Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, appreciate y'all bearing with me today, a bit discombobulated Monday morning thing going on here.
I really should have a show at night, but then I'm on the West Coast and all my guests are either on the East Coast or in Europe.
So that makes that kind of problematic with the whole time zone difficulty and all that.
But anyway, speaking of guests east of here, Fred Bronfman is on the line and he's written this incredible article, it's extremely important, it was the spotlight article on anti-war.com on Friday, it's at alternet.org, mass assassinations lie at the heart of America's military strategy in the Muslim world.
And now let me tell you a little bit more about Fred, he's the author of The Third Indochina War, The Old Man, a biographical account of a Lao villager, Voices from the Plain of Jars, Life Under an Air War, Life Under the Bombs, Project Air War, The Village of the Deep Pond, and he's got a website at trulyalive.org.
Now welcome to the show, Fred, how are you?
I'm doing great, thanks.
Good to talk to you again.
And by the way, I should say you've got an article at anti-war.com too, called We Must All Be Prepared to Torture, about good old Charles Kruthammer over at the Washington Post, well worth a read as well.
So if it's okay with you, I'd like to kind of just continue the conversation I was just having with Phyllis Bennis, also from Alternet, about the motivation for the attack of September 11th, and to just cut right to the chase real quick, you know, she basically went down the list, I think Michael Scheuer did it the best, he said there's the six reasons, and that's support for Israel in Palestine, the bases in Saudi Arabia that were used to bomb Iraq and blockade Iraq and kill a million people over the space of ten years, support for the dictatorships in the region, and pressure on them to set the oil price where Houston wants them, high or low, I guess low was the complaint in the 1990s, and then reason number six was America's at least blind eye, or in Bin Laden's words, support for Russia, China, and India and their wars against Muslims.
And these were the highlights of all Bin Ladenite propaganda all through the 1990s, this is what the hijackers agreed with, and this is why 3,000 people died, it's the price we pay for empire, and so what they did, Fred, was they lied, and they told us they hate us because how good we are and how evil they are, and for nothing that America ever did, it's something about that hateful extremist Islam that they believe in that makes them do this, and so now we have to regime change the world, and here in the Obama administration we need to solidify and expand Dick Cheney's mass assassination program, as though the occupations and the wars and the torture and the assassinations aren't just reasons seven, eight, nine, ten on the list, Fred, determined to get us bombed in the future here in America.
Well, I can't disagree with what you said, I don't claim to understand Osama Bin Laden, but I think the point is, I've seen numbers between 1.3 to 1.6 billion Muslims, and the people who are actually doing the killing and the bombing are not Osama Bin Laden or extremist religious fanatics necessarily, they start out as people in many cases of lost family members or lost friends due to our war-making in Iraq, where over one million people, as we've discussed, five million people have been killed in order to remain homeless, Afghanistan, the numbers are escalating, and then of course in Saudi Arabia, we've supported a vicious dictatorship, which to this day doesn't even allow women to drive, as far as I remember, and these either through our direct killing or indirectly supporting regimes which kill and torture their own people, remember these regimes are the ones we send people to under the so-called rendition to do our torturing for us, annoy people, and I think what's insane about where we are today, I won't even talk about the morality of this, if anyone thinks that it's moral for the United States to have a small group of people going around the world murdering anyone they wish to, without any kind of legal process, without any chance to prove their innocence or anything, I think that you have a real moral problem, I don't think that's moral, I don't think that's legal, etc., but let's for a moment just stay on, is it in America's interest to antagonize and provoke hundreds of millions of Muslims through these insane policies?
Well, I would argue it isn't, and let me quote who I think is the best source on the subject, General Stanley McChrystal, in the famous Rolling Stone article, he said that for every civilian we kill, we create 10 new enemies.
We're killing dozens of civilians daily, there's no serious argument about that, and therefore we're creating hundreds and hundreds of people who want to kill us.
Whether this is in our national interest, again, I don't see how anyone could make that argument that this is in our national interest.
And by the way, finally, for every so-called insurgent leader, how many insurgent leaders are there after all?
I mean, we're flying thousands and thousands of these drone strikes every month, every day you see reports of a dozen people killed here, 50 there, 100 there.
How many insurgent leaders are there?
And the fact is that we, our present government, is relying on deploying assassins all over the Muslim world, killing anyone they want, without any judicial process at the heart of their counterinsurgency strategy.
Well, and Fred, here's the thing about that, is that they're actually, if you read the New York Times version of this, this is about, you know, the Democrats are finally getting really smart, and instead of going in with a giant hammer like Bush's invasion of Iraq, they're using the scalpel, the laser sight, to get just the bad guys and do it in a surgical way to minimize that McChrystal ratio that you're talking about.
