Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is AntiWar.com's editor, Matt Bargainere.
You can find his archives of all his old articles at AntiWar.com/Bargainere.
And that Liberty Stickers commercial, Matt, welcome to the show.
Hi, Scott.
The Liberty Stickers commercial reminded me with you on hold there of a Liberty Sticker that I stole from your article.
Dude, you like got totally blamed, which was a glossary for these times that you wrote back in, I don't know, 03 or 04 or something like that.
And the definition of democratically, as you had it in there, was how civilized people oppress, loot, and murder one another, as opposed to the informal methods of barbarians.
And I like that one so much I made a Liberty Sticker out of it, and they still get rid of those up there.
I was asking Rick just a couple weeks ago about that.
So thanks for your contribution to Liberty Stickers, and that's a great article, not just that one.
There's plenty more hilarity where that came from if you go back to Matt's archives and find it.
Dude, you just like got totally blamed.
Does anyone remember who Valerie Plame was at this late date?
I don't know.
I know you do, of course.
Yeah, probably not.
Yeah, she was the one that Dick Cheney used to destroy the CIA's investigation into Iran's participation in nuclear black markets, and then of course they made it look like they were just attacking the husband for debunking the Nigerian forgeries, but really they wanted to be able to lie about Iran easier by shutting down the CIA's operation and finding out the truth about what they were doing.
As we all know, I think it was Gordon Prather was probably the first one that put those together in the correct order.
Right.
Good old Gordon.
I miss him.
So anyway, you're the editor of Antiwar.com, and I brought you on the show to wonder to you what you've been running this week and how come.
Well, Scott, we have several interesting things.
I don't know how many I'll be able to get to, but I want to lead off with today's spotlight by HDS Greenway of the Boston Globe.
It's called The Sign of Weakness in the Propaganda of War.
Greenway compares the last throes sort of propaganda that the U.S. government is putting out now about what's happening in Afghanistan with similar language going back to Vietnam in which American officials act as if attacks by insurgents or rebels or whomever are signs of desperation, signs of weakness.
And this is a recurrent theme in U.S. government propaganda, and yet it never seems to actually be true.
Right, yeah, that's a very interesting story.
I, of course, am very familiar with this line from the worst days of the Iraq War, before they bought off the Sunni insurgency after the Civil War had been pretty much lost by them.
But I had never heard this one from Vietnam, that yeah, we found the dead anti-aircraft gunners there, and they had been chained by the communists to their guns.
And they only fight us because they're forced by the communists to fight against us, otherwise they would all welcome us with open arms and the war would be going great.
Yeah, I thought that was an interesting note that Greenway included.
It's too bad David Beto isn't still on the line, we could ask him.
I bet you there's pieces of BS about American occupations going all the way back that say pretty much the same thing, right?
The Battle of the Bulge.
Probably so, but I think that this one in particular is probably a more recent vintage.
The idea that the people in the occupied country are being, that either their apparent successes are signs of weakness, or that they're being forced to fight, or that they're just about to give up, probably goes hand in hand with a more recent phenomenon of this pretense that U.S. forces are there to actually liberate people.
If it's actually more or less a straightforward war of conquest, then you don't really have to engage in that particular type of propaganda, right?
You don't have to say that they're on their last legs and they're really only fighting because someone's compelling them to.
You just say something like, well, we just keep going until we crush all of them.
The other side of this is if that's just weak propaganda, specifically in the case of this war in Afghanistan, what does it really mean that we have all these highest level assassinations and attacks on hotels full of diplomats and U.N. people and whoever in Kabul on a regular basis now?
Right.
Whether it's a sign of weakness or not would seem to be irrelevant.
As Greenway points out, these sorts of insurgent, non-state militias are weak relative to their opponents.
I mean, that's just a given.
They don't have access to the same weapons, they don't have the same numbers, and thus they have to adapt their tactics to their situation.
But, you know, these sorts of assassinations are extremely disruptive to the U.S. occupying forces and their local puppets.
So, the fact that it's a sign of weakness is irrelevant.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems to me like a sign of strength.
I mean, hell, it was just, what, a year ago they completely withdrew from the Korengal Valley after fighting for years and years and years.
They had their little fort there for a while, and they just gave it up.
I mean, there's no reason to think that, you know, other than last-ditch attacks on hotels because we've got their backs to the wall or whatever, that that's the truth.
It seems like, you know, there's no reason to think that they're on the run anywhere except back to their safe havens, which they seem to have plenty of, you know?
