07/30/08 – John Judis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to anti-war radio chaos, 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest is John B. Judas.
He's a senior editor at the New Republic, visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He's the author of The Paradox of American Democracy and Grand Illusion, Critics and Champions of the American Century.
And he's also the author of a couple of very interesting articles about John McCain, including his most recent for the New Republic, Back to the USSR.
Welcome to the show, John.
Hi.
It's good to have you here.
Very interesting.
I'm familiar with your name from quite a few years ago, this essay for Foreign Affairs, From Trotskyism to Anachronism.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know all about that.
I think that was the first article that linked the neoconservatives to the history of Trotskyism.
Well, now, this is actually something that has been a matter of contention between myself and a leftist friend of mine, just how much Trotskyism has anything to do with neoconservatism.
She says, no, they're just ex-liberals.
And I say, well, I think that the Trotskyism actually is important in the history of the neoconservative movement.
So you want me to settle this argument, is that it?
Well, sure.
You know, in a couple of seconds here, before we get to the John McCain part of the interview.
Sure.
I wrote about this a little in a book called The Folly of Empires, which came out a few years ago.
You have to see it as a generational thing.
The first generation of neoconservatives were, for the most part, ex-radicals.
And what they were doing was that they were rejecting a kind of radicalism in becoming neoconservatives.
If you think about the late 1970s, their principal target at that point was Jimmy Carter's human rights policy, which they saw as a kind of ethical universalism.
And instead, they wanted to focus on fighting communism, rolling back the Soviet empire.
And as far as creating democracy in places like Argentina or Chile, that could wait until after the primary task was done.
So they were not the revolutionaries in any sense.
But the next generation, which comes really in the 1990s, and a lot of them are the children of the first generation, like Bill Kristol and Irving Kristol and John Podorec and Norman Podorec, like you find in many kinds of things in life, harken back to the grandparents, in a sense, or to the early beliefs of their parents, and are much more revolutionaries in their outlook.
They're revolutionaries on the right, and they see a kind of democratic, free market revolution taking place in the world, led by the United States.
That is a kind of Trotskyism.
It's a capitalist, not a socialist Trotskyism.
So you do sort of come full circle.
And with the weakly standard people in the mid-90s, you start to get a right-wing Trotskyism.
That would be my answer.
Well, when we hear a little bit of this, I'm thinking of George Bush's second inaugural speech.
I don't know exactly who wrote it, but the line about how we can't have capitalism and democracy here unless there's capitalism and democracy everywhere else in the world, that sort of sounds like an echo of Trotskyist doctrine, right?
Sure does.
His speechwriting shop, I mean, David Frum was his first speechwriter, and I don't know who was doing that one, probably Ed Gerson, but all that stuff went through the different people in Cheney's house over there.
So yes, that very much reflects the neoconservative outlook of the world.
Okay, so now we'll tie this back into the John McCain subject, but I want to start talking about John McCain in the same place that you do in your recent article for the New Republic.
He was actually a pretty reasonable guy in the 1980s, opposed, sounded almost like Ron Paul opposing Ronald Reagan's intervention in Lebanon and praising him for getting the troops out when he finally did.
And even in the 1990s, in the early part of the 1990s, he opposed, at least at first, some of Bill Clinton's interventions overseas, but then something happened to this guy.
Is it just as simple as he made friends with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard crew?
I'm not sure what went on.
You know, part of it was that he was chastened by the experience of the Vietnam War, and a lot of the people who came out of that, and particularly people in the military leadership of the country, felt that before we engaged in another intervention, we would have to go through a whole bunch of steps, including large-scale popular support, certainty that we could win, and that became known as the Powell Doctrine.
And that was very much what McCain believed in the 1980s, and that's what led him to urge the Reagan administration to pull the troops out of Lebanon in 1983, and that was a fairly controversial position for a Republican to take at the time.
And he was even skeptical at the beginning about going into Kuwait to dislodge Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War, though by the end he supported the first Bush administration in doing that.
And then, as you say, he was initially skeptical about the Clinton administration's intervention in Bosnia.
I think a few things happened.
