11/13/08 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
I have some gangsta for you.
We're here every weekday, 11 to 1 Texas time here on Chaos Radio Austin, streaming at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And introducing our next guest, Anti-War.com's Doug Bandow.
He is a Robert A. Tapp fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
He's the author of the book Foreign Follies, and you can find his regular column for antiwar.com at antiwar.com slash bandow.
One of the best things about our whole website, if you ask me.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
Happy to be on.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So it says here in your most recent article that the American people have rendered their electoral judgment.
It's time to finish off the neoconservatives.
Well, my first question for you, how are the American people supposed to be able to tell the neoconservatives from the Democrats and the Republicans and the liberal and conservative movements that they, you know, fix themselves to?
Well, there's not much difference, you know, in terms of the, you know, at least the elected Republican leadership of the past.
What I really hope is that you'll see both among the liberal activists with the current, you know, the incoming administration, and particularly with conservative activists who aren't particularly ideological on foreign policy, but who care about winning elections, is a willingness to really get involved and target the neocons, especially on the Republican side.
You know, it should be obvious to Republican activists that they lost, they lost big, and the obvious starting point is Iraq.
And if they listen to the neocons in the future, they're going to have more disasters like that.
Yeah, well, and it turns out Bill Kristol is the guy who fixed McCain up with Sarah Palin, too.
That's right.
Now, it's obvious that they're hoping that, well, they may have lost this go-around, but maybe 2012 they have another horse to ride.
It's kind of a frightening thought.
Yeah, particularly that I think it's kind of revealing, actually, that they say, I mean, what quality in Sarah Palin attracted the neocons to her?
It's that she's an idiot, and they can tell her to believe whatever they want.
And all the stories are that when they had this kind of famous, you know, cruise that went up to Alaska, and all these neocons kind of met her, that she apparently sounded very much in sympathy with their crazy views.
So, yeah, they figure they have a kind of a willing tool here.
I mean, I thought it was striking that if you looked at the people who are supposedly kind of educating her on foreign policy, it was all the neocons.
I mean, so she clearly was getting the usual, you know, tripe from them, and certainly sounds like she bought it all hook, line, and sinker.
Yeah, it's funny.
You know, people talked about how, well, you know, she said nice things about Ron Paul, but if you look, all she said was, oh, yeah, you betcha, he's a maverick, and that's just like me, and blah, blah, blah.
She didn't say anything substantive about him at all.
Yeah, I'd be very skeptical.
I mean, certainly, you know, you could obviously argue that some of the things she said, she said simply because she was a VP nominee, but I'm very skeptical.
Given the neoconservative support for her, that certainly suggests to me they think they have somebody who, you know, they can run the way they ran the Bush administration.
Well, and they're talking about she's going to be, I'm sorry to just have this whole conversation divert to Sarah Palin, but she's talked about for running in 2012.
She's all they got left.
I guess they think that this is what they want to run with over there in the Republican Party headquarters?
What the hell?
Well, I think it reflects, though, you know, if you're a neoconservative worried about who you can control, you know, the other two names, you know, that would be the prior contenders are Romney and Huckabee.
You know, Huckabee actually, I mean, had some really stupid things he said, but he also talked at different moments about some things that neoconservatives got upset about.
And Romney is one who's always cared more about economics, and perhaps, you know, with this kind of campaign over, would be more likely to talk rationally on some of these issues.
So I think the neocons are concerned that the only person they obviously have who can articulate these kinds of things, apparently, is Palin, as opposed to the other guys.
Yeah.
Well, which is silly, because Romney's for torturing and murdering people.
He made that clear in all the debates, that he'll be as murderous as they need.
Well, I think that might be true, but I don't think the neocons trust him.
So I think, you know, the one thing about people who seem to be kind of completely unprincipled and flip-flop on everything, which was really Romney, is that, you know, if they don't believe that it's any longer politically advantageous, they'll drop the position.
So I think from a neocon standpoint, they have to be worried that Romney might run again, and he'll decide that, well, kind of the era of torture and war is over, I'd better be on the side of peace.
And I think they made a judgment about Palin that she probably believes this stuff, you know, irrespective of political consequences.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I thought it was interesting that Ron Paul wrote this essay for CNN, which they ran on the front page, which basically said, hey, as long as everybody's having a big conversation about the future of conservatism and the Republican Party, how about paying attention over here?
Here's a guy who got a million, he got a million votes, and those million voters were told by the GOP to go to hell repeatedly throughout the entire election season.
But if they want to succeed, I'll tell you, it's as clear as the blue sky.
Make Ron Paul the minority leader.
That's how to restore the Republican Party.
You can do it tomorrow.
