Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and it's time to talk about Iran again.
Welcoming to the show, he's a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Gene Lyons, author of a new article, Global Funhouse Horrors, an Attack on Iran.
Welcome to the show, Gene.
Good morning.
It's good to have you on the show.
I'm talking to you from Arkansas today, is that it?
Yes.
Oh, that's good.
I don't know if I've ever interviewed anybody from Arkansas before.
Well, I'm here.
I'm known in Arkansas.
I'm in the deepest boondocks, so it sounds different.
Yeah.
We could be interrupted by animal noises, but nothing else should bother us.
Yeah, that'd be okay.
I don't know if October finally arrived in Arkansas, but it's finally arrived here in Texas a little bit.
We're enjoying it.
Right.
It rained and cooled off.
For the first time.
Everybody here is happy about that.
All right.
Well, basically, the deal is on this show, I just sit around debunking the lies leading us to war with Iran all the time, and I figured I'd bring you on and you can help me out, since you wrote such a great article about it.
Well, thank you.
I've written a couple.
I wrote another column that's in the paper today.
It's actually syndicated.
Actually, there are quite a few papers in Texas that take it, but they're all kind of smallish towns, I think.
That's good, though, that you're syndicated in small town papers that they're getting a chance to read this kind of straight dope.
Well, I hope so.
I mean, I think that apart from what I call sort of after the novelist Walker Percy, the knothead faction, which he used to describe what used to be called the Know Nothings in the 19th century, I think most Americans are open to new ways of looking at things and foreign policy because everything that they were told was such great confidence has proven to be so drastically wrong.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, if the windows open, if this is the window of opportunity where people are willing to listen to Eugene Lyons, let's start with Ahmadinejad's trip to New York as the president of Iran came a few weeks back.
And I think probably more conservative beds were wet in those three or four days than probably in the years leading up to in the entire Bush administration.
It was total panic, it seemed, that the president of Iran came to America.
Well, there was a lot of simulated hysteria, I think, or make-believe hysteria.
It's hard for me to believe that people are actually afraid of Iran, for heaven's sake.
But I do think that there's a great interest in drumming up a new threat.
Everybody's Hitler these days.
I mean, there's a new Hitler every three or four months.
And, you know, I think there was a great interest in stirring that up, although I think most Americans, seeing how things are going in Afghanistan and in Iraq, would be hesitant to attack a country that's larger than the two of them combined.
For no particular reason that I can tell, other than that their president is sort of, as I called him in the column, kind of the Persian George Wallace.
Yeah, what exactly do you mean by that?
He's not Hitler, he's more of a George Wallace type.
Well, I mean, he's the third stringer.
First of all, the president of Iran is in elected office.
He leaves office next year around the same, a little after Bush leaves office.
I suppose he could be re-elected.
It's not clear how the wind's blowing there now.
But under Iran's constitution, the president of Iran has no power over the military at all.
His authority is only over Iran's civil government.
And so, making him into this big, you know, and trying to make him into the new Hitler is silly.
And I think that now, he certainly wasn't back in 1968 when he ran for president, but I think now most Americans view George Wallace as kind of, you know, an unamusing but futile and relatively powerless leader.
And that was the suggestion I was trying to make.
I would be demonizing Khomeini.
I mean, it sounds just like Khomeini, and he's got the weird hat and everything, and he's the real Ayatollah.
Why don't they demonize him?
First of all, Ahmadinejad goes around saying silly things.
Like, well, hosting the Holocaust conference was just idiotic from any point of view.
As I quoted in the column you're talking about, I quoted an Iranian blogger who said, you know, why would you think they'd take you seriously?
And this is coming from the Iranian point of view.
You have to criticize Israel and Zionism and do it in a manner that is guaranteed to blow up in your face.
Why should we respect that?
I mean, that's the question, but I'm not sure why they don't go after the Ayatollahs more, although it would be inconvenient because this Ayatollah, who is the so-called supreme leader of the country, has actually written a fatwa back, I think it was in 2004 or 2005, in which he stated that nations, for a nation to possess nuclear weapons is deeply immoral and anti-Muslim, and to use them is unthinkable.
