For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and welcoming back to the show, Ivan Eland, he's the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute, he's the author of Putting Defense Back in Defense Policy, and The Empire Has No Clothes.
His column runs Tuesdays at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Ivan.
Thanks for having me back, Scott.
Well, very interesting article running on Antiwar.com this week by you, my friend.
Pakistan is going down the road of the Shah's Iran.
Oh, no, we know what happened there.
Yes, well, what happened there was that the U.S. was closely associated with a very repressive dictator, and finally, the people overthrew the dictator, and of course, there's been hatred for the United States ever since.
But what many people don't know is that the U.S. is so unpopular that being a supporter of the Shah actually undermined him with his own people, because the U.S. superpower was, of course, very unpopular.
And I think that's what's happening in Pakistan as well.
Musharraf is very closely aligned with the U.S. in public, probably less so in private since he's not really doing all that much to help us get bin Laden, but he's certainly taking our military assistance and that sort of thing.
And so in the eyes of his people, he may actually have the worst of all worlds because he's cuddling up to the U.S., and the U.S. is very unpopular in Pakistan because of its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Well, I guess if we could put the shoe on the other foot, George Bush has an approval rating somewhere between 24 and 28 percent in America now.
I guess it's fair to say that the American people don't favor him, but how would we feel if we all believed or knew for a fact that somehow he was just a puppet of Tony Blair or the government in Germany or something?
If he was a foreign satrap over here being as lousy a president as he is, how would we feel then?
Well, that's the problem that the U.S. has.
Whenever a U.S. supports a dictator, whether it's in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it actually undermines their standing with their own people.
These leaders find reasons to do that for other reasons, perhaps in Musharraf's case, because he gets a lot of military aid and that sort of thing, and he's also very concerned about having the U.S. on his side if he ever has a dust-up with India, etc., etc.
But nonetheless, with his own people, oftentimes these leaders are imperiling themselves over time.
They don't think so in the short term, but then we see this recent incident in Pakistan where Musharraf suspended the Chief Justice, and there's been protests all over the country, and it really shows how fragile Musharraf is.
That was the same way with the Shah.
He thought he was invincible.
He didn't really care if his people liked the U.S. alliance, that sort of thing.
But in reality, the U.S. alliance is part of the problem for Musharraf because we are occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's also a problem for the U.S., which our government doesn't see, and that is if Musharraf falls and Islamists take over, Pakistan is probably the most dangerous country on the planet because it has nuclear weapons and it's very unstable.
Now, you mentioned the mass protests over the firing of the Chief Justice.
What was going on there?
Do you know the story behind that?
Well, actually, something came out in the New York Times today about this.
Apparently, Musharraf hauled in the Supreme Court Justice, got all of his military and intelligence generals in there, and tried to intimidate the Chief Justice to resign.
The Chief Justice says, no, I'm not going to do that.
And of course, the Pakistanis regard Musharraf, many of them, he said he was not going to hold both the generalship, the chief generalship, and the presidency, and he's reneged on that.
And now he wants another five-year term, and he was worried that this chief judge, who kind of sticks up for democracy, would make rulings that wouldn't allow him to have the parliament elect him for another five-year term.
So this was very important to Musharraf to have the presidency for another five years, and so he got rid of the judge.
And so now the question is, well, the judge is going to be tried for malfeasance.
But the real thing is not in the courtroom, it's what's going to happen in Pakistan.
And I think we've already seen mass protests, and the Chief Justice has been leading himself.
And I think this is very, the outbreak of the protests was, I think, shocked Musharraf and shocked the United States as to how perilous Musharraf might be, and many people are now predicting that Musharraf might have to go.
Well, it definitely was something else, seeing those protests on TV, something you never see in America.
A bunch of guys in business suits out in the street protesting, it looked like, well, they look like all the Pakistanis I've ever met in America.
That is, they have initials after their name representing advanced degrees and so forth.
This was not poor downtrodden masses out in the street protesting.
This was what amounts to the civil society of Pakistan.
Yes, I think there's a widespread support for this.
The problem that I think the United States will have is if this whole movement gets hijacked by the Islamists, gets hijacked not by those guys in business suits, but the radical religious groups which Musharraf has actually cultivated.