One thing that happened was that the success of the Gulf War really made believers of a lot of people, McCain among them, but also, again, that generation of neoconservatives that American military power really could change things in the world.
It also came on the heels of Panama, also, which was seen as a military success.
So I think that during that period in the 90s, McCain lost some of his skepticism about military intervention, and it kind of turned on its head.
Instead of being reluctant to intervene, now he was eager to intervene, but insisting that we do so with our full complement of forces.
So when you get to Kosovo, he's very critical of the Clinton people for not threatening to send in ground troops.
He wanted not just the Air Force, but he wanted us to threaten them and even, if necessary, use ground troops in the Balkans.
So same thing with Saddam Hussein.
He goes from being skeptical about trying to change things to insisting that we do so and we do so with our full complement of forces.
So he kind of flips, he kind of embraces the other side of the POW doctrine, which is do it and do it fully.
And now, you know, it's interesting, just a couple of years after you pronounced the neoconservative movement an anachronism and basically pointless in the post-Cold War world and so forth, they found their new, whatever, I forgot the French word, raison d'etre, something or other.
Raison d'etre.
Yeah, yeah.
Reason for being.
Yes, exactly.
And that is regime change in Iraq.
And they brought him right in to sign him up for that program.
He's the guy that sponsored and pushed through the Iraq Liberation Act, at least in the Senate version in 1998.
Yeah, he was one of the main people.
So was Lieberman and so was, oddly, Trent Lott, who later takes a different position.
I think the Trent Lott's advisor was, at the time, was Randy Schoenman, who shows up later as McCain's foreign policy spokesman.
The thing that happens with McCain and the neoconservatives is that McCain gets won over to intervention in the Balkans.
And he does so partly, I think Bob Dole is a big influence at the time.
And there's a split in the Republican Party.
And a lot of the congressional Republicans oppose intervention, but one group favors it, and that's the neoconservatives around the Weekly Standard.
And it's about that time in 1995, 1996, and especially around Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, that McCain becomes close to the Weekly Standard crowd.
And that's particularly Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan, and the, what is it, PNAC, the Project for the New American Century.
It's not so much the Richard Perls and that other group of neoconservatives, but it's more the Weekly Standard people.
And they become his foreign policy team when he runs for president in 1999.
I mean, what I found that surprised me is even after he sponsors the Iraq Liberation Act, which, you know, at the time, it got almost unanimous support in the Senate.
Bob Kerry from Nebraska was one of the main sponsors and probably did more to get it passed than McCain did.
The neoconservatives tucked these provisions into it that they could later refer to as justifications for going to war.
But that was not really the way it was seen.
It was seen more as a measure to support the exiles and various attempts to overthrow Saddam without sending the troops in.
So even at that point, 1998, McCain is not fully committed to a neoconservative program.
And if you look at his statements at the time, he still refers to people like Jim Baker, the former Secretary of State for George H.W. Bush, fondly as somebody that is a model for him.
Or, of course, General Scowcroft, another person who is much more of a realist.
But 1999, when he starts running and he has to articulate a foreign policy, that's really when he becomes the main spokesman in the Senate and in the national arena for a neoconservative foreign policy.
Well, and that must reveal something about him, even before he's been completely won over by their arguments that the Weekly Standard crew preferred him to George W. Bush by so much.
Yes, most of them did.
Fred Barnes, as I remember, was a George Bush supporter.
Yes, they did.
But they did for those reasons.
And again, his whole foreign policy team pretty much came out of the kind of network of neoconservatives that Bill Kristol had built up.
Now, I think it was in your article that you wrote a couple of years ago, Neil McCain, you talked about how, I think particularly Kristol, would continually praise McCain by comparing him to Theodore Roosevelt, and that that seemed to have quite an impact on him.
One of McCain's early heroes was Theodore Roosevelt when he was a kid.
I mean, he grew up and his father loved Theodore Roosevelt.
His father was an admiral, his grandfather was an admiral, and his father loved Theodore Roosevelt.
So it's not important to note that he was also a big fan of British imperialism.
So McCain grew up with this kind of favorable attitude towards a militant American, you know, you could say neo-imperialism.