The fact that he's done that would not necessarily preclude him from being attacked because very few people know that.
And also Americans really don't know how to take those things.
I mean, is that misdirection or is it sincere?
Who knows?
It very well could change, even if it is sincere, but you're right that I think he'd be more difficult to caricature as a Hitler.
Especially now, I guess, Rafsanjani and some of these other reformer types have been elected to the council that oversees him and that kind of thing.
It seems like where the Ayatollahs are, that's the moderation in the country.
The hawks are centered around the powerless president.
Right.
Not only powerless, but I mean, Iranian democracy is very far from what we would consider an ideal democracy, but it's certainly more democratic than most countries in that part of the world.
One of the other columnists in the paper sort of took me up on this and I said, well, you know, find me another country in South Asia that's more democratic than Iran.
But we're only focused on Iran.
Come on.
All the champions of human rights in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan?
Come on.
Right.
Pakistan, all of them.
Iran is, as a matter of fact, and this may not necessarily be good because they do have a very different point of view on a lot of things, but Iran is a far more democratic country than anybody around them.
Well, when we found out that, at least in terms of American so-called interests as defined by our government anyway, that democracy in the Middle East has been an absolute disaster.
We've got Hamas.
We've got the Iranians in Iraq.
We've got Hezbollah empowered in Lebanon.
Everything is working exactly the opposite of the way they would say.
Yeah, which anybody who knew very much about the Middle East, I don't know a great deal about.
I'm not an expert, but I've been to the Middle East.
I've been to Iran and I've been, you know, I know a little bit about it.
I read a lot.
And it's very clear that if you're going to elect governments in that part of the world, you are not going to like what the majority of the voters in those countries say, what they actually think.
So the biggest irony in the world, of course, is that President Bush, who campaigned in 2000 against nation building, now finds this country, now has us in the most ill-conceived nation building exercise possibly well since Vietnam, let's put it that way.
It's a great irony.
On the other hand, I would also argue, I mean, I'm just playing around.
I mean, for the sake of argument, I would say it's not necessarily bad that an operation like Hezbollah has some power and some say, because now at least there's an opportunity for people who want to deal with the problems of that region to deal with its real problems.
And it's what the people there really think rather than what we can persuade stooges like the late Saddam Hussein to say under differences.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, no, I agree.
In fact, in Hezbollah, Nasrallah has forged an alliance with Michael Aoun and some of the Christian factions and whatever.
I don't know if there's going to be another war there or what and whose side who's going to be on, but I mean, let's face it, the Syrians were the power in southern Lebanon until Bush forced him out over the Hariri assassination that was never really proven to be done by them anyway.
And that's what gave Hezbollah all the power in the south.
They filled the power vacuum after the Syrians were forced out for good or for bad.
Well, I do have Lebanese relatives, I mean, relatives who were born in Lebanon, and the perspective that they share on the politics of that region is always no one ever believes this cover story.
Everyone tries to figure out who, which two enemies are teaming up with each other to screw a third enemy for now.
And then, you know, when the situation shifts a couple of years from now, the alliance could go the other way.
Right, this is the quote that Ron Paul keeps quoting Ronald Reagan in the debates as saying that he figured out that the politics of the Middle East are too irrational for him to try to figure out and pick a side and that it's better to just get the Marines out of there.
He learned from his fatal mistake and putting them there in the first place.
Well, the mistake was putting them there as peacekeepers and then taking sides in the civil war and being surprised when they were attacked.
I mean, that was a really silly blunder, but as you say, Reagan was capable of learning, unlike the president incumbent, who I think just seems to display a lifestyle, a lifelong hostility to learning.
Yeah, well, and it does seem to all come down to him, all the best information I can find, such as, for example, this great new article in the Telegraph from yesterday, The Man Who Stands Between U.S. and a New War.
It's about Robert Gates and Steve Clemons at the Washington Note and others have done a great job of, I think, explaining Gareth Porter as well that the entire military, the Secretary of Defense, the heads of the Director of National Intelligence and the head of the CIA and the Secretary of State and her number two, Negroponte, and everybody is opposed to a war with Iran except the vice president's office, Dick Cheney's office, and that it's all up to Bush.