Yeah, that's the argument, and what I present in my article are numerous quotes, which, by the way, when the New York Times quotes something against what the government is saying, I take it quite seriously, because 90% of what the New York Times and the other major media reports is what the government wants it to report, because they quote official sources.
There are numerous quotes now that indicate that the drone strikes are just randomly killing anyone they feel like, and then they call them assassins, or excuse me, insurgents.
We've empowered something like 9,000 assassins in Iraq and Afghanistan who wake up every day looking for someone to murder.
This is a vast increase over what we've had in the past, and as you're pointing out, Scott, when we had our famous Obama evaluation of our policy towards Afghanistan about a year ago now, the dumbest position, the peace position, was Biden, who said, let's only do assassination, of course, let's ramp it up as they have, and then the so-called hawkish position was McChrystal, who said, let's do assassination and have 30,000 more troops.
This is what American foreign policy towards the Muslim world has come down to, and I argue in my article that people listening to this radio program, or people we all know, may well die over the next decade because of this insane policy.
You know, what the argument comes down to, Scott, is a very simple issue, and I think to the extent that rationality or logic has any say in any of this, we need to decide whether we believe Proposition A or Proposition B.
Cheney is Proposition A. They all hate us.
They're going to kill us anyway, so it doesn't matter how many we kill of them.
Proposition B. When you hit a hornet's nest with a baseball bat, you're much more likely to get stung than if you don't hit the hornet's nest with a baseball bat.
Even if the bees in the hornet's nest may potentially want to sting you, they won't sting you unless you provoke them.
We're increasing the possibility that we're going to get hit because we are now fanning out throughout the whole Muslim world.
I list in my article the countries where Petraeus got permission to kill anyone he feels like, and where they're presently either presently conducting operations or are planning to.
All right, now hold it there, Fred.
I mean, that's the most important point.
I hope people heard that clearly, and I think I'll just let you start off with that sentence again when we get back from this break.
It's Fred Bronfman, Antiwar Radio.
Listen to LRN.
FM on any phone, any time, 760-569-7753.
That's 760-569-7753.
It's all live from baseball to apple pie to bomb.
Waco, Texas, Heaven's Gate to Oklahoma bomb.
The Desert Storm Syndrome experimented went wrong.
Inject our own because they probably won't come home anyway.
The thing in non-conflict was a mere experiment.
Soldiers came back from the war, couldn't tell you where they went, and commandos said don't come back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Talking with Fred Bronfman from Alternet.org.
He's written this incredibly important piece.
It's one of these for those of you who don't read too often, just like to listen to radio or whatever.
This one you read, I think.
Mass assassinations lie at the heart of America's military strategy in the Muslim world.
Now, Fred, when we went out to break, you were telling me that Barack Obama gave General David Petraeus permission to do what now?
To unilaterally engage in assassination in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, the former Russian republics, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else he deems necessary.
Whoa.
Now, wherever else he deems necessary, inside the Central Command area or anywhere?
Latin America, New York, in the end.
I mean, the point is these people are unaccountable to no one.
There are 13,000 of them.
They call them the Special Operations Command.
The New York Times, when they reported this secret Petraeus directive, they said the following, unlike covert actions undertaken by the CIA, such clandestine activity does not require the president's approval or regular reports to Congress.
Let me read that again.
The clandestine, such clandestine activity does not require the president's approval or regular reports to Congress.
So President Obama has empowered the military Special Operations Command to kill anyone they want without even asking the president or Congress about it.
Right.
Because the CIA has to report to the gang of eight, the top leaders in Congress.
The CIA does pretty much what it wants, but yeah.
But technically, anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, this goes back to Seymour Hersh's article about Donald Rumsfeld preparing the battlefield.
And I think even back in 2005, the coming wars, and it was all about Don Rumsfeld's strategy of arresting as much covert action authority away from the CIA as he could, and making them all special access programs in the name of preparing the battlefield for future overt conflict.
Yeah.
And David Petraeus is far more popular than any, excuse me, any military figure in this country, perhaps any political figure in this country, for all I know.
Yeah.
And he therefore, because of his aura of success, of having succeeded in Iraq and reducing the violence, which, by the way, as I know, was primarily due to the perceived success of assassination in Iraq.
It had nothing to do with, I mean, the other factors were important, but the key factor, and the proof of that is they appointed Stan McChrystal to head up forces in Afghanistan.
His only previous experience was assassinating people.
That was his specialty.
So we now have a situation.
Operative word there is perceived, I think there, Fred.
They believe that assassination was the key.
I actually don't know why the violence went down in Iraq.
Some people like Noam Chomsky suggested because we'd already murdered hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered.
And they were just they were just exhausted.
Perhaps arming the Sunni was a good short term strategy.
I think you're going to see the stupidity of that in the next in the next year as civil war may well break out in Iraq.
