04/30/07 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing Doug Bandow.
He's a writer, policy analyst, and member of the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy.
He's the author of a ton of books, the last of which is Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire.
Welcome to the show, Doug.
Happy to be on.
It's good to talk with you.
I'm a big fan of your writing for a very long time.
Oh, thank you much.
Very kind.
Now, I guess let's start at the end of your article here.
Is George Bush a jihadist plant?
Well, if you just look at his policies, you know, if I was a conspiracy-minded person, I would say, yeah, you know, that he'd been converted to Islamic fundamentalism a long time ago, and they said, hang out and we'll activate you when we need you.
And George Bush, the sleeper cell.
Exactly.
Yeah.
He's being run by Osama bin Laden in the mountains somewhere.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they got that promise software.
I guess they communicate back and forth.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, okay, now, I'll tell you, I honestly, I am a big conspiracy-minded, and I don't think that bin Laden and George Bush are necessarily working together, talking to each other.
However, I do think that they are working together, I guess sort of in the same sense that you and I are all this time.
I mean, now we're on the phone together, but both of us have been basically pushing for the end of American interventionism and pushing against the idea that leaving Iraq is going to worsen our terrorism problem, etc.
And I sort of think of George Bush and Osama bin Laden working together for sort of the same purposes.
They both are pushing, really, aren't they, for a Saudi-dominated Sunni caliphate that dominates the Middle East into South Asia?
Isn't that what they both want?
Well, it's certainly what bin Laden wants.
Of course, if he's thinking about a Sunni-Saudi caliphate, he doesn't want the current royals to run it.
Right.
I think the problem with that for Bush is, frankly, I don't think he understands particularly the difference between Sunnis and Shia.
I think it probably gives him far too much credit to assume that kind of sophistication in terms of what he wants.
I think what he wants is pro-American regimes.
And I don't think he quite gets the fact, I mean, this kind of irony that what you're at the moment doing is supporting a Shiite government in Iraq, which is actually allied with the Shiite government in Iran, which we don't like, which we're trying to convince the Sunnis to be against, I think that kind of goes well over out of his understanding.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess, really, I shouldn't have said Bush.
Let's talk about James Baker then, because he's somebody who does understand.
And I don't know if you've ever read Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast.
No, I haven't.
Well, Greg Palast puts quite a bit of emphasis on who's going to control OPEC.
Now, what's happening with the civil war in Iraq is largely a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for who's going to be the top dog setting the quotas there.
And he basically sort of makes the same joke, I guess, that Bin Laden and the Bush regime, anyway, if not a junior himself, that what they're really both pushing for is to have a Sunni caliphate.
Obviously, they differ on who they want to be in charge of Saudi Arabia at the time.
But the Shiite mullahs in Iran are America's enemies as well as Bin Laden's.
They're the ones who stand in the way.
I think, yeah, and I think that the way they would look at it, I mean, James Baker, certainly going back to the first President Bush, these folks have long had a very strong and rather unsavory friendship with the Saudi royals.
So I think the view there is that Saudi Arabia is our friend and our bedrock foundation of policy in the Mideast is to maintain them.
And then that preserves oil stability and everything else.
Certainly going after Iraq was viewed, I think, to some degree by them as helping protect Saudi Arabia.
That's why we got involved the first go-around, primarily wasn't so much Kuwait as Saudi Arabia.
So that underlying devotion to Saudi Arabia is very, very strong.
And it's very embarrassing, of course, because this is a totalitarian regime, so you're talking about democracy.
And then your closest friend in the region is one of the most ugly authoritarian states there.
Right.
Yeah, there's some who say that really one of the main reasons that we invaded Iraq was simply to move our bases north out of Saudi Arabia because it was causing so much trouble for the kingdom there.
I think that, again, the problem here is that everybody will phrase things different.
But I think their argument would be we had to get rid of the threat, you know, which that would allow us to take our bases out of Saudi Arabia.
And indeed, we took our bases out of Saudi Arabia.
The problem is, of course, you have to-they want to start, you know, wherever they want to start.
You have to take Mideast policy back decades.
You know, why do we have troops in Saudi Arabia?
Well, it's to protect them, supposedly, from Iraq.
You know, why do we have the problem with Iraq?
