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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
What did I tell you?
Staying in Iraq forever, and then Fox News at the top of the hour.
By the way, they're meeting at the White House to come up with excuses to tell you we're staying in Iraq forever.
Yeah, well, imagine that.
Something honest on Fox News.
All right, David Bromwich 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.
I really need to read that.
I keep saying that every time I interview him, and then I forget.
And co-editor of Yale University Press edition of On Liberty.
I think I left out the word the in there somewhere.
Anyway, welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
Thanks a lot, and it's good to be here.
Good.
Also, I forgot to say, David writes for The Huffington Post.
He's got incredible articles there, and I really like this stuff.
You can tell you're a literature professor and all that.
Got the actual writing skills that some of us sorely lack.
Well, anyway, quoting skills.
Yeah, well, it really is something.
It's a bizarro world type of column.
What the heck has happened to us that all of these terrible things are going on?
And, you know, in fact, I think I want to start off our discussion here with this article.
I don't know if you saw it, but good enough anyway.
It's by Howard Fineman in Newsweek called Post Anti-Americanism.
And it's about the view of the collapse of the American empire from Europe and how they're just rolling their eyes at us and just shaking their heads and watching us repeat all their same mistakes, driving our, you know, committing national suicide like all empires do.
No, I haven't read that.
I pretty much like Howard Fineman, so I'll look it up.
Yeah, yeah, it's good.
He's talking about a recent trip that he took.
He's never seen it like this before where he says, they can't even be bothered to hate us anymore.
Anyway, so it seems like as everything is falling apart and we have, depending on how exactly you count them, I would say five wars going on right now, at least four.
It seems like as things fall apart, if we can kind of fast forward to the end of your article here, we get to the solution, which is to start another war, right?
Yeah, well, if somehow in our domestic politics, the, you know, what to call them, left-wing libertarians and right-wing libertarians could get together and realize that the biggest spending that absolutely kills the deficit is our spending on wars, then we'd have a start.
And I, you know, I felt for a while that this is a point that President Obama could afford to make, to say, you know, you who worry about the deficits, this is one of the ways we can start reducing the deficit.
But he lacks the courage to do that thus far.
And, you know, our dissident political groups lack the, I don't know what, maybe just the good sense and intelligence to see the point.
It's funny, you know, I still wonder myself, even after all this time, whether Obama is just pure evil like all presidents or whether it's, like you say, just a lack of courage to do the thing that he knows is right.
He doesn't seem like that bad of a guy.
I mean, he's kind of a product, a corporate kind of actor sort of, you know, position holder and whatever.
I understand that.
But he is the guy in the chair.
And what's right is so obvious, and it's even politically expedient.
You know what I mean?
Why not just close Guantanamo in one day?
Why not just say, you know, forget the Status of Forces Agreement?
We're getting out of Iraq.
Wouldn't that help him?
Wouldn't that make him look like big macho man leader guy that he needs to be in order to be reelected?
I think as much of it as he can do and can show people that he is leading the doing of does help him.
It helps him to look like what he pretends to be, a leader.
You know, he is evil to the extent that power is evil, and he has inherited and extended power.
So that part's true.
I mean, I think one of his faults politically, but something that helps you figure him out a little, is that he does have the academic and, you know, high corporate habit of, you know, he loves to declare his beautiful sentiments, what it is that he would most like to do.
And I think politically he gets in trouble over this.
But, you know, we've heard sentiments from him that it's done him no political good to speak of, about closing Guantanamo and wanting Israel to stop its settlements and, you know, climate change legislation and many other things.
His drawback is that he isn't good at following through.
And these, you know, intentions, if that's what they are, are left to just lie around.
And they alienate his supporters by the failure to come through.
And they make the people who hate him, hate him all the more because he's come right out and said it.
So, you know, he's very hard to get a picture of.
But I think it's partly because his stance changed so much in the half a year before he came into power and the half year or year after.
But now he is a pretty conventional, you know, imperial president in our foreign policy in most ways.
Now, did you happen to see this Haaretz story yesterday?
