All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Got Mark Sheffield back on the line.
His blog is called Policy on Point.
News and opinion for global citizens.
Welcome back to the show, Mark.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us today.
So, your article is interesting here, Ignorance or Arrogance.
It is both, right?
And in your narrative, make me feel really old, I guess.
A lot of time has passed, even though it seems like it has flown right by, in a way.
You were in junior high school when September 11th happened.
You were completely ignorant because you were in a government junior high school.
And you didn't know anything.
And the people teaching you didn't know anything to teach you anything.
And so, at the same time that the neoconservatives and their arrogance were taking us on a path of global revolution, you were coming at it from basically just knowing only what they told you kind of point of view.
And then your article is about what everybody has learned since then.
Thank goodness both sides have learned a little bit of something, huh?
Right.
I mean, it seems like it.
I tried to answer more questions than I could actually get to.
But basically, I tried to figure out what exactly changed after 9-11, at least with regard to foreign policy.
And I'm sure people have already answered this question before.
I just never really thought about it in depth too much.
And just trying to move backward from 2001 and then find some sort of commonality between our wars now and those before 9-11.
And Vietnam was this far back.
You know, you have to go all the way back to find any sort of occupation, long-term occupation.
So, I mean, that's kind of what I've – really the only thing that I could find that really changed.
After Vietnam, the Vietnam syndrome and the more Clintonian-style bomb them from the air with a 10-foot pole kind of thing?
Exactly.
And proxy wars and economic warfare.
I mean, I tried to go through and put all these little conflicts into some sort of categories.
And the problem to me is that maybe in just the common media or something, you have this timeline of modern American history.
It starts at World War II, and then you have Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, 9-11.
And there's all these other little things in there, but some people just – it's hard to make them realize that there's just been constant warfare throughout, whether it's U.S.
– official U.S. forces involved or not.
And the only way we can ever – I don't know.
Maybe I'm just sitting around angry about defense budgets too much.
But the only way we can ever get any sort of reduction in that is if we slowly pull back, in my opinion.
And I see the point where you can just bring everybody home, but then what do you really do with all the soldiers?
And I'm kind of all over the place right now.
Well, yeah, I think that's not so much a problem.
As Ron Paul likes to point out, they brought 10 million soldiers home from World War II and said, get a job.
And yeah, I mean some of them got the GI Bill and whatever, but not 10 million of them, not by a long shot.
And they all got jobs, and it was fine.
Yeah, and I mean you might be right.
I just don't know if – I'm just not – I just don't think I can answer that question yet.
So I mean I'm just of the kind of position where I don't even – Well, it doesn't really matter so much because the fact is being overseas, killing people is no way to just – if we've got to pay them to do something, we'll just pay them to dig ditches and fill them back up here in North America and stop bombing ditches into existence over there in Afghanistan, for example.
Right.
Because that's other people's property.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so look, you're certainly right that, as you say, that we're sort of going back to that.
I guess 9-11 succeeded really for al-Qaeda in provoking a full-scale invasion type response where Afghanistan was too remote for an effective demonstration.
They had to go, as Tom Friedman says, and go beat on Iraq just to prove we mean business, basically, just to show that we will overreact when that's what they were trying to get us to do.
So they succeeded in that part.
But on the other hand, it seems almost like unfortunately, in a way, the Democrats have learned the lesson from that that they want to just bomb the whole world with drones and now hypersonic whatever the hell and bomb everybody with a 100-foot pole.
Right.
And the Democrats have always kind of displayed that they don't really like to put ground troops in because they want to be able to attack Republicans for doing those sorts of things.
But, yeah, now with the advent of all this cheap robotic technology, it makes it really, really tempting just to fly across the border and pretty much do whatever you want, wherever you want, especially in countries that have no strong central government and don't control the parts of the territory that you're actually striking.
So, I mean, in the first place, that's usually the excuse to go drone strike them in the first place.
If Pakistan can't control that area, then, okay, we'll step in.
We'll come help them in some double-speak kind of way.
Right.
Yeah, same thing in Yemen and Somalia and everywhere else, too.
The AU needs shoring up over there.
We've got to go help them.
John Glaser wrote this thing at the Anti-War Blog about how it was one of the architects of the Somalia drone policy working for Barack Obama told the media in his words that, yeah, you know, we risk taking this al-Shabaab thing and turning it from a local phenomenon into an actual threat to Americans.
