All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And our guest on the show today is David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale.
He's 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.
You can find his regular column at the Huffington Post.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Good to be here.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And you've got a very interesting article, which I strongly encourage everybody to look at here.
Not everybody's going to go ahead and go through the source material, but secondary sources explaining the First Order stuff is always great.
And this is called The Meaning of the Eikenberry Cables.
And this is about Carl W. Eikenberry and two cables that he sent in November 2009 to Secretary of State Clinton.
So tell us, who's this Eikenberry guy and what's so important about these cables here?
Well, Carl Eikenberry is a distinguished American, both military and now diplomatic figure.
He's in his late 50s and went to West Point, took an MA in Asian Studies at Harvard and another in Political Science at Stanford.
So he's one of those West Point people who stay in the military but become erudite and invaluable accordingly in other ways.
He's fluent in Mandarin Chinese and one could go on citing other such unusual achievements.
He was, for I think three years, the senior American commander as a lieutenant general in Afghanistan.
And then he worked with NATO in high positions to advise the military and civilian work in Afghanistan.
And Barack Obama named him, a little taking people by surprise, early in 2009, named this military man to the diplomatic post of ambassador to Afghanistan.
So he's a well-qualified person to be in the Foreign Service in that way.
And he's important to us now, and that's what I wrote my article about, because he sent two cables in early November 2009, in the middle of the Obama administration's long drawn out reflections on what the new policy in Afghanistan should be and whether the general's advice should be followed for putting in 80,000 troops or 40,000 troops or 30,000 troops or less.
And I can tell you in the middle or toward the end of that long process, sent two cables to State Department people to be read, that have now been obtained by the New York Times and are out there online for people to read.
Well, let's stop right there for just a second and we'll get to the substance of these.
We've got time.
But I just wanted to point out how, and this is maybe my own frame of mind here, and I guess I shouldn't be speaking for everybody else or anything, but it does kind of seem like after what we've been through over the last decade, if not the last half a century or however you want to define the limit on it, the military is so dominant in all policy decisions concerning foreign affairs that the State Department has this reputation of basically being a bunch of wimps and weenies and whatever.
And if there's a less violent policy being proposed by the State Department, oh, well, you know how they are.
And so forget that.
We need the real men here to decide what to do, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I think it's important the way you describe this man's background is that he is not a State Department weenie.
He's not some counsel on foreign relations, son of some powerful guy who is some diplomat at the State Department for his career, taking orders and kissing up and kicking down and all that.
He's a guy who is an army general and used to be in charge of the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.
He qualifies.
He has checkmarks on all those right wing qualifications for being able to say something and not have us just roll our eyes and forget about it because you know how those State Department weenies are.
Yeah, that's that's a good sort of point to to pivot on.
So I'll finish about his role in these cables, this man who has military credibility, which may make, as you say, his judgment of the state of things in that country more weighty in the State Department and in the administration.
He is indeed somebody whom Petraeus, General Petraeus, who's the commander of forces in that region, and General Stanley McChrystal, who's the head commander in Afghanistan, both looked up to going back to West Point days and both found themselves pretty much in agreement with, I think, through 2006, 2007.
But Eikenberry had changed his view of the state of things in Afghanistan and advised strongly and decisively against adding any more troops at the present time as of November 2009.
He said that the American forces had the part of the country that they did control well under control and that there were no important military threats to American forces there at the time.
The big problem was extending government to the whole country in a way that was coherent.
That was a problem for Afghanistan as such, not to be cured simply by American military remedies.
And that was what we should concentrate on.
So he advised a sort of stepping back and a re-evaluation of the policy by a commission composed of present former members of Congress, distinguished civil servants, and experts on Afghanistan, somewhat on the model of maybe of the James Baker evaluation of Iraq policy at the end of 2006, which remember advised our getting out of Iraq pretty quickly, but which was supplanted by the Petraeus idea of the surge.
But although he mentions the Baker commission in his cables, he disclaims any desire to reproduce that kind of setup.
And I see that it is on antiwar.com today, there's a column by Ray McGovern suggesting that in sort of veiled terms, what Heikenberry was asking for was a national intelligence estimate on Afghanistan, which has not been done.
