03/20/07 – Leon Hadar – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Ah, the best laid plans of mice and neo-cons.
Sometimes they don't go how they're supposed to go.
Everybody knows that America's disaster in the Middle East is threatening to spread and engulf the lives of even more innocent people.
Here to help examine the disaster that is American foreign policy is Leon Hadar.
He's the former UN bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post and is the author of Sandstorm Policy Failure in the Middle East.
You can read his articles at the American Conservative magazine and at Antiwar.com.
He's also got a great one in the new Chronicles, The War on Terror Ended, looking back 2007 through 2027.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
And, oh, well, you're very welcome.
I got a great kick out of this article in Chronicles that you have here.
I enjoyed writing it.
Yeah, it's 2027, and now we're looking back at how America lost the war on terrorism.
Is that basically the premise of the article?
Yeah, I'm basically arguing in, you know, it's kind of a dialectical way of thinking that the US can win the war on terrorism, so to speak, in a sense of using all its military might to go around the world looking for terrorism, establishing new regimes and so on and so forth.
But at the same time, the United States is going to basically overstretch militarily, economically.
And by 2027, China will probably, you know, China that for the last 20 years, from 2007 to 2027, didn't do anything except accumulate a lot of dollars and build new factories and so on and so forth, will emerge eventually as major economic and perhaps military power.
Yeah, so right now they're just sort of biding their time watching us spend all our energy.
Exactly.
They don't have to do anything and just look and enjoy.
The American policy here, this Bush doctrine, is preemption, unilateralism, and I can't remember, what was the third one, lying about everything?
Well, regime change, of course.
Right, right, right.
And so basically you lay out in this article, not only do you say, you know, here's how things went bad looking back from 2027, but in the story you go and you give a speech to the American Enterprise Institute explaining to them how they got it wrong.
And in doing so, you lay out an alternative policy, basically what a reasonable administration might have done after September 11th rather than the neoconservative project.
Can you outline for us?
Yeah, I'm not saying, you know, there's no way to prove that this would have worked better than this policy.
We just know clearly and most of us predicted that this is going to be a disaster.
Basically after 9-11, and again we can go even backward and say, you know, maybe 9-11 was not inevitable, but you know, it took place.
You go after the terrorism, you go after the terrorists Osama bin Laden, you can make an argument that the idea of going to Afghanistan and getting rid of the Taliban and establishing some minimum stability and then get out of there also.
I mean, I'm not one of those who think that the U.S. should remain in Afghanistan forever, but you know, that would have been a reasonable kind of policy.
It would be nice if we had Osama bin Laden and some of his associates in our hands and find a way of punishing them, but that's about it.
And you know, I'm not sure that it's going to work.
It's quite possible that we wouldn't have found Osama bin Laden, but clearly we should have devoted more energy, more time, and more resources to deal with that, and we might have succeeded.
But instead we decided, I mean, the Bush administration decided to divert all the resources, the military and others, to Iraq.
As many people say, it's like after Japan attacking us in Antara Lab, we go and attack Spain or, you know, China or whatever.
I mean, there was no relationship between the attack on 9-11 and the target we found.
It was a mistake.
It was a mistake from any perspective that you look at it, including morally, but certainly strategically, politically, diplomatically.
It proved to be a total disaster, and as I said earlier, most of us in the skeptical community, let's call it, predicted that.
I mean, there was really nothing new about it, and nobody should have been surprised that that would happen.
Well, and I guess the best way to measure how successful the project has been, and this is, I guess, the measure that you use in your little fictitious speech there, is the results of the election or the bringing to power of the Shiite radicals in Iraq, of Hamas in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Exactly.
Look, what the US did, what the Bush administration did, it basically accelerated the process that could have taken place at some point.
There would have been, you know, just based on reading of history, political and economic processes and so on.
At some point in the future, the status quo in the Middle East, the regimes in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, Saddam Hussein, and so on, at some point they would have fallen from power.
