Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio and our next guest is the heroic Chris Floyd.
He wrote the book Empire Burlesque High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium and he keeps a blog with that same name Empire Burlesque at Chris-Floyd.com.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show.
Good.
Good to be here.
Yeah.
I just wanted to point out, of course, you know, the book was in the Bush Imperium, but now the blog is Empire Burlesque High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium since we have such good bipartisan continuity between our parties these days.
It is great continuity, isn't it?
Wonderful continuity.
Well, it's very comforting, yes.
You know, life is so predictable in that way.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so what's the carp of truth?
The carp of truth?
Oh, that's a line from Shakespeare, you know, where Polonius is going to tell a lie and that's going to catch the carp of truth, you know, your line of little sort of bait of falsehood catches the carp of truth.
Ah, I see.
There you go.
Well, I'm kind of illiterate, so what the hell do I know about that?
All right.
Well, so let's talk about Jack Straw, Colin Powell, as he prefers to be called, and the carp of truth here.
Why are we going over this old news about Iraq?
Aren't you over it like everybody else?
Don't you know they renamed the Iraq War something New Dawn or something, Chris?
What the hell is the matter with you?
Actually, I saw it referred to the other day, and where was it?
I can't remember.
One of our fine upstanding media seriosities, Time or Newsweek, something was referred to as the post-war Iraq they were talking about.
They were talking about here, such and such happening in post-war Iraq.
They're always referring to it as post-war Iraq.
What have we got?
Six thousand soldiers over there, killings every day, a growing tyranny from the party that we implanted in power there.
But this is post-war Iraq, so it's quite an accomplishment, I think, quite an accomplishment of Orwellian manipulation there.
So now we're in post-war Iraq, yeah.
Yes, Operation New Dawn, they're calling it.
Oh, really?
I mean, really.
Can you imagine having that on your gravestone?
We died in Operation New Dawn.
Oh, gosh.
Operation, yeah, I don't know.
No, I haven't heard that.
Yeah, well, that changes everything.
Changing the name, as everybody knows.
Well, so tell us, you know, what's going on in Iraq right now?
I mean, I guess there's all these headlines about Chalabi's purge of the Sunni and secular nationalist candidates from the upcoming elections.
What does that mean?
Well, you know, I don't know.
You're a man there at antiwar.com.
Jason Dietz has been on top of this really well, you know, so I've been following him, basically.
But I don't know, there's all kinds of things going on.
I mean, basically what we're seeing is just what we always knew we'd see in the end, is sort of strongman rule, one-man, one-party rule.
And so now the Americans, you know, they've did it around here, they've did it around there.
These, you know, Maliki, who's the head over there in Iraq, is basically a Shiite extremist.
They come from a Shiite extremist party, a terrorist party.
They used to kill Americans, you know, but now we're over there spending our money and our blood to keep him in power.
But, yeah, I mean, all kinds of stuff's going on.
It's hard to be, you know, it's hard to keep up.
And as you say, one reason it's hard to keep up is because it's so buried in all the news you can't find it anywhere, unless you're looking on antiwar.com, which is where I found a lot of the stuff about Iraq.
But, you know, again, as you had there today, you had the American chief over there, what's his name, Ray Odierno, saying that, well, you know, we might not be able to pull everybody out if there's too much violence going on.
Of course, all the moves being made by the ruling party in Iraq right now is guaranteed to up the violence.
If you cut the Sunnis out of the electoral equation, and you, you know, jail some of them, arrest some of them, and you've got, you know, all sorts of repression going on, then of course you're going to have more and more violence.
And then guess what?
The Americans will just have to stay around.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it really goes to the question of whether that slogan, in fact, is true, that the surge worked.
Either it worked or it didn't.
Remember, they were going to have all these benchmarks met by October 2007, and the benchmarks were going to be that all the different factions make friends and decide to work together in a new democracy.
Well, yeah, I tell you, I mean...
Oh, and they pass an oil law that turns it all over to Exxon instead of the Chinese and the French.
Well, yeah, that's a bit, you know, that's a bit they've sort of fallen down on.
But yes, I mean, actually, you're right, the surge did work.
And I remember writing about this at the time, when the surge was being put in place, the purpose of the surge was to continue the war.
Because if you remember the time before the surge, there was, you know, a great, you know, a feeling, a great anti-war feeling in the country.
