11/06/08 – Christopher Manion – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
Our first guest today is Christopher Mannion, and I often read him over at the LewRockwell.com blog.
He's the co-founder of the American Foreign Policy Council and former staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in the 1980s.
He's taught politics, political theory, and international relations at Boston University, Catholic University, and the University of Dallas, and he's a contributing editor to The Wanderer, America's oldest national Catholic weekly.
Again, you can find a lot of what he writes at LewRockwell.com.
Welcome to the show, Christopher.
Thank you, sir.
It's good to be here.
Well, I have to tell you, I always have such a great time reading your blog entries at LRC.
You seem to like picking on these neoconservatives, don't you?
Well, I like to do it with a sense of humor, because they take themselves very seriously.
Yeah, and frankly, they're the bullies.
All you're doing is standing up for the people they would have killed, right?
Well, I was a conservative when they were all Trotskyites.
Oh, really?
You know these guys going back that far?
Well, their tradition is from the left.
Many of them are scions of Leon Trotsky, and who believed in spreading the revolution worldwide all at once, but they came over to the so-called conservative side over their differences with regard to the Soviet Union.
And so they became advocates of America's anti-Soviet policies, and have been embraced by the conservative movement as fellow conservatives ever since.
I believe that embrace was in error.
So tell me then, what does conservatism mean to you, and then I guess what's so different about neoconservatism to what you hold to be your principles?
It's simply the constitutional limitation on the power of the government.
I accept it, and the neoconservatives deny it.
We accept it, if I may extend my remarks here.
We accept it because the tradition in Christendom, the entire West, Europe, the United States, has recognized the limitations of government because, after all, government can't save your soul.
Now the left, for two or three hundred years especially, has denied the existence of the soul, and has made out of government what Thomas Hobbes called a mortal god.
Neoconservatives embrace that view, and whether or not they make a bow in the direction of the Church for political purposes aside, they believe that the government should take the actions that Divine Providence normally should, and that's why they want to spread democracy all over the world by force.
Well, so what's conservative about them at all, then, if they're simply secular humanist commie types?
They were anti-Soviet, and they were pro-defense, and when the left, the traditional left in the United States, in the 1960s opposed the Vietnam War, in the 1970s applauded a weak foreign policy against the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives left the left and came over to the Republican Party because they believed in a strong opposition to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Yeah, well, they were Americans, after all, right?
Yes, and they also recognized that whatever private agendas they had were also threatened by the Soviet Union as well.
And so, I guess basically the hippies of the 1960s and early 70s, in that era, the new left peace movement taking over the Democratic Party is what drove them out, they decided they would rather hitch their wagon to Republicans who were more willing to initiate wars?
Well, more willing to beef up the defense, and here's another dimension.
The left has always been an intellectual movement, and the neoconservatives came from the university, Irving Kristol, Norman Podorec, Midstector, Gertrude Hemopharb, they are all university types.
And they found the Republican Party very receptive to the intellectual input because, as you might recall, in the 60s and 70s, Republicans were a bunch of businessmen, and the intellectuals were all in the universities and were all liberal Democrats.
So the Republicans welcomed all these eggheads.
Now, I worked down the hall from Jean Kirkpatrick before I went up to Capitol Hill, and when I was staff director, it was of the subcommittee on Western Hemisphere.
She and I worked very closely together, but Jean Kirkpatrick was a profound Christian.
Now, she is identified as a neocon, but she told me when she was working across from the United Nations, where she had to deal with the commies every day, she was going to church a lot more often than she used to.
That's funny.
Well, you know, I remember being kind of puzzled in the 1990s, seeing, I saw a video that featured Jean Kirkpatrick and Jesse Helms that was an anti-UN video.
And I remember thinking that, you know, mostly the Republican Party, they're not against the United Nations.
I mean, hell, Eisenhower was elected way back then, and he didn't overturn the New Deal or the World War II policies of FDR and Truman, and that was basically the consensus that stayed.