And so here we are, you know, the guy that can't find the door is the guy who really gets to decide between Gates and Cheney here.
Well, it is a tricky situation to be in.
It's a scary situation to be in.
I don't think that Bush is actually stupid.
I just think he's resistant to learning new things.
He doesn't have ideas, he has beliefs, and he's very, very slow to change those beliefs, but with all those, you've got to think at some level, you've got to pray that he's amenable to reason on this because I really do think, and now I sound like I'm out in left field somewhere, I think an attack on Iran.
If we get bogged down in Iran, if we're bogged down in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan at the same time, that's a guerrilla war we can never win.
I'll go that far.
There aren't enough Americans that they can force to go over there to fight that war and win it.
That's a losing proposition.
Not that any of these countries could take on the American military in a straight up battle, but there'll never be a straight up battle.
It'll just be more guerrilla warfare for the indefinite future, and I think eventually, I was talking about this with a friend the other day, the American empire would end up imploding over this, and I don't think it would be pretty because I think the domestic repercussions would be much worse than they were, for example, for the British.
Well, I totally agree with that, although you've also identified the very core of my fear, which is that George Bush, this is one last chance for him to be great, to conscript hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans and force them to go fight a huge, great war.
This is his chance to be Franklin Roosevelt.
Well, I think that the domestic politics would become very quickly unendurable if, I mean, I think we'd be back, it would be like 1968 all over again, and I'm old enough to remember it well.
I was in school that year.
Well, you know what?
I'm not old enough to remember it well, and I know that most of my audience is not old enough to remember it well, so what's the big significance of 1968 then, Jim?
Well, 1968 was just the worst year of the Vietnam era.
It was the year that Martin Luther King was shot and that Bobby Kennedy was shot and that Medgar Evers was shot, and it was the year of the riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention.
And it was the year that George Wallace ran for president and actually won five states, including Arkansas, I'm embarrassed to say, and it did seem at times during that year that the country was just going to fly apart, that it just could not contain all the anger and bitterness that were in the body politic.
I've never felt anything quite like it before or since in America, and I also think that if we had a draft for a war against Iran, those kinds of conditions could return.
I don't think that the Congress would enact the draft right now anyway.
Well, and it should be said, too, that all the talk is of airstrikes.
It's just the problem with that is, as very informed former government employee types have said on my show recently, how do you tell the Iranians the war is over?
Look, we're going to bomb you for two weeks and then that's it, and then there's just not going to be consequences after that?
Well, the most amazing thing of all to me is that the assumption behind all this, which the neoconservatives have been saying, well, there are many millions of Iranians who are unhappy with the government and would like to see it overthrown.
That is definitely a fact, but that the reaction to being bombed by the United States would be to turn against your own government.
That's so crazy, I don't even know how to discuss it.
What happened in 9-11?
Do they remember that?
You know, what happened in 9-11 was...
Oh, well, we all rose up and overthrew our government.
Well, we all rose up against the government and overthrew...
I mean, it's operating on the assumption that people in countries like Iran are not actually human beings like us.
They don't love their children.
You know, I mean, it's just so irrational and so crazy, as in the immortal words of George Orwell, only an intellectual could think it.
Right.
Yeah, that's a good one there.
And the higher you get in the power, the further away you are from anybody who's not buying it, who could tell it to you otherwise.
You know, I saw Chris Matthews yesterday say to Dr. Paul after the debate that this is all just a bunch of war propaganda.
They're selling us another bill of goods, aren't they?
And yet, he will not interview Gene Lyons or Gareth Porter or anybody else to sit there and go through and debunk these lies.
Well, I think he's had a lot of skeptics on.
He has Pat Buchanan.
I don't care for Matthews.
You know, I wonder sometimes if he's had his distemper shots.
But, you know, he has had on Pat Buchanan and Pat Buchanan wrote a very forceful column about this the other day.
He even went so far as to say, look, when Ahmadinejad wanted to go to plant a wreath at 9-11 and everybody acted like that would be a bad thing, why would that be a bad thing?