And this was one of the reasons why the Democrats won the Congress in 2006.
Those people thought, you know, jokes on them.
They thought the Democrats were going to be, you know, weren't going to keep supporting Bush's war.
You even had the establishment doing things like the Iraq Study Group, you know, saying, well, we've got to do something, we've got to do something.
And so what they came up with was just the surge, which is a way to perpetuate the war by making it seem like it was, you know, yes, of course it reduced some of the violence, but of course it reduced the violence.
The surge didn't reduce the violence.
The surge, which is only, in the end, is actually just a small increase in American soldiers, about 30,000.
We've already had two of those in Afghanistan since Obama's come in.
But besides that, so they put 30,000 more soldiers in, about the same time that the Shiites had finished up their ethnic cleansing, you know, this great civil war that went on within Iraq.
We know, with our help and with our, you know, abetting the winning side, you know, hundreds of thousands killed, millions driven from their homes, communities divided, you know, Baghdad basically cleansed of Sunnis.
And yes, so the violence did reduce in that sense, but the whole point of the surge was to slap, as you just said, you know, to slap a new name on the Iraq War, to slap a new coat of paint on it, and say, oh, well, look, look, something's happening, something's happening.
And so to perpetuate the American presence there, because otherwise there was just, you know, a window there in 2006 where it looked like, you know, that presence was being, was greatly imperiled.
But so yes, the surge is a success, because where are we?
We're still there.
And what do we have, 96,000 troops there now, and with a promise that they'll all be gone.
But of course, you know, and I know, and I'm sure your listeners know, is even the withdrawal plans, which Obama's great withdrawal plan is essentially the same one that Bush negotiated before he left office, so we have more of that continuity.
This great withdrawal plan always calls for thousands and thousands of American troops to remain behind in Iraq.
Well, in December, Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was talking about keeping air power in there indefinitely as well.
Of course.
Well, they don't have an air force.
They have to have our air force.
We have to have our trainers and advisors.
And of course, we built this gigantic fortress of an embassy there, and it's going to have to be staffed by, you know, thousands of soldiers just to protect it.
So, I mean, even in the best case scenario of these so-called withdrawal plans, you're going to continue to have a vast military, American military presence in Iraq.
And if you go back to the plans that, you know, we've talked about this before, you know, the Project for the American Century, and all these people are back to the regime, you know, Iraq regime change laws in 98 that were signed by Clinton.
If you go back to all these things, this bipartisan consensus that formed in the late 90s was that the goal of the whole point was to have a permanent military presence in Iraq.
And that Project for the American Century document even said, regardless of the presence of Saddam Hussein, whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not, it was imperative, you know, for America's strategic, geo-strategic future to have a permanent military presence in Iraq.
That's what they went in there to get.
That's what they went in there to put in.
That's what they've got.
That's what they want to keep, you see.
And so when people say, oh, gosh, you know, what a botched war, oh, gosh, you know, or what a successful surge, or blah, blah, blah, I mean, that's just not, you know, they've done what they wanted to do.
They wanted to put a permanent American presence in Iraq, you know, for their various different reasons.
And, you know, not everything's worked out the way they wanted to.
And sure, I'm sure they would have liked to have had an easier ride.
And like you say, they would have liked to have been able to put Exxon in there right away and be pumping out, you know, things from the BP pumps in Baghdad right this minute.
A lot of the stuff hasn't gone the way they wanted to.
But their main objective was to put an American military footprint right there in the Middle East, right there in the heart of the Arab world, right there in the middle of the oil lands, right there in Iraq.
That's what they went in to do.
That's what they've done.
And that's what, even if Obama's plan, you know, even if the draw goes through, that's what they're going to continue to do.
That's what they've done, you know.
And so, you know, I have to take issue with these America bashers who say that we didn't win the Iraq war.
That, you know, it was a great catastrophe because, you know, as far as our grand poobah geo-strategic planners are concerned, they've done exactly what they wanted to do.
And they've also, the other thing they wanted to do was to militarize American society, you know, greatly, greatly, vastly increase the defense budget until, at a whole new level, you see.
I mean, at a whole new level, a whole new permanent level.
And just in general, sort of augment and expand our war profiteering industries, you know.
And that's what they've done.
And look how, look how it's vastly changed American society already.
Well, that's what they call national greatness.
Hey, everybody.
