01/17/09 – Joshua Frank – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Alright everybody, welcome to the new show.
Sort of like the old show, it's Antiwar Radio.
And thanks to everybody who's emailed me and contacted me and Facebook-poked me and whatever, asking me what the hell's taking so long.
As many of you know, I moved out here to California at the beginning of the year.
It's taken me a little while to get all my technical difficulties straightened out.
But this will be the first interview of the new show.
And I'm very happy to say that we're still going to be on Chaos Radio here.
But rather than doing a Chaos Radio show with the interview archives going up on Antiwar.com, it's going to be Antiwar.com interviews that'll be played on Chaos Radio.
A subtle difference, at least for now.
But there are other things that are at least warming up, if not actually cooking up.
So we'll be working on that and hopefully having further announcements for you guys in the future about what's going to happen with Antiwar Radio from here.
But for now, I'm trying to get back in the game here.
And I'm happy to introduce my first guest on the show for 2009.
It's Joshua Frank from Antiwar.com, Counterpunch and Dissident Voice.
He's also the co-author with Jeffrey Sinclair of Red State Rebels.
Welcome to the first new Antiwar Radio 2009 Los Angeles edition.
Joshua, it's nice to meet you finally in person here.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, it's so good to be here.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm privileged.
Well, I really appreciate having you on.
And, you know, we've talked a few times over the years about various matters, but I think there's a common ground between us that we both recognize.
Not just do we agree on our list of priorities of government policies that need to be immediately stopped and reversed, but we also, I think, both really come pretty close to eye to eye, even though we do come from different perspectives, on the need for real realignment around those top priorities and a need to kind of, you know, take everybody's pet issue and let's put those aside for a little while and see if we really can combine to lead coalitions of the best of the left and the right and appeal to the best of the left and the right.
And so I think we agree on the issues, which obviously we can talk about, but I'd really like to get you to address that realignment and what you see as the possible future of the realignment that we've actually had some success in forging over the Bush administration.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think the first thing we need to do is start to shed those labels, right, of the right and the left, because we think of the right and the left as being something that is a caricature of Washington politics, which it's not.
I mean, I think a lot of the ideas that you and I might agree on and the sort of belief sets that we have coming into talking even tonight are very similar.
But what separates us is this sort of ideology that you're a libertarian, I'm a leftist.
And that's not really an accurate portrayal of our agreements, because we probably agree on 95 percent of the stuff we will be talking about tonight.
Well, and, you know, I like to think that, well, all the issues that contradict my point, notwithstanding that ultimately, you know, liberalism is about liberty at its core and, you know, the belief in the availability of liberty, you know, that it ought to be extended to people who've got the least chance ought to have some to kind of, you know, idea.
But primarily it's about, you know, freedom itself.
And conservatives, the best ones, seek basically to conserve the original American Revolution, which was based on that conception of liberty and conserve the Bill of Rights and constitutional forms, separations of powers and so forth.
And, you know, obviously there's a lot of warmongering and pro-torturism and so forth on the right.
But there's also a lot of, well, you know, Ron Paul leaning, leave the world alone because it's the right thing to do kind of feeling too, you know.
Well, I mean, it's funny when I talk to people that might not be familiar with my politics or of the kind of things that we would agree on.
They are quick to say that I'm a conservative because really the issues and the beliefs that I have are very, very conservative, whether it's on the environment or it's even on foreign policy.
We don't want our tax dollars going to fund overseas interventions that are based on lies and fabrications.
And radical ideologies.
And radical ideologies.
Absolutely.
And Joshua Frank, hardcore right-winger.
No, I mean, on these issues, absolutely I am.
And I think that's a very important distinction.
Well, see, this is why I like all these labels is because I like to bring them all out here so that we can kind of beat the crap out of them and kind of show, you know, where they fall short of holding any real definition.
Or it could be Scott Horton, radical leftist on this issue.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm a complete peacemaker when it comes to Empire.
No doubt about that.
Although I was never a right-winger, never have been.
