04/13/09 – John Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing John Basil Utley.
He is Associate Publisher of the American Conservative Magazine.
He is a Foreign Correspondent in South America for the Journal of Commerce and Knight Ritter Newspapers, and former editor of the Times of the Americas.
He is a writer and advisor for Antiwar.com, and edits the blog, The Military Industrial Complex, as well as maintains the site Americans Against World Empire.
That's at againstbombing.org.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Fine.
It's Military Industrial Congressional Complex, we call it, or Congress Complex.
Right.
Well, and don't forget scientific and industrial and toothpaste and everything, right?
Number one on Google, Military Industrial Congress, because Congress is a big part of that today.
Right.
Well, in fact, isn't it the case that when Eisenhower gave the speech, he originally wanted to call it the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, but he took it out because he thought it would be seen as a slight against the legislative branch by the presidency.
That's true, and it's a bit long, so he cut it short.
Well, I think that in your most recent article here for Antiwar.com, which was also published all over the place, which is really an accomplishment for an article like this, I think, you focus on not just the importance of the Military Industrial Complex, but something else that I think is really the most important thing, and that is the realignment between the best of the left and the right, with real libertarianism as the moderate center, rather than the worst of the Republicans and the Democrats, the worst of conservatism and liberalism with the extremists in the center, which is the way it seems to be now.
And the article is called Left and Right Against the Military Industrial Complex.
So I guess before we get too far into the hazards of the Military Industrial Complex and why it needs opposing so much, maybe you could address a little bit of that kind of ecumenical left-right sort of position that you're trying to take on the issue.
I think that's very important, what you bring up, that left and right is not what it used to be by any means.
And since Reagan, the left doesn't say confiscatory taxes and taking over the means of production and all those things.
And the right, on the other hand, has gone, parts of it have really gone overboard to an extreme.
So in the middle, there's a lot of people, the great majority of Americans, I think.
And I would add to that that left and right, there's another issue, is congressional, how would you say, incumbency.
That is, it was interesting when the war started with Kosovo, Serbia, that the Republicans who support war, the distinguishing line wasn't leftist or right, it was those who'd been in Washington the longest time.
The new freshmen, sophomore elected Republicans really did not favor invading foreign countries and massive support for the Military Industrial Complex.
But the Republicans who'd been in a long time, and this applies to Democrats too, were most favorable towards war and empire and conquest and suspending the military.
So it's a lot to do with the Washington establishment.
Well, and the American people seem to be divided along kind of just sort of cultural lines, country and rock and roll almost, you could define as the difference between left and right among the population.
And you have, as you're saying, a lot of conservatives who are skeptical about empire building.
There are a lot of liberals who are skeptical about such things.
But it seems like the anti-imperialist forces are split in half ourselves between country and rock and roll.
And the parties get to switch back and forth, but it's always the war party that leads the parties in power.
When Obama named Biden as his vice president, that was a clear sign that he was going to accommodate the war party.
Biden had a long record of pro-war support.
And that's the establishment in Washington.
And, of course, as is often the case, follow the money.
There's tremendous money today in the military and industrial complex.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, who's right wing, long-time anti-communist, pointed out that there were 15,000 earmarks in the defense budget two years ago.
All of those involve money being sent to favored constituents in their districts.
And then those companies and individuals send money back to the congressmen in donations.
So it's a vast circle of that.
That element has vastly increased the power of the military industrial.
The manufacturers, for example, the F-22 is made in 44 states.
One reason it costs so much, they're careful to put some subcontracts in every key congressional district that they can and state.
And now, of course, they're saying we don't cut the F-22 because we need it, because it creates jobs, as if producing a fighter that is very questionable and was designed for fighting the Soviet airspace, which no longer exists.
It gives an example of this.
Of course, now we have some efforts to control it.
But I think in this discussion, people who, if you want to know the military industrial complex, you just look around at the incredible spending.
Robert Higgs, is it, at the Independent Institute has written you should pretty much double the figures you see in the budget for defense, because there's so much hidden as well in other aspects.
Right, because the nuclear weapons costs are all in the Department of Energy, and the V.A. costs are all separate.
And intelligence, CIA.
I mean, there are incredible amounts of money.
And the wars themselves, even, are, at least in the Bush era, off-budget.
Obama's promised to change that in the future.
Higgs is pretty right on that.
