07/30/10 – Ivan Eland – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio, I'm Scott Wharton and our first guest on the show today is Ivan Elin from the Independent Institute and Antiwar.com.
He's the author of The Empire Has No Clothes and Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity and Liberty.
Welcome back to the show, Ivan, how are you doing?
Thanks Scott, happy to be back.
Well good, and I'm happy to have you here, thanks for joining us.
Your article at Antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Elin, from I think just yesterday or the day before that, is called The Main Effect of the WikiLeaks Documents is Political.
So why don't you go ahead and share with us your overall view of this thing, and then maybe we can break it down into some particulars here.
Well I think these documents merely confirmed what the policy elite in Washington already knew, that the Pakistani intelligence service was helping our enemies, and by the way we're aiding Pakistan, giving it billions per year in aid.
The second thing that appeared in the documents was that the Taliban is gaining strength, and of course the elite here in Washington knew that as well, and the third thing is that the U.S. has killed a number of people in collateral damages with airstrikes, drone attacks, etc.
So I think, but the real effect is political, because a lot of people in the country, you know, in the rest of the country, outside the bubble in Washington, probably weren't as familiar with these things as the policy elite, but I think this has really caused a sensation for the last few days on the front pages of the newspapers, and I think it really has a political effect, which is being registered in Washington, and an example of that political effect is one of the president's major allies on the war, John Kerry, is now questioning the policy and says that we need a recalibration, and of course that's Washington-speak for this isn't going well, we need to shake up things, or get out of there, or do something.
So I think John Kerry is coming around to the president's, you know, he was on the president's side, and I think he's now a former war hero in Vietnam, and against that war, and I think he's slowly coming to his senses here, and he's a key player because of his record and also because he has a key position in the Senate, so I think that's just one example of a person, but I think that the Congress is going to feel more heat, and I think, you know, the troops are supposed to begin coming out in 2011, they've been waffling on that, and I think this will put more pressure on them to make that an active withdrawal, and that meaning a lot, a serious withdrawal of forces.
Well, a few things to go over there.
I guess first of all, they've kind of had to admit that they lost and recalibrate their strategy about at least four times now or something, I mean, we're supposedly, Ivan, in the midst of a giant recalibration, the McChrystal-Petraeus Center for a New American Security Counterinsurgency Doctrine, right?
The nation-building plan.
Before we were doing it Rumsfeld style on the cheap, and it just wasn't working.
Now we're doing this big search to fix everything.
You're saying that Kerry and them are already giving up on, well, hell, everybody knows that the coin thing's a big joke, right?
You're telling me they're going to begin to admit that in D.C.?
Yeah, even General Mattis, who's the new Central American commander, and this was buried in the newspapers, no one focused on it, at least not many people did, was General Mattis, Senator Reid from Rhode Island asked General Mattis in his confirmation hearing, well, does that mean next July we're going to have to go to a counterterrorism strategy and move away from the counterinsurgency strategy because we're going to start having fewer troops there?
And he said, yes, sir, that's what it means.
Well, you can't do a counterinsurgency strategy in 18 months.
It takes years to do that, and you need actually more forces than they have.
So yes, counterinsurgency strategy is rather a bogus thing, and I'm not sure why they convinced Obama to do this for 18 months.
I think they were trying to trap him into staying longer than that, but I think actually the president may have inclinations that this is a lost cause, and I think the original bargain was he would give them the 18 months and the extra troops, but by that time they had to show some results, and I think basically what they're trying to do is the same thing they were trying to do in Vietnam.
LBJ never intended to win the war.
He just wanted to try to alter the calculus by bombing North Vietnam, etc., so that he would get a better deal at the negotiating table, and I think that's what they're trying to do with the Taliban.
It seems that they're even more blatant about it than LBJ, but I don't think that's really going to happen.
I think the Taliban is very tenacious, and like the North Vietnamese, they don't appear to be willing to negotiate.
So I think the whole strategy is really incoherent and probably not going to work.
Yeah, well, it's certainly incoherent, and it's funny to hear an expert like you based in D.C.