There would have been civil war changes that would have taken place, some of them more gradual, some of them more revolutionary.
We don't know what would have happened exactly, but it would have taken probably, you know, 10, 20, 30 years.
Instead, the Bush administration, almost in a revolutionary move, decided to accelerate the process and basically transform the Middle East, you know, starting with Saddam Hussein.
And this created an earthquake in the Middle East as such.
It played into the hands of, as you suggested, and again, as many of us predicted, it played into the hands of Iran, into the Shiites in the Middle East.
It brought to power in Iran a regime that is antithetical both in terms of its values and its interests to that of the United States in many respects, even more than Saddam Hussein, who was an awful dictator.
But, you know, he was a secular dictator.
At the point when we attacked him, he was basically a status quo, pro status quo power.
It didn't bother anyone at that time.
And instead, we ignited a revolution in the Middle East that is going to continue for a very long time.
We put in place a process that led to the election of the Hamas in the West Bank, to elections in Lebanon that actually strengthened the power of Hezbollah there.
And of course, we turned Iran into the demonic power in the Middle East.
And now we have to develop more resources, military, politically, diplomatically, financially, in order to contain Iran, which we helped to strengthen as a result of this war.
So this is really unbelievable.
As I said, a few months ago, in 20 years, 30 years, maybe there's going to be a Middle Eastern caliphate.
And one of the pictures they'll put in the museum will be that of George Bush as the guy who helped start the revolution, who helped bring the big change that they wanted so much.
You know, in many respects, that's what happened.
And they continue to do that.
And they are in a position now that they, you know, it's not so much the Bush administration, but the United States now is in a position that it's them if it doesn't do something to Iran, and it's them if it does something.
You know, it's just a loser.
And from any perspective, you look at it.
I'm not saying that, you know, as I said earlier, I don't think that the status quo in the Middle East was something that I liked based on my values and so on.
I don't have any sympathy for the regimes in Saudi Arabia, the military dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere.
But again, this change should have taken place in a gradual way, and we shouldn't have been the ones who ignited the change.
You know, that was ridiculous.
And even where the change was toward more power for the people and less for the dictators in the region, it was also a change that was where the cultures and societies that were becoming more westernized and, you know, modernized, more western friendly.
They tried to force them to democratize, and now we've got the backlash.
Yeah, and it's not only that.
We are also responsible for that, and now we have to do something in order to prevent the changes.
And also we feel morally responsible because we got into Iraq.
We, you know, we destroyed this infrastructure.
We created a lot of problems.
But, you know, and one of the things that I always point out that, you know, people talk about the need to westernize the Middle East, bring democracy, free market.
You know, we can, you know, this is a long story we can discuss and debate whether even the idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East or to other countries for that matter is indeed in U.S. interest, whether we should use our resources to do it, whether we should use military power to do that, and whether in the case of the Middle East, whether the Middle East, you know, the different political culture that exists are very different than that of the West, whether the Middle East is ready or even wants to become democratic in the way we think it should become.
You know, what right do we have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan and tell them that 20% of the members of the parliament should be women?
I mean, you know, Switzerland, you know, which is a democracy, which is a western country of, you know, probably on the top of the list, did not grant women the right to vote until the 1970s.
The 1970s, I tell the people and they say, what?
I can't believe it.
I don't remember anyone in the United States putting pressure on Switzerland at that time to grant women right to vote.
I would have granted women right to vote, but that's the question of their decisions.
And to go around the world and to the societies that are really Afghanistan for example, coming out of the Stone Age, and to tell them, you know, they should do this and they should do that, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
And the fact of the matter is, if you look at the Middle East today, as I always said, you know, the most westernized, the most poor American, the most educated community in the Middle East, including in Iraq, tend to be the Christians.
And interestingly enough, after the US invasion, you will assume that the Christians of Iraq, who are westernized, tend to be multilingual, tend to be highly educated professionals, will be celebrating.
Finally, you know, Iraq is becoming democratic and westernized.