Focus USA, Will Israel Really Attack Iran Within a Year?
It's about the new Jeffrey Goldberg article coming out.
You know, just preparing for our conversation, I just now read the Goldberg article.
Oh, is the Goldberg article out now?
You can see it online at the Atlantic site.
OK, great.
Well, I mean, that article is being treated as a more or less impartial piece of reporting.
I saw that there was a long, serious kind of summary column about it by Steve Clemens.
But I, you know, I thought Clemens got it wrong.
I mean, he sees Goldberg as trying his best to report accurately the percentages and what Israel's, you know, deep motives are and what's likely to happen.
But I think Goldberg in this article, as he has done before, is working to a serious extent as a publicist for Netanyahu.
And he's trying to build up support for whatever Israel may do and to work on Obama, you know, to soften the American acceptance of what Israel may do.
It says at one point that chances have gone above 50-50 now.
He thinks that sometime in the next few months, and he puts it at next spring, Israel may just, you know, announce to the U.S. that it has launched 100 fighter bombers over to take care of the Iranian nuclear sites and, you know, leave it to Obama to approve or disapprove, knowing that he won't dare to disapprove.
I mean, I think that to write an article saying that is provocative in itself, and he's following a certain technique of side-taking journalists and being a literary critic.
I know what the strategy is.
You admire a piece of writing, and it's saying something you want to do also.
So you summarize what looks like just the words on the page written by somebody else, but you're also saying what you want.
That's, I think, what Goldberg manages to do in this article.
It's not that he wants Israel to bomb Iran, but he wants whatever Israel does to be okay.
Well, and it is all about creating in the broader kind of understanding in the narrative or the whatever zeitgeist or public consciousness or whatever the thing is, the idea that this is just inevitable.
We're going to have to bomb these Iranians over this nuke thing, and everybody knows that.
Yeah, he is striving to make it look more normal, more like part of what could have been predicted.
And, of course, Israeli memories of the Holocaust are brought up.
Rather more interestingly, he deals a bit with Benjamin Netanyahu's reverence for his father, Benzaie Netanyahu, who's a great scholar, author of a huge masterpiece of scholarship, I take it, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain.
But Benzaie Netanyahu, who's now 100 years old or something, is an old-style greater Israel partisan.
He was personal secretary to Zev Yevotinsky.
That's the founder of the Likud party, right?
Pretty much.
The spiritual link between Herzl's nationalism and the right wing of Israeli politics today.
All right, so hold it right there.
We're talking with David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale, and he writes for the Huffington Post.
And we're talking about, well, the empire in general, but Iran specifically right now.
Hang tight.
You can watch the LRN studio cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with David Bromwich.
He's a professor at Yale University and writes at the Huffington Post.
He's got a really great article today.
One more war, please.
I highly suggest you go and read it.
It's very good.
And now I'm about to share with you, David, my very favorite thing that Hillary Clinton ever said in her whole life, I think, that I know of.
I can't think of anything that she ever said that was better than this.
Okay, so the context is, first of all, I'm sorry, a breakout capability means that if a country has the ability to make nukes, if they try to make nukes, that's a breakout capability.
It's basically meaningless.
They talk about how much uranium has been enriched up to 3 percent as the standard, even though why not just count all the uranium in the ground?
They have enough uranium in the ground to make 100 bombs, whatever.
They still got to do 15 things before they have bombs out of it.
But anyway, so that's a bogus standard anyway.
So then the context is this.
It's an interview from August 8th by David Sanger and some other guy at the New York Times.
And Sanger is badgering Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, about, well, what about the breakout?
And I know you can't talk about intelligence, but what about other things that might lead you to believe that maybe their breakout capability has been pushed back or something like that?
And so she's kind of defending herself from this guy, Sanger.
So that's the context of the way she's answering here.
It's not like she's trying to be a good person or anything.
She's kind of defending herself.
And she says, well, let me just say – she stutters a bit – but let me just say that based on my conversations with allies, it's not so much the timing as to when or if or how the Iranians might pursue the nuclear weapons.