It's Chris Floyd from Chris-Floyd.com.
Empire Burlesque is the name of the blog.
It's really the conscience of the anti-war movement.
And I really highly suggest that you read everything he writes here.
Now, you know, one thing that really gets me is, well, I got a couple of gray hairs on my chin here, and I'm realizing just how much time has flown by with all this war over these years.
And, well, especially the news over the weekend about Ron Paul's victory at CPAC and all that kind of reminds me that there are a lot of young people who were just kids when all this stuff went down and who never have got to hear a real Chris Floyd telling how America got into this war.
And this ties into what we're talking about today with Ahmed Chalabi literally being the guy in charge of purging all the Sunnis and nationalists from the upcoming election there, this thing that's putting the country in danger of falling back into a full-scale civil war, it looks like.
And these kids don't know how we got into this war, really.
Not in the detail that you can tell them.
And this is also timely in the news again because you've had this kind of bogus 9-11-style commission over there in England rehearsing this.
So let's talk about Chalabi and Jack Straw and Colin Powell and the Carp of Truth and how we got into this mess in the first place.
Well, you know, as you said, Chalabi, I don't even know how to pronounce his name, as you said, there's people who are adults now who weren't even teenagers when all this sort of got started and he's been a prime mover all the way.
He's a man with no support inside Iraq.
The few times he ran for office over there, he got zero percent.
He got, you know, like one percent or something like that.
He has no support inside Iraq.
He never had any support inside Iraq.
But he was always, even the CIA didn't like him.
But he was, you know, the neocons man and he was actually convicted, as you remember, he was convicted of massive fraud in Jordan where he was a businessman for some time.
But, yes, now he's come back in power.
He's been in and out of power.
He's been in and out of power.
At one time, I don't know if you recall, of course, you know, as you say, young people don't know this, but at one time he was even arrested by the Americans after the Iraq invasion for suspicion of espionage with the Iranians because he's also been very close to Iran.
But as you say, now here he is again, you know, oh, he's also the author of the very famous statement when after the war, after the invasion, and after they found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, which is what Chalabi and his group had been pushing all the time.
They were the ones pushing, oh, there's WMD, there's WMD.
You know, someone said, what about this, Mr. Chalabi?
There's no weapons of mass destruction.
He said, well, if we were wrong, we were heroes in error, you know, heroes in error.
So, yeah, they lied their way into war.
And now he, as you say, he somehow, by hook and crook, he's kept himself on the margins of power there or on the margins of the center of power there, rather, even through the successive administrations we've had there that we've put in there.
And now he's in charge of this de-baptization committee or whatever it is, and he's throwing a lot of people off, as you say.
And they get into a situation where they're about to provoke a new internal war, you know, a new internal ethnic conflict, which is what he wants to do.
Well, you know, everybody thought that they had weapons of mass destruction, and maybe Chalabi really was just in error.
Or maybe if he knew he was lying and all his defectors were all simply just pushing, you know, things made out of whole cloth, maybe George Bush fell for it.
And Colin Powell and Jack Straw and these guys really thought that they had to protect England from being bombed with chemical weapons at 45 minutes' notice from Saddam Hussein.
Chris?
Well, you know, as old, what's his name, Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof used to say, Yeah.
You know, I mean, of course, you know, as you know, I mean, they knew very well there was no weapons of mass destruction, and this is one thing you mentioned, the Chilcot Inquiry they've had over here, into the origins of the invasion of Iraq.
You know, it's been sort of one of these, it's a little bit like our 9-11 Commission that you get all these establishment worthies on there.
And you know they're not really going to press very hard, but just the way things are set up here, they actually press a little bit harder than they do over in America, at least because, not least of all, they put these people under oath.
But no, it's been mostly, it's been to a large degree sort of soft-spoke kind of thing.
But some interesting facts, you know, have come up.
And I've mentioned before, mostly what we've seen is a confirmation of things that have come out over the years, sort of piecemeal.
But it's been instructive to have it all wrapped up about this.
But of course what we go back for is that the documentary evidence shows that they were well aware that there were gigantic gaps in their so-called intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
And I mean, this goes all the way back to the Downing Street Memo where they say they were fixing the evidence around the policy.
The policy was regime change for the same reasons we mentioned before.
It's been the open policy.