So whatever he was asking, it's clear what he was pressing against.
And he was pressing against the policy of the generals, which they more or less got, though with some concessions to things that Heikenberry wanted also.
Well, and that's a very interesting part of this is, you know, I sit here talking with all these different guests and trying to puzzle out exactly, you know, what the policy is in Afghanistan.
And then what does that signify in terms of who's got the upper hand in setting the policy in Washington, D.C.?
And I think I really learned something today in reading this about how it's Heikenberry's point of view, the guy who's against the escalation now and and resigned over it.
Right.
No, he did not.
Oh, he did not resign.
No, I'm not.
I'm thinking of Matthew Ho as the.
Yeah, Matthew Ho, who was in charge of one region called Babel, if I'm pronouncing that right, in Afghanistan.
Matthew Ho, who had a military career in its middle stages going well, did resign on principle.
There was no suggestion, I should say, from my reading of the cables.
There was no suggestion from the tone of Heikenberry's cables to people in the State Department that he was threatening to resign, that this was an ultimatum or anything like that.
At the same time, the the advice he gave was unequivocal.
It was not perhaps we should reconsider how many troops to send.
It was send no troops.
We have other problems.
Right.
And then you're saying that part of their concession to him was, well, we're going to send more troops, but we'll go ahead and bomb Pakistan more because part of his point is there's no point in escalating in Afghanistan as long as there's sanctuaries across the border in Cambodia or, you know what I mean?
Right.
That is a, that is a, what should one say?
It's not one of his main or primary points in the cables, but it's a major secondary point to back up his skepticism that the problem is in Pakistan and a heavier campaign against Al-Qaeda linked or in any case, you know, Muslim interests that are dangerous to what America plans in Afghanistan, that those forces in Pakistan or in the border regions are the ones that, you know, America should want to work hardest against.
And it's very limited what we can do there.
But he suggests nothing is worth pursuing in Afghanistan unless we attack Pakistan more.
So, I mean, that probably dovetailed with a change of policy that Petraeus himself wanted in any case.
But they did give that to I can bury.
And they also gave him an increase of subsidy for civilian advisors, which is something he asked for strongly.
We don't know what else they've promised him, but there's no doubt that some sort of balance was aimed at by the Obama administration in order to keep him, I would guess, though again, there was no threat suggested of resignation.
Now, I mean, one of the interesting things about these cables is that they seem to have surprised Barack Obama and the people around him, Hallbrook, Hillary Clinton and so on.
They didn't expect this.
As far as one can say, I mean, no one is hard to know.
Maybe it was orchestrated.
Maybe they wanted to use these cables as a sort of counterweight against the generals.
But when you read the whole episode through, it does not look as if as if people in the White House wanted this confusion in the message.
In fact, it looks very much as if they were planning to send in something like 30,000 troops as far back as March 2009.
And the long delay was from a variety of causes, including health care and the length of debate over that.
And they they dressed it up to look like a scrupulous deliberation and so on and so on.
Well, I thought they went ahead and sent those 30,000 and what they sent with what Obama announced in November was another 30.
Yeah.
Some did begin to go over almost as soon as he got into office.
But what I'm suggesting is that the later request from the generals was already, you know, under the wing of this administration and pretty well settled on somewhere around late spring or summer, just from the sort of signals that the president was sending about Afghanistan being a necessary war.
I mean, those are those are messages that even if you talk a lot, maybe talk too much like this president, you still are careful not to trap yourself in calling something a necessary war when you have generals, you know, pushing hard to get more troops.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, this is the whole thing, too, is you have a split, it seems like, between Obama and Petraeus on whether we're doing this counterinsurgency doctrine from now on to the end of time or whether, as Obama announced in his speech, I don't know why you give this any credibility, really, but maybe this signifies some kind of split where maybe Obama is taking a more I can bury position where he's saying, let's surge in there now and then we'll start getting our troops out.
We'll start withdrawing, not just, you know, scaling down the surge or whatever, but we'll start withdrawing troops in July 2011.
And that seems like a pretty different policy.