You don't really know what to make of it either, do you?
This is where I'm at.
Yeah, we're going to do this counterinsurgency strategy that, in the strategy, it says, your great-grandson will be putting the finishing touches on this thing, and we're going to do it in 18 months.
I don't know, what's the point of that really, other than maybe Obama kind of, it seems to me like maybe it means that he wants to stay forever, but he knows he's got to give us the Friedman unit, right, that, oh, don't worry, the end is near, we have a time horizon that we're approaching, and these kinds of things, and like they call it, they're just trying to figure out different ways to add to the Washington clock, to lower the pressure on the politicians to get out of there.
Yeah, I think, and I think basically this came down to the fact that Obama had good inclinations in the Iraq war.
He thought it was the wrong war, a war of choice, and he wanted to get out of there, although, of course, the truth is still in and out of there, and they may need to renegotiate that.
His intentions were originally good, I think, on that, and he had to, as a Democrat, he had to be for some war, because they're always getting criticism from the Republicans for being weak on national security, so the other war seemed more relevant to 9-11, since Al-Qaeda was originally harbored by the Taliban, but, of course, we're nine years down the road now, and it's a different war for a different reason, and it's kind of one of those things that we started out doing one thing, and then the mission expanded, and certainly Bush was nation-building, and now Obama's nation-building with even more aid, and that now, of course, we've destabilized Pakistan, the whole thing, and, of course, Pakistan is much more important than Afghanistan, and I think that's the major ill effect of the war.
Not only is Osama bin Laden the top Al-Qaeda people, probably, in Pakistan, but Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and also, it is the most dangerous country in the world, and we've now destabilized it by being, in nine years, in Afghanistan, and I think that's the one thing that people don't realize, is that this war is not only killing both Afghans and U.S. soldiers, and not having an effect, it's having a counterproductive effect on the entire region, so I think we need to scale back our efforts there.
Well, indeed, and you know, there's a lot to talk about on the Pakistan issue, and I think we'll try to get back to that in the next segment, Ivan, but I wanted to ask you this, you know, it seems apparent that all along, they keep escalating, and the more they escalate, the more innocent people they kill, you have even the McChrystal Ratio, right, it's not the Ivan Eland Ratio, it's the McChrystal Ratio, every time you kill an innocent person, you create ten new insurgents, and it seems like the resistance, whether it's the Taliban or anyone who resists in that country, has grown stronger and stronger over the years as they escalate American troops, it's just a mirror effect, but then again, American Marines can deliver firepower to targets pretty effectively if they have some targets to deliver that firepower to, and I wonder whether you think it's within the realm of possibility that they could, you know, really hurt the Taliban over the next year or so, like in the plan, to try to weaken them, to force them to the negotiation table, like you were saying, or is it we're simply stuck in this equal-opposite reaction thing here?
Well, I think the most basic thing is- I'm sorry, just give me a real quick one, and then we'll come back from this break.
I think we've lost sight of who we need to attack, not the Taliban, it's Al-Qaeda, we need to differentiate those, we need to negotiate with the Taliban, and go after Al-Qaeda, which we've never gone after, really, to pull what went after Iraq, etc.
Right.
Alright, hold it right there, we're going to go out to this break, and we'll be back with Ivan Ehlen right after this, y'all.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
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Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I've got Ivan Ehlen on the line, he's from the Independent Institute, that's independent.org.
So much great stuff there, just, you could spend months digging through that website.
Also, he writes for us at antiwar.com, that's original.antiwar.com, slash Ehlen, and he's the author of the great book, Recarving Rushmore, why instead of a bunch of warmongers, it ought to be a bunch of peaceniks, which there's only very few of up there on that thing, if anyone at all.
That's not the real subtitle, I was paraphrasing.
Now Ivan, thanks for holding on the line with us here.
We were talking about Pakistan, America's Pakistan-slash-Afghanistan policy and how ridiculous it is, but right when we were going out to break, you were talking about limiting the mission to Al-Qaeda only, and it occurred to me that that was what the American people gave George Bush permission to do in the first place, and that's what led us to more than a million dead bodies since then.