I think it's nearly a trillion dollars, and tremendous amounts of that are totally irrelevant to defending America from the war on terror, or terrorists.
And they're designed to fight something that doesn't exist.
All these carriers.
Another big aspect is that the firepower, with technological advances available to a small ship, is comparable to what an aircraft carrier used to be able to fire.
In other words, the range of a fighter bomber.
It can be done with cruise missiles from small ships, etc., etc.
There's a strong argument, in fact, just reading today, that you should have the whole thing of carriers.
Carriers is obsolete, which are giant targets for nuclear missiles.
And all the paraphernalia to defend a carrier, which is cruisers and submarines and destroyers and supply ships, all this is questionable when a few smaller ships could have the same key firepower.
And, of course, weapons today are immensely accurate.
They hit their target.
These designs of aircraft carrier fleets was when most of the bombs missed.
In my day, the Korean War, they spent months trying to hit some bridges on the Yalu River.
Well, you know, it's funny because, as we have, I don't know, more than a dozen, I think, carrier battle groups all throughout the seas, one at a time, where, as you say, a few good battleships would be enough to defend this country and probably even to keep all the sea lanes open and clear for trade, too.
Cruisers with multiple missiles.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know all the different distinctions.
But at the same time, though, John, when Obama increased, when they passed the new military budget and there was an increase from 510 billion, this is the non-Higgs numbers, but the government numbers, from 510 billion to 534 billion, they called that a cut.
And on all the right-wing propaganda radio and on Fox News and so forth, Sean Hannity and all his clones all announced that, look at this terrible, you know, almost treason against America, that Obama is cutting the defense budget because, I guess, they're reallocating some resources within the expanded budget.
And that is apparently, for many people on the right in this country, to have any cuts from half a trillion dollars a year is to put all of our lives in jeopardy.
Well, they're doing no favor.
They think they're helping America or defend America.
They are bankrupting America.
And they're doing no favor for this country, people who talk like that, as if more weapons automatically means more spending means you've got better weaponry.
It's not the case.
And another side point of that is Republicans voted against saving General Motors.
They want to see it go through bankruptcy, and we don't know what will come out of a bankruptcy case.
And yet they want to support the F-22 and build a hundred more of those.
It's preposterous.
I don't think this is the way to win the election either, but that shows the power.
But, Scott, I think the point in the article I tried to make is areas where left and right could cooperate on trying to bring this under control a bit.
As far as the waste and spending, there's many sources to find that if you look on the Internet.
Military, industrial, of course, complex.
But what I tried to write in the article was ten ways that the left and right might work together to try to bring some semblance of control over the waste and corruption of the military budget today.
Well, number one on the list here is something that I'm sure above 90 percent in opinion polls say that they believe in and support, and that is the Bill of Rights and the threat to our domestic liberty here at home.
Whether you're a conservative or a liberal, you've got to keep those first ten amendments.
And those very things really come under threat when we're involved in foreign wars.
Unending wars.
I mean, if we want prosperity, democracy, and freedom, they are incompatible with unending war and empire.
I say that.
And there's a sort of image that it's nice to have an empire.
If you remember the Hollywood movies, the Romans were always having parades and parties.
Well, it was actually miserable for most people.
And the citizenry is oppressed by taxes, and that's coming, war taxes, taxes going up.
The misery of the common people in these periods of empire, it does not help most people.
And you go back to the British Empire, others like to model that.
In the 19th century, life was miserable for most people in England.
And one reason they could have the empire was popular was run by people who left England because they couldn't make a decent living inside England.
And the appeal was to run, go to very difficult places around the world.
In other words, empire and prosperity are not compatible.
In fact, your famous professor, Carol Quigley, who you studied under at Georgetown University, had a whole kind of theory of classifying the different stages in the cycles of the rise and fall of civilizations.
And in his model, world empire is the last stage before you kill yourself.
This is how civilizations die.
You get eventually destroyed because of empire.
The other side of empire is the tremendous corruption in the capital cities that Rome had.
And you see that already.
Part of the military-industrial complex, of course, is the money that's paid out to these companies, and then they send it back here to subsidize think tanks and various columnists and intellectuals to go for more and more and more rah-rah spending on these kinds of things.
And it's a circle.
Yeah, well, you know, Richard Cummings, in a great article he wrote called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he said, you know, people often call it the revolving door.
He likes to call it the iron triangle.