And his hero was Theodore Roosevelt.
And David Brooks at the time, now a New York Times columnist, was working for the Standard.
And he and Kristol and Kagan wrote several pieces comparing McCain to Theodore Roosevelt and linking McCain's politics to a kind of national greatness, conservatism that was open to using the state, for instance, for conservation, and if necessary, to correct the flaws of the free market.
In 2000, I followed McCain around, and he was, to all intents and purposes, a kind of, you know, moderate Democrat in many of his views.
You know, I'm not talking about a boy, he would never talk about that abortion and all that stuff.
I still don't think he, you know, gives a damn about the social issues.
But at that point, even on economic stuff, he was very much a centrist.
And I think the Theodore Roosevelt comparison was apt, both in terms of the good side of Roosevelt's domestic outlook and the bad side of his foreign policy.
The progressive Republican imperialist.
Yeah, exactly.
It seemed to me that that's where McCain was at in 2000.
And given that nobody took too seriously that we would actually do anything, you know, in the world, this was before September 11th, it seemed like, well, you know, most people, including me, paid more attention at the time to his domestic positions than to his foreign policy position.
Campaign finance reform was also, that was a major part of his presidential run in 2000.
So it was really a different McCain than the one that comes after September 11th.
And now, on the Iraq War, after September 11th, he really played a major role in selling this to the American people, telling the American people it would be, quote, easy.
And I kind of like to pick on the guy, I don't know whether this is really hyperbole or not, I sort of don't think it is, but I'd like to know your opinion.
It seems to me that he was basically the asset of the Iranian spy, Ahmed Chalabi, an unwitting asset.
But that this guy who, Ahmed Chalabi, whose headquarters was in Tehran, brought all his defectors in to lie to the American people.
And it was John McCain that was paying all his bills and helping funnel all this bogus intelligence to the American people to justify this war that has, in fact, empowered Iran more than anyone else in the region.
Well, you're going way too far.
I mean, McCain wasn't paying all his bills, except in a figurative sense in which, you were paying his bills.
And there were probably other people in the Senate who were more enthusiastic, but there's no question that he supported Chalabi, and he supported the neoconservative fantasy about what would happen in Iraq, and that, you know, among Republicans, I can't think of anybody who was more important as a war supporter than McCain.
You know, and we shouldn't forget that, because that was his single greatest moment of bad judgment, and he could repeat it if he were president.
Well, and he had the foreign policy gravitas or whatever at the time where, if he had been cautious and opposed it, or even just said, well, now wait a minute, let's be real careful here, let's insist on, I don't know, a real debate in the Congress and a declaration of war, he could have.
If he had taken the decision, let's say, of Lugar, that would be the, I think that would be the comparison.
Right, right.
I mean, he could have really made a difference.
If he had said, now hold on a second, we all know how patriotic and Republican I am, but I think we need to, you know, take this seriously, etc., etc., if he had been a voice caution, it would have worked.
Yeah, but he was going in the opposite direction.
Yeah.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time here, but we've got to talk about Russia here.
You, in this new article, Back to the USSR and the New Republic, you say that McCain tends to personalize his foreign policy, that this seems to be his real flaw.
He looks at Russia and he sees KGB in the eyes of Vladimir Putin instead of seeing the biggest country in the world that's armed to the teeth with hydrogen bombs and that has to be dealt with in a calm and reasonable fashion.
I use that as an example, I could just as well have done Iran.
What concerns me now about McCain is that you have a combustible combination of neoconservatism in terms of a kind of global ambition to transform the world and a belief that it can be done.
And at the same time, you have a guy who's known for his pugnacity and for his willingness to take offense and to fight things out.
And he's going to send in the troops.
So I think that's a very dangerous combination.
And if I had to explain McCain's views on Iran, for instance, or his views on Russia, I don't think I could do so without looking at his tendency to get completely hung up with particular leaders, to identify the country with those leaders, and to take offense at the provocative statement that those leaders make and to blow them entirely out of proportion.
And I think that that's a very bad practice for an American statesman and it could lead us into a lot of trouble if McCain were president.
Well now, people make a lot about his temper.
