All right, y'all, it's Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, streaming live on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our guest today is David Bromwich.
He is joining us on the phone from Connecticut, home of George W. Bush.
He's a Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and blogs at the Huffington Post.
Welcome to the show.
Good to be here.
It's good to have you here.
I think we all were disturbed, anybody who saw the New York Times last Friday, this outrageous editorial by one Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, about the likelihood and the necessity, he seems to think, of an Israeli-slash-American attack on Israel and, I mean, on Iran, I'm sorry.
Well, there's a lot of really notable things about this.
I guess we could just start with the fact that he just assumes from the very beginning that Israel will attack Iran's nuclear sites any time now.
And if they don't do it now, they'll have to do it with nuclear bombs later.
So they might as well do it now.
Yeah, the steps he makes are a little more intricate.
He says that Israel, I think at the start, he says Israel will almost surely attack in the coming months.
And he says, this is no surprise to hear, it'll likely come sometime between now and January when the new president, whoever he is, takes office.
But he says somewhere along the way, though it has turned into a minor point here somehow, that we can all hope that Iran is made to cooperate immediately by the international community and give up all research and essentially surrender all their pretensions to nuclear power.
But if that doesn't happen, and then that's what you're just stating, and he assumes it won't happen, Israel will almost surely attack.
And if Israel's attack fails, that is to say, I don't know how they're going to make sure that it succeeds.
But if they think it has failed, they'll come back and do worse.
The fundamental idea of the article is Israel's right to preemptive attack against Iran.
And it's right to make, if necessary, a preemptive nuclear attack of some kind to stop Iran from getting its first nuclear weapon.
Not that Iran is anywhere near being a competitor with Israel as a nuclear power.
But even one weapon in the hands of these mad people is the presumption of the article.
It's too much.
Israel's going to do this, probably, and Americans should understand.
Well, and even that, America ought to go ahead and do it to make sure that it works the first time.
Otherwise, we'll probably have to come back with this, right?
He seems sort of doubtful that Israel will be able to pull it off the first time and that it'll make nuclear weapons necessary if America doesn't do it instead.
Yeah, that's a piece of his argument.
It comes in in the middle that, unfortunately, Israel is not as well equipped for such an attack as the U.S.
We are allies.
It's a pity that Americans don't have the stomach for what he calls wars in the Islamic lands.
Israel is more matter-of-fact and can do it.
But if only America would, he implies, that would be better because Americans could do the job better.
Wow.
I'm sort of deeply offended by that.
Fight my war for me, because if I do it, I'll use nukes, is basically the argument there.
Which, he's not the Israeli government, but it seems like an article like this from someone of his prominence, apparent prominence, in the New York Times, it must have been written with the guidance and approval of the Israeli government anyway, right?
I don't know that.
That is to say, it's more than any of us knows, and I'm not sure that that is a hunch I share.
I saw that in anti-war.com today, Justin Raimondo makes that same surmise.
But I do think it's meant to prod and more than persuade, it's meant to coax a certain kind of sympathy and possible reaction from the American government and from American public opinion and the American media.
It's meant to soften us for whatever may come, and whatever may come, he suggests, includes actions of a violence we had been taught to think extreme, in fact, atrocious.
What's underneath this?
He's using Cold War tropes and situations to appeal to American readers.
We, from the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe, have a sort of vague memory of being up against a power that's supposed to threaten us so immediately that it would be worth putting almost everything on the line to stop it.
He's asking Americans to enter into the situation of Israel and think that it's that extreme.
This idea of preemptive war, or preventive war, as we should call it, though that distinction is pretty sophistical, it only hangs on differences of time.
I mean, preemptive war means if you have reason to believe your enemy's just about to attack you, and that is on some theories of just war.
Well, yeah, I think that's an important distinction between, you know, the British are massing troops on the Canadian border and they're ready to come into New York or whatever, versus, well, you know, we're going to bomb this country because we don't like them and we're pretty sure that they don't like us, and so therefore they might attack us if we don't kill them first.
Right, I mean, if you accept the distinction, then what he's done in the article is, you know, jack up the illegal action of preventive war to the point where it seems like it's preemptive.
