All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Steven M.
Walt.
He teaches international affairs at Harvard university's Kennedy school of government.
He keeps a blog at the foreign policy website.
That's walt.foreignpolicy.com.
And he's famously the coauthor of the Israel lobby and us foreign policy with John J.
Mearsheimer.
Welcome to the show, Steven.
How are you doing?
I'm doing just fine.
Nice to be here.
I'm very happy to have you back on the show.
I wanted to ask you about this piece you wrote, I guess, a couple of weeks back.
Uh, when did the American empire start to decline?
And, uh, it's got a big picture of Saddam Hussein on it right there.
And, uh, you know, I guess, I don't know.
I'll save my funny thing I want to say till the end.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about, uh, you know, why it is you wrote this?
What was so significant to you about the anniversary of, uh, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait back in 1990?
Right.
Uh, I wrote it to coincide with the 21st anniversary of the day that, uh, the Saddam Hussein and Iraq invaded Kuwait.
And obviously this sort of discussion is always a little bit arbitrary, but to me, that marked, uh, what you might think of as the high watermark of American dominance.
Uh, this is back in 1990, 91, the Soviet union, uh, is in the process of falling apart.
The Berlin wall has come down, uh, and the invasion of Kuwait then of course led the United States to assemble a large coalition and to toss Iraq out, uh, of Kuwait, uh, in the process, destroying much of Iraq's military power.
And I think demonstrating a really an extraordinary military capacity that, uh, even some Americans had underestimated, thought the war was going to be much more difficult than it was.
Uh, so there is this moment where you see the United States really almost at the pinnacle of its power.
Uh, it has virtually all the other major powers behind it.
It is leading this large coalition.
It's demonstrating now that there really isn't any conventional military power that could stand up to it.
Uh, and it has extraordinary, uh, diplomatic influence, uh, including influence in the region.
And the argument of my piece is that if you then consider the various decisions that flowed from that victory in the first Gulf war, uh, they all have led to an undermining of America's global position.
Uh, we proceeded to both, uh, make some big mistakes, uh, in the nineties and even more, uh, after, uh, September 11th, but we also failed to exploit some of the opportunities that we might've had, uh, given the position we were in at the end of the first Gulf war.
So for me, that was the moment where we sort of reached our peak and the United States is still very powerful and very influential.
Uh, it's been downhill ever since.
Well, now that war was sold at the time as a quick and easy kind of thing.
We're going to go liberate the people of Kuwait, nevermind their system of government we're fighting to reinstall.
Uh, we'll not have any discussion of that, but it'll be, you know, real quick and fun operation yellow ribbon.
In fact, Robert Perry at consortium news, uh, the great reporter argues that the overriding aim of the first Gulf war was to, to beat that Vietnam nom syndrome, to, uh, beat it once and for all to get the American people back on board for empire.
This was their unipolar moment with the fall of Soviet union and they wanted to seize it and they needed to get the American people on board.
They were going to have this almost made for TV kind of war to get Americans chanting, you know, USA, we're number one and we're on board for this kind of thing from now on.
And yet, you know, here we are in 2011, we're still in Iraq trying to negotiate staying longer.
It looks like.
Well, a couple of points.
One is if you go back and look at the debate prior to the first Gulf war, there was actually a serious debate about whether or not using military force was a good idea or not.
And even, uh, you know, president Bush, the elder president Bush was not entirely clear at the very beginning if that's what he was going to do or if he was going to simply send some troops to prevent an assault on Saudi Arabia or perhaps rely on economic sanctions.
Uh, Congress was in fact divided on this issue, uh, and wasn't sure it was a good idea.
And there were plenty of people, including plenty of American Hawks who were warning that, uh, you know, Oh gee, we're going to have real trouble here.
We might have thousands of casualties.
This could be really difficult.
I think the American military was actually pretty confident that it was not going to be a difficult victory because they understood, uh, that, uh, Iraq had a pretty third rate, a third rate army.
The other point to remember about the first Gulf war is that president Bush, again, the elder president Bush, uh, and, uh, secretary of defense, Dick Cheney understood that trying to go to Baghdad and take over Iraq and run it ourselves was a completely idiotic idea that would lead to some sort of, uh, deep quagmire.
