08/24/07 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my first welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today is Doug Bandow.
Antiwar.com/Bandow, open market.org, and the number four, pundits.com, is where he writes and blogs.
He's a member of the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, former aide to Ronald Reagan, author of the book Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
Happy to be on.
Good to talk to you again, sir.
Benito Giuliani has penned this essay in Foreign Affairs explaining what he intends to do with his power if elected president, and you have this article up today, Rudy Giuliani, confused, ignorant, or deceitful.
I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive ideas.
You say in your article today that he is breathtakingly naive, shockingly irresponsible, and cynically dishonest in turn in this Foreign Affairs article.
That sounded like a pretty good summary to me.
Well, it's an extraordinary piece, and what frightens me is that this is the kind of article where they don't throw these things off.
I mean, this is where you have the campaign staff, you have all of his foreign policy advisers.
I mean, everybody sits down, they say, throw this thing back and forth.
I mean, this is their opinion, and if this is what they have him saying, I have to believe he believes it.
Indeed, I suspect he's probably worse privately, and this is kind of the watered-down version of Rudy Giuliani.
Right, and for people who aren't familiar, Foreign Affairs is the bi-monthly journal of the Council on Foreign Relations created in Europe after the First World War to try to lobby the Senate to pass the League of Nations Treaty, and has worked ever since to expand American influence in other people's countries.
It's an establishment journal.
I mean, if you think of American foreign policy, if you think of international business, you think of diplomats, you think of this sort of crew, I mean, this is the group.
But he's making this pitch to them, this is kind of the top of the American foreign policy establishment, this is what he's providing to them.
Again, this tells me, I mean, this is Giuliani, this is not a put-on job.
Right, and now he starts out invoking 9-11, basically using the same phraseology that is used over and over on television, which is, only I understand it, the rest of these people just don't understand Islamic terrorism, but I was there that day, I know.
You know, it's a wonderful political line, and there's no doubt that even for him, I presume it was a somewhat scarring experience in kind of what he went through.
But unfortunately, it tells you absolutely nothing about what to do about foreign policy.
It doesn't tell you anything about how to deal with terrorism, the fact that you saw it firsthand.
You know, we have soldiers who fight in wars, and they see people die firsthand.
That doesn't tell them necessarily what you do, when you go to war, how you deal with other countries.
So he's trying to essentially turn into an asset, one of his greatest failings, which is, frankly, he knows nothing about foreign policy.
He's been a U.S. attorney, he's been a lawyer, he's been a mayor.
You know, those things are legitimate, but they don't tell you how to kind of deal with the rest of the world.
He's never learned that, and this article sure shows that.
Yeah, now, I notice, now, what he's said on TV over and over again is, it's the terrorists' war on us.
It's not the war on terrorism, it's their war on us.
Only, in this article for Foreign Affairs, he doesn't say us.
He says, it's the terrorists' war on the international system, it's the terrorists' war on the global order.
And I wonder if you think that that's really his policy, or is he just saying that to suck up to the CFR crowd?
Well, I assume that, you know, part of it is simply, you talk differently to the Council folks than you talk to the American electorate.
You know, it's a much better sound bite on TV to say, they made war on us.
Frankly, if you're going before the Council on Foreign Relations, that sounds just a little bit too populist.
You want to kind of sound a bit more sophisticated.
Frankly, you want to make it sound more like a foreign policy and not just personal revenge or something.
So I'm not sure that there's a difference there in terms of what he means.
It's like he's talking to different audiences.
But of course, you know, it's the same problem, which is, you know, why are they conducting this war?
I mean, he acts as if this kind of came out of the blue, that there was nothing to suggest that, you know, just this evil war they've been fighting for decades, and we just haven't fought back, you know.
I mean, it's a nutty analysis.
Well, but couldn't it be said the Bush administration has waged war on the international order?
And I'm not defending the international order.
And frankly, I don't think there should be one at all, other than, you know, just happens to arise naturally.
I don't think America should be going around shaping it or anything.
I remember Richard Perle wrote in The Guardian, thank God for the death of the United Nations.
And it seems like the typical liberal internationalist realist attitude toward collective security and the multinational institutions has really been thrown to the wayside by the Cheney foreign policy.
So if this is Giuliani saying, I promise to be a little more James Baker-like in my internationalism to the CFR, he doesn't really mean that.
He really does plan, as you say in your article, to act just like Dick Cheney in a very kind of right nationalist sort of attitude.
Well, I think, you know, to some degree, the question is, you know, what is the international order?
You know, the reality is that even the Bush administration, I think, is recognized, you know, it's helpful if people go along and assist you.
You know, their vision, of course, of the international order is everybody does what we say.
So we tell them we want to go to war and you support us.
You know, that's the Bush view of the international order.
