08/31/10 – Robert Naiman – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Robert Naaman, he is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, of course that is JustForeignPolicy.org online.
Mr. Naaman edits the Just Foreign Policy Daily News Summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at the Huffington Post, he's the President of the Board of Truthout.
Welcome to the show, how's it going?
It's good to be with you.
Well, I'm happy you're here.
So, today's the big day, according to Fox News, top of the hour, the end of the war, and Joe Biden snuck into Iraq last night to declare victory and Obama's going to give a big speech tonight, and so everybody can get down on their knees and worship Lord Obama for coming through on his wonderful promise, right?
Well, I hope not.
First of all, the war is not over.
Even if you spend more than seven seconds reading the print media, even the Washington Post editorial board, that totally supports the war, always supported the war, said in an editorial, the war is not over.
You still have 50,000 troops there, they've been rebranded from combat brigades to advise and assist brigades, but they're still carrying guns, still carrying out military operations, they're still killing, and they're still being killed.
So, the war is not over.
I give Obama some credit for following through with his promise to reduce the 50,000 troops, I give Obama some credit for continuing to insist that all U.S. troops will be out by the end of 2011, as specified in the signed agreement between the United States government and the Iraqi government.
I give him credit for that, because there's a lot of counter-pressure.
There are a lot of people in Washington who supported the war originally, who have not given up on the idea of the United States having a permanent military garrison in Iraq to protect power in the region.
That struggle is not over, and it won't be over until all the troops are out, consistent with the agreement.
So, I think it's important to keep an eye on that, because there are forces that are trying to undermine that.
At the same time, one cannot celebrate, certainly, any kind of victory, any kind of success, any kind of win.
This war has been a total catastrophe for the United States, it's been a total catastrophe for the people of Iraq.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, there are more than a million refugees, there's been a tremendous human suffering has been unleashed on Americans and Iraqis, as a result of the illegal decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq, and as a result of the decision by the U.S. Congress at that time to support that, and by the U.S. media at that time to support that.
Not only that, but one of the things that President Obama is going to do in his speech, according to Press Report, is pivot from Iraq to Afghanistan.
So, at the same time, we'll be celebrating or marking, or whatever we'll be doing, the drawdown of 50,000 troops in Iraq, we'll be marking the escalation in Afghanistan, which is certainly contrary to the broad promise of peace that President Obama was elected on, if not actually contrary to the fine print of what he was saying at the time, which many people weren't paying attention to, namely that he did, without specifying detail, that he did intend to escalate in Afghanistan.
There's now three times as many U.S. troops in Afghanistan as there were when President Obama took office.
More U.S. soldiers have died in Afghanistan since President Obama was inaugurated than died in Afghanistan under President Bush.
So there's certainly nothing to celebrate there, and I think people ought to ask, as President Obama correctly withdraws U.S. troops from Iraq, why the same logic doesn't apply to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan?
If we can withdraw from Iraq, why can we not also withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan?
Yeah, especially when, under the narrative, it's the same counterinsurgency doctrine in a place where it's much less likely to work, the same counterinsurgency doctrine that Obama opposed as a senator when it was being implemented in Iraq.
It's the same doctrine that he opposed.
He made the argument at the time that perfect security in Iraq cannot be the bar for U.S. withdrawal, because if we make that the bar, then we'll never leave.
Of course, some people don't want to ever leave, and that's why they try to make perfect security the bar.
The same thing, the same considerations hold for Afghanistan.
In fact, as the United States has added more troops, violence in Afghanistan has spread.
So we're not making Afghanistan more safe for the Afghan people by our military presence.
We're not making Americans safer by our military presence.
There was an item in the last week, General, the head of U.S. Special Forces said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have actually degraded the U.S. ability to hunt terrorists' ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Now, regardless of how big a threat you think that is, according to him, it's a big threat.
The threat's been never greater.
And yet, this threat that's been never greater is something that the U.S. ability to confront has been degraded by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because these Special Forces guys who are the specialists on hunting terrorists' ability to possess weapons of mass destruction, they're not doing that.
They're fighting counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're not training to hunt terrorists.
They're busy fighting counterinsurgency against, in the case of Afghanistan, against the Taliban insurgency, which is largely devoted to driving out the foreign forces.
So it doesn't make any sense.
The policy that we have now in Afghanistan makes no more sense than the policy in Iraq that Senator Obama and Candidate Obama opposed.