Now is the time.
Most of them are actually living in Iraq and going well to Syria, you know, Syria, which we think is, you know, has an awful regime and maybe we should do another regime change there.
So in many respects, the situation in the Middle East in terms of being hospitable to western culture, western idea and so on is now in a worse situation than it ever was.
I don't know if we can do anything about it.
And, you know, for all I know, we probably should expect some sort of like a healthy war in the Middle East between the Shiite and the Sunnis and major changes that are going to take place in the coming years.
And I don't think there's anything we can do about it.
The regimes, the countries in the region, Turkey, Iran, the Arab countries probably have more an obligation and a right because it's close to them to do something about it.
Maybe the Europeans should get involved more in all of this because they're closer to the Middle East, the United States, but we really don't have the power or the interest for that matter to continue in this crazy engagement where we have so many other problems at home and abroad.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Leon Hadar.
He writes for the American Conservative magazine and antiwar.com.
Now, if I can be a bit more cynical, it's been bandied about.
It's not just my idea.
There are some who say that they believe the neoconservatives never really meant to spread pro-American democratic values around the Middle East, but that, in fact, what they meant to do with, for example, firing the Iraqi army and and other things like that was to spark this sectarian war, at least as a plan B, if they couldn't get their Hashemite king, they can set all the Arab and Muslim peoples fighting amongst each other.
Do you think that that's possible or likely that this is on purpose or is this just a disaster?
One of the reasons I tend to be skeptical of conspiracy theories in general, I know that this is a conspiracy theory, but this assumes that the neoconservatives are a group of intelligent people who meet and have ideas and try to advance them and succeed in advancing them.
I don't think it works that way.
I'm very skeptical as a libertarian about the ability of a government and government officials to deal with a small educational program in a small city in the Midwest.
I certainly don't think that they can have the power and the ability to do anything in the grand scale like in the Middle East.
I think the neoconservatives are probably less, I use the term all the time, but in reality, we're talking about a large group of intellectuals.
I think some of them, I guess, is from reading and body language and so on.
I think someone like Wolfowitz, for example, really thought, I mean, I think he was considering his dreams about changing the Middle East.
I think he had, in addition to the fact that he wanted to expand US power and US presence and a gem on me, he also clearly thought that this idea of democratizing the Middle East is a realistic proposition.
I think others were more skeptical.
But I think what united all of them is not so much to bring havoc and destruction, is that after the Cold War ended, they emerged as the ideologues behind a project to turn the United States into a global Germanic power.
I think that was the main goal.
If you go back to that famous Pentagon paper that Wolfowitz and Libby actually wrote after the first Gulf War, in which they argue that the United States all now is to become the only existing superpower to prevent other global powers like the EU, China, and Russia from challenging it, and to control the Middle East because the Middle East, because of its strategic position, the energy resources, and so on, can be used as a leverage against competing regional and global powers.
So that's what I think they wanted.
I mean, I think they were the ideologue.
No one took them seriously for a while, but when 9-11 took place, they were there.
I mean, that's the great thing about what happened to them.
They were there, and the Bush administration decided to implement the project.
And of course, they came up with – they said, you know, we knew that's going to happen, and now it's time for us indeed to go beyond this kind of panama – the lack cost free Pax Americani.
Now we really have to be like the British Empire.
We have to rule the world, starting with the Middle East.
So I think that's what they thought they wanted to do.
They, of course, added to that that democracy stuff and the Wilsonian stuff, as I said once, it's like as though Queen Victoria would be married to Woodrow Wilson, and they'll have a very ugly child.
And that's the Democratic Empire, you know.
It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't work.
There are so many internal contradictions in this project, because if you expand democracy, by definition, as we saw in Iraq, you play into the hand to strengthen the power of revolutionary forces, anti-status quo power.
And who are they going to challenge, first of all?
The hegemon, the emperor.
So the emperor, in a sense, helps to create the opposition that's going to, at some point, remove him from power.
