04/17/09 – Ivan Eland – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Now it's time for Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute.
He is a senior fellow there at the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org.
And of course he writes for us regularly as well at Antiwar.com.
His archive is available at original.antiwar.com.
His latest article is called China's Threat to the US is Exaggerated.
Welcome back to the show, Ivan.
How are you?
Thanks for having me back on.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for joining us today.
There's a whole part of the right wing that wants me to be afraid of the Chinese government for some reason.
Is that right?
Well, I think you can fight a war on terror for a while, but as we're seeing with Gates and the Pentagon, eventually you get pressure to cut some of these weapon systems which have been designed only to fight a conventional foe that we really don't have.
And so China is the best bet because they've been increasing their defense budget because their economy has been increasing rapidly.
Even the Pentagon in their report, though, said that they could not project and will not be able to project large forces very far, even in the distant future.
So I think their threat to the US is very marginal.
Now, the threat to Taiwan might be greater, but then that raises the question of whether the US should really be defending Taiwan, which is a rich country and is not really very strategic to the United States anyway.
Well, and has plenty of opportunity to work things out with China without warfare.
But the original question was, though, isn't there some big part of the right wing that wants me to be afraid?
Is it just the guys in the Pentagon who want to sell the big ticket items and their front men?
Is there anybody else?
Well, it's the weapons contractors, but of course you have neoconservatives and even mainstream conservatives who would like to have a threat.
The neoconservatives believe that war is good for the country to solidify the national resolve, et cetera.
So I think they're philosophically opposed to intervening in other countries and that sort of thing.
But China, they better be careful with China.
China has nuclear weapons, and of course the main issue, as we've just been talking between China and the US that could arise, is the US defense of Taiwan.
Now, of course, we have many more thousands of nuclear warheads than the Chinese, but the Chinese are fairly irrational about it because they regard it as their territory.
Whether that's justified or not, that's how they regard it.
So I think neoconservatives need to be careful about this.
And certainly, yes, they're pushing that view, but it depends on whether you believe philosophy and ideas have more impact than interest.
I think the interests sort of use the neoconservatives as the thinkers behind this so they can get more weapons.
I think if you looked at all the funding of a lot of groups, you would find that they're being funded, the neoconservatives are being funded by weapons manufacturers, et cetera, to some extent, who have an interest in this.
So the combination of ideas and interests that are driving this threat.
But it's kind of hard to sell that right now since we're fighting two other wars which have nothing to do with China.
We're completely overstretched by those two small wars.
So they're having a bit of a problem, but they've got to put the next threat on the horizon for us.
Well, and this is a big thing, a big argument going down, at least according to the Washington Post and establishment organs like that.
There's this big fight.
Well, I guess Gates has even said so on TV where I could hear him and quote him myself.
He seems to be giving these speeches, and there's all this debate about whether the military should be geared toward fighting, you know, nation states like China, as you said, or whether they should be focused on doing what they're actually doing, which is occupying countries that have no armies and fighting militias of locals, basically, whether they should, I guess, divert resources into more armored bottom trucks and that kind of thing rather than more F-22 fighter planes.
And so I guess in that circumstance you get a real fight going on between the people who make the trucks and the people who make the planes over which way the policy should go.
Well, the reason that they don't like, and Warren Thompson, who's sort of an expert, but he's really tied into the defense industry, he's funded by them, he said that this is a facade of the strategic argument of spending more on the wars or fighting these futuristic wars.
He says it's really a failed way to make a budget cut.
But, of course, that's only a budget cut in Washington terms because a budget cut in Washington means that you're just slowing the increase in spending.
And even this budget, which is not rising as fast as the Bush budget, is still a 4% increase.
So the real problem is Gates is sort of reshuffling the chairs on the Titanic, I think, because what really needs to be done is to cut the defense budget.
And certainly what Gates is doing, I think, is probably an improvement because he's also trying to get rid of some weapon systems that were designed during the Cold War and which interests have prevented from being erased out of the budget because these constituent groups, states and cities that have defense industries, and what they do is, it's a politicized industry.
It's not really like they're private companies doing, but it's really not a commercial business.
In other words, a lot of these big companies that do defense don't do anything else.
So they're essentially wards of the state, and they pretend to have competition among them, but they really don't if you look closely at the way defense contracts are led.
It's usually either allocated if they have more than one producer or sometimes there's only one producer.
So you have a lot of socialism, over-regulation, and things are produced very inefficiently in the defense industry, and very frankly most of the cost overruns are huge, and the weapons are way behind schedule.
And then they have, of course, all these weapons that are left over from the Cold War.
So I think Gates is trying to get rid of those.