It was a declared open policy passed by Congress, signed by Bill Clinton in 1998, Iraq Regime Change Act.
They were always out, you know, to take over Iraq.
So they had to find something.
But they knew very well there was no weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, you have Colin Powell up there with his little, I don't know, bottles of salt water or, I don't know, semen samples or whatever he's waving around in front of the UN, you know.
It's like, this is the kind of anthrax they have over there.
But, no, I mean, one thing that the Chilcot Inquiry has been revealing is the total paucity of any solid evidence they had.
And even things where that, you know, you remember, you may recall that Tony Blair's big thing that he used to scare Parliament was that Iraq could weaponize their chemical weapons in 45 minutes, you know, and launch them.
Well, it turned out that the intelligence for that came from a taxi driver in Baghdad who told someone else, who told someone else, who somehow got it back to them.
I mean, this is what they had based their so-called intelligence report on.
So, yeah.
In other words, there's just no question, Chris, that they knew that they were lying.
Yes, no, of course.
Well, I mean, as I said at the time, and many others, if they really thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, they wouldn't have sent, you know, 700,000 soldiers with the most scanty kind of protection.
You know, all this point was, oh, we've got to protect the world from his weapons of mass destruction.
We're going to invade him and he's going to launch a weapons of mass destruction.
They knew he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction.
Of course he didn't have any.
In fact, if you look at the first Gulf War, they bombed him for a month before they sent the troops in because they knew he did have some back then.
Yes, I know, absolutely.
Well, also, but if you look, I mean, as you know, I wrote this before, and this actually came out in Newsweek before that attack.
Now, why it didn't make a big deal, I don't know.
But, you know, Saddam's son-in-law defected in the mid-'90s.
You know, he defected.
He brought a lot of evidence, and he debriefed the Americans and British.
He said, you know, we have destroyed all our weapons of mass destruction.
We destroyed them, you know.
Anything we had left after the 1991 war, we destroyed.
We destroyed it at Saddam's order.
I was in charge of it.
I destroyed it.
Here's where we destroyed it.
Here's how we destroyed it.
Now, this was 1995, or 94, 95.
Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law.
That's right.
Who was quoted in half-truth format by Dick Cheney at the VFW speech in August of 2002, saying he admitted that they kept their stuff after the Gulf War and then left out the part about, and that they got caught, and they destroyed it all by the end of 1991.
Yes, absolutely.
It was all gone.
You know, again, this was well-known.
It was well-known to the intelligence services.
It was well-known to anyone who wanted to know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction for 12 years from the time they did the invasion.
But, again, at some point, you know, I mean, not to move on, but, you know, it's almost so evident now, as you just said, you know, that they knew there was no weapons of mass destruction.
That was all sort of a lie from the beginning.
There was no matter of, oh, we're so scared, you know, there's nothing like that.
And, in fact, you know, Blair has even admitted that.
He admitted in an interview over here.
He said, well, you know, even if I'd known there'd been no weapons of mass destruction, it was still the right thing to do, and I still would have found a way to do it because, you know, they've liberated, well, they've liberated a million people from the prison cell of their bodies.
But, you know, so, I mean, there was no question of that sort of thing.
Well, it is a bit academic and a bit redundant, but, you know, Chris, it's important for people to just hear it out loud in English.
Oh, no, no, I'm not saying it's redundant.
I'm just saying that it's so provable that we need to sort of, you know, it's like, yeah, it's not redundant.
It's just so evident now, you know, that we don't need to move on, but the question is what to do with these people.
Of course, nothing's going to be done with them.
That's the other question, you see.
Well, I mean, and that's really the thing is that, hell, we were sitting in the chaos garage, you know, this time, 2002, saying they've already announced that their policy is regime change and they're going to tell us whatever lie they need to between now and about a year from now to get this thing done and all of that.
Here we have a situation where pretty much everybody knows, even if they haven't really gone ahead and said it out loud in English themselves, that these men are war criminals.
They made no mistake.
That was their phrase at the time, make no mistake, right?
They made no mistake.
They knew what they were doing.
They lied this country into war.
They got a million people killed.
And if there's justice and law at all in England and in America, then they would go on trial immediately for war crimes.
This is what Germans and Japanese hung from the neck for at the end of World War II, starting a war.
That's true.
Of course, you know, the Germans and Japanese lost the war.
That's why they hung by the neck.