And this guy, I can bury is saying, listen, if you want Afghanistan, Afghanistan, I guess you could call it.
And and he does call it that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which in that point, it's the same thing.
Iraqization, Vietnamization and all that.
It just means, you know, hopefully strengthening the puppets enough that they can take over for our occupation is all it really means.
And he's saying that, you know, just like Donald Rumsfeld said before George Bush fired him, listen, if we just surge in more and more troops, that just makes them more and more dependent on us.
So let's start withdrawing so that they have to take responsibility for their own government, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, Rumsfeld is a complete, almost to the point of mindlessness, successful technocrat.
But Obama does have these, you know, kind of convenient making technocratic conceits also.
And I think you're fairly describing what Obama would like to see happen.
I'm sure he kind of shared that idea with I can barely look.
We're going to show our good faith by bringing in some troops now, but they will be only temporary.
I can't believe that he spoke in exactly the same way to Petraeus.
So the idea that came across in in the president's speech at West Point, that troops that we moved in now, those 30,000, we would begin to move out by July.
2011, you know, seems a piece of wishful thinking.
It could come true.
But Obama is not is not free of that tendency of wishful thinking.
We've we've seen it in other in other areas.
And Petraeus, so far from getting the message clear himself, you know, seems to have gotten even that simple date wrong.
And in an interview recently, Robert Dreyfuss asked Petraeus a question, you know, about the length of the stay in the beginning of the withdrawal.
And Petraeus put it at August 2011 instead of July.
Right.
He put it out of his mind since November.
That was just a line in a speech.
Don't pay any attention to that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Hey, you know what?
This is crazy, but I'll go ahead and ask you anyway.
I saw this.
Somebody emailed this to me pointing out that this New York Times piece had Robert Gates on the plane watching seven days in May.
And then, you know, so there's two ways to take this, which is, whoa, they're sending a signal to the president or it doesn't mean anything at all.
Don't be ridiculous.
What do you think?
Well, seven days in May is a movie I know very well.
It is about an attempt at a military coup of the United States by members of the U.S. military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all except one, the secretary of the Navy, who is named Admiral Hardesty in the plot.
He pulls out from the plan and it's that gesture of his that becomes the sort of loose thread that is the way into discovery of the of the plot.
The head of the military attempted coup is a man named General James Mattoon Scott, played by Burt Lancaster.
It's a truly great performance.
And there is some accidental, very accidental, but very peculiar resemblance between this General Scott as played by Lancaster and just the physiognomy of David Petraeus.
Now, Lancaster is...
Wait, wait, wait, the what?
You're using all these Yale words on me, I don't know.
But there's something roughly similar about the look, the look of the character.
So somebody may have suggested that.
Who knows what it means to be to be thinking about this movie at this time?
Who knows?
I mean, Gates is a civilian, sort of middle of the road, brought in to be a bipartisan appointment of the sort that didn't work out so well for Obama on other fronts.
But I would guess that there's there's some anxiety and has been for a long time about the way to hold back the military influence and the way to guard against what a New York Times reporter warned about as a an officer's rebellion brewing late last year.
So it's a great movie.
It's a thriller, just a movie, but made by John Frankenheimer.
And he was allowed to use the White House, actually use the White House on a weekend when John Kennedy left it to be shot there for that purpose, because Kennedy had seen Frankenheimer's earlier movie, The Manchurian Candidate, thought it was very smart and true to the spirit of something in American life and had told Frankenheimer, these people, meaning the military, industrial people are dangerous and the Americans need to know about it.
So you can use the White House.
Yeah, well, so, I mean, I guess I'm just asking you to speculate or whatever, but it's it seems like Robert Gates is smart enough to maybe even tell a New York Times reporter, hey, look, don't write what movie we're watching because I don't want this to look funny or anything, but maybe not.
Right.
It means nothing.
You think that that's in the Times story?
I don't I don't I don't know, I it's the first I've heard of it and I would need a longer time to think.
But it's it's it's tempting to thought.
Well, you know, I don't really have any reason to believe that Obama wants much different than what they want.
I mean, this is the bipartisan consensus in the imperial court is that America is to occupy Eurasia forever.
