05/21/09 – David Bromwich – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, our guest today is David Bromwich.
He's a literature professor at Yale University.
He has written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's selected writings, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press Edition of On Liberty.
Wow.
Can I make a pitch for Burke?
Yeah, tell me real quick.
Edmund Burke, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform.
Sum it up for us in a nutshell here.
Well, I'll give you my, at present, favorite sentence of Burke's, or at least my favorite for our time, which I quoted in an article that's in the current issue of The American Conservative, and the sentence which he wrote in 1777 about the American War, which he was opposed to.
That is to say, what we call a revolutionary war.
He didn't think the British should fight to keep the American colonies.
The sentence is about civil liberties.
Power in whatever hands is rarely guilty of two strict limitations on itself.
My favorite part is in whatever hands.
Power is the problem, and thinking you can change the hands that power rests in and change everything is an illusion.
Well, and that really is the key to it.
That's what Harry Brown used to say, the great former libertarian candidate and writer.
He used to say, it's not the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse.
And that's why power must be limited as much as possible.
In fact, the great quote, I was reminded of this by a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, actually, where he has Obama saying that he's going to continue the Bush wiretapping program, but he's going to monitor it very carefully.
And as though that was the problem all along, was the president wasn't paying enough attention to his illegal spying program.
It's also an unfortunate choice of words, because monitor really means spy in a way.
Right.
Yep, so there we are.
And you know, one thing, I'm confronting it more and more, people want to believe so badly in something, anything, I guess, you know, whether it's just the hockey team or, you know, their political party.
I think so many people want to believe that Barack Obama is newer, better, different than George W. Bush.
But he has inherited the greatest empire, well, the biggest empire in the history of the world.
And that's just a fact, right?
The power to abuse at his fingertips is unprecedented in the history of the world.
Yes, he has inherited a new kind of control of instruments of discipline and containment and war making.
And, you know, his favorite metaphor for what he means to do about it seems to be the one about a very large ship taking a long time to move in the water.
But he is certainly deliberate about it and certainly slow.
Maybe the largest single sign of that has been going along with the Bush policies on state secrets and just switching the war abroad from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Yeah, you know, we ran an article by Michael Scheuer on antiwar.com yesterday where he said that, you know, the al-Qaeda guys call Afghanistan, what was it, holy Afghanistan, land of jihad or whatever.
You know, it's this romantic place where people go to fight empires and destroy them.
And by Obama doubling down there and sending 21,000, of course the Pentagon is asking to make that 31,000 more troops there, that will be sold all over the Arab world as the reinvasion of Afghanistan.
And the proof, the final evidence, as though any were really necessary, that George Bush and Dick Cheney were not a fluke at all.
This is what America is about.
Right.
I think that will be a hard sell in the Arab world.
I think Obama looks different, talks different, acts somewhat different from Cheney and Bush.
But you're right that this use of overwhelming violence halfway around the world, all its effects are visible.
I thought when he first came in, one of the most interesting things he could have done was call a moratorium on all drone flights.
But he was careful to keep those up and who knows why.
I think to stay close to Petraeus and Petraeus recommending that they be kept up.
You know, just in the last week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was saying, in I think a speech at the Brookings Institution, that we can't win this war by killing civilians, which I guess he thunk real hard about that to come to that conclusion.
I thought that was what this war was about, killing civilians.
But anyway, you know, it's not like there's an Afghan army we're fighting or anything like that.
But he was being critical of the drone strikes and saying this is counterproductive.
If we're going to surge in there, if we're going to be killing people, we need to target who we're killing a little more carefully because we're supposedly trying to get the people there, their hearts and minds on our side and all that kind of thing.
Buy off their loyalty, at least temporarily.
And it's really hard to do that when we keep killing their sisters and kids.
Yeah, well, you and I are just both talking as whatever, citizens and newspaper readers, but my guess is the only reason that makes sense to me for why Obama would have done it as far as he's done is that somebody's told him there's a certain percentage chance he might kill bin Laden if bin Laden's already not dead.
And if he could do that, he'd feel he was golden.
He could get a second term.