What he's saying symbolically by doing that is we're on your side against Al-Qaeda, which Iran has been trying to say since 9-11 happened in many different ways.
They don't like us, but between the near enemy and the far enemy, they choose the far enemy, us, rather than the near enemy, bin Laden.
What amazes me, too, is that these guys are thought of as the tough-minded, realistic ones.
How can you be tough-minded and realistic when you think you're going to bomb a country which, unlike Iraq, is a country?
Iran, too, has ethnic and religious divisions, but the great majority of its people are ethnic Persians who speak Farsi and are Shiites.
And it's also been a country for a very, very long time, 3,000 years at least, and most of the minorities have long accepted being under the yoke of the Persian majority.
So the point is it's more of a country, but the idea that any group of people who think of themselves as a people is going to react to being bombed by a foreign power by attacking their own government is just so nuts.
How do these people get to be called the hard-headed, realistic ones?
It seems to me it's like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
Well, but the only reason you and I are having this debate is because a substantial number, at least, I don't know what proportion it really is, but a substantial number of our neighbors are willing to go along with the same mushy-headed, ridiculous notions.
The polls show that most people are opposed to war with Iran, but then, oh, if the president says we need to have one, well, then the majority supports it.
The really awful bottom-line truth, and this is just something that anybody trying to espouse reason at this time has to struggle against, is I remember there was a poll of geographical knowledge among American college graduates that was done around the time the argument was being conducted about whether Iraq needed to be attacked.
And I believe the figure was 17 percent, not of Americans, but of American college graduates, could find Iraq on a blank map of the world.
I'll give you another example of what I mean.
There was a cartoon published in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, I believe by the right-wing cartoonist Ramirez for the L.A.
Times, I think it's the L.A.
Times he works for, which had Ahmadinejad laying a wreath for the hijackers on 9-11.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, anybody who hasn't figured out yet that there's a schism between Sunni and Shiite Islam and that the wise policy would be to befriend the Shiites in Iran rather than alienate them because they know the ground over there a lot better and they don't like bin Laden at all.
The original point was most Americans don't understand that they say Iraq and Iran, they're like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, they still don't get it.
They don't understand that they're very different countries with very different histories, very different cultures, and completely different approaches.
This misunderstanding goes for not just the people, but the people who draw the political cartoons, the people who report the news on TV, the people who write the articles.
For the most part, they're not any more educated about it.
They don't see it any more differently.
It seems to me you could do a Google search for 15 or 20 minutes and find, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of sources describing Iran's efforts to help us fight Al Qaeda after September 11th, the candlelight vigils in Tehran, their peace offer of 2003 where they offered to turn over bin Laden's son and four others, and America refused them and now says, oh, they're working with Al Qaeda.
There's Al Qaeda in Iran.
Yeah, they're sitting in prison.
They would be in American prisons except Dick Cheney refused their offer to turn them over to us.
Yeah, well, there it is.
It's also true that Iran hasn't attacked another country in centuries and they have specifically and repeatedly at the highest level, by which I mean Ayatollah Khomeini, said they're not attacking Israel.
They have no territorial demands on anybody.
Even if the United States withdrew entirely from the Persian Gulf, Iran would still be surrounded by enemies.
So it doesn't make any sense to me.
Right.
I don't think it's really about making sense.
It's about causing fear.
And if the fear doesn't work on you, you're supposed to just find something else to be interested in.
The fear is for the people the fear will work on, I guess.
And coming back to what you asked right at the beginning about Ahmadinejad, he makes a very he makes a good he makes a good symbol because he's first of all, he's a little guy and he's bearded and he doesn't speak English and he doesn't wear a necktie.
And he can be easily depicted as kind of a crazy man, a crazy man who isn't scary either.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, he comes off as ridiculous because in some ways he is ridiculous.
Yeah, he's David Koresh.
The boogeyman.
The boogeyman who doesn't really have any power, but we're going to get him for you.
Well, he has very little power.
Yeah, very little very little power in their system.
And there's a transient figure who will be gone in a couple of years.
But if you want if you want to produce an Iran which is militant and dangerous, bomb them.
Look, they have their own hardline crackpots.
They have their own people who look.