And so you, I think you can actually credit the first Bush administration for a certain amount of, uh, intelligence, strategic judgment.
It's the second Bush administration, George W.
Bush, the son that voluntarily decided to go invade Iraq and it led to all the problems that we've faced, uh, ever since.
But in many respects, I don't think the first Gulf war was, was an ill chosen war.
And I actually don't believe it was fought just to overcome the Vietnam syndrome.
Uh, I think, uh, you can make arguments pro and con here, but they understood, I think both the strategic necessity there, but also the limits of what military power could and could not do.
Well, but it does seem strange, doesn't it?
From 2011, looking back and seeing the, you know, the lone remaining superpower, uh, for intents and purposes picked this one third world nation to be our whipping boy for a generation, and we've just about destroyed ourselves in doing so.
Helpless Iraq that could have never threatened us in 500 years.
Yeah, well, there were two big, uh, blunders made.
And the first blunder was the Clinton administration's decision to adopt a policy.
What was known as dual containment prior to the first Gulf war, the United States had kept its own military forces out of the Persian Gulf region.
We occasionally would send ships in there, but we did not send ground troops.
We did not keep air forces there.
Uh, we relied on a balance of power and we shifted sides.
We relied on local allies of different sorts.
So we really minimized our military role in the region as much as possible.
And that worked reasonably well, not perfectly, but reasonably well.
It was also relatively inexpensive, which was nice.
After the first Gulf war, after we had smashed Iraq's military power, we then foolishly decided we were going to try to contain Iraq and Iran simultaneously.
This was really an odd strategy because we were basically pitting ourselves against two countries that hated each other and would have been fine balancing each other off what we had done in the past.
Dual containment, of course, forced us to keep lots of troops in Saudi Arabia and lots of troops in Kuwait and to fly a constant air patrols over no fly zones and all sorts of things like that, which incidentally is one of the things that inspired Osama bin Laden to target Al Qaeda at the United States.
In fact, he didn't like having all those American troops in Saudi Arabia.
Right?
So there was a big price we paid with dual containment.
Now, dual containment was a blunder.
The next blunder was after September 11th when George Bush and the neoconservatives foolishly decided it was time for regional transformation.
It's time for the United States to take its military, invade a bunch of countries, install pro-American governments and solve the entire region.
Iraq, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was supposed to be the first step in this process.
And unfortunately, we all know how it turned out.
It was a fool's errand from the very beginning.
It's been immensely costly to the United States.
It's destroyed that balance of power in the Gulf.
In fact, enhanced Iran's strategic position, given it something of an ally in Iraq now.
So that was the second of the two errors.
And of the two, I think it's the larger.
Well, yeah, given that it's cost us a couple of trillion dollars and we're not done yet.
Right now on the dual containment in the 1990s, you couldn't have been the only one who saw that that was a bad idea in real time back then.
I'm just guessing that you must have told somebody about your opinion at the time.
Was there a good reason?
Was there an argument on the other side for why we ought to do this?
Well, the there were a number of critics of dual containment.
Those were the Clinton years.
We can't say it was Paul Wolfowitz's doctrine, can we?
No, there were critics, of course.
Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a very good article criticizing dual containment.
Dual containment was actually dreamed up primarily by Martin Indyk, who now is an official at Brookings, had been assistant secretary of state for the Near East Affairs and ambassador to Israel.
And this was part of it actually was closely connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This is, remember, the period of the Oslo peace accords.
And the US administration, the Clinton administration, believed that if they agreed to sort of take on the job of containing Iraq and containing Iran, this would make Israel feel more secure and therefore Israel would become more flexible in the peace process.
And this is, by the way, been documented by Ken Pollack, who works at Brookings, and by Trita Parsi, who's an Iranian-American scholar.
Both have shown very clearly that there was a link between dual containment and peace discussions that we were trying to get going.
But again, the problem was it didn't really make Israel more compliant and it put the United States in a position of taking on a bunch of burdens in the Persian Gulf that we really shouldn't have been trying to carry.
Well, and as bad as Saddam Hussein was, part of the war propaganda for the original Operation Desert Storm there in 1991 was that he was Hitler, that he was the worst monster the world had seen since Mao Zedong died or something.
And so that kind of stuck.