It's whether they do so.
Pursue now was the word she's using here.
Not when, if, how, but whether they do so.
And so then she says, and so whether it would take six months or a year, five years, it's still a deep concern, blah, blah, blah.
Five years, whether – so Hillary Clinton just said Scott Horton is right, has been right every day on this show for five years, saying the same thing over and over and over again.
There is no Manhattan Project in Iran.
There is no nuclear weapons threat from Iran.
There's only a completely arbitrary breakout capability standard and they're liars and murderers.
Which Japan has, too.
Yeah, that is a revealing statement because, on the one hand, she is conceding and probably looking ahead to the coming national intelligence estimate, which we are told will not rate Iran's current nuclear capacity very dangerous, though there's been a fight within the group about that, but this is what the leaks seem to suggest.
She's looking ahead to that and that there will not be an emergency bell rung by that report.
But on the other hand, she's going along with the Israeli preference to say that Iran, because it is opposed to the very existence of Israel, poses an existential threat to Israel simply because if they had a weapon, they might use it.
And that means that the logic of preventive war, which means you go to war against somebody who means to destroy you, works on any timescale.
If you're given Iran's current intentions and given the fact that they have an anti-Semitic president who refers to Jews in a recent speech as the filthiest, most criminal people who come from all corners of the world, etc., etc., absolutely standard anti-Semitic stuff.
Given that that's their leader, given that the mullahs are extreme Islamists in their intentions, never mind the whole history of Iranian foreign policy, never mind the triangular relations between U.S., Iran, and Israel, which is full of concession and compromise on all sides in the past, including what Iran helped us to do in Afghanistan in the early days.
We can support Israel if it wants to go after Iran any time because Iran is going to be dangerous at any time, no matter how mean and meager their advances toward nuclear weapons are right now.
She's invoking this idea of the existential threat.
And of course, if you look at it that way, though there isn't the same religious determination in it, and there's not the same religious vocabulary of hatred, Israel is an existential threat to Iran also.
And Israel actually has the weapons.
Yeah, and threatens to use them all the time.
I mean, they don't say anti-Persian racist things, I don't guess.
Not that they get quoted too often, but they sure threaten nuclear holocaust all the time.
Israel, the Israeli rhetoric, including statements of various of them attributed to Ben Zion Netanyahu, is anti-Arab, not anti-Iranian.
And they, of course, are not an Arab country, but it's part of our mythology to include them, rope them in under the general definition of Arab.
Well, I don't know why we can't just be like the good old days under the greatest president ever, Ronald Reagan, and just sell weapons to the Iranians and be their friends.
I thought you were going to say Eisenhower, who called off any American participation in the Suez debacle.
That would be my nominee for our best president of the Middle East.
Oh, okay, yeah.
No, I can't stand Ronald Reagan.
I just like the fact that he sold weapons to the Iranians.
That's how dangerous and horrible and existential threatening they are, et cetera.
And who were the middlemen of that sale?
The Israelis.
The Israelis, absolutely.
Well, we were backing both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, where a million people died.
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, and by the way, back to the whole breakout thing here.
This is, you know, it's really hard to say the Iranians are going to have nuclear bombs by the end of the year for 20 years in a row and have it never be right.
It's a very kind of, it must be a clumsy sort of narrative to have to try to carry forward, right?
They're always about to have nukes, but they never do get them.
And so in some places, like the Hillary Clinton quote just there, and this Michael Hayden quote, Bush's former torturer-in-chief and spire-in-chief Michael Hayden.
Head of the CIA, right.
Yeah, he says here in Time magazine, just a couple weeks ago here, Washington raises Iran war rhetoric over nuclear program, is the title, and he says Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage.
And frankly, that will be as destabilizing as they're actually having a weapon.
So they are dumbing down the costus belli here to a pile of uranium at 3.6% industrial grade under the watchful eye of the International Atomic Agency inspectors in a safeguarded facility, and they're saying that might as well be H-bombs with three-stage missiles ready to go, huh?
Yeah.