You know, the British, not to mention the Soviets and the Nazis and others, when they took control, they were tough.
They were rough.
They didn't have any – or at least, you know, the Soviets and the Nazis didn't have any moral constraints.
And we do have that.
And, you know, that's a problem, because we can't act like the British and certainly not like the Soviets and the Nazis, and we see that now in Iraq.
Right.
And now you can turn to the pages of Foreign Affairs and read articles like, for example, one recently by Richard Haass, where he basically is completely agreeing with you that this is a new era in the Middle East, the post-American hegemony era.
Yeah, look, I think, as I indicated in my book, the debate in the American foreign policy establishment is not really between people who are the imperial types, like the neocons, and people who oppose that and want the U.S. to adopt, like we are talking about, more disengaged policies.
I think the debate is between people who, like the neocons, who clearly want to establish an American empire, and between those who say, like Richard Haass, you know, we can have like an empire light.
You know, we can continue to be hegemon, but, you know, we will be the driver, and we'll ask the Europeans from time to time to check the oil, and we'll ask the Chinese from time to time to, you know, check the tires, and so on.
But we will continue to be the drivers.
We just have to throw, you know, here and there some peanuts to our allies, and that will allow us to continue to do all of this without invading the Middle East, you know, just by, you know, establishing our power, threatening sometimes, using diplomacy sometimes.
So, you know, people like Richard Haass, I think that's their position.
Let's continue with hegemony, but with less cost, and it's possible to do that, they say, you know, by co-opting allies and so on.
And I think, clearly, if I had to choose between the neocons and the empire light type, I would prefer the empire light, because, you know, it's less costly, and it might work in the short term, but in the long term, as I suggest in my book, the U.S. has indeed to reconsider its global policy, especially in the Middle East, and we have to ask ourselves what should have been asked in 1991 after the Cold War and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Why are we exactly in the Middle East now that the Cold War has ended?
What are we looking for there, and why do we continue to project our military power in a region that is very far away from the United States?
And our interests are quite limited, so, you know, that debate didn't take place.
I think, eventually, it's going to take place now, after Iraq, when the cost of this project has become enormous, and I think most Americans are clearly, through the public opinion poll, questioning the policy, and expect that the lawmakers and leaders will do the same.
Well, I know from reading your articles on Antiwar.com that the experts fare worse than blind chance when making predictions, but I wonder whether you think the chances of America attacking Iran are better or worse than 50-50?
I mean, if I had to make a prediction, I would say close to 60, but as I suggested in my articles and other places, I don't think this administration, you know, people, again, think that, you know, these are small people, and, you know, Cheney and Bush meet, and they come up with this great policy, and, you know, they say we should do this.
Is that what people think?
What we have now is, as I said many times, a muddling through strategy.
They would love to see, let's put it this way, a cheap military confrontation with Iran that will not cost a lot of United States and will lead to the collapse of the regime.
They thought that it would be practical, you know, immediately when, you know, after the mission accomplished speech, when the U.S. was perceived at the height of its power.
They understand now there are the many constraints that operate, and they recognize that.
They are dogmatic, but they are not suicidal, you know, so what they are going to do is continue muddling through, you know, work with the Europeans, try to put pressure, and hope that there will be here some opportunity to take advantage of and do something to Iran, whether it's an attack on its nuclear reactor or a command operation, I don't know, but my guess is that before Bush leaves the White House, there is going to be either some sort of a military confrontation with Iran, or that can happen, also some sort of agreement with Iran.
But I think Bush would find it very difficult to live with the legacy, a messed up Iraq, high cost for the United States, and at the same time, Iran emerging as a hegemon in the Persian Gulf, you know.
That will really give him a bad reputation, you know, so to speak, in history books.
So he's going to have to do something about it, but again, I don't think they are saying, you know, we are going to attack Iran in this date.
I don't think that's in the cards.
I think they are just hoping and looking for an opportunity to do something, perhaps.