Rumsfeld got rid of a couple of them.
Even Cheney, back when he was defense secretary, tried to get rid of some of them, but they just keep hanging on like a dog on your pant leg.
You can't get rid of them.
So in that sense it's an improvement, but of course what they really need to do is start cutting the defense budget because that makes the people get more efficient faster than what they're doing.
But I don't know if Gates will have a lot of success.
He's a very smooth operator.
If anyone can do it, he can.
But I think that the vested interest will probably prevent some of the stuff from being carried out.
Well, and even the idea that the whole thing is just a ruse in the first place makes more sense to me.
Well, the Pentagon is essentially, I don't want to overstate it, but the Pentagon essentially works like any other part of the government, and that is that you have vested interests getting money, and the money is not doled out to where the threats are because we really don't have that many threats right now.
So we have this massive defense budget to fight terrorism, and it's very cheap to fight terrorism if you're going to fight terrorism because you need a few drones, you need special forces, that sort of thing, which are fairly cheap compared to these big-ticket weapons that are still in the pipeline and that sort of thing.
So you could really cut the defense budget quite a bit and still have enough forces to go on raids to get terrorism.
Now, if you want to do occupations as we're doing, that, of course, requires bigger land forces, and those cost money because when you put people under arms, you have to pay for their training, their housing, their health care, et cetera.
So adding people to the force is very expensive, and, of course, that's what they're doing with the Army and the Marine Corps.
So that's not cheap either.
If we gave up these occupations, that would save a lot of money as well.
Well, you know, you bring up the cost of labor there.
It makes me think of some of these documentaries I've seen on the Learning Channel and what have you about the dawning age of robotic warfare and how more and more they're perfecting battle droids that can take over for soldiers in more and more circumstances.
And then I guess they have the teeny tiny ones too for force multipliers in terms of eyes and ears on the battlefield, that kind of thing.
So it seems like, I don't know, do you know much about that and the move toward just putting soulless droid killers on the battlefield to replace the American GIs?
Well, it's more advanced in the air for reconnaissance and even they have drones that will fire weapons like the Predator than it is on the ground.
Now, we do have robotic ground sensors, and they're talking about creating robotic ground vehicles, but in the ground warfare it's not quite as advanced.
You know, you still need the, particularly in counterinsurgency warfare, you need people to go out and befriend the population to the extent that you can.
It's very hard to do when you're an invading force, but hand out candy to the kids and build schools and that sort of thing.
So there's a certain PR element, and also there's other things that robots can't do.
So I think in the ground warfare, I think we're still going to have to have a lot of forces to occupy countries if that's what they really want to do.
You could even do a robotic ship too.
I mean, they've at least drastically reduced the crew size on a lot of these ships because they've automated a lot of stuff.
So I'd say it's most advanced in the air, then probably on the ships, and then the ground warfare is the least advanced, although they're working on that too.
But I think we're a long ways from completely replacing humans with robots, especially if we're going to do occupations.
Now, here's something that always gets me, is the proportion of the military budget.
And I guess in the last couple of years, it's fallen just shy of 50% of total world military spending was from the United States.
But you mentioned before, I was kind of the bookkeeping trick there on the so-called cuts in the military spending, when really it was an increase.
Maybe they cut the rate of increase by a little bit or something.
And yet, as I'm sure you're aware, all over right-wing media, the Sean Hannity Show and all those kinds of places, this is all evidence of Barack Obama's treason, bringing American military spending down to less than one-half of the entire world's military spending, because apparently America is completely beset on all sides.
It's us versus them, 50-50.
And if there's the slightest cut in the military, our whole civilization might cease to exist, according to all of right-wing media, basically, with very few exceptions, and apparently the people who listen to and watch and read, I don't know, consume that right-wing media.
Well, I think that's true.
The defense budget has always been a red-meat issue for conservatives, and they're now out of power, and so they're trying to get some of their constituency back by being strong on national defense.
But, of course, they don't answer the question.
We're in a deep recession, and can we really afford to be an empire anymore?
We've got these two wars, as I mentioned, that are very small wars, and yet they're really straining the U.S. military.
The bolts are about ready to pop out because of it.
So can we really afford this sort of thing?
I mean, our budgets are higher than the Cold War budgets, and we don't have a major enemy to fight.
As I said, terrorists can be fought fairly cheaply.
And even if we had to do these occupations, if they reduced, if they took to what Gates was saying, and we took it to its logical conclusion, perhaps then we would get rid of a lot of these systems that we don't need and concentrate on the ground forces.
But I'm not advocating that, but certainly we could still save money, even if they want to occupy countries, because a lot of the budget is just constituency groups grabbing dollars for their districts and states and not based on any threat.
