All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest is John Mueller.
He holds the Woody Hayes chair of national security studies, the Mershon center, and is professor of political science at Ohio state university, where he teaches courses in international relations.
His most recent book is atomic obsession, nuclear alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda.
His latest piece is called why Al Qaeda may never die at the national interest.
That's national interest.org.
He's also the author of the great book overblown.
And if you go back to the archives, you can find my interview of him on that subject quite a few years back now.
Uh, welcome back to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
Thanks.
Uh, well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
And I think I'm probably the biggest fan of that book overblown.
And I've recommended it a whole lot of times to people.
Uh, and maybe we can get to, uh, some of that and it's sort of the same kind of topic here.
Uh, why Al Qaeda may never die.
Why is it that Al Qaeda may never die?
Because, you know, I remember reading, in fact, sorry, let me preface it this way.
I read an article by Robert Dreyfuss, a very capable reporter for the nation.
Uh, back, I don't know, must've been six or eight years ago called the bogus war on terrorism, where he talked about how the CIA with their laser pointers on the ground and the air force with their bombs from the sky had just obliterated the few hundred people in the world who could have been called Al Qaeda back in the fall of 2001.
And that, uh, they said, well, if you wanted to do a body count, you'd have to go out there with Q-tips.
Cause they just blasted them off of the face of the earth with their Daisy cutter bombs.
And there was just a few dozen guys that ever escaped to Afghanistan.
And, uh, Al Qaeda has been nothing but a shadow of itself as, as Obama claimed in his victory lap speech that he snuck into Afghanistan to give yesterday.
Uh, they've been a tiny, uh, disgraced former little piece of themselves this whole time anyway.
And yet they never seem to go away.
They never seem to stop justifying further American interventions.
Why is that?
Yeah, well, probably they keep lowering the bar.
Um, so if you get some nutcase in Baltimore who decides to, uh, on his own to try to blow something up, uh, for Islamic purposes, and then people say, see, they're still out there.
And so consequently of Al Qaeda and he may be sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
So if you constantly have, if, if your idea is that Al Qaeda is still going for, is still alive means that anybody who thinks he might have something to do with Al Qaeda does try to do something.
If that's the threat, it'll almost never go away.
So that's the basic argument there that just, uh, they keep lowering the bar or maybe raising it to bring a look at it, uh, well, actually lowering so that, uh, you have, uh, distant groups that have very, very little connection to Al Qaeda are considered part of Al Qaeda.
And you have all these guys linking things up.
This guy was in the same country at the same time as this guy.
So therefore, and he had something to do with Al Qaeda.
So therefore they're both on Al Qaeda, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
And that's just standard things are going on for 10 years.
Well, I mean, it used to sort of be that Al Qaeda meant any Arab in Afghanistan.
Cause otherwise what's he doing there?
He must be friends of Osama, right?
But they kind of define that way away many years back now, I guess.
Yeah, that's it.
They've had been, now have these franchises and so forth.
And there, you notice that there's one pretty vicious group in Nigeria, uh, that, uh, is sort of on the same wavelength and they may, but they would be there anyway.
I mean, and that's a Nigerian problem.
It's not really an international one at all.
We're just dealing with trying to purify, uh, uh, Nigeria for Islam.
It's a whole different thing.
Uh, but if they sort of link themselves or say something nice about Al Qaeda, then suddenly they're part of the big conspiracy too.
So even if Al Qaeda central is basically wiped out or effectively wiped out or minimized, nonetheless, you have this, uh, you know, you have these connections around it.
Uh, people can get exercised over.
And if you're, uh, you know, in the terrorism industry and it's important that you keep the threat high, uh, you're constantly, um, uh, you know, you're exercising, you exercise your imagination quite, uh, quite assiduously in this regard.
Yeah.
Well, the industry, that's a pretty broad group of interest too.
Maybe we can talk about that, uh, a little bit more, uh, here in a minute, but I wanted to say that I think it's just not fair that they can, the American government can fight on the same side, if not outright for, but pretty close to outright for, but certainly on the same side as Al Qaeda ish folk in Libya and Syria at the same time that they use Al Qaeda as the excuse for proposed further interventions into Nigeria, as Hillary Clinton has threatened, uh, further intervention into Somalia, where we created the Al Shabaab with our phony war against them, our proxy wars against them all this time, uh, et cetera, et cetera.
It seems like once they're outright fighting on the side of the Mujahideen warriors again, then we get to lap them off the stage and then they have to knock it off enough of this.
Yeah.