But my point is, even if you want to give Petraeus credit for what happened in Iraq, since then, he's been a total disaster.
His biggest mistake besides this assassination business is extending the war into Pakistan, where we've destabilized the nuclear armed country by first of all, all the drone strikes in Pakistan, of which there are dozens now every day, the sending in special forces, provoking the Pakistani government and what's been the result of it.
Al Qaeda is stronger than it was before.
And there's a whole new Pakistani jihadist force that's been built up in Pakistan, largely as a result of this of this this provocation.
The one thing the United States doesn't seem to learn our leaders after 50 years is what we learned in Vietnam, which is the more we do this kind of thing, the more the counter reaction in the end we lose.
And I just want to remind everyone listening to this that if you don't believe our our leaders are capable of making incredible besides the moral issue, incredibly stupid miscalculations in the interest of their short term career, I have one word for you, Indochina.
We wasted $330 billion there, we have 50,000 men were there, we lost.
And I don't have to go through all the other mistakes.
The point is that the people running this country are not only immoral, but they're incompetent.
It's not working anymore.
And this thing of taking on the entire Muslim world, I think, is an incalculable mistake that we'll be paying for for the rest of our lives.
Well, you know, I'm really stupid.
That's what I think.
Well, I absolutely agree with you.
It seems to me like empire in general is a policy of murder, suicide, there's, you know, writ large, it's all it is.
But, you know, it's interesting to me that, you know, like, for example, john Bolton today is complaining that, you know, like, Obama's the American Gorbachev just overseeing the dismantling of the empire and all this.
But as you talk about in this article, no, he's actually lashing out just like the worst failing world empires ever do all over the place.
He's expanding, as you say, into all the stones that used to belong to the USSR and deep into Africa.
He's creating enemies everywhere he can.
And I'm not so sure it's just stupidity.
I mean, if you make bombs for a living, especially if you're an executive at a company that makes bombs for a living, and why not lobby to expand the war against those darn Somalis?
You know, I heard they're really religious extremists over there or something.
Yeah, well, it's something to that.
I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of forces that that go into that have created our present situation.
But it couldn't be more perilous.
In my point of view, from my perspective, that's the main thing that really got to me as I was doing all this research, was realizing the, you know, they have a term blowback.
And the idea is that when you do something terrible out there, it can come back to haunt you.
And I think I mean, I can't even describe it.
You see, the real problem from my perspective, is we have a culture that values short term rewards.
Take General Petraeus.
I doubt he ever really sat down at a serious discussion of this really make sense to destabilize this poverty stricken, feudalistic state of Pakistan, with 180 million people.
Is that really in long term America's interest?
I mean, if they had, obviously, the answer would be no.
But that's not what was on Gerald Petraeus his mind when he was the head of AFPAC or McChrystal.
They're thinking, how can I pursue advance my career in the short run?
Well, let's go attack those sanctuaries in Pakistan, because that will advance my own personal career goals of succeeding in Afghanistan, in reducing, you know, attacks from Pakistan or something.
Well, you know, you can argue about whether that makes short term sense.
You could you can't argue about the morality, since it's obviously illegal to be doing this in a foreign country.
But anyway, you could argue about it in the short run.
But think over the long run, it's going to turn out to be a disaster.
I predict that Pakistan could turn out to be a much bigger US foreign policy disaster than Vietnam, as I look out over the next 10 or 20 years.
Well, I mean, I think the parallel between not just Afghanistan and Vietnam, but certainly Pakistan and Cambodia as the the country next door where they have the safe haven and we have to bomb them from the air all the time in order to fix that problem and then just set the place up for pole pots come in and take over something like that.
A worse crisis, in other words, in Pakistan.
It's so it's so glaringly obvious.
It has been for years.
And you know what, though, too, I want to bring up one thing and get your comment on this.
Gareth Porter, I think, is unique in the sense, well, for a lot of reasons, but in the sense that he's I don't know exactly.
I don't want to characterize him too specifically, but he's some form of leftist progressive.
And yet in his analysis, all the corporate power in the world be damned.
It's just the thing that you identified is the center of gravity of the American empire.
And that is the generals and their jobs as commander of this base in Kyrgyzstan and that base in Kazakhstan and this one in Somalia.
And they once they have their job, they're a dirty snowball rolling downhill.
That's why they coined this phrase the long war.
They want to they want to consider all Asia, at least Muslim Asia, Indian country, just a place for them to just play their games indefinitely at the expense of the national interest and obviously the wealth and liberty of the American people.
Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more.
You know, just because you mentioned Cambodia, I was there when the coup occurred in 1970.
Really?
And and at the time, nobody even there was actually debate over whether there was a Khmer Rouge.
No one took them seriously.
There were a dozen guys running around out in the forest.
You go to the American embassy, they didn't even take them seriously.