We really have to have a national debate on what we want to do in the world, and then we need to assess the level of defense spending on that basis.
And, of course, we can't do that because the right wing is, any even reduction in the increase in the defense budget, the right wing comes along and starts yelling, well, this is a liberal guy, he's a treasonous sort of deal.
So that's not a real debate, but they can get away with that if people don't know much about it.
And, unfortunately, defense is one area where people don't really have much experience.
They send their kids to school, they get health care, they have a house, so they know about housing, education, health care, but they really don't know whether we should be buying X missile or Y bomber or Z ship because it's just outside their area.
They don't deal with it too much.
The military is a really narrow group of the population, a small amount of people, so most people don't have too much of an idea of what should be done.
And when that happens, when the public is not involved in the issue, of course the interest groups come in and cash in even more.
Well, you know, I think that's obviously right about which missile or which plane or this and that kind of thing, but it seems like in the large sense Americans ought to be able to understand that among the powers of the earth, Europe is basically the European Union that has more or less a single foreign policy in terms of war, for the most part anyway, and most of them are members of NATO, our alliance.
They're our friends.
The Russians, we're not anywhere near a collision course to any kind of warfare with them.
They pose no threat to us whatsoever.
China, as we discussed, is I guess becoming a little bit more able to defend their own coastline from us maybe, but what other power is there in the world?
The South American alliance is going to come and conquer America with their giant navy or something?
There is no threat.
The bad guys are hiding in exile in the Hindu Kush mountains, in land the size of Travis County, the no man's land that nobody controls.
They're the Soviet empire that this government is protecting us from by spending, what, a trillion dollars a year on this madness?
There's got to be a difference between the reality and the narrative breaking through to people at some point here, it seems like to me.
Also, I think you have to realize that people, the other thing, when you bring up that argument, the military then shifts to the argument, well, you know, we're a superpower and we have unique responsibilities in the world.
Usually it's that vague statement.
Well, of course, people like the U.S. to be number one, and they don't realize the implications on their tax bill or in lives lost if we go into some quagmire like Iraq or Afghanistan, and I think we're going to see, after these two wars are over, a retraction.
We've seen it before in American history.
After World War I, a bloody mess, we had a retraction, not as many interventions.
After Vietnam and Ford and Carter administrations, we had a slack off of the interventions, and we can probably expect that after these wars are over.
The problem is it's usually temporary, and we've started intervening more after our principal threat, the Soviet Union, went away, because there was no longer a threat of nuclear war if we intervened somewhere.
So I think the American people, unfortunately, since 1945, have gotten used to this interventionist superpower model, which, of course, is completely antithetical to the traditional foreign policy of our founders, which was much more restrained activities overseas and not getting involved in things you didn't have to.
And, of course, now when a war comes up, people just automatically assume that the president, well, if he says we have to go to war, then we must have to go to war, instead of saying, wait a minute, there's no threat out there, why do we really need to do this?
Because, unfortunately, I think both parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, at least the majorities in those parties have bought into the superpower, military nanny-to-the-world type of mentality.
Now, of course, you have a minority in both parties, you have the McGovern liberals, and then you have libertarians and traditional conservatives on the right side, which don't buy into this, but, unfortunately, those groups are a minority in either party.
So what we're seeing here, I think, is the neoconservatives and the liberal interventionists, they're sort of the same, they stress different things, but they still buy into this that we have to solve every problem in the world and we really need to be involved militarily overseas.
Our policies become so militarized, and we have this huge military that gets all the resources, and so the old saying is, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
So, of course, when we see a problem overseas, the first thing we do is assume that the U.S. military could be used to stop it, like Darfur, etc., there was some talk about that, both during the Bush administration and the Obama administration.
So, hopefully, I don't think we will do that, since we have two other pressing engagements that we're kind of tied down with.
But if we didn't have those, I think there would be some pressure to go into Darfur.
So it's those types of things that I think both parties, unfortunately, have bought into.
Yeah, well, and it is, you have the neoconservative, you know, blatant Pax Americana imperialists, but, of course, the establishment liberals believe in this collective security idea that says that anywhere that a war breaks out becomes the whole world's responsibility, and so you do have, even though these people would, if you asked them, they would say they're very opposed to each other, they really do see eye to eye on a great many of the worst policies for the rest of us.
And you can see where the two groups agree.
One of the issues where they both agree is the expansion of NATO.
Both the liberals, the muscular liberals and the neoconservatives, agree that NATO should be expanded very provocatively into the former Soviet Union, right up to Russia's borders on Ukraine and Georgia.