It seems like it's a response to an emergency, and what makes up the difference in this argument is the reading of the Iranian government, and indeed the whole nation of Iran, as murderous and insane, both.
They're in fact understood to be a suicide nation, and therefore anything you do against them is warranted once they have so dangerous a weapon in their hands.
Well, now let me ask you a bit about that.
You're a Sterling Professor of English at Yale, and if I remember community college rules, well, you're not allowed to write an essay full of assertions where you don't provide evidence for your assertions.
I got a big D because I wrote a great essay that had one assertion without evidence, and then I learned from then on if I'm going to assert something to be true, I have to provide evidence or I get a big D, but now it seems to me, Professor, like I could write for the New York Times, no problem, as long as I'm promoting war.
Yeah, well, I believe you're right that if this article had come in without a signature, it would have been rejected.
It's not good thinking, and some of it is pretty dingy as writing, too, but there's a premise that is not stated, the one I just sort of alluded to, that the Iranians on the evidence of Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic statements and of the wildness of their denunciations of the West, which many Americans can remember from the time of Khomeini's revolution.
The Iranians are crazy and murderous, that's the unstated premise, and then what you're calling unsourced or the assertion that doesn't have evidence to back it up is his assumption that they're very far towards having a nuclear weapon, and they want it, and this is what they would do for it.
Now, there's a very vague statement about that in the op-ed.
Benny Morris says, all the intelligence agencies in the world, I believe that's the phrase or something very like it, all the intelligence agencies agree that Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb.
Well, I can think of two exceptions, but they're important exceptions.
One is the National Intelligence Estimate of the United States, which we heard about at the end of 2007, which said that Iran was many years from being able to make their first nuclear weapon, and their nuclear weaponizing programs had been so far as the intelligence directorate of the whole U.S. services could see, had been abandoned.
The second exception, which with some people might carry just as much weight or even more, is Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Inspection Agency, who has found inadequacies in Iran's reporting, but has gone nowhere near suggesting that they're about to get a weapon or that they want to have one and use it in this way.
Well, I have a third to add to your list, too, which is Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Mossad, who has said that, oh, we have years and we have plenty of time to work this out.
They're years away, which I don't think anybody specifically followed up, but that would seem to imply that he accepts that the nuclear program the Iranians have is the one that is safeguarded by the IAEA, the one that everybody knows about.
He's not saying in their, well, except for their secret program, which we don't know how advanced it is or anything like that, he's saying they're years away.
Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, says that.
And there is another bit of evidence to confuse us more about the idea that somehow Benny Morris speaks for the Israeli government.
This head of the Mossad is closer to the Israeli government than Benny Morris, and he doesn't quite want to go in the same direction.
So we may be looking at cross-currents and kind of twistiness and argument going on within Israel that is quite comparable to what we see in America, because we know that the Cheney and Elliott Abrams wing of the Bush administration wants to attack Iran or see that Israel attacks it very much.
But that has looked as if Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates and others were pushing the other way.
So for all I know, there's something very similar going on in Israel.
You know, Glenn Greenwald pointed out something on his blog.
I forget which poll it was, but he had a screenshot, a little picture, a JPEG of some poll results that said that a majority of Americans, I guess, who answered other than, I don't know, falsely or mistakenly believe that what the NIE said was that the Iranians are making nuclear weapons right now.
That's an impressive mistake.
It's like the numbers of Americans who believed that Iraq was behind the bombings of September 11th after eventually most of the news media came through and were square about it and said that Iraq, and even Bush, though not Cheney, said that Iraq had nothing to do with it.
And yet, you know, one found somewhere like 2006, still 50 percent of Americans thought Iraq was behind it.
It's just amazing because, you know, November really wasn't that long ago, and there was a whole giant media course.
I mean, this lasted in the news cycle for a few weeks, that, all right, well, we got this NIE, so you can't have a war now.
And this was everywhere.
It was even on TV.
Yeah, I agree.
The forgetting or shrouding or wadding off or suppression of that fact that the legitimate American government statement about the state of Iran's nuclear research and preparations had gone the other way from this judgment.