Yeah.
I'm sure the war will be won if we just give them another 10 or 15 years over there, man.
Probably so.
Actually, I know how we can win the war in Afghanistan.
It's pretty simple.
We just have to use hydrogen bombs and kill them all, and then we'll win.
Yeah, and that's always been, you know, there have always been people who've said that.
You still hear people say that regarding Vietnam, you know, the myth about the U.S. fighting with one hand tied behind its back and all of that.
Right.
During the campaign, Obama and Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other, got into an argument about this when he was asked, he said, I'm going to spread this war into Pakistan, and a reporter said, well, would you use nukes?
And he said, no, I wouldn't use nukes.
And then Hillary Clinton attacked him and said, you don't ever say who you won't use nukes against.
And he agreed and said, yeah, I shouldn't have said that.
Yes, we might use nukes in Pakistan.
And, of course, as soon as he has wrapped up the nomination and then the presidency, his first step is to appoint Hillary, who, you know, the major difference between the two was supposed to be foreign policy.
They basically agreed on everything else, and he appoints her to the top foreign policy position.
So, you know, that was really probably all anyone needed to know about Barack Obama right there.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and even nominating Joe Biden, it seemed to me like, you know, here McCain's entire platform was experience and consistency.
And then he brings on this newbie and completely screwed up his whole narrative there.
And then Obama is saying hope and change.
And then he brings on Joe Biden, the John McCain of the Democratic Party to be his vice president.
That was before even the election and the choosing of Hillary, which everybody knew she was going to get some kind of high-level position anyway.
But anyway, yeah, I guess there are people still buying it, you know, as long as they're watching MSNBC.
All right.
Well, so what else you got on antiwar.com today?
One of the other ones from today that's interesting to me, because it's a country that we don't cover very much in the opinion section, though we occasionally have some news articles about it, is an article called The Folly of More Burma Sanctions by David Steinberg, which appeared in The Diplomat yesterday.
I thought it was interesting because we don't run a lot of opinion pieces on Burma, in part because the U.S. hasn't invaded it yet and hasn't really made a lot of noises about doing so.
But it has placed sanctions on Burma for quite a while now.
And so his article is about the renewal of those sanctions or the extension of them.
And what's interesting about it to me is this idea that sanctions, and we've heard this going back into the 90s about Iraq, that sanctions are an alternative to war rather than, you know, simply a different form of war or a precursor to war, as they often are.
And secondly, that sanctions actually will help the people inside the country, when that's what they're intended to do.
And that's the pretext for the Burma sanctions, is that they will help Burmese citizens.
And Steinberg makes a good argument that that's just not true.
And I think that that can be extended to most other cases of sanctions, that they do absolutely nothing to help dissidents within the country or just ordinary working people.
Right, well, and he doesn't even...
I guess it's sort of like the defense resting without even bothering to make a case because they know that they won on the cross-examination of the state, you know, where he doesn't even bring up Iraq.
You know, here we have this blockade against Iraq for more than a decade, under the pretext that this was supposed to make the Iraqi people so miserable and so powerless to improve their situation that they would somehow just risk all and die rising up in unison to overthrow Saddam Hussein, right?
And that never happened.
Right, and we see the same thing happening with Iran, with so many other countries that get targeted for these sanctions.
The one thing that it certainly does is it gives the state an external bogeyman, you know, someone to blame all of the people's problems on.
It creates a rally around the flag effect within the country, at least to some extent.
The one thing it most certainly does not do is help anyone who is perceived to be against the state.
So in cases where, as in Burma, where there are political dissidents and there's a lot of political repression, those dissidents, although sometimes they support the sanctions themselves, they're not being helped by it.
You know, this just helps the state portray them as in league with the United States and other external powers.
And in many of these countries which have a colonial past, that's really not good.
You know, you don't want to be perceived as on the side of the former colonial power or the new colonial power.
Well, and that's what's going on in Syria right now, right?
I think it was Jason Ditz said on the show yesterday or the day before, I can't keep track, about this is one of the effects of what's going on in Syria.
They can only intervene so much, but the extent that they do intervene, showing up, the ambassadors showing up in Hama and saying, yay, we support the revolution in Syria, is the very worst thing that they could do.
Right, to the point that you have to wonder whether it's just stupidity, which is always a possibility as we see with the Libya intervention.