That's kind of my problem is I can, I don't never fit in any of these categories to break out of them.
But a really, a really true conservative, not even on foreign policy, but on domestic policy, doesn't want the government spying on them, doesn't want them wiretapping their phones, doesn't want them to intrude on their daily lives, doesn't want them to tell them what to do and feel like they're invading their privacy.
And that can be a right-wing thing.
That can be a left-wing thing.
But I really think that's just sort of a human liberty.
Well, it's going to be really strange, isn't it?
As we go into these Obama years, beginning just early next week here, when all the right-wingers pretend, or at least I shouldn't say pretend, that's kind of prejudgmental or whatever.
But all of a sudden, they're going to find themselves in the role of the opposition.
And frankly, it's going to be pretty hard for me to take seriously from a bunch of torture mongers who've been telling me render under Caesar.
Which is Caesar's for the last eight years, you know?
Well, I think at the core, though, there are going to be a lot of conservatives and a lot of Republicans that aren't all that upset with the policies that are going to come out of the Obama administration.
And I think that's a reality that the left and the people that are going to be cheerleading on Inauguration Day don't realize.
I mean, this is a guy that supports putting more troops in Afghanistan.
This is a guy that supported wiretapping.
This is a guy that supported someone that defends liberties on the left or the right.
So I think really, I mean, the people that know what's going on on the right are not going to be that upset by Obama's inauguration.
On some levels, they will definitely because they've lost power in Washington.
But their ideologies are going to be living on.
And I think that's a greater accomplishment of the right wing over the past eight years that they're still carrying on.
Yeah, that's certainly a good point.
And in fact, you know, the David Frums of the world among political commentators, but then, of course, like the Henry Kissingers and all the former statesmen types on the right all say, oh, Obama's done a great job.
And I guess it was Jeremy Scahill compiled the list of all the people who, including kind of some radical neoconservative types who were saying, this is great.
I mean, John McCain could have appointed this very same cabinet.
This is wonderful.
But I think that scares me the most.
And I was no fan of George W. Bush.
But I think that it's naive to think that he was the creator of everything that's bad.
And if anything is good, and we should look at the silver lining of the Bush years, which is empire has been scaled back dramatically under the Bush administration.
On the surface, it might not look like that because we have troops in Iraq.
We have troops in Afghanistan.
But NATO's almost obsolete.
We have international support.
People aren't even believing the lies that we're talking about with their nuclear production and so forth.
The war in Iraq has been an absolute disaster.
Rollback in Georgia.
All of rollback in Georgia.
Absolutely.
I mean, down the line, empire has been scaled back dramatically under the Bush years.
And it's been, I mean, obviously the human toll has been almost exponential.
And that should not be noticed.
It's been silent since he's been even running, basically, at the forefront.
It was easy to oppose Hillary Clinton because she's been a warmonger since the get-go.
But Obama wasn't in office, didn't vote one way or another on Iraq intervention.
I can see an Obama administration, because of this lack of resistance, moving into Darfur.
I can see him getting away with strikes against certain sites in Iran.
He's been absolutely silent on the issue right now, foreign policy issue of our times other than Iraq is what's going on right now in Gaza with the peace accord, or ceasefire, I should say, not a peace accord, a ceasefire being negotiated.
He's been absolutely silent on this because he actually supports it.
And David Axelrod went on all the Sunday shows and talked about it.
So there's no real pressure against him against these sorts of policies.
And I think that's to the detriment of the constructive thing about this entire conservative, liberal, left-right construct is that the people themselves completely flip-flop from opposition to cheerleaders back and forth half and half each time every eight or four years if necessary.
And I don't want to name names or anything because I really haven't even been keeping up.
But I guess I'm prepared to find myself quite disappointed with some of the people who I've really enjoyed working with over the last years as they kind of find themselves in the position of having to defend Obama.
I want to ask you, what do you think maybe the role of the Internet might be in helping to prevent a little bit of that?
