For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Doug Bandow.
Actually, I guess I ought to ask you before I introduce you, Doug.
What's the status?
You've gone back to the Cato Institute now?
Yes, as of Sunday, I'm officially on back at Cato.
Okay, well, you can read his antiwar archives at Antiwar.com slash Bandow.
And that includes the topic of today's interview, Assessing the Bush Administration, a Foreign Catastrophe at Every Turn.
The book is Foreign Follies.
That's also the name of the column at Antiwar.com.
The book is Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire.
So I've been, I'm really fortunate to have a critic such as yourself on the show with me today, Doug, because I've been wanting to go through and, well, do my part to tarnish or make sure that the, really just do my part to help to facilitate the tarnishing forever of the legacy of George W. Bush.
He seems to think it's so important that he goes down in history as being a great man after all, like everybody decided the Klansman Harry Truman was or something.
And so I got to do my part to undo that.
And so I'm happy to have you on the show just to talk about the facts, like Joe Friday, what it is that George Bush has done in terms of his North Korea policy, Iraq and Iran, of course, the axis of evil and on into Africa and NATO expansion, whatever else you want to talk about.
Let's start with North Korea.
I saw that the I don't know if it's just saber rattling or something serious, Doug, but the North Koreans apparently calling off their their truce with the South Koreans or to what degree, I'm not sure, and threatening war.
What's going on?
Well, the South, the North Koreans typically run their policy by brinkmanship.
So this isn't the first time.
The general speculation is two things are going on, one of which is they have a new government, as in about a year old in South Korea, which is much tougher.
And I actually think much more sensible, you know, not throwing money and goodies at the North, which really is an awful place.
So they're mad about that.
And I think they also want to get the Obama administration's attention.
And the way they always do this is they threaten to do bad things.
So what they've said is they've nullified every agreement that they have made with South Korea.
And that includes denuclearization.
It includes agreements for negotiations.
And it also includes an agreement over the maritime boundary.
So they really want to cause trouble and follow through on this.
There's a lot of speculation they might try to create a naval incident.
I think no one believes they really want war.
I mean, it'd be a disaster for them.
But it certainly looks like they're following through their normal behavior, which is to cause trouble and kind of rant and rave.
That's certainly unsettled things in the region.
And it gives the Obama administration yet another issue to worry about.
Yeah.
Well, do you know, is there any indication of how seriously the South Korean government is taking it?
The South Korean government has responded, I think, rather well, in that they put their forces on a bit higher alert.
But for the most part they've said, you know, we really like our brothers up north and we really hope we can have discussions with them.
And they're trying to downplay the whole thing.
And I think that's a wise policy.
You know, the North Koreans love the sense that everybody starts getting upset.
I think the worst thing you can do is to kind of, you know, suddenly worry about things and kind of sound like you're scared of them.
So I think kind of a measured response is definitely the best one.
And the U.S. really needs to defer to the South Koreans.
This should be a Korean issue.
This is not an issue that should be one that we have to worry a lot about.
Well, you know, I'm sure this eternal truth applies in no way to the United States of America.
But certainly in North Korea, if the dictatorship there can point to external enemies sounding belligerent to their own population, that helps solidify their support in their country.
Oh, I mean, it always does so.
I mean, unfortunately, that's one of the things where, you know, whether it be Cuba or any other place, that they always play off of America.
And unfortunately, it very often becomes kind of a unifying factor domestically.
Well, in the early part of the Bush administration, they, of course, broke the nuclear deal that Warren Christopher had arranged in 1994.
And we went through this whole period where they were outside of the nonproliferation treaty and they made at least a couple of nuclear weapons, tested one, and presumably have a few more than that.
And yet, I guess what in the last few years, though, Connellisa Rice convinced George Bush to send the diplomats back over there and to make a new deal, the six-party deal and this, that, the other thing.
How's that going?
Are there IAEA inspectors back in the country?
Is there real progress?
Well, there had been some progress.
I mean, they started dismantling the nuclear reactor.
They took down the cooling tower.
And then they got mad because the administration didn't take them off of the terrorism list.
So they announced that they were going to halt everything.
And they most recently said that they plan on keeping their nuclear weapons until they believe they can trust the United States.
I think that the guessing game is, what are they ever likely to do?
