For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Daniel Ellsberg back to the show.
He is the heroic Rand Corporation Department of Defense whistleblower who stole and leaked at the risk of the rest of his life.
The Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon's persecution of Dan Ellsberg is ultimately what led to his downfall and him being the first president forced to resign in disgrace.
Dan Ellsberg's website is danellsberg.net, and his book is called Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
And I believe you can often find what he writes at truthdig.com.
Happy New Year, Dan.
Welcome back to the show.
Happy New Year.
Very good to be here to start the new year this way with you, Scott.
One little correction there.
My website is not danellsberg.net.
It's ellsberg.net.
Oh, that's right.
It is just ellsberg.net.
I wonder, it sort of sounded wrong coming out of my mouth there, and I wasn't sure why, but there you go.
Close, close.
Sorry about that.
All right, so there we go.
In fact, you know what, as long as we're on that specific topic, what happened to Chapter 1?
I always want to link to Chapter 1 of Secrets by Dan Ellsberg where you tell the story of how it was your first day on the job as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Killing People, and you got all the information about the Gulf of Tonkin and the big bogus attack that never happened that justified Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War.
But it's not on ellsberg.net anymore that I can find.
Okay, I thought I had it on.
I'll check again.
I put that on actually the month that the book came out into the stores.
I had the first chapter on the web because I'd asked my publisher if I could put several chapters on, and they said they limited me to one.
The reason I wanted it on right then was that we were about to reproduce that experience, which we did proceed to do by Congress passing what amounted to a new Tonkin Gulf Resolution giving the President a blank check to go to war in Iraq, and I had hoped by warning people of the lies that had surrounded the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution that Senators might be warned off of doing that again.
As a matter of fact, the two Senators who had still been in the Senate at that time, 2002, who had been in the Senate to vote on the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Ted Kennedy, and each of them were spending their time that month warning in almost pleading terms, I believe Byrd actually put it, I beg you, I beg you not to make the same mistake we did, not to do something that you'll regret for the rest of your life as I have.
Well, and that was the greatest speech Byrd ever gave in all his generations in the Imperial Senate, too.
Yeah.
It really was a great speech.
The warning didn't work, and we went ahead and gave the President a blank check to go ahead to protect us from terrorist attacks by attacking a country that had nothing to do, literally nothing to do with 9-11, imposed no threat whatever to the United States at that time, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
And with the effect, by all CI estimates since then, of having increased the threat to the United States of terrorist attacks by convincing a billion and a half Muslims around the world that the U.S. is on a crusade against Islam.
A somewhat misleading inference.
It's not that U.S. leaders have anything against Islam per se.
It's just that Muslims tend to live on top of oil that we want to control.
So they're in our way if they're not totally cooperative.
So to make an increasing number of people in the world, perhaps at the very peak of that right now, Pakistan being attacked by Obama's drones this year, hate us, not simply not be aligned with us or recognize that they're a different state, but actually hate that the United States is very unsafe in this world, especially in a country that is balanced between different factions in Pakistan.
Well Dan, you know this is...
An Islamic fundamentalist.
This is such an important thing and it's one of those where the truth is one thing and it's actually perfectly and completely obvious to anyone who cares to think about it for a moment that all this terrorism, it is as Michael Sawyer said, it's an Islamist insurgency.
But you can't have an insurgency against nothing.
You have to have overriding power first to insurge against.
And that would be the U.S. empire.
And I just wonder how long can the war party go on?
How long can the government go on pretending that we're not the ones who started this?
I mean it seems to me, and I guess on a good day, I was cheating last night and smoked a couple cigarettes so I was feeling pretty good I guess, and I was thinking, you know, when Ron Paul went on TV the other day and said, come on, they're terrorists because we're occupiers, it was pretty clear that the only reason Ben Stein said, oh yeah, well you're an anti-Semite, is because he had no other argument.
It is so obviously true that they are terrorists because we're occupiers.
Are we making any progress in at least getting past the they hate us because we're angels and they're devils thing?
Can we even begin to really have a real conversation about this bogus terror war?
You know, in the general public.
And include the TV personalities in on it with us.
Well there's no sign of it, I have to say.
On your program, on antiwar.com, on the alternate media here, there is quite adequate understanding of that.
In a way, it was hardly true in the time of Vietnam.
We didn't have the internet, we didn't have the alternative sources here.
But on the mainstream media, no, there is no change there.
There's still spokespeople for the government handouts, essentially, and the government position is that we're there as friends, helpers, aiders, developers, and it's just impossible for us to perceive ourselves as foreigners who are in somebody else's country who are trying to determine who shall govern them and who shall live and who shall die in that country as foreigners.
Well, you know, I think an important part of this, you know, detail-wise, is that there's no such thing as Saudi Arabia to people who live on the Arabian Peninsula, really, except the princes themselves.
I mean, this is a construction of the British Empire.
And, you know, for example, if you read anything that bin Laden wrote in his old fatwas of 96 and 98 in the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, it's the land of the two holy places.
It's the Arabian Peninsula.
And so, you know, George Bush actually gave in to bin Laden, I think correctly, and got, if not all, a great proportion of the troops out of Saudi Arabia.
But he just moved them all to Qatar and Bahrain and whatever, and into Iraq.
And so that's not good enough.
These borders are a distinction without a difference to the people who are mad at us.
And, you know, Robert A. Pape, I'll throw in one more thing here and let you comment on it.
Robert A. Pape, in his book Dying to Win, The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, he brought up a poll that was done in Saudi Arabia, a credible survey, where 91%, of course it was only the men who were asked, but still, 91% of them said that they wanted American combat forces off of the Arabian Peninsula entirely, immediately.