We've already expanded into the Baltics, which are right on Russia's borders, but now, of course, they're talking about letting in Georgia and Ukraine, and, of course, Georgia provoked a war with Russia, so any sane person would say, well, gee, why don't we let a country that's kind of crazy, their leader's kind of provocative and crazy, why would we want to let them in?
They'll drag us into a war needlessly.
But, of course, both parties seem to be buying into this.
All right.
Now, you mentioned how antithetical this is to the, well, I don't know, the George Washington's Farewell Address version of how American history was meant to sort of unfold by those who created it, created at least the Constitution and won the war for independence and all that.
And I know you're the author of this great new book, Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity and Liberty.
And I know it's great not because I've read it, but because I saw Ron Paul interview you on C-SPAN all about it, which was just great watching you guys talking about Jefferson and all that.
I guess my real question for you is who's your least favorite president?
Woodrow Wilson.
Well, wait, it was a two-part question.
I know everybody wants to jump and say Woodrow Wilson as fast as they can.
But wait, wait.
And who's your favorite, Ivan?
Well, John Tyler is my favorite.
And, of course, he's very obscure, but he almost was impeached by his own party for limiting government and staying out of wars.
And he's one of the few presidents to actually settle a war, the largest Indian war in U.S. history, by letting the Indians stay on their reservation, which most presidents just ran them off to someplace else.
And he also avoided a couple of foreign wars as well and stuck up for a restrained executive role, which the Constitution really envisioned, not the imperial presidency that we have now.
And, of course, he limited government.
He was my favorite.
Woodrow Wilson, I think, ruined the entire 20th century.
Yes, that's what I think too.
Tell him.
Yes, well, you know, now people think getting into World War I was a great idea, but when you tell them, well, gee, Hitler probably wouldn't have ever taken power if we hadn't helped tip the balance in favor of France and Germany, who then bled Germany for a lot of reparations when their economy, when the Great Depression came along.
And, of course, Wilson, the idealist that he was, he demanded that the Kaiser, who was the German king at the time, advocate after World War I, after the Germans lost it.
And, of course, that paved the way for Hitler to rise because the Kaiser was fairly powerful, and if he had stayed in power, Hitler probably wouldn't have arisen.
So you can also attribute part of the Cold War to Wilson since he kept Russia in the war by aiding it, and he made the aid conditional on them staying in the war because they wanted two fronts against the Germans.
But, of course, the Bolsheviks were the only anti-war party, and the Russians were taking massive casualties during the war.
And so Lenin even said the only reason we got into power was because people were tired and exhausted from the war, and the anti-war Bolshevik party, of course, took power.
And so you can attribute their...
Woodrow Wilson helped them come out, and then, of course, after they took power, there was a civil war in Russia, and most Americans have long forgot, or they were never taught in their history classes, that the U.S. helped the Allies invade Russia and fight the Bolsheviks on the white side.
Well, of course, the Bolsheviks still won, and so that annoyed the Bolsheviks, and so that got our relations to a really bad start with them as well.
So you can blame World War II and the Bolshevik revolution partly on Wilson, I think, and certainly his legacy is still living because we helped Britain and France expand their colonial empires after World War I, and they continued after World War II.
But after World War I, the British drew some lines on the map, not very effectively, and they created Iraq, and so we're still living with the fractured nature of Iraq.
So that's a Wilson legacy as well, and certainly helped Britain and France expand their empires after World War I.
So the implications of his policies, he was the most interventionist president we've ever had.
Yeah, most people forget he invaded Mexico twice, and Bolivia and the Dominican Republic, and I think Cuba too.
Oh yeah, there's a whole long list of countries in Latin America that he meddled around in before we got into World War I.
Have you ever read Philip Drew, Administrator, by Colonel Edward Mandel House, Ivan?
No, I haven't.
I think you'd be very interested in it.
House was Wilson's cheney.
Yeah, he was Wilson's chief advisor.
Yeah, yeah, Wilson's cheney there.
And it's basically a fantasy about wouldn't it be great if America was a fascist dictatorship, and I was the one running it.
And it basically outlines the New Deal, and the Democrats' platform for the 20th century in there.
It's really good stuff.
Well, the Democratic Party used to be a party of small government until Wilson flipped it around and made it a party of big government to join the Republican Party of big government.
So that's when we began to have two parties of big government.
Of course, when you have a two-party system and both of them are advocating big government, what you usually get is big government, and that's what we've got.
Great stuff.
Yep.
All right, everybody, that's Ivan Ehlen.
He's a senior fellow at the Independent Institute.
He's the author of Recarving Rushmore, ranking the presidents on peace, prosperity, and liberty.
And, of course, we feature his weekly article at original.antiwar.com.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks, Scott.