As a result of Kissinger bombing these the areas inhabited by 2 million people.
He created the Khmer Rouge.
He Kissinger is directly responsible for the Khmer Rouge victory.
And without if we had not bombed enough in Cambodia, if we had not gone into Cambodia, if we allowed Sino to remain king and to keep Cambodia quote neutral, which did involve having North Vietnamese in there in the far northeast region, just like now having having Taliban and Al Qaeda in the top northwest region of Pakistan, it would have served America's interest.
This is an incredible strategic miscalculation by Kissinger on top, of course, being a war crime.
The bombing he did of villages in Cambodia alone would have led to his execution if he if the Nuremberg Principle had been applied to his behavior, and the fourth Geneva Conventions for protecting civilian populations.
But that aside, then they go and they support the Shah of Iran.
Incredible tortures, you know, this was all in our short term interest that was helping us get Iranian oil.
We created an enemy now in Iran that will torment us for the rest of time and torment Israel and possibly, you know, suck us into another into a mini war.
You know, they did that in Iran.
I mean, I can go down the list of the incredible miscalculations of the people running this country.
I think the problem we have now is Petraeus has Obama in a box.
Petraeus can barely, I mean, Obama can barely govern right now.
He's terrified that if Petraeus, let's say, were to resign and say that Obama didn't know how to run the country, that his popularity ratings would drop to 30.
You know, he wouldn't even have a chance of running for president in 2012, and so forth.
Yeah, that's probably the only way you could get me to support Barack Obama.
I'm sorry.
And so he's, you know, I wrote about this a year and a half ago.
I'm proud of the fact I wrote the first article calling for them to replace Petraeus a year and a half ago.
He is turning out to be a disaster, both as head of AFPAC and now in this Afghan policy and promoting this assassination.
Well, I'd be into it.
I put fire Petraeus on a bumper sticker back when he still worked for George Bush.
Okay, then you did you write an article?
I wrote the first article.
I'm too lazy to write an article.
I just made a bumper sticker and then I complained about it on the radio.
You know, I think there's a very interesting analogy with the whole Wall Street business.
You know, now, you know, not to get into Wall Street for a moment, one sentence.
Basically, you had a lot of very smart people pursuing their own selfish, short term financial and they didn't want to destroy the American economy.
They didn't want to lose $2 trillion worth of wealth or whatever it was.
But all they were doing were trying to, you know, make their bonuses.
I mean, hit their marks, as they said, this month, next month, next month.
That's precisely what Petraeus is doing right now.
He's trying, you know, his whole career is on the line.
He could be president of the United States.
As long as he doesn't mess up in Afghanistan, I'd call him the leading contender for president.
But he's not thinking long term.
He's not thinking strategically.
This is, in my opinion, is the single most insane thing the United States has ever done is to take on the entire Muslim world in this way.
We're provoking them.
We're making it more likely that we're going to die, that Americans are going to die.
It makes no sense at all.
Well, and, you know, my friend Anthony Gregory pointed out to me that George Bush, stutterer though he was, managed to explain a few times that we're not at war with Islam.
Islam is all right.
It's a religion of peace.
And they believe in Jesus, too.
And everybody be cool.
And, you know, that was probably the best thing he ever did, although he didn't even do that good of a job of it.
And, of course, all of his actions argued otherwise.
But at least he said that.
And that kind of kept a lid on some of the sentiment on the right against Islam.
But, of course, the neoconservatives have no qualms whatsoever about demonizing and demagoguing against Muslims.
And to them, it's most important of all that Americans continue to hate and fear Muslims, as our previous guest was pointing out, to continue our policy that, you know, of course, happens to coincide with what the neoconservatives and the Likud party want for the future of Israel.
You know, I was going to mention Israel.
You know, again, with Israel, you can argue, you can't argue the morality of what Israel does.
It's clearly one of the most immoral governments in the world in its treatment of the Palestinians and Gaza and all that.
But you could argue, and they do argue in Israel, well, you know, whatever the numbers are, there's 6 million of us, there's 3 million Palestinians.
By starving them, you know, impeding their movement, assassinating, torturing them, impoverishing them, we're able to keep things under control, building that wall.
You know, we actually, the killings have gone down.
That's an argument that can be made.
I find it abhorrent, but okay.
But I don't see how anyone in their right mind can think that 300 million Americans can treat 1.6 million Muslims the way the Israelis are treating the Palestinians.
We haven't gotten to that point yet, of course, but that is clearly the direction we're going.
And your whole problem now is if the Republicans take over control of the House and or Senate and the presidency, this anti-Muslim constituency will be the ones who've elected them.
So while things are obviously not as bad now as they are with Israel and Palestine, that's clearly the direction we're going to go.
And it's clearly insane, you know, just from a rational point of view.