And I think this is something that's becoming, I hope, more and more apparent to average Americans, that the name of the game simply is having your company sell things to the government, whether you're a banker or whether you make arms or whatever it is.
If you can do business with the government, then you can make enough money to bribe enough congressmen to guarantee your continued business with the government.
And it's at the expense of the rest of us.
It's going on right in front of our eyes right now.
Let me add, for example, I mentioned in the article there's a book by Eugene Jarecki called The American Way of War, and he was a producer of a film which came out with a similar name now, I'm forgetting.
Why We Fight.
Why We Fight, yeah, that got really around, and he's written this book.
And what he points out, how the system works, there are two things called political engineering and front loading.
Political engineering is putting plants in all these different states, like I mentioned, the F-22 in 44 states.
And that's in the key congressional districts.
And the front loading meant that defense contractors over-promise results, underestimate costs, and profit from continuous costly modifications.
And he points out also what they do now is they start producing these weapons before they've been completely tested.
So particularly in the anti-missile field, one of the things they're producing this stuff, we don't really know if it works because President Bush, one of the first things he did was to make secret the test results of the anti-missile system before you knew if the test failed.
By making it secret, it covers up vast amounts of potential failures, if not corruption.
And we don't know if these things work.
And so they start producing them.
It's common, the F-22, the F-35 now.
They like to start producing them, and then they've got a constituency whether or not the thing has been properly tested.
So there's a whole, I recommend the book, of course, The American Way of War, it's called.
It gives some idea of what, it's not defending America, it's a vast system of corruption.
Well, and as you mentioned, this is in the papers this week, there's the Christian Science Monitor.
You can't kill the F-22 Georgians tell Gates.
And these are people who, I guess, haven't read their Harry Haslett or whatever.
They don't understand the difference between the seen and the unseen.
And it doesn't occur to them that the money that pays them to make these weapons is money that's taken from other uses.
And all they're seeing is that they're going to lose their jobs.
And the rest of America ought to continue the F-22 project, if for no other reason than to keep Georgians employed on their assembly line.
Why don't they work on building things that help our society here at home?
That kind of money, and you're talking tens of billions of dollars, can rebuild our bridges.
The waste we have, it can provide education, decent education for people.
There's a vast infrastructure here to spend money on if you're just spending it to spend.
But, you know, in fact, that's part of Eisenhower's speech, too, is where he compares the military budget to how many schools could be built and how many different public service type things.
But what we have in Washington is here you had Obama win his primaries basically on an anti-war position.
And the first thing when he gets to Washington is he's thoroughly reinforcing the war party agenda.
And now we have an unending war in Afghanistan, which is with the same arguments as we went into Iraq.
It's impossible in a tribal society.
I wrote also on anti-war in my other articles about tribes, veils, and democracy that you can't.
And another article about American guerrilla wars is you can't win a guerrilla war like that.
We don't.
And spending the money we spend, they take water.
They fly water in for the soldiers to drink.
It's being flown in.
I mean, you can't believe the expense.
And now we don't have even proper – we go to war without having secure lines of supply.
You know, they're being attacked.
Well, you know, it's interesting how on the right they're having all these tea parties and all these kinds of things.
It seems like conservatives out of power have kind of attempted at least to reclaim their – Listening to them, I thought Republicans, that's where they belong, defending the Constitution, trying to limit expending.
Well, I wonder whether you think the lessons of the empire here are going to remain completely lost on these people.
You know, the reason we – one of the main reasons we had this giant bubble that's now popped is because Bush needed the Fed to make money easy so he could have wars for free, so he could borrow all the money and cut taxes at the same time that he was expanding two giant wars.
They want support.
They want public support, and that's why it's called a warfare-welfare state.
They go together.
And that was the case, of course, part of it very much.
That's actually part of your essay, too, is explain the left and the right together who understand need to explain to southern Republicans that they should not despise or fear the outside world.
And it's funny the way you put that, but that really – that case really needs to be made, right, that other people are humans, too, and that really America is not beset by enemies on all sides.
We're doing okay, to tell you the truth.
Of course.
I mean, a tremendous pride, if you will, you know, in a biblical sense.
But there's a couple other points.
I think you have to think that war for Americans – a foreign war means sitting in front of a TV and watching pretty airplanes on carriers and missiles shooting in the air and macho tanks rushing through the desert with dust.
That's what war is, and you have a beer and a coffee, and there's no comprehension, and rarely is shown the misery and the killing and the consequences.