No, I think you've said it just right.
And that is absolutely amazing to me that they can get away with that.
Dumbing down the baseline that you have to operate from to trigger a reaction.
What is most surprising to me as a symptom of what in that article I called the sleepwalking mood of American public opinion now, and of American official pronouncements, is the neglect of the reality we could easily face up to, because we are not Israel, we're not near Iran, we don't pretend to be panicked by it, although if they work on us hard enough, maybe enough people will be.
But the truth is, and Israeli defense ministers and heads of the Mossad have said this for many years, is that Iran is no literal immediate threat to Israel.
The idea of an existential threat is bogus.
What is driving Israel is the idea that Iran would be a military power by having a single nuclear weapon, that they could have military leverage in the region.
And that's what Israel doesn't like.
Right, that they couldn't have the open option to attack them at any time anymore.
Israel would be less powerful.
Can you stay another ten-minute segment with us here, David?
Sure.
Great.
Everybody, it's David Bromwich from Yale and the Huffington Post.
Go read the article here.
One more word, please.
It's really good.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, any time, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
I'm about to have a nervous breakdown, my head really hurts.
If I don't find a way out of here, I'm gonna go to jail, cause I'm crazy and I'm hurt.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale.
So if you can get into Yale and you like literature, you can take his class.
Short of that, you can read a lot of wise things that he writes at the Huffington Post.
That's HuffingtonPost.com, of course.
The one I'm looking at is called One More War, Please.
And it goes back to, I think, the original idea here that we started with, that our empire is completely falling apart.
Our society here at home, in many ways, is in real trouble.
Most importantly, the unemployment rate and all those individuals affected by that.
The economic times and all that.
And yet, somehow, we just keep sleepwalking over the edge of the cliff when it comes to the foreign empire.
Why is that?
It seems like people are grown-ups and stuff.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, I can only put together a couple more pieces for you.
People have to try to analyze the motives or whatever makes them hang together.
But, I mean, it is, like so much of politics, irrational.
It only seems to me that in our country, in the last seven or eight years, and Obama's time in office has been no exception, the irrationality has climbed to a new level.
I mean, you have, I think it's next week, we're told that General Petraeus, who has now inherited the command of the Afghanistan War, is going to be on a publicity blitz telling European media people and so on why our commitment in Afghanistan is necessary and will be extended as long as we have to.
But the same General Petraeus told Congress in testimony as commander of CENTCOM last March that the leading root cause of dangers to American security at home and abroad was the unsolved problem of Israel-Palestine.
And yet that we have more or less given up while driving forward the commitment to war in Afghanistan and upping the ante that threatens Iran with sanctions that may lead to war.
You know, there was an article describing just how unreal our projections of keeping war on the table are that a friend pointed out to me in Juan Cole's site, Informed Comment.
The article is called The Illusion of Limited War.
I don't know if you saw it, by a guy named Mahan Abedin.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right.
But, you know, he points out, and he seems to be a realist, that what will happen if the U.S. is even implicated in an Israeli attack on Iran is that they'll hit back at the U.S. as if there were an existential danger to them.
And it will be the Revolutionary Guard and their black ops people, the Quds Force, that will do it, and they will use speedboats, suicide speedboats as weapons in the Persian Gulf.
They will use missiles, and they will attack American installations abroad, and they'll try to inflict thousands of casualties on Americans, so that even if they lose out, and they will be seen to lose out, given our enormous advantage in weapons, they will discourage a second American strike.
But the danger of that, of course, is that the American public then in turn gets so worked up that nothing short of nuclear weapons or whatever, you know, will satisfy us to take our revenge against Iran.
So, I mean, those are the dangers we are courting with rhetoric like Hillary Clinton's, saying, you know, even if they could possibly jump forward and in 10 years develop a nuclear weapon, we still have to treat it as an existential threat.