Unfortunately, these are people who don't want somebody principled leading the party, of course.
I mean, you know, the Republicans in Congress, frankly, like most of the Democrats, I mean, these are political hacks.
These are people, you know, who, and it's hard for them to disentangle themselves, because they spent the last, you know, six, seven years supporting, eight years, almost, supporting everything the Bush administration did.
They're not going to admit they're wrong.
You know, they really need a transformation of these parties, so people, especially the Ron Paul supporters, you know, have to be out there active, and I hope you see it on both Democratic and Republican sides, both these parties need to be transformed.
I mean, they're basically both war parties, and, you know, the elite, the leaderships don't care.
Yeah, it's really a tough position, because the liberals at least pretend to believe in peace and civil liberties.
The right doesn't even pretend to believe in those things at all anymore.
That's right, though they, of course, still talk all this time about, you know, kind of your limited government, so, you know, utterly oblivious to the fact that if you have, you know, basically war, perpetual war in a national security state, you can't believe you're going to have limited government.
I mean, you look at spending under the Republicans, spending under the Republicans was worse than spending under the Democrats, and the Republican Party has nothing left since it's become a pro-war party.
It's also a big spending party and everything else.
Yeah, well, and whereas the liberals, you know, I shouldn't even say pretend, many of them, most of them actually do somewhat at least believe in peace and civil liberties, and yet they're all in power now, so there's no reason for us to think that they're going to actually protect those things, since they're the ones wielding the bludgeons.
No, that's right, and fortunately, it's going to be a very real test for Obama.
I mean, he's said a lot of nice things, but when it comes down to it, is he willing to stop unconstitutional spying?
You know, is he willing to do these things that need to be done, and to cut back on the presidential power that he now wields?
I mean, the temptation, of course, is to always, you know, kind of exercise the power you have, and he's going to be surrounded by people saying, well, we'll do it fairly, we'll be good about it, we won't abuse it, and I really worry about where we're going to go.
Yeah, well, and in fact, I wish I knew the exact quote, but there is one that's very closely, you know, the paraphrase is pretty close anyway, of Obama saying, well, don't worry about the spying thing, because when it's me, it'll be me, and so that's totally different than George Bush spying on you.
You can trust my judgment, when the whole point is that, no, we can't trust any president's judgment.
That's why the law says you get five years in prison if you tap people's phones without taking it to the FISA court, at least.
Well, that's right, I used to tell Republicans, you know, that you people are crazy, you're telling me that you trust the Bush administration, well, even if I grant you that, don't you realize you're creating powers that in the future are going to be exercised by Democrats?
I mean, even if you trust one, why would you trust the other?
And frankly, I don't trust either of them.
Right, yeah, I can't figure that out either.
People can't just even imagine three or four years in the future at any given point?
That's right.
I don't understand.
Especially when it looked like it was going to be Hillary Clinton, you know what I mean?
Who wants to give a dictatorship over to that lady to run?
No, that always struck me as being very strange, that you have the right that spent eight years hating the Clintons, targeting them, warning us about the imminent doom, and then they create this big national security state just in time that she would have had it if she'd won the presidency.
I really suggest that these are not thinking individuals.
I mean, what you've got here is enormous stupidity, and unfortunately they had enormous power to boot.
Right.
And, you know, I'm sorry for just throwing around dictatorship, because that does sound like hyperbole, but no, I seriously mean to define it as a system where the executive outright repudiates the doctrine that there is a law that can bind his authority.
And that is exactly what we've had for eight years now.
The president can do whatever he wants.
And even when the Supreme Court says, no, you can't, he continues doing it anyway.
No, it really has been extraordinary.
I mean, traditionally Republicans were very skeptical of a strong executive.
I mean, they were horrified by FDR, they didn't like the kind of things he did, they were against that, but they have become completely taken over with the notion the executive can do no wrong.
And certainly not the founders' notion.
I mean, the founders made it very clear they wanted to create a system that constrained the chief executive.
They didn't want the president to have all these kinds of powers that Bush and others claim they have a right to.
Now, let's talk about economics, because I wonder whether America, whether the American government can, the people who run it, whether they can even believe that they can maintain a world empire into the future now that the stock market lost half its value.
I mean, it seems like when they're calling this the beginning of the second Great Depression, this is a really bad time to have troops in 130 countries around the world and welfare payments to various dictators and sultans and emirs and so forth around the world.
Can we afford a world empire right now, Doug?
I don't see how we can maintain it.
I think that this really is the moment where we had $2 trillion of bailouts, we're talking about a trillion-dollar deficit in 2009, you know, we have, I mean, if you look over the long term, Social Security, Medicare, a whole host of pension guarantees, there's an endless list of big federal obligations with promises made and no money to pay them.