Yeah, but the best way to empower them is to bomb them.
Right.
It's the same thing that happened here again.
Just putting the shoe on the other foot.
They attacked the United States and the American people by way of their government turned to Paul Wolfowitz for the answer.
It's the same thing.
When we bombed them, all of a sudden the coupe down the street that everybody had been marginalizing sounds like he's known what's going on for a while now.
We better pay attention to him.
Yeah, exactly.
That's probably why people listen to my show.
I'm just kidding.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's exactly that's exactly the reaction.
And I don't have vast experience in Iran.
I was in the B score there in the 60s.
But what I know is the only big thing I know is that human beings are basically human beings.
When you get past that, you'd rather have a root canal than listen to Persian music and the food isn't particularly appetizing to our tastes.
All the differences that happen when you go to a place that's that foreign, that strange to you.
They are human beings.
They love their children.
They love their country.
They like they like it's music and art.
They like it's sports.
They like, you know what I'm saying?
I mean, most people's most people's feelings about that the world are instinctive.
I mean, I love southern women.
College football, baseball, I couldn't live anywhere but America.
Where else do they have baseball forever?
Well, you know, I guess I could learn to love Japanese baseball if I could learn to beat love being in a crowd all the time.
But you know what I'm saying?
I mean, that's what anchors most people in reality.
And otherwise, most people most of the time would prefer not to think about what's going on on the other side of the world that Americans can afford not to or have been able to afford not to so for the most part, they don't Right.
And and really, that's the thing is it takes reminding that we're so isolated over here and we haven't had to we've been able to get away with ignoring the rest of the world.
As you were saying, people can't even find Iraq on a map.
I think, you know, really, we're lucky if when you say Iran, people can even even picture a shape on a map, much less picture a sidewalk with, you know, women and children and a playground and businessmen going to work and and day to day life mountains in the background, blue sky and birds chirping and so forth.
It's another place like a cartoon land.
It's it's outer space.
It doesn't, it doesn't exist, really.
You're exactly right.
You can bring people up short by pointing out.
It's twice the size of Texas since you're in.
And it's as mountainous as Colorado.
Try that on for size.
Yeah, yeah, let's see.
If you want to if you really want to attack them, it'll be great.
Hey, I used to say back during the back during the Cold War when I was working at this epiphany one day, I used to work at Texas Monthly.
I used to write for them in the 70s a lot.
And I remember being in Houston one time when one of the big things was stirred up between the US and Russia and saying, How would you like to be a Russian soldier trying to patrol Houston?
Oh, my God.
It wouldn't be much fun.
No, it wouldn't be any fun at all.
So, I mean, the point is, what are realistic fears about the Russians and what are, you know, make believe crazy fears that make believe crazy fear is was the one expressed in all those silly movies about the Russians invading and high school boys defeating them.
They were not capable of invading us.
And for the same reason, we're not really capable of invading Iran.
And if we try, we will bring ourselves to we will bring ourselves to doom.
Yeah, well, and the thing is, if the Russians had ever tried to invade us, like you're saying, it would have been like Red Dawn like the movie Red Dawn times 10,000.
It wouldn't have been high school boys.
It would have been everybody in town.
Exactly.
It wouldn't have lasted a day.
No, exactly.
I mean, you talk about Fallujah and so forth.
Try taking over even Austin.
You know what I mean?
And Austin's full of hippies, but they're hippies armed to the teeth around here.
I know Austin pretty well.
I've lived there.
All right.
Hey, I'm talking with Gene Lyons.
He's from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
It's Antiwar Radio.
And, Gene, I want to play for you this clip of Hillary Clinton, the left half of the war party at a public appearance yesterday.
We want to send a clear message to their leadership that we will impose sanctions.
The regular medical organization gives us the authority to impose sanctions on their leadership.
I consider that part of a very robust diplomatic effort, because what wasn't in what you read to me, that somebody obviously sent to you, is that...
Robert, I take exception.
This is my own research.
Let me finish.
Let me say a few words.
No one said that.
Well, I apologize.
It's just that I've been asked the very same question with three other witnesses, so let me apologize.