They couldn't really take that back and normalize relations with him in any way.
I think that there's some truth in that.
I mean, obviously, Saddam Hussein was a really thuggish guy and we don't need to try and defend his way of running Iraq.
But the fact is, we had collaborated with him in the 1980s.
We'd used him during the Iran-Iraq war.
The first Bush administration, in fact, they had tried to cultivate him, which is one of the reasons why he didn't take our possible opposition seriously when he decided to invade Kuwait.
More importantly, by the 1990s, we had developed such a malign image of him.
You know, he couldn't be trusted.
He would never tell us the truth.
He would never, he would always try and cheat us.
And he was, you know, as you would say, history's worst monster since whoever the last worst monster was.
This actually blinded us to the possibility that sometimes he might actually be telling us the truth.
So, in fact, after the United Nations went in and dismantled all of his weapons of mass destruction programs, you know, we kept pushing on this and the Iraqis kept telling us that they really didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, that they had, in fact, gotten rid of them.
And we refused to believe it in the run-up to the second Iraq war because we'd simply concluded that he could never be trusted and therefore we should never listen to anything they say.
Of course, when we got into Iraq, we discovered that they, in fact, had been telling us the truth.
They didn't have any weapons of mass destruction.
They had gotten rid of all of them.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, Cheney in his Veterans of Foreign War speech quoted Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, and said, oh, yeah, he admitted that they kept some weapons after the United, after they had claimed to have gotten rid of them all and then left out the rest of the story, that that was just in the beginning of 91, that the rest was destroyed by the end of 91 and that they knew all of this for a fact.
It was he even did an interview on CNN.
I saw it in 1996.
Right, right.
So that was a deliberate lie, that whole VFW speech that people go through.
You can see the reconstituted nuclear weapons program and all of those talking points are in there already.
I think there's no question that the second Bush administration deliberately misled the American people about the danger that Iraq posed precisely because they were trying to persuade people that what was, in fact, an unnecessary war was something that we absolutely had to fight.
And again, we will, as a country, we will be paying the price for that blunder for quite some time.
Well, now, again, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Stephen M.
Walt from ForeignPolicy.com, Walt.
ForeignPolicy.com and co-author of The Israel Lobby, the article and the book.
And you represent what's called the realist school, right?
Which is, you eschew ideology and you seek to simply look at statecraft from an objective point of view.
What's good for America?
Let's be prudent, as George Bush, Sr.would say, use our power wisely so we can keep it longer.
That kind of thing, right?
Yes, that's a good shorthand.
Realists would argue that the international politics is a competitive business.
There are security problems out there that you do have to, you can't be idealistic about thinking that you'll never face dangers and that you can rely simply on goodwill between states.
But on the other hand, realists warn that military power, though important, is a crude instrument.
It's difficult to control and that you want to be very careful in how you use military power.
I think most realists in the United States also understand that the United States is a very powerful and very secure country, that we are protected from most major powers by these two giant oceans.
We have a very large nuclear weapons capacity, which means no country can attack us directly without facing devastating retaliation.
And that we tend to make mistakes because we exaggerate foreign dangers.
We magnify them out of all proportion.
And this occasionally leads us into foolish adventures, as we've seen in Iraq, and I would argue, as we are seeing in Afghanistan as well.
Well, now that the era of the neoconservatives is supposedly over, does that mean that your point of view is again gaining currency in Washington, D.C.?
Because it seems like the policy is still what Richard Perle would have had us do.
Yeah, I'm not sure it's quite what Richard Perle would want, but I think the key to understanding that is that the view that the United States is destined to lead the world, and it's both in our interest and in our capacity to manage almost all of world affairs, is deeply wired into the American foreign policy establishment.
It is not just neoconservatives, for example, who believe that.
I think that's true of most of the what I would call liberal internationalists or less politely liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party.
So the Obama administration is populated in terms of its senior officials, primarily by people who supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
This is not a foreign policy that's being organized by moveon.org or by antiwar.com.
These are people who are very comfortable with the United States using its military power to try and shape events in different parts of the world.
And the view that the United States should maybe do a little bit less, not be Fortress America and not come back, not engage in radical disarmament, but have a smaller global military footprint that's more strategic, that puts more of the burden on global security in different areas on the actual people who live in those areas.
