Alright, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm happy to welcome Jack Hunter back to the show.
He's the Southern Avenger.
He's the radio show host in Charleston.
And he keeps the Paulitical Ticker blog at rompaul2012.com.
Welcome back, Jack.
How's things?
Always good to be with you, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Very happy to talk with you.
Very exciting debate last night.
I thought Ron Paul got in some great lines here and there.
Although, delivery-wise, it wasn't his very best.
I've been dying for him to fight, well, for any of these people to dare fight with him about foreign policy.
The last few debates, he says some quote-unquote outrageous thing about foreign policy, and everybody else just changes the subject.
This time, he finally got into a good fight on foreign policy, especially with Michelle Bachmann on Iran.
And I was just wondering, I guess, first of all, what's it like at the campaign today, whether it seems as though he came out on top on that?
Did he win some people over, explain himself well enough, you think?
Or at the very least, is this going to be an opportunity for him to continue to clarify the truth of the matter?
Well, yeah, I think for everybody watching that who might not have agreed with Ron Paul, there were two or three more.
I'm talking about the spat between Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul over Iran.
There were two or three more who thought Ron was absolutely right.
If you look at most of the polls, 70% to 80% and upward of Americans don't think we should be in Afghanistan.
They think Iraq was a mistake.
The only person running in this race, this includes President Obama.
Remember, he's in this race too.
On the GOP or Democrat side, who agree with the American people is Ron Paul.
So you get big, brownie points there.
I would also add, you noticed at one point that Bachmann cited PolitiFact, the online fact-checking website to attack Newt Gingrich on a particular issue.
Well, this morning, PolitiFact or PolitiCheck, maybe I'm saying it wrong.
There, I've got it right here in front of me.
PolitiFact, that's correct.
Basically fact-checked Bachmann's assertion that if Muammar Ahmadinejad has a nuclear weapon, that he would use it to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, that he would use it against the United States.
Well, not only did he not say that, but there's no actual proof that he'd have nuclear weapons or tried to get nuclear weapons.
And, of course, that could be a lie or whatever.
But the point is, the exact website she used to attack Newt Gingrich as a source, a credible source, is saying she's basically not telling the truth on her attacks against Ron Paul.
So, all around, it was an interesting exchange between the two, and I think Ron came out on top.
Well, now, there's a consensus.
That's really where this comes from.
You know, I hate to break the law and compare something to Hitler or something, but there's a big lie out there.
And the big lie is that everybody knows Iran is making nukes, and everybody knows that as soon as they have one, they're going to lob it at Tel Aviv in order to bring back the 12th Amam or whatever, something.
And nobody has any real facts here, right?
It's just a narrative, but it's a narrative that is told again and again and again in not just the conservative media echo chamber, but on MSNBC as well.
None of these people understand nuclear technology.
None of them understand the nonproliferation treaty and the safeguards agreement or whatever.
So, they all just defer to their guest, and their guest is always from some warmonger think tank in D.C.
So, when he comes out and goes, oh, come on, none of this is right, it sounds really strange to people, I imagine, on the right anyway, the Republican base, because I thought everybody knew what a terrible, dangerous nuclear threat Iran was.
Well, let's examine history, the last decade a little bit.
2003, when the Bush administration, in conjunction with the media that did it, was ginning up support for the Iraq war.
We were told that they had WMDs, that they posed a threat to the United States, there could be a mushroom cloud, I mean, you name it.
They were a major threat that we had to get in with.
At that time, Ron Paul said that we were overreacting, we didn't have all the information, that going to war with Iraq would put us in a quagmire, and we'd live to regret it.
Most of the so-called experts at the time said, look at the crazy Ron Paul.
Let's know what he's talking about.
He's weak, he wants Saddam Hussein to destroy the United States, you name it.
Paul was wrong.
Well, in 2011, a majority of Americans agreed with Ron Paul.
In retrospect, everything he predicted, that we would find ourselves in a quagmire, that the cost would not be worth it.
Across the board, there were no WMDs.
Saddam Hussein never posed a threat to the United States, it had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
Ron Paul was proven absolutely right.
Here we are in 2011, the same people are making the same arguments about Iran, that they are developing a nuclear weapon, even though we don't have solid evidence to suggest that.
That Bahram Ahmadinejad is a great threat to the United States.
It's the same narrative all over again.
What is Ron Paul saying?
You know, hold your horses, we might be overreacting, we don't have all the information, the worst thing we could do is launch another war, which would put us in another quagmire, cost too much, and the same people are saying he's crazy.
Well, Scott, if we're supposed to base our foreign policy on history and experience and common sense, well, that's on the side of Ron Paul, I'm sorry.