The UN isn't going anywhere.
And yet, you know, I used to like watching Bircher stuff about, you know, why we ought to get out of the UN.
There's actually a lot of horrible things about it, no doubt.
That might be another conversation.
But I remember thinking it strange that Jean Kirkpatrick, who I remember being a high-level member of the Bush administration, was in this, you know, almost conspiracy theory video about the dangers of the UN.
And really, I guess it only became clear after the Iraq War that the neocons hate the UN as much as the Birchers do.
But rather than hating it for wanting to do stuff, they hate it for being in the way and, you know, slowing them down in all their grandiose plans that, you know, they see it as an obstacle to them.
Well, two interesting points.
In 1953, the Bricker Amendment would have passed the Senate and become a treaty if one more vote had been found in the Senate.
My father was an advocate of it because it would have not allowed UN treaties or UN mandates or Yalta, Potsdam, Tehran, Kennedy, Khrushchev, private, secret, executive compacts to have the same power as the Constitution.
Now, fast forward, Scott, to the present day.
What authorizes us to be in Iraq?
It's a UN mandate.
And that mandate expires December 31st, and the United States is scrambling to find some other authority, like the so-called Status of Forces Agreement, on which to base its legitimacy of being in Iraq.
Now, there's an irony for you.
All this UN bashing aside, we couldn't be in Iraq under international law, according to this administration, which defies international law all the time.
We couldn't be there without the UN.
And I, frankly, find that to be side-slapping hilarious.
Yeah, well, it's baby blue, and that means world peace, and that's good enough.
It ought to be.
It's funny.
I think back to Richard Perle and the Guardian.
I can never forget about this thing.
It just is at the tip of my tongue every day.
Richard Perle and the Guardian, right at the end of the toppling of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq, when they were all riding high on their so-called victory, and he wrote this article called Thank God for the Death of the United Nations, and mocked what he called the liberal conceit of peace and security through collective organizations like the United Nations, and how they're just shipwrecked on the new way of the world, and all these kinds of things.
Real contempt for the UN era, bordering on my contempt, but for different reasons, obviously.
Well, Scott, the neocons have one leftover from their left-wing experience, and that's called the dialectic.
When you believe in the, let's say, the all men are created equal, and that there are self-evident truths, and among them are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because we have a creator that endowed us, all those are truths that cannot change, or we lose our liberty.
The neocons thrive on the dialectic.
It's called contradiction.
They can slam the UN today, and use it tomorrow, because anything that serves their advance to power works, and anything that impedes it is bad, and those ingredients change from day to day.
So you'll find that Pearl, and Elliott Abrams, and others of their neocon ilk are very supple with their ability, essentially, to deny today what they embraced yesterday, and what they will praise tomorrow.
Yeah, it's sort of like, well, another example, just from recent memory, the other Scott Horton at Harper's, and Jane Mayer at the New Yorker really put this together, the influence that William Crystal had on putting Palin on the McCain ticket.
And then, of course, it was just, I guess, a week or two ago, where he stabbed McCain in the back, and wrote this article about how he should fire his entire staff, and start over again, and all these things, and everything wrong with McCain's campaign is everybody's fault but his, even though he's the one who put this idiot on the ticket with him.
Well, a couple of things.
Neocons never blame themselves.
That's number one, it's important.
Number two, because it is the way of the neocon world.
Number two, they always have the dialectic.
Crystal was the strongest advocate of Lieberman, who is the anti-Palin.
Right, in a good way.
He was the strongest advocate of Lieberman, and he wants to take credit for being on the left and on the right, if you will, of that issue, which is classic neocon dialectic.
So that whoever wins, the neocons are on the life raft, and not sinking with the ship.
That they have sunk.
That they have scuttled.
So Bush suddenly is a failure, and we need a fresh face from Alaska, if not a Democrat from Connecticut.
And now, you watch, all these guys will wind up conniving their way into the Obama administration, and they will both criticize it and guide it, because of the power of their ideas, which have strong resonance in the American national media.