And I'm probably – well, I am different, but I was a student in Germany when I was 18 after the Second World War, and I saw East Berlin flat as far as the eye could see, a giant city just flat.
And you just don't see – for Americans, war is you win and then you go home, like a football game.
And there's very little showing that – of course, they never show a dead American, and they don't show much of the foreigners, the incredible death and destruction, and making ourselves hated in so much of the world.
But in any case, the point of the article, in fact, is where left and right can work together.
And there's a point for the left.
The left doesn't like to even admit that many people on the right, particularly, of course, libertarians, but many, many Republicans, have opposed these wars from the beginning.
And the left sort of likes to pretend it's their issue, so to speak.
But the left, to be effective, the left needs to promote and use the arguments of credentialed conservatives.
Republicans – I was in the Young Republicans when I was 18 years old during the Korean War.
I mean, it's of credentialed Republicans give the left cover.
Otherwise, the left is condemned as, oh, they hate America, or they're trying – they were Sean Hannity.
They hate America, they're trying to disarm us, they'll leave us in ruins and stuff like that.
The left needs to use the conservatives who – and I name many in the article – who have a strong track record and support the kind of arguments that we're talking about.
Yeah, and that's actually something that I think the left-wing organized anti-war movement, like the Answer Coalition of the Communist Party and people like that, can really be faulted for, because they will hold these giant rallies and disallow and just do everything to ignore requests of libertarians and conservatives to pitch in.
And you would think that it's just so obvious to say, look, even these conservatives say we're right.
But they would rather not do that.
They would rather pretend that they're the only ones who are right.
Well, I mean, what's the group you just mentioned?
Answer.
Answer.
They ran the anti-war demonstrations in Washington.
I went to several at the time of the war with Serbia and then the early stages of the Iraq War.
And they are very far left.
And on the other hand, they're the only ones who do it, you know, who organize it.
But they did have Tom Fleming of Chronicle speak of one of them, and I heard him.
Oh, yeah?
Oh, that's something.
But what you say is, of course, true.
And you need some coalition of the more moderate forces on both sides.
But the military-industrial thing is so powerful.
However, the time is on our side, if you will, because America is being bankrupted by this.
And we've come out probably with vast deficits.
We'll be able to come out of this recession.
But in the longer run, you have, you know, the great historian Niall Ferguson saying that the cost of social benefits, the budget deficits, all the things that's coming in America are going to curtail the empire anyway.
We're not going to have the money for these kinds of ventures.
Yeah, you know, I wonder about that.
It sort of seems like the guys that run the imperial court in Washington, D.C. would rather devour every last bit of resources in this country before they give up the empire overseas.
I mean, they'll try.
But I don't think the voters in the end, even though the Democrats now have gone all over for the empire, I don't think voters in the end are going – well, I shouldn't say voters may be against it.
The point I make in the article is that gerrymandering, in limiting the power of the war party in the military industrial congress complex, you have to focus also in gerrymandering where the congressional districts are made so secure by detailing the geographic bounds of the district in crazy ways.
They are so secure that 98 percent of them get reelected.
I mean, that's like a communist – the old communist election.
Yeah, I mean, if there's really any one symptom – And that form of corruption is a tremendous boon for the military industrial war party.
And that's why the government is not more responsive to the voters.
Yeah, I don't think that there's probably any one issue you could point to and more easily say that it indicates how broken our system is besides the gerrymandering.
I mean, you might remember the scandal that took place in Texas a few years back where Rick Perry and Karl Rove combined to figure out a way to force redistricting through, and the Democrats ended up fleeing to New Mexico to deny the Republicans a quorum.
And they went ahead and got away with that anyway, and it was just absolute travesty.
And it's Republicans and Democrats, too, as you say, all of them just working together to make sure that all the incumbents get reelected.
They don't care which party.
They want to see themselves protected, and they're willing to let the other side be protected as long as they can, it seems like.
And then that feeds the complex.
And these are things that I think will be corrected in time.
The American system has an incredible, unlike most of the world, we do have a way of self-correcting these errors, and I think eventually there'll be more focus on it.
But, well, already we have a taste of it with this economic crash.
A big part of this is because of the war.
And the people vote.
You know, Obama won basically on these issues, but once he got in power, he's caved on the empire, if you will.
But, you know, I have strong faith in the longer run this country will get its act together.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of reason to think so, too.