Yeah, I'll tell you, I mean, you're right.
I mean, we're talking about sixth of the population of the world.
And you know, it really is amazing that the War Party can construct a narrative where like, you know, somehow we've made it this far with the sixth of the population of the world being Muslims for the last, what, like 1700 years or something.
But now we realize that, oh, goodness, you know, these people might as well be Martians, not from here, who came and invaded and they're threatening us all with Sharia and all this, this madness, this nonsense is it's it's like it reminds me of like a Lucky Charms commercial or something for how deep it is in terms of the propaganda.
It's just the most shallow, ridiculous thing in the world that somehow North America is destined to have a war to the end with Islam in general.
I mean, this, this line of propaganda couldn't be more ridiculous or more effective, it seems like to me, or more frightening.
Well, let me add frightening, because we're moving more and more in a policy of conducting mass murder in the Muslim world, they're going to respond.
And it's fomenting the whole Middle East situation.
This is all occurring in an era where people who know about these things are extremely worried about nuclear proliferation.
You know, particularly the the new technologies with the suitcase bombs and all the rest of it.
And as I noted in my article, it's a whole new world now we between the internet and globalized travel and I border we have several million Muslims in this country.
And Britain has a gigantic Pakistani Muslim population, you can't put up these walls.
And unfortunately, the people running this country are thinking short term, they're thinking of their own interests.
They rely upon violence.
And we are in deep trouble, I think and you know, the don't get me started, but but I actually spent most of the 90s working on economic policy.
And I had an organization with my board of advisors included Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, and so forth.
And to make a long story short, I'm convinced that we're America's finished as an economic power.
It's going to be a slow fall, hopefully there could be a long depression.
And so what's really scaring me at this point, is when I try to imagine look at all this madness that's occurring right now.
I mean, a tea party that actually thinks the government's the problem, when they're the ones who are supporting a police state.
And by supporting Republicans, when they're supporting the Pentagon, yeah, and the Pentagon, and they're supporting Wall Street who are impoverishing them.
I mean, you know, it's totally I mean, I sympathize with their feelings about how everything's going.
But I think they're totally irrational.
This this anti Muslim feeling, I mean, trend that out over the next 10 or 20 years.
It's on it's happening.
Well, here's the thing about that, too, though, Fred, I mean, these people, a lot of them are the worst of the Bush supporters from a few years ago.
And I'm not overlooking that.
But I mean, what they're mad about really is is very legitimate is the state of the economy, mostly.
And of course, you know, it's true, they support the Pentagon, which is the root of our problem mostly.
But, you know, it seems like to me, I don't know, I actually just replayed my interview from last Friday with Ron Paul, where he said that, and, you know, I come from much more that direction.
And he says, Look, you know, we can't, we shouldn't try to demagogue and out demagogue them, we need to just explain what the truth is in a calm and reasonable way and whatever.
But you know what, that's more his style than mine.
My thing is that as long as we're all demagoguing, we ought to be demagoguing against Larry Summers, and the people in the, I would argue, the state who were the ones who brought us to this mess, Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke, above all, and the last few secretary treasuries and presidents and the rest of them, they are the ones who have brought us to this crisis with their empire.
And they're the ones who are telling, of course, the Tea Party is a kind of a populist uprising from below.
And of course, the rich and the powerful are trying to convince them and it's not hard that the enemy is Islam, the enemy is Mexicans, the enemy is the gay people and whatever, when what we ought to all be agreeing on together, instead of all this division, what we ought to all being agree, agreeing on is it's the one half of the 1% who control Wall Street and who control the state, they are the empire.
And they're the ones who brought us to destruction, not the Mexicans and the gays and the Muslims.
It's the people with the power like Larry Summers.
Well, you won't get any argument with me.
I mean, I am calling all demagogues, point your finger northeast.
I don't think it's a question of demagoguery.
I just think it's pointing out the facts.
I mean, Larry, when when we started and all that stuff, but you know, when when the when these trillions of dollars were floating around nowhere, no one was in control of them.
This nice lady Brooksley Bourne, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Exchange Trading Commission, just wanted to do a study to find out what are all these hedge funds?
What's all the what are these trillions of dollars of uncollateralized obligations?
Well, what's it all about?
And she was summoned to a meeting with Greenspan, Rubin and Larry.
Larry at that time was scheming to get Rubin's job.
So as secretary of the Treasury and Rubin at that time was scheming to break down the barriers, the Glass-Steagall or the barriers between commercial and investment banking.
And they told Brooksley Bourne to stop.
Don't do this.
You can't even do a study.
She didn't listen to them.
They went to Congress and took away the power of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to regulate these funds.
Summers became secretary of the Treasury, Rubin left and became the head of Citigroup, which is the largest financial conglomerate in the $300 billion bailout that he should have gone to prison for.