Well, and what might cause that?
If we keep bombing them.
I mean, that was his point.
If we keep this up, internationalizing the war against them will make their war a war against us, too.
Imagine that.
And he's thinking out loud.
And this is the guy who's one of the biggest proponents of it in the administration getting it done.
What the hell?
It doesn't make any sense.
I don't get it, either.
I have no idea what could possibly be.
I don't know.
But, I mean, I just hope that, I hope that, I do think Obama has at least kind of abandoned the notion that you can just occupy every, you know, everywhere you want to go.
He is at least, you know, not putting troops, but, I mean, that's the least worst scenario, kind of.
Then again, he doubled down in Afghanistan.
If they're pulling him out, they're pulling him out real slow from the Afghan surge.
I don't even know what's going to happen in Afghanistan.
Didn't they just sign their drafting agreement for 2024?
Yeah.
Well, now, tell me something, though.
So, what was your understanding about all this in junior high?
You had to have understood there was some kind of American foreign policy post-World War II.
It was just the names of Vietnam, you know, maybe Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm.
But, you didn't make any connection whatsoever to the terror war, huh?
The planes came out of the clear blue skies, is that what your teachers told you, or what?
Well, that's kind of what, that was kind of the message.
And I have to say, I was at a private school for like one or two years there.
So, I was actually at that school at the time.
But, you know, I was obsessed with airplanes.
That was my first obsession.
So, I was always watching Wings and things like that.
So, I knew, I probably knew a little bit more about, you know, World War II, and especially Desert Storm, because they had so many shows from Desert Storm.
But, either way, you know, I had no idea where Afghanistan was.
I had no idea what, you know, terrorism really was.
And if I had heard the reasons that Osama bin Laden stated for, you know, starting a war against us, I wouldn't have known what any of those were, either.
So, I mean, it really was, you know, that South Park where one of the kids' moms is just sitting in front of the TV and she's just staring at the replay over and over and over again.
And I feel like that's what a lot of people were doing.
And to discuss even, even at that point, I assume it was, I didn't have the capability to discuss the history.
But, at that point, I assume you were just, you know, absolutely pilloried for trying to bring up any sort of historical culpability on the part of the United States.
Yeah, well, or any kind of context to any of it.
I mean, there was a party line.
I remember driving down the road, listening to the radio, and this guy said, you know, it's just not right.
The mainstream media is doing a disservice to the American people for not explaining the cause of this and not explaining the context.
The American people need to know so we can make properly informed decisions about how to protect ourselves in this era.
And so, I'm here to tell you, it's Islam.
Islam is the devil, the devil.
I'm just going, no, no, no.
Oh, my God, we're so lost.
I actually had one of the hosts of one of the morning shows in Austin in my cab.
And I was telling him, but nobody can conquer Afghanistan.
Yeah, you can overthrow the government in the capital city.
Sure, that's easy.
But you can't actually, like, take over the place.
No one ever has.
And he's going, oh, you just don't know, never.
That was in, like, September of 2001.
What the hell do I know?
Apparently nothing.
We'll be right back with Mark Sheffield, policyonpoint.com, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Mark Sheffield from policyonpoint.com.
Ignorance or arrogance or both, the long war doctrine and post-911 foreign policy.
And part of this article, Mark, is you're talking about how, in a way, bin Laden got what he wanted.
In quite a few ways, really.
It seems like he got what he wanted.
He definitely got us to kind of step in it and go into Afghanistan, which, you know, I don't know.
In the article, I say that just had to be arrogance because, I mean, you have to assume that the senior military advisors to Bush knew their history at least a little bit.
And the easiest thing to learn from Afghan history in the little bit that I've studied it is just don't ever invade it.
Or at least don't ever try to occupy it.
You know, go on a punitive raid or something, but don't try to change the king and then, you know, stay there.
That's the worst thing to do, even in modern Afghan history.
Well, and they sort of went with that, and it coincided with the fact that they wanted to go to Iraq anyway.
And, you know, Tony Blair and Colin Powell had to beg, please, let's just bomb Afghanistan for a minute first, and then we'll do Iraq, you know?
I feel like he kind of used 9-11 as a way to get to further what he wanted to do.
Maybe not overtly, but in the back of his mind, he probably wanted a little bit to go get Saddam.
9-11 just kind of served as that, you know, it gave it a nice little punch if you could now go to war because of 9-11.