I don't know how you continue to spend and spend at the rate we're spending.
You know, we're spending more than we spend at any point during the Cold War.
I mean, we're spending as much in the military as the rest of the world combined.
I don't know how they figure the U.S. can compete economically with other countries when we're putting this kind of burden on American workers and American producers.
So I look at this and think that at some point, these folks have to realize that, but they don't seem to realize it yet.
You know, there was no debate on that during the campaign, and I just found that extraordinary, that if there was an obvious thing for Senator Obama to point out, it's that the Bush administration's kind of policies had put us incredibly vulnerable to an economic crash, and we certainly can't sustain a weak economy and an imperial policy.
Yeah, well, he wants to be the emperor.
He doesn't want to give it up anymore than he just did.
Exactly.
Well, but so, okay.
Now, let's talk about this cost of war thing, because I think that there are, well, I know that there are Republicans who make arguments along the lines of, oh, come on, you know, we're talking about a very small percentage of GDP.
Yeah, we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, but they hardly spend anything, and we're rich as hell, and so it's okay that this really isn't that big of a deal.
A few hundred billion a year, hell, we spend 400 billion a year just paying interest on the debt.
Well, you can get away with that if you really are rich and lots of money is pouring in, but it's hard to get away with that when you have all these other obligations and you're no longer rich.
We have both those going on.
We have a host of other obligations out there, so it's not just spending 400 billion here or 700 billion there, it's the fact that we have $2 trillion in bailouts, plus all this accumulated obligations on Social Security, Medicare, plus promises to pay off pensions, plus Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, I mean, you go down the list, there's an endless amount of money there, and the notion that it's a small percentage of GDP tells you nothing about whether it makes any sense.
Why should we subsidize the Europeans, however much money we have, why should we subsidize their defense?
Why should we spend money trying to rebuild third-world societies, when we should have learned that ultimately, only the Iraqis are going to be able to construct a new Iraq, and they really aren't interested in having our advice, and that's going to be the same in other places as well.
The money is very important over the long term, but there are a lot of other reasons to be against it as well.
I don't see how in the context of an economy that's certainly going into a deep recession, and it could go further, and a federal budget that's utterly out of control, how you could argue that, well, what the heck, it's really not much money.
Today, we have to look at everything.
The argument, it's not much money, simply makes no sense when you have a trillion-dollar deficit.
That means we have no money at all.
So any money we're spending on defense right now, in effect, we're borrowing.
The question is, well, what should we borrow for, to subsidize the Japanese?
I mean, why?
Right.
Well, gee, it's funny, it's sort of like you want to kind of review some of these policies and see whether they make any sense, but you're talking about a perpetual motion machine, this national security state, where the question of whether we should continue to quote-unquote protect Japan, because I'm not so sure what percentage of their population would see it that way, but anyway, whatever you call it, the idea that we ought to have 500 bases on Okinawa or whatever it is, that's never going to be questioned outside Antiwar.com.
That's the way it is.
Like John McCain said, why shouldn't we stay in Iraq forever?
We're staying in Italy forever.
We're staying in Korea and Japan forever.
That just goes without saying.
Well, clearly, this is a policy that will only be changed if the American people want it to be changed.
And in that, John McCain will never come forward and suggest the change.
George W. Bush won't.
I'm afraid Barack Obama won't.
I mean, he just had a conversation with the Prime Minister of South Korea saying, oh, we want a stronger alliance, and I wrote an article saying, well, why?
I mean, you know, 50 years on after the war, I mean, why do we need a stronger alliance there?
It's going to require the American people to look at their bank statements, look at the 401K statements.
You know, they're going to have to kind of then go to their politicians and say, what on earth are you doing?
And what could that even mean, a stronger alliance with South Korea?
We got 30,000-something troops there.
We have our Navy there.
I guess George Bush, Sr., after the end of the Cold War, removed the nuclear weapons from our ships surrounding South Korea.
I guess we could put nuclear weapons back in place.
How else could we make our alliance with them stronger than it is now?
Oh, it's to, you know, have more meetings and to, you know, kiss each other more often or something.
It's a very strange, you know, thing.
I mean, politicians use this phraseology, and it doesn't mean much of anything.
Because, of course, it's not a mutual defense treaty, as it's called.
It's a one-way.
I mean, the South Koreans don't defend America.
The U.S. defends the South Koreans, and the South Koreans can defend themselves.
So this is just one of those cases where all you have to ask is, why, if they have 40 times the economic strength of the North, why aren't they dealing with the North?
Why do, you know, the only reason we have to worry about North Korean nuclear weapons is because we have troops within range of North Korea.