Let me add that I also was the first person to go before the Senate back in 2009.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, anyway, I'm sorry the audio is pretty terrible on that clip, but...
Well, I've read it, so I was able to make it out, but...
You were able to hear it?
Well, I could hear it, yeah, because I've read it.
I don't think I could have understood it if I hadn't read it.
I see.
For the audience, basically, a guy asked her about her vote recently for the Lieberman-Kyle bill, and said, you know, you're basically giving authorization for war here, not explicitly, but you're accepting all of the fake premises, for one.
And she denounced the guy and said it wasn't even his question, that he was reading off of some script that had been written for him, and then went on to say how just because she voted for it doesn't mean she wasn't also voting against it or something.
Well, that was the fourth time that day she'd been asked the question, and I'll give her this.
She did apologize.
I think it was a wrong-headed vote.
You know, confession, I know Hillary Clinton read reasonably well.
I think her vote was probably a tactical vote, and that doesn't increase my respect for her, but I think it was a damn fool thing to do.
You know, I think that she ought to have been with Senator Webb on this all along.
No, we don't need to give them anything that helps them make a case for bombing Iran, so that they can come back and say, well, you know, if you call the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist force and we already have the permission from the American people in the 2000 and what was it?
2001.
So we can now bomb them because they're terrorists.
Well, you know, I wouldn't have given them that.
I would have certainly drawn the line on the other side of that.
I just think it was one of those votes.
She didn't want to spend the rest of the time fighting about it.
However, you know, at some point you've got to draw a line, and I think she's chosen it on the wrong side.
Yeah, I mean, she clearly understands exactly what she's doing when she votes for something like that.
It's not as though she doesn't understand that Dick Cheney can just point right at that and say, look, you've ratified every single one of my false assertions and said they're true, so therefore they're true, and we're going to war, and you're not going to stop us.
You know, this is the same thing as, oh, yeah, I gave Bush the authorization to go to war, but I didn't think he was going to go to war with it.
Well, they did soften that resolution quite a lot before they voted on it, but I pretty much agree with your point.
I think it was a, my guess is it was a cynical vote.
Well, and she shouldn't be surprised that she's getting, or maybe she should be surprised, but I'm happy to see that she's getting challenged on it by people over and over again.
Whether they all got an email from moveon.org to tell them to ask her that or not, you know?
Absolutely.
Wake up.
If the people are awake and making her defend that vote, maybe she'll change her mind.
That's the way American democracy is supposed to work.
Yeah.
Hey, if you know Hillary reasonably well, would you do me a favor?
Yeah.
Explain to her that all the dead people in Iraq, it's because of our invasion and that the longer we've stayed, the worse we've made it, because we spent four years propping up the Shiite government allied with Iran, and now we're redirecting toward the Sunni insurgency that's killed 3,800 of our guys, and arming and funding and training both sides, the Maliki government and the insurgency against it, and that the longer we stay, everything we do makes it worse and worse and worse and worse, and the way to make it better is to leave.
And so when she gets up there and says we can't leave until we make it better, she's operating off a completely and totally false premise that what needs to happen is America has to withdraw in order for the people of that country to sort out their own destiny.
Well, I agree with you.
Can you tell her that for me?
If I talk to her, I will.
The only thing she ever asked me for advice about was what breed of dog to get her husband, and she took it.
No.
But was that your, don't tell me you picked out Buddy for Bill?
Not the specific dog I told her to get.
I told her it would be a good idea to get a lab.
For PR purposes or because you really like labs?
No, because her mother lives near me, and she, I'm a well-known dog, well, where I used to live in Little Rock, I'm a well-known dog crank, and so she came by one day with the Secret Service just to ask my advice, and she was very taken with our golden retriever, Big Red, who's happy every day of his life and with boundless energy.
And I said, well, you don't want him, though, I got a feeling you probably would not be happy to see the, well, when the golden retriever goes out for his walk, comes home and lies down, he leaves a crime scene outlined in dirt on the ground.
That's where he sleeps.
And I said, basically, with a lab, you get the same personality, but you don't get the dirt because they shed it before they come in the house.
So that was my only advice.
Get a lab.
They're always optimistic.
They're always happy.
