09/19/08 – Stephen Schwab – The Scott Horton Show

The Lieutenant Becomes Casualty The Lieutenant Becomes Casualty Alright my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM.
In Austin we're streaming live from ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio and introducing our guest today is Stephen Schwab, he's a professor of history at the University of Alabama and a former CIA officer.
Welcome to the show, Stephen.
Thank you, good to talk to you.
Yeah, it's good to have you on here today.
My friend David Beto recommended you as a very interesting guest, said we could talk all about Central Asia and things like that, but I wanted to start with the rumor, at least, that back in your days at the CIA you were acquainted with one former congressman, Bob Barr, currently the Libertarian Party candidate for President of the United States, and so I want to know what all you can tell me about this guy from your relationship with him or what you know about him from back in the days at CIA.
Sure.
Well, Bob and I worked together for probably about five years in the early and mid-1970s.
Bob was a political analyst in the Latin America division, which is where I also worked, and so for a while we were in the same branch working on South American affairs, and if I recall, he worked on Peru and Bolivia and possibly some of the other Andean countries, and I was working primarily on Brazil and Argentina in that time, but we were in the same general office, which was kind of a bullpen-type construction, and what I remember most about Bob...
Well, pardon me one second, Stephen.
You guys were analysts or covert operative types?
Analysts.
Okay, I see.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, political analysts primarily, and so we wrote for high-level government publications, including a publication called The President's Daily Brief, and we also wrote longer-term analytical pieces, but for the daily publications, we had to send them after they'd been approved by our office for publication.
They went out and were electronically communicated to the State Department and the Defense Department, and analysts who followed the same territory or countries that we did in those respective departments had to read our pieces and either agree to them or coordinate and try to reach a compromise or disagree.
One of the things I remember about Bob Barr is that he was very strong.
When he'd take a position, he wouldn't back off of it, and so there were a lot of times that he had sort of little coordination battles over the telephone, and he would not back down, and so he would either force, if there was a disagreement on substance or interpretation, he would generally either force his opponent to give up or to take a defending footnote.
He was a very forceful, one could say stubborn kind of personality, and anyway, that's the most, I think, significant thing I remember about his personality.
He was a very likable guy, but what else?
During that time, he was going to Georgetown University Law School at night, and about 1976 or 77, he graduated and moved on to the agency's legal staff, which is the Office of General Counsel, and he was only there about a year.
I went to his going-away party.
He got a job with an Atlanta-based law firm and, of course, went to Georgia and started his private practice and subsequently his political career.
Well, you know, when you talk about that kind of stubbornness of mind and things like that, I don't really mind that kind of quality in a person if they're right about stuff.
So I just wonder, when it came to things like that, and I recognize you said you guys were working in different countries and things like that, was there a difference between how stubborn he was when he was right versus when he was wrong when you guys would have these fights or arguments over this?
I think it's fair to say, if you look at Bob's political career and his ideological views, which I've followed to some extent over time because I was interested in them, he's pretty much an ideologically based individual.
He, I think, became a sort of a, if I recall correctly, at one point early in his life he was in college a member of Young Democrats and then he apparently, I think, read some of the works of Ann Rand and bought into her ideas about individualism and laissez-faire capitalism and so on and became, you know, not just a Republican but a certain kind of conservative.
Now, I think that my sense of Bob, and I've watched him on television, is he was sort of moving from being a very conservative Republican and, you know, I might add that if I were to call myself anything I'd probably be a liberal Democrat and so I don't agree with a lot of the views that Bob has espoused over time, but I think that he operates from a basis of ideological belief.
I don't think he's a political opportunist.
I mean, I'm not going to say that he may not act like a political opportunist from time to time, but I think he's switched his position on marijuana for medical purposes and I don't know where he is on gay marriage now.
I know he was opposed to it, but I think the main thing that has prompted his change in moving from the Republican camp to being the Libertarian candidate for president is his thinking about and reacting to some of the provisions of the Patriot Act, which he originally voted for, but then as he thought more and more about it, he became strongly opposed to it.
And I think he's opposed to it because of his belief in individualism and the individual's right to pursue happiness and not to be afraid that their library, the books they check out at the library, are being scrutinized or that they're subject to unauthorized and what should, in his mind and in mine too, be illegal wiretaps and the intrusiveness of Big Brother.
I think that's what has really set him off.
Well, and I think that his background as kind of a real law and order conservative type, you mentioned the Ayn Rand influence, but of course he's most famous for being sort of conservative Christian type, a lot of reactionary social issues and that kind of thing when he was in Congress in the 1990s.