It's not on the side of Rick Santorum or Duke Gingrich or Michelle Bachmann or Mitt Romney or any of these ex-Bushites or the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, all these people who say that Iran is a threat.
I'm sorry, they were wrong the first time, and if you're a betting man, I put my bets on the guy who was right the first time, and that was Ron Paul.
Well, Jack, I'm going to shock you, hold on to your heart, but I agreed with something that David Frum wrote this week, or actually it was something that he said on TV.
Oh, I've got to go, I'll end this call right now, Scott, I'm just kidding, go ahead.
What he said was that the right in America lives in an alternative reality created for them by talk radio, and the example that he used was this Christmas tree thing, where the Christmas tree industry was trying to create this surcharge and whatever through the government, kind of a mercantilist scam, to promote Christmas trees on TV, you know, like pork, the other white meat, this kind of thing, and somehow this turned into Barack Obama is an Afro-Sportan, Marxist, Black Panther, Islamic extremist, agent of Osama Bin Laden, set here to undermine Christianity.
And these freaking people believe this crap, and the point is that it doesn't matter, you know, screw Obama, he's evil for 5,000 reasons, just not those.
But the point is that there really are people who live in this fantasy world where Iran is the Soviet Union, if that's what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh agree, you know?
Well, David Frum is a right-wing echo chamber, there's also a left-wing echo chamber, you know, I can tell you how many of my liberal friends, all the Koch brothers are coming to get us, I mean, that's always existed.
Here's where David Frum is a total hypocrite.
Frum is totally comfortable with that right-wing echo chamber as long as they're promoting war.
Here's the man who gave us the Axis of Evil line in George W. Bush's speech arguing for war with Iraq.
So as long as the right-wing echo chamber is completely solidly neoconservative, David Frum's fine with that.
Oh yeah, well, and he's part of it on the Iran issue in particular, of course.
That's exactly right, but he's not wrong in his overall argument, but he just uses it to his advantage.
And you know what?
You know, let's be fair, I did the same thing.
I agree with Senator Rand Paul and Ron Paul or Tom Coburn or Jim DeMint or any of these conservatives who say, look, we've got to cut Pentagon spending to reduce the budget.
They're absolutely right.
Well, David Frum doesn't like that right-wing echo chamber either.
So, you know, you can use that argument both ways.
Right, except that you're not a liar and he is, that's the whole point, is that the people saying, oh, no, Iran is a terrible nuclear threat, not the people who buy it, but the people who are the origin of this, like David Frum, they are damned liars.
They've been saying that Iran's a year away from a nuke for 25 years.
Well, that's exactly right.
Well, you know, let's step back for a second.
Ron Paul made the point that we have 12,000 diplomats in the United States.
Let's go ahead and put them to use.
That's far preferable to war.
And people say, oh, well, no, you can't do that.
Muammar Ahmadinejad is Hitler.
This guy, you know, is going to take over the world.
He's the next Hitler.
Let's look at what they said about Ronald Reagan when he dared to meet with Gorbachev in 1986.
Charles Krause, however, and Norman Bedard and Newt Gingrich, they said this is 1939 all over again.
Reagan was Neville Chamberlain and this was Munich and Gorbachev was Hitler and so on and so on, that we were appeasing the enemy that Ronald Reagan was weak.
Well, in retrospect, do you think most Americans think we should have went to war with Russia or had diplomatic relations like Reagan did?
I think they would have picked what Reagan wanted to do and that's what Ron Paul wants to do today.
All right, hold it right there, everybody.
We're going to be right back on the other side of this break with Jack Hunter.
He writes the political ticker blog at RonPaul2012.com.
By the way, today's Tea Party Day, Boston Tea Party Day, Ron Paul Money Bomb Day.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the Southern Avenger, Jack Hunter.
Keeper of the Paul political ticker blog at RonPaul2012.com.
By the way, original.antiwar.com/Paul if you want to see Ron's archives going back to 2002 including 35 questions that won't be asked about the Iraq War and other great ones like that.
All of his speeches in opposition to the Iraq War, as Jack mentioned.
And, you know, it's the same thing there as it is now.
People who disagree with Paul, and I don't mean on his whole world view and whatever, but I mean on particular issues, Jack, like what's going on with Iran's nuclear program or whatever.
The difference is he knows what he's talking about and they don't.
And this was clear last night in the debate where even though, you know, Bachman was talking over him and he was kind of stuttering a bit and whatever.
It came out in there.
He said the National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, just testified last spring that the CIA and the American intelligence community's official position on the Iranian nuclear program is that they do not have a secret nuclear weapons program and they have not made the political decision to begin to try to make nukes.
Well, that's exactly right.