All his credibility would be there forever.
And he is not so free from ambition as not to sacrifice a few core lives if he could have bin Laden.
But the whole thing, that side of things, is hard to make sense of.
Yeah, I'm really not sure.
I tend to think it's the whole arc of crisis, manifest destiny kind of thing where they can call it whatever they want.
But what it's really about is just keeping boots on the ground in Central Asia for what ends, I'm not exactly sure.
Whether it's oil pipeline routes or just, as Gareth Porter says, it's just the Pentagon itself.
All these generals who have a new fire base, they don't want to give that up.
Absolutely.
The national security state which has the momentum of its own and which everyone coming into power as president seems afraid to make major changes of.
We really lost our chance in the last years of the first Bush and the beginning of Clinton.
When the Cold War was over and we didn't think we had a big new enemy.
But the Pentagon kept on spending and guess what?
A new enemy appeared.
Yeah, well and it didn't even have to be deliberate to provoke the new enemy.
Although I guess it could have been.
But simply going around, this is the same thing, I won't bore you with it.
But there's a pretty unbroken chain of interventionism since Woodrow Wilson, if not from Theodore Roosevelt.
Where each overseas intervention ends up creating the crisis that justifies the next one all the way down the line to where we are right now.
Yes, I see it much that way.
Check this out.
Do you see this?
At Jim Loeb's blog, ex-APACer Weissman comes out hard against military action in Iran by Daniel Lubin.
It's at ips.org slash blog slash Jim Loeb.
And two interesting things here.
And then I'll turn it over to you for comment, David.
In March, former APAC chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield wrote a very interesting piece for the New Jersey Jewish News.
In it he revealed that although APAC publicly professed support for the Oslo peace process in the 1990s.
It was secretly coordinating with then opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
And working behind the scenes to sabotage the process.
By illustrating APAC's willingness to work against the policies of both U.S. and Israeli governments.
When they prove insufficiently hawkish, Bloomfield noted.
This information could, quote, not only validate APAC's critics who accuse it of being a branch of Likud.
But also lead to an investigation of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
And then he says that just to set up for Bloomfield has another interesting piece in Tuesday's Jerusalem Post.
Where he interviews Keith Weissman.
Who comes out very strongly against the people trying to drum up support for an Israeli slash American war against Iran.
What do you make of all this?
Thank you.
That has made my day.
And showed that there are still surprises.
Look, it appears that Weissman and Rosen, though they were agents for APAC.
And doing things that led to charges being brought against them for spying before the charges were dropped.
That these guys are not hawks.
They're not absolute militarist lunatics within the frame of Israeli politics.
So you learn something.
This was also true among some of Cheney's advisers.
Or, you know, little and medium sized gurus around the time when the attack on Iran was first being discussed in a large way.
06, 07, you may remember that.
And one or two of them, I think I remember Victor Davis Hanson being one of them.
Writing an editorial in some fairly prominent place.
Saying that is lunatic.
You know, I get off the boat here.
And, of course, various militarists, neoconservatives, liquid, identified American lobbyists have gotten off the boat at various points.
But most of them are still on it.
Well, you know, I think the propaganda about the danger of Iran has been really effective.
And I try to, you know, judge these things, I guess, by what's the spin on TV.
And, you know, new people that I meet and kind of, you know, see what they think about it.
You know, regular folks who aren't, you know, as engrossed in the news as you and I are on a regular basis.
But, you know, basically have opinions and are interested.
And I just met a guy the other day who, you know, I couldn't think of any really good reason for him to believe it.
But he believed that Iran was a serious concern and we might just have to have a war against them.
And I don't think, you know, as much exposure as he's ever had to propaganda like that, I don't think anybody ever explained to him what the possible consequences of a war with Iran would be.
Or what the scarcity of evidence to warrant a war like that seems to be right now.
I mean, this is what I wrote about in a column for the Huffington Post published, I guess it was Tuesday late morning, about New York Times coverage of the Obama Netanyahu news conference where, if you listened to it, Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, wanted the upshot of that conference, of that meeting of theirs, to be all talk about the danger of Iran and move towards containing Iran, putting in sanctions, and eventually perhaps getting in position for Israel or maybe the U.S. to launch a military strike of some sort against Iran.