Well, but there's got to be some real power behind them.
What could possibly convince Barack Obama to put the neocons in there, when they're the albatross that destroyed the Bush presidency?
Well, they will explain that it was, in fact they have.
I've cataloged on Lew Rockwell how many different times the neoconservatives have put down a landmine that blows up in Bush's face.
And they blame Bush.
Again, and again, and again.
Give us some examples of that, what do you mean?
Well, when the, right after 9-11, Mr. Krauthammer, Dr. Krauthammer, who writes for the Washington Post, said, anybody who wants to talk about, who wants to discuss, who wants to debate going into Iraq, he accused them of navel-gazing.
He said, what we need here, we can do by sheer force of will.
Now that's Nietzsche, and it's Hegel.
This is classic Communism.
It's a sheer force of will to change reality, including the reality of Iraq.
Whereupon, when the U.S. goes into Iraq and it blows up in our face, Krauthammer and the rest of the neocon crowd blame Rumsfeld, they blame Colin Powell, they never blame Cheney, but they even blame Bush.
And it's a constant cackle of these people pointing fingers at one another, even as with Richard Perle, for instance, he's collecting millions of dollars, millions of dollars constantly coming in because of his close association to defense contractors and international relations.
So these guys encourage us to go in.
They criticize the administration for doing too much, not doing enough.
It's always somebody else's fault when, as Michael Novak has pointed out, a Catholic neocon at American Enterprise Institute, my friend and my former boss, he's pointed out that there were a very small number of people in Washington who made Iraq happen, and most of them were not in government.
Not being in government, Scott, they don't take the blame.
They can point to the people in government who swallowed their arguments whole and say, you blew it.
If they'd only listened to me, that's their constant refrain.
Well, the problem is, they did listen to them, and the whole thing is blown up in our face.
It's amazing that they get away with this at all.
I mean, how could that be?
Nobody else can have carte blanche to be that dishonest and screw up that badly so repeatedly.
It's sadly the way of the world.
Richard Perle, when he was debating Iraq early on, insisted on identifying or categorizing his opponents as left-wingers.
Even Pat Buchanan, even the Pope, even the traditional conservatives, I mean, I come from the family that published Conscience of a Conservative, I mean, we're not left-wingers.
But for Richard Perle, the category of the left was very useful for squirreling all of his enemies into an easily condemned category.
He did not want to discuss the war at all.
Well, is that what we're doing?
Is that what we're doing, is categorizing these men as ex-leftists, and that's what's so bad about them?
Oh, no.
I want to understand.
When Krauthammer says, if you want a rational discussion, it's navel-gazing, it's time for action.
That is Karl Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach.
Philosophy observes the world, the point is to change it, and go out and do it by an assertion of will and of power.
I want to understand and discuss with the neocons what they think about the constitutional limits on the power of the President.
Why haven't they gotten a declaration of war?
Why haven't they gotten a treaty with our so-called wonderful ally, Israel?
We do not have a security treaty with Israel.
They're not a member of NATO, they're not a member of CETO, they're a member of the UN, but they're always voted down at the UN.
So where is our treaty of alliance that defines the requirements that it places on America to defend Israel?
There is none, and the neocons don't want one.
Why?
Because the treaty requires a full national debate, advice, and then consent by the Senate.
And they don't want it, they just want to act.
Now I'd love to sit down at the table with them and take out the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and go over them line by line with regard to what they advocate.
Never.
They will never permit it.
Yeah, well, of course their positions can't be defended with the text of the Constitution.
Right, you are.
Okay, well now, you mentioned the defense contractors there and Richard Perle's fat wallet.
That was nice of you to not mention his fat neck.
But so what is the role of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and these massive defense contractors in the neoconservative movement?
I mean, basically, I guess it sort of sounds like the permanent military industrial complex that was established at the end of World War II basically needed some eggheads to come up with excuses for them to sell their weapons.
Well, when you talk about the role, I would like to mention one aspect that's not normally discussed.