I think it's possible they might agree to a system where they're actually not making new nuclear weapons.
The likelihood of them ever agreeing to give up anything that they have is pretty small.
The only leverage they have, the only reason anybody on Earth pays any attention to them at all, is the fact that they warn that they threaten to have nuclear weapons.
So frankly, they would lose a lot if they actually gave them up.
So I think a lot of this is a game.
I think the administration, the irony is that they handled it badly on both ends.
They spent about six years refusing to talk at all with North Korea, which is crazy, because that was a period in which the North probably reprocessed enough plutonium to make another eight or ten nuclear weapons.
Then they finally recognized that was a mistake and they went into the six-party talks, which is worth the effort.
But they seem to have been a bit naive about believing that the North was going to follow through and be kind of cheerfully dismantling its nuclear program, when nothing in North Korea's history suggests anything with them is ever going to be easy.
And frankly, very little they do can they be trusted on.
So the administration, I think, unfortunately, had a rather naive view of things.
So if it was you instead of Jim Jones, what's your advice for the best policy that America should take in dealing with that country?
I think the most important thing is the U.S. needs to be a step back.
We need to pull our troops out of South Korea.
South Korea has an estimated 40 times the GDP and probably twice the population, a vast edge over North Korea.
And the South has been throwing money at North Korea.
And my view is if the South Koreans are not worried about their own security, even if they are worried about it, they can pay for it themselves.
Basically, this should not be an issue the U.S. has to be worrying about.
If we pull our troops out, then the North suddenly has no direct means of threatening the United States.
And we should basically step back and say this really is a South Korean issue.
This is something which they should be in charge of.
This is really an issue which is primarily one that affects their security.
China has a very real interest in trying to get this resolved peacefully.
Japan as well.
And we should let them take the lead in negotiations.
And I think the U.S. should be willing to have open diplomatic relations and trade relations with the North as an opportunity to try to help undermine the regime, get a view of what's going on in there.
But we shouldn't give them foreign aid.
And we need to back away.
I mean, this is a very strange regime.
And we really don't have to be on the front lines.
Well, do you suspect that things would get much better, that maybe it would be more likely that the North and the South could reunify?
Well, there's certainly a lot of...
Would that be better?
I don't know.
My view on reunification in a sense is the same as my view of German reunification.
Back when East Germany felt, well, this is an issue for them, not us, and whatever they want, they should do.
I mean, the problem, that would be the very serious problem, is if you look at the differences between North and South Korea, trying to put those two together, even South Koreans who ritualistically all wanted to have reunification, they looked at the German experience as a kind of deep intake of breath, oh my goodness, how expensive, what a mess, what a disaster.
So I think that that's an issue where it's hard for me to see how that would all be put together, but it really is up to them to do so.
It's not something which the United States should worry a lot about.
We should offer to back them up if they want to do it, but trying to put those systems together, I mean, going from totalitarian communism in the North to a reasonably vibrant democratic society in the South, I think it's just extraordinary to make that work.
Well, jeez, I've got more North Korea questions, but let's move on and talk about Iran.
Of course, the news there is that because the people of Pakistan, despite their state's best attempts, have cut off the American military's access through the Karachi-Peshawar-Khyber Pass route, they're looking at shipping war goods to the American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan by way of Iran.
Does that mean that we can be friends again?
It really is extraordinary.
I mean, it's one of those moments where you just...
I mean, it kind of shows, I think, the failure of American policy, which is we've taken the position that basically you can't talk to, you can't deal with, you can't have any dealings with Iran.
The U.S. government formally has refused to have any dealings with them, and now it turns out we need them.
Well, that's great, but how do you get them to help out when you've spent all of your time refusing to talk to them?
So that, I think, is what this administration...kind of a result of the Bush administration policy, which the current administration is having to deal with.
It's quite extraordinary.
And I think it just shows the problem.
If we're forced to rely on Iran, well, how does that make all of this work, and how do you have sanctions against Iran if you're asking the Iranians to let us use their territory for shipping?
It's going to put the current administration in a very difficult spot.
Well, and of course, Petraeus kind of jumped the gun and said, oh, yeah, the Russians are going to let us do this and that, and apparently Putin said, hey, not so fast, we're going to squeeze you a little more.