And meanwhile, going forward in Afghanistan with these two policies that sort of defeat each other, counterterrorism, which is, you know, killing terrorists, but also managing to kill civilians around them and alienate the people, and counterinsurgency, which is meant to befriend the people by setting up local governments in the villages, which, however, we're not very equipped for because we don't have enough people to do it, we don't have allies on the ground in Afghanistan to counteract the force of the insurgents, and we don't speak the language or observe the religion.
So, it's just a kind of irrationality that grows from its own, as I see it, poisonous sources, and I don't see any way to get out of it except education and enlightenment.
But the forces for that in America right now are not strong.
Well, you know, the thing is, too, that in America, as well as anywhere else, we're run by oligarchy of the people, I don't know the exact number, right, but they always say it's the 0.01% that own massive proportions of the amount of wealth and property in the society, and they're jerks.
They're the ones who are doing this to all of us.
You know, I mean, it's almost like a Marxist definition class war, but it's not even just the billionaires, but the tens of billionaires versus everybody else.
It's insane.
Yeah, well...
And then we cheer for it.
In general, the American people go along, no matter what.
Well, that's what's so disappointing about this presidency, that you had a man who seemed to have some consciousness of social and even economic equality greater than his predecessors coming into office, and that he would see how the weapons and commercial network, where the same group of people may own General Electric and one of the TV networks, how this is hurtful to society and increases the forces for inequality in the country.
But he, once getting into power, has to be in close alliance with those people, or he feels he loses his support, so it's a pretty deadly circle.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, because he comes into power, he came into power 50 years after Ike Eisenhower gave his military-industrial-complex speech, and Ike Eisenhower gave his military-industrial-complex speech on the day before he was gone.
It was his last day in power.
He's like, well, I'm the one who just did nothing to undo what FDR and Truman handed me, so there you go, everybody, but don't let them control your democracy or anything.
Bye.
He did nothing to undo it and did everything to promote it, but you're right, and I, you know, having re-read it a couple times recently, that farewell speech by Eisenhower is a great prophecy.
Every word of it matters, and it's the best thing he's left us, but its warnings haven't been noticed enough.
Right.
I mean, and the thing is, it's not like they were ever scaled back this entire time.
I mean, it's for 50 years later, for Obama to inherit that power, there's no surprise.
There was an assault agreement, and we had Reagan and Gorbachev after Reykjavik beginning to build down the system of missiles and missile defenses, not all the way, but I mean, I do feel that the biggest lost chance was in the early 90s at the end of Bush Sr.and the beginning of Clinton.
That's when something could have been done, and both of those two presidents failed us.
To put it very mildly improperly, how kind of you.
And now, you know, back to the Iran thing, because I think you did a really good job of explaining the danger of war with Iran, but I think I'd like to expand on the whole point there about it possibly coming to nuclear weapons, because the thing is about that, which I don't know if people really know this or what, but there's about four times the population of Iraq in Iran, and the country's about three times the size, I think, and it's all shaped like Colorado in the topography.
It's mountainous land, and it is impossible, and no one in the military believes ever that they will ever invade Iran.
They forget about it, they say.
That isn't even a fantasy.
So a full-scale war with them means atom bombs.
That's what it means.
I'm afraid that's right.
And, you know, there's this article by Gwynne Dyer, Let's Admit We Can't Attack Iran, and it's about how apparently in the Clinton years, Clinton wanted to bomb them, and the Pentagon ran 15 war games over and over, and it came to nukes every time, and they just said forget it.
Was that not on antiwar.com?
I think I read it there.
Yeah, yeah, I think it was.
I'm reading it in the Salt Lake Tribune now.
It's hard to keep track.
The signals that this administration is sending out now are both, I mean, they're two-faced.
They are keep things slow, but keep up the pressure against Iran, as in this recent press briefing that Obama held with select reporters on Iran, and I'm afraid that's not going to help us at all.
Well, and, of course, Netanyahu could just start the war tomorrow if he feels like, and who's going to do anything about it?
I don't think we're dealing with Edward Olmert anymore.
Let's call him reasonable, compassionate.
All right, thank you very much, David.
Thank you.
You're great.
Everybody, go read David Bromwich at the Huffington Post, please.
