04/28/09 – George McGovern – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing our first guest on the show today, it's George McGovern.
He ran for president and unfortunately lost to Richard Nixon in 1972.
He flew a B-52 in World War II, of course was a congressman and a senator and has a new article in the Los Angeles Times about whether or not America, whether or not Barack Obama needs to consider going ahead and speeding up his pull-out plan and try to get us out of Iraq this year.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Good to talk to you again.
Thank you.
It's good to be your guest.
All right.
Now, Obama's plan has been to get us out according to the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by George Bush.
At least he says, although it seems like most of the withdrawal is supposed to happen toward the end of this timeline, which makes it suspicious to me, but he promises to get us out by 2012.
And in your article here that you wrote on the 20th in the Los Angeles Times, you say that that's just not good enough, sir.
Well, I think that's right.
You know I'm a supporter of President Obama and I want him to be a great president.
And I think he has the capacity to become one.
But he would be making a dreadful mistake to take our forces out of Iraq and put them into Afghanistan.
That's a near perfect example of going from a frying pan into the fire.
The British tried pacifying Afghanistan a century ago and ended up after painful losses defeated in that effort.
The Russians, to come closer to our time, went in for 11 years, from 1979 to the end of the 1980s.
They had put an army of 100,000 crack troops into Afghanistan to pacify the violent elements there.
And they limped out 11 years later with 25,000 dead young Russian soldiers and another 25,000 went home without a leg or an arm or some other organ of the body.
It's sometimes credited with bringing about the downfall of the Soviet Union.
And I don't want to see the United States get lodged in a place like that.
I see another Vietnam on the horizon if we take that road.
Well, there's a few important points there to go with.
In fact, I think I want to start with what you say about the Russian invasion kind of leading to their downfall.
At least many people seem to think that that precipitated the breakup of the Soviet Union.
It seems like there's certainly a pretty strong correlation there.
Well, and I guess you say that your fear is that we're going to head down that same path.
I wanted to ask you about kind of the Cold War view on this.
John Mueller, who's a professor at the University of Chicago, has a thesis that says that the reason that we, he agrees with that, that the Afghan war helped destroy the Soviet Union.
He says, you see, what happened was when we lost Vietnam, we stopped intervening, we stopped containing, basically, or not completely stopped, but the containment policy against the USSR basically had a bunch of holes in it, and then they expanded into a bunch of new obligations, into Afghanistan, into Angola and other places in Africa and in South America, and that this is what broke them is we finally stopped containing them, that they went too far and killed themselves.
Well, I think that's true.
We can't say that with absolute certainty because we don't really know all the other internal strains that were affecting the Soviet Union, but what we do know is that after their 11-year pilgrimage in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union came apart.
Instead of 16 united republics, they had 16 independent states that, in a sense, withdrew from the Soviet Union, and I think the strains on the United States stemming from a decades-long war in Iraq and probably another decades-long war in Afghanistan, if we go in there, I think it's terribly dangerous to our own internal strength.
We're in a deep recession at the moment, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s.
We can't afford a two-front war in the Middle East, and the time has come not to jump from one state into another, but to withdraw our military forces in that part of the world.
Well, Senator, the opposition view would be that, well, one opposition view, I guess, would be stay forever, but I guess the other opposition view would be, well, Barack Obama knows what he's doing, and December 31, 2011 is soon enough.
Why do you insist that, as you say in your article, our troops inside Iraq ought to be out of there by Thanksgiving?
They ought to be home by Thanksgiving.
Wouldn't that be dangerous?
No, it wouldn't be dangerous.
It doesn't mean we're going to leave Iraq feeling all happy and blissful and prosperous, because our occupation there has just about destroyed that country.
It's destroyed much of the infrastructure.
It's destroyed thousands of homes.
It's destroyed a good share of their public buildings, their electrical system, their running water system.
So no matter whether we stay or whether we go, Iraq's going to be unhappy and unstable and hurting for some time to come.
But one of the things that drives the turmoil that's now gripping Iraq is the resentment of our military occupation.
We Americans ought to be able to understand that.
Right at the beginning, George Washington's little guerrilla army drove the mighty British Empire from our soil in 13 little colonies.
That's a strong sentiment in the minds of people everywhere, to be their own boss, to be their own control, and they don't want a foreigner, however benevolent, running their country.
You also point out in your article that when Truman got America into the war in Korea, that Ike Eisenhower came in and was elected on the mandate to end the war, and he did just that, and it worked out.