Whereas Obama sang a very different tune, talked about Palestine, talked about Gaza, said that he wanted to be deliberate toward Iran and by the end of the year we may start knowing some things, we'll be in a position to know things.
But the way the Times planted the coverage, not only in the news story published on Tuesday by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, but also in an analytic piece that they kept online by David Sanger, both of these stories pitched it as if the conference and the question and answer with Netanyahu and Obama had all been about Iran, as if there had been pretty substantial agreement with Netanyahu dictating terms that Obama was now on a strict calendar and the Times was going to keep watch on him and by the end of the year we'll know if we'll attack Iran and when.
And it was a pretty nearly perfect distortion of what I saw when I looked at the 35 minutes or so of those two talking and what I confirmed when I read the transcript.
Other agencies and newspapers were much more accurate on this story.
Reuters was better, McClatchy was better, the Washington Post was even significantly more accurate than the Times.
It amazed me that the newspaper of record, as it is called, would think that they could pitch the story in so very slanted a way.
And of course the point of doing it like that is just so you can meet the guy in the street you're talking about who says, gee, Iran is really a pretty big problem.
They don't really have to show evidence and they don't have to give a faithful report of what happens when our President, the President of the United States, speaks his policy.
All I have to do is limit the subject of discussion.
If the subject of discussion in the Middle East, these are the Israel, becomes Iran and nothing but Iran, then we've already accepted Netanyahu and the Israeli right coalition terms for discussing U.S. policy.
And the Times had an interest in doing that.
So it's fascinating.
I mean, that's the goal of this sort of, as you say, spin, prejudicial slant on things.
It's to limit what we talk about.
If we were to talk about, if somebody were to say, Palestine, what about the Palestinians?
What about what Israel did to Gaza?
What about repairing that?
Every time, you know, an authoritative news source brings up the word Iran, we'd have a very different kind of discussion.
But the importance of the Times is not, I suppose, in the number of persons who actually read many of its stories, but that other members of the press take it seriously.
And it, you know, Charlie Rose and MSNBC and C-SPAN and so on say, Oh, so this is all about Iran.
And Obama has committed himself to, by the end of the year, we'll know what we're doing toward Iran.
Well, you know, I was reading on Bob Dreyfuss' blog that Nick Burns was talking about a two-month fuse on the talks with Iran, where, of course, the demand has not changed.
At least now Obama's willing to sit down and make the demand face-to-face instead of not, like George Bush.
That's the major difference there.
But the demand is still the same, that there must not be any nuclear program of any description in Iran at all, despite the fact that they're guaranteed the unalienable right, quote-unquote, in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Dreyfuss says that, according to Burns, there is now a two-month fuse.
Well, actually, I was curious about it.
It seemed like if Netanyahu and the Times were trying to set the standard at a year, and Obama wasn't even going along with that, I wondered whether that meant maybe Obama was overruling Nick Burns and saying, you know, that, no, that's not right.
Obama said by the end of this year, which is, what are we talking about, you know, seven months plus right now.
Nicholas Burns, if he says two months, is on a shorter schedule.
Now, maybe they're describing different things.
Maybe Burns has, you know, all the minutely calibrated phases of a longer schedule in mind, that Obama was just alluding to very roughly.
But if you look at the language of Obama's main remarks about Iran, it's deliberately cooling, as he often is.
I mean, you know, he has continued a great deal of the Bush violence in foreign policy and in the coercive treatment of, or at least the opportunity for such treatment and detention of prisoners.
But Obama does not relish violent talk, and that's quite noticeable.
And so, you know, the remark which I quoted goes like this.
I mean, it's not brilliant English.
It is not Lincolnian.
It isn't very precise.
But you get the drift.
He says, my expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, soon.
He doesn't even say they're already happening.
So he's not in a huge hurry.
If we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian election, that's in June, right, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year, a sense by the end of the year, as to whether they are moving in the right direction.
So he's not putting an end stop at the end of the year.