Because somebody like Glenn Greenwald, for example, has really established himself not just among leftists but by libertarians.
He's writing in The American Conservative sometimes now, that kind of thing.
But on the left particularly, he's an honest broker and a real dealer of facts and knowledge and holding people to account.
And he provides hyperlinks to what he's talking about.
And I wonder how difficult it's going to be for the pro-Obama part of the blogosphere to somehow write that off and pretend that the problem now is Glenn, not them.
That the problem now is him, not Obama.
You know what I mean?
I have great hope, I guess, that a lot of that hardcore left anti-war sentiment is going to have to kind of stay because people are able to contradict you right there in your own comment section right in front of everybody, you know?
Right.
As long as people are dying and there's international media covering it, I think the Internet's going to stay lively.
And as long as it's not regulated, we're going to have these free flow of conversations and information.
As far as movements, though, in the U.S., I think that the Internet may play a role.
We'll see how it turns out.
We'll see how you can exploit it as well.
I really have a fear that a lot of the people that didn't look back on the Bush years with an honest eye are going to continue that through the Obama years.
And what I mean by that is we can look at the most egregious policies that came out of the Bush years and the ones that we can probably agree on are the Patriot Act, the War on Terror, and so forth, Homeland Security.
Absolutely.
But those were all bipartisan things.
I mean, these are things that came out of, in some cases...
Including the wiretapping and the torture, the secret programs...
Well, or the invasion of Iraq.
I mean, the Democrats controlled the Senate at the time that this was approved.
Joe Biden was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, you can't just look at the Bush administration as being the bearer of the past eight years and the horror that has transpired.
I mean, these are things...
I mean, it was because the Democrats didn't put up any opposition.
I mean, even Supreme Court nominations, whatever, they did not put up a fight, even though they might have symbolically disagreed.
Well, you know, a common theme, and this is something that Alexander Coburn mocked in his speech last June at the Future Freedom Foundation conference, he talked about the secret Obama.
Oh, well, you see, there's a secret Obama, and all you have to do is believe in him a lot, and then once he has total power, then he will reveal himself to be the angel that I want him to be.
Right now, he just has to pretend that he's a sick, evil imperialist bloodthirsty killer.
But he only has to say that to get elected.
He's going to be great once he's in power.
But then, you know, I wonder whether there's actually perhaps something to that, that really, in that kind of general election, especially against a warmonger like McCain and a media that at least is compliant enough that the issue can really be framed that the least warmonger of the presidential candidates is in fact the most dangerous of them because he won't protect us enough and that kind of narrative.
Maybe he was bullshitting about what a killer he is and that he actually does intend to soften at least some of these positions.
I don't want to put too much stock and I'll ask for your comment on if you saw Hillary Clinton in her confirmation speech in her introductory remarks, I guess, to the Senate hearing mentioned the plight of Palestinian suffering and how, hey, you know, that really does matter and it was sort of like she was talking to the lobby to the Israel lobby saying, hey, look, you know, we do have to take this into account whether you want us to or not.
We're going to come at it.
But how can they not?
How can they not?
And we've got to, I mean, I think that either...
Well, Bush clearly hasn't so I guess, you know, do you believe that Hillary Clinton will be a better Secretary of State on this issue than Connelly's rise?
Is she going to actually tell the Kadima party or the Likudniks if Netanyahu takes the prime ministership?
Is she going to tell them, no, look, and lay down the law or is she going to tell them, all right, you know, I'm your number one partner let's go ahead and do it.
Well, but I mean, we got to even look at on a fair assessment of Condoleezza.
I mean, she did not originally support what's coming out of the UN.
She was originally, as antiwar.com reported even, she was not in support of this.
She was actually taken aback by being pressured by her higher ups to do so.
So I see Hillary Clinton as far further right than Condoleezza on a lot of issues.
I think that from the Obama administration, it's really an unknown entity at this time.
We've seen him in his speeches at AIPAC.
We've seen him appease the Israel lobby repeatedly.
We just don't know how he's going to respond to the situation.