They wouldn't have hung themselves by the neck if they'd won.
And that's what's happening.
No one has defeated these people.
It really is as simple as that, isn't it?
It is as simple as that.
There is no, I mean, no, it's true.
But it is important, as you say, it is important to keep telling the story, just so that people know that, yes, you know, okay, there is no justice.
You know, there is no real law.
But you have to know that's the world you live in, and that's the only way you might be able to change it later as long as you know it.
If you keep thinking, oh, gosh, they made a mistake, or, oh, gosh, if we just worked with the right people, or, oh, gosh, if we just gave them one more chance, you know, or, you know, oh, gosh, maybe it wasn't this way.
Maybe if we could find some way to, you know, to explain it away.
But as long as you know the real truth, that they did it on purpose, they know that they knew what they were doing, and they are war criminals, and that this is the world you live in, is that your society and your government is controlled by people who are war criminals.
You know, it doesn't mean that, you know, that they don't love their children or pet their dogs.
I mean, you know, Hitler loved his dogs, too.
I mean, the only thing that matters is what your policies are.
This is another thing that happens in American politics, and to some extent in British politics, but not quite as much, is it gets all tangled with personalities.
Oh, he's a nice guy.
He's a guy like us.
You know, he went to my college.
He went to my school.
You know, he did this like I did.
You know, he likes to watch baseball.
He likes to bowl, whatever, you know.
And, you know, so he looks kind of like us, so he can't be a war criminal.
You know, so this is something that's sort of a cognitive dissonance that's really hard for people to get over, I think.
You know, as I say, if you keep telling the story and telling the story, you know, I mean, that's my whole sort of gamut that I've always tried to do.
It's like, just tell the story.
It's almost like telling it to one person at a time, but what can you do, you know?
That's all you can do.
You can tell it one person at a time, ten people at a time, you know, whatever.
You know, it gets through this person, it gets through the one person there, one person there, and that's where we live in, that's the times we have, and that's what we have to do, you know.
If we lived in better times, it'd be better, but it's not.
Yeah, well, because it's all about the future, too.
And the thing that's just, you know, driving me up the wall, and I'm sure you as well, is these poll numbers that say that 71% of the American people think the Iranians already got nuclear bombs, and get this, that might be a reason why to start a war with them.
Well, of course.
I mean, we're seeing this.
So, you know, the stage in this has to be the same thing in Iran.
Anytime they want to pull the trigger, they can pull the trigger on it.
It's just a question.
I think the only thing that's preventing an attack on Iran is just when the elites, our elites, our powers that be decide whether it's worth their while or not, you know.
Right now, if it looks a bit hard, they won't do it.
If they decide, you know, well, I think we can do it now, they'll do it, you know.
But, yeah, they've set the stage.
Everything, every card has been put in place, the same thing as before Iraq, you know.
Even down to the point of an Iran regime change act.
Everything is there, except, you know, everything is there.
Sanctions are there.
Sanctions are there.
The same kind of lies are being told.
The same kind of demonization is being told.
The same kind of, oh, gosh, do they have weapons of mass destruction?
They do.
They don't.
You know, whatever.
It's the whole gambit is being played out again.
In a way, it's almost, it's the only way to reconcile what they've done in Iraq, right?
I mean, they handed the whole country over to the Iranians.
That's who's purging all the Sunnis and nationalists off the list is the Supreme Islamic Council.
Everybody knows it.
And so the only way to fix that is to change the regime in Iran.
And then it's okay that we gave them Iraq.
Well, that's part of the deal.
That's the kind of policy these idiots are working with up there.
You can have a lot of problems down in, you know, Iraqi Balochistan and stuff.
You know, it just keeps going on and on.
But, of course, the main thing is that, you know, one reason why it's kind of hard to deal with these is because it's sort of a moving target.
You know, you have on one hand you have that kind of overpossessing, but there's an overarching policy, which is just sort of to keep the empire going.
Because the empire, you know, any empire, not just the American empire, is like a shark.
You know, if it doesn't keep moving, it dies.
If it doesn't keep devouring things, it doesn't keep going.
Just like the Russian empire for hundreds of years.
You know, I read some amazing statistics once.
It added something like, I don't know, 300 square miles to its territory, you know, over a course of almost every year for 300 years or something like that, you know.
And then when it reached its limits, it keeled over and died.