And, I don't know, it was just really, it served as a way easily for him to spread lies about whatever the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection is, something like that.
It made it a lot easier to convince the public that this was something that needed to be done for some reason.
And that one, I would mostly say it's just ignorance, because when you look at it, what other outcome could this be if you topple the minority Sunni regime, and it's right by Iran?
Well, and that's the arrogance, too.
I mean, the whole idea here was that, hey, this is the USA with the Republicans in power, willing to use the military as much as they feel like, obviously not against any major powers who can fight back, but other than that, boy, they're willing to go for it.
And like Rumsfeld said, gloves off, do what you want kind of attitude for the use of the power.
They're unstoppable.
They're the greatest juggernaut of freedom and justice and greatness ever, ever.
No one can withstand them.
And so it was that kind of hubris where, you know, they just said, we'll just go in and whoever it is that we put in power of Iraq, they'll do what we say because it's what we say.
We make our own reality, as they bragged to Ron Susskind.
That must have been Karl Rove talking to Ron Susskind, right?
Well, it does seem like they kind of just adopted a posture that they thought they could just refute all history and rewrite it because they were, you know, America with Republicans in power.
You're right.
And, you know, bin Laden's son talked to Rolling Stone and said that his father was thrilled when the Republicans won the election in 2000 and saw George Bush and Dick Cheney.
And he said, oh, now these guys I'll be able to provoke into doing and to going overboard.
Clinton was too hobbled one way or the other all the time to ever do anything more than make matters worse with his cruise missiles.
You know, right.
But he said, oh, boy, I'm going to punch this George W.
Bush right in the mouth and then we'll see what he does from that.
And as far as I know, I mean, I might be wrong, but he didn't you know, he had no idea.
The Iraq war was just a windfall for a for bin Laden, excuse me.
And I can't believe it ever happened.
You know, I was still so young at that point.
I really didn't know what was going on.
But looking back on it, you know, all I have is hindsight.
So, you know, it's really easy for me to criticize it.
But, you know.
Well, look, a lot of people at the time were saying that.
I mean, that's the whole thing about Michael Sawyer and his book, Imperial Hubris, is he's saying that this is the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden, that it's fair to conclude the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally.
You know, for fun, I like to turn the 9-11 conspiracy theories upside down, where actually the neocons and, you know, the George Bush cabinet, that these guys were al-Qaeda moles, that there's nobody who could.
Look, how else in the world could any power, I mean, other than the Russians launching all their nukes at us or something like that, how could any power take down America?
The only thing you can do is get us to chase you down a bunch of stairs and get us to trip and stumble and hurt ourselves.
You know, come on.
It's not that hard.
It's judo.
How does a little person fight a giant person?
You know?
Right.
And, I mean, what I think is really the long-term problem that we face, at least with regard to, you know, defense budgets and empire, I guess, would be how to make it politically tenable for people to vote for any reduction in overseas bases.
And, I mean, I assume, I haven't read their defense cut budget bill.
You know, maybe they are cutting some bases, but either way the defense budget's not going down.
It's very cute.
They're making a big deal out of it, but it's only a handful of bases in Germany.
So, and I mean, also I read something by Stephen Waltz the other day.
He made a really good point.
Why do we still have land-based tactical nukes in Europe?
I mean, we always have our subs everywhere, and those things, as far as I'm concerned, are the biggest threat to civilization is those nuclear subs.
Right.
Well, that was Daniel Ellsberg's point.
He and a co-author wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor saying we could get rid of all of our land-based nukes in Europe or in America.
Why should North Dakota be a giant target for nuclear strikes?
We could deter any power in the whole world.
All of them combined forever with just our subs, like you just said.
Right.
And I think he's totally right.
I mean, things like that just pull, gradual pullback.
Because, like I say in the article, the, you know, there's thinkers like, you know, classic Cold War thinkers that just think whenever we pull back, Russia or China or Iran will rush into this, you know, the gap.
And I really don't think that the idea that Russia would in any way do it is plausible because they would just risk reversing our withdrawal because we're not completely weak like they were when they had to give up all their states.
And I just think that, you know, it eventually has to be politically tenable to start doing a full-scale withdrawal from around the globe and still be perfectly defensible.
Like you said, there's no existential threat to the U.S. except for Russia, and I don't really see them wanting that.
See, look, we're kind of fencing a new Cold War with this European defense shield.