And so it doesn't matter whether our puppet King Abdullah feels the same way as them.
It would be like if the Iranians had, you know, puppet King Schwarzenegger of California or puppet King Rick Perry of Texas.
It doesn't mean that the people of California or Texas have invited them to be our guests or that we're willing to tolerate their occupation of our land.
Look, if you don't mind, though, I'd like to focus on the new war.
You got us started here on the war that got started in Iraq.
Well, I mean, Yemen's right there on the Arabian Peninsula.
That's where we're going.
Yeah, let's talk about Afghanistan here right now.
I'm very, very pessimistic, I have to say.
And I won't say fatalistic because I'm talking to people here who have a chance.
They have a chance to change this process as American citizens.
And it's a small chance, as a matter of fact, and the obstacles are very great.
The likelihood of success is not high, but the stakes are very high.
That means we have a responsibility to use the freedoms we do have to change Congress here, to change Congress's pressure and to countervail the imperial interests, which work on Congress at the same time as we are speaking to them, but the imperial interests that work through the Pentagon and the CIA and the other representatives of oil companies or investment, foreign investment, Wall Street and so forth that still prevail.
The fact is, I think, though, that the odds are that, let's say, putting aside our overwhelming mobilization and efforts to change this, if that doesn't happen or if it's not effective, the future we have to look forward to in the next ten years is a future of expanding war in Afghanistan.
And it will not end at the end of this next decade unless there's a real change in the process here.
There's no reason, I think, that our involvement, that our war against Afghanistan, really, will not continue decades to maintain bases there in that region critical to the oil of the world and to try to dominate, to try to do what the Soviets tried to do.
And I think with absolutely no, in no respect, any reason to believe we will be more successful than the Soviets.
Ultimately, they will kill fewer people.
They killed a million people in their ten years there.
Will we kill less?
That will depend on us who are listening to this to a large extent.
But leave it to the Pentagon, and it can be easily another million.
And I emphasize that rather than what we hear about all the time, the Americans will die.
Yes, Americans will die.
Their lives will be wasted in terms of American real interests and democratic values and our Constitution.
They will have died in vain.
I say that in terms, in bitter terms.
But, and that will be a significant loss, but that is not the only way in which the cost of this effort should be measured.
Afghans will die ten to one in terms of the people we designate as enemies and a hundred to one in terms of civilians will die.
Well, in the headlines in just the last couple of days, bear that out.
Civilians dying all over the place.
Now, the Karzai government posturing, saying, turn over the murderers to us for prosecution.
Yeah, that will be the day.
Well, you know, for ten years now, in Afghanistan in particular, we've been hearing reports of civilians being killed in airstrikes.
And the American command always says, well, it's a very remote area, we can't get in there to check.
Our estimates that only Taliban were killed are based, of course, on the images they get from the drones and interpreted 3,000 miles away.
Karzai, our man in Kabul, will say, has said over and over again, as he's saying now, by the way, these are civilians, they're school children, they're unarmed people, old men, women, children, and so forth.
We've been saying right along, we don't know, we're investigating, we'll let it go.
Well, if those 30,000 men that we're putting in there now can do one thing, they could investigate what we're doing from the air and who we're killing.
We shouldn't be hearing all the time, we're investigating, we'll let you know.
The American people deserve to know how many civilians are being killed in our name day by day.
Well, now, as far as kind of, well, and you're right too, I mean, there's a million dead Iraqis, and there's no reason to believe that if they can continue this war in Central Asia for decades, like they say they want to do, that the casualty numbers will eventually, you know, maybe sooner than later get that high.
But, you know, you talked about, well, if the Pentagon gets their way, and this is something where, you know, I'm sort of playing dumb, but kind of not really, maybe I am dumb.
You know, it seems like Pepe Escobar says, you know, it's all about the pipeline politics, right?
Eric Margulies, I think, signs on to a bit of that.
But different people have different ideas.
Some people say, well, what they really want is a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Karachi, to the port of Karachi there.
And others say, no, they're trying to prevent.
They're just stirring up all the violence because they want to just keep the whole region destabilized so that the Chinese can't build a pipeline from Iran.
Or then others say, well, it's all just about, you know, the larger kind of project for a new American century, arc of crisis.
We just have to keep our military presence, our footprint there as an eventual check on Russia and China.
And their power in Eurasia.
And this and that.
But, you know, when I talk to my friend Gareth Porter, who's my favorite expert guest on this show.
I interview him all the time.
I'm sure you know him and read his work often.
And he says, Horton, stop trying to find a reasonable explanation for this.
There's not one.
You know, you're basically speculating, trying to find, you know, the math that fits.
But this is basically what's happening here.
The Pentagon has a strategy that says, if they resist us, kill them.
And that's about it.
And there's really all the grand strategy stuff in the world, the oil politics, the even the airplane sales, the bullet sales and all those things that all that really is nothing.
It really all just comes down to the will of the generals to continue doing what they're doing, to continue occupying the bases they occupy, to get more, to increase their own power and influence as generals, and to put more people on the ground killing people just because that's what they do.
What do you think about that, Daniel Ellsberg?
Well, Gareth Porter is a close friend of mine, and we talk together a lot and analyze his stuff.
I've had a running disagreement with him on one subject.
I do think that in Iraq in particular, he, with his emphasis on the military motive, just for power, extension of power and keeping at war, the motive for permanent war in effect in the army, underrates the role of oil.