But if a company makes $10 billion off of the government, $10 billion, $100 million is 1% of that.
And the company can easily spread $100 million around to various foundations, universities, and so-called charities that are independent, but which hire thousands of people to resonate the policy that is bringing the $10 billion a year into that particular company.
Now that's one aspect.
Very few studies have been made of what the board membership of these big foundations that are handing out all this money, what is the board membership and what is the money coming from, and where are they getting the money to use as a pass-through?
I'm sure that if I were a crass, unprincipled businessman and the government came along to me and said, we got a billion-dollar contract here, Chris, why don't you put some music over in Iraq for us?
But by the way, that's a billion dollars.
Can you spare $10 million for some of these very fine educational institutions that are doing such good work?
You know?
Now that's not the only case.
I've spent a lot of time in academe.
There are academics who are approached by foundations, and they'll never admit it publicly, so don't ask me, and the foundation says, Dr. Jones, you've done wonderful work on the Bolivian railway system in the 19th century.
We want you to continue that work, and here's a three-year, half-a-million-dollar grant.
Now why do they go to Dr. Jones?
Because he's an international relations specialist, highly regarded, and they know, because they have sources, that he's about to come out dead against the entire US-Bush foreign policy.
But he's never seen half a million dollars in his life.
Now that trickle-down theory of corruption is sadly what has caused a lot of non-neoconservatives, non-neocons, to buy into the war and the hot tub.
Stan Evans said about the hot tub 30 years ago, conservatives all know that Washington's a sewer when they get there.
The trouble is, most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub.
And with Bush, a lot of conservatives that I know have said, look, Chris, there's nothing I can do to change it, and I'm going to make the money that I can, because we're going to hit the wall eventually.
People were telling me that four and five years ago.
We're going to hit the wall eventually, but I've got kids to put through school, and I'm going to make a million a year, and I'm going to save it.
Well, Scott, we've hit the wall.
Yeah, and they lost their million dollars in the stock market anyway.
Some of them did, and some of them didn't, but the Pope told it to them straight when he said last month, you guys, it's all built on sand.
Your whole materialism is built on sand.
And these guys have sold their souls for a few pieces of silver.
It's sad to watch from a distance.
Yeah, well, so the National Review is a major part of this story of the neoconservative movement, and William F. Buckley, I guess, basically when he founded the National Review, and of course, well, I don't know exactly his background, but I think he's a real waspy kind of skull and bones type, and yet he hired all these ex-communists to staff the National Review, Sidney Hook and James Burnham and Whitaker Chambers and all these guys, and they really, the National Review itself, which has been the flagship of American conservatism since then, since the 1950s, it was created by neocons and has been maintained by them this whole time.
Well, Pat Buchanan made an excellent point when, in an introduction to Goldwater's reissue of The Conscience of a Conservative, Buchanan said, in the 60s, and National Review was founded in 55, he said, in the early days of the conservative movement, there were no opportunists, because there was no opportunity.
So going back to 55, those weren't the only people at National Review.
As Bill Buckley's son, Chris, has just written when he endorsed Obama, he said, his father once told him that his primary effort was to cleanse the conservative movement of kooks.
Now those kooks included the John Birch Society members, hundreds of thousands of people without whom Goldwater never would have gotten the 1964 nomination.
Bill Buckley hated the John Birchers because he considered them to be beyond the pale.
He wanted to keep conservatism.
Remember Russell Kirk, Gerhard Niemeyer, Eric von Kuhnelt-Ledeen.
There were other, what we would call, definitely non-neocon, non-leftist, traditional conservatives at National Review in the early days.
But what happened was that this foment of intellectual discussion, plus the grassroots groups on the ground, melded together in a coalition.
Everybody didn't have to agree on every point, but the combination made Goldwater happen.
And as Reagan readily admits, without the speech in 1964, he never would have stayed in politics, he never would have become governor of California, and of course, he never would have been president.
Well, and now the thing that they all did have to agree on was war.
