you know, kind of cold evil going on.
There's, you know, the evil of omission.
People not thinking about it.
People just saying, look, I guess that's what we have to do.
And, you know, and I mean, just this whole imperial mindset that's been adopted by so much of the American power structure is that, you know, there's all kinds of things going on.
You have to keep the drugs running, you know, to keep that illicit secret money from going, you know.
People coming in rich, you know, war profiteers are coming in rich.
Politicians, you know, making hay out of it.
You can always, you know, you can always make hay of being a great warrior for peace or whatever, for freedom or whatever it is, you know, you're warring for.
So there's always that to be done.
There's always the, and, you know, there's always the nice authoritarian powers that accrue to any war leader in any wartime government.
You know, people have to kowtow, you know, because it's wartime.
It's wartime.
Don't you know it's wartime?
You've got to do this.
You've got to give a thud.
You've got to give a this because it's wartime.
And, you know, these powers, year after year, they accumulate, and who wants to give them up?
You can see Obama is not only not giving up the powers that Bush grabbed, he's expanding them, you know, because once you get up to that rung, you know, and this is what you do, why would you give it away?
This is great.
What power?
I'm not going to give it away.
So, I mean, you've got all kinds of different things going on.
I mean, my column, I'm not meaning to say it's all boiled down to the drug war, but, again, as I mentioned, the drug war itself is some, you know, is exactly like the terror wars.
It's amorphous, ever-expanding, never-ending military authoritarian conflict that goes on and on and on, and it's always aimed at the poorest and the weakest and the most marginal aspects, elements in any society, you know, in Afghanistan and Colombia.
Well, and, again, the means are the end, it seems like.
What's that?
Again, it seems like the means are the end, you know, the waging of the drug war itself.
For example, in this country, you have another great article at your website, at your blog, Empire Burlesque, about the drug war in this country and the prison population and the private prisons, all the kickbacks, the slave labor.
They don't make license plates.
They make all kinds of things, like, you know, Chinese prisoners.
They're making cell phones.
They're making everything.
Yes, that is a point that I made earlier, and that's a good thing to bring that back up, is, yes, you know, that's another part of what's going on is the means is the end.
Because, as you said, you pointed out, if you were actually trying to build a state in Afghanistan, you wouldn't go about it this way.
If you're actually trying to reduce the amount of fanaticism and terrorism in the world, you wouldn't go about it with a terror war but going into the middle of Muslim lands and killing one million innocent people.
If that's your goal, then that's not what you're doing.
So obviously you have to look at what is the result.
And you have to think at some point, I mean, you know, I'm not trying to claim that I'm smarter than all these guys in Washington.
So you have to think that they can look and say, wait a minute, if this is what we're really trying to do, it's not working.
So you know they're smart enough to see that.
So you have to sort of walk it back and think, well, then, whatever is happening must be what they want to happen.
If they didn't want it to happen, it wouldn't keep happening that way.
So, yeah, the end, the means becomes the end.
And it doesn't matter whether it started out that way or not, but as I said a minute ago, you have 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
I mean, this means, this war machine becomes, you know, the raison d'etre, quite literally.
It becomes the reason that the state exists.
It becomes the reason that it becomes, it's what we do, it's what we are.
I mean, it's like, and so it goes on and on like that.
And you just sort of shift from one conflict to another in that way.
All right.
Well, it's still relatively early, I guess.
And for some reason, Chris, we're supposed to sort of, at least for now, bend over backwards and say that, well, Barack Obama inherited the worst mess ever.
I mean, we haven't had a president as lousy as George Bush since Harry Truman or something like that.
And so we, you know, Barack Obama really needs time.
You need to withhold your criticism of him because he's still trying to clean up the mess that somebody else started.
What do you say to that?
Well, I mean, you can imagine what I'd say to that.
I mean, you know, of course, that's a ridiculous argument because he's not even trying to clean up the mess that Bush started.
He's exacerbating the messes that Bush started.