He very specifically does play down the role of oil in Iraq in particular, and I think he was, I believe he's misled on that point.
In Afghanistan, it's true there are oil comes in, not only bases in the area, but the pipeline issue.
But there, he has a stronger point.
The prospects are so bad for a total, the word quagmire is not just a cliche, it's a reasonable description of a stalemate, but an escalating stalemate, a bloody stalemate.
The prospects of that are so great that the economic motives, whatever they are, do seem to pale by any means.
And even if they were much larger, as they were in Iraq, by the way, the prize of Iraqi oil is a very, very large prize.
That doesn't justify our aggressive war, our crime against the peace.
It doesn't justify the people we kill and the tides of refugees that we generate by our bombing.
The same is true in Afghanistan.
And that seems so obvious that it raises the question of who are the people who are determining the policy?
What are their motives?
I'd have to say that there probably will, for a very long time, remain a kind of mystery about some of these motives, as there is still about Johnson in Vietnam.
Johnson, unknown to the public, was warned by some of his strongest Cold War supporters, people who had almost invented the Cold War, like Clark Clifford, who advised Harry Truman on the Cold War, or early policies, or Hubert Humphrey, his vice president, who had tried to ban the Communist Party earlier, and people, and Fulbright, Richard Russell in the Senate, who couldn't be stronger as anti-communists or as Cold Warriors.
Nevertheless, we're telling Johnson, not this place.
Do not plant the flag here.
We will not do any better than the French in that they were exactly right.
We will lose.
Actually, Clifford made an amazingly prescient prediction in July of 685, the very month I was working for him, and the very month that Johnson made the decision for an open-ended war in Vietnam, the same kind of decision, I believe, that Obama has just made.
And Johnson was hearing from Clifford, Mr. President, I see nothing ahead but catastrophe for my country.
Catastrophe is a word you just don't see in bureaucratic language.
Well, you know, the clip of Johnson that I'm thinking of when you're talking about that is the one, I don't know who he's talking to, but there's a clip of Johnson where he says, look, I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war, okay?
That's it.
So send another 100,000.
Well, what Clifford and Humphrey and the head of INR, State Department of Intelligence, Tom Hughes, and Russell, Johnson's mentor in the Senate, and the head of the Armed Services Committee, were all telling him, if you go into Vietnam, you are going to be the president who loses a war.
You are going to lose.
We will lose.
We will not succeed.
And, you know, amazingly enough, in the tapes, it turns out later, Johnson isn't really disagreeing with that.
He's saying to Russell, if I were them, I wouldn't give up.
I don't think they'll ever give up.
The bombing won't do it.
We won't do it.
And yet he went ahead.
In the face of Clifford's, Clark Clifford's prediction to him, he said, five years, 500,000 men, that's exactly what we did put in in three years, he said 50,000 dead, an amazing prediction.
We lost 58,000 dead before we got out.
He said, that is not for us.
It's catastrophe.
Don't do it.
But he was hearing this now from people whose advice he could not write down or ignore, and yet went ahead.
So there remains a kind of mysterious aspect to that.
What you can conclude is, don't trust a president to make wise, prudent decisions, or legal, or moral, or just rightful decisions for our own interests, for our own security, by himself in secret on these things.
They're capable of making terrible errors, and getting them obeyed, and having the people around them keep their mouths shut, as did Clifford and Humphrey, did not tell the public what they believed, what they foresaw, they did not give them the estimates that McNamara could have given later, of just how badly mired we were in this.
I have no doubt that there are people in the administration right now, who see what we're heading into in Afghanistan as catastrophic, in the region, in its effects on Pakistan.
Precisely the opposite of the effects they're talking about.
They're saying they want to stabilize Pakistan.
By every indication, this war will serve to destabilize Pakistan, and to extend the war into Pakistan with the risks of Pakistan's nuclear weapons coming into the exclusive power of Taliban-like...
Yeah, isn't that funny?
The excuse for why we need to intervene is the number one cause of why we might need to intervene, right?
It's just like Vietnam, right?
You bomb Cambodia until the government falls, then the Khmer Rouge takes over.
Well, that's what we're doing to Pakistan, seemingly, is we're trying to unravel, it looks like, or at least where the people running the policy don't seem to mind that the actual danger of Pakistan, those nukes falling into the hands of crazies, is being made more likely every time they use a robot to murder some lady.
I agree with you, and it does seem hard to believe.
You stand back at that and you say they're talking about stabilizing Pakistan while they are inciting an unprecedented hatred of this country.
I wonder if there's ever been a country that hated the United States the way that the people of Pakistan are reported to do right now.
While they're under, in those areas, continuous attack, humiliating in violations of their sovereignty, their own government presumably lying to them when they say they're not cooperating, but that is precisely what will destabilize a government that is in fragile control of its nuclear weapons right now.
So we ask, could it be that when they say they want to protect us from Pakistan's nuclear weapons, they want to stabilize Pakistan, could it be that they're really doing things that have the effect of destabilizing Pakistan, the opposite of what they say?
All you have to do is look back at the plans I described earlier.
Well, do you think that it is designed?
I mean, I think you sort of misspoke and corrected yourself there, but maybe that is the purpose of it, is to destabilize the whole thing for the long term.
You know, that isn't to be ruled out, but I'll give you an analogy.
What I was about to say was that let's just think back to 2002 and 2003 when we were told we were going to protect ourselves from terrorists in the world by attacking Iraq.
It was exactly the opposite.