And that's one of the reasons that we haven't apprehended bin Laden, because I think the Pakistani government probably does know where bin Laden is hiding.
But if they turn him in, all hell could break loose.
And I think even now, even without bin Laden being turned in, we have this mass movement, and the danger is that the Islamic parties could really gain control of any sort of situation.
And now, this is a point that you make in your article that America could have chased bin Laden even into Pakistan, that Musharraf actually gave America a window of time that said, you know, if you have to use your soldiers to pursue bin Laden across the border for a limited amount of time, that's okay.
But instead, what we did was we basically let bin Laden go, but stayed in Afghanistan right on the border.
And because of that, all this pressure mounted on Musharraf that then he was put in the position because we stayed, he was put in the position of having to cut a deal with these tribal warlord types on the border region.
Is that right?
Right, because our presence there undermines him with these Islamic forces and the forces within his country, because as I mentioned, just like the Shah of Iran, the United States support is actually very unpopular with the people.
As you mentioned, what the United States should have done was get bin Laden, capture him, and get out of there, and just say, listen, Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can have any government that you want, that your people want, or whoever, we don't care.
But if you're supporting al Qaeda or bin Laden, we'll be back with a vengeance.
And that's what should have been done rather than the occupation, because now we have the worst of all worlds.
We haven't rounded up bin Laden or the al Qaeda, the top leadership of al Qaeda, but we have this occupation, which is stirring up the very Islamist types that support bin Laden.
So our policy is totally counterproductive, and we're caught in a quagmire in Pakistan in addition to the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, except the quagmire in Pakistan is not U.S. soldiers on the ground per se, it's support for this guy who probably is going to have a short shelf life, I think, here.
Why do you think, Ivan, that the decision was made to really not even target al Qaeda, but instead to focus on overthrowing the Taliban and doing a regime change in Afghanistan, rather than chasing the guys that ordered those towers knocked down?
Well, I think it's just a case of mission creep.
We see this with a lot of other military operations that happened from the first Bush to Clinton and Somalia, where they went and started to do nation building, when it was a relief mission to start with.
That thing happened in Afghanistan, where our original mission should have been to capture or kill bin Laden, but we didn't put enough troops in there because of Rumsfeld's idea that the new way of warfare was fewer troops on the ground, or using indigenous forces with U.S. air power.
That was the model they were doing.
Well, of course, indigenous forces were paid off by bin Laden, so he escaped, so they should have used U.S. forces.
But there was also a problem that after that initial failure, the mission changed from capturing or killing bin Laden to nation building to counterinsurgency, when the Taliban was in resurgence because of the U.S. occupation.
And now we're even into eradicating and stemming the drug trade, which is, of course, counterproductive to our main mission because when we try to take people's livelihoods away from them, they then get livelihood from doing drugs illegally or moving them illegally, and therefore they recruit the Taliban to protect them, and that gives the Taliban money.
You mentioned in your article as well, and I guess this goes along with the guys in business suits protesting in the street, that Musharraf is suppressing, well, I guess he's making deals with the Islamic parties and he's suppressing the other secularist parties because they could probably beat them in the election.
I think you mentioned two of these guys.
He's refusing to let them even come back to Pakistan.
Right, the two former prime ministers, Bhutto and Sharif.
And the problem that we have here is that as in Iraq, we're supporting kind of a radical government against more moderate elements because Musharraf, like Maliki in Iraq, his base is some of the people that could be potential enemies of the U.S., namely, in the case of Iraq, radical Shiites.
In the case of Pakistan, the radical Islamists that Musharraf depends on for support.
And the very fact that we're supporting Musharraf and we're allowing him to suppress these alternative parties, we're doing exactly the same thing that we did in Iran with the Shah.
We pull all our eggs in one basket or ride one horse, so to speak, and it's counterproductive.
And I think it's especially counterproductive, at least the Shah was friendly to the U.S.
It's not clear that Musharraf, with this need to get Islamist support, is actually very friendly to the U.S.
He pretends like he is, but he certainly only does what he has to to pretend like he's getting bin Laden and so we're hearing the rest of the Al Qaeda people who are probably somewhere in Pakistan.