Well, you know, well, if you look at if you if you consider that the greatest anxiety now is about Iran and we're being pressed on that hard by Israel.
But there is American worry about that, too, because of its being a neighbor of Iraq.
Well, where where is Iran?
It's got Iraq on the west of it and Afghanistan to the east of it.
And, you know, if Iran should be the big influence in the region, it would seem disastrous for the US project of American force being a major presence over there.
So, you know, the danger of Afghanistan falling apart relates to fears about Iran, which in turn relates to our genuine grounds for trouble of mind over how things are going in Iraq, whether that will really stabilize itself.
Right.
Yeah.
America's regime change in Iraq is the number one reason why we have to have a regime change in Iran.
Yeah.
And and but some of the same people who came out for regime change in Iraq, like Kenneth Pollack, are now supporting the idea in Iran, too.
So I agree.
You're right that the thinking if if we call sort of mainstream thinking in American think tanks and foreign policy advice circles, if we take that to be neoconservative and neoliberal.
Yeah, they anticipate a long stay by American forces in that region.
And, you know, they probably do need to hold up a military presence in in Afghanistan.
It's curious to think of what I can Barry's idea would have been in the back of his mind.
But I'm guessing that he would rather not have seen this country put so much of its stock into supporting the existing government in Afghanistan, but move towards a more defensive strategy of making sure that Afghanistan doesn't fall into chaos.
And it might even turn into several different states or even multiple states governed by tribes or, you know, warlord interests or whatnot.
But the main idea would be to control the amount of terrorist activity that could come from there.
And he's suggesting, I think, that that's a matter I would have been suggesting that that's a matter of security, guarding boundaries, keeping control of the north.
But that the more soldiers we put in, the more night raids we conduct, the more not just counterinsurgency, but counterterrorism we enforce through assassinations by, you know, the Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force and so on.
The more terror we bring back against ourselves.
I've seen him interviewed, Heikenberry, and he's a modest, rather mildly self-presenting sort of guy, speaks very well.
But, you know, he's obviously moderate and realistic in his assessment of things.
But Americans making policy and, you know, guiding military action in that region, people like Holbrook and Petraeus are people with much bigger appetites.
Hey, everybody, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with David Bromwich from Yale University.
And, you know, when you bring up the Karzai government there and the kind of, you know, cul-de-sac there, the idea of just propping him up forever when his government, as you say in your article, as Heikenberry basically is saying, wants American occupation forever.
Karzai doesn't have any reason to believe he can hold on to power without American soldiers there as force protection.
And it seems like just in the last week we've seen all these articles coming out.
Apparently there's been a bunch of money put aside in a big meeting in England and they've got permission from the Russians and they've decided that they're going to try to cut some kind of deal with the Taliban.
And, you know, here's the civil war that's been going on for 30 years here.
The Bush and Obama administrations have been solidifying basically ethnic divisions within who's on the side of the Karzai government and who's not.
And now they're saying that they're going to just invite the Taliban in.
They're going to stop calling them the Taliban and they're just going to work out some kind of coalition government or something.
I mean, this is kind of getting fanciful to me.
I don't know.
I don't know either.
This is the policy that General Petraeus followed in Iraq, which is to say, you know, the surge got what success it did get, not by heavy military engagements against the Shiite insurgents, but by paying off Sunni rebels to have them join the American side or at any rate not shoot at Americans and help keep the peace or make the peace such as they could get.
And they call those sort of large neighborhood Sunni rebel groups the awakening.
Difference is they were losing.
Yeah.
What what interest do the Pashtuns have in surrendering to NATO right now?
Well, I would think that the Pashtuns see that the Americans or some of them see that the Americans are going to be around for a while.
Therefore, it's worth taking American money and at least seeming dependent on Americans while we're there.
There's a story in today's New York Times by Dexter Filkins about maybe that's what you're alluding to about one tribe in particular called the Shinwari tribe, who, you know, in exchange for their support, American commanders agreed to channel one million dollars in development projects directly to the tribal leaders.
Now, I mean, this in some sense extends an idea that Carl Ikenberry was putting forward in 2007, just after he pulled out of his military role in Afghanistan when he, you know, emphasized civilian control and letting those people make the reforms and do the renovation in their country that was needed.