He's making more messes.
He's bringing in more elephants to make, you know, bigger piles of crap.
But, you know, he's expanding the war in Afghanistan.
He's expanding it into Pakistan.
The war in Iraq goes on and on and on and on.
I mean, all these policies, the terror war policies, the rendition.
You just mentioned, you know, this guy who's renditioned for a minor fraud case somewhere in Washington and tortured for it.
You know, all these sort of things.
We could get into the whole thing about how he's not only continued Bush's bailout of Wall Street but has, you know, exacerbated it and expanded it to unimaginable terms.
What trillions and trillions of dollars he's made available to only a very few people.
And we could go on and on like that.
So, I mean, yeah, you know, I could buy that argument if he was actually trying to change anything.
But he's not trying to change anything.
Now, I mean, the only other thing you could say is that maybe somewhere along the line he'll have a, you know, a road to Damascus moment, as some people think, and I think with good cause, you know, that maybe John Kennedy had at some point where he finally came and said, Oh, wait a minute, all this military stuff is getting us in a deep water.
You know, maybe he tried to change, you know, he had to issue this national security order to get out of Vietnam and all this kind of stuff.
Well, I'll start holding my breath right now, Chris.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, but the point is, I'm saying, you know, well, who knows?
You know, I mean, one never knows what's happening.
But, I mean, the point is, it's all you can do, all you can ever do as politicians, and I don't understand why people, you know, really can't see this.
It's not a necessarily difficult or radical thing.
It's that you have to judge them by what they actually do.
And if what they're doing is wrong, if you feel that what they're doing is wrong, you know, or even evil or unproductive, however you want to put it, you know, destructive, what are you supposed to do?
Not say anything about it?
I mean, you know, if your own father was walking out and slapping three-year-olds up inside the brick wall, you'd have to say, Gosh, Dad, I think you should stop that.
Not, you know, I'm going to give you another six months and see if you stop.
You know, I mean, you have to say something about it.
So, you know, even in the best case scenario, even with all the goodwill in the world, you know, even with all the giving of benefits of doubt in the world, all you can do is go by the results.
It's the same thing.
I know I've said this on here before.
It's the same thing is that if you criticize George Bush for it, you have to criticize Barack Obama if he does the same thing or even worse.
And the whole point was, you know, my point was that did we criticize George Bush for these things just because he's a Republican doing them or because the things he did were bad?
In which case, if these things keep being done, then they have to be criticized.
It's the policy, not the person that has to be criticized.
And, you know, so this argument that we have to give him time, time to do what?
Time to do what?
Yeah, you might say, oh, well, gosh, now he's, you know, he's not doing anything.
You say, well, we've got to give him time to stop the Afghan war.
Well, he's expanded the Afghan war.
Oh, we've got to give him time to, of course, all he has to do is take a pen and, you know, rescind all of George Bush's executive orders, you know, which authoritarian power grabs, you know, by executive order.
You know, but he didn't do that.
He goes to court to defend him.
He could write now and say, you know, all those legal memos that John Yoo wrote and everything were blatantly illegal and, you know, they should be prosecuted.
But he's not doing that.
He's going to court using our money to defend John Yoo in these torture memos.
So, you know, I mean, that's the thing that we have to give him time.
You know, I mean, I didn't hear anybody giving George Bush that sort of benefit.
But we've got to give him time, give him time.
But all you can do is go by what people do in a politician campaign.
You can't pay any attention to what they say because, first of all, they're either going to be lying or they're not going to tell the truth or they're not going to tell the whole truth or they can't tell the whole truth or they don't know the whole truth because there's, you know, a whole shadow government out there playing with them.
So all you can do is go by what they do, not what they say.
Well, if you go to, you know, during the election campaign, if you just go by what he said, you know, I thought it was funny.
Alexander Coburn gave a great speech at the Future Freedom Foundation conference in 2008, I think it was, where he talked about the secret Obama and how all these people believe in the secret Obama who, yeah, he claims to be a Zionist and a militarist and an imperialist, but he's really not.