Well, of course, we supported Iraq against Iran because we were afraid of Iran.
And, of course, we have a problem in Iran because, going back even further, we helped overthrow, you know, their elected prime minister back in 1953 and gave him the shah who they threw out.
So the problem here is the administration and its supporters all want to start, you know, it could be 1990 or whatever point they want to start.
They never want to look back at the very beginning where the U.S. has set all this stuff in motion.
Right.
And, you know, George Bush actually even said, well, hey, look, people say that the war in Iraq makes terrorism worse.
Well, September 11th happened before the war in Iraq, so that's it.
And it reminded me of Harry Brown, that's what Harry Brown used to say, history does not begin on September 11th.
Yeah, no, I debated Victor Davis Hanson a couple of weeks ago, and he made this, you know, they've been doing this since 1979, and I came back and said, well, Iran doesn't start in 1979.
So Iran, if you really want, I mean, at the very least, you start in 1953.
You could argue you'd go back even further.
But you can certainly start in 1953.
Come on, you know, they act as if, why did they attack us in Lebanon?
And I try to explain, well, you're in the middle of a civil war.
I mean, there's no context.
We were attacked in Lebanon, we were attacked in Yemen, we were, you know, they kind of glide over what the reality was in any of the preceding events, which helps you understand.
It doesn't justify terrorism, but it certainly helps explain why all this stuff goes on.
Well, and it certainly puts a whole different spin on the question, which is really the primary topic covered in your article of whether the terrorists are going to follow us home when we leave Iraq.
If they're fighting us for no good reason, then it very well may be we got to stay there and kill them all until they're all dead.
But if the reason that they're terrorists against us is because our army is over there occupying their neighborhood, then perhaps pulling our troops out would lessen the risk of terrorism rather than making it more.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, this notion that they're kind of like puppy dogs, you know, that they're going to follow, it's utterly inane and it's embarrassing to have that kind of an argument made by, you know, supposedly important political leaders of the most powerful nation on earth.
I mean, it's, you know, you really just have to be kind of horrified at the thought of the image this presents to anybody who knows anything.
Yeah, sure.
John McCain, a couple of weeks ago, last week on the Jon Stewart Show, and I believe in the newspaper a couple of days before that, threatened that Zarqawi is going to follow us home and kill us.
And he's been dead for more than a year.
Yeah, I mean, what's really bothersome here is that, I mean, you get a sense that you have folks who are acting primarily on ideological and political presumptions that are utterly unshakable.
So it doesn't matter what the facts are, it doesn't matter what we discover, it doesn't matter what anybody who knows the area tells you, history doesn't matter, nothing matters.
They're attacking us because we're beautiful, we're so wonderful, that's why they're attacking us.
They're going to kill them in Baghdad so they don't come to Kansas City.
I mean, it's nonsense, but unfortunately, it's had a certain resonance with some Americans, and it's given them, you know, at least so far, the political power to carry through.
Yeah, I'll have to agree with that.
In fact, someone that I know very well, and in, I guess, a lot of ways, have a lot of respect for, that's his argument for why we have to stay in Iraq, is we have to fight them there so that they don't come to fight us here.
The flypaper theory, there's some finite number of terrorists, and if we keep our army in Iraq, they'll all come there until our Marines and Army soldiers shoot them all to death, and then the war on terror will be over.
We'll be safe.
Yeah, no, what's amazing is there's very good research out there that just, I mean, disapproves this completely.
There's the studies that were conducted both by a Saudi Arabian researcher and an Israeli, both of which looked at these new kind of foreigners flowing into Iraq.
Most of these people had never had any jihadist contact in the past.
These are people who were radicalized by Iraq, and you see that in many of the kind of locals who've been doing bombings, say, the bombing in Bali, you know, the bombing in Jakarta, the bombing in London, bombing in Madrid.
And you found local groups which, again, had no formal affiliation with Al-Qaeda but had been motivated.
Yeah, and the evidence is very strong.
One of the most powerful motivations bringing them in has been the war in Iraq, so we're creating people.
There's this weird notion there's a fixed number of jihadists, so we can kind of kill them all.
It just mistakes what human nature is all about and what motivates people.
And you'd think people who hailed from a country that staged its own revolution, where Americans grew angry because of British behavior, would understand that, you know, policy matters.
