All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is William J. Astore, he's a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, a professor of history and regular contributor to Tom Dispatch.
And of course, all foreign policy stuff anyway, from TomDispatch.com runs under Tom Englehart's name at AntiWar.com as this one does, American militarism is not a fairy tale, is Tom's headline for his little introduction at the top, and then it's a Siamese twins sharing the same brain, how the military and the civilian are blurring in Washington, is the title of William J.
Astore's essay.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, thanks, Scott.
I'm doing fine.
Good deal.
I'm happy to have you here on the show.
And it's a very interesting piece.
I guess to start, I would mention just from the last week, the issue of civilian control over the military came up in the Republican debate, where when asked about war, Mitt Romney said he would let the generals decide everything.
And Ron Paul basically denounced that as reminiscent of him saying, you know, he needed the lawyers to tell him whether he could start a war by himself or not.
And, you know, four years ago, but Ron Paul said, no, if I'm the president, I'm the commander in chief and I'm the boss of the generals and I will tell the generals what to do.
And of course, to Ron Paul, the constitutionalist, Romney's talk is just upside down.
And yet inside Washington, DC, it's really not.
This is the conventional wisdom.
I think probably like Lyndon Johnson tied the general's hands in Vietnam and that's why we lost or whatever.
So that's part of the right wing myth.
And so certainly during the Bush years, all Bush ever did was blow the whistle and say, OK, generals, you guys figure out how to do it.
Right.
Well, if history's taught us one thing, Scott, you know, there's that famous saying that war is too important to be left to generals.
And I think that comes from Clemenceau and World War One.
You know, the French for a minute, actually, prime minister, I think the leader of France, he's basically saying, look, I mean, if you just leave a war to generals, chances are a war will will never end.
You know, this is something that our country was founded on exactly the opposite, that you must have civilian control over the military.
And that's something that are that that that a lesson from the founders that we need to keep in mind.
And I don't know what Mitt Romney was thinking.
But I think, you know, Romney, as you said, Scott, is is basically articulating a message that he thinks is going to resonate with conservative Republicans.
You know, if if we get into a situation, well, you know, I'm going to listen to the generals and do what the generals want.
You know, just imagine if if Truman had adopted that policy in the Korean War with MacArthur trying to extend the war into China.
Well, we'd probably have World War Three.
Yeah, we'd all be dead.
Yeah, well, I guess part of that, too, is that and this is part of what you talk about in your article, is that with the all volunteer force, the military more and more really kind of is a separate Praetorian Guard from the rest of the society.
And I just thought this is so ironic that if you include Obama on the Democrat side to the only veteran in the entire presidential race right now is Ron Paul, the peacenik, and every other one of those Republicans and Obama, the Democrat are all chicken hawks, you know, down to a man.
And so Romney has to kind of compensate for that, too.
Not him, not any of his five fighting age male sons are military men.
And so he has to say, well, I'll leave it to the experts.
Right, right.
And as you said, it's a dangerous idea to have.
And and it is something that I think in a way, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, you know, a little bit of military service can be a good thing in teaching you that the military is not perfect and teaching you that that war can be a very horrible thing.
And the best thing for our country to do is to avoid wars, you know, not to get involved in more.
You know, Tom wrote a great, Tom Ingleheart, you know, he wrote a great introduction to my piece where he talks about all of the wars that we're involved in now, whether it be, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, you know, Pakistan.
And then you have, you know, congressmen calling for, hey, let's get involved in Syria, too.
I mean, it's sort of a there's almost a dynamic at work, almost a one upmanship where where the where the answer now is, is is not to put peace on the table, but to but to use our military more and more.
And it's very disturbing.
Well, I sort of wonder now we're kind of too close to it, you know, we'll have to be a year or two out at the very least to look back.
But it sort of seems to me like there's a turning point going, you know, tipping point here with the obviously broken budget and skyrocketing prices.
And just the simple fact that it's the Democrats in charge of the war means all the Republicans are off the hook from the worst of the kind of nationalist mindset that you're either with us or the terrorists and all that kind of thing that we had to put up, us peaceniks had to put up with over, you know, the last presidency.
Right.