Just as soon as he gets power, then he'll reveal himself as the angel that I believe him to be.
And really all he has done is live up to what he said during the campaign.
I mean, he's contradicted himself on civil liberty stuff, but when it comes to expanding the war into Pakistan, that's all he's been promising since November 2007, Chris.
No, yes, I know.
I've written it several times.
You know, I've been sort of, I've written a couple of pieces defending Obama in this sense, saying, you know, why do people think Obama's a set-out?
He's doing exactly what he said he was going to do, you know, as you just pointed out, except for the civil liberty thing, where he has made some really, you know, bald-faced reverses.
But in all the things, in all things relating to empire and all things relating to the domestic side, basically, like in the financial, you know, bailout and all these things, he's doing exactly what he's going to do.
He came into office surrounded, he surrounded himself in the campaign with, you know, Wall Street sharks and Wall Street mavens and Wall Street barons, you know.
So he knew what he was going to do with the financial thing, and as soon as he appointed his Goldman Sachs guys, he knew what was going to happen.
And also, as you pointed out, he was especially belligerent and aggressive in foreign policy all through the campaign, you know.
So, you know, he picked his Secretary of State, someone who wants to obliterate Iran.
So, as you say, I mean, what are you supposed to give him time to do?
You know, he's putting his agenda into place.
Well, you know, yesterday, Chris, on the show, I was going off about the policy in Somalia, and I was explaining the facts of the situation as best as I could recount from, you know, at least 2006, around there, the Christmas war that Dick Cheney started.
And as I was reciting the facts of the case about who America's backing and at which point we switch from this to that and the other thing, I was thinking, wait a minute, do I really have this right?
Because, you know, I know imperialism is ridiculous and everything, but do I really have it right that the guys who were the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union that Dick Cheney started that war to overthrow are now occupying the shell of the bogus government in exile that America imported from Ethiopia and attempted to install?
And now that's the guys we're backing against the insurgents who helped those guys overthrow the puppet government that the Ethiopians and the Americans put there in 06, early 07?
Yeah, late 2006.
See, I read your blog, and it said I was right.
And I thought, my God, man.
Yeah, this is what I wrote.
I wrote this the other day.
I mean, you've got to have a scorecard to keep up with this kind of stuff, you know.
And now, yes, absolutely.
Now, the president of the interim government in Somalia is the same.
He was the head of the Islamic Union that we overthrew with our regime change operation in late 2006, early 2007, which, you know, has now killed tens, I don't know the exact number now, has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced about a million people in a very small country, and has led to what the UN has called probably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Worse than Darfur, worse than Sri Lanka, worse than all these places like that.
Oh, it's got to be second place compared to Iraq.
Well, yes.
Well, it's a humanitarian crisis.
People are actually on the streets starving.
It's that kind of thing like this, you know.
I'm not talking about death counts or something like that.
But as far as people being displaced, just add into, I mean, there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of Somalis now displaced.
They've got into the wilderness, I'm talking, you know.
They're out in the wilderness.
They're just, you know, caught in the crossfire of these warring factions now.
But, yes, and, of course, the same things happen.
This is what I said before, you know.
If it was your purpose to fight radical Islam and radical violent terrorist groups, you would not have shattered the very fragile stability that the Somalis had won for the first time in 15 years, which guarantees, guarantees that what you're going to have is what we have ended up with, is which one faction of that shattered Islamic Union has become more and more and more radical and violent.
That's the Al-Shabaab, I think is how you say it.
I'm not quite, I don't have it in front of me, so I don't know the correct pronunciation.
This is the people that, you know, Hillary Clinton is now saying that, oh, this is a ridiculous thing.
Hillary was saying the other day was this small faction, and this faction in the Ethiopian civil war, now threatens the entire world, the safety of the entire world, you see, because they're going to get in league with Al-Qaeda and I don't know what, build atom bombs out of sand, I don't know.