Politics matters.
Well, you'd have to have a population of people who knew anything about American history to feel that way, I think.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're right.
We don't seem to have that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, another question here is, if it was true, how immoral is this fly paper policy anyway?
You just invade a third country that had nothing to do with an attack against you in the hope of that in the process of destroying that country, you'll lure all the people who are a threat to you there instead?
Of course.
I mean, the problem is, you get back to the initial justification for going in.
And that, I think, clearly undermines any argument the administration makes.
The reality is nothing they said was true.
You know, you look at Colin Powell's discussion before the UN General Security Council, nothing was true.
You know, the claims about vast stores of weapons of mass destruction, none of them were true.
You know, the kind of sly game that people like Cheney tried in terms of tying Hussein to Al-Qaeda and what have you wasn't true.
So the problem is, all of their arguments are gone, so now they have to kind of look at these kind of desperate things.
Well, you know, we're going to promote democracy, you know, we're going to, you know, we have to stick around to save the Iraqis, even though they're being consumed by this horrific war while we're there, somehow if we stay there, we're going to get it fixed, or we can kill all the terrorists and then everybody will live happily ever after.
So I think there's a desperation there, because they know that the American people look at this and say, you know, we were misled, we were lied to, you know, what can we believe?
Yeah.
And, you know, back to the whole, you know, Bush and bin Laden seeing eye to eye, I had a great discussion with Gareth Porter on Friday about, well, and I've had this discussion all along for years now, I guess, with these people, James Bamford, Robert Pape, and many others who say that Al-Qaeda desperately wants us to stay.
That is their number one thing, is to keep this war going as long as possible.
If the war's over, they're out of there.
No, I mean, it's the best recruiting poster that they could have, you know, it's proof positive that America is anti-Muslim, you know, it's proof positive that we have aggressive designs.
You know, just the visual, what it presents to the rest of the Muslim world, as well as what it does to radicalize Iraqis.
I mean, every time we mistakenly kill somebody, we kick down doors, you know, these sorts of things.
And, you know, frankly, the longer it goes on, it discredits the whole message we have about democracy.
I mean, can you imagine going to other countries in the region and saying, you all should have democracy, look how well it worked in Iraq.
I mean, you know, so from bin Laden's standpoint, this is a fantastic opportunity for him.
An entire country is now a terrorist proving ground.
Urban warfare, I mean, the other, the real fear, I think, for the West is, you know, we talk about following this home is that it's not that us leaving causes them to follow us.
I mean, a certain number of them are going to go back to their home countries naturally, and they have all these new skills that we have essentially enabled them to learn.
It's absolutely frightening.
Yeah.
And you said the word earlier, terrorism university, that came from one of these jihadists put it up on his website last week.
He said he was, I think, referring to a former CIA official who called Afghanistan terrorism school.
And he said, well, if Afghanistan is terrorism school, then Iraq is terrorism university, pal.
Exactly.
I mean, we spread this knowledge all over, and of course, you don't even have to be there to spread it.
I mean, it gets spread by the Internet and everything else.
I mean, they're learning a lot of lessons that are very dangerous over the long term for the rest of us.
And I think it was in December, maybe toward the end of December, when Bush wasn't announcing the surge plan really yet, but was putting it off until after the new year.
And there was a lot of hype and talk about whether he was going to have to bow down and do what his dad's friend said and adopt the Baker Commission report and all that, which shorthand basically in the world, in the media out there, was a plan to get out, a plan to leave one way or another.
And I, in fact, blogged this on the anti-war.com blog at the time that this, I forget the man's name, but supposedly, Zarqawi's replacement as one of the head leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq came out and said, oh, George Bush is a wimp.
Look at him turning tail and run, blah, blah, which is, you know, simply begging, please don't go.
Of course.
We're doomed without you.
That's right.
And I mean, I understand, you know, one of the ways that you kind of appeal to people's egos and loss of face, you know, any number of these things, you know, you challenge them and then you make it clear if you leave, we're going to declare this a great victory, even though privately, you know, the jihadists are desperate for us to stick around.
Yeah.
And, you know, one of the things I learned from James Bamford, the great intelligence reporter, is that this was really why they did September 11th in the first place.
We're not just talking about, you know, aren't they lucky dogs that we invaded Iraq?
