Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing our next guest today, it's Tom Englehart, Tom Editor, TomDispatch.com.
You can find much of what he writes and edits and introduces at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to have you on the air here.
Sorry for leaving you on hold so long.
I was kind of rocking out.
No problem.
All right.
So, well, there's always a million things I could ask you about, but I want to focus here on a couple of articles ago now, the Bush Doctrine in Ruins, where you do such a great job here of holding George Bush to his own standard of what he claimed his doctrine was going to be about, all the wonderful things or horrible things he was going to accomplish, and how, even judging by his own standard, the legacy of this presidency is just nothing but blood and failure.
Am I right?
Exactly.
I had an urge, let's say, a couple of weeks ago.
I realized that although, you know, everybody kind of knows, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, I mean, the individual places are dealt with and they're usually dealt with as, you know, anything from a catastrophe to whatever you want to make of Iraq.
I mean, I make a catastrophe of it, but some people post-surge claim other things.
Nonetheless, when I started looking at that huge expanse of land that the neocons back in 2002-2003 used to call the Arc of Instability, it was just a phrase then, and they really meant the lands that extended from North Africa to basically the Chinese border in Central Asia.
Some of them took it as far as the Philippines and Indonesia.
And these were the lands that the Bush Doctrine was meant, in essence, to dominate.
And what's striking is when you take each place, place by place, starting, say, with Somalia and working your way eastwards until you end up in Central Asia, in each place, what it was that the Bush and his men wanted to do in that first term, almost the opposite happened.
It's a kind of a catastrophe in its own terms.
So I had this urge to do a little report card, which I did at timedispatch.com, and antiwar.com also used it, in which, in essence, I took each place, Somalia, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, and so on, and did a little capsule summary of what had actually happened, and then offered a grade, and the grade was F. I called it F for failure, because I think what's striking, when you take a look at this sweep of lands which the Bush administration has turned from a phrase, the Arc of Instability, into an actual area alit, unstable, I mean, aflame, and as we know, even in the last days, there's been more of the same.
I mean, there was a U.S. attack in Syria, really the first one in a long time, which was quite striking, just a day ago.
When you look at this, it really is an unprecedented record.
I would challenge anybody to think of another president who had such a record of failure in the foreign policy arena that he chose.
I find it a little bit staggering, despite what I know.
Yeah, well, so let's go through, well, I don't want to go all the way as far east as the Philippines and China and everything, that'll take too long, but let's start with the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the support from the sheriff all this time, and now, you know, increasing violence on the border, attempting to buy off various militias to fight against each other, a civil war in Afghanistan.
What do you say?
Success?
Well, I think what you could start by saying was, of course, there was, in 2001, November, there was that invasion, that kind of odd invasion of Afghanistan, which really was a kind of classic, you might say, neo-colonial use of native forces, U.S. air power, special operations people, and so on and so forth.
Afghanistan was declared to be liberated, and then the Bush administration, and of course, the place where this all started, which was al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, Osama bin Laden was semi-surrounded in an area called Tora Bora, and then he escaped.
Well, after that, the Bush administration's attention turned to the first place it wanted to deal with anyway, which was Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
We started moving troops and special operations people out of Afghanistan, and Afghanistan, as we all now know, has become a disaster.
I mean, the thing you could say about Afghanistan is that the only thing the Bush administration did for it in the end was to turn it back into the world's greatest producer of drugs.
So that's Afghanistan.
I mean, we know now the Taliban, that was supposed to have been defeated, has a shadow government across much of the South.
Its guerrillas are literally at the gates of Kabul.
I mean, it can't take Kabul, there are just too many international troops there, but they're embedded in villages around Kabul, so that simply traveling the highway to the South is like traveling on some kind of highway of danger.
You have a U.S.
-backed government in Kabul that has almost no power.
Right across the border in Pakistan, which back in 2001 was an autocratically-run, nuclear-armed, but relatively stable country, you have the kind of badlands or wildlands, these mountainous lands of basically Pashtun tribal lands along the Afghan border, are now aflame.
There is a Pakistani Taliban there, as well as the Afghan Taliban.
There are foreign fighters, there's al-Qaeda.
Pakistan itself has been remarkably destabilized.
The guy we backed, Musharraf, collapsed.