We're now told that George Bush and many others in his administration have assured the Israelis that they agree with.
Now, the Israelis I have in mind now are not the head of the Mossad, whom you just cited, but Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak.
I think Barak, perhaps the more belligerent of the two, the defense, the originally labor defense minister who had been taken to be not a hawk, but who now looks far more eager to go against Iran than Olmert is, perhaps.
Well, who is this guy, Benny Morris?
It seems strange to me that the New York Times would print this, and I guess I'm shocked but not surprised, something like that.
This is a pretty, you know, hey, if you don't do this war, then we're going to probably end up having to nuke them all to death and turn Iran into an atomic wasteland, he says.
He says nuclear wasteland, that's right, those are shocking words.
I mean, this is the New York Times, this is the newspaper of record.
This is, you know, every government leader, establishment, bureaucracy, intelligence agency in the world read this Friday.
This is important that this is in here.
This isn't just an essay written for Little Green Footballs or something.
Yeah, and that would take a whole separate excursion by both of us to talk about Benny Morris and what he represents and his changes of view between the late 1980s and the present.
But I mean, he's a labor Zionist, left wing originally, and grew up on a kibbutz, went to Cambridge, was for a time a reporter for the Jerusalem Post.
His earliest career was in journalism, but he's a archivist and, you know, really turned around the self-consciousness of Israelis about their own history in this book, On the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in 1988.
So at that time, people took Benny Morris to be what they called a revisionist historian, one of the new historians.
And he was pointing out that the expulsion of Palestinians in the war of 1948, not of all of them, but of many, had not happened simply because the Arab government told them to leave and they left or because they were panicked about the war.
Some of this had been coerced and supervised and commandeered by Israeli armed forces.
And there had been in the process of it, massacres, poisonings of wells and so on.
Now, these are the, what to say, the darker side of almost any war.
But it was Benny Morris, among others, who brought it out concerning Israel's founding.
He was born in 1948.
So there's a very curious, I suspect, identification with the country in complex ways.
It sounds like recently maybe he was mugged by reality.
That horrible neoconservative line.
Yeah, you might say so.
I mean, as I read it, and I'm not a close scholar of his development or indeed of the history of Israel, but I think Benny Morris was a supporter of the Oslo Accords and somebody who hoped that the Palestinians would get a separate nation, that there could be peace between Palestine and Israel.
And as I see it, as it's come out in two or three interviews of his that I've read from the last few years, he seems to have been shattered by the experience of the second Intifada, where the suicide bombings began and life in cities in Israel and on the roads and so on started to seem dangerous.
Not as it was dangerous in Baghdad for many, many months, but something that we Americans really have no way to enter into from our own experience.
So he turned around then and I think began to feel that the expulsion, though grim, may have been justified, necessary, that there was no alternative.
He said in an interview in 2004, I cite other parts of the interview in that Huffington Post thing that I put online the other day, but he said also in that interview that maybe Ben-Gurion should have finished the job.
And by finished the job of expulsion, he meant, you know, the transfer of population of the Palestinians should have gone all the way so that Israel would have had a state of all Jews rather than a state whose central identity was Jewish, but which has other citizens as well.
The Times piece is very extreme.
It's more extreme than I think anything he would have said in Israel.
Well, as far as the finishing the job thing there, he was talking about not just kicking everybody out of the West Bank, but kicking all the Arabs out of Israel proper.
Yeah, I think that's right.
It's a phrase he thinks in phrases as forgive me because I write journalism, too, but as many journalists too often do, he uses phrases as a substitute for thought.
But yeah, I think it was the idea of an all Jewish state.
But the more interesting question which you bring up is what is the New York Times doing publishing this?
And I think that's part of a larger pattern of trying to move the center or what counts as legitimacy within American opinion very far from where it has been.
I won't say far to the right exactly, because left and right have become such peculiar and hard to scrutinize terms now.
But let us say far farther towards war, farther towards a presumption in favor of war than it has been in the past in America, though I have great skepticism about the Times editorial policy.
I would never predict that they could have done that.
Yeah, I mean, again, I guess with the whole shock but not surprise thing, it does seem like a little much.