This is why they knocked down those towers was to to finally motivate the American military to come and fight in their neighborhood.
I guess I think that the phrase he used was from Zawahiri's point of view, America had been at war with them for 50 years since the end of World War Two, but never with Americans within rifle range.
They're trying to slap us in the face hard enough to bring us there to bog us down and bleed us dry in their neighborhood and also to get a reaction that would cause others to join their cause.
Right.
And what I find frustrating here is that a lot of Americans seem to think that terrorism started on September 11th, but we have a history of decades of terrorism committed by lots of different folks.
You know, and I mean, in none of those cases is that they were mad at somebody for being too free or something.
It's all kind of geopolitical, you know, games.
I mean, it's, you know, you want freedom for, you know, Ireland, or you want any number of other things, you start committing terrorism, and there's always a component of that is to get an overreaction by the authorities, because that gives you recruits.
You want the authorities to show up and break down doors and kill innocent people and arrest people, because that helps your cause.
So that's exactly what the jihadists expected, I mean, and we gave it to them.
I mean, we did the invasion, you look at Abu Ghraib, any number of things that we've done that, you know, it's very sad, you know, the mistakes that are made, especially as kind of a tribal, clan-oriented society, I mean, every time you kill somebody mistakenly, you suddenly got yourself 100 or 200 new enemies, and it's made the U.S. really hated by a lot of Iraqis.
And that's what the communists used to always say, the various red brigades and whatever in the, during the Cold War days, was the action is in the reaction.
Yep, exactly.
That's, I'm reminded, you mentioned Ireland.
I read a story one time about how the IRA chopped up, killed this British soldier, chopped him up into little pieces and left him on the steps of the barracks of the British troops.
So that when they found their buddy, they would be so outraged, they would just run out and commit atrocities against, you know, any average Irishman they found.
So that then the IRA could point and say, see what animals these British soldiers are, we told you.
Yep, that's exactly right, that overreaction, which, you know, and I don't blame troops in the field, I mean, in that situation, you can imagine the anger that consumes you.
You know, policymakers are putting U.S. soldiers in an absolute, you know, no-win situation.
You know, our soldiers are trained, they're phenomenal in terms of fighting a real war.
You know, they're not phenomenal in terms of trying to sort out a guerrilla conflict and decide who's the enemy and, you know, how do you kill the bad guys when they intermingle with, you know, civilians and, you know, you suddenly you have to be a mayor and you have to be all sorts of other stuff.
I mean, we've put our soldiers in an awful position.
Yeah.
And, you know, one more concrete example here that I have in my pocket is the actual hijackers.
People say, you know, refer to bin Laden's fatwas and say that he was angered by the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia and that kind of thing.
And of course, he always mentioned Palestine here and there.
But I read this book by Terry McDermott called Perfect Soldiers, which is basically not the 15, you know, muscle guys from Saudi Arabia, but the core of the September 11th hijackers.
They would sit around in their Hamburg apartment after going to the mosque or whatever.
They would sit around in the afternoon and talk about, did you hear what Israel did today?
Americans must pay for this.
That's what they talked about.
Every day was what Israel did and how it was America's fault.
Well, and that's something, that's an attitude that's very prevalent even in countries that are favorable to the U.S.
I visited Kuwait several times and these people love America because they know they would have ended up as the 19th province of Iraq if we hadn't invaded back in 1991.
And what you find, though, is that what they will consistently say is, oh, but one thing.
I mean, they hate American support for Israel.
And the visual you would see is you'd see posters of Israeli tanks in Palestinian villages.
And you're right, when you'd have Palestinian speakers come, it went to a women's center.
I mean, at that point, they hadn't gotten the suffrage yet.
They liked America, but they were angry over this policy.
So it's not just people who you figure don't like us anyway.
Even our friends say these kinds of policies are a problem, bother them, and you can see the anger that it creates.
And it's interesting, too, when you look at the degree to which the government of Israel took advantage of the September 11th attacks and their lobby has said about explaining to Americans that Al Qaeda is the same thing as the Palestinians and don't you see that these people are crazy and are terrorists and now, you know, we're all Israelis now and this and that.
But really, it was our support for them that got us bombed in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, that was clearly one of the very important grievances that motivates people.
And it is irritating.