Now, there's no question, and the CIA has estimated this, that Osama bin Laden not only was delighted at our attack on Iraq and Afghanistan, but had intended that from the late 90s and the early years of the century, that his desire was to draw us in to an attack on Muslim lands that would recruit people worldwide for al-Qaeda, which it has done.
So it definitely played into his hands.
He was very happy about that.
And by the same, you could almost say, well, then does that mean that Bush was in the pay of Osama?
I think not.
It sure does seem like it sometimes, doesn't it?
I know there are people in this audience, friends of mine too, who will entertain that hypothesis.
Well, they'll say it's the other way around.
Osama works for Bush all along.
Either way, together, there's no question there was a synergy there.
Listen, looking back at Westmoreland's search and destroy methods of attrition, which brought American troops into the jungle to be ambushed, essentially at the will of the North Vietnamese and of the NLF.
And just to attrit US troops, granted we were killing 10 to 1 in the jungles there for everyone we lost, but they were more easily able to replace the 10 they lost than we were the 1 in terms of political support.
Ours were dying thousands of miles away from their homes.
Theirs essentially were at homes.
And the brothers and cousins and sisters of the people who were killed filled those ranks, and not so quickly back here.
So looking at that strategy, you could have inferred that Westmoreland was actually working for Hanoi.
But I didn't, and I don't.
I think that's the way it was.
It's just that generals and presidents are capable of doing what is just the worst thing for their country.
And in some cases, that will correspond to what's best for an adversary.
Well, and you know, stop me and correct me if there's a flaw in my theory here, but I guess I sort of, you know, for honesty's sake, I have to sort of give Petraeus credit here in that, I mean mostly his taking power coincided with the end of the civil war there.
But the previous generals running the war in Iraq, Abizaid and Casey and Sanchez and all these guys, I forget who all was the general and who all was the head of CENTCOM at the various times, but that's what they did.
Seek and destroy.
Seek and destroy.
Phoenix mission type stuff.
Phoenix operation stuff against the people of Iraq.
And a million people died in the civil war that they touched off with that.
You know, I remember talking with Darge Mail about, you know, a big part of the civil war, if you went back and traced the cause and effect back, it was the second assault on Fallujah after the re-election of George Bush in November of 2004 that caused so many Sunni refugees to have to flee and go try to stay with relatives in Baghdad, which of course forced a bunch of Shiites out of their houses in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods.
So then they became refugees and a bunch of Sunnis got forced out of predominantly Shiite neighborhoods where they were going to stay with their relatives.
And this is really the, and of course using the El Salvador option they called it, hiring the Shiite death squads to hunt down the leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
This whole search and destroy thing is what tore Iraq apart.
I mean, you know, overthrowing the Baathists and whatever is going to lead to a bunch of chaos no matter what.
But they couldn't wage that war more wrong.
I mean, if Petraeus deserves any credit at all, it's just calling the troops back to their bases, closing down a lot of the checkpoints, and getting them off the streets.
Right?
Well, to say that, yes.
That's the way that it should work.
And that's to say that there was less violence, as you say, when American troops withdrew from the street-by-street combat.
Geraldi made the same point when we were talking about suicide terrorism the other day.
How in Lebanon, when the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon, all Hezbollah suicide bombings stopped.
There hadn't been one since they left.
And how when they withdrew from a lot of their further occupation in the West Bank, that's what landed the last Intifada there.
They finally said, okay, here.
And they withdrew to their bases and the suicide bombings stopped.
Well, you mentioned Robert Pape earlier, who has made, I think, the single really comprehensive study of suicide bombing in the last generation.
It's studying virtually every case.
And in looking at the pattern, he found an almost perfect correlation in the following way.
He said that suicide bombing occurs when there is an issue of foreign occupation, and second, when that foreign occupation is associated with a religious difference, when there's a religious element in that.
And, of course, we fit both of those categories when entering into Afghanistan right now.
But even with, aside from us, imperial policies always, for millennia, going back to the Romans and the British and the Soviets and everyone else, have exploited rivalries between ethnic groups.
The notion of divide and conquer is an imperial notion of thousands of years old and always tried and true.
We hear a lot about counterinsurgency now and pacification, a subject, by the way, which I was 100% involved in in Vietnam.
That was my area in Vietnam for two years, evaluating pacification and actually writing doctrine for counterinsurgency or pacification in Vietnam.
And the idea, by the way, that if we'd done it right there, we would have won, which I think is the basis for a lot of what's going on in Afghanistan right now, is, I believe, a simply false lesson.
It is not the case that we had any chance of either applying it right or if it's working.
If we apply it right, it's not going to work now in Afghanistan.
But I wanted to make a point that I think is very unfamiliar.
The essence of that is to get local people, native people, as the imperial power calls them, the natives, indigenous people, locals, to fight for the imperial power against the independence of their country.
That generally turns out to be possible to one degree or another, especially by exploiting ethnic splits of various kinds.
In Vietnam, we relied on Catholics, for example, who were a minority in that Buddhist country and animist country to work for the imperial power.
The French did that, and we relied on them, too.
But the effect of that is that if you get enough people to work for you, the imperial power, the foreigners, you have a fighting force there that is fighting against other groups or other ethnic groups, the insurgents, the resistance, which may be the majority, in their own country.
And what you get then is a civil war.
What starts as a war of invasion, of foreign occupation, is converted if the occupier is successful.
If we get in Afghanistan, what we're trying to do, we generate a civil war of people who work for us, the foreigners, fighting against and dying and killing against countrymen who are fighting for independence of their country against the foreigners.
So a civil war is not something you intervene into.