Well, I always like to do the counterfactual, because Harry Brown ran for president in the year 2000.
And I think if he had won, probably September 11th wouldn't have even happened, because he would have cut Israel and everybody else off the dole immediately, and he would have got the troops out of Saudi Arabia immediately.
The attack might have never even taken place.
But if it had taken place, of course, and he told me this himself when I asked him, his whole program would have been to do the most minimal response possible.
And of course, anyone could see, even, you know, whatever, if it was Ralph Nader or any decent person who was the president, regardless of their particular ideology, the way to actually fight a war on Al-Qaeda would be to, you know, expand Interpol a little bit and try to work with the national police in Kyrgyzstan or whatever.
You know, this is how you fight a war against a couple of dozen pirates on a rampage.
You don't declare war on 60 nations in the world.
That's a prescription, I think, pretty obviously, a deliberate one for creating more crises so they can have more wars, because that's what the Pentagon does for a living.
Well, the main thing that the United States should have done after September 11th is what it did do, which was reform its domestic security operation, which, you know, like 99.999% of Americans agree with.
Those guys should never have gotten on those planes, and they shouldn't have gotten on those planes with weapons.
Nobody should be allowed to get on planes with weapons, and those particular guys shouldn't have been allowed to get on any plane.
And the US government has conceded both those facts, those guys shouldn't have been allowed to get on those planes.
And it revamped its domestic security procedures, you know, as we all know from, you know, any flight that you've taken since September 11th, 2001, particularly in the immediate period afterwards.
Bush also immediately, well, at least immediately upon the invasion of Iraq, got the bases out of Saudi Arabia.
He kept them, of course, in Bahrain on the Arabian Peninsula.
But Paul Wolfowitz even said, great, now that we've invaded Iraq, we can get our bases out of Saudi Arabia, which is the motivation for these guys to join the bin Laden night group and their war.
Well, that's exactly right.
And I think that the that's one of the real connections between September 11th, and the US invasion of Iraq is that people in the elite in the United States, I mean, senior State Department guy, tell me this directly.
They drew the conclusion from September 11, that the US relations with Saudi Arabia weren't sustainable.
And we need a new base of operations in the Middle East to get our troops out of calm everyone down.
We'll just invade Iraq and kill hundreds of 1000s of people there.
All right, hold it there, everybody.
It's Robert Neyman from the Huffington Post and a lot of other places just foreign policy, and we'll be right back.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Robert Neyman, from just foreign policy, a truth dig and the Huffington Post.
And, you know something, Robert, I gotta tell you, one thing that really got me thinking the other day was a friend on the Facebook sent me a link to a best of George W. Bush, acting like an idiot, you know, trying to open the door that was just the prop in China and stumbling through putting food on your family and all these things.
It's just what a goofball he is.
So I was watching that laughing.
And what occurred to me was just how long ago that was already.
And how it's almost like when you hear older people talk about the eyes, it was the Eisenhower era or something like it's this period of time, an era, I guess, is really the best word for it.
That's over now.
And the Iraq war was part of that.
And it's, it feels like even in my own mind, even though I cover the Iraq war every day, but just my own understanding of the rest of the society and whatever and what people are thinking.
It's like we're racing to just put that whole chapter behind us, like Korea, the forgotten war, we thought we liked Truman, and then look what he did kind of thing where, where we just want to forget about it and make Iraq the new forgotten war.
You think that's right?
Well, it's definitely the case that a lot of people would like to forget about Iraq.
And it's definitely the case that it's not right to do so.
Particularly because, you know, if we agree that the war in Iraq was a disaster, then we ought to think about what got us into it, and how to avoid that turn in the future.
You know, we're going to be next year, the United States will have been at war for 10 years.
And, you know, the very the, the notion that we have, traditional notion that we have of war is something finite, like, you know, you go to war, and then the war is over, and then you're not a war anymore.
But we're in danger of becoming a country that's always at war.
You know, Andrew Bacevich talks about the permanent war in his new book.
And we are kind of in a permanent war.
There's no, you know, if we, we hope that they will fulfill the agreement by the end of 2011, all the US troops will be out of Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is building long term military bases in Afghanistan.
No one will talk about when US troops are coming out of Afghanistan.
Next July, President Obama promised to start reducing from the from the last surge.
But there's no discussion about, you know, when will it be the case that there will be no US troops in Afghanistan?
That's not even a discussion.