I mean, he was passing laws that he then used to enrich himself.
And you know what I just read is so funny is this guy, Talal Bin, whichever the Saudi prince, that's the part owner of News Corp, that is on one hand, he owns Fox News that's demagoguing against the mosque.
And on the other hand, he's the one who's financing the mosque.
He's also one of the largest shareholders of Citigroup, the most powerful bank in the history of mankind.
I just read that yesterday.
I mean, it's amazing.
See, the scary thing when you really get into this, and I must say about myself, I think I've looked into more of these different domains, foreign policy, economic, environment, energy, than most people I know.
What's scary is to realize that we're on a Titanic and nobody's in the captain's booth.
What you have is a bunch of little groups of very powerful people pursuing their own self-interest, slowly steering us into this iceberg, and nobody's in charge.
Nobody can control them.
I doubt if you or I were president, there's very much we could do in the short run.
I mean, we're in a situation now, what we're looking at is two to eight years of Republican rule that will totally destroy the country.
Now, at that point, either an FDR will arise and there'll be popular movements, and we'll sweep into power a decent leadership who at least are interested in helping people, or we'll become a police state.
Those seem to me to be our two options.
Yeah, well, you know, under FDR, they rounded up all the Japanese and put them in internment camps, so I'm not sure he's the model we want to follow too much.
Okay, but usually it's good marks for doing so.
No, no, I totally agree with you, and I think we completely see eye to eye on the economics of empire, that all these individual actors are acting in what's their short-term interest.
Why not get a bomb-making contract or whatever, and they're driving us all off the edge of the cliff, whether it's the guys at the Fed, the guys at the Treasury, the guys at the Pentagon, or Rahm Emanuel, or any of these people.
They're working only for their individual interests, none of which coincides with the national interests at all, it doesn't seem like anymore.
See, here's our dilemma, that if you go back to 1945, the U.S. wins World War II, we own over half the world's wealth.
Through the Marshall Plan, using strict Keynesian policies, we spread the money, then they start buying all our goods, and we have 20, 30, 40 years of healthy economic growth, arguably at least 20 years to 25 years of healthy economic growth.
Now, during that period, a lot of unhealthy habits got built up.
Just as one example, it was a debt-fueled expansion, but it was okay, because we were also producing goods and services that other people wanted to buy.
Our problem today is that our economic situation is entirely different.
We're basically living on borrowed money and borrowed time.
We're not producing goods and services sufficient to allow our economy to expand on its own.
And of course, we're overextended, we're wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the military, we're accomplishing nothing.
As the Chinese come in behind us and go into Afghanistan and get all the copper and all the minerals and all the oil, while we're sending our young Americans to die to protect Chinese economic interests, they then lend us the money back, so we'll fight more wars for them so that they can get more of the resources.
I think you just hit how to get right-wingers to turn against war.
Explain to them that the U.S. Army is the security force for the Chinese billionaires, or maybe better call them the Chai Koms.
You know, what's so maddening to me at this point is that nobody, I mean, the Republicans actually realize this, it's just that they're, I happen to agree with the Republicans that we just can't, it's one thing to take out a lot of debt when you've got a healthy, you know, like let's say in the 30s, the United States didn't have a large military, we had an enormous industrial potential, we were already at that point the leading industrial power, not really that many competitors.
It was one thing to take out debt in that situation, and then we were rescued economically by World War II, and certainly by what happened afterwards by winning it.
But now, to be taking out all of this debt when our economy is stagnant and dying because Larry Summers and all these people exported all of our jobs abroad in the 90s and the 1000s, and George Bush and company, Greenspan, is insane.
So we're living a fantasy right now, we have an army that's being funded by borrowed money.
You know, most Americans are still working borrowed money.
We're heading for, in my opinion, we're heading for a major, major crash.
I mean, I don't see how we can continue, you can't keep running $1.5 trillion deficits and all the rest of it.
Now, on the other hand, the Republicans come in and use that not to stop the military expansion, no, they keep funding that, more tax breaks for the rich.
And they're going to, you know, you'll have millions of Americans living in cars over the next five years, which will create a, you know, very, a lot of protests, a lot of dissent.
And, you know, I just see us on the verge of falling apart as a nation, in my opinion.
Well, and you know, this brings us right back to what you said earlier, and really where we started this interview is the question of blowback.
And, you know, as Chalmers Johnson explains, it's not just the Newtonian laws of physics and all that with the cause and the consequence.
It's the consequence comes as the result of foreign policies that the American people don't understand, generally covert activities that they don't know about at all.
And so when the planes come out of the clear blue sky, you know, like in the TV pictures that day, it can seem in reality, like they just came out of the clear blue sky, like history just began on September 11th.
And there was nothing that that kind of preceded that.