He said in an occasion at the Kennedy School at Harvard that if he were given the choice, this is in March 2007, that Ikenberry said if he were given the choice between 600 more soldiers to fight with in Afghanistan or 100 million dollars for road building, he would take 100 million dollars for road building.
Well, now, Obama, in his have it both ways manner, has given Petraeus the soldiers and Ikenberry the Pashtun tribe to do the road.
So, you know, it seems to me all possible paths are being are being followed.
And it's hard to know what it adds up to.
Well, you know, it's it's hard for me.
On one hand, I got to take all their arguments on face value to show how ridiculous they are.
But on the other hand, I wonder what the true policy is.
I mean, in fact, when when Hamid Karzai and his buddy General Dostum are our closest allies in this country and the best I guess we can do there and then maybe the hope is form an alliance between them and Mullah Omar or something, then, you know, this whole thing is just a even if they really mean to do well here, the best they can do here is put together a recipe for a further disaster and further occupation.
This is like accomplishing this guy, Dostum, for example.
You know, Eric Margulies, the very objective journalist, says, oh, if I had a gun, I'd shoot Dostum right in the head.
That guy.
And, you know, he's the one that was in charge of the Afghan massacre where they suffocated and machine gunned all those people in the tractor trailer beds back in 2001.
I mean, this guy's like the the guy will skin you alive over there.
And he's the general in charge of the army that we're training.
I mean, yeah, well, I agree with your premise.
So I agree with what you take away from it.
That is that, you know, the violence of wars tends to bring more violence.
It's in very rare cases that you can see the end of it because you know what what injustice or what immediate danger to your country you want the war to remedy.
Now, in this case, I agree.
We don't have a clear idea of the goal at all.
And it's a fair guess to suppose that the danger of Pakistan is much more on President Obama's mind than anything about Afghanistan.
But, you know, the problem about Pakistan is sort of wheels within wheels.
That country, too, is divided from within.
There are nuclear weapons there.
The idea that one of the tribal terrorists might get hold of a nuclear weapon seems very farfetched.
But the country itself, the control of the government over its region is not very strong, not very secure.
And yet if you destroy what security there is in Afghanistan, you know, it's a country of a far more imposing to try to occupy or conquer or subdue than Iraq was.
And and, you know, the problem with with Pakistan also can't be separated from its rivalry with India.
And, you know, the huge hidden difficulty in that region, which Americans barely know the name of and Obama, I don't think, has mentioned is is Kashmir, a country that both Pakistan and India have claims on, where there are now, I believe, three quarters of a million Indian soldiers occupying the country.
And it is for that for that region as controversial a cause as Palestine is for that other part of the Middle East.
And we don't we don't hear about that.
But, of course, that's very much in the cards when Pakistanis and their government think about what the Americans might be doing.
America is known to be allied with India.
If Americans show much encroachment into Pakistan, that's a hugely threatening fact.
And the reaction it's likely to draw is immense.
So on the one hand, you know, a military officer like Petraeus has to want to get rid of the terrorists in the border region as far as possible in order to protect American interests in Afghanistan.
On the other hand, if you destabilize Afghanistan seriously, there is huge popular backing for repelling the Americans by other means.
And they don't trust us because of our closeness to India.
Right.
Well, and as you know, I brought up Eric Margulies there who wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj and, you know, covered the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 80s and spent, you know, decades over in that part of the world.
The way he puts it is that, you know, in total agreement with you there, we have alliance with both of these countries, but we only really mean it with India.
And and Pakistan knows we're playing a double game on them.
And so they're playing a double game on us because, again, and this goes to your point about Americans don't even know where we're talking about.
They might picture a blob somewhere in the center of Central Asia or something like that.
But Pakistan is kind of a skinny little country that runs north and south.
And if there's a nuclear war with India, they have to retreat into Afghanistan.
That's what they consider their strategic backyard fallback plan in the case of an atomic war.
And so they can't give up the land of Afghanistan to the Karzai government that is allied with America and India when they need that land.
And that's their strategy there.
