03/26/09 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest today is Jim Loeb.
He's Washington Bureau Chief for Interpress Service.
And he's got a new article with Daniel Lubin at Antiwar.com, IPSnews.org.
It's called Neocons, launch new foreign policy group.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
I'm okay.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining me on short notice this morning.
Sure.
So, it seems to me like, and you know, I first really learned the definition of the neocons, a biographical description of this group of crazies from you back in 2003.
You explained to me exactly how this works.
And I guess the best I've learned since then, Jim, is there's really no more than, what, three or four dozen of these guys.
And yet, they write for all the newspapers in the world, and they have a hundred little think tanks.
And they make it look like there are, what, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of American neocons out there.
But really, it's just the same few guys over and over again, huh?
Yeah, they operate in an echo chamber pretty effectively, yeah.
And so now we have the famous Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan duo, the guys that wrote all about proclaiming America's benevolent global hegemony back in 1996, the neo-Reaganite foreign policy and so forth.
And they're back in action, even though their entire movement has been disgraced worldwide.
And they have what's, I guess, supposedly, at least, a new think tank.
Is that right?
Yeah, apparently that's the case.
It's called the Foreign Policy Initiative.
And they're the co-founders and directors, along with Dan Senor, who came to fame as the main spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
That is, Paul Bremer's.
He became the main spokesman for Paul Bremer during the latter's tenure as essentially a viceroy of Iraq, I guess you could say.
That's interesting.
Now, Bremer was a Kissinger guy rather than a neocon, right?
Yeah, but he's kind of associated with them for some time.
Senor, I think, is quite of the neoconservative variety.
But he's also been critical of a lot of the things that the neoconservatives did.
He, for example, has been pretty scathing about the neocon critique that the United States should simply have handed over power to the Iraqis and then kind of gotten out of Iraq right away.
That's been something that Richard Perle has said, that there was a fatal error in formally announcing an occupation of the country.
Of course, Crystal and the Kagans have always been for escalating more and more and more.
But Crystal turned on Donald Rumsfeld first out of all of them, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think the critique was more refined in a sense.
They argued that the U.S., that is, Kagan and Crystal, through the Project for the New American Century and through a number of other think tanks or people associated with think tanks, at Brookings, for example, argued that once the U.S. came in, it should and it had even a duty to build the country, to nation-build, if you will.
And Rumsfeld really didn't want to do that.
And I would say there is a split among neoconservatives on this question because Perle and Feith and others say, kind of went along with Rumsfeld, so we should just get out now that we've liberated the country and not necessarily try to transform it.
After presumably installing Ahmed Chalabi and others in power who they were confident could transform it on his own, Kagan and Crystal took the position that we should invest much, much, much more money in building and resources in building institutions in Iraq and have many more troops on the ground.
Well, and it was Kagan's brother, Fred, that put his name on the surge thing, which I guess they got away at the time with making it seem like that was where the policy came from.
And then I guess now we learn that it was Ray Odierno who came up with the surge and they got Kagan to put the intellectual stamp on the policy.
Well, some people credit Petraeus.
It's very confusing to figure out what the antecedents were because there's so many conflicting claims, particularly now, that in their view the surge appeared to have succeeded.
I mean, I still think the jury is out on that for a lot of people, but the number of fathers who claim parenthood has grown significantly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that really caught me when I read this article today, and again, it's at antiwar.com slash IPS today, and this paragraph here I want to read, the organization's mission statement, this is the foreign policy initiative, the new neocon think tank, Crystal Kagan Venture here, the organization's mission statement argues that the, quote, United States remains the world's indispensable nation and warns that, quote, strategic overreach is not the problem and retrenchment is not the solution.
To Washington's current financial and strategic woes, it calls for continued engagement, diplomatic, economic, and military in the world and rejection of policies that would lead us down the path to isolationism.
Doesn't sound like they're going to really have too much trouble.
That sounds pretty much like the Washington consensus broadly defined, no?
Well, I think they are trying to make it as broadly appealing as possible, and there are some Democrats who are participating in the conference they're putting on in Afghanistan.
Yeah, I think they're looking to forge coalitions again as they did in the mid-90s with neoliberals who are for an interventionist foreign policy and who, you know, in the words of Madeleine Albright, consider the U.S. to be the indispensable power in the world, and I think there is a deliberate choice to use that word in part to attract neoliberals because, you know, what neoconservatives have always done is look for alliances, particularly when they're out of power, that would bring them some influence, and I think that's what they're angling to do here.
The involvement of John Nagel is also, as one of the speakers, I think is also significant because he comes from CNAS.
The Center for New American Security.
Yeah, which is seen as a Democratic-leaning think tank that deals mainly with military issues, and which has already supplied quite a number of people to the new administration.
Well, as Michael Ledeen said in the movie World War IV, he and Richard Perler are both still proud card-carrying Democrats and never left the Democratic Party, so I guess there certainly is that overlap there, and, you know, when they use terms like isolationism, that's a great way to get liberals on board for the project, I guess, because only a backwards, ignorant, illiterate, conservative, reactionary weirdo would be an isolationist, which, of course, is more or less true.
There basically are no isolationists anywhere within any of these arguments, but it's a great smear term for anybody who favors peace over war.
Well, I mean, it has a long history.