Well, it's just, it's just not, uh, it, it, it reminds me a lot of the cold war where you'd have somebody in some country.
And if they could, the, who was opposing the incumbent government, any government government was able to demonstrate to the United States that some of the rebels had some communist connections or something, uh, they could count on a whole lot of American interest and possibly aid and help.
Uh, so the same thing is basically going on now, except now you don't cry communist, you cry terrorists.
In fact, Assad even tried that in Syria.
You know, it didn't work very well, but at least he gave it a whirl, uh, which is that he's not really opposing the people of Syria, but he is opposing terrorists among the people in Syria.
Uh, so, yeah, I mean, even he was doing that and after nine 11, it turns out everybody's fighting terrorists.
Israel was fighting terrorists.
The Pakistanis are fighting terrorists.
The Chinese are fighting terrorists.
Uh, the, uh, Russians were fighting terrorists, uh, and the Indians were fighting terrorists.
I mean, because that was the way you got the attention from the United States.
The same thing, again, is what happened during the cold war.
And when a terrorist just means a Muslim with a gun, who's not part of a state army, but who's part of some other group.
Yeah.
And basically if anybody with a gun or a little tiny group that shoots something up someplace, uh, can be labeled with that.
If that's, is that, if that's what Al Qaeda is now, there's no way to basically cause that to the, uh, to, to completely evaporate.
So that's why I say basically, uh, maybe that Al Qaeda can never be thoroughly defeated because we have such low standards of what Al Qaeda is.
Now the key thing on this, so they also point out in that article, I also did a book last year, by the way, uh, called terror security and money with a risk analyst and engineer by the name of Mark Stewart.
Uh, and in that we tried to do use regular cost benefit analyses and to, to imply them to Homeland security measures.
And not surprisingly, not many Homeland security measures passed the cost benefit test.
But one of the things we want to look at is to begin with is what is your chance of being killed by a terrorist?
If you're an American, well, your chance of being killed by a terrorist, uh, and there's various ways of measuring it, but a perfectly reasonable one is your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States at present rates is about one in 3.5 million per year.
Your chance of being killed in an automobile accident is something like per year or something like one in 8,000 or being a victim of a homicide is one in 22,000.
So one in 3.5 million is pretty low chance.
And essentially that's the essential way to look at it.
You know, are we not so much, are we safer, but are we safe?
And if you really think that, uh, the threat that presents a one in 3.5 million, uh, chance of killing you each year is a major thing to have to worry about, uh, then, uh, you're welcome to your opinion.
Right.
Well, and that's where we get to the industry here.
And I guess first and foremost, you can count among that the media.
Um, it's in, it's in TV's interest to keep us all scared so that we'll buy dish soap.
Yeah.
But it also means that people are actually willing to pay, you know, turn on the TV or buy the newspaper when they do say that, and they don't seem to be willing to do so when you say, well, your chance of being killed is one in 3.5 million.
Right.
But, but, uh, you know, if it seems to be that, that, that should be in every story, it doesn't have to be in the first line or even the first paragraph, but it should be there somewhere.
And, you know, everybody's read a billion stories about terrorism.
And they're perfectly okay to, you know, it's a perfectly okay subject to cover.
It's an important issue that you want to think about and deal with.
Uh, but somewhere in there should be some sort of context.
Like how often does this happen?
How many people actually get killed?
What is the chance of a, you as an American or as a Frenchman or as a Zimbabwean for that matter, uh, being, uh, being harmed by terrorists.
And that should be part of the calculation.
And it, and it, that phrase is simply never there.
Uh, in, in all of the, since nine 11, the only time I've ever heard of a public official who actually said something like that was only once.
That was in 2007.
Mayor Bloomberg said, get a light.
Uh, your chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being killed by lightning, which is at least roughly correct.
Right.
And he knew because he had the NYPD infiltrating every group of more than two Muslims for a hundred miles in every direction.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I'll be right there.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with John Mueller from the Cato Institute and Ohio state university and the national interest nationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
Santa war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Mueller, senior fellow at Cato and professor of political science at Ohio state university.
He's the author of terrorist security and money, balancing the risks costs and benefits of Homeland security.
And so we're talking about how Al Qaeda will always live, at least in talking point form, uh, at least in excuse form, because, uh, anybody with a rifle anywhere who does anything, uh, can be called Al Qaeda, the media won't contradict them, won't explain why that isn't quite right, uh, that kind of thing.