I mean, in the last two or three years, they seem to have come to at least some realization that, you know, guess what, sometimes other people don't go along with you and then you've got to compromise.
I think Giuliani takes much the same view.
I mean, he makes very clear in his article that we're certainly not going to be held back from doing what we think is necessary.
And to some degree, I don't know, that doesn't bother me.
As long as you have a fully cautious and thoughtful view of looking around the world and deciding what's necessary, you know, as opposed to, I mean, Giuliani's piece suggests we want to kind of do everything.
He has this bizarre analogy about, you know, the world is like a city.
You make a neighborhood safe, everything works.
That's the same way internationally.
Presumably that means he wants to create a very new kind of international order.
So he'd say it's an international system or an international order.
It doesn't look like anything we have today.
But he claimed it was one.
So part of this, I think, is just arguing definitions.
He has a very dangerous vision, in my view, what international order should be.
Right.
You also point out here that this whole thing here is based on the false premise that the stateless band of pirates that attacked us on September 11th is this aggressive, benevolent force of world imperialism that we're defending ourselves against and that they're motivated, apparently, by some perverted version of Islam.
This whole term of, you know, Islamic fascism and as if somehow Osama bin Laden is a Hitler wannabe.
And of course, this is the nuttiest idea imaginable.
They're both evil.
I mean, so they have that similarity.
But beyond that, kind of the goals and their methods and complete confusion.
You're not going to get good policy run around thinking that somehow the jihadists are like Nazis.
And if only we defeat them like we defeat the Nazis, you know, everything will be fine.
It's a very confused article.
He kind of says, new world of terrorism.
We no longer worry about nation states.
But of course, the first two things the Bush administration did was attack two nation states, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And if you're thinking about the future, we're thinking nation states, China, Russia.
So and he, of course, talks about them and then acts as if we can kind of tell them what to do.
But the whole underpinnings of this article is a world in which America is able to boss everybody around.
That was the world that George W. Bush thought we lived in, in the inaugurated war.
But I think even he today recognizes maybe that's not quite where we're at.
But Giuliani seems stuck there.
And that's why I think it's kind of Dick Cheney rebirthed.
Yeah, you also point out in your article that he talks about every terrorist group in the world as though they're just one force.
His law is Islamic Jihad is the Al-Aqsa modder's brigade is Hamas is Al-Qaeda is Jandola is the Iranian government is, you know, Russia for that matter.
Again, it's a very curious way of looking at the world when it's at this very moment, one of the kind of successes of the US military in Iraq is working with the Sunnis in Anbar province, because even the Sunnis, you know, kind of normal Sunni insurgents don't like young people who blow up a civilian in market places.
So what you find is within the Sunni community, there are very real differences between insurgents and terrorists, and he just kind of lumps them all together, we got to fight them all.
Well, what that ensures is you always have everybody your enemy, you're not able to kind of make any distinctions, you're not able to make temporary alliances, you don't get anybody on your side, you don't divide the other side.
I mean, that's just nutty.
That's the sort of thing to ensure endless war, which you really do lose, as opposed to trying to come up with something that isn't quite as disastrous as we've got today.
Right, I mean, that's really the dilemma here, is it's been years and years and years, and still our policy is based on this fantasy, and I don't know, you know, what your opinion is on this, I'm not really sure what my opinion is, whether Giuliani, well, like it says in your title, is he deceitful, or is he really this stupid, or what?
But if our entire foreign policy is based on a misunderstanding of our enemy's motivations in the first place, or even based on a complete lack of the ability to differentiate between competing groups in the Middle East and so forth, then the prescription cannot possibly be right.
We're only going to make matters worse.
And I guess I'd have to say my opinion leans toward it's deliberately deceitful, because otherwise, Doug, they have to say to us, look, every once in a while, 3000 or so of you guys are going to have to die so that we can have our world empire, okay?
Tough.
They can't say that.
So they have to pretend that this is about anything but their foreign policy and the rest of the world.
Yeah, you'd think, I mean, they have to be smart enough.
As Ron Paul responded to Giuliani after Giuliani gave that kind of flip, demagogic response in one of the debates, read the 9-11 report.
But it's not as if this stuff is hidden in some secret CIA document.
This stuff is out there.
And when I talk to people, and what I point out in the article is telling me that the American troops were bombed in 1983 for any other reason than the fact they were there, somehow that if they hadn't been there, that what, jihadists would have shown up in New Jersey?
Referring to Lebanon.
That's right, the Lebanon disaster.
I mean, we got in the middle of a civil war.
What does this guy think?
He thinks you get involved in a civil war and you're not a combatant?
He's smart enough.
He's got to understand this.
They have a foreign policy, and I think you're right, that they have a foreign policy that they think is justified, but they also recognize that American people might not believe it's justified if they knew the truth.