But then again, these are the guys who unapologetically lied us into war in Iraq and just let Michael Gordon and Judith Miller write whatever they felt like on the front page.
And well, yeah, they did not they did not supervise or edit.
Well, those people who were basically a pipeline from neoconservative and now discredited spies into American policy, the Times was an important conduit for it.
Well, and their basic New York Times editorials have kind of forgotten about the NIE, too, haven't they?
Don't they talk again about the nuclear weapons development?
Well, it's it's curious the Times, you know what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other on the very editorial page where they had the Benny Morris piece of threatening and promising an attack on Iran on the right side.
On the left side was the unsigned editorial.
Essentially, I believe, backing Condoleezza Rice and hoping that the peace process works out with Iran, it's confusing.
And it is I think the confusion is both deliberate and uncontrolled.
I think one could say the the drift of the Times in the last year has certainly been towards making normal or normalizing, if you'll allow that, the idea of violent action against Iran, if Iran does not unconditionally give up nuclear research sometime very soon and that the U.S. will preside over a solution to its satisfaction, it will not go through Al-Baradai or the U.N.
That's one.
I think the Times has been pressing towards that.
Iran must be solved and it must be solved on terms satisfactory to America and Israel.
And the other is that they want us to stay in Iraq.
They've been very consistent and oddly upfront about that.
They published that really partial, inadequate, almost incompetent, unqualified endorsement of the surge in June 2007 by Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, both of whom had been strong endorsers of the war from the start.
And they allowed these guys to build themselves as critics of the war.
But that, if you remember, was an important moment in the middle of last year when there was still a lot of attacks and people were talking about withdrawal and the Democratic controlled Congress was wanting a time schedule for withdrawal, but ultimately letting Bush have the money he wanted.
And that Pollack O'Hanlon thing got enormous play in the other media, in the mainstream media, and I believe it influenced opinion towards the platitude we hear now.
The surge is working.
The surge has worked and so on.
I was just looking it up in March 2008 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the launching of the war.
They did something even weirder, in my view, though it was not noticed as much.
I wrote a post about that, too, which is that they printed reactions by nine persons to the war five years later.
How has it gone?
What could we have done different?
And so on.
Two or three of these were, you know, openly advertising neoconservatives.
One of them is the architect of the surge, Frederick Kagan.
One of them, Danielle Pletka, is the officer of the American Enterprise Institute who had hired Kagan to draft the document for the surge.
Out of nine persons that the Times chose for this symposium, the only one who is not pro war now was Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But Cordesman had never been anti-war.
He's just been what you might call skeptical and realistic.
And he gradually turned against the war.
That's one out of nine.
That's shameful.
You know, it makes me think it seems like a billionaire would just create a new newspaper to challenge them, hire enough reporters to challenge them as the newspaper record.
And we would all just say phooey and be done with the New York Times after such blatant dishonesty.
Let's find the billionaire.
Yeah, well, there's got to be one somewhere.
I don't know.
Well, you know, when you talk about their point of view on Iran, that something's got to be done about that.
I mean, that completely bleeds through in all their articles.
I mean, as wrong as Broad and Sanger often get it when they write about the nuclear programs and stuff, still, you know, I'm supposed to believe that Broad and Sanger have no ability to talk with any of the other reporters at the New York Times and let them know that, hey, by the way, y'all, in case you don't understand, there's such a thing as a safeguards agreement and the IAEA is there.
So it's kind of ridiculous to talk about Natanz and what might be going on there without mentioning that, you know, they would have to kick out the inspectors in order to begin producing weapons grade stuff.
The fact that that's not included in every article to me is an outright lie.
Right.
Yeah, no, I think that the drift towards an American consensus, a consensus of so called legitimate American opinion, that something must be done about Iran soon and the US and Israel will take care of it.
This is this is an extraordinary thing for us to be accepting, given the evidence that we have.
But the Times has been among the the outlets pressing for it most clearly.
And I've been disturbed by that as well.
It's interesting, if you compare the Times with an Israeli paper that is comparable in some ways, it aspires to the same range of responsibleness and to be international and to cover culture and so on.