That kind of brings you up to, and we're now beginning to fight what looks very much like the beginnings of a third war in the Pakistan borderlands, which we're bombing almost every day now.
Right.
And, you know, I guess it seems like the situation now is we have a kind of wink-nudge agreement with the Pakistani government.
We're not actually at war against the state of Pakistan, but we're at war inside the state of Pakistan.
Yes.
Yes.
But as with many other places, we pay modestly little attention to – I mean, the Bush administration has little respect for any sovereignty except our own, so basically right now it's a war as far as I can tell fought by the CIA, largely via predator drones.
Well, and this is the kind of thing where they immediately conflated al-Qaeda with the Taliban, and then of course with Saddam Hussein and everything else.
But if they just said, okay, we're going after not even just Arabs in Afghanistan, we're going after people who know and or are friends with bin Laden and him and, you know, Zawahiri.
And that was their mission.
They could have wrapped this whole thing up by the end of 2001 and said, see, we're all about the judicious use of power.
We could have won the war on terrorism way back then.
Yes, but as we well know, they weren't about the judicious use of power.
They were about – I mean, you know, it's funny.
I'm often struck because the Bush administration was often called a fundamentalist administration, you know, and usually what people meant by that was Christian fundamentalist.
But of course, many of the people – you know, most of the neocons weren't Christian fundamentalists.
It was – you know, but it was a fundamentalist administration in a completely different sense, and that was in the sense of military power.
As a group, the neocons in particular, and so the Bush administration, came into power in awe of the U.S. military, of U.S. military power, and what they believed it could do on the planet.
They thought it put us in a position stronger than the British Empire at its height, like the Romans during the Roman imperial period.
They thought it meant that we no longer needed allies.
We just – you know, I mean, when you look at the initial statement of the Bush doctrine, it was a speech he gave at West Point in June 2002.
He makes very clear – there's a stunning passage, a passage that I think so many years later still takes my breath away, at least.
I don't have it right in front of me, but he basically says, given our power, there will never again be.
We will ensure that there will never again be, in essence, a great power rivalry on this planet, and that other powers will be left to do, in essence, those wimpy things which are trade and peace.
That's what they can do, and they actually believed this.
They were overwhelmed by the idea of American military power.
Now, we did have the most powerful military in terms of pure destructive force.
We had the most powerful military on the planet.
But in truth – and I think this is clear in retrospect, it was clear to some people at the time – its power lay in the power of threat.
That is, it was credible as a threat.
Once, of course, they tried to use the U.S. Army in these kind of wars against ragtag insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, they discovered the immediate limits of military power.
And anybody who, for instance, reads the book of Andrew Bacevich, who was a military man and is very smart, and this is his best-selling book, The Limits of Power, will see, I mean, this is exactly the point he makes, that, I mean, military power always has its limits.
It certainly had its limits throughout the history of the 20th century when fighting these kinds of insurgencies.
But Iraq was not, of course, an endpoint.
It became an endpoint.
This is our second disaster.
We've just talked about Afghanistan, Pakistan, now Iraq, an utter disaster.
But it was never – and it's become, you know, Bush now calls it the central theater in the war against, in his global war against terror, but of course it never was meant to be.
You know, the neocons had a great quip back in 2002, 2003, before the invasion, which went, in essence, everybody wants to go to Baghdad, that is the capital of Iraq, but the real men want to go to Tehran.
Iraq was just supposed to be the first stop on the way to Iran, to subduing Syria, and so on and so forth.
Well, you know, one thing, Tom, that really strikes me about the war party and the way that they conceive of Iraq, I mean, I don't know how well Thomas Friedman at the New York Times really speaks for any of the other members of the war party.
Seems like, you know, to a degree, pretty close anyway.
He said that what had to happen, whatever, there was this bubble, he makes this metaphor about a bubble, where they think they can attack us and get away with it, basically.
And he says, now, in order to burst that bubble, we had to – and he says outright, it could have been in Egypt, it could have been in Saudi Arabia, it could have been in Iran, it could have been anywhere.
But what we ended up having to do, in effect, was kick in doors from Baghdad to Basra and say to those people, suck on this, which of course means blow them apart with high explosives, take their lives away from them.
And that would prove that, you know, that would pop the bubble and prove that you can't mess with us.