But one thing that is certainly true about him, and there's a Blogging Heads interview, I guess, between he and Jane Hampshire from Firedog Lake talking about the FISA amendments.
This was, I guess, a month or two ago.
And he certainly believes, he truly does believe in the theory of the rule of law and that if the Fourth Amendment says they can't do this, they just can't.
And of all the things for him to be bullheaded and stubborn about, I like that.
Well, I like that too.
I think that that's one of the great strengths of our government and what the Founding Fathers did here.
I think that the establishment of a very strong judiciary and the belief in the rule of law, without that, I think we lose a lot of what we should be patriotic about.
And so I totally agree with him on that.
And I think that I too have been disturbed by the Patriot Act and some of the practices that have come about as a result of our so-called war on terrorism.
Well, you know, I interviewed Bob back in 2005 and asked him whether he accepted responsibility for voting for the Iraq war, voting for the authorization to let Bush decide to have the war.
And he answered, no, I don't take responsibility for it.
In fact, first he said, well, it was a very precipitous move.
No, I don't take responsibility, he said.
And I've got to tell you, I was pretty hopeful, actually, when I heard talk about him wanting to run as the Libertarian Party candidate.
I thought with the whole Ron Paul revolution thing going on, that basically he'll have to understand, he has to understand, that if he's going to run as the Libertarian Party guy, that he is going to have to accept responsibility for it, that he is going to have to improve his position on foreign policy, improve his position on some of these right-wing issues.
As you alluded to, and I'm sorry because I don't really know the details either, but I think he has to a degree repudiated the Defense of Marriage Act and his kind of anti-gay rights stuff and that sort of thing.
And yet when it comes to whether it's perfectly okay for the U.S. government to go around slaughtering people by the hundreds of thousands, this guy will not give an inch.
This is where his stubbornness kicks in.
And here he is supposed to be representing libertarianism in this country.
And it ain't just me.
He's got the entire libertarian movement pulling their hair out as he talks less and less like a libertarian and more and more like a right-winger, the exact opposite of what we'd all hoped.
Yeah.
Well, you know, old beliefs die very hard for some people.
And if they die at all, and my guess is that he's still a staunch supporter of the NRA and a whole bunch of right-wing causes that I don't think he's going to shed that baggage.
And I'm not a supporter of the NRA.
Well, me either, for different reasons probably than you.
I think that they're sellouts, that their role is to basically affirm all current laws on the books and then say, oh, but please just seriously and completely and totally enforce the ones you have now, which are all unconstitutional anyway.
Just don't pass any more new ones, which to me reeks of false opposition.
Daily co-supposing the war.
It's a half-assed effort at best.
Well, you know, if you go back to the Bill of Rights, the reason for the right of citizens to bear arms was in those days we didn't have any kind of a standing army.
We had at best cobbled together a militia when we needed it for the Whiskey Rebellion or whatever.
And we were having, in effect, for a long period of time, pitched battles with Indians in various parts of this country.
And there was also always the potential that we'd be invaded again, at least up until it happened in 1812 when the British burned Washington, D.C.
And they still weren't friendly with us until very late in the 19th century.
So I think that there was considerable justification in that era for citizens to have the right to bear arms and to use them for other purposes than hunting.
But I think that the problem I have is that people who are NRA advocates will tell me that they forget that part of the words in the amendment in the Bill of Rights, which basically defines it the way I just did, as a right not only to defend yourself but to defend your family and your community.
We didn't have police departments back then either.
Well, I'll tell you what, I don't want to get too bogged down in this, but I'll go ahead and give you my take just for the record and we can agree to disagree.
I always believed, and I think that the quotes of the American founders back me up, that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect the right of the whiskey rebels to defend themselves from George Washington's and the national government's depredations, and that the purpose of the first part of that Second Amendment, the operative part there, is the right of the people to make sure that they can keep their state a free state.
I believe this was Thomas Jefferson's case, that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was so that natural-born, free human beings can guarantee that they stay free no matter who threatens that liberty.
But we can leave this argument here if you don't think we're going to resolve it, Stephen.
No, we won't resolve it, no.
Okay, so Bob Barr, I think we both appreciate the fact that he's bullheaded.
We just wish he was right about more things.
Is that basically it?
I think that's right, yeah.
And I'm glad to see that he has taken up some ideas that are different from the ones that he previously held when he was the most conservative congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Yeah, I mean, this is a guy who one time when...
I think I'm pretty close to being accurate.