And Ron Paul's argument basically in a nutshell last night was, well, do we go to war with Iran to find out they don't have any nuclear weapons like we did with Iraq or do we not overreact and not spend all the money and lose all the lives this time around?
And the candidates just seem to think it's completely insane not to look at our recent past and what we did in Iraq and to listen to Ron Paul.
And he was making the case that, no, they were insane by not looking at our recent past, what happened in Iraq, and going forward.
These people have no sort of political or moral compass when it comes to these sorts of things.
They just demagogue and jet up support for war on the flimsiest of circumstances.
A part of it, a lot of it, Scott, you know, we're still, a lot of these Republicans are still stuck in that Bush Republican mindset where it was never about limited government.
Medicare Plan D, no child left behind.
The biggest big government present in history until this one with President Obama.
But what did Republicans love?
The Iraq war, the war on terror.
That's where everybody's mindset is.
And when you're not for limited government, when you don't stack up on the constitutional issues, and you're a Republican candidate, what do you do?
You start with the warmongering again.
And that's exactly what you saw with these candidates last night, and there's only one guy standing against that consistently.
Yep.
And now, here's the thing, too.
You may very well be aware of this, but I just want to go ahead and mention because a lot of people are going to be hearing this later on and all that.
In 2007, when the National Intelligence Estimate came out, Bush himself, under pressure, went ahead and published the unclassified summary.
And it really undercut their drive for war.
CIA, et cetera, say Iran not making nukes after all.
And it really killed their drive to war by many percentage points or whatever back then.
Now, they did another National Intelligence Estimate this year, at the beginning of this year, 2011, but they didn't produce the unclassified summary.
All we got was a couple of newspaper reports about it in the Washington Post, in the Wall Street Journal, I think Newsweek, and then, of course, Seymour Hersh's piece.
And Hersh's piece, Iran and the bomb, from I think June or something like that, that's the one where he really is talking about the Joint Special Operations Command inside Iran, switching out the road signs for fancy new ones with sensors embedded in them, and putting sensors in the roads to measure the weight of dump trucks going back and forth from suspicious sites and all these things.
Years worth of this.
And they've been unable to detect any indication of a secret nuclear weapons program.
They still stand by their conclusion from 2007.
And so, there's an NIE from this year that agrees with Ron Paul on this, or he agrees with them on this, or whatever.
That's an important point that I think most people don't know, because it really didn't get that much coverage.
They'll talk about even supporters, people who agree with Ron, I see them saying, the last time the CIA mentioned this was back in 2007, and they said the same thing as him.
But no, it was this year.
Well, that's exactly right.
And we know from our experience with the Iraq War and what's going on now with all this information that you just mentioned, they're very selective.
When I say they, I'm talking about the political establishment, the GOP establishment, Barack Obama.
They are very selective in what they want us to know and not know, because they're creating a narrative.
They've already decided if we're going to war with Iran or Syria or Libya or any of these places, and they just have to convince the American people accordingly.
And even when they can't, they make that the story.
They're selective in what information they allow us to see and not see, and that's a good example that you just spelled out.
All right, and now another thing that made me really proud of Dr. Paul last night in the debate was he mentioned a million dead Iraqis.
Now, in the follow-up interview with Hannity, when Hannity asked him about that, he referred back to the million people that Bill Clinton starved to death and diseased to death in the 1990s with his blockade and bombings, and Madeleine Albright's boast to Leslie Stahl that it's worth it to kill 500,000 children in order to make their parents so weak that they'll overthrow Saddam Hussein or something like that.
But anyway, that's not what he meant in the debate.
When he said a million dead Iraqis, he wasn't referring to the million that Bill Clinton strangled to death.
He was referring to the million that George Bush killed since 2003, and it's the rate of excess deaths, and I figure the reason he didn't talk about all that to Hannity was just because he didn't have his footnotes in order, like he had his Madeleine Albright example ready to go.
But it was opinion business research in Britain, obr.co.uk, that did the study that determined that there were a million excess deaths, comparing the rate of death from the last years of the blockade under Clinton and early Bush Jr.to the rate of death during the war.
And they concluded, and they did the study twice to make sure, and this is consistent with what Johns Hopkins and Lancet did in their studies in 2004 and 2006, that a million Iraqis died more than would have under the rate of death before the invasion.
Right.
Yeah, and those numbers are staggering to a lot of Americans.
They don't understand, actually, how many.
Whether you're looking at the Clinton sanctions, as you mentioned, or whether you're looking at what George W. Bush and Barack Obama have done, most Americans can't wrap their head around that.
The idea of casualties of war is such a vague concept, and when Ron brings up a number like a million, and it measures up and all that, people just don't want to hear it.