He's just saying, I think we'll know what they're about by the end of the year, and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good faith effort to resolve differences.
I mean, we know what kind of political statement that is.
And it's not precise.
And it's not warlike.
And it's not determined to set a tight schedule.
But the Times figures it all the other way.
And in the analytic piece by David Sanger in their online site, you know, Sanger comes out and says, Obama has to sprint to the end of negotiations with Iran because he set a strict, a rigid calendar.
Amazing.
An amazing distortion.
So you think he's really, it sounds like, you know, you're giving me some reasons for optimism here.
Well, I mean, I guess Robert Gates has made it clear he does not want war.
He's the secretary of war.
So there's that.
And so has Mullen.
Well, now, but what about this guy Netanyahu, who out of power was negotiating with the American Likudnik front at AIPAC to undermine the Oslo agreement that he was pretending to support?
He was doing considerably worse than that as a major politician in Israel at the time when Rabin was elected prime minister, mid-'90s.
Netanyahu was one of the ones undermining Rabin with the charge of endangering the lifeblood of Israel and being a traitor.
Now, this is what the settlers were circulating among themselves, very feverish, very ranting kind of accusations.
And Netanyahu was a fellow traveler of that kind of inflammatory rhetoric.
When Rabin was assassinated, there were many who thought that, you know, the people who drummed up this kind of feeling had some complicity in the crime.
So he's a, it's not, you know, Netanyahu is a very Americanized, very civil seeming, very, you know, you can take him to dinner type of Israeli American neoconservative.
But his actual politics of Israel were extremely subversive of that crucial peace process of the mid-'90s.
That is known, but it is not talked about.
The effort now in the mainstream American press and the New York Times above all is to make Netanyahu appear normal and to make his cabinet, which is even wilder and contains the, you know, near fascist Avigdor Lieberman, who says that the greatest problem the world faces is minorities everywhere, all minorities, a very strange thing for any Jewish person to say.
But, you know, Avigdor Lieberman is the foreign minister of Israel.
But this does not get talked about.
The other Lieberman does not get talked about.
So, you know, what do we talk about?
Iran, Israel, you know, legitimate worries about Iran.
What do we not talk about?
Who is Netanyahu?
Who is Lieberman?
What direction is Israel going in?
Now, there are things going on behind the scenes.
I don't profess to have more than, you know, careful reader, newspaper readers' knowledge of this.
But, you know, when you cite the Nicholas Burns figure of two months, and I say Obama has said end of the year, but he said even that in a vague way, but other people are reading it in other manners.
Well, you know, it sounds like we have an administration within which there are some arguments.
But on one thing they seem to have been pretty clear, and it's something that makes the Netanyahu administration in Israel very unhappy, which is that the U.S. government, the Obama administration, is saying no more settlements.
And Hillary Clinton said it more firmly and clearly than Obama.
She said no more even so-called natural growth in the settlements, meaning somebody who is living in a house which just got approved after they were living in the town illegally for years, but then they made it legal.
Now they have kids, and the kids are living on the roof, and they plead, can't we build a new house, a new illegal house, but you'll make it legal, because we have expanded population.
And Hillary Clinton said no, not even that, no expansion of settlements.
So that's the beginning of a hard line.
The times played this down to an unbelievable degree.
Well, do you think that this really means that, I don't know, Obama is dead serious about having a Palestinian state established?
If he is serious, the first sign of it is that this mourning from Hillary Clinton about tearing down Palestinian places of residence in East Jerusalem and building new ones in the settlements on the West Bank, this hard line of Hillary Clinton will continue, and it will have sanctions behind it.
It won't just be talk.
It will say you don't get this or this or this kind of support if the settlements go on, and we're interested in seeing the evidence that they're not going on.
Now, I don't know.
It would be good to think that they're serious about it.
The fact that Biden and Rahm Emanuel and John Kerry, under the presumptive permission of Obama, all went to the AIPAC conference this year and said two states, which is a two-word formula.
Netanyahu and his people have not been able to bear to bring themselves to say.
They do not say two states.
Their new formula is two people living side by side in peace, security, and prosperity.