Nevermind, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Philippines, all places where the United States is conducting offensive military operations.
Are we ever going to be at peace?
When are we ever the United States?
When are we going to be at peace?
And do we want to be at Sparta?
That's a war around the world all the time.
Can we at least have a discussion about it?
I think if people you know, before we can leave Iraq behind, we need to have a discussion about President Obama said, I don't want to just end the war.
I want to end the mindset that leads to war.
Okay, let's get started.
We don't seem to have made much progress in that regard.
No, definitely not.
Well, and you know, I think, well, and we kind of had this same conversation in different contexts with Max Blumenthal earlier about Israel, but it's America's really the same thing.
It's, it's what Garrett Garrett called the complex of fear and vaunting, where on one hand, we're number one, we're the best, we're the greatest, no one can touch us.
And on the other hand, Oh, boo hoo, we're so afraid everyone's trying to kill us all the time.
And, and the world is such a dangerous place.
I mean, how many times have you heard people say that cliche on TV?
And even though there are no powers anywhere in the world that are enemies of the United States, we got one band of pirates to deal with.
And, and we pretend like we must direct all this fire outward at all times, or we'll all die.
They'll push us all into the Mediterranean Sea.
Yeah, what are we doing here in the Mediterranean Sea that we can be pushed into it?
Right?
How did we end up with a border conflict with the Russians in Georgia?
You know, like, are you sure we have a border on the in the Caucasus Mountains?
I can't even say right.
Yeah, I think that the, you know, the majority of the American people have not signed up for the project of trying to run the world.
It's not in their interest, doesn't make them better off, gets our young people killed, cost trillions of dollars, makes people around the world hate us.
And it's not in the interest of the majority of Americans.
But unfortunately, our political institutions and our media institutions, you know, the powerful ones are not yet ready to to have this discussion got Secretary of Defense Gates saying that the US military in this time when, you know, everybody's talking about it, oh, the deficit, oh, cutting the budget, except that the US military, they should get guaranteed an increase, really, after inflation, they should get an increase, while everything else is cut, got bases all over the world, conducting offensive military operations in at least six countries.
There is a contradiction here.
And we need to have a national conversation about what our priorities are.
We know what what the priorities of, you know, Robert Gates and Council of Foreign Relations are, but those aren't necessarily the priorities of the majority of America.
Well, and, you know, it's funny, too, to me that it seems like there's about as much dissent as a man could hope for, among the power elite, or at least, you know, a reluctance to continue on this path.
And right at the time when, you know, the other 80% of the American people who aren't in charge, need to be the loudest saying, Yeah, exactly.
That's what we're saying, get out of there.
We're tired of this.
And the anti war movement's gone, because geez, we like Barack Obama.
He's the same guy from, you know, the the peace bumper sticker.
And, and after all, what do you prefer Michelle Bachmann in them.
And so the entire anti war movement is just laid down for for Barack and Hillary to kill whoever they want.
No, I don't think that's true at all.
I don't think the anti war movement has laid down.
You know, the, for example, on October 2, there's a big mobilization in Washington, that many peace groups are involved in peace action, United for Peace and Justice.
This few months ago, there was a big push for a representative McGovern's bill trying to compel the President to establish the timetable for military withdrawal in Afghanistan.
I see a lot of activity, you know, it may not, I think, if you compare it to 2006, it seems like, Oh, my gosh, you know, where did all the protesters go?
But if you think back to 2003, 2004, there was this tremendous upsurge around the world, massive, you know, February 2003, massive protest movement around the Iraq war, and then against the Iraq war, then the war happened.
And, you know, there were protests for a while, and, and people, you know, then the protest, they then look, well, you know, we protested.
And, you know, they went to war anyway.
And then things were quiet for a while, people were trying to make them not be quiet.
But, you know, the bunch of anti war activists can say, let's have a good demonstration, other people have to cooperate.
But the so I think, you know, we've seen these ups and downs before.
But I see tremendous dissent around the country, people trying to do stuff, people trying to have demonstrations, people trying to lobby Congress, people are doing stuff, I think.
And I think it's going to grow in the coming.
I think it's going to grow in the coming months.
Well, I sure hope you're right.
And it's nice to end the interview on a positive note for a change.
Everybody, that's Robert Naaman.
You can read what he writes at the Huffington Post and at just foreign policy.org.
Thanks very much for your time.
It's great to be with you.