That is Haaretz, which is one of the best newspapers in the world and far more critical of Israel within its opinion pages and its articles than the New York Times ever allows itself to be.
Haaretz, practically the same day was a day one side or the other of that, you know, Benny Morris article saying maybe Iran will have to be turned into a nuclear wasteland.
Haaretz published an article by two persons, one of them was Trita Parsi, the Iranian American scholar whose book called Treacherous Alliance is a wonderful scholarly unearthing of the three way relationship between the US, Israel and Iran.
And an Israeli whose name I forget, I'm sorry to say, but the Haaretz set up on their editorial page was here, let the let the Iranian tell us Israelis three things about Iranians that we don't know to show what their predicament is, what their anxieties are and the ways in which they are surprisingly human.
And here, let the Israeli tell us some things about ourselves and let it be overheard by the Iranians, which explain why we are so fearful, but why we should still be thinking.
That was Haaretz's idea of an editorial at this critical moment, how much more grown up and reflective and genuinely promoting of free discussion.
So, I mean, I think that's a contrast one has to make with the Times and right down the line on coverage of the Palestinians over the years.
This comparison between the Times and Haaretz will favor the Israeli paper for fairness, criticism and coverage at every point.
There was an article to this effect by Jerome Slater, an international studies scholar and political theorist.
People could easily find it online, but it's it's an impressive article and very comprehensive in its treatment of the two papers.
Well, I think the war party here knows that if they let us have a fair discussion in mass media about whether we should have a war with Iran or not, that the war party will lose.
They have to just go with kind of this drumbeat, this narrative that, well, there's a trust us, there's a danger there and we need to do something about it.
And you're OK with that, aren't you?
Which is how they've been going about it.
Yeah.
Now, you could have a real debate in Israel and people might still be scared enough to support a war, but not here, not the population really understood what the NIE said, et cetera.
I agree.
What's revealing and again, I have to say, surprising to me is that among the people at the front of the war party, as you call it, are not the people who have to fight the war among Americans.
That is to say, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, has made it as clear as he can without insubordination that he does not want to fight another war.
I don't need another war.
That was a headline just today.
And the armed forces, the Navy and the people who would be on the ground, most of all, I would guess the Air Force always more or less is OK with wars because, you know, they're way up.
They don't see what happens.
But there are those people and there are the, you know, those who know most about the situation of the Middle East who are, I think, pervasively, predominantly against the war.
So when you talk about the war party, you're talking about certain think tanks, people within the Bush administration.
And yet that comes to be accepted as legitimate and centrist opinion very quickly.
And as you say, they forget the NIE and other such obvious pieces of evidence.
Yeah, well, the squeaky wheel gets the grease in democracy.
And actually, that's why I usually don't pay too much attention to the public opinion polls, because I figure, you know, best I can figure what's right is the best I can figure what's right.
And regardless of what the rest of the so-called democracy thinks out there.
But, you know, Glenn Greenwald points out on his blog about this poll that has 71 percent of the American people want America to have an unbiased approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yeah.
And I think that's what you're talking about when you talk about taking this some insane line and defining that as somehow the middle of the argument.
Right.
And so here we live in a society where we basically never you have to go to alternative media to hear any sort of fair discussion about Israel policy.
And yet a super majority of the American people want not necessarily a neutral approach, but an unbiased approach.
That's a statistic that we hear as little about as the proportion of Iraqis who want the U.S. out of Iraq, which has been towards two thirds for more than a couple of years now.
And I mean, another index of it is the number of Iraqis who say that attacks on Americans are an approved form of conduct, where that number, I believe, hovers around 50 percent.
Now, you know, General Petraeus is an expert on counterinsurgency, but anybody who knows the first thing about guerrilla wars knows that the population has to be on your side.
Fifty percent of the population being to that degree against the American occupation.
But that's not a figure we hear much about.
And we hear astonishingly little about what the Iraqis want.
And that, too, is a fact of, I believe, self-censorship in large part of the American media.
And it's a strange thing.
Yeah, well, you know, they don't even do that poll that often.
It's I don't know which one you're talking about.
I haven't seen one like that in years where they even ask the question of whether they want the occupation to continue or not.