But I fear that that it seems to me that, you know, President Obama and the Democrats, at least at least the establishment, you know, people like Hillary Clinton, et cetera, that they've that they are also taking a very hard line, maybe in part because they believe that's what they should do.
But I think also in part because it plays out well politically.
And sadly, I don't think we're going to see any significant cuts, if any cuts at all to the defense budget, at least for the last for the next couple of years as we go up to the election in 2012, because the Democrats are perennially they seem to be always sensitive to this notion that that they may be called soft, whether soft on whether it's soft on communism back in the 1970s or soft on terrorism today.
You know, even though we we we found and Obama, as they say, Obama got Osama, as the saying goes, even though you would think that that after after after doing that, there would be an opportunity to change course.
It seems to me that that so far it's always well, you know, we we got Osama bin Laden.
You know, that proves that our approach is the right one.
Let's double down and try to kill even more terrorist leaders.
Right.
Yeah.
And they say it right in the pages of The New York Times.
Somehow that's not prosecutable whistleblower and leaking classified information when it's, hey, yeah, we're going to expand the war even more into Yemen.
Now we've proven how good we are at using these robots.
Right.
And of course, Scott, the scary thing there is that it's not in a way you would think that if we're going to to have a military operation, at the very least, it should be run by the Department of Defense.
But this, of course, is being run by the CIA, which is a civilian agency, which which which helps to illustrate my point that we're having this this incredible blurring of the civilian and the military so much so that you can hardly tell the difference.
And, you know, reading that New York Times piece, what what really struck me was when they said, well, it's it's very good that the CIA is running this because they're less constrained by laws than the military.
And I'm like, how scary is that?
Right.
By definition, they're that's why it's covert activities because it's illegal.
Right.
And that's that's the sort of of I know I know in a way this is nothing new, but in a way it is.
I mean, maybe it's not new and kind, but it's new in degree in the sense that it's just getting more and more open and more and more common and pervasive.
This idea that that that, you know, we can pursue all of these, you know, military solutions many times run by civilian agencies like like the CIA.
And I find that kind of blurring very scary.
Well, and part of that, too, is it really does cut both ways, you know, during the Bush years, especially I think Rumsfeld had had a major push to take over covert activity and get away with even more because the Joint Special Operations Command doesn't have to answer to the House and Senate intelligence committees like the CIA does.
And then but at the same time, we see like in Yemen and Afghanistan and Pakistan, the CIA really taking the forefront in war activities.
It's like they're kind of trading places.
Right.
Right.
And in a way, it's it's a strange kind of operation, too, because it's it's you know, the use of the use of drones is is in a way it's sort of a high tech sniper approach to war.
It's an assassination approach to war.
I'm sorry.
We're going to have to hold it right there.
Got the bumper music playing.
Got to go out to this break.
But when we get back, we'll pick up this conversation with William J. Astore.
He's got a new piece at Antiwar.com today.
Under Tom Englehart's name, it's in the viewpoint section there about American militarism.
Hold tight.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with William J. Astore.
He's a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
Now he's writing for Tom Dispatch.
How do you like that?
He's got a piece today at well, yesterday at Tom Dispatch today on Antiwar.com.
Siamese twins sharing the same brain, how the military and the civilian are blurring in Washington.
And it's really been a long time coming.
I think, you know, as you mentioned in your article, William Eisenhower gave his military industrial complex speech a long, long time ago now.
And it's not like they ever got thrown out of power since then or anything.
But as you also point out in your article, just in the last 10 years, things have really increased.
I guess it's sort of like computer power doubling every two years, that kind of parabola curve or whatever, where military power is just such a gigantic part of the government and the way it operates that it's really just taking over.
Right, right.
It is something, of course, that accelerated after 9-11.
As you know, I mean, everyone remembers 9-11, of course, you know, 10 years ago.
And just the shock and the fear, you know, we talk about shock and awe, you know, with respect to Iraq.
But, of course, we were shocked and awed on 9-11 by the attacks.
And so and then, of course, a lot of people forget right after that was the whole anthrax scare.
So that combination definitely put our country on edge.
And it gave, and you could see maybe a different president and different leaders, you know, saying that, you know, kind of giving an FDR kind of a speech saying, you know, America, all you have to do is, you know, we don't have to fear anything except fear itself.
And Americans are tough and we're going to take care of this.