I mean, that was really the big problem with the Birchers, wasn't that they were conspiracy nuts, it was that they were against the war in Vietnam.
Well, I had a historian tell me that my father, who was a founding member of the Birch Society's board, as well as the Dean of Law at Notre Dame, this historian, Perlstein, who wrote a book on Goldwater, devoting a chapter to my dad, said that my father was the first person he could find that opposed the U.S. entry into Vietnam under Eisenhower in 1955.
Wow, really?
And I find that amazing.
Now, who's your father?
Clarence Mannion.
He founded the Mannion Forum in 1954, and that was the conservative radio program, Par Excellence, on 400 stations for 25 years.
So what you have is when the conservative movement was small, there was a lot of intellectual foment because there was no power.
But Scott, once you get in power, here come the manipulators, the self-dealers, the hucksters, the opportunists.
I had a guy call me from the White House in 1981, and I was running the Latin America subcommittee staff.
He said, �Chris, here's Joe Blow.
He's applying for a job in the administration.
He says he's a conservative.
He's from Indiana.
What do you say?
� I said, �My goodness, Morton, this guy's not a conservative.
Why in the Lord's name would he call himself a conservative?
� And that's when Morton Blackwell, who was at the White House in personnel, said, �Chris, you don't understand.
Ronald Reagan is going to be president for eight years.
This man has a career.
So Ronald Reagan is the horse he's going to ride.
� Yeah, you know, there's a clip.
I guess I can play it.
I have it here somewhere.
Michael Ledeen talking.
It's from the movie World War IV by Don Craven Jr.
It's interesting.
It starts with Dr. Ron Paul basically making the case that you make, and Justin makes, that the neoconservatives came from either the hard left or at least the Democratic left and became conservatives, and it's Ledeen talking about how he's not really certain why anybody would call him a conservative.
He's still a card-carrying Democrat.
Okay, here's that.
They're not conservative.
As a matter of fact, most of those who came over to be called neoconservatives into the Republican Party came from the radical left, from the Democratic side.
The word was invented by Irving Kristol, who said a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
There are many of us, Richard Perle being the greatest example, and I think basically we still think of ourselves as scoobjacks and Democrats.
Why are people who advocate revolution called conservative?
I don't know.
Beats me.
There you go.
But you see, these intellectuals, let me tell you about Central America in the 80s.
These communist guerrillas, when they were captured or shot, their knapsacks were full of 50 pounds of communist tracks, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, that they would carry up and down the Salvadoran and Honduran mountains with guns and everything else, because all they did at night was argue ideology.
These people take ideas seriously.
That's for sure, because ideas are the avenue to power.
You'll notice the neocons didn't come into the Republican Party until Reagan was ascendant and they saw opportunity.
They are opportunists.
Right.
Well, and what they did partially was get themselves installed, not in charge of Middle East policy, but in charge of South America policy, where they supported death squads that went around butchering people in order to pretend that those communists had done it.
Well, that is, my Mexican-Spanish teacher used to say, is flower of another sack.
But one very famous neocon, Elliott Abrams, cut his teeth on Central America and was involved in Iran-Contra because the guy didn't understand Central America at all, but he believed in the projection of American power.
Now, when he was indicted and convicted of lying during the Iran-Contra issue, who was his right-hand man but Robert Kagan?
Oh, really?
Well, let's talk about Robert Kagan.
I think, you know, for most people out there, they're probably not that familiar with him.
Maybe, I don't know, if they read the Post, he writes for the Post, and I know that he's the co-author of the 1996 article with William Crystal, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, where they talked about the doctrine of benevolent global hegemony and all that.
Can you tell us about the Kagan?
There's a whole family of them, right?
Yes, he and his brother.
I must confess that I've got a lot of purgatory to work off, Scott, but I am not going to immerse myself in the works of the Kagan family.
Let's leave it at that.
They advocate the projection of American power, but notice, to them, ideas are very important.
Neo-Reaganite.