And so they're never going to stop backing the the Pakistani Taliban, whose job it is to destabilize the Afghan government and never let them claim a monopoly on power there.
Yeah, no, I think you've got the fallacy of what's so wrong with creating dependency on certain tribes, at least for a little while on American forces, when what we're fighting against is a force so much stronger for for internal reasons.
And, you know, that gets to the deeper fallacy, I think, of of counterinsurgency as a whole.
I mean, that that strategy was, you know, brought forward during the Vietnam War.
And a man like Petraeus, who wrote his Ph.
D.on counterinsurgency, was among the group out of West Point who thought it could have been done right.
You know, Vietnam might even have been, you know, a victorious war if we'd handled it right.
We just did counterinsurgency wrong.
But I mean, I, you know, I picked up if you've got a second for for a reading.
I picked up this old book by Hans Morgenthau, an early critic of the Vietnam War.
He was only a tactical critic of it in the late 50s and early 60s, but had changed around completely by the end of 64 and was saying this war could not be won.
And it was a very wrong investment of American energy.
And he writes, you know, in an article from the New York Times magazine, April 1965, you know, at this time, a new theory of warfare called counterinsurgency was put into practice.
Strategic hamlets were established, massive propaganda campaigns were embarked upon, social and economic measures were at least sporadically taken.
But all was to no avail.
The mass of the population remained indifferent, if not hostile, and large units of the army, and he means the South Vietnamese regular army, ran away or went over to the enemy.
The reasons for this failure are of general significance.
They stem from a deeply ingrained habit of the American mind.
We like to think of social problems as technically self-sufficient and susceptible of clear-cut solutions and foreign aid as part of this.
And then he concludes, this view derives from a complete misconception of the nature of civil war.
People fight and die in civil wars because they have a fate which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a fate.
Now, that's what I can bury with asking the Obama administration to guard against.
And the word that occurs often and centrally in his cables is dependency.
That's all we're doing is creating dependency.
Yeah, and not just this tribe here and this faction here in the Afghan war, but then also in the surrounding countries where we have bases and alliances, India, Pakistan, etc.
It does seem kind of, well, it's almost too good to be true from the point of view, I guess, of the Pentagon is that all of this just means permanent conflict.
And no matter which way we go, as long as we don't leave, we're creating the circumstances for the excuse for the next intervention.
It's been like this since World War One.
Every time they blow something up, now they have to go and blow up more stuff to fix the problems that their original explosions caused.
Yeah, it keeps it keeps our defense and national security machine going.
But it is also it's also I would think just what Al-Qaeda and the numbers of people from that region who do hate America would most desire also, because the more we stay in that region, the more innocent people we kill in night raids or with predator or reaper drone attacks, the more people have a sort of sworn antagonism against us.
And, you know, they become virtual allies of Al-Qaeda, even if they've never heard of them.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing is, I guess, the base dishonesty of the empire is its refusal to admit that it is an empire and its refusal to deal straight with the American people that, listen, we're getting away with bloody murder over there only occasionally, you know, buildings full of you people are going to get blown up as a consequence.
You know, I mean, that's the simple tradeoff we're talking here.
I don't think most Americans would rather take the risk of getting blown up by terrorists and keeping the empire if the choice was put to them that way.
You know, do you do you think that there is an element of demonstration for Iran in this because that's something that a well-informed friend or two has brought up to me as a possibility.
I mean, what there is there is a you know, why are we doing this?
The obvious explanations don't really take care of the case.
But if you add Iran and you say, well, you know, that's that's a big problem Obama wants to solve.
And he has been convinced by whatever authorities, military and civilian, that the way to prove to Iran that the U.S. really could be serious about military strikes against Iran or serious about keeping the pressure up.
The only way to do that was to increase our commitment to Afghanistan.
I'm wondering if that's an element of it.
Well, I mean, in general, we do have them surrounded, right?
We got ships in their Gulf and in the Indian Ocean.
We have major forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the thing is, it seems to me like the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are Iran's hostages.
They're not a force that is ready to turn around and and, you know, meet in the middle and invade Iran and not even I don't think Bill Kristol or any of them talk about an actual land war in Iran, which is covered in mountains and it's four times the size of Iraq.