It's something you generate to a large extent in order to serve your own imperial purposes.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with the heroic whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the guy that stole the Pentagon Papers and almost got life in prison for it.
And now, this is such an important point, I want to dwell here for a minute.
You're telling me, Dan, that you were the General Sanchez of Vietnam.
You were writing up this search and destroy kind of program that didn't work?
Is that what you're telling me?
No, no, no.
Certainly I was not a General Sanchez, and I was not a General Westmoreland.
What I was was a civilian working for the State Department.
Well, I know that.
You know what I mean.
I was a Marine of a low level.
Well, I wasn't that low level.
I was a FSR-1, as a matter of fact, which is the highest civil service level.
So as a civilian, it was reasonably high.
But I was working in the embassy, writing.
They wanted concepts for what they called revolutionary development, which was a term that Lodge and others seized on.
It sounded somehow better than pacification, which is French.
These are French concepts, which we're hearing right now, and counterinsurgency from French colonial warfare in Algeria, Morocco, and Indochina, going back to the 19th century.
Right, because the European empires are the model that America follows.
The idea was, yes, that the locals who were resisting, who were always called terrorists and gangsters by the occupying power, the idea is to find ways to confront them with people who will work for the empire, people who work for the empire for various reasons.
In Vietnam, for instance, some of those people had sentimental feelings toward the emperor who allied himself with the French at that point, Imperial Fort Baudoy.
And Catholics, as they say, a lot of whom had converted to Catholicism because the French had influenced that.
The way to get ahead in the army was to be Catholic, and that's how Nguyen Thieu, for example, converted to Catholicism.
On that basis, the president we relied on toward the end.
So what I was doing then was, in particular, my job was as an observer, really, to go through, I went through 38 of the 43 provinces looking at how we were doing and the kinds of things that McChrystal is laying out as his tasks right now.
When I read McChrystal's report of what had to be done and what the obstacles were and so forth, it had a very familiar ring to me.
I thought, well, gee, I could have written that 30 years ago.
In fact, I realized I had written it.
Well, so Dan, help me understand.
I'm a total novice at this stuff.
I'm taking off, but I'm doing exactly the same report.
So what you're telling me, then, is basically the narrative, the very thin narrative, obviously, is that in the Vietnam War, they had this terrible policy of search and destroy, like you said, just sending troops out to be ambushed and getting nothing done except create more enemies.
As you say, the alternative, in theory, was a counterinsurgency strategy.
But would that have worked?
He wasn't really trying to know.
Right.
I mean, that's what I'm getting at, is that you're telling me what you developed was what they're now calling their advanced clear hold and build kind of thing.
That's what I was working on and advocating.
I came to conclude while in Vietnam that it was not going to be implemented in the way it was imagined to start with.
And second, look, with what?
With American troops who don't speak the language, who don't know the religion, don't know the culture.
But above all, and it wasn't going to work even best implemented, and the reason is this, the theory of it is to acquire, as they said, the hearts and minds, the allegiance of the people there for government representatives of a government essentially selected by us, by the foreigners, as in Afghanistan right now, so that they will give their loyalty to a foreign controlled and selected government working in the interest of foreigners.
And with this loyalty that they give them, they will then be able, they will be willing to give information on the guerrillas who will no longer be able to hide themselves in the population or in the jungles or in the mountains.
They'll be able to find them and destroy them.
And the reason that that is not going to happen is very simply this, that the majority of the population may or may not see those activists, those militants, the rebels, the independence fighters, as people they really would choose to run their country if they had a free choice, which they've never had, perhaps never will have.
They're not their chosen representatives necessarily, but they are recognized as leaders in the fight to expel foreigners from their country.
And as such, the population is not going to inform on them to the foreigners.
They're not going to give us, the Americans, the information necessary to find, torture, kill.
Now let me stop you there for a second, because I don't know if this really makes a difference or not, help me out, but it seems like if you're going to be an empire, you have to support the minority so that they need you.
This is why the Belgians propped up the Tutsis over the Hutus, because there were fewer of them.
And so they would rely on the foreigners to prop them up in power.
And this is what we're doing, this is what we did not do, what our empire did not do in Iraq.
They overthrew the minority that of course had been for many years dependent on the West to prop them up, and installed the majority, which has now told us, thanks, now get the hell out of our country, and so we're leaving.
But it looks like in Afghanistan what they're doing is they're installing the Tajiks and the Hazaras and the Uzbeks, at least as Gareth Porter and Patrick Coburn and others have reported, the army is, the leadership of the so-called Afghan army is almost exclusively Tajik now, and becoming more and more that way, and maybe that's a great way to do it, right?
Is to prop up the minority, that way they need us, the Northern Alliance basically, in a perpetual low-scale, low-level war against the Taliban that will never end either way.
You know, the Taliban will never be able to overthrow them as long as they have our backing, but we'll never be able to defeat the Taliban either.
That sounds kind of perfect if you're the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy or something, right?
Yes, if what you want is permanent war, and that may be what some elements in our army actually want to keep busy, that permanent war.
Apparently the doctrine of counterinsurgency has taken over the army, and thus opposed the people who emphasize the tanks, the artillery, the air power, the heavy army, that showed itself, its abilities, its very good abilities when it came to Blitzkrieg in the first part of the Iraq war.
But what has come to power apparently in the army are people who say, no, no, the future is in putting down rebellion in the lands we occupy generally, and it's counterinsurgency.
And for that purpose, they really do, to my amazement, seem willing to contemplate a future of essentially permanent war.