But of course, Baghdad and Basra, these are towns in Iraq, a state where the only thing they had to do with the September 11th attacks was it was a bunch of Saudis and Egyptians avenging their murders.
Planned, by the way, partially, in Hamburg, Germany, if you remember.
Right.
I mean – And in the United States.
We did not bomb Hamburg.
Right, yeah, well, and they didn't bomb Hollywood, Florida or San Diego, either.
Exactly.
But, you know, the phrase, which, you know, has mostly passed out of the language, we've forgotten it, but it was very powerful at the time.
You remember the initial attack on Iraq, it was an air attack, and it was referred to as shock and awe.
Right.
And of course, that wasn't just a name for that attack, it was a theory about the ability of the American military to not destroy countries anymore, but to literally, with these precision weapons and its power, literally take out regimes in their bedrooms.
And of course, but as I was saying before, the truth is, who were the people who really were shocked and awed, who were basically in awe?
It was the Bush administration.
They misunderstood the nature of power on our planet, they overemphasized military power, and they did not – and as a consequence, you're at a point today where they, in essence, have managed to create almost a perfect storm, politically across the planet, but also economically.
I mean, it's a remarkable legacy for a man who keeps talking about his legacy, the President.
I mean, a legacy of untrammeled failure.
You can't find another example of this, really, I think.
I mean, Iraq, obviously, is a catastrophe.
We have – when we went into Iraq, we went in with 130,000 troops.
You remember, that was supposed to be the light, agile force, blah, blah, blah.
And key administration people, like Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Undersecretary of Defense, they believed that – firmly, they believed that within a few months, by – we went in in March, we took Baghdad early in April.
They believed by maybe August or September, we would have maybe 30,000 to 40,000 troops left on large bases that we were going to build, outside the cities, in a peaceful country, a now pro-American country that had welcomed us, and they could turn to other things.
I mean, this was their – you know, here we are, what, five-plus years later, and we now have 150,000 troops, 20,000 more than we originally went in with, in the country.
The military people there are saying, if you want this surge strategy to work, we better not – you know, we're not going to take – you know, this is very fragile, we're not going to take other troops out at this point, if we can help it.
So here you are, five – more than five years later, with more troops in the country, in a country that has literally been wrecked.
Well, and whatever alliances and ceasefires they have now are all bubblegum and string.
I mean, the Mahdi army can rise up and go back to the war at the snap of the fingertips.
The sons of Iraq can become the Sunni insurgency again, either at their will or if Maliki decides to attack them.
Either way, they're the Sunni insurgency again.
There's – nothing has been solved there at all.
Kirkuk is – every day that – or, well, every time I've ever talked to anybody who's an expert on Kirkuk, they talk about it like it's an oily rag ready to burst into flames at any moment there.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
Iraq is a tinderbox.
I mean, the only question is, will it – I think is, will it burst into flames before or after January 20th?
I mean, the irony was the Bush administration has put all its efforts recently in the last year – or massive efforts – into kind of making Iraq quiet enough that it would go off the front pages.
I mean, this was the preparation for this election and so on and so forth.
But very typically of this administration, they were once again ambushed from a place they didn't expect.
It just happened to be an economic ambush.
They were ambushed from Wall Street this time.
You know, the insurgents, the Sunni insurgents were on Wall Street, you know, or they were arcane derivatives or something.
But it's quite remarkable.
They have never – from the moment before 9-11 on, they have never seen where the next attack is coming from and they have never – they have never been prepared.
I see the attack metaphorically.
Yeah.
Well, in all this catastrophe and catastrophes and what have you altogether, they do go, as you say, to the philosophy of, you know, doing whatever you want with military force because of course we have so much of it, et cetera.
And yet, I mean, any kid can tell you the purpose of the military is to kill people and destroy property.
It doesn't build things.
It doesn't remake regions.
It can remake it by setting it afire and leaving ashes and corpses.
But it can't – I mean, Bush himself ran again.
What are we supposed to do?
Use the military to build other people's nations?
That's crazy.
What if somebody tried to build a nation here with their military?
We'd shoot at them.
This is stupid.
You know, but almost everything that the Bush administration has done, if you turned it around and applied it to the United States, we'd go crazy.
I mean, that's the thing you could say.
We are on a one-way planet in that way, or we have been.
Absolutely.