I think there has been one in the last year, but I'm sorry, I don't have it ready to hand.
Yeah, well, anyway, I'll have to look for that.
But yeah, the only ones I know, they don't even ask that question.
They don't want to know.
And, you know, when you talk about those numbers, a giant proportion of that must be up in Kurdistan, where they've been autonomous and under American protection since 1991.
You mean the largest proportion of those who wouldn't mind us saying, yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.
So I'm saying if you if you were to take the Kurds out of the equation, that 50 percent will go up a lot more.
I don't know exactly what percentage of the population they are, but somebody out there with the mathematics, I think, would be able to show that among Arabs, it's much higher, Sunni and Shia alike.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, and this this is a larger problem.
It has to do with, you know, the shaping of public opinion in this society and of the perception of public opinion, which is a very different thing.
I mean, my first large scale introduction to it, and I'm still sort of dazed thinking back on it, was the many month long process of the run up to the Clinton impeachment.
You may remember that, but I remember vividly that it became part of accepted opinion, mainstream media opinion, that Clinton was on his way out, that what they had with the evidence from Monica Lewinsky and the Paula Jones scandal, it was enough and he should just leave.
You know, he's toast.
A very knowledgeable lawyer friend told me 10 months before he was acquitted.
And it there it was American opinion that I think defeated the impeachment.
Well, I don't know.
I would say that it was clear.
Wasn't it clear by this time, 1998, you know, July, middle of the summer in 1998, that they were never going to have 63 votes in the Senate and that if he only stays in there, he'll be in there.
Yeah.
Well, at a certain point, the vote counting started.
But my memory and I'm sorry to be so impressionistic that I would disapprove of myself if it were someone else.
But my memory is that Democrats were waffling on this, as they always do.
They were being craven and uncertain.
Joe Lieberman gave his deeply moving speech saying that it was a crisis of conscience and Bill Clinton had offended the morals of all Americans and he Lieberman could not support Clinton.
And so it went.
And one heard this on the talk shows.
And then came the opinion polls month after month, 60 percent, 70 percent, where a majority of Americans are saying they don't approve of what he did, but they don't want him impeached.
I think that's what gave stamina to the to the majority who voted against impeachment in the long run.
But my only comparison is on this point.
Impeachment is an extreme act possible under the Constitution because of the powers of inspection and the correction of the abuses for maladministration.
It was extreme.
And yet it was made ordinary.
It became part of our daily talk for months.
And that was over the head of the disapproval of most Americans.
And it's been the same with this war since at least late 05, that disenchantment with the war is general.
And yet acceptance now of the idea that we're going to stay in Iraq and nobody ever says the word super bases.
And the last.
Political character who made a point of it was Bill Richardson in the primaries, he said, if I'm elected, the super bases will go, but you don't hear a word about that from Obama or from any other Democrat.
No, indeed.
Ron Paul has talked about he talked about.
Yes.
The size of Vatican City there in the green zone.
Yes.
He's been very, very candid about that.
What's funny is, you know, I wanted Bill Clinton impeached for anything.
I didn't care what they came up with.
I mean, I didn't want it to be a bogus charge, but I figured if they picked any of the thousands of felonies that he had committed as president and impeached him for that, that would be good enough for me.
And I wish that everybody felt that impeachment was normal and that we impeached and removed every president from office.
I think impeachment.
I agree with you this far.
Let's not go back into the Clinton business.
But I agree with you this much, that impeachment is underused.
It's meant to be a much more regular, by which I mean frequent proceeding than we have made it.
But the effect of the Clinton impeachment has been to inoculate Bush against the danger of impeachment.
Yes, I'm afraid that that's true.
Yep.
Well, one thing is, if everybody who would oppose the Clinton impeachment had favored it, then George Bush would have never been the president, although Lieberman would have been the vice president.
And that probably wouldn't have been very good either.
So, you know, no editorial right there.
That's right.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time and insight on the show today, David.
Well, thank you.
And it's been good talking to you, everybody.
That's David Bromwich.
He's a Sterling professor of English at Yale University.
And he writes a lot of great blogs at the Huffington Post dot com.