No, I mean, it shouldn't surprise anybody.
I mean, you know, I don't have any affection for Vladimir Putin, but you can see why he doesn't particularly like the United States, why he's angry at how he believes the U.S. treated him, or treated his country.
So no surprise that he's going to want something out of that.
He has an opportunity to take advantage of it.
He's certainly going to do so.
And, well, and so what about George Bush's legacy and all the stans that nobody can even remember?
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, all these countries, Bush has tried, I guess, at least succeeded in some cases, in establishing bases in that part of the world.
Are those a possible trigger of major crises on down the line?
These are the kinds of things we're going to have to give up to get the Russians to let us ship our stuff in Afghanistan.
Well, clearly, I mean, the Russians have a fairly lengthy agenda, as do we.
I mean, the question of relationship with Ukraine and Georgia, I think it's particularly important.
The issue of NATO membership is one that the Russians feel extraordinarily strongly about.
I mean, I think one of the things with the stans is the administration has this embarrassing contradiction between wanting to promote democracy and a relationship with countries which, in the main, are really very thuggish, very ugly.
So, I mean, we've had times where Richard Cheney went over to Russia to complain about them not being democratic, and then went to the stans and talked about how wonderful and democratic they were, and by any measure, of course, the stans were worse.
So this has, I think, been one of the embarrassments of the administration.
It wants to play realpolitik, and it also wants to be an idealist.
It's very hard to do both at the same time.
Well, when you talk about the conflict in Georgia, that goes to, well, basically the whole strategy of siphoning all the oil out from under the Caspian Basin without going through Russia, cutting them out of the whole deal.
Where do we stand now that we're a few months out of the last Georgia conflict?
I don't mean to be predicting another one, but I guess Chakashvili hasn't gone yet, and neither has Putin.
What do you think of the prospects of the Bush legacy of expansion?
Of course, Richard Cheney again went down there and gave a speech right after that conflict last summer in Azerbaijan, and said, oh yeah, we're going to build another pipeline through here, too.
How do you like that?
Well, I think most people recognize that the Bush administration went out of its way to antagonize Russia, and that was not a very productive policy.
So the difficulty for the current administration will be, can they pull back from that?
When Georgia became an issue during the campaign, unfortunately, while Obama initially took a more measured approach, he very quickly took the McCain position and joined him in breathing fire against Russia and demanding that the U.S. do everything possible to save the Georgians.
So I think that the challenge now is stepping back from that.
The Europeans certainly want him to do so.
I mean, the Germans and the French and the British, none of these people want to risk their countries in kind of going to war with Russia over Georgia.
None of them actually are ready in any way to have Georgia as part of NATO.
So that's going to be the challenge.
How do you work with the Europeans?
How do you get them to accept what you're up to?
And that's going to be one of the tensions.
The Europeans have this view of, oh, with Obama everything will be wonderful, but in fact there are going to be a lot of problems to work out, and some of them aren't going to be worked out.
What do you think of the chances that America needs Russia badly enough in Afghanistan that Obama and his administration might be willing to back off the installation of the so-called anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic?
I think that's possible if for no other reason than the fact that typically Democrats have not liked the missile defense program.
So it's not something which they are normally inclined to support anyway.
So from that standpoint it's an easy thing for them to give up.
Well, that's something that maybe the anti-war movement can really focus on if they don't need that much pushing on it, we can get at least one under our belt, you know?
No, I think that that is one where there's a real chance that this administration would act differently.
So it's certainly one of those where we may actually see some change.
All right, well, it's a long legacy and we're almost out of time, but I guess at the very minimum hundreds and hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq and a situation now where, well, I don't know, Gareth Porter and Patrick Coburn both seem to agree that it doesn't really matter what America wants at this point.
They're kicking our country out of there in 16 months.
I think that's right.
I think that whatever Maliki might want, whatever other people might, their deepest kind of heart wants, that they are ready to run their own country.
My guess is that in the long term it's likely to be a rather authoritarian place, not as bad as Saddam Hussein, but not one that would fit what we were in a sense promised by the Bush administration.
This is not going to be kind of wonderful, kind of democratic, everybody loves everybody sort of stuff.
This is going to be a pretty rough, fairly authoritarian system.