And it seems to me like this is the all important point that people understand the way that we really got into this mess, because as the economy falls apart, and all the demagogues voices get louder and louder against Muslims, against basically the weak and the voiceless, instead of the imperialists who brought us to this.
I mean, witness Glenn Beck's rally for the military and against state power yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial.
You know, we could be in real trouble here if we don't get our, our, you know, first question straight, which is what, who were those people that day?
And why would they do such a thing, which we still haven't got right after, you know, going on nine years now?
It's true.
Yeah, I agree with that.
It's really sad.
You know, the, the, they always have those amazing statistics that, you know, half the American people don't have passports or half the members of Congress or something.
We just don't know how to look at it from the bottom up.
I mean, I can sum up everything in those six reasons you can, you just mentioned.
Let's, I can sum it up in one sentence.
Why do they hate us?
Because we killed them.
Why do they hate us?
Because we oppress them.
That's the bottom line.
And the same way we felt on September 11, we wanted somebody to go hurt somebody for that.
And that's the way they feel too.
What's so surprising about that?
They're just people only somewhere else.
Come on.
Yeah.
Why would they like America?
I mean, just take Pakistan.
I think that's the most important country on earth right now.
180 million people, nuclear weapons.
These, this flooding is just horrific.
I mean, millions and millions of people, you know, being dispossessed of their homes, going hungry.
Obviously, I don't know how to put this, but it's a very, it's an unusually volatile country.
Let's put it that way.
Almost every leader has been assassinated since the end of World War Two, constant military coup, IU Khan, a national hero selling nuclear weapons to the Muslim world and so forth and so on.
Now, is it really in our interest to go in there and stir everything up?
Why would anyone in Pakistan feel good about the United States?
We're sending drone strikes to kill their people.
We're supporting a feudal, a feudal aristocracy, which, which, which actually many of them are still essentially slaves.
You know, the, the, the, the landowner owns the land.
He leases it to them.
They have to give him back a part.
They work all year just to survive.
And they give him the surplus.
Now, why should they like America?
But nobody ever in this country ever asked that question.
Nobody's interested in and how the Vietnamese felt after we killed, wounded and made homeless over 16 million of them.
And that's our biggest mistake.
You know, what's surprising to me, maybe you can answer this question for me.
I'm not saying I regret this or anything, believe me, but it's just a curious thing to me that, you know, when I read that America dropped 75 million cluster bombs on Laos and that they still explode and kill people hundreds of times a year, you know, almost two generations later, I wonder why there aren't Laotian suicide attackers.
I wonder why, is it just the, the kind of, you know, they believe in karma.
So what goes around is going to come around anyway.
And they, so they don't have to do it.
Is it just the philosophy of life?
Or, or what has earned us immunity from permanent reprisals by the people of Indochina?
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, I would say Laotians, where I live for four years, and the cluster bomb issue is very personal to me.
I interviewed an awful lot of refugees during the bombing.
And I've seen the effects of the cluster bombs blowing up after the bombing.
They're very weak.
They happen to be very nice people.
But even the Vietnamese, when the war ended, they had so many problems at home.
They had no interest in expanding, you know, beyond Southeast Asia or beyond, beyond Indochina.
I mean, they had no, they just couldn't even cope with their own problems.
So they, and also they're highly civilized.
I mean, the Vietnamese have a very long civilization.
I mean, so do the Muslims, but you do have these extremist elements there that I've never seen in Vietnam.
I mean, you know, in the old days, they, you know, now looking back on it, the Vietnamese, so called communists were pretty humane.
I mean, they didn't attack their own citizens directly.
I mean, there were incidents like that, but very few compared to what's going on now in the Muslim world, which I find very disturbing.
I looked up to the guerrillas during the war, I admire them.
But now in the Muslim world, I can't find anybody to admire.
So it's a really bad scene.
And I think what we need are wise, careful American leaders who think 10 and 20 years out, and who ask themselves, is it really in America's interest to provoke 1.6 billion Muslims, extremely emotional, volatile people, who are who do because of their oil wealth, unlike the Vietnamese or the Laotians or the Cambodians, with this enormous oil wealth are in a position to acquire, build nuclear weapons are in a position to conduct 911.
Is that really in our interest?
I think that's, that should be the debate in this country.
Now, unfortunately, the Democrats started to say that under Bush, but as you've noticed, since Obama came into power, because he's now the leader, that argument has suddenly disappeared.
As I said, the left wing position was to just assassinate Biden was represented.
Yeah.
In that debate.
He's the dove up there.
The guy that presided over the Iraq hearings in the Senate in 2002, that excluded any dissent whatsoever from them.
Yes, a reasonable moderate Joe Biden is, you know, try to tell the truth, hope that people wake up.
And and that our country doesn't go completely insane.
I mean, you know, the with all due respect to the tea parties, because I really do empathize with their concerns, and feel the same way.