And when they talk about, you know, the Chief of Staff of the army in Britain, when he came into office earlier this year, actually last year, made an offhand comment that 40 or 50 years of war might lie ahead.
Well, that burst of candor, you know, got him immediately reproved from Whitehall.
He had to back off a bit.
Yeah, you're not supposed to tell the proles that.
40, 50 years, 100 years perhaps.
Well, yeah, that's against the principles of Ingsoc to let the people know that their great grandson is going to die killing posh toons.
You know, that's a secret, I think.
Well, back to Vietnam for a second here, because I'm trying to get my head wrapped around, you know, real reality as versus the shape of letters on pages.
You know what I mean?
There's the truth and then there's the truth.
And I saw this thing last two or three weeks ago, Dan, called American Holocaust.
It's a movie, I guess it's narrated by one of them famous Hollywood guys or something.
And, yeah, boy, oh, boy, it really describes an American Holocaust.
It describes war crime on top of war crime in Vietnam where, you know, I've known this my whole life.
I was born right around right after the Vietnam War ended, basically a year after the war finally was over or whatever.
So I've kind of grown up my whole life with these stories.
And I guess maybe now that I'm approaching my mid 30s or whatever, I just have a little bit of a different perspective.
And I saw this movie that put, you know, a lot of information I'd already heard kind of in a new context for me.
And, well, the reality of it was absolutely sickening, if indeed that was the reality of it.
Throwing people out of helicopters for fun, spraying them with every kind of chemical weapon and every kind of explosive napalm and cluster bombs and white phosphorus that they could possibly use.
Carpet bombing North Vietnam basically off the face of the earth.
Killing, you know, somewhere between three and five million Vietnamese.
How's that for missing in action?
A couple of million that we don't even know because everybody who knew them is dead, too.
So there's nobody even to say that they're dead.
I mean, is that was that really what happened in Vietnam?
Is that really what this country did to that one, Dan?
Well, you're asking that rhetorically because the simple.
Well, I mean, maybe it was a bunch of commies who put together this propaganda and they really portray it falsely.
I don't know.
That was Robert McNamara who gave the estimate in 1995 in his book that three to four million Vietnamese had been killed.
That was, by the way, something that the Defense Department very assiduously failed or refused to collect during the time of claims that they did.
How many are we killing with all the body count supposedly enemy Viet Cong, although they said any dead Vietnamese is Viet Cong for the purpose of the body count of a small girl.
But they refused really ever to estimate.
I remember asking at one point Henry Kissinger because it was the last time that I actually saw him at a conference before the Pentagon Papers came out and at MIT and asking him, what's your best estimate of the number of people that actually first I said Vietnamese that we will kill in the next 12 months?
The assumption you have estimates of how much gasoline you need, how much what the effects will be on this and that and what the cost will be.
How many people will die?
And he was very taken aback.
And he said, you're accusing us of racism.
And I said Vietnamese.
I said, no, let me change.
I'm sorry, Dan.
That's a great Kissinger impression, but it's a little thick of an accent.
What was that in English?
He says, you're accusing us of racism.
No, no, no.
It's just, you know, how many people, how many, how many humans will die?
That's racist to say that Vietnamese are human.
Come on, Dan.
Get with the program.
I'm suggesting I'm mentioning this to say it's a good question to ask any of the military or of Obama at a press conference right now.
What's the best estimate you've received of the number of people who will die in Afghanistan in the next 12 years, 12 months or 12 years, but that would be better.
But let's say 12 months from our policy.
What's the estimate?
They'll certainly have estimates of how many troops we're putting over, what our casualties will be, how many people will be killed.
And actually he backtracked on that 10 ways as well.
What's your alternative?
And I said, I'm not talking options here and alternatives.
I know all about that.
I'm just saying, what's the effect of your policy?
And, of course, I asked that knowing, and I even checked up on it before answering it.
They had never asked that question.
They don't have an estimate.
They don't make an estimate of that.
And they may or may not have a secret calculation of how many they've already killed.
They may claim they haven't because they don't want it to leak.
But they may actually have done that.
And they certainly haven't let us know in Iraq.
We've seen estimates.
The highest estimate that Bush ever gave was 40,000, which was impressive because that is 10 times 9-11.
And it's larger than they'd admitted up until now.
It was probably an underestimate by at least an order of magnitude, a factor of 10, at the very least at that time.
That would be about 400,000.
But the better estimates really were that even at that time that there was something like a million who had been killed.
And that was back in 2006.
So since then, very much more than that.
I'm saying, in other words, that the estimates you do get are underestimates by 10 to 100 times.
And that is what really has to be taken into account when we look at where we're going and challenged.
Obama, really, as we come here to the start of a new year and a new decade, I think it's time, in my own mind, to have come to a kind of bottom-line appraisal of him, which is very dark, actually, in my opinion.
There's really two views when you look at his behavior in many spheres.
And one is that he's very weak, that he's a cowardly leader, weak, that he avoids conflict, conflict-aversive, and that the last person to talk to him, which seems always to be the right wing or the military, seems to bend in their direction and he can't confront anybody.
That may be true.
Maybe that's the answer.
I'm inclined more and more to think that he has been a con man all this time.
And that the notion that he's somehow on our side, progressive or even liberal in any real sense, is very misleading.
And that when the Wall Street people found him and backed him in the very beginning, Wall Street money, I think, was what got him started before the Internet chimed in.
And then, in the end, Wall Street and insurance companies, military, industrial complex, oil, all kicked in much more than the Internet people altogether.
And I think it's not so much that he's doing their bidding, but they knew who he was.