And also Musharraf has caused a big problem with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The single biggest contributing factor to that is that the Pakistani army moved out of these wild areas and lawless areas in western Pakistan where the Taliban originates from and crosses the border into Afghanistan.
And the reason that the Pakistani army declared a truce with these groups is because Musharraf needed their support.
So this has allowed the Taliban, the Pakistani groups were supposed to suppress the Taliban and that sort of thing, but of course they haven't done that and the Taliban attacks have increased in Afghanistan.
The regulators end up being controlled by those they're in charge of regulating, huh?
Right.
Exactly.
Where can we find that principle?
There is no regulation of the Taliban now and this truce that Musharraf has with these groups has really contributed to the problems that the NATO coalition is facing in Afghanistan.
How many nuclear weapons does the state of Pakistan have, Aga?
Well, you know, that's always hard to, you know, estimate.
I mean, we don't even know how many for sure that Israel has, but, which is friendlier to us than even Pakistan, but they have probably, you know, maybe in the tens of nuclear weapons, not as many as their rival India, because they're behind them in nuclear capabilities, because India has more money and is a larger country, but they certainly have, they're not a nuclear superpower, but they do have a few nuclear weapons.
I would estimate probably in the tens of weapons.
And now we've heard also that there's been a few different assassination attempts.
I've heard numbers everywhere from two to a dozen different near takings of Musharraf's life.
Yes.
Well, Musharraf has a curious relationship with the Islamic groups.
He needs support from the Islamist parties, but at the same time, the most radical Islamists kind of regard him as a traitor because, of course, he's supported by the U.S., and so they try to assassinate him.
Yes, there have been many attempts on his life, all unsuccessful.
I think you will probably see those increase now in addition to the mass protest that he's getting.
Okay, well, let's pretend that somehow we could convince George Bush to make a clean break with the past and appoint you, Ivan Eland, as the new National Security Advisor of the United States.
You have experience in government at the Congressional Budget Office and so forth, right?
You're a serious foreign policy guy.
He puts you in Steven Hadley's chair and says, all right, Ivan, tell me what to do.
What do you say?
Do you tell him to take the army into Pakistan and get bin Laden and finish this thing?
Well, the first thing you need to do is tell Musharraf that unless he, I give Musharraf one last chance and say, listen, we're not going to give you any more military aid, no economic aid, or any of these things that we give you if you don't come up with bin Laden soon.
And then, you know, if he doesn't, then you pull that aid.
And you also say at the time, and after that, if you don't get him after that, then we're going to come in after him and do it ourselves.
But the real thing about it is we don't want to occupy Pakistan, and we need to get out of Afghanistan.
What we need to tell these countries is, listen, we're going to be very harsh on you if you're harboring people that are attacking the United States, but we're not going to tell you how to govern your country.
We're not going to nation-build.
We're not going to interdict drugs.
We're not going to fight the Taliban, because the Taliban in Afghanistan has come back because of largely the U.S. occupation.
The Taliban had been pretty well discredited after the U.S. deposed it, but now it's coming back because of the hatred of the U.S. and all these bombings of civilians that the United States has, you know, all the collateral damage that our aircraft are causing.
So I think what we need to do is focus.
We need to get back.
We need to roll back the mission creep.
We need to concentrate on bin Laden and Zawahiri and trying to get them out of there.
Now, I wouldn't overstate that, because I think Al Qaeda has become decentralized, so that's not going to eliminate the problem.
But it would still be nice to get rid of them or capture them, because they are responsible for 9-11.
Obviously, capturing them and trying them is the best solution there.
But sometimes that's hard to do when you haven't armed, these people are armed to the teeth and they might fight to the death.
So but I think we've got to put that back at the top of this agenda, and we've got to say, we've got to stop this nation-building in Afghanistan.
It's a futile attempt.
I mean, Afghanistan has had decentralization for a long time.
They haven't really had much of a central government.
The people don't really want that much of a central government.
And even the central government in Afghanistan now doesn't really govern very much.
The warlord's governor, Afghanistan.