They're always friendly.
Okay.
Well, you're obviously an insider, so go ahead and pass on my message.
No, I'm not an insider.
I just, you know, I just, my wife worked with her for a long time, not at all.
My wife works at the Arkansas Children's Hospital, and Hillary was on the board of directors, and my wife's job would involve the board of directors, so they had known each other as more or less colleagues for a long time.
I see.
Here's how well I know, or my first reaction to when they announced for president, I just said what I actually thought to her just to see what she'd say.
I said, have you all lost your minds?
I don't know.
This is the end of your private life forever.
And what did I know?
I don't know.
I thought that they sort of- You're talking about back in 92, or you're talking about this time?
Back in 91, yeah.
I was addressing them as human-sized figures who fit in the same landscape that I do, Little Rock, a town not as big as Austin, where after a while you pretty much get to know people.
You're not astonished to see the governor in the grocery store, that sort of thing.
So I reacted to them as if they were friends, as if they were friends of mine.
I had no idea of the boundlessness of her ambition, which I don't share, which I think is a form of insanity.
But there it is.
Well, what about Mike Huckabee?
What do you think of him?
If I had to pick a Republican, I'd pick him.
But Huckabee is a complicated guy.
He's very good on some issues and very bad on a lot of other issues, but he's not inhumane.
He's not stupid.
He's not mean.
He's petulant.
And he goes in for, you know, he whines a lot when people say things about him that aren't true.
And he had a history here sometimes of going off half-cocked and then when things blew up in his face, denying that he'd done and said what he'd obviously done and said and everyone knew he'd done and said.
But that's kind of a classic political thing.
I would just basically say at the end of the day, if you have to have a Republican, he'd be your guy.
Well, that's my favorite Republican there, but I would agree with you.
He doesn't seem like he would enjoy inflicting pain as much as, say, Rudy Giuliani.
No, I remember the time that he really woke me up with the last time we had a big celebration over Little Rock Central High School, which was five years, I think five years ago, maybe longer.
Ian Clinton gave a speech and the theme of his speech was how the southern white churches had failed in racial matters, which is true, morally true, a big, big theme, not popular on the religious right.
But he gave a very heartfelt and very honorable speech on that occasion.
And I respected him for it.
Yeah, I could see that.
Although in that debate where he got into the argument with Ron Paul about whether we have to stay in Iraq forever because of our honor and one nation under God and all that, you must have rolled your eyes that day.
I have to confess that I haven't watched any of the Republican debates, not until the baseball season ends at least.
Oh, I see.
Well, you've got to get on YouTube and see the Paul versus Huckabee and see what you think after that.
Well, I just think, you know, as we were talking about Mrs. Clinton's point of view or Senator Clinton's point of view earlier, I think what most of the politicians right now are hunting for is somewhere in the middle ground so that they can appear to be anti-war, but not, you know, they're trying to find the middle in the debate, which is where most people always end up just because most people don't want to think about it very hard some of the time.
And it's a job of people like you and me to move the debate to move them.
That's my view of politics, I guess, in a nutshell.
If you want them to change their position, you need to move the debate because they're going to be in the middle.
They're going to be just to the left or just to the right of dead center on every major emotional issue if they can.
That's just my...
Well, I think that's true.
And in fact, someone who's forced himself to sit through these Republican debates, I think it's shown itself in a lot more free market rhetoric and pro-federalism rhetoric and so forth as the other guys try to hop on Ron Paul's bandwagon.
In fact, yesterday John McCain told him that he ought to read Adam Smith, which I thought was hilarious from a guy who could have, you know, written a far better version of the Wealth of Nations itself, Ron Paul.
Well, it'll be interesting to me to see if he gets what kind of votes he gets because the tendency, of course, is to try to isolate him as a crackpot.
Yeah.
Well, I guess if he serves to move the debate, especially on the war question, then that's progress.
Although I would just rather see him beat the nominee and beat Hillary in the fall, but, you know, that's just me.
Well, I mean, absolutely.
The debate has to be moved.
That's what has to happen because we're not going to get out of there until the people really demand it.
Well, and I think the danger of war with Iran is probably the number one reason to get out of Iraq before this war expands.