But, you know, the thing is to sort of keep the war machine going, keep this whole system that they've set up going.
But, you know, I was just thinking, I've been thinking, we should talk about the future, you know, doing things for the future.
And I've been thinking a lot about that because, you know, us dissidents or whatever, critics of the powers that be, we often get accused of being negative, you know.
We're just tearing things down.
We're never offered a positive vision.
But it does, it so happens that I do have a positive program to offer.
I want to hear it.
All right.
Well, I'd like, if I could talk about it just for a second.
Give it all the time you need, man.
All right.
Well, first, here's what my program offers.
Here's what it would produce, you know.
Lower taxes, more jobs, higher wages, less government, stronger national security, greater prosperity, better schools and roads and health care, you know.
And this program would require no social upheaval and no political turmoil, no revolution from either the left or the right.
And it could be accomplished entirely within the existing political and economic system.
Sounds good so far.
Huh?
Sounds good so far.
How are you doing?
No new government power.
Yeah, it's a winning agenda.
No new government powers, no new bureaucracy and no new taxes.
And all it requires is simply the one thing, and I know you know what it is, and that's bring America home.
You know, end our worldwide military empire.
Because, you know, if you ended America's imperial wars and you dismantled the global military empire and the gulag, you know, you would automatically save trillions of dollars in the coming years.
Not only from the cuts in military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for homeland security funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign countries and killing their people, supporting their tyrants, and inciting revenge and resistance.
So you wouldn't need all that.
And this, in turn, would release a flood of money for any number of domestic initiatives that you might want to come up with, while also giving you scope for deep tax cuts all across the board.
You know, working people would thrive.
The poor and the sick and the vulnerable would be better off.
Businesses would grow.
Because one thing, you'd end this distortion of our economy to the war profiteering businesses.
And, you know, economic growth would spread out across all different sectors.
You know, businesses would grow.
The opportunity would expand.
The education of our children would be enhanced.
Our infrastructure could be repaired.
You know, the environment would be cared for better.
In short, here's what the program would mean.
Ending the empire would just mean that people could keep more of their own money, while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life for all the nation's citizens, not just the elite.
And, you know, this idea of bringing America home is not a utopian vision.
Because, you know, we all have our own ideas and beliefs about what constitutes the good life and the best kind of society.
And there's lots of disagreements.
And me and you might disagree about this or that other thing.
You know, we think we should like to see society do or not do.
You know, and in a post-empire America, there'd be plenty of scope for heated debate on all kinds of things.
You know, all the ideological conflicts and the culture wars and the partisan wrangling, all that would go on.
And, you know, and of course, if you ended the empire, there'd still be injustice and corruption and suffering.
You know, so it's not a utopia.
But here's the thing, though.
But it would be a better society than it is now.
It'd be more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more sustainable.
And all these culture wars and political conflicts would take place, you know, in a healthier context.
In a freer country where the focus was on the pursuit of happiness for American citizens, not on the projection of dominance all around the world.
And this is, you know, this is entirely achievable, you know, by ordinary human beings.
We don't need a messiah.
We don't need, you know, we don't need great heroes of hope and change.
You know, you could easily dismantle the empire.
You know, you do it carefully.
You could do it safely with proper planning and deliberation.
You could do it in ten years.
You know, so that's, when we talk about the future, that's my blueprint for a better world.
Just bring America home, you know.
It's not revolution.
It's not rocket science.
It's not dogmatic or doctrinaire.
You know, you could be a Democrat and support it, Republican, a Baptist or a Marxist or whatever.
Because it's not about trying to build a perfect society.
It's about taking this one very simple step that will automatically make life better than it is today, you know, for Americans and for everybody else.
I mean, to me it's just so self-evident that I don't know, you know, I don't know why somebody just jumped on it.
Because, you know, this thing with Ron Paul, the feedback thing, you know, there's a lot of things that I might disagree with Ron Paul about and he with me.
There's a lot of things that all people across the spectrum could disagree about.
But look what you could do is you could knight people with this one idea, you know, ending our global military empire, bringing America home, you know.
Again, saving trillions and trillions of dollars that we could spend on ourselves or keep in our own pocket.
And, I mean, just what a better world it would be.
It would automatically be a better world, automatically be a safer world, automatically be a more prosperous country, automatically be, you know, just automatically.