I mean, I personally think that historically, I did some research on this in college and got into a lot of trouble for the thesis that I presented, but I actually argued that neoconservatives, even back then, we're talking about late 60s, were actually, in many respects, the inheritors of the isolationist tradition, because isolationists were unilateralists above all.
They were only isolationists in terms of political relations with Europe.
They believed the United States should be able to do whatever it wanted to do in Latin America and in Asia, really in the rest of the world, anywhere outside of Europe, which was seen as kind of decadent and imperialistic and so on, whereas we were seen as innocent, well-meaning, and young, and therefore these quote-unquote younger parts of the world should be our playing field, in a sense.
So I consider a lot of the isolationists, particularly those who were on the right in the 1930s, were, in many respects, proto-neoconservatives in terms of their interventionist ideas.
Well, you know, that's an interesting point.
You know, there's kind of a weird overlap.
I wrote an article a few years back called Who's Afraid of John Bolton?
And it sort of explores the sameness of the rhetoric, in a sense, of John Bolton with, say, somebody like Ron Paul.
But in fact, they're very, very different traditions.
One of them is a very nationalist, right-wing, conservative hawk who certainly wants to be unilaterally at war.
The other is a libertarian peacenik who calls himself a descendant of the ideology of, say, Robert Taft, but who is an avowed peacenik, wants nothing to do with the UN, but certainly wants to be unilaterally at peace and is no hypocrite on it, you know?
Right.
Well, I think there was a lot of scrambling of ideological alliances as a result of World War II.
And I think that created a lot of confusion.
Back in the late 60s, I was focused most on Scoop Jackson, who happened to be my senator, and the kinds of things he was talking about and the way that he put them were very reminiscent of some of the isolationist positions of the 1930s.
For example, Senator Borah of Idaho was just next door to where Jackson grew up.
And I was making the case there was a certain degree of continuity there.
Very interesting.
I wish I had hours and hours to talk to you, but I've only got a couple of more minutes here before I've got to get Gareth Porter on the phone.
So tell me real quickly about the very first little bit that this new so-called foreign policy initiative of Crystal and Kagan has come out with and how it focuses on Russia and China.
Well, I wouldn't say it focuses on Russia and China.
It names challenges and adversaries of the United States in its statement of purpose, I guess you could say.
And leading those challenges and adversaries were, there was a whole list, rogue states, terrorist groups, failed states and so on.
But the first ones that were mentioned were authoritarian states like Russia and China, emerging authoritarian states, which kind of reflects what Kagan has been writing about for the last couple of years, that somehow in the 21st century, the world will be divided between democratic states and autocratic or authoritarian states led by Russia and China.
Yeah, in other words, states loyal to the U.S. Empire versus those that are still outside of it and can possibly challenge it.
Well, I don't know how flexible he is in that respect.
But the idea is I think that which is typical of neoconservatism, of seeing the world in a very Manichean, black and white, good versus evil sort of framework, he's setting up a new framework in which we could essentially continue the last half century's fight with what we then called communism in the guise of Soviet Union and China.
So I think, again, it shows their tendency toward Manicheanism.
And I think the reason they do like to see that is they firmly believe that the American public at large will not take an interest in international affairs and in international engagement, unless they see it in moral terms.
So they, I think, deliberately frame foreign policy challenges in moral terms in order to rally public opinion behind them.
And I think what they firmly believe that, as Ken Adelman once said, the default position of the American public on foreign policy is isolationism.
And they believe that isolationism in the 30s brought total disaster to the world, and particularly to European Jewry, of course.
Yeah, it's too bad nobody ever remembers the 19-teens, isn't it?
And how it was our lack of isolationism that created the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany back then, you know?
I'm just kind of trying to explain the worldview.
Oh, I know.
I'm just pointing out the irony that, you know, for the neocons, history always begins in the 30s or something.
There's no such thing as Woodrow Wilson in their world.
Right.
The 30s is the be-all and end-all of their worldview.
And they derive certain lessons from that period.
And one of the most important of which is you have to fight isolationism.
And the way you fight isolationism is you create and exaggerate enemies that you can mobilize public opinion against.
Or at least you can create the fear of those enemies that Americans will engage internationally, vote for more military expenditures, which they think is critical given the lessons of the 30s and what they talk about in terms of appeasement.
And so, once again, I think they're trying to create a dichotomy that will, number one, enable them to reach out to neoliberals, who do have influence in this administration, and number two, rally public opinion behind greater defense expenditures and greater international engagement in all ways.
And that very much repeats what they did in the mid-90s, because the Project for the New American Century, and indeed their article from 1996 about benevolent global hegemony, was directed particularly at the Republican Party, which they feared was going increasingly isolationist.
Right.
In fact, Crystal and McCain even threatened to bolt the Republican Party over the Serbia war, all the right-wingers who voted against funding it.
Exactly.
And I think what we're seeing is a kind of redux of that now.
They want to keep the Republicans pretty much in a neoconservative frame, appeal to the neoliberals, set up new enemies that will help rally public opinion behind higher defense budgets and persistent international engagement.
Well, we're not going to let them get away with it, and we're going to keep our eye on them by way of your great work at Interpress Service.
You can find all of it, y'all, at antiwar.com slash lobe and antiwar.com slash IPS.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, sir.
Sure.
Not at all.
My pleasure.
Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter, also from IPS, right after this.