And it looks like it might be wrapped up by the time he takes office and the time he really can speak about it.
I mean, I think that might have been definitely one of the reasons why Israel invaded when they did.
Also because they're in the midst of elections.
There's a number of reasons, but I really think a lot of it had to do because Obama was an unknown entity.
They didn't know how he was going to respond to this.
So in that case, yes.
I mean, and there are going to be those first few tests that Obama faces.
I think we're going to be able to tell a lot of how it's going to form his foreign policy agenda.
Yeah.
I mean, he's got quite a list of executive orders to repeal on his first day before, you know, I got to give him 24 hours before he's a war criminal because, you know, there's a lot of things to call off if you're going to sign documents so fast.
Right.
But, you know, how far he really goes in.
Well, and, you know, I think this is sort of part of the realignment, too, is when we talk about putting off certain issues in favor of the most important ones.
Best I can tell, you and I pretty much agree that the most important ones are things that we want them to stop doing right now.
And the things that we would like them to do are much lower down on the list.
But what we've got to have, first of all, is we've got to stop, for example, torturing people and pretending that the president can authorize people to go ahead and break federal laws that ban such things.
You know, the war crime statutes and these kinds of things.
We've got to stop the aggressive wars and all the spending on killing people overseas, propping up dictatorships, torturing people, the threats to our Bill of Rights.
We don't want them to, I mean, I guess you can turn all that around, say, you know, make the Fifth Amendment strong again or whatever, but how about just stop assaulting it?
The Fifth Amendment is fine.
Let's just get rid of the things that are infringing upon it.
Yeah.
Well, and I agree with that.
And I hope that's sort of what transpires.
What I'm fearful of, and going back to kind of what we were originally talking about, is, yeah, some situations might get better.
We might have more influence in the Middle East in some situations.
But we're going to go and throw tens of thousands of more troops into Afghanistan, for example.
If we're going to go into Darfur, if we're going to continue the intervention that was very popular among Clintontonians, which are now surrounding the Obama administration, right?
I mean, these are the people that have the direct influence on his foreign policy team.
These are people that supported the, you know, what's going on in Bosnia.
They supported what we did in the 90s there.
They supported the sanctions against Iraq.
And I think that they would support similar actions against Iran.
They are still very hawkish when it comes to Israel.
Absolutely.
They are very big supporters of the war on terror.
Now, is he going to go in and radically change these ideologies?
No.
I mean, what I'm more fearful of is that he's actually saying he's going to be sort of the pilot of the plane that went down on the Hudson, right?
I mean, he's going to land it more judiciously.
He's going to be a steadier hand at the helm of empire.
And that's a scarier precedent because there isn't any opposition to that.
There's going to be a lot of celebration on Tuesday because of Bush's leaving Washington, his whole squad packing up and heading back to Texas, right?
But there isn't going to be opposition to what's going to continue.
We still have a war.
We still have all of these problems that Obama needs to respond to.
And as long as we're cheerleading on the sidelines of Bush's leaving office, we're not opposing what's actually continuing to enter into the debate.
And I think that that is the biggest problem that I see when it comes to this left-right ideology because it's not about issues.
It's about who wins and who loses.
And right now, the Republicans have lost big time and there's cause for celebration for that, but we need to get back to work immediately.
Yeah, yeah, not let team spirit kind of obfuscate matters.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you about this.
You brought up Darfur a couple of times and I guess everybody knows that there's a certain, maybe different certain segments of the left that have decided that stopping the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur, which is a western region of Sudan in northern Africa there, that that is the cause and whatever and this is the thing that all real caring liberal people care about and that something must be done.
And I wonder, do you know much about the actual situation there or can you address that or is your, you're just generally opposed to do good or meddling where you don't think it's really going to work out kind of thing?
Well, I mean, on the first point, I'm opposed, absolutely, to the notion that the U.S. direct involvement in.
I think that what I acknowledge I do have of what's going on in Darfur is presented in our media is not fully the accurate story.