As I say, you still have lots of problems, but look what the context those problems would be in, you know.
I think if a politician could jump on that and really, and just hold to that, just hold to that and say this is what, this is what I'm going to unite us all on is this one thing here, you know, ending the empire.
You know, we can talk about abortion over here, we can talk about taxes over here, we can talk about, you know, later on or over to the side or something like that, but here's what we're going to push through.
Well, you'd have, I think you'd have, I think you'd have a winning program there.
But nobody, nobody's doing that, you know, no one's pulling that together.
And, of course, you know, because one thing is all our elites, our media elites and our government elites, but the media, especially in this case, keeps throttling the message.
You know, because they just won't imagine such an alternative because it'll make them somehow seem less important, I guess.
Well, and it works because the American people are just terrorized.
In fact, I'm looking at, I'm looking at the picture of your book, Empire Burlesque, and it's got some terrified guy on the front of the book.
That's, that's really the thing is we just have to refuse that and just let go of that fear.
Because, you know, I got to tell you, man, I hear you make the case, and it's no different than the case that I would make.
It's not a utopian thing.
It's, you know, you don't have to have that much imagination to see that it doesn't have to be this way.
It's not supposed to be this way.
You know, Jean Kirkpatrick was one of these neocons, you know, one of these people who hated the U.N. because it was in the way of their wars instead of for getting them into wars like the libertarians do.
But even she said it when the Soviet Union fell apart that now we can be a normal country in a normal time.
That's what I mean.
And the thing is, you're exactly right.
You know, terror is used all the time.
But the thing is, I think, you know, you could even use, you could even use that.
You could even use the American people's propensity, what they've suddenly shown, to be a bunch of cowards, you know, just a bunch of cowards, basically.
But you could use that to say, look, are you scared of being, you know, are you tired of being scared?
Well, here's how you could stop it, you know.
Are you tired of being threatened by, you know, evil Muslims from around the world?
Well, here's how you could stop it, you know.
Bring America home, you know, take care of your own self, and your terror will go away, you know, because they're not going to keep killing you unless you're over there killing their people.
But as you say, I mean, you know, it's not a utopian vision.
It's a very practical thing that could be done very reasonably.
But what is, I think, more and more utopian is actually getting that message out to enough people, you see, because that message is blocked at every turn.
And anyone who brings that message gets demonized, gets knocked down, like Ron Paul.
And like I say, you know, I would have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul if we sat down and we talked about the whole scope of society and what we thought, you know, what government should do or not do with this, that.
I'm sure we'd have a lot of disagreements, you know, about, you know, social issues, and I don't, you know.
But the point being that, you know, as you know, one of Ron Paul's big focuses the last few years has been this anti-empire thing.
But, of course, any time he talks about that, then you'll suddenly get stories about, oh, you know what Ron Paul said about blacks 15 years ago.
Oh, you know what this has meant.
You know, if everyone is demonized, everyone is cut down, if Dennis Kucinich on the other side starts talking about, you know, ending the empire, ending the wars and stuff like that.
Oh, you know, Kucinich is a nut.
He did this.
He believes in spaceships.
You know, anything you do, anyone who steps up for that is going to be...
In the old days, they used to be shot like Martin Luther King.
But nowadays, they just sort of trivialize them, you know.
They don't even bother to demonize them most of the time.
They just trivialize them.
Oh, you know, they're sort of fringe.
Oh, they're crackpots, blah, blah, blah.
So, as you say, it's not a utopian vision.
And I'm going to be writing more about this Bring America Home idea.
You know, I'm hoping one of these days to write a book about it, you know, like a blueprint.
There's a whole movement on the right, Chris.
Not just the libertarians, but there's a whole movement of guys that call themselves the paleo-conservatives.
Well, men and women, too.
You know, the American Conservative Magazine and all that.
And, in fact, we're running an article on antiwar.com today by Pat Buchanan about ending the empire, where he's, you know, basically talking about the long war and full-spectrum dominance in Central Asia and all that.
And he says, listen, for how long are we going to borrow billions from China to protect the world from China?
To protect Asia from China?
I mean, this is the silliest thing.
If it wasn't so murders, it would be the silliest thing.
This is, as Ron Paul always says, this is going to ruin us.
And that's, I think, his real point is that I know the empire is not going to end because, you listen to me, he says, it's going to end because our economy is going to be destroyed.