So, you know, that's not that's not a possibility.
And, you know, this is something that William S. Lynn talked about in his article, how to destroy an army or how to lose an army.
He wrote for the American Conservative magazine, I think, back in 2005 or six.
No, it must have been in at the end of 06, beginning of 07, when Fred Kagan and those guys were pushing the surge in Iraq.
He said this is how to lose an army.
You dig into Iraq, surge into Iraq, in this case, just Afghanistan, same difference.
Put all your troops within missile striking range of Iran and then attack Iran and you'll lose an army.
And he said, guess what?
In history, all those generals that lost all those armies, none of them thought they were about to or else they wouldn't have done the stupid thing they did that got them their army lost.
And this is what happens.
And and it's the number one most dangerous consequence of a war against Iran, which, again, in the State of the Union address last night, Obama threatened them.
I love the way I am too good at this, David, because you're sitting there saying we need a world free of nuclear weapons.
And I said, yeah, you just mean you're threatening Iran.
And then his next sentence was, and I'm threatening Iran because a world free of nuclear weapons means Iran better not make them and we're threatening to bomb them if they try or supposedly they are trying.
You know, everybody knows they're not.
Everybody knows that's just a myth or anybody who reads any foreign papers anywhere in the world or looks at the IAEA website for 15 minutes knows that that's not the case.
I'm very almost exhausted, exasperated anyway, I know that with that pattern of his of constant trimming one, not this thing on this side, that thing on that side.
I mean, the it was the same with the West Point speech, which was peculiarly almost a speech for peace, saying, you know, we're going to do this temporary thing, but this war is going to begin to end almost before you know it.
And certainly by the end of my first term was the suggestion.
But then he goes to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize and makes a war speech saying that, you know, wars in our time are inevitable and necessary and that he is a realist.
And unlike unlike Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he, Obama, faces the world as it is.
I mean, this is this is bizarre in a way to make to make the peace speech at West Point and the war speech when you accept the Peace Prize.
Yeah, well, and, you know, the double talk works on people who aren't looking for it, I guess.
I mean, the same thing happened in Prague when he really gave his world without nuclear weapons speech, which I guess is supposed to be something only some stupid, dirty hippie thinks is important or something.
Right.
The abolition of thermonuclear weapons.
Only crazy people are for that.
But that whole speech was only the first half.
The whole second half was.
And this is why we're putting anti-missile missiles 30 miles from Moscow or maybe 60 miles from Moscow on the border of Poland.
And we're calling it defense from Iran and and and we're putting the radars here in the Czech Republic, whether you people like it or not.
That was what the speech was really about.
That was the policy.
Although he pulled back, he pulled back the radar from the Czech Republic and the missiles from Poland.
Oh, I thought they just announced some more missiles going into Poland yesterday or two days ago.
Oh, well, I think I have that here somewhere.
I'm sorry.
I don't.
I don't want to go back and forth on that, but he did for many months.
It seems that that was pulled back.
But I mean, Obama, in a very different way, he leads wars than Bush with his belligerence and strutting.
You know, he did when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, write an article for a student publication on nonproliferation.
That was that became a sort of dangerous little piece of evidence for the right wing campaign against him when he was running for president in one of his very few publications, because Obama, except for a few poems and so on, was careful not to publish much in his younger years.
So he was interested in anti proliferation and the danger of nuclear weapons.
One has to assume genuinely from an early age.
But this is a man who thinks that it is good to tell the world in very complete terms what he wants, what he would like.
And then in his actions indicate the opposite.
And, you know, I don't I don't know how people begin to estimate it or how they how they come to trust someone who speaks such high and hopeful words.
And then the actions are much in line with what our previous actions have been.
Well, and I have a confession to make.
I might as well make it to you.
Something in me wants to like this guy.
Maybe it's just because my whole life I've hated every president so much.
Well, you have a right.
I mean, I don't know.
I remember Jimmy Carter.
I'm sure I would.
Yeah, I'm sure I would have hated him if I if I remembered him.
I kind of hate him for his other things.