But anyway, yes, so you have these people, and they're not nice people.
They're a very radical faction, and, you know, I wouldn't want to live under them either.
Well, now, is this a hope and change moved by the Obama government, or is this a policy that he inherited from Bush, that now we've given up on throwing out the Islamic Courts Union and installing the warlord Aidid's son.
We are going to settle for the guys that we overthrew the first time, or whichever time.
Well, what we've got now is, I mean, the president of the interim government is from the Islamic Union, but, I mean, the interim government itself is cobbled together from, you know, it's not a recreation of the Islamic Union.
The Islamic Union has been shattered, you know, this sort of, this confederation that had brought some stability to Somalia for the first time.
That's just been shattered.
It's gone.
It's destroyed.
It's ruined.
It's been broken into all these different factions, and, you know, some of these factions are fighting each other.
Someone like Aidid, the interim president, you know, has thrown in his lot with the interim government because he's fallen out with the other people.
So, but what you still have in this interim government is also, you know, it's the same collection of sort of CIA-paid warlords and things like that that we had before.
And, you know, and also some legitimate people who think, and maybe even the Somali, the new Somali president.
Some people just think, well, we've got to do something.
We'll just throw in with the interim government.
Of course, the interim government is, I mean, it's really, we're sort of doing them a big favor by calling them a government.
As far as anyone can ascertain right now, they control about, you know, 10 or 15 city blocks in Mogadishu, and that's all they control is the whole country.
That's as far as their writ runs in the country.
If you want to call that a government, I guess you can, you know, but...
Well, and as you say, Hillary Clinton's over there threatening everybody.
They've delivered, what, 40 tons of arms that they'd admit to.
She doubled it to 80 tons.
Oh, to 80 tons.
Good.
And there was an article on antiwar.com yesterday about how this stuff is just hitting the open market all over Somalia, it's arming all sides, and now she's threatening Eritrea next door.
Is that just as a favor to Ethiopia, or what's going on there?
Well, Eritrea has become, you know, they're another new, they're the new, they're going to be another new.
I think I put it in that column, you know, if you've got new paid sons and daughters, start reading up on Eritrea because they may be dying there sometime soon.
You know, yes, they've always been opposed to Ethiopia.
Although, again, if you don't get your scorecard out, just a few years ago Eritrea was a U.S. ally against Ethiopia.
So, but right now they're not, well, Eritrea's not sort of kowtowing, and I'm not here to, I don't know anything, I don't know so much about their internal politics.
I'm not an advocate for any nation, you know, Eritrea or anyone else.
But, I mean, in the sort of global terror war scheme of things, you know, they're just not playing along.
I mean, so, and they're opposed to Ethiopia.
They're kind of fighting Ethiopia.
And Eritrea obviously has their own interests in mind, like Ethiopia and everyone else does.
And so now they're just the enemy of the day.
I mean, they're just, Eritrea is a, you know, sort of a broken down country itself.
You know, it's a poor country.
You know, the ability to hold yourself together is a threat to no one, essentially.
But since we have our, you know, 60th state of the United States of America, the greatest military power that's ever been known in the history of the world, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
She comes over there to Africa.
Of course, she can't actually go to Somalia and meet the government because they can't meet them or they might get killed.
They were in Kenya then.
And she declares very sternly that Eritrea should not interfere in the internal affairs of Somalia or else they're going to get it.
This while she dumps 80 tons of United States weapons into the internal affairs of Somalia, which, as you say, are just going to go straight out, as you say, into the street.
A lot of them are going to go to al-Shabaab.
They're going to go to all these other factions because, just as we said a minute ago, there's no real government in Somalia.
Who are they giving these 80 tons of weapons to?
Are they giving it to, you know, these guys who hold 15 blocks of Mogadishu?
Where are these weapons going?
Of course they're going to flow out of these cells immediately.