He was still able to stand tall and be a patriot and whatever, which I guess he was General Eisenhower, but still it was an important policy position, and he made the best of it and ended the war as soon as he possibly could.
And to the great relief of the soldiers who were fighting out there in Korea, as brave and as effective as any group of soldiers we ever sent into combat, and you can say the same thing about the soldiers we have in Iraq, but you know soldiers don't have much to say about whether we go to war or not.
Those decisions are made most of the time by people who've had very little, if any, military experience, and they're not as fully aware as a soldier is of the sacrifices in wartime.
That's why I think it took a five-star general like General Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of all the allied forces in World War II, to say if he was elected, he was going to go to Korea and end that war, and he did exactly that, and that was the right thing to do.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking to former Senator George McGovern, presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 1972.
I know that you were a B-52 pilot in the Second World War, Senator.
Was there something that you learned during that experience that has really shaped your view toward war since then?
Absolutely.
Actually, it was a B-24.
The B-52 came later on.
But I flew 35 missions against the most heavily defended targets in Europe.
I saw my fellow airmen, my fellow pilots, being shot down on all sides of me, and that makes a permanent impression against you.
It doesn't mean that you're embarrassed about the role you played in a legitimate war, as was the American participation in World War II against Hitler and the Nazis.
But it does mean that you're going to be very cautious about committing American soldiers to a war where it's not clear that it's either in our interest or the interest of the occupying countries for us to put our army there.
Well, do you extend your same position on Iraq and Afghanistan to, for example, all the bases in Germany and Italy and Japan and Korea and all over the world?
Well, I think we're overextended.
It's enormously expensive.
It's a big part of the military budget, which is by far the biggest part of the total U.S. budget.
So I'd like to see a reexamination right now, a thoughtful reexamination, involving, of course, the Pentagon, involving our best military minds, involving the Congress of the United States, and take a critical, careful look at every base we have overseas.
This would be a good time to economize on some of our military outreach.
But, of course, we don't want to do it at the expense of our security.
Only those bases that aren't needed for our security should be closed.
Well, you know, many economists of the left, right, and libertarian and centrist in every description, I think, have identified a major problem in American society being our permanent wartime economy, something that we've had really since Truman invaded Korea or started our part of the Korean War, and that the military industrial firms have such a control over Congress and the government itself, the federal government, and the military industrial complex are so intertwined that the people cannot get in between them.
The people cannot really exert influence that would really in any way overrule the influence of General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin, Marietta, etc.
In fact, just the other day there was an article about how the Stryker, which was to be this giant artillery tank, mobile artillery vehicle that Rumsfeld had tried to kill, is now going to be a tank.
It's basically a tank.
It's a giant tank that used to have a giant gun on top of it.
Now it's going to be an ambulance for the Department of Homeland Security.
And General Dynamics gets to continue to make the Strykers, and we pay millions and millions of dollars for worthless equipment we don't need.
So do you see the same problem that I'm talking about here, and do you have any ideas for a solution to the problem?
Yes, I do.
I think it's true that right now with a Pentagon budget of $515 billion for this year, and that doesn't count the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that figure of $515 billion for the Pentagon is bigger than the combined total of military spending of all the other countries of the world.
There are 184 countries out there spending less in total than the United States spends, and we're doing this at a time when nobody is threatening us.
No country in the world wants to go to war against the United States.
We have this little band of desert warriors that took over the core of our commercial airliners and brought down the World Trade Center, but that's the only incident of that kind.
People say to me, well, at least we haven't had any since then.
I say, well, we didn't have any before then.
So we're in a kind of a national security war mode in which we see an enemy behind every tree, and I think we've got to get out of that and look realistically at what we're spending on military defense.
Now, it's more than simply the political pressure of the military-industrial conflict.
It's the pressure of members of Congress who have a base in their district where maybe 200 of their citizens work, maybe 2,000, maybe 20,000, and so they fight to keep that base whether it's needed or not because it's denied employment.
If we had alternative employment, say, for example, building the fastest, safest, cleanest railway network in the world where we could put people to work, maybe that would take off some of the fear of closing down needless bases.
I'm going to have to run now.
I have a need in another part of this state where I have to go to, but I really enjoyed being with you, and your questions were right on the head.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I enjoyed it.
All right, everybody.
That's former Senator George McGovern on anti-war radio.
We'll be right back.