So, you know, I mean, even, you know, imagine an Iranian predator, if they had one, predator, unmanned aerial vehicle armed with the Iranian equivalent of hellfire missiles, which don't exist, cruising over your little town in, you know, the Gulf of Mexico, you know, and, you know, it's completely remarkable, or the Iranian president on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico congratulating his men on the job they were doing containing the United States or something.
I mean, this is like, you know, this would be – these would all be the grounds for war, of course.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And maybe even rightfully so.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, we have to go real fast here, because we're almost out of time, but we have his complete failure.
The doctrine has been Iran will stop spinning centrifuges, period.
And that is a complete failure, one way or the other.
I mean, if you want to just run through a few of the others quickly, they were going to suppress or destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Disaster.
I mean, by their own terms, Hezbollah is triumphant, relatively speaking.
They were going to run an election in Gaza, which would, in essence, put both democracy and Fatah into power.
Instead, Hamas won, and they tried to take it back unsuccessfully.
When a group of moderate Islamists, a militia in Somalia – poor Somalia, which has been, you know, devastated for years – when, not quite a couple of years back, this Islamist militia looked to be on the verge of actually unifying the country, the U.S., which trains and supports the Ethiopian military, basically got the Ethiopians to conduct a proxy invasion.
We backed it with some air power.
They went in.
They knocked that Islamist, not-quite-government out of power.
And today, that invasion, just like the invasion of Iraq, is a disaster.
Tens of thousands have died there.
And a far more radical Islamist militia looks to be on the verge of taking power.
The Ethiopians look to be getting ready to withdraw.
I mean, this is just another of a series of these things.
It's hard, except – Let me just – let me break in right here, just to also mention, you know, when I talked to Ken Menkhouse, who's an expert on Somalia, a few weeks ago, he said there are a million and a half people on the brink of starvation there.
Absolutely.
They have no economy at all.
It's the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
Worse than Iraq, worse than Congo, worse than Darfur.
This government's fault.
Yep.
It's – you know, I mean, we are not – I mean, to be – you know, there was a pre-existing catastrophe there, but we – but, you know, and – but again, the result is the very opposite.
Forget what you even think of it, of what the Bush administration wanted.
It's just place after place after place.
If you take their own goals, you know, they've created almost – you know, there was that game when you were a kid, kind of an opposites game.
This is like a weird opposites game of foreign policy.
You want one thing, you get another.
Now, the world is that way to some extent.
It's not like, you know, people simply go out and get what they want, particularly with military power, but this is still – this is at a level that it's kind of like record-setting levels.
We like records.
We like records.
This is a record-setting level of genuine failure and competence disaster, and so on and so forth.
And we're going to pay for it for years and years and years and years, and of course, other people are going to pay worse.
Well, and I think that's a very important question, really, about when people talk about whether George Bush is the worst president ever.
I mean, I can easily pin the rise of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the Second World War on Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War I and, you know, hold him up as probably the worst leader in the history of all mankind for that.
And yet, here we are with George W. Bush.
We have no idea what are going to be the long-term consequences.
We can easily guess that there are millions of – never mind just people in the Muslim world throughout, but in the Arab world – who mean to take revenge and will someday for what has been done over the last few years.
Absolutely.
By the way, a last note for those of your listeners who might be thinking about TomDispatch.com.
This Thursday, I'll be posting a piece by Andrew Bacevich on his version of why the global war on terror was a disaster and what exactly the next president is going to inherit.
Yeah, and he always has a lot of really great stuff to say.
In fact, he's got one in the LA Times today that says, never mind the politicians.
The people are over it.
We don't want any.
We're going to try to just salvage what we have here.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, it's a great piece, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
Absolutely.
All right, listen.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Tom.
Such a pleasure, Scott.
Okay.
Bye.
Bye.
And everybody, by the way, if you go to antiwar.com slash Englehart today – again, it's TomDispatch.com is his website.
If you go there to antiwar.com at least – sorry, I haven't looked at TomDispatch yet today You'll see one with Nick Turse putting the Pentagon on the auction block about the unbelievable amounts of money that could be saved if we would only just renounce our empire.
Just give it up.
Whoever wanted America to be an empire anyway except some sick criminal.
Come on.
You think you're broke?
You think maybe all this world revolution might be part of why you're so broke?
Putting the Pentagon on the auction block.
Nick Turse and Tom Englehart.
