Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Hell yeah, it's time for Tom Dispatch to be on the show again.
Tom Englehart, that is.
You can find his archive at AntiWar.com and of course at TomDispatch.com.
What's new, Tom?
Well, you know, the newest thing at Tom Dispatch, for all your readers, is tomorrow morning, about 11 o'clock Eastern Time, I'm going to put up the first full-throated defense of Private Bradley Manning.
You don't say.
Yeah, not written by me, but written by a young lawyer, Chase Madar, wonderfully researched.
It's fictional, obviously, but it's the opening statement.
It's our idea, his idea of the opening statement of the defense of Bradley Manning.
I mean, Tom Dispatch has wanted to do something, we've been planning this for a while, you know, to support Bradley Manning, because he is, and it's the support of him as a hero and a patriot.
So that's coming tomorrow morning.
Go to TomDispatch.com and don't miss it, because nobody else, there's been some great Bradley Manning stuff written, but nobody else has done this.
Wow.
So tell me, it's just preview, I don't want you to spoil the ending, I guess you don't have to, but is it an open and shut case that he's innocent of any crime and is purely a hero and ought to replace Theodore Roosevelt up there on Mount Rushmore?
Well, you know, for you and me, Scott, it is.
For the Obama administration, it obviously isn't.
And their punitive response to having their dirty laundry hung out to dry, you know, has been their knee-jerk punitive response, has been horrifying.
And the horrifying thing is to see that while the people, I mean there's real blood on real hands in this American world from our recent wars, ongoing recent wars, and it's not on Bradley Manning's hands, they are intent on breaking his will and putting him away forever, locking the door and never letting him out again.
And this is a terrible thing.
So in any case, this is something that your readers should be interested in, and you should get Chase Medar, who wrote it, who's a wonderful young writer, writes a lot for American Conservative magazine, in fact, on the air tomorrow or the next day to talk about it, because he's the expert, and it covers whistleblowing, war crimes, it covers the works.
Awesome.
I certainly will do that.
Something tells me, I've interviewed him before, although I can't remember about what, but I could be wrong about that, but I certainly will arrange that as quick as I can.
And you know what?
This is the dead horse I keep beating on the show, but I figure most people don't know this, and it's really worth telling that.
It's in the chat logs, assuming that they're legitimate, as published by Wire magazine, between Bradley Manning, the specialist, now a private, accused of, well, basically accused of leaking to WikiLeaks, although that's not specifically the charges, but anyway, and the rat, Adrian Lamo, that turned him in.
Those chat logs indicate the purest of whistleblower motives here.
He talked explicitly, Tom, did he not, about the people have the right to know about this.
This is some wrong things going on here in Iraq and from the State Department around the world, and how can the American people do the right thing if they don't know the truth?
I've got to do this and et cetera like that, didn't he?
It was done, I mean, it was clearly an act done without any profit interest, without the urge for anything for himself.
He had been over in Iraq.
He had seen some ugly things, and he wanted to expose the kind of wars we were fighting and the kind of world we were making.
And that impulse is, of course, a great impulse, and it's an irony.
I mean, if you can even call it that anymore, then an administration, the Obama administration, that came in proclaiming sunshine policies, let the sunshine in.
I mean, of course, across the board, they have been extremely anti-sunshine and anti-leaking of any sort, but they've been particularly, you could say, essentially violent on this, because they put this kid, he's just a kid, and they put him away in a marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, and they've subjected him to a kind of isolation that might happen in the worst of super maxes in this country.
I mean, it's a spreading thing, this kind of isolation, and this is isolation for someone who has yet been convicted of absolutely nothing.
So I see it as a strikingly punitive and vengeful act.
Well, thank you for helping stand up for this kid, because obviously it's the entire American state against him, and that's a lot.
And he certainly needs your help, and I just think it's great that you're doing this, and I guess I won't carry on too much further in this conversation about it.
There's more to talk about, but I just want to thank you for doing that, Tom.
That's awesome.
Thank you.
All right.
So now I'm looking at tomdispatch.com.
The same article is at antiwar.com/Englehart, and it's called Pox Americana, Goodbye to All That, Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East.
And this is really kind of a broad perspective about how the American government and the American people post-Cold War blew it.
Yes.
I think that's you've described it better than I could.
I think what I would say is it's also an attempt, I mean, maybe I put on my kind of amateur historian's hat, you might say, and it's a kind of an attempt to, a kind of a re-periodization, a time to take a look at the Cold War.
We normally think of the Cold War this way.
1989, the Berlin Wall came down.
You know, the Soviet Union began to collapse, and by 1991 it was gone.
Now, the American government was initially, in Washington, was initially stunned by this.
They didn't expect the Cold War ever to end with the Soviet Union just disappearing from the earth.
And, in fact, Robert Gates, our present Secretary of State of Defense back then, wrote a memo saying this wasn't going to happen.