Iran will be accused and there will be evidence that they took part in, unfortunately, in some future terrorist attack, there might be some confrontation between U.S. troops and Iranian troops, all kinds of things can happen, and they hope to take advantage of it.
As I said, I think at this stage today, they recognize the constraints that operate on them, and I don't think they are going to launch any attack tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
At the same time, I also – you have to remember that another possibility is encouraging Israel or giving Israel a green light to attack Iran, which will mean that the U.S. was not directly involved in it and that, you know, it's Israel that did it because it was in its interest to do it and supposedly we cannot put pressure on Israel not to defend itself, blah, blah, blah.
And of course, Congress in election season, including the leading presidential candidate, are not going to accuse Israel of anything, and in fact, will accept if the Bush administration would support Israel, they would applaud it.
So, you know, that's another scenario that we have to take into consideration, that is an Israeli attack against Iran, which will be applauded and supported by the United States.
Where do you think the Saudis come down on this right now?
Well, the Saudis, you know, people always – they don't understand, I think, that in the Middle East, if you look at the Saudis, the Syrians, all these people, the regimes I'm talking and the level of the regimes are survivors.
And they remind me very much of the Italian city-state, you know, in the Renaissance period, like the Medici family and so on, that were very Machiavellian who didn't have any permanent allies.
You know, you sleep today with this guy, you sleep tomorrow with another guy.
Foreign policy consists of many one-night stands.
And that's how the Saudis look at it.
They say, you know, we want the – we, when they say we, they're not going to fight.
We want the United States to contain the Iranians.
We hope they can do it.
If they cannot do it, we'll have to make a deal with the Iranians, you know, because it's in our interest to do that because we are in the region and the United States is not going to be there forever.
So I think they are going to encourage the United States to do something.
I don't think they want to see a full-blown military confrontation.
And in any case, even if the U.S. will do something, they will criticize the United States for doing it while enjoying the benefits of an American attack against Iran.
And that's what free riders in foreign policy do all the time.
They don't use their own resources to deal with something.
They expect the hegemon to do it and then they criticize the hegemon for taking that step.
They just are pursuing their own interests.
They don't have any emotional or ideological commitments here.
And if they see that the U.S. is failing, they'll piss the Iranians and try to make a deal with them.
Now, in the Middle East or, well, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I know the Saudis have been actively working out or succeeded in working out an agreement between Hamas and Fatah to have a unity government.
And I'm surely no expert on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, but I thought I remembered just a few months ago that the Israelis were insisting that they couldn't deal with the Palestinian Authority until they had a unity government with Hamas.
And now they have one and they're saying, well, we can't deal with you because you have a unity government with Hamas.
Well, on both sides now, we have weak governments consisting of so many forces on both sides, which makes it almost impossible, I think, at this stage to move towards any resolution of the conflict.
Certainly in a permanent way.
The Israelis said a lot of things, you know, and the U.S. said a lot of things also.
The U.S. said, you know, that we want democracy in Palestine.
And then when the world election and Hamas was elected, they said, well, we really didn't.
We wanted you to elect someone else.
And since you didn't, you know, we really are not for democracy in Palestine.
The Israelis, I think, are now in a situation in which the government in Israel, which is a coalition government, just doesn't have the power at this stage to conduct negotiation, even with the most moderate Palestinian government that could emerge.
So, you know, it's just as someone wrote, I think, in the Washington Post yesterday, Jackson, Dale, it's a world of make-believe.
It's kind of let's pretend.
Let's pretend that we want to make peace.
Let's pretend that we want to negotiate.
That's what the Americans and the Israelis are doing.
And I think the Palestinians also, to some extent, because they know that, you know, at this stage there's not going to be any serious negotiation.
So everyone is creating the impression that, you know, they want an agreement, they want to move forward in the so-called, you know, peace process and so on and so forth.