I think you have to go to the foreign press for that and I don't think it's at this point we're not sure at what level of genocide that's going on.
We don't know if we are going to intervene what side the U.S. would even be on.
We obviously know that there is a Muslim segment that if the U.S. is seen as supporting the opposition to them that it could inflame even more Islamic radicalism toward the United States against the United States as foreign policy in the region.
It's a situation that isn't if it's not fully understood as a black and white issue as intervention wise, there's no way that the U.S. should be intervening and not to even mention that we're overextended militarily, not to mention that we don't know the outcome of these sorts of things.
We go in with good intentions and I honestly believe there have been times when the U.S. has gone in with good intentions but there's been dramatic blowback from that.
I think the U.S. supporting of people in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet invasion at the time might have been on the face of it an issue that was probably should have been supported but you never can say but you never can foresee what the blowback is going to be and obviously it's been horrendous in that case.
You don't know exactly what side you're going to go on and support certain elements that could turn against you in the future.
It's not our business and we don't need to be involved in it.
I wonder about the role of humanitarian war as like kind of repentance somehow or like making up for like or even just a rat guilt you know what I mean?
Like I think a lot of liberals bought into the Iraq war because they said they were going to go save the little people and all that kind of thing and then you know they should have known better it was left up to a bunch of Republicans to run it and a million people died but you know like we want to prove that we really are superman and our military our army really is there for the betterment of the world and whatever and well I guess it really goes down to like just you know the basic belief system that you know wherever there's not a liberal government program there's a Hobbesian chaos and so they they must fill up every vacuum in the world with their space you know?
Their mass.
No it's true and I think that the Obama administration's big challenge is going to be how do you manage continuing to realign the alliances that have been broken during the Bush administration and still be seen as an honest broker and not as a as a a country that is imperialist or you know America first because that's really what you know that's exactly what came out of 9-11 right?
That we are in it to protect ourselves we will not abide by international law we're going to do whatever it takes to do so it never mattered it never has mattered we're going to invade we're going to do whatever we want at the same time invoking it's all for their own good and it's all for their own good part of their justification too you know?
So it's not all America first it's them first but we insist you know?
It's kind of what it is right well and it's what we're seeing right now with Israel and Palestine right?
I mean this is the security council matters not at all right even though we have reports of what Israel has done with the U.N. bases in Gaza destroyed them I mean we we aren't seeing an uproar against Israel's aggression within the United States and that's because it's a sad commentary because our media is so inept but it's also a sad commentary because the new leader coming into Washington is so inept well and you know I'm really worried about Iraq too and it seems like so many people take it face value that the election of Barack Obama is the end of it and whatever so that means that he's going to end it so I don't have to worry about it anymore if it takes a couple of years or whatever well I'm sure he's working it out and I have a feeling that this guy's honeymoon is going to last five or six years like George Bush's did where he's just allowed to get away with basically anything and I'm already hearing people talk to me I was on a radio show in Florida where the host was a good liberal anti-war guy who thought everything was just fine now and I was like maybe I'm just having less than absolute and unrelenting pressure on Obama to end that war immediately will result in that war lasting forever and ever and ever now is not the time to compromise and back off our anti-war stance because we think we won because I'm not so sure it's in the bag like that no I mean we're going into the fourth quarter now and we can win or we can lose and we need to keep up our fight and I think what Jeremy Scahill for instance is that even though Obama may want to pull out some of our troops when I say pull out I'm not saying bring home he's probably going to be shifting them to another country in the area but we're going to be then supporting a private military in its place a more expensive military as in Blackwater will be left behind in Iraq is what you're saying with more contracts yeah with more money allocated from the U.S. taxpayer and and a you know a private enterprise that has no oversight and is not as accountable as they should be as the U.S. military would be at least in some regards and so that's I think that's something that we need to look at a little bit closer because it's something that can clearly go under the radar if Obama starts pulling troops out we're not going to we have to look at what's going in we have to look at where those troops are going to be sent because