And articles like yours, I hope, are helping to push in that direction.
I especially like hearing that it's run in small town papers across the south and so forth because you speak reason.
Well, I'll try.
And this will blow on house horrors and attack on Iran.
Well, I'm not taking the point of view that you have to love their government or you have to love their, you know, I'm taking the point of view that, look, it's a very big place.
We're already tied down.
They aren't immediately threatening us.
We can't do this, which I think is the realistic, which I think is where the Pentagon's coming from.
We can't have this fight.
This is not a fight we can have right now.
Yeah, that's exactly the case.
That's what this Telegraph article was saying, too, that Gates has given the generals explicit permission to say exactly what's on your mind to Congress.
And one of the generals immediately asked Congress if he could come testify about how overstretched his forces and about how he doesn't want any new wars, please.
That's General Casey, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
General Casey, exactly.
You know, that's the best description.
I'll never forget this day.
I went to a Fourth of July party held by a now deceased journalist in Little Rock.
It was a sort of a famous yearly event.
They had a lot of he was also a bluegrass musician.
So it was a big sort of supper on the ground and picking and grinning festival.
And I was talking to one of our local federal judges and General Clark about Iraq.
This was in July 2002.
Before it all started.
With my limited knowledge of the area, thought it was a bad idea.
I've been reading a lot of the foreign press.
I didn't I wasn't buying a lot of the WMD's propaganda.
And I put the question to Clark.
And what was surprising to me wasn't so much the answer, but that he gave it in a circumstance where almost everybody around was a working journalist and people were listening.
He predicted with considerable precision exactly what could go wrong in Iraq when Pandora's when the lid was removed from Pandora's box.
With with by deposing by the posing Saddam Hussein.
And what was most impressive about it is he's a brilliant man and very learned in history and knew the Middle East inside out and had thought about it seriously.
And the way you would think about it if you were going to have to lead an army there.
And it it was amazing to me that the the strongest and most prescient anti war argument, anti Iraq war argument I came came from the guy who led the war again in Kosovo.
And wasn't publicized, really.
I mean, he didn't he didn't say whatever it was he said to you.
I guess he might have said it in front of reporters, but shouldn't say it on TV when they were interviewing him in 2002.
By the time he started appearing on TV, he was being asked different questions rather than, you know, being asked questions about how will we do this?
I mean, he had made the shift that military men do, which is OK.
I think this is a I thought this was a bad idea that the order has been given.
Now I have to try it.
Well, you know, it sounds silly, but I had just read a Tom Clancy book and I think it was a new one that, you know, all the G.
Gordon Liddy fans out there were reading.
And it had the plot was Saddam Hussein got whacked and the Iranians inherited the south in a day because and it explained all about why that would be the case and everything.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, it's a new novel.
If no, I might be confused.
I think it was the one that came out in 2001, The Bear and the Dragon that came out in 2001.
Although I might be confused.
I read a couple of those.
But no, I don't it was before the war then.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
Before the war and not too long before it either.
So it is the kind of thing sort of like, you know, somebody might crash planes into something sometime on purpose, kamikaze style.
It was it was kind of a meme that was that was spreading right beforehand.
Well, you know, the whole point of diplomacy, as I understand it, and a foreign policy, as I understand it is try to understand the other guy's point of view and help him achieve his goals in a way that isn't inconsistent with yours, if you can.
And the most obvious thing in the world is that the Iranians don't want an unstable, fractured Iraq with crazy Sunnis in control, and they don't want Afghanistan to be that way either.
So why not try working with them instead of working against them?
Are you going to try to create a Hitler-Stalin pact?
That is to say, you know, some kind of rapprochement between the crazy Sunnis and the Shia so that, you know, because they both say, well, these Americans, we can get back to killing each other later, but these Americans are going to kill us both if we don't team up.
Right.
That's not what we want.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
But I guess you would have to be able to distinguish one brown guy with a funny hat from another in order to draw a conclusion like that.
Yeah, you're right.
Exactly.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot, everybody.
It's Gene Lyons, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
The article is Global Funhouse Horrors, an Attack on Iran.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