The tendency is, you know, Americans do it, too.
They conflate, you know, kind of terrorists to attack Israel with terrorists to attack America.
I don't like terrorists to attack Israel, but that's still a very different thing from American policy.
And given the fact that we already face a problem of terrorism, the last thing we need to do is to take on everybody else's burdens.
You know, how about the terrorists to attack Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers?
How about we can start going down the list and say lots of these people are evil, but that doesn't mean that suddenly we have to be at war with them, because frankly, you know, we're having trouble enough on our own, let alone kind of decide to take everybody else's problem.
Right.
Well, and here we are backing Al Qaeda in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
It's one of the more bizarre.
I mean, and of course, Israel itself, you know, I mean, bears blame because of its initial invasion of 20-odd years ago, the creation of Hezbollah, and Israel helped create Hamas because it wanted a counterweight to Fatah, you know, which is a secular group.
But they thought they could weaken Fatah, and lo and behold, they certainly managed to do that.
You know, now, of course, they've gotten a far more dangerous, you know, threat, you know, a group that, you know, has political legitimacy and is involved in terrorism.
So once you start storing the pot, you know, as we have found, the Israelis have found, those have found, I mean, you never know what you're going to end up with.
Right.
And you know, and in fact, in your recent article, you quote from bin Laden's fatwa, where he said that he first decided that he wanted to knock down American towers back in 1983, when the US Navy was shelling Beirut.
Yeah, and I have to, I mean, that strikes me as just one of the most egregious, awful episodes of American policy.
I mean, we were blowing up hillsides with Muslim villages.
You know, we, I mean, we got involved in the middle of this horrible, fratricidal civil war to defend a minority Christian government, it wasn't even unified Christian, I mean, the factions there within both Christian and Muslim, you know, they throw in the druze, you know, I mean, mind boggling.
And I talked, I've talked to people, and I've mentioned, you know, we got involved in the civil war, and I had one person, very smart person, say, what do you, so you mean our troops deserved it, and you say that you're trying to tell me you can get involved in the war, and your soldiers aren't targets, it's a bizarre attitude that's still unfair what they did, even if we were killing them, like it's still unfair.
I mean, it's a horrid thing, and I think bin Laden's, you know, you don't have to believe everything he says, but that has a certain amount of credence to it, I think, of how the Muslim world perceived what the US was doing.
We were supporting the minority Christian government against Muslims, and we were killing them in the process.
Yeah, there was a plane that was hijacked, I'm sorry, I wish I remembered more specifically when and where, but I remember the, one of the hijackers running up and down the aisles saying New Jersey, New Jersey, and there was an American, a woman who got off the plane who said she was so confused, she didn't understand why he kept screaming New Jersey, New Jersey at her, and it turned out she went later and found out it was because it was the battleship New Jersey that had been shelling Beirut.
Yep, yep, that's exactly right.
And Matt, so what you're saying, then, is when the American government goes overseas and mass murders people, that sometimes that makes them angry and they want to fight back?
Yeah, it's amazing.
I mean, I think, you know, the comment of actually bin Laden, the fat war on the comments that have been heard by some others, is essentially if they're going to kill our women and children, we're going to kill their women and children.
I mean, it's an awful, awful perspective, but it's foolish of us to act as if we can kind of do whatever we want in the world, hurt people, kill people, and not have a reaction.
What terrorism has proved is they don't have to have carrier groups and aircraft carriers, you know, and intercontinental missiles.
There's another way they can hurt us.
And I think, you know, we've just got to understand it's not because, I mean, they hate our freedom.
I mean, I find that kind of this extraordinary argument goes if they sit around saying, we don't like the Bill of Rights, you know, and that First Amendment that America has is really awful.
Yeah, and we don't have that anymore anyway, so how could that possibly be the motive?
That's right.
I mean, if they know anything about American constitutional law, none of this stuff actually is in force, but, you know, it's nonsensical, and it really is, I mean, you talk to people in Europe and elsewhere, people who are friends of America, you know, and they just kind of roll their eyes at this, you know, notion that we're just so wonderful, that we're so beyond criticism, that obviously, you know, it has to be because we're nice guys that they're doing this.
You know, if we weren't all around swell guys, they'd leave us alone.