Again, the left and the right each are split in half between the good and the bad on most of these issues.
And so that still leaves some giant percentage of the American people who basically favor peace and liberty.
The great majority favor free markets and don't want to invade these foreign countries, et cetera.
But it's, of course, the right is in the hands of these, if you're coming back to the southerner, I know you're in Texas, but this so-called base in the southeastern states, which is very jingoistic.
And the whole strategy of eliminating Republicans in the northeastern and northwest, right in the two coasts, you hardly have Republicans anymore.
That was a strategy during the Bush years.
Yeah, a real self-defeating one for them, I think.
Stay with the base and so on.
But in any case, there are many ways the right and left can work together, and I try to address that, of course, on the article.
Well, you know, it seems like the conservative movement is really split, but without any real intellectual leadership.
I mean, the highest officeholder is Mitch McConnell, who inspires no loyalty or excitement whatsoever.
And so it seems like you have kind of the Pentecostal faction, a faction led by Sarah Palin, and you have the kind of big business, you know, maybe Mitt Romney types.
And then you have the supposed centrists who are actually the most violent, like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.
And it seems like the Ron Paul faction are the only ones who have any real, you know, principle or drive or organizing power.
But the rest of the conservative party hates them because they're anti-war.
And vast appeal to the younger people.
Yeah.
I'm told that by professors.
The Ron Paul had tremendous appeal, so others will come along like Ron Paul.
Do you think that the Paul faction really will emerge as one of the more dominant factions inside the Republican Party?
Is there any chance of that?
Oh, I think so, yeah.
But he himself is getting on in years.
You're talking four years from now.
But people come up, you know, among the governors.
They'll be leadership.
The main thing is getting these ideas out and having debate about it.
And I think that so-called base of the party has been discredited thoroughly in the last election.
Although they dominate Fox News and whatnot, I don't see that in the longer run.
But, I mean, I may be optimistic because David Frum has argued that the Democrats, it took them 20 years before they could get their act together.
Because they just kept the old theory, the Rush Limbaugh theory, I guess, is shout louder.
Shout our message louder when it's been repudiated.
But the Republicans today sound pretty good that they're concerned about the waste in the government.
And they're concerned about preserving the Constitution and our freedoms.
I mean, those are the old Republicans we used to know before Bush.
Well, and I think some credit ought to be given to people on the left because we're the right wing by, I think, much bigger majorities.
Completely flip-flopped for Dick Cheney and George Bush in power and the bogus terror war and the torture regime and the rest of it.
I think a lot of the liberals, and this may be simply because of the changes even in technology just in the last eight years.
It seems like there's a lot of intellectual leadership on the left by people like Glenn Greenwald who are saying, Hey, listen, if state secrets and indefinite detentions and wiretapping and all these things were wrong when George Bush did them, they're still wrong now.
It sounds like most of them, or at least fewer of them, have been willing to flip-flop just because it's Obama doing the wrong thing.
Even Keith Olbermann, who's probably the biggest suck-up in all of media to the Obama administration, really denounced them for the state secret stuff that they did.
Has he?
Good.
Well, I mean, the left is principled.
Much of it, it was.
I mean, divided, the same on the right.
I think we're principled.
But the main point is left and right, the divisions are not at all what they used to be.
And today the difference is people who favor limited government and free markets and so on.
And they're on both sides.
So the left today is not on the economic issues like it used to be before Reagan.
You're not quite that bad anyway.
No.
But yeah, I mean, you're right.
There is certainly a lot of room for real alliances on the issues that matter most.
And those are peace and freedom, rolling back the empire, reinstating our Bill of Rights as the rule of law.
How could anybody think anything's more important than those things?
And I think you're absolutely right.
That's a basis for a great coalition.
Getting that message across to most Americans, I think it can be done.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, the article is Left and Right Against the Military-Industrial Complex.
You can find it at original.antiwar.com slash utli.
And it was also published all over the place, too, Market Watch and a bunch of other great sites and probably in newspapers, too.
So keep a lookout for that.
Ten steps, ten ways that the right and the left can work together on opposing world empire.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, John.
Of course, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's John Basil Utley, associate publisher of the American Conservative, former Knight Ridder newspaper correspondent and editor of the Times of the Americas.
He is a writer and advisor for antiwar.com, and he edits the blog, The Military-Industrial Congressional Complex.