And so, again, we have another sort of conflict that just boils on and on and on.
And none of the steps that are taken, no steps are taken that would really address the conflict and try to bring it under control.
But instead, steps are taken to exacerbate the conflict.
As I said, you know, in terms of Afghanistan and Colombia and all these other sort of things, drug war, terror, all you can do is go by the results to try to find out what their intentions are.
And after year after year after year, the results of these policies are the same thing, more war, more tension, more bloodshed, more chaos, more profitable conflict, more authoritarian power.
Then we have to start to assume that this, as we said before and as you said, that the means is the point.
The end is to keep these things going because obviously these policies are horrific for the people on the ground.
Obviously these policies are horrific for, you know, any hope for real stability in Somalia or for any real stability in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
But, you know, Obama's whole policy in Pakistan seems designed to destabilize the entire country.
So, again, we have to just look, as I said before, you know, you just have to look at the results to try to ascertain the intentions.
And I think that after 40 or 50 years of the national security state and the war machine, I think we can judge these things pretty clearly.
Well, so what's your prognosis for the anti-war left?
Obviously it's much harder for them to be the anti-war left when their hero is the president and all that kind of thing.
And yet there's not much hope for an anti-war right.
I mean, there has been the American Conservative Magazine and all that, but still that only goes so far.
I don't know.
Do you think that people are going to finally snap out of this?
That Obama's at least so-called betrayal, despite what you and I know he admitted during the campaign, people mostly understood him as a peace candidate.
Do you think that maybe this will kind of help wake them up?
That, wow, this guy Obama really is just another front man for Goldman Sachs and Lockheed and the Empire, just like George Bush before him.
Well, I mean, I have to say I have no sort of hope for this.
I mean, there is an anti-war left, as far as I can see.
There's not an anti-war left, as far as I can see, that has any sort of effect.
I think the only thing that would galvanize that sort of thing is if they were stupid enough to reinstitute a draft, because isn't that what really galvanized, to a great degree, the anti-war left in the Vietnam War, was that, oh, my God, we're going to actually have to go fight these imperial wars.
There wasn't any anti-war left in the 1950s, was there?
I mean, not only in Korea, but not only with the Korean War, but all the other American interventions and secret overthrowings.
You know, no one rose up against overthrowing the Iranian government, the Guatemalan government, and all these other governments in the early 60s.
No one was rising up.
There was a little bit of incipient protest in the early days of American involvement in Vietnam, but not until you had the draft coming in, people actually being plucked off the streets and plucked out of their nice middle-class lives and sent over there to fight and die.
You know, I don't know.
I mean, I hate to speak accounts of despair.
I mean, no one knows what can happen.
Who knows what may catalyze people down the road?
I mean, I don't know.
But from everything that I've seen and everything that I've known in my lifetime and what I've read about, I don't see what will galvanize these people.
What will galvanize an anti-war left or an anti-war middle or an anti-war right?
Only the actual threat of having to go fight the empire's wars, things like me, might galvanize them into opposing them.
But otherwise, people seem quite content.
You know, this Afghanistan war is now its eighth year.
I mean, every year, every month, a few more Americans die.
I mean, I don't know how many more Afghans die.
But let's just take it strictly from the American viewpoint, which is the only way that Americans will view things anyway.
Every month, you know, Americans are dying, billions and billions and billions of dollars being spent, month after month, year after year.
No one says anything.
Our involvement in Afghanistan is almost as long as the Vietnam War now.
But until the same thing happens as in Vietnam, you know, i.e., the nice middle-class white folk get threatened by it, get directly threatened by it, then what's going to galvanize this mess?
I don't see it happening, really.
Well, so in other words, it's not going to happen because they're not going to draft people, thank God.
But that only does mean that, and in fact, more and more, they're just turning the war over to the droids so they're not even risking the American lives.
They're still behind the lines, controlling by the PlayStation Remote, you know, what the droids are doing.
And so they can really continue like this indefinitely, it seems like, even though the country's broke.