You know, if we weren't involved there, that would suddenly be an issue for South Korea, Japan, China.
Nobody would be expecting us to solve it, because we'd be thousands of miles away with a nuclear deterrent.
They would be the ones who'd have to be concerned with what happens in that, you know, kind of crazy little country up North.
You know, I wonder whether the, well, I guess it's assuming a lot to think anybody in D.C. is even this thoughtful, but it would make sense to me, I guess, that they would be worried that if the status quo on the Korean Peninsula changes and the North and South are reunited, then you'll have the South's economy with the North's arsenal, and then you'll have a whole new power in Asia to deal with, whereas right now, as you said, the South is dependent on us, the North is isolated.
Well, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of people speculate that privately the Japanese and the Chinese are not unhappy at a divided Korean Peninsula.
I mean, there's a lot of people who think that.
Nobody will say it publicly, of course.
And certainly, it's also said within South Korea that there are South Koreans who don't really worry about the North Korea's nuclear program, because they assume there will eventually be reunification, and if there is reunification, they get the bomb.
So I think there are a lot of factors at play there that nobody wants to talk about, but makes it much more complicated, and that's one of the reasons why there's no reason for us to be there.
Those are the situations where my reaction is, you say, you guys work it out.
You know, as long as you're not threatening us, I don't care.
You go to it.
But of course we won't.
You know, we insist on, we have to be at the middle of everything, you know, trying to organize things, and I think for the most part, we act utterly insensitively to these kinds of complications that we don't even know about or care about.
Do you think it's more likely at all or less that there actually would be a war there if the American troops were gone and we no longer guaranteed, you know, a war for, on behalf of the South Koreans?
No, I mean, South Korea has, you know, a vast edge on every element of power, you know, over the North.
You know, they have fewer weapons, but the North's weapons are antiquated, they're old, and you know, neither Russia nor China would support the North in any military action.
So the clarity would be, you know, the South Koreans, you know, could and in that case probably should do more in terms of building up their own forces, but it also, you know, might allow some real negotiations with the North where the North would understand that, you know, we're no longer relevant, they can no longer play games in terms of us, that they have to make a deal there, and then they'll have to decide, do they want economic development or do they want to remain a garrison state?
But I think in most South Koreans, very few really think the North has the capability or interest in terms of trying to launch a military attack.
How beneficial is it to Kim Jong-il that he can tell the people of his country that they're beset on all sides by enemies led by the United States?
Well, it's certainly a tactic they use all the time.
And they point to the U.S. and they always denounce the South Koreans by saying they're puppets of the U.S., so they use it and he can try to explain his own failures by pointing at the U.S.
You know, with the U.S. gone, without that kind of, you know, anything near him, he couldn't say that the world's superpowers are out to get him, it'd be much harder for him to explain his failures, you know, other than his own policies.
Huh.
Well, that's good to know.
And I guess that's just par for the course with any of these negotiations.
But you know, I really like the North Korean example of the failure of American foreign policy, particularly in the Bush years, but really overall.
But what George Bush basically did was lied and broke the deal, or I don't know, I guess it's less clear to me now that they lied.
But anyway, they broke the deal, the agreed framework, when whatever differences could have been worked out, even if it is true that the North Koreans were enriching uranium in centrifuges they got from AQ Khan, although there's still no evidence of that actually beyond people swear to God that they admitted it one day or something.
But anyway, they kicked them out, basically broke the deal, the agreed framework that Warren Christopher had made back in the 90s.
They created this crisis where the North Koreans actually started developing nuclear weapons, which they didn't have before.
And now here we are in the position at the end of the Bush years where we're giving them the agreed framework, again, only I guess more money this time than they were supposed to get under the old deal.
Now, if there is a policy where the Bush administration has utterly mishandled things, I mean, kind of beyond Iraq, it's North Korea, where they basically spent four years, five years, whatever, refusing to talk to the North Koreans, during which we think the North Koreans probably processed enough plutonium to make about 10 atomic bombs, and then they decided to talk to them again.
And of course, they've been talking to them since, and you have the usual ups and downs where the North Koreans make promises and then demand something else, and then whatnot.
So it's not at all clear where this deal is going, but what we do know is that we're measurably worse off, because even my theory with the North Koreans is that we may very well convince them not to build more.
We might actually freeze the situation.
I doubt they will ever give up whatever they have.
So to the extent the Bush administration managed to have a policy that encouraged the North Koreans to build more atomic weapons, you know, it's given them what I think is likely to be a permanent arsenal that they're going to have in East Asia.
And that's something where, absent an invasion, which would be crazy, I think we're going to have to live with that.