And you can talk to them and say, listen, you know, what you do is your business, but if you harbor bin Laden or Zawahiri or any of the Al Qaeda people, we're going to come after you.
And also, you can tell that to Musharraf.
Yeah, it was the fear in this country that allowed the Bush administration to conflate Al Qaeda with the Taliban.
Even though we can all read in the London Independent, the Taliban actually sent a guy to DC a couple of weeks before the attack to warn us and was turned away.
But it was because of our fear that our government was able to say Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Taliban, until they were just the same thing.
And then they focused all their energy on the Taliban.
And this is purely my speculation.
I can't prove it to you, Ivan.
And I know you can't read minds either.
But I believe that the decision was made in the White House and in the military to deliberately let Osama bin Laden go at Tora Bora.
They had 20,000 Marines ready to go.
The New York Times reported in their article lost at Tora Bora, 20,000 Marines were right there ready to go a few miles away from Tora Bora.
And I believe they deliberately let him escape because they want that Goldstein.
They want that enemy out there for all of us to do our two minutes hate and be afraid and let our government drag us into war after war after war.
Here we are in Somalia now in the name of Osama bin Laden, who's exiled up there in the in the Hindu Kush somewhere.
Well, certainly bin Laden does provide a continuing threat.
And certainly the Bush administration has taken advantage of that, both to invade Iraq and also to, you know, nation build in Afghanistan to get additional bases in Central Asia, you know, to get the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
So having an enemy out there does help the Bush administration and has certainly helped Bush get reelected in 2004 and still helps him to some extent, because the only thing that's really holding up any popularity at all for him is the people, I think, who still believe that the Taliban, I mean, Al Qaeda had something to do with Saddam Hussein.
And of course, the Taliban is the same problem.
After the 9-11 attacks, even after the 9-11 attacks, I think they could have done a better job of negotiating with the Taliban offline to try to give them to give up bin Laden.
Right, they did offer to give him up to a fellow Arab state, another Arab state, which we could have had him turn them over to the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Syrians, they'd have tortured them all to death for us.
Well, I think, you know, the public ultimatum, they should have done more back channel because any government that's confronted with an ultimatum usually resisted.
And I think they should have done more offline to try to get them to give them up.
But I think, you know, the Bush administration wanted to use this to go after Iraq.
You can make the argument that they also want to go after Afghanistan.
I remember, you know, in the immediate wake of September 11, the media, obviously, to a great degree, was very cowed and afraid to criticize the administration.
But at the same time, there were basically just reporters unleashed all over the world and it was very hard to kind of centrally organize in the way that we see the media comes out now.
We just kind of had, you know, let's go live to Joe in Tajikistan.
What do you see, Joe?
And I remember listening to NPR News in November, it must have been November of 2001.
And Joe in Tajikistan is reporting that, man, there's Al Qaeda everywhere here.
These guys are Arabs.
They're not Taliban.
These guys are Arabs.
And they're standing around.
They're all around me.
I just ate with them.
Where the hell is the U.S. Army?
The U.S. Army has a deal with the government in Tajikistan, you know?
How come all these Al Qaeda are standing here right in front of me?
And of course, we never heard a thing about that again.
But it's just little things like that seem to me to betray the fact that they weren't really making an effort, that they had decided the enemy is the Taliban, not Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and surrounding areas.
Well, also, I think the record is pretty clear that they believe that 9-11 interrupted their quest to go after Saddam Hussein.
So their first mission was to get to use 9-11 as an excuse to go after Hussein.
And I think that when you put that in perspective, that 9-11 was, you know, they had to go after Afghanistan first.
So they approached it in the same way.
And I think they did want to take down the Taliban, because that's just the way they want to, as Rumsfeld said, they wanted to use the 9-11 attacks to transform the world.
And, you know, certainly getting rid of the Taliban was, you know, was desirable from the U.S. perspective at the time, because the U.S. government didn't like the Taliban very much.
And, you know, they were regarded as an outlaw regime.
And so it was certainly easy to justify taking them out when they could have, you know, they could have perhaps negotiated a hand over bin Laden and avoided this whole thing.
Well, and it really goes to the title of your book, The Empire Has No Clothes.