But I think they're going to be on their own, they're going to be working it out themselves, and that's the way it's got to be.
There's going to be no permanent U.S. bases, massive American presence, certainly no U.S. forces being used for war and being supported by the Iraqis, as I think the neoconservatives once hoped.
They're going to take care of their own interests, and that's going to be their focus.
It's not going to be America's interest.
Well, and of course Somalia, which Jess Raimondo called Iraq writ small, has basically wrapped up the Bush administration right at the end, basically undoing the invasion, kicking the Ethiopians out, and restoring basically the same government they had before, which is, or at least they're starting to, it seems like.
No, that's right.
It's another one of those, frankly, very embarrassing things, where the Bush administration supported the Ethiopians going in, and what we've had is a renaissance amongst the Islamists, that they really made the situation far worse than it originally was.
Now there's no good options.
Certainly Ethiopia is not going to go back in.
The U.S. is certainly not going to go in.
So now what are you left with?
We don't know, and they don't have an answer.
Well, and at least a hundred and something thousand people killed, I forget.
I know there was more than a million refugees and a humanitarian crisis.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this is one where, the extraordinary thing about the administration, is that it may have believed that it was acting for good humanitarian reasons.
I mean, what you found is kind of death and destruction in its wake.
It's certainly the case when it comes to Iraq, that they threw out a nasty regime, no doubt, but I mean, the estimates, depending upon the study you look at, run up to a million dead.
I mean, it's an extraordinary casualty toll.
So to kind of talk about how wonderfully humanitarian we've been, if we've actually set off a conflict that's killed that many people, I mean, that's really problematic.
Well, and, you know, Osama bin Laden, he and his buddy Zawahiri still podcast, apparently from the Hindu Kush mountains every once in a while, putting out notes to their followers and so forth.
And, you know, really if you trace back to the beginning of their jihad, I think it's pretty clear in the 1996 fatwa that it was greatly inspired by Israel's actions in Lebanon.
And, of course, we know that was true of the pilots, the core of the group of the 9-11 hijackers as well.
And this is a big part of the Bush legacy, where Bush really came in saying that he really wanted to work out a solution.
He criticized some settlements here and there at the beginning and what have you, and yet how would you characterize the sum of Bush's policy in Palestine?
No, I mean, unfortunately, at the end of the day, this is an administration that, for whatever ever its rhetoric, and in theory the President Bush backed a two-state solution, but in practice its support for Israel made it very easy for Israel to resist that.
That's a great tragedy.
I mean, even Olmert, now that he's about to go out of office, has admitted that basically all the settlements are going to have to come out of the West Bank, that the only way to have peace is going to be to dismantle them.
But this is something where, as Prime Minister, he basically did nothing to support.
Well, it looks more and more like Netanyahu is going to replace him.
Well, that's right.
And Netanyahu, at least rhetorically, is a much tougher, much more hawkish guy, so unfortunately it's very unlikely that there's going to be much good that comes out of, I think, a new Israeli government.
And then the conflict just goes on.
Israel can rule millions of people forever, I think, is an extraordinary mistake.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a tenable situation from where I'm sitting either, but what do I know?
Well, we could talk about the Indian nuclear deal, the increasing threat of war with all of Pakistan, not just part of it, the police state here and the unitary executive torture, and all the rest of this stuff, but I think we've covered a pretty significant chunk of the mess around the world that the United States of America's government has caused under the leadership of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And, well, read them and weep, folks.
That's what we got.
That's right, unfortunately.
It's certainly not an administration we want to repeat.
All right, everybody, that's Doug Bandow.
It's Foreign Follies.
That's the name of the book and also the archives at antiwar.com slash Bandow.
And do you have your own website or blog?
I'm sorry, I don't have everything.
Actually, the blog is moving and the website isn't quite yet up, but I'm going to be having a lot of stuff on Cato, so Cato.org should be a good repository of what I'm writing.
Okay, great.
Well, I sure look forward to reading what you have for us in store and keeping you coming back on the show to explain for everybody.
I really enjoy it.
Sounds good.
Thanks very much, Doug.
Sure thing.
Take care now.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
That's Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute.
And, well, I don't know.
Stay tuned to this podcast feed for more antiwar radio.