For economic reasons, our empire will fall.
I just hope that you remember what it was that I said when the S hits the fan there, you know?
Well, that's what I'm saying.
There's all sorts of, that's what I mean, there's all sorts of a broad spectrum.
Again, you know, I know for absolute fact, if I sat down with Pat Buchanan, I'll disagree with a lot of stuff he said, you know, and he believed.
But that's what I'm saying.
There's a broad spectrum that you could draw on, you know, if it was focused in on ending the empire.
And then we could have all our arguments.
I could sit down with Pat Buchanan and we could talk about, you know, whatever, abortion and things like that.
Then we could have a lot of arguments.
But, you know, as you say, until we end the empire like this, you know, as you say, it's going to be this canker that's going to destroy the nation and, you know, lay waste to great parts of the world while they're at it.
Well, you know, as we go through all these changes, especially with the economy and all the imperialism and the switching of parties in power from the party in power to the dissent and vice versa and all that, you know, there's kind of a whole new thing.
Of course, you have the whole Tea Party anti-establishment thing on the right.
You have a lot of progressives that are really angry at Barack Obama.
And, you know, this to me, you know, I guess like Condoleezza Rice says, you know, a crisis is a great opportunity.
Rahm Emanuel echoing the same thing.
And to me, it seems like we need to define this thing that you're talking about is, you know, what I learned in community colleges, they called it the realignment, like what happened in the 1930s where town and country and black and white and Irish and Anglican and all kind of different people came together, East Coast, West Coast, and everywhere in between to become part of the New Deal Coalition of FDR.
Now, I'm sure that's, you know, very much the community college version of events.
But also to a great extent, it's true that people change sides in great measure.
And that's really, we don't need them to change from one side or the other here.
But what we do need is, like you're talking about, getting our priorities straight, saying end the empire, protect the Bill of Rights, and everything else can be on hold.
And the guys at FireDogLake and at AntiWar.com and everywhere in between, we need to all get together and have one big, you know, new left, old right, libertarian, anti-empire movement in this country.
I mean.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
We just need a name for it.
We just need an organization to all join or something.
I don't know what you call it, the Anti-Imperialist League.
We'll have Mark Twain as our mascot.
Yeah, well, we'll have to get some PR stuff in there.
You don't make it anti, you make it positive.
You know, you make it, I don't know.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, of course, that's what you need.
That's what has to be done.
And then, you know, we may be, as you say, you know, the economic crisis and everything may bring things to a pitch to point.
If they don't get sort of thrown off, you know, and one thing about the Tea Party thing, of course, we know that a lot of these Tea Party gatherings and stuff, you know, are already infiltrated by mainstream Republican organizations and stuff like that.
Sure.
Just like, of course, all the progressives, you know, line up to support the Democrats.
You know, when push comes to shove, they throw over everything to support the Democrats.
And the Democrats will manipulate progressive organizations in the same way.
So, yeah, I don't know.
That's what I mean.
The vision itself is realistic.
It's hard-nosed.
It's pragmatic.
But it's somehow getting the message out.
That's what's almost utopian.
That's what's hard to imagine, you know, how we can break through that kind of thing.
And, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what, I don't know.
That next step is something that, you know, something has to be worked on, I suppose.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think for those of us who do have our priorities straight, kind of getting that message straight about, you know, the realignment itself is a top priority right there with peace and the Bill of Rights.
You know, there's a lot of people out there, a lot of great writers, a lot of great websites.
You know, something can be done.
Something's being done.
You know, it's slow, but as George Bush used to like to say, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
I mean, for Ron Paul to bring down the house at CPAC the way he did means that something's afoot here.
And, you know, the work you do at your website here at Empire Burlesque is indispensable, and you really are helping to lead the way on a lot of these things.
And you know what?
You're a really talented writer, too, which helps for a guy who reads blogs all day.
It's nice to have somebody who, you know, with a little education and wit behind his prose there.
Well, I appreciate it.
I know how to throw in a great Shakespeare reference every now and then, I guess.
Well, you're much appreciated.
I know you know that, but I like saying it anyway, Chris.
I appreciate being appreciated.
All right, everybody.
That's Chris Floyd.
The book is Empire Burlesque.
The blog is Empire Burlesque at Chris-Floyd.com.
Thanks again very much.
All right.
Thank you.