That view has yet to sort of acquire much of a foothold in Washington, despite the problems that the policies we've been following have created and despite the economic challenges that the United States is facing at the present time as well.
Well, and exactly that's the most important point right there.
I talked with Chris Heller the other day from the National Priorities Project, and he talked about the eight trillion that's been spent so far.
That's not projecting health care costs for veterans or anything.
That's just so far what's been appropriated for the baseline Pentagon budget, the wars and the domestic security state since September 11th.
They're clocking approximately a trillion dollars a year now.
And it seems like they don't have a problem going on TV with a straight face and talking about grandma's going to have to be a few years older before that Social Security kicks in and these kind of things.
And yet, as you're saying, even never mind a Ron Paulian view like mine, even just slightly scaling back the ambitions of the American military state, that still hasn't even really crossed the minds of the people up there in power.
Their votes in Congress certainly show that the Pentagon budget is absolutely untouchable.
I think that I think that it will get touched, but but we have not had anywhere near the kind of let's call it grand strategic debate that really is is called for.
Remember that, you know, we we built this very large military establishment really for the first time in our history after World War Two in order to wage the Cold War.
And the Cold War ended in 1990, more or less, and left the United States in a position where it had no major power enemies, where most of the world's powerful countries were, in fact, our allies.
They were assets and where the United States, therefore, should have seen it possible to substantially alter its global military posture, at least reduce it somewhat.
And there was a brief period where that happened under the first Bush administration.
But by the mid 1990s, we were ramping up again and we were expanding our alliances in various directions.
We were taking on more commitments in various places.
Then, of course, after September 11th, we ramped it up again and adopted an even more ambitious set of goals.
It seems to me you can have a prudent view of American security where you want to, you know, leave yourself a sort of margin for error, but then substantially less than we are doing now without substantially endangering the security of Americans here at home.
And in fact, in some cases, doing less in some parts of the world would probably make us safer because it's probably it is our involvement in some parts of the world that generate resistance that cause people to dislike us and to cause some of the most extreme to then plot in various ways to try and attack us.
But if we had a different policy, those people would not be trying to get to the United States and do harm to Americans.
Well, and if the first Gulf War was the height of American power and it's been downhill since then, I guess the second Iraq war, hopefully it seems like most of the worst of it is over now, you know, obviously marks some kind of low point on this scale.
But now we also have this Arab Spring and summer and these revolutions.
And I know they're not to a great degree successful so far, but it seems like the influence of American power, even without any cuts to the Pentagon budget or anything like that, is simply just becoming irrelevant that that really like the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers, kind of a thing like Princess Leia said.
Yeah, the I think the key to understanding that is that that there are real limits to what any country, including the United States, can do to shape the internal politics of other societies, particularly societies that are very different from us and where we don't have the tight connections there and where they're in the midst of what is a genuine revolutionary upheaval.
So we're not going to invade Tunisia.
And even if we did, we couldn't control their politics.
They're going to be driven primarily by local conditions, by the various grievances and aspirations of the Tunisian people.
And that applies to, you know, Egypt and Jordan and Syria and Yemen and all the others.
So it would be an illusion to think that the United States, under any circumstances, the United States, at the peak of its power, could determine the politics of each of these places.
What we want to do is be in a position with a set of policies that will win support, win favor from from most of these peoples.
Not all.
We're not going to agree all the time, but we want to have a sort of an intelligent policy that can adapt to these changes as they're taking place.
I think if you look at the Arab Spring, the big implication there is that these are going to be governments going forward where mass politics matters more, where the views of the population have to be taken more seriously by the government, more seriously by their rulers, whether they are or not, they are actual democracies like the United States.
And and we don't know how any of these are really going to turn out.
But I would argue that in almost all cases, you're going to find governments that are more responsive to popular sentiment.
That means if the United States wants to have a good relationship with these countries in the future, we're going to have to have policies that aren't just appealing to a few guys at the top who are in charge, but are actually more broadly appealing to these populations, that we don't want our approach to the world to be completely out of step with what these societies aspire to and want.
And I think that would call for some adjustments in the way the United States has dealt with the world and in particular dealt with the Middle East.
Well, and certainly with the Israel-Palestine issue.