And that really is the record of this administration.
Extraordinary.
We won't talk to them.
They're nasty people.
And then flipping on that and suddenly deciding to talk to them after you've made the situation immeasurably worse.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the way you put that is, I think, simple enough that that could even be a narrative on TV.
That could even probably be explained to the American people.
Let's measure George Bush's failure in North Korea.
Wow.
It's beyond measure.
We need to invent a new system of measurement just to show what a horrible failure this is.
And we can sum it up.
We can bring Doug Bandow on.
He can sum up what happened in a minute.
You know, how come everybody doesn't know this?
How come we're not talking about this?
Is it that nuclear issues are just too complex that they think they can't explain it in a couple of minutes like that?
I think part of it is that when you're in a presidential campaign, it tends to be the two candidates who set the agenda.
And as far as I can tell, the Barack Obama folks decided they wanted to talk about foreign policy as little as possible.
And I thought that was foolish.
So they were afraid, well, the polls show people, for some reason, think McCain is better on these issues.
But I thought they could have destroyed him.
You know, do you point out, you know, this is a man who's wanted to go to war with everybody.
Why would you want him as your, you know, kind of commander-in-chief of the military?
That makes no sense.
And if you look at policies like Korea, he's made us a lot worse off.
And of course, there's the debacle in Iraq, and there's, you know, so I thought they should have took the fight there.
I think, you know, these are people, they wanted to win.
Frankly, that was about all they cared about.
I mean, that was the focus, so they weren't going to get into any issues that seemed at all complex.
And they decided to talk about economics as much as you can, try to carry that forward and carry the votes.
Well, I wonder if in December, as they do the looking back at the Bush years special and remind us what great leadership he showed on 9-11, they never gave any concrete examples of that.
I'm not sure what, they're standing on the fire truck with the megaphone?
I guess that's what they mean.
But anyway, I wonder whether they'll even review the North Korea story at all.
I mean, this is a prominent member of the Axis of Evil, and this is quite a spectacular policy failure when basically everything was fine when Bush took office.
And Colin Powell said, yeah, we're going to continue everything along just like the Clintons were doing.
It was working well.
And then John Bolton and all, and George Bush came in here, ruined everything.
And now, as you said, the North Koreans have a permanent nuclear arsenal.
Yeah, no, I mean, they, in fact, the president publicly gutted Colin Powell.
I mean, Powell indicated, we'll probably pick up where the Clinton folks left off.
And then at a summit, it was one of the early summits of Kim Dae-jung, the then-Korean, South Korean president.
You know, Bush said, oh, no, not at all, I mean, publicly, to, oh, it was a real humiliation.
And it, I mean, it horrified the South Koreans, because, you know, they're the ones who live next door.
So they really want to have some kind of a soft landing and outcome there.
They're not interested in doing anything terribly provocative.
And Bush didn't bother alerting everybody ahead of time to what he was doing.
And that has led to a lot of tensions on the peninsula, because from the South Korean standpoint, the U.S. is throwing bombs, we're thousands of miles away, so it's easy for the U.S. to do that.
And it's an incredible policy failure, and it's one where I suspect will only get attention in, you know, kind of the esoteric foreign policy journals, won't reach TV, it's just not going to get the kind of attention it deserves.
We need a real accounting of his legacy to show people how negative it is.
And that's another way to try to get some change within the Republican Party, if they can, kind of the activists can realize what a mess these people have made of things.
But I'm just not too, you know, hopeful that it's going to happen.
Yeah, no, because then they have to admit that it's all their fault for cheering the leader and turning their brains off.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, Doug, call me a traitor if you want.
I don't think you will, really.
But anyway, it was going to be funny.
I ruined that part.
Call me a traitor if you want.
But I think that Barack Obama on January 21st ought to go on TV and offer the Iranians absolute pure friendship from here on out, the lifting of all sanctions unilaterally by the United States, the his desire to open up an embassy in Tehran to normalize all trade relations, to give them all the security guarantees in the world that will never bomb them.
And then we, the United States and the people of the United States and Iran, the government of Iran and the people of Iran, we can all be friends and rub butts in fields of flowers from now on.
What do you say?
Well, what I would do is frankly, I would start during the transition period.
What I would do is I would have the people who are identified with me on foreign policy and who are seen as likely to be involved in that issue in the upcoming administration to be publicly saying things about how, you know, he really does believe that it's important we turn the corner here, that we change policy, emphasizing the importance of dialogue and openness, especially making the point about desiring friendship with the Iranian people, that we believe our peoples have an awful lot in common.
So I would start that process because what, you know, start sending those signals out very clearly because then I think that will help prepare the ground.