I mean, it shows you how much these guys knew.
And when it finally sunk in that the Soviet Union was simply gone, they decided that they were, that they had won a victory most rare, and they went on to act that way.
Now, I've argued for a long time, and I'm not original in this, there have been historians like Emanuel Wallerstein, for instance, who declined as historians who have been arguing this as well, but I've argued for a long time that, at time dispatch, that there wasn't really a winner and a loser in the Cold War, that, in fact, there were two losers, but the second loser, the second losing power, which is us, was, at that time, still so powerful and so much wealthier than the first one, the Soviet Union, that it headed toward the exit unbelievably slowly and wreathed in a kind of self-congratulatory triumphalism.
And, in fact, what's interesting, and when I go back in this piece to take a look at the last 20 years leading up to people power, because what I'm arguing is that the Cold War, we shouldn't mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 when the Soviet Union went, we should mark it to this year and to these Middle Eastern, this second round of people power in our lifetime, the first being the Eastern European one in the late 1980s and early 90s.
The second one, which is linked to the first one, actually marks the beginning of the crumbling of the second empire's imperial position, really, and they're linked.
And they're linked because, coming out of the Cold War, with many things, I mean, it was really a new situation.
There had never been a situation, I think, in history where there was simply one superpower on planet Earth.
And, in that moment, the United States decided to act utterly triumphantly.
We call it, when we get to the Bush people, we call it unilateralism.
They decided just to go it alone.
They decided they could set up a Pax Americana on this planet.
And there were two waves of unilateralism, both of which drove this country off a cliff much faster than it probably would have had to go.
The first wave was in the Clinton years, and it was economic unilateralism.
It was the attempt to call in the IMF, discipline various poorer nations and do kind of a starvation profitability.
The attempt to establish what people often call globalism or neoliberalism.
And we know where that ended.
In fact, it ended in 2008 with the global economy going into meltdown.
That was round one of unilateralism.
The second round was a military version of the same.
They're usually not linked.
And that was the Bush people, George W. and his friends, who were in love with the U.S. military, who decided it could do anything, decided they didn't need anybody else, and simply went and, you know, first they, after 9-11, they tried to take out Afghanistan, then they went for Iraq, and you know the rest of that story.
And both of them came together in 2008 in disaster.
That's where we'll pick it up on the other side of this break with Tom Englehart.
TomDispatch.com, Antiwar.com/Englehart.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're online with Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com, regular writer also at Antiwar.com.
He's the author of The American Way of War, How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, and The End of Victory Culture, Cold War America, and the Disillusioning of a Generation.
And that's a bit of what we're talking about, the end of our victory culture.
And, you know, Tom, I hope it's fair.
I know this is not exactly your school, but I think you really have to be a Ron Paul-ian on foreign policy to tie in the easy money policy of the entire post-Cold War generation here as being a part of the ultimate collapse that we're facing now because we see all this easy money sort of creates this illusion of wealth while creating the climate where it becomes a proper investment decision to go ahead and offshore all of our industrial capacity to the rest of the world, and we don't seem to suffer the consequences of it until much, much later on.
And now we're facing the diminishing power of the dollar as the global standard, and we face a much harder collapse because we've let our economy be very distorted by this easy money, too.
And the easy money is so that we can get away with not giving a piece dividend.
Sure, we're going to keep our world empire after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, but it's not going to cost you.
We're all making money anyway in dot-coms or in houses or whatever.
We can have a war on terrorism, and it'll be free.
We'll give you a check in the mail even, and we're all getting rich.
Your house is getting more expensive.
You can refinance one more time.
And so that's how they get away with expanding the world empire and distorting our economy and our country's position in the rest of the world so much that it just means when it all comes down, it's going to come down harder than ever, right?
Yeah, you know, and let's keep in mind that the guys from that first wave of unilateralism I was talking about and that you're talking about, they were our financial jihadists.
I mean, when you really think about it.
I mean, everybody looks at Mubarak now.
I mean, the Egyptian dictator and autocrat, you know, who has made, supposedly has gotten somewhere between, he and his family have managed to accumulate somewhere between $40 and $70 billion.
So the claims go.
Billion dollars, the claims go.
I mean, this is staggering.
This is like more than a billion dollars a year for his, quote, term in office, you know.
But we had the equivalent of that, you know, ourselves.
You know, I was just reading a piece.
You know, I mean, there are these financial shysters all over the world, and I was reading a piece by Dexter Filkins in the New New Yorker magazine called The Afghan Bank Heist.
Filkins is the New York Times.
He's been the New York Times guy, one of the guys in Afghanistan.
And this is about the swindle at Kabul Bank.
And they have a picture of a guard outside Kabul Bank, and they have this title under it.
They say a guard at Kabul Bank, and then there's a quote.
If this were America, 50 people would have been arrested by now, one American official said.