But that, you know, elides the question whether the Palestinians will have any kind of state and how long-term this prospect toward peace, security, and economic prosperity is for the Palestinians who right now are much less at peace being occupied and far less prosperous or secure than the Israelis.
The Israelis on the West Bank live in what are, in effect, gated cities, whereas the Palestinians live in conditions enormously inferior to that.
So, I mean, all that the Obama administration are aware of, and the signals have been only of one kind, have been in the direction of wanting to press towards two states.
But I don't, it's hard to say how hard they're going to press.
Some of that depends on how they read the signals of, you know, of the establishment, of the establishment which includes many strong sympathizers with and editorial writers for Israel.
So the Obama administration reads the New York Times, and the Times knows they read it, and they want to say, hey, Rahm Emanuel, he's an insider, he may tell you you can have two states, but we're telling you, you know, when Netanyahu talks about Iran, that's what we're making the story.
Yeah.
Well, and again, in case this does ever happen, let it not be said that we didn't warn them.
If Israel and or America gets this country into a war, or either of our countries, or both, into a war with Iran, that means that thousands of Americans will be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan probably in the first week or so.
It means oil prices absolutely through the roof, and major consequences for a world already in a depression, and seemingly getting worse, and could lead to asymmetric warfare, they call it, of all kinds, you know, unheard of.
I mean, who knows how far Iranian intelligence has infiltrated the governments of, I don't know, Azerbaijan, or Uzbekistan, or Pakistan, or, you know, God knows what kind of consequences could flow from this.
And there have been real experts and real military people who have been saying that for years, that the consequences of any war in Iran would be absolutely disastrous.
Consequences in Iraq, perhaps most of all.
It's a Shiite government in Baghdad.
That has been said.
You know, the fears of Israel toward Iran, which has this bellicose sort of street corner, sort of box-order demagogue of a president who's an anti-Semite, you know, and who says to Israel, the Zionist entity or whatever should be wiped off the map or carried away to the four winds.
You know, the Israeli, at least, rage about such statements, if not actual fear as deep as it looks.
Their rage and anger is great, but you would think the job of the United States, which is farther away and should be a wise as well as friendly ally to Israel, is not to take the Israeli view of things as our own just because it's Israel.
You know, one thing a friend can do and a friendly country can do is help by cooling the other one off.
Suppose at the time that Bush and Cheney drove this country off the cliff in 2002-2003, suppose the United States were not the most powerful country in the world, but the third or fourth most powerful, and we had somebody whose client state we were who said, you know what, United States, you won't be happy you did this.
This is not the way to go after your enemies in the Arab world.
Don't invade Iraq, and we who subsidize you are not going to help you do that.
Gee, that would have been good advice, wouldn't it?
Right.
Yeah, in fact, that's what the French said, and it might have been cynical or whatever, but that's what Jacques Chirac said.
It was like, you guys don't know.
Look, we know a couple of things about Iraq, and we're telling you, don't do this, man.
This is not going to work.
I mean, one of the surprising omissions in public discussion of Israel and Iran and, well, you know, press coverage is names like Mohammed al-Baradai and Hans Blix, but al-Baradai most of all, I mean, there is somebody who has aired public suspicions about Iran, who is no friend of Iran, but who has a genuine claim and a reputation based on his impartiality.
And al-Baradai, you would think, is somebody that American authorities should listen to at least as much as they're listening to Israeli intelligence.
Yeah, most of them have never even heard of him.
They get their information from the same TV I watch, which I think most of them do, judging by the ridiculous things they say.
Yeah, we don't hear much of his name anyway.
It would be nice to hear names like that.
Yeah, well, antiwar.com slash Prather.
He's been writing about al-Baradai and the IAEA's relationship with Iran this whole time and doing the best job of anybody, I think.
That's a good reminder.
Listen, I have to go.
Right, I know, and I was just going to say, sorry for keeping you over here.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
As ever, it's been good talking to you.
All right, thanks a lot.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that's David Bromwich.
He's a literature professor at Yale and writes at the Huffington Post.
His latest one is called New York Times falsifies Obama Netanyahu meeting.