Sure.
I mean, come on.
We're talking about a guy who won the nomination of one of the two major parties in America to be the president, which means that he's a serial killer.
They wouldn't give him the job if he wasn't willing to use robots to bomb women and children off the face of the earth.
He wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the power.
I mean, let's go back to 2007 real quick.
There was Gravel and there was Kucinich in the Democratic Party who were running for president and were opposed to war.
And then there was Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, all of whom were warmongering, lunatic, imperialists, and made it absolutely clear.
I don't think anyone could mistake Barack Obama for Dennis Kucinich on foreign policy, even a year and a half before he was elected.
That's right.
His largest private contributor in the campaign was Goldman Sachs.
And Goldman Sachs has gotten very good service from him, basically.
And I think the point is they chose him, basically, because they saw somebody who would conform to a philosophy that what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for the country.
Goldman Sachs is, in a way, the new symbol, the new economy, whereas 50 years ago, when was it, 1950, that's a long time ago, 60 years ago, when the head of GM, Charlie Wilson, made the mistake of Secretary of Defense saying, what's good for GM is good for the country.
Well, that was GM. That was the old industrial model.
And now it's what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for the country.
And they're very sincere about that, no doubt.
But there is something of a conflict of interest when you're getting these hundred million dollar bonuses.
It's easy to understand, gee, this is very good for the country.
I think you could probably buy my morality into being quiet for a little while for that much of a bonus.
Well, all right.
So let me ask you about the most important subject on the planet Earth, and that is the maintenance by the American, British, Russian, Chinese, Pakistani, Indian and Israeli governments of stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
You've been doing this series for Truthdig, which I guess started with your Hiroshima and Nagasaki article last August.
And we've been talking about this on the show a little bit.
And there's a couple of directions I want to go on the subject of nuclear weapons.
First, Dan, would be the status of negotiations with the Russians.
It looks like there was a treaty that I don't know why they let it expire, but they let this treaty expire.
And I don't know exactly what's going on there.
I hope that you can help me out with that.
And then also, of course, Mordecai Venunu, the Israeli whistleblower who revealed their secret nuclear weapons program, apparently has been rearrested from his house arrest to real arrest, something along those lines.
So I guess say whatever you like about either of those topics, please.
Well, as you know, I've had very little sleep today on New Year's Day because late New Year's Eve, and I was celebrating with my son and his fiancée and their friends.
My wife and I were very honored to be invited to join these young people in their New Year's Eve.
I'm glad you had a good time.
So in the midst of that, I got the worst possible news, or among the worst possible news I could get, which was that my close friend Mordecai Venunu had been arrested in Israel on grounds, by the way, on which they could have arrested him any time in the last five years, and certainly the last several years, and chose for some reason to arrest him.
Now, threatening him then with a six-month prison, which he has over his head as a suspended sentence, for having associated with foreigners.
Now, I'm a foreigner who associated with him on several trips there, and I'll explain to listeners who don't know Mordecai in just a moment.
But, you know, he's talked to every foreigner possible in the last couple of years, and for some reason they've chosen to get him for dealing with his Norwegian girlfriend at this point, a woman he's been seeing for two years, and they've known about it.
So he's faced with going back to prison for six months, on top of 18 years of imprisonment, of which 11 and a half were spent in a six-by-nine foot cell.
It was the longest period of solitary confinement of anybody in the world.
Amnesty International called it cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.
And he managed to come out of that, not in the best of shape at the time, but he's recovered a great deal from it mentally, or totally mentally, once he got out.
Now, wait a minute, you're saying that this is...
They want to send him back now.
This trouble, but he hasn't done anything except see his girlfriend and you?
Well, he had talked to every foreigner who'd come through for a year, since he got out five years ago.
But when he got out after serving his full sentence, and let's explain right now, for having revealed to the London Sunday Times photographs that he had taken, showing that the nuclear program in Israel, which they don't even admit they have to this day, the nuclear program, which everyone else in the world knew that they did have, was much larger than anybody had estimated, and that even CIA had estimated it at all.
And he showed that it was large.
Now, that, by the way, is something I've noticed they've talked about as the sixth or so nuclear power, Israel.
That's very misleading.
Vanunu's point at the time was that the estimate of, say, 200 nuclear weapons, which one often saw for Israel, which would put them behind France, let's say, or England, was actually wrong at that time, that it was probably closer to 600 weapons even then, certainly over 300, or closer to 600 even then.
That was in the 80s, in the early 80s, and they've been building weapons ever since.
Probably Israel's power puts them as the third country in the world, after the US and Britain, above France.
And you said that Vanunu's estimate is 600 atomic bombs in Israel's arsenal?
That was back in the early 80s.
Wow, because, you know, yeah, I guess as you say there, the usual estimate is a couple of hundred.
I guess the Air Force one time released a thing that they said they thought it was maybe 400.
Well, who knows?
You know, one would think that, you know, I think the world does deserve to know who the nuclear powers are.
That's of world interest.
And the people of the country as well.
How many weapons do they have?
How big are they?
And what are they for?
Let me put this in the larger context a little bit.
I don't think there's a single country in the world, the US or any of the other nine known nuclear powers right now, can justify, could justify openly why they have or their rationale for having as many weapons as, let's say, India, which might be a couple of hundred, or Britain or France.
We have thousands.
We have thousands.
But what exactly are those to do?
Let's take 600 weapons and Israel.
It would be very interesting for them to explain to the world how they would use those weapons.
I don't want to focus just on Israel here.