And I look at that and I laugh, of course.
You know, those guys drove us economically off over a cliff.
I mean, AIG and the banks and so on and so forth.
Nobody was arrested.
I mean, this is a fantasy.
They're in Afghanistan, and they're saying, oh, God, they are so crooked in Afghanistan if it were in the United States, we'd take care of it.
No, no, we did not take care of it.
And this kind of – it was another kind of unilateralism that went along with the Bush unilateralism.
It was an economic unilateralism, and it was a kind of a screw you attitude toward the world.
And, you know, it really has left us.
It has left the United States as well as other places.
And it created the basis.
It helped create the basis.
I mean, for instance, the Bush people, the Bush people had a fantasy, you might say a fantasy construction, which was a thing they called the greater Middle East or the arc of instability.
Before they had any idea how unstable it was, going from North Africa to the Chinese border, they then plunged that area into war, into the war on terror, and so on and so forth.
And in the process, while blowing a hole in the middle of it in Iraq and blowing another hole, if that was possible, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know, and various other small holes, they also, weirdly enough, they not only radicalized the region, they also unified it in certain ways.
So that when you see that this people power movement sweeping across the region, you can to some extent say, thank you George Bush and co.
Because they created some sense that there was some unity, that the fate of a person in Tunisia somehow had something to do with the fate of a person in Egypt or Pakistan or wherever.
And now everybody's looking carefully.
And we don't know where this is going to go.
I never predict the future, but holy Toledo, it's something.
You know what's funny, though, is a friend of mine was pointing out that you could have an author of a novel who comes up with this extraordinary spy plot that's all complicated and chess moves and whatever, and yet in the State Department, it seems like they can't even figure out simple cause and effect about things at all.
You know, even the most basic kind of 5th grade test about which came first.
Yeah, I think one of the striking things of this period, you can see it in the reaction to the Egyptian thing, you can see it in almost everything, is that Washington is remarkably, has been, this administration came in after the wreckage was already in place.
They were brought in whether they knew it or not to manage the wreckage of really what had been the American empire.
I mean, we remain a powerful country.
We're not going to go down like the Soviet Union, but we have headed on the Soviet path.
These guys have come in to manage it, and they are remarkably brain-dead.
They are almost incapable.
I mean, you can look anywhere in foreign policy.
They're almost incapable of having a new thought, a new idea.
I mean, the world is changing rapidly.
This is obvious.
I mean, all you have to do is turn on CNN or any radio station and look at those crowds in Tahrir Square, and you know that this world is changing.
It's changing in China.
It's changing in India.
It's changing in startling ways.
And we have a bunch of guys who, as you say, you know, it's not so much just that they're 5th graders, or they can't quit, but they literally, their box has gotten so narrow, and they cannot think outside of it.
I mean, I have yet to see a new idea about any of our wars.
I mean, we're just going to, you know, even while this disaster is happening, you know, we are just going to plug on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is with wars that are just destabilizing the rest of the region.
I mean, it's remarkable.
It's just unending.
Yeah, well, and I think the Somalis better look out, too.
There's more talk of, you know, gee, all of a sudden there's this al-Shabaab movement for no reason whatsoever that we can think of, and we might have to really intervene there.
And, of course, they use the excuse of the pirates, too, like they just came out of nowhere.
Yeah, yeah, and of course they're bringing these mercenary outfits that are being brought in as well, I mean, into Somalia.
I mean, Somalia, it just, every time you think it couldn't get worse.
You know, I mean, we've already helped send the Ethiopian army in there once, and it was a catastrophe, but we can't stop meddling.
Same thing with Yemen, by the way.
Yeah, well, the sooner we call it off, the better, but it doesn't look like they're going to call it off anytime soon.
They're not going to give up at all.
Absolutely.
They're determined on getting Suleiman and his counterpart in every country in the region if they need to.
Yep, but, you know, I mean, I don't know what will happen in Egypt, but in the long run, this is a kind of a fantasy, and a very dangerous one, you know?
Well, you know, that's the thing that's so frustrating to me, is it doesn't take much wisdom to know that all empires fall, and you can only push it so far, and if you want to sustain yourself, you've got to be a little bit prudent, as George Bush Sr. would call it, as he was invading Iraq, but still, you know?
I mean, you don't have to be that smart to figure out that you can only pick so many fights before all of a sudden you find yourself getting beaten, you know?
It's so true.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time, as always.
I appreciate all your great writing, and all the great writers that you feature.
I encourage everyone to keep your eye on Tom Dispatch tomorrow.
It'll be on antiwar.com as well, this new piece, The Defense of Bradley Manning, and also check out Tom's books.
The American Way of War is absolutely great.
I haven't read The End of Victory Culture, but I bet it is, too.
Thanks very much for your time, Tom.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Bye.
That's Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com.
We'll be right back.