I think it's the case, I'm sure you'd agree with me, that most Americans will immediately stick their fingers in their ears and start singing Mary Had a Little Lamb as loud as they can, rather than hear a fellow American tell them that their government maintains an empire, and that, well, for example, basing rights in Tajikistan or something, the fact that that could have a conflicting interest with catching the people responsible for killing all those American citizens is something that most people just can't wrap their head around.
America could not possibly be an empire, and yet the title of your book implies that's exactly what it is.
Well, I think particularly in the conservative camp, conservatives don't like government, or at least they say they don't, until it comes to, you know, overseas engagement and, you know, beating other countries with the military stick.
They somehow think that the, you know, the U.S. government's not very effective here where it has at least some legitimacy, but they think it's going to be even more effective overseas where it has no legitimacy at all, and is regarded as a foreign invader and occupier.
And so I think we really have gone away, again, from the principle function of the government, and conservatives should agree with this, is to defend our country, and certainly this empire is not defense of the country.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
We're getting blowback from the empire on 9-11 and then afterwards.
And of course, Bush did the exact opposite of what he should have done.
He dredged up more terrorism by launching other wars against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
So this empire is certainly causing the blowback, and the empire does not equal security, and in this case, it's making Americans less secure.
I remember a woman I met in 2002 telling me, well, I say we go get Saddam and get out.
And I told her, lady, if they go and get Saddam, they're staying forever.
Yeah.
Well, that's what we do.
It's the same thing if they wanted to take down the Taliban because they felt that they were, you know, they were too prone to harbor bin Laden, they could have done that and gotten out as well, but they didn't.
The propensity of the bureaucracies is the nation built, let's make these countries like us and, you know, make them have democracy and everything, and most of these countries are not ready for democracy yet.
Well, how did somebody who thinks so reasonably about foreign policy like you ever have a job in government advising people on such matters?
Well, I work for congressional agencies and they're more independent.
They do investigations and in the case of the Congressional Budget Office, they provide alternative viewpoints and ways of doing things.
So I've always had jobs that are kind of, even though they're with the government, they're sort of independent operators and that sort of thing.
So they don't, none of the jobs I ever had with the government really bought into the policies, necessarily the government, they're always more of a critique, in-house critique of the policy.
Right.
You're an oversight guy, basically.
Yeah, except that, you know, after you do oversight for a number of years, then you start asking yourself, as I did, why is the government doing this stuff in the first place?
You know, because my reviews were limited to, well, could we do this a different way?
And I reached a conclusion over the course of my work that perhaps we shouldn't be doing this stuff at all.
So really, you weren't already kind of a doctrinaire libertarian?
You kind of just learned this from doing your job?
I got my libertarianism from seeing how government actually operates from the inside, so no, I was not a libertarian before I started working for the government.
So that's very interesting.
So you're working in the Congressional Budget Office, and I guess basically you kind of came to the conclusion that you were just drawing out about conservatives and empire that, hey, wait a minute, the government isn't any more effective overseas than it is at home.
That's right, that's right.
So I think libertarians are much more consistent than conservatives.
Conservatives like overseas adventures, they like big law enforcement, they like getting into people's social issues, what they smoke, what they do in the bedroom, etc.
And I think that's big government, too, and the liberals, of course, are less ashamed of being for big government, but we have basically two parties that are for big government, and at least the libertarians or the classical liberals, they seem to be more consistent for small government across the board.
And that's why when I meet libertarians who are for this type of overseas intervention, I think that many libertarians don't really realize that war is the principal cause of big government throughout history, and the nation state was created for the purpose of warfare, and welfare was only added in the 19th century.
So we had the warfare state before the welfare state.
Yeah, it was sort of, I've always seen it as kind of 100 years of welfare for the people who were already rich, mostly in terms of the war machine and such, and then around the turn of the last century, people decided, well, as long as there's going to be socialism for the millionaires, we ought to get some, too.
Instead of taking the welfare away from the people who are already rich and going back to the Constitution at that point, they made it doubly worse by falling for the same scam, supposedly to benefit themselves, being bribed with their own money.
Right, exactly.