Yeah, I remember one time when Washington, D.C. voted, they held a vote, a referendum about whether to legalize medical pot, and he used the power of the Congress to deny them the funds to count the votes, which had already been cast.
Oh, gee.
I know, man, I'm telling you.
So, really, I blame myself for even being confident.
I just thought that with Ron Paul serving as such a good example up there, that he would know that this is the direction I have to move, and unfortunately it just hasn't worked out that way.
But that's my fault for having expectations, I suppose.
Yeah, well, why don't we talk about something besides pot?
Right, yes, let's do that.
So tell me this.
Well, you said you worked on South America, and you didn't say exclusively, so I'm going to ask you about all kinds of stuff, hopefully, but particularly on the South America thing.
It seems to me that over the past eight years particularly, in the Bush years, that what's happened was they put such a brutal face on what they call free market capitalism, that they have really pushed South America to the left, not just in Venezuela, which I guess he was already in power, but in Bolivia and Ecuador, I think, more and more leftists being elected to power, moving further and further away from the United States.
So I guess my question there is, well, do you agree with that, first of all, and then, I guess, secondly, do you think that that's just inevitable for not having the Soviet Union to protect people from anymore, or is this just because the Republicans have acted with such kind of blatant maneuverance that they've really kind of caused the situation to backfire on them?
In a historical context, I think it is not inaccurate to say that for well over 100 years, the United States has exercised hegemonic influence in Latin America, and by that, to be blunt, I think that we have alternated between a kind of neglect of the region in terms of what the region itself needs in terms of infrastructure, in many places in terms of education, in terms of access to the most modern medications and better public health, and so on.
And we have asked Latin Americans to give us what we wanted from them, and when they didn't do it in a spirit of open cooperation and courtesy, we tended to get nasty at that.
So I think that we have built up over time a lot of hostility in Latin America, as well as fear towards our policies.
And the truth of the matter is, when I think about it, except for when you look around the world, we have never been, except in the military sense in NATO and CETO, which we have dominated when we have chosen to do so, we've never been very good partners, except in wartime, in alliances.
I mean, our strongest ally since the late 19th century, and particularly since World War II, has been Great Britain.
But I don't think that we have really a lot of friends around the world that we could really honestly or justly call friends, and I think that's because we tend to throw our weight around when we choose to do so, and we've done that a lot in Latin America now, as far as I agree with you, in terms of the Bush administration.
But I think that one can look back and find reasons to criticize both Republicans and Democrats in the past.
I mean, even under the so-called good neighbor policy, we didn't do anything about people like Somoza or Trujillo or Batista.
And when Franklin Roosevelt was told that, I think it was, Somoza in Nicaragua was an SOB, he said, well, at least he's our SOB.
Well, at that time, you could perhaps justify that attitude on the part of the president, because we were concerned about the possibility of the Third Reich, in particular, at some point trying to invade Brazil or whatever, and so we wanted strong anti-communist governments throughout the whole region.
And apart from that, we frankly didn't give a hoot about what they did to their own people.
Well, and I think the American people don't really know the history of, I don't know, I guess if I ask you, you probably know better than anybody, just to list even the countries where America has backed fascist dictators.
I mean, there was a dictatorship in Brazil that was basically just a front for the American empire for years, right?
Julio Vargas in the 1930s and 40s, until he committed suicide.
And then, of course, for a long time, we were friends with that little petty dictator down in Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner.
You know, one wonders how much we even cared about Paraguay, but we certainly...
And then, of course, the Stimosas, until they left Trujillo for a long time, until he became an embarrassment, and then the CIA probably gave guns to his assassins.
I look at this relationship that we have with Mexico, and I'm frankly a bit schizophrenic in my own thinking about the whole issue of illegal migrants.
Part of it, I attribute this whole attitude to one that is deep-rooted in the American psyche of a kind of nativism.
But at the same time, you know, it's more complicated than people coming across our border illegally, in some cases joining criminal gangs in Los Angeles, like the Crips and the Bloods and elsewhere, or getting on the welfare rolls.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
But when you look at Mexico, I don't think we can ever expect a lot of positive help from the Mexican government about illegal immigration into this country because of our war with Mexico.
I mean, in the 1840s, New Mexico, California, Texas, and so on, Arizona, were all part of Mexico.
Oh, that's ancient history.
Surely they've all forgotten about that by now.
Not to them, it isn't.
If you go to Mexico City and you go to Chapultepec Castle, they'll show you where the young Mexican wrapped himself in the flag and threw himself in front of the invading American forces under Winfield Scott.