And that's a good way to start getting things bubbling over in Tehran.
And you want to not just the government there to hear it, you want the people to hear it.
You want it very clear to them and the message I think undercurrent there is that they have a stake in this.
They want to make sure to the extent they can wield any, you know, kind of pressure on their own government that they want to, you know, get a positive response from them.
Well, and yet instead of that, what's happened is in Barack Obama's first press conference, about two, three days after winning the election, he came out and talked just like the Bush administration about Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon and how it is intolerable, even though has been established at least on this radio show 500,000 times over again, there isn't a nuclear weapons program in Iran.
And in fact, as we learned from Gareth Porter on the show this week, there never was one, but at least we shouldn't believe that there was one based on the so-called stolen laptop because that's forged.
Right.
No, what is striking there, I mean, they have their own national intelligence estimate from American intelligence agencies, which argues there was one, but this has been stopped.
Right.
And then the was one is based on the laptop, which is forged.
And I, you know, to me, this is the utter refusal of American policymakers to pay the slightest attention to what is supposed to be, you know, U.S. intelligence.
I mean, it really is one of both ways if they, the so-called intelligence, you know, is kind of from a standpoint bad, it indicates this is an evil country doing terrible things.
They will use it and flaunt it like you're wrong.
But if it tells you there's actually no problem here, they just completely ignore it and act as if it didn't exist.
So I don't know why, what is moving Obama on this?
I mean, if it's the question of Israel, I mean, I understood during the campaign that he didn't want to appear to let McCain kind of out-hawk him.
But you know, at his first press conference, if you say it's intolerable and it can't be accepted, you really have kind of painted yourself in an incredible corner because, well, then what?
And if you don't reach a deal with the Iranians you think is enough, then are you going to bomb them?
Well, if you don't, then you've said it's intolerable and you don't do anything.
I mean, it's a horrible position to put yourself in before you even, you know, get into office.
Utterly foolish.
Well, and you know, belligerence based on some sort of reality would be one thing.
But if I'm sitting here, you have your hands in the air, and I'm telling you to drop it or I'll shoot, then what the hell is that?
How are we going to resolve that other than I'm going to kill you now?
Well, it's basically the same thing with Iraq, of course, where we have to, you know, make sure they don't have weapons of mass destruction.
Well, of course, they didn't have any.
You know, there's no evidence they did have any.
So, you know, I mean, how do you kind of resolve this?
Well, at the end of the day, they wanted a war with Iraq and they didn't care about the evidence.
So it was never going to be resolved.
And I worry we're going to get ourselves in that same situation with Iran, because you're right.
You know, if we're claiming you all have a bomb program, you've got to stop it.
And if there's no bomb program, well, how do you resolve the issue without invading them?
At which point then you discover, oh, there's no bomb program.
Oh, well, that's too bad.
Whatever.
It was good anyway, because we'll create democracy or something.
Right.
Well, and this goes back to the complication of nuclear issues where, you know, and it wasn't too long ago in my life where, you know, you talk about there's some nuclear something or other in some country.
As far as I know, that's enough to make a bomb if that's what the government is saying or whatever.
I don't know better than to dispute that.
It took till really reading Gordon Prather regularly at Antiwar.com and talking with all these great reporters and experts like you about what all this means that I've even understood the difference between, you know, regular uranium enriched to this percent or that percent weapons grade and how much uranium or plutonium you'd need and all these different things.
Nobody understands these things.
So if they if it is a fact, as it is, and everybody knows it, that they are enriching uranium at Natanz, that there is a nuclear weapons program, there's a reactor being, you know, the finishing touches are being put on the reactor at Boucher, et cetera.
Well, and that's probably a nuclear weapons threat in the mind of most people, if that's what their leaders tell them to believe.
No, that's right.
I mean, like Iraq, they had nothing.
I mean, the American people don't understand these issues.
And, you know, they're you know, they like to believe they should trust their leaders.
Now, you invest enormous power and responsibility in these people.
Now, you want to believe that they will actually kind of treat you right and be honest.
Unfortunately, our experience tells us that's not the case.
Well, now let's talk about NATO expansion and Russia.
It's just amazing the language of the press when the Russian president gave this speech right after Obama's election, saying we're going to put weapons on our border with Poland to take out your anti-missile missiles and this, that, whatever, and to read the never mind the editorial pages and whatever.
But just the the news story I know in the New York Times said, you know, this is his declaration of a cold war against us, that he's going to put anti-missile missile missiles or whatever the hell, however many redundancies were on at that point there to take out our missile defenses that we're putting in Poland, which Obama says he supports.
And no irony there whatsoever that we are putting missiles on their border inside Poland.