They borrow Reagan.
Why?
He is the horse they're going to ride, even though he's dead.
They're going to do the same thing that the candidates did during the primaries.
I'm more like Reagan.
No, I'm more like Reagan.
I'm here to tell you, I know a lot of people who were Reagan officials.
I'm working with one of them on a book about the period, and Reagan would not, in their opinion, have gone into Iraq.
So these people are going to empty out the Ronald Reagan content and put back in what they feel like putting there.
And they're going to use him as a symbol to browbeat Americans who are working so hard to pay their taxes and their mortgages that they can't do the research that would expose these people as fraud.
And as you've written in such a hilarious way most of the time in your blog entries lately at LewRockwell.com about the aftermath of their annihilation in the election the other day, and even in the run-up to it, that these men, really, at the Weekly Standard, at the National Review, and the editorial pages at the Washington Post and the New York Times where these men write, they're really pretending that there just never was a war in Iraq.
That whatever the problem is, it's because there were a couple of Black Panthers standing out in front of some voting booth somewhere, not because they killed a million people in a war based on lies.
That would require self-criticism.
Now when Mao set up, had the Cultural Revolution, he set up prison camps.
And the first thing that you do in a prison camp is go to self-criticism session.
The next thing you do is get shot.
Well, maybe we should do that to the neocons?
No, Scott, but listen, they haven't lost.
They are not in the prison camp.
They're still in charge.
No, it's their enemies who have to be self-critique, have to do self-critique.
They're never going to admit mistakes.
They only have to do that if they're being tortured.
This is their way.
This is, as long as you're not in jail in Washington, you're ethical.
Well, if you're at a foundation, if you're in a nonprofit, a think tank, as long as you're getting funded, you're fine.
And these guys have plenty of fun.
You know, it's funny, the way you describe them, it almost sounds like not an ideology as much as, well, sort of like they're psychopaths or something.
No, it's just petty self-indulgence.
You know, I don't believe in conspiracy theories along the depth and breadth of things.
Sure, there are some conspirators around, Satan foremost among them, and Marxism, Leninism is a handbook for conspirators, to be sure.
But most people are just, you know why most Russians joined the KGB?
They got health care.
Right down the street from the Lubyanka is a world-class hospital.
No one else in Russia got that.
In the middle of Pyongyang is a world-class hospital.
But if you're a peasant, you get a room with no lights and no anesthesia.
These people wanted lights and anesthesia.
And they got to travel, and they got education.
That's why they joined the KGB.
That's why Russia has always had such wonderful athletes and musicians, because those are two areas that a Russian could go into under the Soviet Union and not be bothered.
So it's simply just opportunism, that this is, if you want to get by in life, what you do is you go get a contract or make a friendship with somebody at Lockheed, and get some money, form a little think tank, push for a war, invest in war technologies, and that way you can pay your mortgage and take care of your kids, just another day at the office.
And that mentality is open to manipulation by the few powerful, successful self-seekers who are willing to use that self-indulgent inclination of the peon to motivate and accelerate their own power play.
Well, now, see, that's kind of part of this, isn't it, that from, I'm only guessing, but from the point of view of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, I mean, the neocons, they're the help, right?
Ha!
Well...
I mean, who's exploiting who, I guess, is kind of what I'm getting at.
When you make the deal with Mephistopheles, when Satan offers you great success in this world, who wins?
Did Faust win because he made the bargain with Mephistopheles?
Well, eventually, the bell tolls for thee!
All right, everybody, that's Christopher Mannion.
You can find his archives at LewRockwell.com.
You can also often find him on the blog there.
He is the co-founder of the American Foreign Policy Council.
Their website is AFPC.org, professor of politics, political theory, and international relations, formerly at Boston University, Catholic University, University of Dallas, and he's a contributing editor to The Wanderer, America's oldest national Catholic weekly.
Thank you very much for your time today on the show, sir.
Scott, I really appreciate your invitation.
Thank you.
All right, folks, it's Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back.