It's not dead at all for the Mexicans.
There's a lot of resentment towards Uncle Sam.
Any tour guide that'll take you to Chapultepec Castle will point that out to you.
No, it's part of their official propaganda.
It doesn't matter who's in the government in Mexico.
It's part of their sense of a national identity.
As victims of the United States?
Yeah, yeah, the exploitation by the United States.
And, you know, we've had such an inconsistent policy regarding immigration from Mexico.
We invited them up here to work in picking fruit under the Brasero Program.
We've had various times when we've had policies of forgiveness.
We've said, well, we don't care how you got here, but we've been law-abiding people, and now you can stay.
And the result of that, of course, is that anybody that makes it safely into the United States probably has a cousin or a friend or somebody who will give them a place to stay and help them find a job.
So it's a really big problem.
And, you know, I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do something about it, but how you craft laws and enforce them that really deal with it, I don't know.
Well, more the merrier, I say.
In fact, I saw something recently.
The National Intelligence Council has put out a new report, which I guess they haven't put out a declassified version, but Thomas Fingar, who oversaw the process, gave a speech about it where he talked about, I guess it was looking ahead to 2050 or 2035 or something like that and America's declining role in the world.
And basically the point was that the only advantage that we really hold over anybody, any other power block in the world at this point is our military power, which is becoming less and less important in the way things work.
But he said on the bright side that one of the reasons that America will still have a vibrant economy and will still be, you know, if not on the upswing, at least will take a long, long time to fall is because of our relatively open immigration policy and all the new blood that we bring into this country and all the productive value that they add to it.
Whereas the Europeans are so scared that Europe won't be Europe anymore if they let immigrants in, that basically they're just stagnating, paying each other not to work all day and eventually are going to decline much faster than the United States.
Well, Scott, I also hold on to the view, and I may be proven wrong, but the United States, you know, as I watch this, what I think is a growing panic in our financial markets.
And, you know, in many ways the situation that we're going into is reminiscent in some respects of what happened in 1929, and if you go back even further, the Depression, which practically everybody but historians have forgotten about, of 1893, which lasted for, well, lasted until 1897, and it was the worst Depression we had before 29.
Well, in 29, the Depression, which kicks off in 29, of course, really lasts until World War II.
But what seems to me to be, there's some similarities, of course, in terms of over, you know, too rapid expansion of production, not enough consumption, and then, of course, the horrible credit card and credit mess.
But what you have on the positive side, I would think, is that we now are much more of a closely intertwined global economy, like it or not, and you have billions of dollars that have been invested by countries that really don't like us all that much, like Beijing and the Saudis, but with the billions of dollars that they've put in, that seems to me to be a recognition that the U.S. is still the driving force in global economics, and you can't afford for it to go under.
And now, I can be proven wrong, because I haven't seen these countries making a major effort to step in and help bail us out, but at some point, if the panic worsens, and I do believe it's panic that drives these economic downturns more than the actual financial realities, but maybe at some point they will step in.
Well, and it could be that there's only so much they can do.
I mean, I'm really no expert in all this, but at least some of the coverage that I've seen has said that a lot of this bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is actually a bailout for China, because they've bought so much of this debt that, you know, the whole you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours thing, and I really don't like all these governments being that intertwined with each other, but then again, I guess it keeps us from going to war with them, so that's good.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's pretty close to the way I see it as well, yeah.
And you know, I really would just prefer that billionaires here and billionaires there are all intertwined and can keep the politicians from going to war, and I don't know, actually having the Chinese government hold a bunch of U.S. government securities probably helps along the same lines there.
Well, the Arabs are very heavily invested in our economy and own a certain percentage of our banks and other financial institutions, and so it's a very complicated situation in terms of ownership that I don't fully understand, and I don't certainly have all the information, but I do think that that may be a stabilizing factor that will work to our benefit and make this a shorter-term problem than it could be, but it's a myth.
All right, now you were a CIA during the Cold War days.
Do you see a return to Cold War-type policy?
I know that the Secretary of Defense has given some cautionary statements.
On the other hand, he's ordered American ships in the Black Sea, and one of the headlines today, the European Union diplomats are saying now that they do not want to restart their talks on their different partnerships with Russia until they get all their troops, not just out of all of Georgia, but out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, before they even restart this thing.