And I think that, you know, if you look at the figures, I think very few, very little of the welfare goes to the poor people, we term it welfare when we give it to poor people, when we give it to rich people, it's, you know, we're subsidizing a weapons system or a highway or agricultural crops, et cetera, we don't call it welfare, or high protective tariffs for industry or whatever, but I think, you know, the problem with government is people think the government is a Robin Hood, it takes from the rich and gives to the poor, but the people who really get benefits out of the government are the people who are best organized, and those usually tend to be the wealthiest people, who, there's nothing wrong with wealth as long as they earn it in the market and not use the wealth once they get it to get even more on the cheap from the government.
You know, I never understood that Robin Hood analogy.
Does nobody remember that story?
It's about a group of outlaws who robbed the sheriff their tax money back.
The sheriff came and looted what they had earned, and they ambushed him and stole it back.
He was, they were the government, it wasn't, Robin Hood wasn't a socialist, he was protecting people's property rights.
Right, but the liberals and the socialists used the Robin Hood example as a, you know, just what the government should be doing, giving, using tax money to give from the, take from the rich and give to the poor, that's their perverted analogy of the whole story.
Alright, well let me ask you this, I don't, I'm not going to bother trying to give any of the, what I deem to be excuses for American interventionism that are put forward here, but let me try to pitch to you, you know, the most cynical defense of empire.
I've been told this before, and I imagine, again, total make-believe, but I imagine that if I was to, you know, somehow get James Baker, you know, alone and drinking and smoking and get him talking, that he would basically tell me, look, Horton, we have to have an empire, okay?
Your standard of living comes from the American government looting people overseas.
And the fact of the matter is, if we bring our navy home and face it out off of our coasts, and bring our army home and leave them sitting at Fort Hood doing nothing, with the only job of protecting this country and not going around enforcing empire on the world, that your standard of living, young man, is going to go through the floor.
That there's, it's a finite world, and if the US government does not steal from people on behalf of our tribe here, or whatever, then we're going to lose out.
So it's either us or them, and it's going to be us.
Well, of course, you're getting, you would get that from many policymakers in Washington, not just James Baker, but they've all had, they've all been inculcated with the idea that government is the one that produces wealth.
And really, I think the classical economists have shown that empire is not, does not pay.
It's better to, it's better to spend the money buying what you need overseas, rather than sending the US military over to guard the oil, or whatever else.
And empire is very expensive, because you have to have huge military forces, they have to be deployed around the world, which is expensive.
And you have to have bases for them, and all that sort of thing.
And of course, we're in the position of where we're sacrificing our allies will hold hostage, imagine this, our right to defend them, so that they can get even more concessions.
For instance, the Japanese, to keep our military bases in Japan to defend the Japanese, we have had to reduce our pressure on the Japanese to open their market, because they have a, you know, somewhat closed market.
And so, here we are, what do we get, the same thing with the Europeans, they don't totally open their market to our goods.
And the way, the reason that they can get away with that is because we need those bases to defend them.
And that's kind of a weird thing to do, a weird way to negotiate, but we, this empire is very valuable to the policymakers here in Washington, because it's driven by domestic interests that are feathered by it, and the general population would be better off economically.
And in fact, if you're talking to James Baker, you could say, well, you know, I don't think that's right.
If we reduce defense spending to only what we need to defend our country, and we didn't have a lot to spend all this money on empire and that sort of thing, we'd be wealthier because we could return some of this money to the private sector.
So really, the American people as a whole lose out from all this empire.
It's just money going out and not coming back, but for certain interests, say a particular oil company here or certain airplane manufacturer there, they get cash in, and so the rest of us are made to suffer for their private special interests, as Ross Perot used to call them.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And you can say that about any government program, whether it's transportation, welfare, building weapons systems, foreign policy, the groups drive the policy because they're more well organized, so it benefits certain groups to have these policies.
But the general taxpayer and citizen is disadvantaged because of these policies, and unfortunately, the taxpayers and the citizens aren't as well organized as the pressure groups.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio, and I'm talking with Ivan Eland.
He's the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute and writes every Tuesday for us at antiwar.com.
And I want to talk about progress for the future.
I want to talk about the new realignment, Ivan Eland.