When I talked to Anand Gopal on the show a few weeks ago, he was saying that, oh come on, there's probably 100 Al-Qaeda, or maybe he said 200, on both sides of the border, all told, as far as Egyptian or Saudi friends of Osama and Zawahiri, and really it seems to me like the major flaw in the whole Afghan safe haven for Al-Qaeda theory is that it was Germany and America that was the safe haven for the 9-11 attackers.
These guys were grad students in Hamburg.
It wasn't that Al-Qaeda is the greatest hidden base to attack America from, it's that these guys had passports, man!
You know?
Yeah, well, I guess I would say that we had to firebomb Hamburg again, but we don't want to do that.
No, no, definitely not!
So I think that, you know, you're right, we have to calibrate, and I think basically we should rely on law enforcement for much of this, and I know that's kind of wimpy or whatever, regarded in Washington as wimpy, but if the people who really studied terrorism will tell you that terrorists operate like organized crime, like gangs, and of course using military to fight gangs, we don't do that.
We rely on law enforcement and that sort of thing, intelligence, whatever.
That doesn't mean you couldn't use special forces once in a while if you really had to, but I think the more we do that, even with secrets of special forces, the more of this we dredge up.
This is not a traditional enemy, as George Bush told us, that the best defense is a good offense.
And in conventional warfare, that's usually a good doctrine to use if you're using conventional forces, but terrorism is different.
Terrorists can get in your own backyard, as they have in 9-11, and they can go through all the layers of your defenses, your extended offensive defenses, if you will, and being offensive, and that may have a double meaning there, in the world, only gets you more build-up of resistance, more blowback.
And so I think to the extent we do use the military, we have to be very sparing, and we also have to do it in secret, and of course that doesn't mesh well with politicians, because politicians like to show they're doing something, and of course that's why George Bush originally invaded Afghanistan, primarily it was for the politics of it.
And I think that's why Barack Obama has escalated, as I said, I think he was a Democrat, and he had to be for some war, and we've come down to a situation where war is patriotic, and you have to be for some war, or you're regarded as weak or wimpy, and that's indicative that our society has been very militarized, and militarization of empires, that's usually when they're in their final stages, because the military gets too big for the economy to handle.
And I think certainly we have a huge economy, but we're overstretched, and we're fighting two quagmires, and make no mistake about it, I don't think Iraq is over till it's over, those troops aren't going to be out of there next year, so we've got these wars going on, we have a huge budget deficit, and that sort of thing, and I think we're, in our society, we're militarized, so we're exhibiting many of the characteristics of the Soviet Union, Rome, and other empires that have fallen, and I'm not saying our fall is coming about soon, but I wrote a book, The Empire Has No Clothes, as well, which goes through these things, and why both conservatives and liberals should be against policies like this, these nation-building, because it really stretches the military, it stretches the nation, and it almost never works.
Right, well, that's why, you know, I know you agree, you made sure it's in the title of your book, and this is something that we emphasize at Antiwar.com all the time, is it is an empire, and people just don't want to admit that, they always, you know, TV always portrays everything as a defensive thing against the evil enemy that's out to get us, and when people realize it is an empire, then by default, they're against that, because that's part of the civic religion, is how, you know, the heroic George Washington and them seceded successfully from an empire, in order to be free, you know?
Yeah, so of course, this empire has only occurred since World War II, the traditional foreign policy of America was always against empire, now of course, we had laughs, like the Spanish American War, and unnecessary involvement in World War I, and that sort of thing, but for most of the history, we did follow George Washington's principle of staying out of things we didn't need to be in, and avoiding permanent alliances.
Our first permanent alliances were the Rio Pact and NATO after World War II, so we didn't have the alliances, and it's kind of funny, we got the alliances when, about the time we got nuclear weapons, so we really didn't need alliances anymore, but nonetheless, I think when we really became the empire was after World War II, and that's an aberration in American history.
Well, there's different interpretations of that, I would certainly agree that the American people never internalized the idea that we needed to police the world until after World War II anyway, certainly the elite have been wanting, and have been succeeding in building empire in stages all along.