It's clearly the Russians are starting a cold war with us by responding.
Well, it was much the same that we saw with the whole issue of Georgia.
I mean, part of it is, you know, the Russians are not very good on PR, so they don't worry very much about, you know, how do you try to twist things and how do you try to slam things to give you a better image?
They just do their thing.
And certainly fits with, you know, kind of the history in the sense that it was a lot easier to write about the Soviet Union than Russia.
You write about the Soviet Union, they're evil, OK, that's very simple.
You don't have to worry about complexity or anything.
You know, to try to explain Russia today is a very complex thing.
I mean, it's clearly not the Soviet Union, but, you know, it's a lot easier to talk about Joseph Stalin.
So if you can try to say Putin is Stalin, it makes your job a lot easier.
And I think that's the problem we face.
Now, you know, the press, unfortunately, takes at face value, you know, the presentations of American officials on this, of course, has nothing to do with Russia.
Why on earth would they be upset at us putting, you know, missiles here, you know, without looking at the genuine situation, the same thing on Georgia, without questioning this kind of authoritarian demagogue they have in power over there.
You know, John McCain runs around calling him Misha, you know, my buddy.
And now we have the report of the European monitors saying there's no evidence that in fact the South Ossetians were attacking Georgian villages, that it was a Georgian assault.
They started the whole thing.
And yet, you know, the Russians are still overall blamed and people talk about fear of Russia and what NATO should do and the Europeans should do.
That's a very real lack of sophistication and a willingness, I think, to be fooled by American officials and there's an utter unwillingness to challenge those officials that just we accept whatever they tell us.
You know, we may argue among Republicans and Democrats, but they don't argue the larger issues in terms of are these people being utterly dishonest with us?
Yeah, I think I'm just going to have to try to remember to quote this every time that Russia comes up on this show.
It was something Pat Buchanan said when I interviewed him, which is that there's nothing more important in the whole world than the relationship between the United States of America and Russia, period.
These are the guys with the hydrogen bombs pointed at each other by the thousands.
This is the single most important thing ever anywhere and far and for the foreseeable future.
But if you have these kind of nutty folks out there, a lot of the right wingers do this, that there is the greatest danger facing us is terrorism, and of course that's utter nonsense.
I mean, 9-11 was horrible and several thousand people dying is horrible, but it's nothing like the prospect of nuclear annihilation.
The end of the Cold War was such a blessing because we stood that down, which was the greatest threat, not just to the U.S. and Russia, but to all humanity.
And what you do is you have people playing with fire, you know, acting as if you can play around on Russia's border, and you ignore the fact that they're a nuclear-armed power, and without any thought in terms of what's the potential escalation, what happens if there's a mistake, what goes wrong, it's utterly irresponsible.
And to my mind, you're absolutely right, I mean, today the relationship that matters most is Russia, and over the longer term it's going to be China, and they also have a nuclear arsenal.
I mean, these make these countries very important.
You don't play with them.
You can bomb Serbia and nothing happens to the U.S., but if you start fucking around against Russia or China, you really could inaugurate, you know, a destruction of American cities.
Right, and look, what you're talking about, you're not saying, oh, we need to appease them or whatever.
We're the empire.
We're the ones being appeased.
They're not expansionist powers, either of them.
No, I mean, I tell people, people write about China and they worry, and I tell them, you know, that what China is doing is very simple.
China's creating a deterrent force.
You know, you just look at the numbers.
We have 12 carrier groups.
They have none.
I mean, who's going to be invading somebody else?
The Chinese aren't showing up here.
What China wants to do is stop us from intervening against them.
It's the same thing with Russia.
Russia's complaining because we're fucking around on their border.
We are claiming the right, that is U.S. officials are claiming the right, to intervene anywhere in the world against any country, and essentially, you know, that old adage, you know, what we say goes.
We can show up and dictate on your borders about what happens if the Russians showed up and had an alliance with Mexico, you know, and kind of started arguing about separatists in, you know, Baja California or something.
I mean, the U.S. would be apoplectic, but we don't see that when we're dealing with other countries.
Well, and, you know, I think part of this, too, is just the kind of thing you read about in the polls every couple of years.
They'll come out with one of these studies where people have no idea about any geography, a lot of times even outside their own state, much less the world, and I think people just don't understand that, you know, where Poland is in the world, and can America really guarantee their borders?
And for how long can we be in a position to guarantee that Poland, well, again, like Abbie Cannon said, what if a right-wing nationalist expansionist power came into being in Moscow and they decided they wanted to take Poland?
What of that?
Now we have a war guarantee with them.
We're talking about giving up Houston, Texas.
That's right.
No, I mean, that really is the issue.