But anyway, Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton and George Bush again.
And these people are the scum of the earth, the most horrible people.
They're worse than Jeffrey Dahmer or any serial killer.
And, you know, worse than the the vampire of Sacramento, these guys.
And now here's this guy.
He's young.
He's smart.
He's at least well spoken.
And he's a black guy.
And it works on me, too.
I want to like him.
But then, like when I'm watching the speech last night, I just I can't.
I mean, everything he says, it's it's half I'm going to buy you everything for free and half.
We're don't worry, we're going to end the wars while we escalate them and threaten more.
You have I mean, I think you have caught his greatest weakness and it's a weakness he shares with all the predecessors you named with the go at least going back to Reagan and including Reagan with the partial exception of Bush, Sr., who, you know, backed off on taxes and also, you know, took a step towards trying to put pressure on Israel.
But all of them could not bear to tell Americans that things worth having but difficult to achieve had to be paid for.
You have to pay for it.
You can't win wars and declare victory and pull out.
You can't, you know, have social programs and keep taxes down.
And Obama has the exact same tendency that way as Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
I mean, I consider him, you know, I mean, Reagan and Clinton, the people who are most guilty of pandering in this way, but Obama is very much in their mold so far rhetorically.
All right, everybody, you know, wait a minute, I got some more to say.
Here's the deal.
The military coup already happened, right?
Why have General Petraeus cross the river and and, you know, officially destroy the Constitution forever and create a fascist dictatorship when they have George Bush's and Barack Obama's who make perfect front men?
Well, it's it's true.
There's no there's no need to be the person holding the reins of power visibly when there isn't anything you really want that you don't get.
So I think that's right.
The power of the power of saying no to them.
It doesn't seem to be in any of our leaders thus far.
You know, Carol Quigley that wrote Tragedy and Hope back in the day, it was kind of the conspiracy theorist Bible, because here's this guy telling sort of the inside story of all the most powerful bankers and their lawyers and politician front men that controlled British and American policy to a great extent during the World Wars and so forth.
But what was the most important part of that to me was where Quigley actually says in there that he's scared because now you can't just rely on the fact that some skull and bones men or some chairman of the board at Lazard Brothers in England or something somehow is the ultimate final say on what the policy is going to be that has some kind of control that now those people had created an empire that was so big that it was just a free for all.
And he was really worried that people like the Goldwater rights is how he defined that, you know, the military industrial complex guys that their new establishment was far more powerful than anything that the old banking clans could match.
And it seems like that's the world we're living in now, right?
Let me and so I'll just pick that up and close my thought with that.
The large power military industrial state power that we're talking about is dangerous and is ominous in part because its motives are undisclosed.
The avowed reasons for its actions are not the unavowed reason.
But it is even even though all that is true, it's also irrational.
I mean, look, you know, south of our borders and at the drug wars in Mexico, some parts of which seem on the verge of chaos of falling that Mexico right near us falling apart.
The disaster that would come on this country, if Mexico really does become a failed state, it dwarfs anything that could follow from failure in Afghanistan.
And yet we're we're trying to solve the problems in Afghanistan that we do very little about in Mexico.
And that's the irrationality.
And when you think about it, you just stand back and shake your head.
Yeah.
And with budget deficits approaching two trillion dollars a year to that's the real punch line to me.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think the car's already on fire and going over the cliff right now is just the free fall before we hit the bottom.
Well, your next interview must have a note of hope in it, since this one closes this way.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see what we can do about that.
OK.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time.
I always enjoy talking to you.
Good talking to you.
All right.
But that's David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale.
He writes about politics for a great many magazines.
And he is the editor of Edmund Burke's Selected Writings on Empire, Liberty and Reform.
That's interesting.
Wish I was smart enough and had the time enough to dig into that.
Please check out his recent blog entry at The Huffington Post, The Meaning of the Ikenberry Cables.
Just got an important on air correction from our guest today, David Bromwich.
He wanted to make sure to get it straight here.
Apparently he got the name of the secretary of the Navy in the movie Seven Days of Mayrock.
That's Adam Barnswell, not Hardesty.
Now, that's meticulous.