I mean, and it's awful, because, you know, we make dumb policies, you know, without caring about the consequences.
And, you know, when you read bin Laden say, kill women and children, civilians, wherever you can find them, because that's what they do to us, so we should do that back to them, there is nothing more, obviously, pure evil than that.
But then, what do we do?
What did the American society decide was the proper answer after September 11?
Kill as many of them as happened to be nearby where we're bombing, and if they die, screw them, tough.
Women, children, we don't care about that, Americans don't care about that.
What's the difference?
Yeah, what I find very disturbing is that, at the very least, there's no moral reflection.
I mean, it's one thing to say, you know, there are awful choices you make in the world, sometimes innocent people die, you know, I mean, we wish we had a better way, etc.
But you don't hear that stuff verbalized, it's all kind of kick Saddam's ass, do this, do that.
You know, I'd like to have some American policymakers express some anguish at the fact that Iraqis get killed, they're at checkpoints, I mean, these are families, they speed up, they don't follow instructions, they get killed.
Well, then we should regard this as a tragedy.
I mean, maybe it has to happen, but gee whiz, couldn't we be morally bothered?
Oh, no, it's just collateral damage.
And that's right, and that callousness, I think, comes through to the Muslim world, and ultimately, we're not going to change bin Laden's opinion, but we can change the opinion of a lot of other people in the Muslim world, and we need to be working on that.
Instead, we tend to make it worse.
I mean, the longer we're in Iraq, the longer we're engaged in these activities, the more reason they have to believe that we're really awful people.
Yeah.
And, you know, in Robert Pape's book, Dying to Win, he says a very important part of this is where the occupier is from.
When the occupier looks different and speaks a different language and believes a different religion, forget about it.
Insurgency is on.
There's no way to stop it.
That's exactly right.
I mean, Americans, if they were a little more reflective, would think about what would they like to have America patrolled by, you know, and kind of fill in the blank.
I mean, you'd have the same kind of reaction, not the sort of thing that Americans would countenance.
You know, you imagine if somebody else has kind of managed to intervene and was killing American, saying, oops, sorry about that, well, that's the way it goes.
And again, you know, that would not go over very well with Americans.
We do.
You know, we would resist.
We'd try to kill people killing us.
You know, these reactions are not kind of mysterious.
They're very natural human reactions.
And as you pointed out, this is a country that was founded in rebellion from empire.
That's right.
I mean, while the American kind of form of terrorism, if you want to call it that, was very genteel compared to what we see today, Americans were quite happy to, you know, break the law, rough up the authorities, and ultimately to revolt and kill, and engage in what the British viewed in certain ways as terrorism.
You know, sniping from behind trees was not fair European warfare.
We didn't let that stop us.
I mean, we didn't have the trained army they had, so we adopted another method to beat them.
You know, so we said, you know, throw out the rules.
We don't care.
I mean, we've decided to fight this.
We use whatever tools we have.
And this is really the key here, too, is this lie that somehow they hate us for freedom only makes sense to people who don't know that America has an empire, that America is an empire.
And I know your book is called Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire.
I think, yeah, for most people, they just won't even hear that word at all.
You know, if you say empire, that just means that you're a left-wing America-hater who doesn't really understand.
America doesn't have colonies overseas.
America's not an empire.
That's right.
And I think, you know, one of the problems, you know, is that Americans want to, you know, they want to believe that we're doing good things overseas, and they cannot imagine that other people view them differently.
And yet it's so hard to talk about this, because people assume that you're saying, oh, well, you think we deserve it, you know, you like the terrorists, you're justifying them.
And the answer, of course, is no.
I mean, these are evil people.
They do monstrous things.
But again, you've got to understand consequences.
If you don't know why they're doing it, you know, you can't very well combat them, and Americans need to be more reflective.
You know, it doesn't mean that we are necessarily evil people, but it's to say, look, how does the rest of the world view what we're doing?
You know, we may think we're doing wonderful things, but if the rest of the world thinks we're behaving badly, thinks we're engaged in activities that, in fact, would be called evil, if the rest of the world thinks we're killing people, starving people, this sort of thing, we've got a real problem.
So we need to step back and ask, number one, are we doing the right thing?
And number two, why do people view it differently?
And we've got to ask those questions.
We can't just go around kind of preening, saying, well, you know, they don't like us because we're wonderful.