So you have to spin these tales that they're attacking us because we're so wonderful.
They don't like our Bill of Rights.
I mean, they've looked at the Bill of Rights and said, you know, that First Amendment is just outrageous.
Let's attack America until they get rid of the Bill of Rights.
I mean, it's stupid.
Well, if that's their strategy, it's working.
I mean, that's one way, right?
If they hate us for our freedom, well, we'll just ditch the Bill of Rights and then we'll have gotten rid of all their motivation to attack us and everything we find.
That's right.
I mean, in some indirect way, you think the Bush administration, if they were right, should solve this because they'll take away our freedoms, at which point, presumably, Osama bin Laden will go away since we know he's only attacking us because we're free.
Yeah, exactly.
And now, he does say this in this article.
Benito Giuliani says this in this foreign affairs article.
He invokes the cowardly retreat from Lebanon and from Somalia as energizing the enemy and showing weakness and a lack of will to the enemy.
And that's why we have a problem with these terrorists today.
You know, it's something which Dick Cheney has said.
It's something a lot of other people have said.
You know, my question to them is, well, what would you have had Reagan do in 1983 in Lebanon?
I mean, we got involved to support kind of a minority, kind of nominally Christian government that basically ruled Beirut, not much more.
You know, and this was, as it is today, an incredibly factionalized place where you find Muslims on different sides.
You have the Druze, you have Christians on different sides.
So they throw this out there and they act as if we didn't do anything.
We bombarded hillsides.
We blew up Muslim villages.
The battleship New Jersey sat offshore and bombarded Lebanon.
So it's not as if we didn't do anything.
So what would he have us do?
Do you want nuclear strikes?
I don't know.
Kill every Muslim who lived in Lebanon?
Who knows?
Because he doesn't spell any of that out.
I mean, it's this kind of glib, I'm tough, they were weak.
What's interesting in that article is he doesn't name Reagan.
I think this is, you know, political.
He understands that Reagan's very popular.
He's not going to criticize him by name.
But what he's saying is that Wimp Reagan kind of got us into this.
And you know, it's interesting.
I'm glad you mentioned the battleship New Jersey in terms of the subject of what motivates the terrorists.
As you said, the Marines in Beirut wouldn't have got bombed if they weren't there.
And there was a hijacking, and I forget which airline or what year it was, but there was a hijacking not long after that where the hijackers were going up and down the aisles and I guess finding the Americans or whatever and shouting, New Jersey, New Jersey at them.
And there was a quote from a lady who was a victim of the hijacking who was later released.
She said, you know, it was the strangest thing.
He kept yelling New Jersey, New Jersey at us.
And then later on, I don't know if someone had told her or she went and looked it up and figured it out, that it was because it was the battleship New Jersey that had been shelling Beirut, as you just said, the suburbs of Beirut.
The point is, none of this justifies terrorism.
But if we don't understand what motivates people, then they say that we're attacking them when we understand what American foreign policy is.
You know, that if you're in a village that's being bombarded by shells from the USS New Jersey, guess what?
You don't like America very much.
It has nothing to do with whether or not we're free.
It has very much to do with what you're doing over there, what your behavior is, you will perceive we are attacking you.
Suddenly, this whole thing looks very, very different.
And I'm scared to have a president, we have one today, and I'm scared to have a follow on who just doesn't get it, who seems to think the US can try to run the world.
And nothing will happen.
I mean, there's no consequence to running the world, no consequence to trying to boss everybody around no consequence to inaugurating new wars and attacks.
That's a frightening world.
Doug Bandow from the Coalition for Realistic Foreign Policy, Bill Moyers has said, the delusional is no longer marginal.
And that's what really worries him.
And I've known, I've heard for my whole life, basically, this certain segment of American society that says, the only reason we lost Vietnam is because the gall darn Congress tied the guy's hands behind their backs.
They weren't allowed to win the war.
The rules of engagement weren't fair.
And then right when they were about to win, and they changed their insurgency strategy from search and destroy to clear and hold and build, right when everything was going great in Vietnam, the cowardly Democrat Congress caved and pulled the rug out from under them.
And there were terrible consequences because we left.
Now, in my understanding, that's been always 10% of the American people are actually that stupid, that that's what they really think about Vietnam.
And yet, Rudolph Giuliani in his article in Foreign Affairs magazine and President of the United States just two days ago, have been making exactly this case, that the problem with Vietnam is that the war ever ended.
And now tell me, help me, Doug, believe that I'm not the one who's delusional here, because the President of the United States is a pretty high authority.
Well, you know, it's one thing to respect the office, but you don't have to respect every officeholder.
If I was you, I don't think I'd spend too much time worrying about authority.