I actually think I could sit down and talk.
If there was a chance, I'd love to sit down and talk with them.
But presently, what they're saying is just irrational.
It's just not true.
It's just silly.
I mean, to blame the economic crisis on government when obviously it was Wall Street to blame the environmental problem on government when obviously it was BP.
Well, now, come on now.
I mean, you were the one who just told the story about how Alan Greenspan, who if I remember right, was a government official.
In fact, the czar of the currency was the one who went to Congress to prevent the regulator from doing her basic job investigating their fraud.
I mean, don't tell me that was just Wall Street.
I mean, who is who is the treasury and the Fed anyway, but Wall Street, it's all one organization.
There's no real distinction.
I mean, look at getting their Geithner and Summers right now, they're doing exactly what Wall Street wants.
Not exactly, because they've managed to piss them off at the same time.
I guess I would just argue with the tea partiers.
Don't argue with them out of criticizing the state.
Argue with them about criticizing the weak and the powerless and the voiceless, the Mexicans and homosexuals and the Muslims, because that is what the powerful that's what the state and what the right wing elite want them to to do is to not focus on the bailouts and not focus on the empire, but instead to focus on, you know, the weakest of their neighbors, which after all, we're talking about right wingers who like to be bullies and like to win easy fights against powerless people.
So, you know, we want to I would say, don't dissuade them from hating the state, dissuade them from hating the rest of us, you know?
Yeah, well, all I can do at this point, I mean, my only approach is I've given up making the moral argument.
I've given up making the constitutional argument.
I've given up making the argument, all this is undemocratic and so forth.
I think the only thing that maybe we could agree on is is this really in our self interest?
Let me just since we're talking about we started out talking about my article, let me let me just read you this quote from the New York Times after the Times Square bombing.
One American official intelligence official said these attacks on to the this was after we had murdered two Pakistani Taliban leaders have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban Taliban.
So it's no wonder they're beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.
Now, is it really in our interest?
See, now the chain argument as well.
Oh, my God, they're Pakistani Taliban.
They are going to kill us anyway, no matter what we do.
So we might as well go kill them.
Well, that's absurd.
The Pakistani Taliban have a lot on their plate.
They're not interested in the United States unless we come to them and start killing and murdering, you know, both their leaders and countless civilians.
Now we make it personal for them.
And what what's going on today is the Obama portrays policy.
And the height of insanity is making it personal for millions and millions of Muslims to want to strike back at the United States.
They have a culture of revenge.
I mean, that's part of the Pashtun Wali.
You know, that's the kill my father, I'm going to kill yours.
And they have the means to do it in today's globalized world.
They have the money, all this Saudi money floating around and all the oil money.
So that's that's where I'm just putting my cards on that argument that maybe people can understand that their own children are likely to be killed or are the increasing chance of being killed by Muslim extremists unless we come to some kind of rapprochement with the Muslim world or at least stop killing them.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I got to tell you, Fred, I I'm afraid that I agree with you that that's the only argument that might work, that referring to the Constitution or to basic human decency or to, you know, any other thing other than, you know, what's good for the individual listener at any given moment is basically worthless.
And it's too bad that it's true.
I hope we're both wrong about that, but I don't really think we are.
And I think with that, we better go ahead and leave it.
But I really appreciate your time on the show today.
And I really could not recommend this article highly enough to the listeners.
It's called Mass Assassination.
One last word, I'd suggest you go to the very bottom of the article.
Click on the video clip on Dwayne Claridge, who we've unleashed now on Pakistan.
Oh, yeah.
CIA station chief who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Latin America.
We've unleashed him on Pakistan now, and you'll see his face.
He says, we'll intervene wherever we decide it's in our national security interest.
And if you don't like it, lump it, get used to it, world.
That's what the that's what the world sees of us.
They don't hear the Obama speeches go over their heads.
Most of these Pakistanis haven't even hear his speeches.
They certainly don't believe them.
We are unleashing vicious, murderous assassins who kill at will all over the world.
And boy, if you don't if you don't think 9-1-1 was as I said in my article, even if you want to say that 9-1-1 was we didn't do anything to provoke 9-1-1 for the last 10 years.
And increasingly, we're killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims, depriving millions of people of their homes.
If you don't think there's going to be a blowback to that, you're literally nuts.
So that's my final word.
Right on.
Well, yeah.
And I especially appreciate you pointing that out.
I guess I just had the printer version here.
I didn't realize that you had the embedded YouTube on the page there.
That's good.
Take a look at that clip from Dewey Claridge.
One more time for the audience.
The article is called Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America's Military Strategy in the Muslim World.
I strongly urge all y'all to read it.
And thanks very much again for your time on the show today.
Everybody, that's Fred Bronfman from Alternet.org.