I think that that's just a clear case of stupidity rather than evil genius, or whether in some cases this sort of intervention on the side of the dissidents is not some sort of cynical ploy just to exacerbate the crisis within the country, whether or not it helps any of the people who are actually being oppressed.
Well, and even in this case, I can see why the State Department types would prefer Assad to whatever's going to happen after he goes, if he's going to go.
Oh, sure, yeah, I mean, you know, the devil may know and everything.
Right.
All right, now, before we get to yesterday and the day before, I wanted to ask you about this one by Gene Healy that's on the site today.
It's in the Washington Examiner.
Have neocons lost the GOP?
And I wonder, having read this and knowing what you know about American politics and foreign policy, do you think that they've really taken a hit?
Because it seems like even though the actual individual neocons were discredited and forced out of the Bush administration after the first term, they really still maintain a monopoly on foreign policy opinion in the Republican Party.
Up until very recently, maybe they still do.
What do you think?
Yeah, it's hard to say.
Often the debates within the Republican Party are between neocons and just some other sort of hawk, just more classical, traditional hawks, you know, people who grew up in the Cold War and just see American hegemony as a natural thing but don't necessarily have some sort of big ideological framework for it like the neocons do and aren't necessarily as attached to certain pet causes such as Israel or Kosovo or whatever.
So, yeah, it can be very difficult to tell, especially within presidential politics, because most of the politicians, I mean, other than Ron Paul or very few exceptions like him, most of them have very muddled foreign policy messages.
I mean, that extends to their domestic policy ideas too, and there's combinations of ideas that they sort of halfway picked up from papers written for them by their staffers.
And so trying to tease out a coherent foreign policy from someone like Michelle Bachmann or Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney is, you know, it may not be worth your time.
But, yeah, it does seem that the Republican candidates are, if not exactly less hawkish than in years past, less specifically neocons in their hawkishness.
Right.
Well, you know, I'm not sure if you saw that one by Eli Lake, I guess late last week in the Washington Times, about it seems like Michelle Bachmann, even though she came out on the good side in Libya, is a Frank Gaffney-ist of reasons that, you know, anything that smells like democracy in the Middle East is just cover for the Islamists taking over.
And so that's why she's against the war in Libya.
And it seems like anybody running around with Frank Gaffney is going to be trouble.
Yeah, well, that's exactly it.
Many of these people, and Sarah Palin was another good example of it, and not to pick on her because, you know, John McCain was an example of this too, they just don't, they're not particularly deep thinkers.
And when it comes to foreign policy, they're kind of led around by people within the movement who write the op-eds that end up being selected for these politicians by their staffers.
And so the fact that they can lurch from being these Jacksonians one day to being these neocons the next is really not that surprising.
They don't see any inconsistency between those two positions, to the extent that there is any.
But yeah, I mean, any sort of decrease in the influence of the neocons within both parties is a good thing, and I think that we have seen some of that.
Well, hopefully some more.
I'm really worried.
I think the American people are just going to love Rick Perry when they get to know him, and they're saying, I think it's that same Eli Lake piece, he's running around with Douglas Fyfe and Bill Lutie.
I mean, not just Bill Crystal and the gang from the magazines, but the actual guys from the Office of Special Plans that lied us into war in Iraq.
Yeah, I think Perry will be a strong candidate in the Republican primaries if he declares.
Oh man, that's probably the worst possible thing that could happen, I think.
I can't think of anything worse than that.
All right, well, now listen, I want to go back to something that you did on Monday, I think it was.
You ran two pieces about the war on whistleblowers, one by Glenn Greenwald, and another by a guy named Mark Adamanis.
What should happen to the Tbilisi bombing leaker about the war against whistleblowers who declassified data to journalists?
Is that a big issue with you?
Yeah, I mean, it's a big issue for the side.
Of course, we cover all of the new stuff about WikiLeaks and the like.
The Adamanis piece is particularly interesting, because he's raising this question about why there's such a double standard with leaks.
Leaks tend to further the U.S. government's position, or the positions of certain hawkish factions within the U.S. government.
The question is never even raised who did the leaking, and what should happen to them.
So we see that leaks are only bad when they embarrass the U.S. government.
Right, which I love that term, because they could ever lead to accountability.
Embarrassment is the worst thing they could possibly suffer, but they'll nail a man to a tree for it, you know?
Why don't you do it?
All right, well, thanks very much for your time.
I'm sorry we've got to go, because we're all out of it.
But I appreciate it, Matt.
All right, thanks.