And that, unfortunately, is what kind of this administration, and I mean, and not just the administration, of course, I mean, many Democrats and a lot of other people kind of take the same attitude that, well, we can't imagine why they would do this to us.
Oh, my goodness, we're just so great.
Yeah.
Well, now, so let me ask you to predict the future then.
If there's another spectacular terrorist attack in America sometime soon, is the population going to roll right over again like they did back in 2001?
Or perhaps are people going to be a little sharper and maybe blame George Bush?
We've been through all this in the name of stopping the terrorists, that they can still hit us.
Is he going to have to take the hit?
Well, there may be a short and a long term, you know, effects which may be different.
I mean, I fear that in the short term that Tennessee would be to rally around, you know, where he says, see, this is a threat that's out there.
That's why you have to combat it everywhere, you know, yada, yada, yada.
But it strikes me that there's probably a, I mean, the last poll I saw showed that majority of Americans believe we can win the war on terrorism and get out of Iraq, that they disconnect Iraq from terrorism.
So that tells me the American people are starting to learn.
And my hope would be that as they reflected on the fact that despite all of the kind of internal surveillance and everything set up, despite, you know, supposedly the flight paper theory that all the terrorists are now over in Iraq, suddenly it turns out we're still attacked, that they would step back and say, hey, something's wrong here.
And my hope is that they would understand that, in fact, Iraq has made it much harder for us.
We've created more people, encouraged more people who want to kill us.
We've diverted our strength over there.
We've hurt our image with friendly nations that we need to cooperate with.
But all of these things would kind of come up as issues that, you know, it's going to take some explaining and, you know, the American people show they have fairly short attention spans.
Yeah.
Well, this one isn't usually voiced out loud too much.
But a lot of people do believe this, I think, that America is an empire for a reason.
Or maybe better, America has the standard of living it has for a reason.
And that is because we're an empire and we take things when they're not cheap enough to buy on the open market.
And that if we were to give up our empire that our economy would be ruined, our society would be ruined, our standard of living would be ruined.
And so if we have to go and steal oil or steal these or those resources, spend inflationary money in the third world and, you know, demand their tariffs fall while we keep ours, etc., then that's just the way it has to be to keep us on top.
I mean, I tend to think that actually, you know, the empire that we have cost us a lot more than we gain in benefits, because it's not the old kind of empire where you literally occupied and kind of extracted everything.
You know, I think the primary benefit to American policymakers today, frankly, is they want to boss everybody around.
That there is a certain, the idea of social engineering, frankly, I think is probably far more important for a lot of these people.
They want to run Americans' lives, but that's not enough.
You know, they'd prefer to run the lives of over six billion people around the world.
And that's, you know, the Secretary of State shows up in every foreign capital telling them what kind of elections to run and telling them what to do on their economy, you know, telling them what to do on this and on that.
I think that, in many ways, is probably the strongest animating feature for American policymakers.
We really do want to kind of reorder and transform and socially engineer the entire globe.
And now I know you're a libertarian like myself, which means, I believe, well, and you're right for antiwar.com, so I know that that means that you're not an isolationist, you're for free trade and friendship with foreign nations, just not entangling alliances.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Now, well, what about this?
There is no free trade on Earth other than at the point of the Marine Corps' M4 machine guns.
Well, I think, I mean, the reality, of course, is that you can have free trade easily without any military around.
I mean, I hear people who try to justify what we do based on if we didn't try to kind of run the world and have alliances all over, how would we have free trade?
And, of course, that's silly.
I mean, you've had, you know, countries always trade, the incentive to trade is very strong.
There's very little incentive that countries have to impede that because everybody's benefiting.
I think the problem comes when, in fact, you entangle the military with the economic, and the danger there is that you turn people off to American products and to American ideas if they perceive it's being spread at the point of a gun.
Now, and to the extent you try to kind of have corporations free ride in on the U.S. military, that is a very real problem because, you know, understandably, then people in other countries are going to kind of put the two together and view there as being not a lot of difference between kind of American military imperialism and American economic imperialism.
And that's a tragedy because, to my mind, you know, free trade is one of the most important mechanisms for spreading prosperity and ideas around the world.
The last thing you want to do is link that to the military.