They don't know what to do with it, but they need to hear it.
They need to know the consequences of war, and why these people become mad at us and want to do bad things to us.
I think all of that's important, and once again, who else is talking about that?
I mean, honestly.
Right.
And you know, it's hard, because really he's asking them basically, implicitly, to admit that they were wrong.
And he's not trying to beat them over the head with it, but he's saying, like, look, this war in Iraq was worthless.
A million people died, and for what?
And it's hard for people sometimes.
They'd rather rebel the other way, fly into the arms of Newt Gingrich, because he keeps telling them they're right to be so afraid.
That's exactly right.
And if we go to war again, and we spend all this money, and all these lives are sacrificed, and we find out that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, and that we were overreacting, Ron Paul will be right again.
God, if he was right about Iraq, he would be right about Iran.
Okay, so what's the next war?
Syria?
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum going to bomb Pakistan after that?
There'll be the same arguments over and over.
But I will say this, more Americans this time around are willing to listen to Ron Paul and ignore those other guys.
And believe me, if there's a third war, it would go more and more in that direction.
People are starting to learn that less, but however slowly, it's happening.
Right.
Well, and you know, the other thing is that blowback really matters.
It's not just that, you know, Ron Paul is this contrarian, and he just keeps wanting to blame America all the time, or whatever.
You know, when he's blaming, when he's explaining that Bill Clinton's policy of occupying Saudi Arabia in order to blockade and bomb Iraq and kill that million people in the 1990s was the motivation for bringing on this attack, it's a very important point that they didn't attack us because we were just sitting here not invading them enough.
They attacked us because we were invading them too much already, supporting their dictators, dropping bombs on their heads.
And so, you know, the point that, you know, the war party says because they attacked us for doing nothing, that proves that we have to do something from now on.
And he's saying, no, they attacked us for doing something, all we've got to do is call it off, and this war will go away.
It's funny, my conservative friends, when we're discussing the concept of blowback, conservatives across the board agree that government intervention affects human behavior, taxes affect human behavior, regulation affects human behavior.
Hell, if there's a long line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, I've done an hour on that on talk radio, people complaining about it, and it affects their behavior, makes them angry, or so on and so on.
But they can't wrap their head around the most oppressive and most intense government action you could possibly imagine.
Waging war might actually cause a human reaction as well.
Oh no, that doesn't happen.
Taxes make people do stuff, but war, eh, it just rolls off their back, it's no big deal.
There's a big disconnect in the logic there, and to the extent that conservatives can begin to see that, we can actually change the Republican Party, elect somebody like Ron Paul for president, and do some good things, as I said earlier, I think people are starting to see that more than they used to.
Not quick enough for me, but at least it's going in that direction.
Well, you know, Jack, one thing that occurred to me was that maybe it would be helpful for Ron to go ahead and use the name of Bill Clinton, because people are so used to knee-jerking that, oh, you're blaming America, and you're saying we deserved it, and this kind of thing.
And maybe it would be a little easier for Republicans to understand that it's possible for Bill Clinton to have a foreign policy that ends up hurting the United States, and that's what happened on September 11th.
Then he can make the further point that continuing to act like Bill Clinton is not in our interest.
Well, that's exactly right.
Acting like Barack Obama is not in our interest.
All these Republicans are acting like he's weak somehow, which is laughable when he's just as bad as George W. Bush on foreign policy.
If not worse, it's the same policies.
It's completely ridiculous, but you're absolutely right, Scott.
I mean, you know, the policies, the Clinton administration enacted, the sanctions on Iraq, which Madeleine Albright then said on 60 Minutes famously, you know, that half a million children that the U.N. estimated had died because of our sanctions, that that was worth it.
Yes, that upset a lot of people over there in that part of the world.
That was part of the reason Osama bin Laden could recruit members, and we had our own troops from the Arabian Peninsula that did like that.
All of that led and culminated 9-11.
Well, and I know it's not Ron Paul's style to point fingers, you know, directly at Bill Clinton caused this, that, but he could call it the Clinton policy of the blockade against Iraq.
Something like that, I think, could really help make it easier for conservatives to understand.
He's not blaming all 300 million Americans.
He's saying this was a bad policy that the 1990s Democrats had that ended up in this blowback.
Make it a little easier for them to accept, you know?
Unfortunately, whether it works to our advantage or not, partisanship always works.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
Yeah, well, and it's true enough, so no problem.
All right, well, listen, I love talking with you, Jack.
I wish all of you guys on the campaign the best of luck.
We're with you out here.
Take care, Scott.
Always good to talk to you.
Thanks very much.
Everybody, that's the great Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger, and he writes the blog The Political Ticker at RonPaul2012.com.