That would be one obvious one where this is an issue that resonates very strongly in many Arab societies still.
It's been something that's been an awkward issue for Arab governments.
It was always a problem, say, for the Mubarak government or for the Saudi government to be as close to the United States as those governments were, as those rulers were when American policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was so one sided.
The key to understand here is this is not a call for the United States to throw Israel over the side or anything like that.
Rather, it's a call for the United States to put some real muscle behind what our stated position is.
Our stated position is that there ought to be a two state solution, that Israel ought to be safe and secure and the Palestinians ought to be safe and secure in a state of their own.
That's been our position.
That was Clinton's position.
That was George Bush's position.
And that has been Barack Obama's position.
The problem is that American policy has never actually used its influence to try and advance that objective in any serious way.
The result, of course, is that we're very unpopular through much of the Arab world.
The other result, of course, is that Israel's security is imperiled by a continued and ultimately, I believe, unsustainable occupation.
So in this case, American policy has been bad for all concerned.
Bad for us, bad for the Palestinians, bad for our Arab friends and bad for Israel.
And a shift in course would be good for almost everyone, except the most radical extremists or governments like Iran that take advantage of that conflict to try and advance their own objectives.
Yeah.
Or al Qaeda either.
I mean, exactly.
This is Ramzi Youssef told the judge that the reason he bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 was because of American support for Israel and Palestine.
And when Osama bin Laden put out his declaration of war, it was one, the occupation of Saudi Arabia to blockade and bomb Iraq from there and to support for Israel.
And then now I learned from your article, I knew I should have read Trita Parsi's book.
I learned from your article that really the occupation of Saudi Arabia and that dual containment policy was all about Israel, too.
And we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attack, where almost 3,000 Americans were killed as revenge in great measure for American policy toward Israel.
It's certainly one of the key factors, not the only one by any means, but it is clearly one of the sources of grievance.
And sometimes that grievance takes the form of terrorism.
And again, the point, the conclusion to draw from that is not that the United States ought to jettison its ties with Israel.
The conclusion you ought to draw is that the United States ought to have a normal relationship with the state of Israel, where we support them when they're doing things we agree with and we don't support them when they're doing things that we think are not in our interest or not in their interest.
My view is that that would ultimately be healthier for both countries and would actually go a long way to improving our overall position in the region and also enhancing Israel's long term future as well.
That is, of course, not a view that you get many people in the U.S.
Congress to agree to for obvious reasons.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing you make the case in your book of why that is.
It's the Israel lobby is why we don't do those things.
And I wonder if you saw Grant Smith's recent piece where he went to court and got the IRS documents and showed that there are actually only two major donors to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
And I wonder if you had any thoughts on that.
Well, I think anyone who looked carefully at that understands that some of the leading organizations in the so-called Israel lobby are are not representative in terms of their opinions of the views of all Americans.
And they're not even representative of the views of all American Jews, that they are much more hard line, much more extreme than the average opinion there.
This is a familiar story.
I'd say the same thing about the National Rifle Association, which is not representative of the American people.
It's not even representative of the views of most American gun owners, right, in some of their positions that they take.
So this is an old story of interest group politics that people who are most actively involved and who give the most money tend to be the ones who are most passionate about the issue.
But, of course, politicians, particularly in the United States, respond to the people who are most passionate, who are one issue voters or who are one issue campaign contributors.
And therefore you get situations where the American people would like the United States to have a much more even handed position where we used our influence to push both sides towards a peace settlement.
But that's not the response you'll get from the U.S.
Congress when it gives, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu 29 standing ovations or when some 80 plus congressmen are spending the current August recess visiting Israel, which is just one of 200 or so countries in the world.
And when you would think that some of those congressmen would actually be spending most of their time brushing up on, you know, the federal budget or on economic policy or maybe checking in with their constituents to see how they're faring in this very nervous economic climate.
But instead, they decided that the place to go with was Tel Aviv.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it right there.
We're all out of time, in fact, over time.
But I want to thank you very much for yours.
It was nice talking to you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Stephen M.
Walt.
He's a professor at Harvard University.
He writes at Foreign Policy.
That's Walt.
ForeignPolicy.com.
And he's the author of the very important and controversial, the Israel co-author with John J.
Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy.