I thought when this crisis broke out at the beginning of August that, oh, well, this is terrible, but cooler heads are going to prevail, and maybe Dick Cheney will say something tough, but ultimately interests in America, well, just like we just talked about with China, somehow have got to prevent the ratcheting up of crises in confrontation with the Russians, and I have to say I've been quite disappointed to see a couple of conciliatory statements from Gates, but almost all ratcheting up of tensions on every other front, including Condoleezza Rice's denunciation of the Russians two days ago, so I just wonder if you can tell us how worried you are about the direction of American policy toward Russia right now.
Well, I may very well be off in a ridiculous corner on this, Scott, and I'll get to that in a second, but my own view is that I don't think that Putin is going to rebuild the Soviet Union.
That's not going to happen, but Russia has historic reasons for being paranoid, and when we push to make Ukraine and Georgia members of NATO, you can expect Putin, regardless of what position he holds, he is the power in Russia, he holds the political cards, and he will continue to do so for the undetermined future, and you can expect him to do things like holding joint naval exercises with the Venezuelans, which I understand they are planning to do, and other things.
You know, Russia is in the process of building a new strategic air defense system around Moscow.
They're concentrating on trying to rebuild their military weapons.
I understand they have a rather impressive new infantry fighting vehicle, which also they link to their airborne units, and so this kind of military modernization that they're undergoing, their dust-up with Georgia, I think is evidence, clear evidence, that Russia is flexing its muscles and trying to say to the United States, quit hemming us in with your efforts to extend NATO.
I don't think they trust us at all, and I understand, and this is hearsay, but I understand that a lot of the archives that were open to Western scholars after 1991 have now closed again.
So let me get to where I may be way off on left field.
My own view is that the Cold War ended in 1991.
That's almost 20 years ago.
You're crazy.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, anyway, you know, up until the onset of the Cold War, we not only did not have U.S. military bases all over the world, Congress would never have stood for it.
Now, I mean, it wouldn't have been just Gerald Nye, the great isolationist out there in La La Land.
It was very hard for us to, you know, get into World War II, despite our land lease and all that sort of stuff.
There was a very strong, call it isolationist, call it just a desire to deal with our own problems and to try to solve them, whatever it was.
But all that changed with the onset of the Cold War.
I really think it's time for us to quit calling ourselves a superpower.
I think it's better for us to think of the world as consisting of big powers, middle powers, and little powers.
Frankly, if we would reduce our little Americas all around the world where we have our forces stationed, concentrate on building up our special forces, our SEALs, my view is not exactly to emulate the Israelis, but to have a very strong military force that could respond to any challenge that directly threatened us, but bring our forces home.
I mean, in this world, you can deploy them anywhere on the globe pretty damn fast and take the money, the millions and millions of dollars you're spending on this stuff, and put it into our crumbling infrastructure and repair our roads, repair our bridges, build more, you know, do something for this country rather than fighting all the battles around the world and telling countries when to stand up and sit down, which is what we've been doing.
And the mindset has not changed.
Bob Gates, you know, was a Soviet expert.
That's what he did his graduate work on at Georgetown.
That's true of Condoleezza Rice, too.
You have these people.
I think Bob Gates is a lot better in terms of public relations, and, frankly, I think he's a lot brighter than Donald Rumsfeld.
But you have a lot of old think that is still in the highest corridors of government.
Now, you know, that's my soapbox.
And I've written, I wrote to a United States senator recently expressing these views, and he never caught me to answer them.
He probably thinks I'm a nut, you know, and maybe I am, but that's where I am.
Yeah, well, that doesn't sound so nutty to me.
I think it's pretty clear why the neocons hate you CIA guys so much, all this stuff about, you know, and maybe our soldiers should be here instead of more than 130 countries around the world for, you know, defensive purposes, how maybe having our government think of what's best for America rather than a few select politically connected corporations and everybody else in the world but us isn't the right way to go.
You'll never be welcome at the American Enterprise Institute, sir.
Well, actually, I have a very good friend, Mark Falkoff, at the American Enterprise Institute.
But if he listens to this program, he may nix me or write me out of it.
Yes, I bet he probably will.
But no, that sounds eminently reasonable.
In fact, you're not even anywhere near as extreme as me.
I want a Switzerland foreign policy where we are absolutely neutral in the affairs of all other nations of the world.
But I guess, you know, I'd take your foreign policy as a halfway step.
Okay, all right.
Sound good?
That sounds good.
I now have a friend who's semi in my corner.
There you go.
Yeah, there you go.
You got at least one ally out here.
All right, everybody.
That's Stephen Schwab.
He's a professor of history at the University of Alabama and a former CIA analyst.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Oh, thank you.
Goodbye.