And yet we see the effect of this, and I fear it may be, well, I mean, I don't know, I guess the logic of Ludwig von Mises is never going to go away in economic laws or economic laws, but you look at at least short-term effects.
In South America, they're electing red after red after red because, to them, capitalism means the American military.
No, I think that's, and I think that, you know, for a lot of people, again, it's this sense of overbearing social engineering, that, you know, they're angry not so much because, you know, Starbucks shows up, but because it seems to be part of this larger package.
You know, the American secretary of state is over there, and you're being, they're being badgered to, you know, to be allied with us in this particular military adventure.
And, you know, it starts to look as a package, and they have a very hard time disentangling it.
You know, and the irony, of course, at the end of the day is America's going to find itself much weaker and much more isolated because of these policies than in following the policies we would follow, you know, that, in fact, military disengagement is, you know, is the best mechanism to ensure, I think, broader political influence and economic influence.
Instead, by being heavy-handed, you know, they're going to kind of hurt America in all the other areas as well.
Right.
Yeah, empire weakens America.
So, you really think, then, Doug Bandow, that if America tried, you know, somehow Ron Paul became president, all the troops came home, we got out, stopped, you know, the foreign aid through the IMF and the World Bank and all these international organizations, and we really did try to have that Jeffersonian foreign policy of friends with all, allies with none, that we would all, even in the short term, be better off rather than worse off?
That's right.
I mean, I would not say that you couldn't have bad things happen in the future.
There are evil people on the planet.
Some of them will end up running governments.
Over time, we're going to have more powerful countries, you know, China and others, the development, we don't know where they're going.
But I would say that, you know, in America, that doesn't get involved the way we do today.
In America, that looks for opportunities to avoid conflict instead of jumping into them.
You know, in America, that's much more hesitant and humble, you know, in its willingness to be involved, certainly militarily, is likely to yield a globe that, at least for America and its, you know, major allies, can be much more peaceful, much more prosperous.
And that, you know, look, we look back and say, yeah, we've tried the other side.
You know, the other strategy hasn't worked very well.
I think it's time we let freedom and, you know, non-intervention have a chance.
Okay, now, you're a member of the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, and in foreign policy circles, these catchphrases sometimes mean a lot.
So by realistic, are you saying a non-interventionist one, or are you saying what they call the realist school, which is Henry Kissinger-style interventionism?
My view is that the most realistic school is primarily non-intervention.
You know, the people in this, the coalition, what we try to do is bring together a broad group of people, you know, who would argue about some issues.
I mean, what do you do about China or something?
Some of them would probably be more classically realist.
Some of them that, you know, we've worked with are more likely to be protectionists.
But everyone comes down and says the current foreign policy is disastrous.
All of them want a policy that's more restrained, even though we sit down and, frankly, we're going to argue about some of the points.
You know, several of us, like Chris Preble, who is a primary mover behind it, and others, you know, we're much more libertarian, much more non-interventionist.
We have some folks who aren't quite there.
But our view is, you know, the crisis today is so great.
We need to cooperate with anybody we can to try to transform current policy.
Otherwise, you know, we're heading for a real shipwreck.
And who are some of the members of the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy?
Well, Chris Preble is probably the leading organizer.
Chuck Pena has been involved.
John Holzman, who used to be at the Heritage Foundation, has been involved.
Michael Vlaos, or Marty Seif, who writes for United Press International.
There are a lot of folks out there who have been involved in one way or another.
I mean, it's not like we have a big organization that spends lots of money, but it's kind of an umbrella group to help us get together, occasionally run some ads, you know, hold some meetings.
Okay.
And what's the website there for the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy?
Oh, my goodness.
It's been a while since I've got on.
I think it's, I think it is Coalition for Realistic, I mean, it's a long one.
All right.
Well, just Google it, everybody.
Yeah, just Google it.
I mean, it'll come up.
That's embarrassing.
It's been a while since I've been on.
It's all right.
And I think there's a link right to it if you just look at Doug Bandau's archives at antiwar.com/bandau.
Yeah, I think we have it in the bio note.
I think the URL is right there.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, great interview.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Really appreciate it.
Happy to be on.
Take care now.
Doug Bandau, he writes once every two weeks for antiwar.com, his current article is Fight Terrorism.
Get out of Iraq.