I see that you've now joined with Bob Perry at Consortium News, and that's just the kind of left-right realignment, and particularly in terms of great investigative journalism and policy recommendations and stuff.
So why don't you tell me a little bit about Consortium News and whether you think that portends perhaps a better future for maybe even a chance of a realignment of the real anti-war left and the real anti-war right to come together to put a stop to this madness?
Well, I don't really have a close association with them.
I think they may reprint some of my stuff.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought this was a project that you were working with them on and everything.
No, not really, but I do support their efforts because I think what we need to do is get the old right and the new left together and to forge a coalition, because unfortunately both of those groups are a minority within their own party.
Both parties are very interventionist, and I think it's a good idea to speak to people across the spectrum and say, listen, and that's what my book attempts to do.
I have a chapter on why conservatives should be against empire, a chapter on why liberals should be against empire, and another chapter on why everybody else should be against empire.
So I think you need a broad-based push to educate the public on why empire is bad.
And I think the problem was illustrated during the Republican debate when Ron Paul said very convincingly to me, and I think to some other people who have studied these things, that 9-11 was blowback for our empire.
Well, of course, Rudy Giuliani gave him a dressing down and saying, I don't remember the exact words, but it's basically, that's preposterous and blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, the media coverage implied, well, yes, Ron Paul is kind of a kook, but Rudy Giuliani shouldn't have been mean to him.
And that's the type of thing Ron Paul has dismissed as some sort of a kook or a nice eccentric congressman, whereas his logic, if you follow his logic, it's very right on target, but nobody bothers with that because it's such an unorthodox and unconventional view.
And I think Ron Paul has had activities with people on the left that were anti-war, and I think we all ought to join with that because we need to get people to think about the issues rather than to just agree with Rudy Giuliani that, oh, that's a preposterous thing to even fathom because we're Americans and we never do anything wrong, or we never do anything that other people could take revenge for.
And now you're one of the people who in the 1990s predicted that America would be attacked again here at home because of our foreign policy, aren't you?
Yes.
In 1998, I did a report when I was with the Cato Institute that said, you know, if we continue this foreign policy meddling, we are going to face a catastrophic attack.
And in this report, I documented over 60 cases where acts of terrorism followed US foreign policy or were caused by US foreign policy, and I was pretty conservative about what I put in there.
If the terrorist attack, the cause of it was in any way murky, I didn't put it in there.
So those 60 cases are pretty solid, I think, and it's really empirical evidence.
And then I actually updated it for the American Prospect last year, which is a liberal publication.
So they got me to update the, you know, for my 1998 report.
So yes, unfortunately, I predicted, but of course, even after 9-11, we did the exact opposite and we didn't do a restrained foreign policy, which the President promised.
In fact, we went 180 degrees and we became a hyper aggressive in the world.
Yeah, well, maybe after the next attack, they'll finally listen to you Ivan.
Well, you know, it's really the problem with these attacks is they just, it took several years for the raw emotion of having 3000 people killed, you know, the, I guess the emotional, you know, first response is to lash out and say, wow, these people are evil.
And yes, they are evil.
Anybody who kills civilians is evil, but you have to ask yourself, what's driving this and could we in any way be responsible?
And I shouldn't use the term we because people always say to me, well, are you saying, well, we the victims were responsible for this, or they say, are you saying the victims in that tower responsible for this?
And I know I'm not going there.
I think that what's really the case is we need to distinguish between the US citizens, which are the victims of this.
But there are victims first of bin Laden, but second of their own government's actions, which bin Laden is retaliating against.
We ought to ask if those government actions are really needed overseas and that gradually and quietly we can retract the empire.
But unfortunately, we have to deal with the causes of the empire.
And I think the causes are domestic and that these pressure groups get certain benefits from these and that you have your military bureaucracies who need a mission to guard oil even though the market will probably produce the oil without any military protection simply because oil is a valuable commodity and even radical regimes like the Iranian regime need money.
So they'll sell it.
So these types of things, we need analysis, not just pressure group pressure.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time today, Ivan, I sure appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Ivan Eland, he's the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute and writes The Empire Has No Clothes every Tuesday for antiwar.com.
We'll be right back.