Okay, appreciate you letting me off the hook there.
I mean, it's so amazing that we left Vietnam, like the fourth largest military on earth.
It was as well equipped as our European allies.
We've given them almost everything we spent 10 years building them up.
And guess what, they fall apart.
So now I'm told, well, the reason they fell apart was because, oh, the Democrats wouldn't let us help them even more.
I mean, I think it shows the problem.
If you have a regime that was not representative of its people, a regime that didn't have credibility, a regime that existed only because of US support, then to fall apart, there isn't much there.
And what's amazing to me is that, in his article, Giuliani argues that, well, of course, the bad things that happen after Vietnam show why we don't dare leave Iraq.
And yes, you know, some bad things happen.
But you sit here and say 30 years after, essentially, the whole thing went.
Soviet Union's gone.
Maoism has gone from China.
Vietnam wants US investment.
The Khmer Rouge have been gone for 30 years.
You sit here and say, hasn't he noticed that in fact we won?
That despite the fact we left Vietnam in a very embarrassing fashion, we won.
The other guys are gone.
Kind of hegemonic communism, the all the dominoes, all that was discredited, disappeared.
We won.
So maybe that tells us about Iraq is, yeah, it could be really messy in the short term, but there's no particular reason to believe that staying is going to make it better.
And we have no idea over the long term what's going to happen.
Right.
And in fact, you know, I like to extrapolate that over the whole century.
Everything has been nothing but intervention on top of intervention on top of intervention to solve the problems created by the last one for going on 100 years in a row.
Now, at some point to me, it's like that movie Trainspotting, where these guys are trying to kick heroin.
Like, just get over it.
You're not going to improve things by killing more people.
No, that's right.
I mean, people act as if, for example, our problems with Iran just kind of came out of the blue that, I don't know, magically the Iranians don't like us.
But of course, you go back to 1953 and we helped overthrow kind of left wing prime minister.
We got the Shah, you know, no surprise.
A lot of people didn't like this thug.
And he was our guy.
So when he went, the new guys didn't like us.
Even our involvement in Iraq.
I mean, we're worried about Iran, so we support Iraq in its war.
And every step, it's like, oh my, that's screwed up.
Now we have to put troops in Saudi Arabia.
Well, it turns out that's what helps motivate Osama bin Laden, kind of again and again.
It never ends.
Do you think that Rudy Giuliani, if he was the president of the United States, would initiate a war against Iran if Dick Cheney hadn't already beaten him to it?
Well, he certainly lays out that possibility in the article.
And yet, Norman Potahartz is one of his advisors.
Now, you know, Potahartz wants war with Iran.
Potahartz thought Reagan was a sellout and appeaser.
It's kind of hysterical.
This is a guy who, because Reagan decided war with the Soviet Union probably wasn't the best thing, for Potahartz, this is a disaster.
So I am very concerned about the kind of people around Giuliani and his own temperament.
So it would not surprise me at all that we find ourselves at war, if you're right, if we haven't already been there by the time the election is held.
All right.
Now, very quickly, because we're right up against the time wall here, he wants to empower the United Nations apparently to intervene in Africa.
And then also, as you point out, he sort of threatens Russia and China that if they don't do what we say, they're not going to be allowed to make any money anymore or something like that.
If you could just touch on those two briefly.
Yeah.
I mean, he clearly wants to kind of make the world better and that we should do something to make sure that we won't let Darfur happen again, as if, I don't know what the U.N. was supposed to do about Darfur.
He doesn't say.
And his really nutty sentiment is that we shouldn't let the Russians and the Chinese profit from the world economy.
Well, he hasn't noticed, but they are already.
I don't know what he figures we should do, bomb them.
I mean, frankly, we're in a world which we don't control.
And it sounds to me like he still thinks we do.
Right.
We really are moving toward a multipolar world.
And these imperialists just don't know how to handle this at all.
The power spreading out outside of their control.
It's like that the children's story about the little girl who overhears the witch's magic words that make the magic pot filled with spaghetti.
When the old lady goes to town, the little girl says the magic words and the pot of spaghetti start filling up and then starts overflowing.
But she doesn't know the magic words to make it stop.
I just remember this one picture of this massive wrought iron lid from this massive pot floating on this giant sea of spaghetti, you know, and that's the totalitarian communist government in China trying to dominate all the new wealth that's being created from beneath them.
They don't have the magic words to make it stop.
And it's on.
No, I think that's exactly right.
They're going to have real trouble holding that country together.
And that's going to be their problem.
The worst thing we could do is kind of fan their nationalist pressures by being anti-Chinese and letting the U.S. government become the new enemy for them.
Absolutely right.
All right.
We're all out of time.
Thank you very much for yours today, Doug Bandow.
Happy to be on.