And so on and on it goes and we really have had, and they haven't so far followed up on this as far as I know, but Hillary Clinton has threatened to escalate, uh, and to, you know, put American forces on the ground in some form in Nigeria in order to protect us all from Boko Haram, which is a bunch of bark eating crazies from the backwoods of nowhere and are obviously no threat to the United States at all.
But, you know, they have links to Al Qaeda because one guy knows a guy who knew a guy who once said this thing and whatever, and, uh, how they can keep getting away with it.
And now I want to say that I like to believe for their sake, that most people in DC are just a bunch of fools and they really do believe the ridiculous things that they say and, uh, and have them as reasons for the terrible things that they do.
But there's something very suspicious about this terror war from the very beginning, which is that they called it the terror war, the war on terror instead of the war on Al Qaeda.
And that was pretty obviously because they did not want to limit it to Al Qaeda, which they knew was just a couple of hundred guys.
And so they wanted to, and not even terrorism, but terror itself, the emotion must be eliminated from the planet.
And, and I guess anything that causes such emotions, uh, must be eliminated.
What a cost this belly and it's so overbroad and it's so manipulative, you know, uh, people really fell for that.
And they, we haven't found a way to make them back down from that and just have a war on Al Qaeda.
If there's, if I'm in, I was always here.
He's still in his mom's basement over there in Pakistan somewhere.
Then I guess the war on Al Qaeda lives on until somebody cuts his throat.
But otherwise we can call this whole thing off.
You know, if they would just use English to describe what it is that they're talking about instead of, you know, marketing speak that kind of thing.
Yeah, but you also have to keep in mind that it sells.
I mean, they, they do it because they get the right kind of response.
Uh, and it's not, it's not only the fact that they're persuasive, but the people are willing to be persuaded.
Uh, it, uh, the result is that, for example, in public opinion polls, if you ask people, are you afraid that you are a member of your family might be a victim of terrorism?
Uh, the percentage of people say they're worried about it.
Has not really changed very much since 2001, despite the fact that there have been no real attacks in the United States of any magnitude.
Uh, and despite the fact that, uh, the, uh, you know, there's been a huge cost being paid chasing phantoms in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So what is that number, by the way, if you're a politician, you have to pay attention to that.
Yeah.
But what is that number of people who are afraid, you know, ballpark?
Well, yeah, it's about 40% say they're very, very afraid, very worried or somewhat worried.
And the thing is that it hasn't changed.
I mean, if you, if your chance of being killed is one in 3.5 million per year, then 40% of the people saying they're very worried about that is really bizarre.
They don't know that number.
But also if you tell them that number, they may still be afraid.
Yeah.
Um, so it's a, so the, but the point is that when he, when he's done, the terrorism industry does does this or the media does it, or the politicians do it, or the people selling things to the government do it.
Uh, what they do is they get a favorable response.
So naturally they're going to keep doing it.
Well, it's really just the same as the thrill of going to the movies or something, being afraid, right?
Yeah.
Well, people aren't afraid of being crushed by an asteroid.
You know, they're not afraid of genetically modified food.
They don't seem to be very much afraid of global warming, which people have been trying to sell for a long time.
So it doesn't follow that you can just bring up a fear and then people start to get afraid.
They, they, there's something else has to happen.
Yeah.
Well, global warming takes too long to wash you away.
You know, it's gotta be something on, on fire that happens in a space of an hour or something.
Yeah.
But there's been 2 billion movies about asteroids hitting the world.
And there's a distinct possibility that it'll happen sometime in the next two or 3 billion years.
Uh, and there's books about it and it's captured, you know, the lore of the world and captures people's mind, uh, not the caps, the caps of your imagination and so forth.
And still people aren't, uh, don't aren't, aren't afraid of it.
It's funny how they pick and choose.
I remember learning how in the 1980s, um, there was a, uh, poll that had, they used to, I don't know if they still do this, but they used to have, what's your biggest concern, you know, public policy wise, your biggest concern or public issue in America, that kind of thing.
And they kind of left it open ended.
And people would say drugs was, uh, about like ranked 14th on the list.
And then they had a whole propaganda push about the Crips and the Bloods and young black men with machine guns fighting over turf.
And it's so scary.
And we have to double down on a drug war.
And then drugs became the number one issue in America, according to the people, if you call them and asked them.
And then, but once the propaganda died down, it went right back to 14th, the exact same rank that it held previously has the top concern.
That's probably where it is now, but the drug war continues, right.
But it was escalated during the time that they made it number one.
That's the point, you know, the lie served its purpose.
Yeah.
But it, uh, in that it's, it may have been the other way around too.