Oh yeah, definitely, Teddy Roosevelt and all those guys before him, but it really never stuck, it never stuck to the wall until after World War II, and the narrative was that...
I guess we don't really have time to get into the details of the Pakistan policy, so I'll just go ahead and throw this out there, that, you know, I talked with Harry Brown, who ran for president as the Libertarian in the year 2096 as well, and I asked him, well, if you'd been the president on 9-11, how would you have handled it?
And he said he would have given a speech about how, look, everybody knows that we could invade ten countries and do all kinds of harm, but we're not going to do that, and we're sorry if we were an empire, we were just trying to protect you from the Russians, and everyone would know he didn't really, that wasn't really true, but he would have basically said it like that, and he would have said, look, we never tried to be an empire, we didn't want to be an empire, we're bringing all our troops home from everywhere, and we're sending a few people to kill a few people who dared to organize this attack.
They'll have their throats slit, but that'll be the end of it, and the war on terrorism would have been over by January 2002.
You know, that's the way it should have been handled, but isn't it too late now?
It seems like we just need to call it off and say forget it now.
Yeah, I think that would have been the policy to do.
I think we need to have leaders that are restrained, and I said we had a leader who was trying to milk the thing for all the political mileage he could get out of it, and you need a leader like Eisenhower, who had the...
When that crisis occurred overseas and people were pressuring him to do something, he would always say, this isn't a crisis, and he only intervened one time, and he was goaded into that in Lebanon in 1958, but he successfully avoided all those temptations and pressure.
I think we need presidents like that because, and I think Obama, unfortunately, Democrats have a problem doing that because the Republicans always goad them into warfare.
Republicans actually have an easier time of it, but of course George Bush can take that opportunity to dampen tensions and take the appropriate response.
He just kind of went wild.
The funny thing about how you talk about all the pressure on the Democrats to prove that they're tough, I mean, who knows?
I guess I don't usually agree with many people about many things.
I certainly agree with you that that's the conventional wisdom, and I'm not sure whether you were saying anything more than that that's a fact of life in D.C.
That's what people think, but it seems to me that if Barack Obama would just say, no, look, your policy, the Republicans' policies were wrong, okay?
Here's what they did.
A, B, C, D, E, and give the Ivan Elin case against the George Bush policy and say, no, we're not doing that.
We're ending this.
That would be tough.
That would be the manly thing to do, would be to face down those Republicans and whoop them and do the right thing.
That would be tougher than killing a bunch of women and children with drones.
Yeah, I think that's really true.
Obama should have, on the first day of the presidency, he should have said, you know, wow, they briefed me on all this stuff, this classified stuff, and these wars are in worse shape than I thought.
We're just getting out of both of them.
And he could have done it, and it wouldn't have been his war, but Afghanistan is now his war.
And I think this also happened with LBJ.
He was really afraid of the Republican rights criticism, and I think so was Obama.
So LBJ had won the 1964 election by a landslide.
He could have done anything.
The people in the United States didn't even know what Vietnam was, and yet he felt he escalated it because he thought the Republican right would crucify him in the 1968 election.
Well, what happened?
The war itself crucified him in the 1968 election.
He had to drop out of it.
Right, he didn't even run.
Yeah, so I think if he had done the courageous thing in the first place, the president has the power of the pulpit, the bully pulpit, and he can use rhetoric and do whatever they have to do, and they can frame the agenda, and I think people, Congress and presidents are much too timid in doing the right thing.
They can do the right thing, and they shouldn't be goaded by a lot of sinners and advisors to do the wrong thing.
And oftentimes, doing the right thing isn't as hazardous as they think.
Those wars weren't that popular when Obama took office, and he could have gotten out of both of them.
Yeah, all right.
Well, thanks very much for your time, Ivan.
I really do appreciate it.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Ivan Ehlen from the Independent Institute.
That's independent.org and antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com slash Ehlen.
Check out his books, The Empire Has No Clothes and Recarving Rushmore, Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.