Their policy is no more reckless and stupid and criminal than that of every other nuclear state.
Well, agreed there.
I mean, although at least the rest of them are members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
That's better and it's not worse.
Well, now, does Israel have H-bombs, Dan, do you know?
Yes.
Now, that was also the other thing that Venunu revealed, that they almost surely had an H-bomb capability.
And so, anyway, having revealed that, they kidnapped him.
They lured him with a woman to Italy, got into an apartment, beat him up, put him in a drug den, hypodermic needle, put him in a sack essentially, kidnapped him on a boat to Israel and put him in a closed trial in Israel.
Sentenced him to 18 years.
Having served the entire 18 years, not a day off of good behavior or anything else, the sentence finished and opened.
He's now released under conditions that he can't speak to foreigners, he can't talk to the press, he can't go near an airport or a railroad station or anything like that or leave the country.
Restrictions that were direct, explicit, word-for-word carryover from British mandate.
When the British colonial rule in Palestine preceding the birth of Israel, those regulations were carried over.
And at the time, they were tyrannical regulations by any standard.
They don't meet any aspect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as restrictions on somebody who has served a sentence and who is in principle paid his debt, whatever that was, to society.
So he has, from the beginning, explicitly talked to foreigners regularly, talked to journalists regularly, defied that in effect.
And for that, he was sentenced earlier, six months suspended sentence.
Meaning that they propose to put him back in prison where he spent the 11 and a half years in solitary confinement.
I don't, if there's a man in the world who can stand up to that, it's Mordecai Vanduna.
He's been tested, he's been through the fire.
I would have more confidence in his doing it than I would in myself.
But can he do it either?
Is even he up to that?
I don't know.
Maybe he doesn't know.
As they say, if anybody can do it, he can't.
But it's outrageous that he should be confronted for that with that.
And in this case, as his lawyer has just said, that's all I've been able to find out so far, is that he's been seeing his Norwegian girlfriend.
And that's the excuse for consorting with a foreigner.
By the way, he was arrested a couple of years ago for going to Bethlehem for a Christmas Eve service.
And that was going out of the territorial restrictions that are put on him.
He would like to get out of Israel.
But anyway.
That's interesting how sometimes the West Bank counts as Israel and sometimes it don't.
That's right.
But for purpose.
Now, listen, Dan, I'm sorry, because we are right up on an hour here.
And I want this to still be within.
I want people to still click on it, not see a file is too big to bother with.
But I wanted to give you a chance to address the expiration of the start one treaty here real quick.
And is this I think I read in the BBC here that Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, was saying, it's just technical issues.
We're still working out.
Are we going to have a new version of the start one treaty?
What the hell is the start one treaty anyway?
Exactly.
There will be almost surely a restriction.
They will arrive at an agreement limiting this into what we were saying earlier, the significance of it, limiting the number of warheads that we have and that the Russians have down to perhaps from the current ceiling of about twenty three hundred down to sixteen hundred.
Although the earlier ceiling was, by the way, seventeen hundred to twenty three hundred.
So limiting it to sixteen or sixteen fifty is a pretty marginal change.
But you get it down anyway to sixteen hundred, which sounds better than twenty three hundred.
Except when you reflect that one thousand warheads, as in the piece that I did, I could write on Truthdig, which is on my website, Ellsberg.net.
I think the piece is titled A Hundred Holocaust.
One thousand warheads is enough to cause nuclear winter.
In other words, to blot out the sunlight for long enough to destroy most civilized life in the northern hemisphere, possibly in the world, possibly lead to human extinction and extinction of many others.
Possibly a real risk, a serious risk.
One thousand.
So limiting it to sixteen hundred means nothing.
Nothing.
It doesn't reduce the risk to humanity.
There is no conceivable legitimate justification for having sixteen hundred warheads and no way to use them that does not threaten ecological catastrophe, not just in a region.
Even a war between India and Pakistan involving a total of hundreds of these warheads would involve ecological catastrophe.
Well, I want to beg everybody to go and read A Hundred Holocaust.
It's at Ellsberg.net and at Truthdig.com.
And just to look at the chart where it says, you know, this is our estimate of how many hundreds of millions of human beings would die in the first week, the first two, the first four, the first six weeks.
Finally, what you were saying about the arms control agreements, unless and until public pressure forces them down far below sixteen hundred, far below one thousand each, because one thousand altogether is enough for total global catastrophe.
Will you have made any significant change?
This is not a significant change so far.
And so long as we maintain our first use policies of threatening to initiate nuclear war as against Iran, against their underground sites, a threat remains on the table in this administration as it did during the campaign.
All of those make it impossible to think of other countries being willing to give up their nuclear weapons, especially, as I say, as the U.S. and Russia maintain forces that could lead to ecological catastrophe, forces of a thousand, thousands, let alone sixteen hundred.
So it all remains still to be done.
And what's happened so far does not even amount to any progress on the way of what Obama put forth as his goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons, which he then immediately backed off from, and said not in his lifetime.
He's not even moving toward that at this point.
I would say that's...
Oh, but the first half of the speech was so inspiring, though.
It wasn't until the second half of the speech where he admitted that he didn't mean anything he said in the first half.
Well, he gives us the rhetoric, and he gives the Pentagon the reality.
All right, everybody, that is Daniel Ellsberg, the man who ended the Vietnam War.
I give you credit.
I thank you very much, and I recommend everyone please read the excellent book, Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and check out ellsberg.net, and especially check out the series on nuclearweaponsfortruthday.com.
Thanks very much, Dan.
Thanks a lot.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, too.