So my guess, we would be better off, all of us, if instead of this grand design of peace process and the final settlement and all of that, let's just deal with, you know, small issues of, for example, improving the economic and the social problems in the West Bank and Gaza, which I think is something that should take place because of a situation that is very bad and works against the interests of everyone.
So, you know, I would say, you know, small steps at this stage seems to be more effective and productive than trying to, you know, launch another peace agreement and reaching another, you know, another Camp David negotiations.
You know, even my friends who agree with me on the issue of Iraq, you know, the reality-based community, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, they seem to be residing in the faith-based community.
They seem to think that, you know, if just the U.S. will do something, you know, we're going to have this meeting in Camp David, they'll pressure Israel, and before you know, there is an agreement.
It's not going to happen because the situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians now is probably the worst that I recall in living memory.
And, you know, it will take a very long time for us to move towards the direction of a permanent agreement, and we just have to start step by step.
Right.
Now, when you compare and contrast the neoconservative vision for global hegemony versus the empire light of Richard Haass and the Council on Foreign Relations, you also say in your articles that America must have a leadership role in the world.
So how would you define that?
How would you like to see America's foreign policy develop in the future from here?
Well, I, you know, in a sense of a leadership role, what I mean is that, you know, from a real politic perspective, I think that in the mid, you know, short and mid-term, what we should accept and embrace is the kind of a more multipolar system as opposed to a unipolar system.
That is to say we have to work together with the other great powers, which is the European Union, Russia, and eventually China and India.
Indeed, one of our main challenges in addition to the problems of the Middle East is to bring China and also India into the international system, the global economy, and the international political system as such.
And so we have to work with other great powers.
Because we are so powerful economically and militarily, there is no doubt that even in a multipolar system, we would still be the leading power.
You know, in economics, you have monopoly and oligopoly.
I'm not for American monopoly.
I'm for more for an oligopoly of great power in which the U.S. is the leading power in this concept of great power.
But we cannot do it on our own.
And we should, even as a concept of great power, we should adopt realistic expectations.
We should understand that what's happening in the Middle East, in Central Asia, all the developments that are taking place in the Muslim world, there is very little that we can do in order to dominate the process and determine what's going to happen.
We have to live in a world which reminds me very much, you know, when I'm in Washington sometimes and I go to a conference and people say, we should go to Pakistan or to Egypt and really change the place and, you know, we have to have a Marshall Plan and, you know, we should help the Iraqis bring electricity and blah, blah, blah.
And I say, no, guys, you live in Washington, D.C.
If you go to Southeast Washington, which is the inner cities of Washington, D.C., where all the poor people live, most of you don't travel there at night, probably not during the day.
You treat all this area in kind of benign neglect.
You form money from time to time.
But you know very well that there's nothing you can do in the short run to turn Southeast Washington into a middle-class neighborhood.
It will take time and you recognize it.
And this is, you know, part of your own community.
Now, the notion that we can, you know, what we can do in Baghdad and in Karachi and in Cairo, what we cannot do in Washington, this is nonsense.
We have to accept that we're going to live in an international system in which there will be a lot of inner cities, so to speak, that we have to treat with benign neglect, so we won't be able to change maybe in our lifetime.
And we'll just have to accept it as it is.
We should try to co-opt them for investment and trade and diplomatic relations.
But if we can't, we just have to leave them alone and just make sure that our red lines, we tell them, you know, you want to live in a medieval system like, you know, a caliphate, that's fine with us as long as you don't do this or that.
You don't send terrorists to attack us or drop nuclear bombs on us, you know.
So we have to understand that we cannot change the world, we cannot restructure and reconstruct societies that are just beginning to get, as I said earlier, out of this, you know, the medieval, the Stone Age, and just live with it as it is.
Continuing to help keep me informed, Leon Hadar, his blog is globalparadigms.blogspot.com, he's the author of Sandstorm, Policy Failure in the Middle East, and you can find his articles at the American Conservative magazine and at antiwar.com.
Thanks so much for your time today, sir.
Thank you very much for inviting me.