See, and I think the U.S. policymakers all assume that when push comes to shove, the Russians would back down, but I think the Russians have already proved with Georgia they won't back down.
I mean, there's no better evidence as to where you'll go to war than looking where you went to war before.
I mean, they've made it very clear they ain't going to be backing down, and then we really are talking about a nuclear exchange, and the thing is that it could spiral rapidly out of control, and the Poles are nice people, but since when did it become the American purpose to die, you know, to preserve Poland's borders?
I'm not sure.
I guess 1945, 1946?
I guess so.
Yeah.
But, of course, then we weren't worried.
We didn't do anything to try to liberate the Poles then.
We accepted it.
We didn't view Poland's liberation as something important for America's interests.
We just didn't want the Russians to go further northwest.
Right.
Yeah.
We have a policy of waiting them out.
But we're extending this guarantee up to Russia's borders.
I mean, the Baltic states are 60 miles from St. Petersburg.
I mean, this is, you know, extraordinary.
So I guess there's really no hope, though, that Brexit will come to an end.
No.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.the issue and so forth.
Well, let me ask you this.
Let me put it this way.
I'm going to try to, you know, come up with the accusation that the right wing would use against him if he ever did try to do anything right, Doug.
Is it the case that if America took a Doug Bandow foreign policy toward Russia, that then they really would be a threat?
That if we weren't there guaranteeing Poland and Latvia and Estonia, et cetera, that the Russians really would, you know, rise back into the Soviet empire and take these lands over again?
No, I mean, especially with the recent economic crisis, the recent economic crisis has shown how hollow, you know, Russia's rise is, very much dependent upon high energy prices.
They've had a stock market crash, you know, that whatever they might want to do, this is, I tell people, where Russia is today is Russia has gone back to pre-1914 great power.
It has no ambitions in terms of taking over the world.
It's very concerned about its own security and its own area, particularly its borders.
So it's going to be very sensitive on things like Georgia and mucking around in the south of Ossetia, Abkhazia.
But the idea that the Russians will launch wars of invasion, I think is just utterly nutty.
There's no evidence they have any interest in that.
They don't have the capacity to do that.
You know, what they want is a greater respect for what they see as their security interests.
And I think that probably means that countries like Poland and Georgia need to be a bit more deferential.
But it doesn't mean they're going to be taken over.
And I think, you know, we have to look around the world and say, you know, America has interests.
Frankly, you know, the relationship of Georgia to Russia is not one of our substantial interests.
I mean, I hope they work things out peacefully, but I don't see much evidence of war.
You know, it took a Georgian provocation where the Georgians knew the Russians were sensitive about this.
The Georgians knew the Russians had troops there.
And then Georgia launches an attack on essentially and effectively an ally of Russia.
That's pretty foolish behavior.
It'll get worse with an American security guarantee, because then the guy figures, hey, I can do this.
They won't dare attack.
That's an almost invitation for a war between the U.S. and Russia, is to guarantee these countries, if they act irresponsibly, the U.S. will bail them out.
Well, I guess we don't have to worry now, because there was an election and the party changed power, and so everything's great.
And so don't worry about it.
Oh, how I wish.
You know, don't worry, be happy, and let's all go sing the song.
I wish we could at least take the holiday season off, you know?
That's right.
Well, I think the real tragedy here is that Obama really has an opportunity to start things afresh.
I mean, he had the right instincts on Georgia.
I mean, his initial reaction was both sides should stand down and not to do things.
And then, of course, he felt pushed by McCain, and he had to try to out-hawk McCain.
But I don't see any evidence that he's willing to back away on these things once he's president.
It's a great opportunity for him to do so, and he can simply come in and say, look at the evidence.
I realize I see now things that weren't discussed at that point.
We need a new approach here.
Here's how I'm taking it.
And you start signaling that, I think there would be reciprocity.
I think now Russia's kind of gotten itself into a corner.
You know, it's got your financial problems now.
You know, they'd be much happier with a positive relationship with the U.S.
It would be very much in their interest to have that kind of relationship.
Obama could move us in that direction if he was willing, but if he keeps up the kind of Bush-McCain rhetoric and policy, it ain't going to happen.
All right, everybody.
That's Doug Bandow.
He is a Robert A. Taft Fellow.
What a great title to have.
Good for you, man.
He's a Robert A. Taft Fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance.
Their website is ACDAlliance.org.
He's the author of the book Foreign Follies, and you can read what he writes for Antiwar.com at Antiwar.com slash Bandow.
Thanks again for your time on the show today.
Happy to be on.
Take care now.
Thanks.
We're over time.
That's it for Antiwar Radio.
See you tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time.