you know they're going to candy coat it for us because I mean the TV news bureaus don't even have don't even have people there now so we don't even have pictures on TV of the war at all anymore we're not getting from the army I mean they'll basically be able to get away with saying the war's over we only left 100,000 armed contractors there there are great print journalists there and some of them you've interviewed like Patrick Coburn sure but as he has even pointed out there's TV stations and TV news channels that are there U.S. ones that are allocating millions of dollars for air in over a month they can't get their stories on air especially outside of the green zone if it's not about restaurants opening up and about you know prosperity coming back to Baghdad it's not going to make CNN you know it's not going to make ABC so we're not also not hearing the true story about what's going on there and yeah it's amazing during the election it was I guess in the poll the exit poll or whatever it was and I guess 10% said Iraq or Iraq was averaged as 10th on the list or something one of those stupid statistics it just drove me mad to think that that's really all it takes is the surge working not in Iraq but as a slogan on us if you just say it's working it's working ah it worked just like I told you it was working then that's it really I mean it isn't like Patrick Coburn is going to be a regular so you know the slogan goes unchallenged and the slogan sticks and here we are it doesn't matter how bad we lose over there now well and of course the Obama administration wasn't going to make it a priority they were never going to make it a key tenant of their campaign because they knew that the Democrats were going to get hammered on the issue mostly because they always supported Bush's war they supported and disagreed on certain aspects of managing the war sure but on the actual basis of it and the philosophy behind it they were in complete support of that and Obama's right hand man Joe Biden was the same way I mean if Obama had picked someone that actually legitimately wanted to alter US foreign policy in the region we may have seen a different debate but he steered clear of that and didn't even go I mean he could have called on Chuck Hagel on that issue and we might actually have seen that but he stuck with someone that was middle of the road that supported the war because he needed to be seen as tough on foreign policy and so I know that was never an issue and I don't believe it's going to be an issue I think the economic downturn has taken the airwaves so to speak instead yeah it really is too bad that you can only I guess have even on a 24 hour bunch of 24 hour news channels 24 hour soundbite news channels that's why I guess I'm just old enough now there are a couple of gray hairs on this chin that I remember that the whole spiel about the invention of the cable news networks was that they're going to be able to really do in depth investigative reporting and dedicate to these important stories instead all they do is sit around and talk about the same cold snap every 15 minutes on the 15 minutes and go on that way it's crazy to watch it's the idea of news and independent media has always been a freelance journalist independent media has always been more free to cover the real story and that's why the internet that's why antiwar.com that's why counterpunch that's why is as popular as they are because they still are a great source of news and commentary and there's definitely good stuff that's coming out of mainstream media but it's few and far between it's much more controlled and they never give you what it means that's why you have to have counterpunch and antiwar.com to say we all saw that so and so said this to that reporter but here's some context for you kind of thing I mean where are you going to get good context it ain't going to be from Broad and Sanger in the New York Times you know what I mean they'll give you something but it ain't going to be context no no it's true and that's why it remains an important medium of information that I really really hope stays free over the next eight years well and I really hope that we can continue what's been our mission at antiwar.com certainly is we're going to keep trying to make it this way and we're going to keep working on bringing together the people on the right and the people on the left with libertarianism as the moderate center because I mean right now the people who call themselves the centrist why they're extremists they're not moderates at all they're the ones who are for every terrible thing the libertarians need to be the real people and so you know like you said about well I guess in contrast to Sudan you know black and white issues hey empire aggressive war kidnapping torture and murder and the destruction of the bill of rights those are black and white issues let's get our priorities straight let's keep them straight you know let's make sure that the alliance is strong because it's going to be tough you know as the big move takes place as the two major political feelings in the country switch from pro to con and vice versa that we keep our bearings straight and we provide the support that we need to make sure that we keep them straight and we provide the support that we need to make sure that we keep them straight and we provide the support that we need to make sure that we keep them straight and we provide the support that we need to make sure that we keep them straight and we provide the support that 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