What happened is there are a couple of cases of overdoses by, you know, John Belushi or somebody or other who are very popular.
And suddenly that caught the people's imagination.
And so, uh, so the, they, that number did go very high up in politicians and jumped on it naturally and naturally for politicians at least.
And, uh, then it, it stayed at those, but, but even now, now that the people are not worried, if you ask the same question about terrorism, uh, terrorism doesn't show up very high.
What's the most important problem facing the country today?
That was really big naturally in 2001, but it's quite small.
Uh, now, when you, when you bring it up, because people are mainly of course worried about other things, particularly the economy.
Uh, but what happened was that, uh, uh, even though it's not, uh, it's not something that's it's the number one problem as far as people are concerned when you ask what's the number one problem, nonetheless, fear levels, which you think would go down.
And that happened have not gone down particularly since 9-11, since 2001.
All right.
Now in your book, Overblown, you talk about how the threats pretty much always overblown like this and all the wars going back in history, you know, the Japanese are about to invade and conquer North America.
If we don't stop them.
And, uh, and of course the Russians and that kind of thing.
But, you know, I bring up that book and, uh, your work there, uh, on the show from time to time in regards to the end of the cold war, the end of the Soviet union and your thesis, as you outline in Overblown, that it was the end of the containment policy that, uh, after the defeat in Vietnam, when America, we came down with that Vietnam syndrome and the people didn't really want to contain the Russians anymore.
Then they expanded their empire out and too far.
And that's what finally led to their collapse.
And I was wondering if you could maybe give us the very shortest version of that.
Yeah.
Well, you did a pretty good job of summarizing it.
The basic after 1975 containment lapsed and the Soviets then picked up a whole bunch of about eight or nine dependencies, um, mostly in Africa, but also, um, uh, Latin America and of course, Afghanistan.
And once he picked up these, these places, they almost all immediately went into economic and military downspins.
And suddenly they were sort of holding the bag there.
They said they didn't pay their, they, they kept all these countries look to the Soviet union for maternal sustenance.
And the Soviets found that they would have been better off if they had been contained because their budget for the amount of money they were spending on overseas places like this, uh, increased by something like a factor of five or seven.
Uh, and that was one of the reasons they were so strained during the 1980s cause they're, they're doing their internationalist duty as they put it, uh, sort of trying to prop up all these basket case countries.
That's funny.
And you know, that was the whole, uh, well, not the whole, that was part of the Trotsky versus Stalin thing, right?
Was Stalin wanting to have socialism in one country and let the rest of the world bend for itself to protect Russia from just that very thing, the loss of all of their buffer zone states.
Yeah, by and large.
Um, and so, I mean, uh, containment was the idea that you hold a Soviet union where it is and eventually it'll, you know, fall apart internally.
Instead, what happened was that by letting containment lapse, uh, the Soviet union then did somewhat expand.
They were pretty careful about it more, more like stolen than like Trotsky.
Uh, but as they did it, nonetheless, the burden became intense.
Uh, and they were always, and they're also having problems with their close colonies, i.e. um, um, uh, Poland, uh, which were also becoming basket cases economically and the Soviet union supporting them.
So that was really a major contributor to the, the malaise and the desperation that they found toward the end of the 1980s and which Gorbachev then responded to.
In fact, one of his big things, of course, is to get out of Afghanistan, uh, which he called, uh, you know, uh, uh, a bleeding sore.
Um, and, uh, you know, which he recognized it distinctly that they'd met much overextended.
They would have been better off if they'd been contained.
In other words, if they'd never been able to get into Afghanistan.
Well, you know, it's funny cause they call the, let's the, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, let's give them their own Vietnam, or at least Brzezinski claims that after the fact that that's what he thought at the time and everything.
And so if you look at Putin's cooperation with America after September 11th, you can look at it like, well, he was just trying to be friends with the United States and say, Hey, use some of our old bases and, and, and supply routes if you want.
Or you can look at it like he was a dastardly KGB agent encouraging us to give us our own Vietnam again in Afghanistan again, uh, in order to bleed us dry and get a little payback either way it works.
Yeah.
Well, he's, uh, it's certainly been a disaster.
It's been a Vietnam.
It was the first to Vietnam, of course, for the Soviets and now to Vietnam for the United States.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, John.
It's been great.
Great.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks very much.
Everybody that's John Mueller, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and professor of political science at Ohio state university.
He wrote terror security and money with Mark Stewart, and he wrote the book overblown, which I urge you to read.
You can find his latest piece.
Why Al Qaeda may never die at the national interest, national interest.org.