They're not really, I don't really see them as threatening, aside from the fact that they, too, still have all these nuclear subs.
But, yeah, I think that we're the main aggressor in the world and that the problem is Americans think they're constantly under attack.
So that validates the aggression.
And that really is the irony of the situation is it's hard to find another war.
I mean, even Sudan and South Sudan now tangling again, that's America succeeded in negotiating that secession after there had been a peaceful ceasefire, kind of indefinite Korean War-type ceasefire, but it had been lasting for five years.
America engineered the secession and now they're back at war.
Other than that, where in the world is there a war where it's not America's war?
In Congo?
I don't know.
I suspect that's America, too, or at least as soon enough will be.
Yeah, I don't know enough about that one yet.
But, I mean, yeah, and like I think Chalmers Johnson said, you can either go the way of the Romans or the British.
You can either lash out like a dying beast and then, you know, just get picked apart by a bunch of small little enemies, or you can try to save your civil society.
And, you know, Britain's still a strong power, of course, but they gave up a huge part of their empire.
And now they still maintain some sort of democracy, at least.
You know, their civil rights might be going away just like ours are, but either way, I would much rather have gone out the way the British did than the Romans.
Right.
Or even the Russian way is better than going out the way the Japanese and the Germans did by getting bombed off the face of the earth by the United States.
You know, that kind of thing could happen to us, too.
You know, that's the real hard way.
Forget the fall of the Roman Empire.
How about the fall of the Japanese one, man?
They got nuked.
They got burnt to the ground.
Yeah, I just don't see that happening to the U.S., though.
I mean, it's still incredibly powerful.
I don't know.
I don't see it happening like a violent outside overthrow of the United States.
I just don't see it happening.
Well, you know, there's always Georgia.
You know, Dick Cheney urged George Bush to launch missiles at the Russians coming under the Caucasus Mountains when Georgia invaded South Ossetia back in the summer of 2008.
And it was only the calm patience and wisdom of George W. Bush that stayed his, you know, power and bloodlust.
That could have been a real deal.
And, in fact, the same thing happened under Bill Clinton when Wesley Clark, the Supreme Commander of NATO in 1999, ordered the troops to take the Pristina Airport, which had already been taken by the Russians.
And it was a British general who simply, through insubordination, just refused to carry out the orders.
So, you know, as long as...
You mentioned the missile defense system there in Europe.
As long as we're over there messing around on Russia's frontier, that danger is not over.
No, not at all.
Doesn't seem like to me.
I mean, it's our decision to not make that missile shield.
So, you know, it's not really...
The Russians just are going to have to respond if we move forward with it.
It destroys the parity underlying START treaty.
Well, and, you know, there's this guy named Klaus Ehrich, who he posts in the comments section, I think, of every interview I've ever done on antiwar.com, about a guy named Bob Aldrich, who I can't interview because he's deaf, and I don't know how I'd arrange all that.
But, anyway, his point is that the entire European missile shield is based upon the premise of gaining a first-strike capability against the Russians, who, I guess they're already on launch on warning mode, but they've got a launch on even shorter notice mode, if they mean for any of their land-based nukes to survive our first strike.
It basically, in the minds of the Pentagon anyway, it gives them SWAT team-style overwhelming force in the first strike so that the Russians don't even have a chance to fight back, and therefore undoes the threat of mutually assured destruction, and just means that the Russians got to get that closer to their hair trigger to respond.
And it sure sounds good to me, sounds right to me.
And it means they have to move more missiles over, because whether it's a first-strike capability or an anti-missile defense system, then they have to account for some level of attrition, you know, whenever we shoot our interceptors at their missiles.
So whenever we put our missiles on their border, they automatically have to put more missiles on their border, regardless of whether they want to or not, just to maintain the level.
And then the Western media will say, oh no, the Russians are putting more missiles on their border, and it'll be the Russians' fault.
But that's not going to be, hopefully, until 2020 or something, whenever they finish that thing.
Right.
Well, I don't know, it might take a lot longer than that, if they can make more money that way.
Anyway, I'm sorry, we're over time and we've got to go, but thank you very much for your writing and your time on the show today.
Hey, thanks a lot.
As always.
I'm Mark Sheffield, everybody.
The blog is policyonpoint.com.
The article is called Ignorance or Arrogance or Both?
The Long Word Doctrine and Post-9-11 U.S. Foreign Policy.
Well worth a read there today.