They say that, you know, he'll just fly off the handle.
I guess there's one rumor that he punched a congressman 20 years ago or something, this kind of thing.
Is that really a big deal?
I heard a lot of those stories and I don't give a damn about them in terms of the Senate or in terms of domestic policy.
What worries me is that there seems to be traces of that same kind of behavior and pugnacity in his view of the world.
That's exactly what worries me.
Not personal, interpersonal behavior, but policy, based on that same temperament.
That's right.
That's something, I think, to be concerned about.
One other thing that strikes me is to hear him talk about Al-Qaeda, never mind the fact that these guys used to be almost like us enough that they were our friends in fighting the Soviets and that kind of thing.
But he talks about Al-Qaeda now as though they are simply just this black void of pure nihilist evil that is the exact opposite of everything that is good, true, and beautiful in this world and about America and they must be annihilated at all costs.
And the idea that there are actual grievances that could possibly be addressed has never even occurred to him.
It almost sounds like he's fighting comic book Osama Bin Laden and not the actual war on terrorism here in the real world.
Well, for me, the main question with McCain and Al-Qaeda is whether he's exaggerating their importance and their importance to American foreign policy.
I don't see Osama Bin Laden as somebody we could deal with.
I don't see him, for instance, on a par with the Iranians, let's say, which is a country I think we should try to deal with.
I think that he may be set on a mission that is incompatible with the security of the United States.
But the question is how important is he and whether he has already been isolated to a great degree.
There's a debate about this among a lot of international security terrorism experts.
It's by no means agreed that what McCain says that it's the transcendent threat of our time.
I mean, a lot of people think that the terrorist threat as such has been completely decentralized and that Osama Bin Laden is no longer that much of a major player.
I can't tell you what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure that McCain is on the wrong track.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like, I mean, I'll concede that there are still some al-Qaeda terrorists who need to be, you know, abducted, put on trial or whatever somehow by police, CIA types.
But it's this endless war in the name of al-Qaeda that I think is...
It's justifying everything else in the name of that.
Right.
Yeah.
And gearing our whole foreign policy around that, I think that's ridiculous.
And there are, incidentally, neoconservatives like Bob Kagan, who also think it's ridiculous, too.
I mean, you have to see divisions among them, too.
Really?
Kagan thinks it's ridiculous.
Well, I mean, read his book, his latest book.
He gives very little space to al-Qaeda and that stuff.
Interesting.
Okay.
Now, I'm sorry.
I know our time is very short here.
I wanted to ask you one more question.
And, well, it sounds kind of silly, but I'll give you a hypothetical.
I want to know if you think that John McCain is smarter than George Bush.
And my hypothetical is the conflict in Nigeria, where you have villagers have oil being stolen out from...
Well, that's something I don't know anything about.
So I'm going to be...
That's why I picked it.
It's one that we don't all know very much about, but I'm saying so.
It's a McCain administration.
A crisis breaks out in Nigeria.
All the staffers come to explain the situation to John McCain.
This is what's going on.
This is who's on whose side.
Is he going to be any better than George Bush at being able to decide what to do with anything in a situation like that?
Oh, I don't know.
You know, Cheney was so important to Bush.
I think that Bush's foreign policy now, as Cheney has been somewhat eclipsed, has gotten a lot better than it was six months or certainly five years ago.
So it's hard for me to say.
And McCain seems to me to be less flexible in his views than he was five or six years ago.
And that worries me a lot.
But I think you'd have to look and see who his advisors are going to be and who's going to be the Secretary of State, you know, and reason it out from there.
Yeah.
Well, that's fair enough.
And I think really the flexibility and that kind of thing is really what's most important.
And that's really what worries me about McCain the most.
It sort of seems like whatever his first impression is, he's just going to go with that no matter what.
He's not very flexible.
He's not very willing to take in new information, too.
Yes.
I think that the new information, all that stuff, I think that's a thing to definitely to worry about.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, everybody.
That's John Judas.
He is a senior editor at the New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.
He's the author of The Paradox of American Democracy, Grand Illusions and the Folly of Empires.
Thank you very much for time today.
Sure.