And, you know, Ron Paul, I guess, is the only one in national politics who says, Listen, we're broke.
Let's start with bringing the empire home.
What are we doing wasting all this money policing the world?
And, I mean, you can't put it more simply and honestly than that.
Still, this has only caught on so much.
Well, it's a message that, you know, those are seeds that fall on foul ground.
I mean, no one's picking up on that.
I mean, of course, we have all these nice, jolly arguments about, you know, Nazi communist health care or something.
I mean, you know, all these distracting arguments, you know, I mean, about this, you know, meaty-mouthed, corporate-heavy reform plan of Obama on health care, you know, being regarded as some sort of socialistic nightmare.
Clearly, it's a fascist plot, not a communist one.
Come on.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's some kind of plot anyway.
But it's a lot more fascist plot, I guess, than what it is, according to these guys.
But, I mean, you have all these kinds of distractions.
But, no, I mean, people don't.
Again, except for the Vietnam War, when people were actually sort of, you know, being sent to fight against their will, when have the American people cared about these innovations?
You know, did they care about the innovations in Nicaragua in the 1930s and 1920s?
Did they care about the, you know, some people did about the Philippines.
You had people like Mark Twain in the anti-imperialist league.
Well, you know, the polls say that the majority of Americans oppose even the Afghan war now.
But there's just not the hatred for it that you and I have.
It's sort of like, you know, likes and dislikes on their centerfold description.
Oh, yeah, I'm against the war, but still, it's not like I'm going to take out time of my day to complain out loud about it or anything.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, you know, maybe I could possibly be bothered to join a Facebook group, I am against the war, but, you know, that's about it.
No, I don't know.
I mean, again, as I say, I don't like to be despairing, but I don't see anything on the horizon except, you know, they could stumble into a situation where they have to call for a draft.
They may, you know, as they did in Korea, they may cross a trip wire with the Chinese or something, but I don't think they'll do that because there's too much money to be made with the Chinese, too much coordination to be made with the Chinese.
I mean, you know, they're a lot more careful than they used to be about these sort of things.
So, who knows?
I don't know.
I don't know what will happen.
I don't, as you say, I mean, you know, Ron Paul and the other very few voices out there who make, you know, Chalmers, Johnson, and these things, people you've shown many times make the very common-sense argument, it's like, well, let's bring the empire home.
Why do we need these bases?
Why do we need to spend all this money?
Let's spend it on ourselves.
I mean, forget the moral arguments, let's make a selfish argument.
Shouldn't we spend $3 trillion a year on our own self, you know, our own schools, our own roads?
You know, let's rebuild our society.
Why not, you know?
So, I don't know.
I don't know.
But no one in national politics, again, except for the very few people, but no one with a chance of gaining power in national politics, let's put it that way, ever says these things.
And, of course, they can't say these things or they wouldn't have a chance at power in national politics.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, Ron Paul has this position as long as he doesn't really try to make himself the minority leader or something like that, in which case they would spend every bit of resource they needed to to defeat him in the next election.
Well, yes, of course.
I mean, that's what happens to everybody.
You know, he would have that happen or suddenly some sort of sex scandal would erupt, you know, a vague sex scandal would erupt.
Or, you know, he might find himself in airplane trouble somewhere over the planes or something.
So, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens if anyone really threatens to upset the apple cart.
All right.
Well, times are tough, but I'm glad we have your great blog and all your great work there to help call the score and keep it straight.
At least we can know the truth about what's going on, even if we can't really do anything about it except blog and do radio shows and little things like that.
Well, as I say, you never know what can happen.
But we do know if you don't say anything, you know, nothing good will ever happen.
So all you can do is keep throwing out those little fragments of the truth and see what happens.
All right, everybody.
There he is, the man with the x-ray eyes, Chris Floyd.
The book and the blog are called Empire Burlesque.
The website is chris-floyd.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Chris.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
I appreciate it.