You know, don't be afraid.
But instead, we went down a different road.
You know, we went down a road where we had all those terrorist alert warnings, you know, it's elevated, it's orange.
Be afraid.
And we spent an enormous sums of money on national defense.
We invented the whole idea of homeland security.
I mean, this is common knowledge to all of your listeners, of course.
And as a result, as you said, things got worse.
You know, talk about the blurring of the civilian in the military.
You know, the classic case is George W.
Bush landing on an aircraft carrier dressed like a pilot, you know, right out of the movie Independence Day.
I mean, that's just something, you know, Ike was a five star general.
And when Ike retired, he never put on military clothing again.
And when he was president, he dressed like a civilian.
He never put on any military gear.
Nowadays, our presidents do that routinely, whether it be Bush or Obama.
And it's not a good thing.
It's something that undermines the whole idea of civilian control, which is fundamental and is written in our Constitution.
Well, I sure don't mean to, you know, acquit Obama or portray his motives as any better, really, because I think he always meant to do this.
But I don't I also think that David Petraeus wasn't so sure.
And it looked like in 2009, the Pentagon was saying we are going to escalate this war and we will not take no for an answer from this president.
We are going to have this surge.
And, you know, I think he probably meant to go along with it anyway.
But obviously he was buying a pig in a poke, but he didn't really have a choice because David Petraeus was playing politics on TV, The Washington Post.
Right.
And that and that is that is something that that, you know, when I first wrote this article, it you know, like anything that you write, you know, it changes as you write various drafts.
Now, this started out as as as a sensible article by me where I was saying, you know, we need to reassert civilian control of the military.
We need a firm president who's ready to take over as commander in chief and who needs to tell the military that we need to we need to reduce these number of wars and need to work with Congress and reduce the amount we're spending on defense.
And and then I just realized that although all of that sort of makes sense, at least it does to me.
You know, we we need to reduce the number of wars.
We need to reduce the spending on on on on wars because of budget deficits, among other reasons, that all of that's not it's it's not going to happen.
And it's not going to happen because, you know, civilian control of the military is almost a non sequitur now.
I mean, with the Pentagon getting so much money with the State Department, you know, I describe it as a I describe the State Department as a remora attached to a predatory shark.
You know, the State Department kind of goes along with with the Pentagon and the Pentagon basically is almost running our diplomatic efforts because they're the ones with all the money and the influence overseas.
So so all of that being said, it's very difficult now to imagine a scenario where a civilian president, you know, short of someone, you know, that old thing, only only Nixon could go to China because of his reputation of being anti-communist.
What kind of president is it going to take?
Certainly not President Obama, obviously.
What kind of president is going to stand up to the Pentagon and take a new, you know, chart a new course?
I don't know.
You know, I can't help but say, you know, I think that right now is the first time.
Well, last time, too, but especially, you know, this time around, this is really the first time in 100 years that the American people actually have had a choice between Republican Empire.
It's always been, you know, FDR versus Wilkie, Truman versus Dewey, Bush versus Dukakis and this kind of thing and McCain versus Obama.
But now we actually have a guy who quite obviously is willing to tell the entire Pentagon to go to hell.
I said, get your troops on the planes and get them home right now.
And that includes all six wars.
Well, five and a half or whatever, depending on how you count Samaria.
And that includes all the bases in in England and Germany and Italy and Korea and Japan and all the rest of them, too.
And that's Ron Paul.
He's running for president right now.
He's made no bones about it, that he means to abolish the empire.
Yeah.
And it's and it's and it's curious and revealing that Ron Paul is usually not taken seriously by the mainstream media.
You know, he's usually he's usually portrayed as some kind of like almost, you know, wild eyed fanatic, where actually his his policies, his policies of of, you know, I wouldn't say a return to isolationism, but just a downsizing of the empire and a return to a focus on on America's problems rather than, you know, all the all solving the world's problems that that used to be that used to be America's mainstream.
And now, unfortunately, it's it's considered to be a fringe opinion, opinion of someone like Ron Paul.
And somehow we need to get back to the idea that what Ron Paul is saying is not crazy, that he's the sane one.
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of support from some former military officers probably wouldn't hurt, William.
Well, you know, curiously enough, you probably know this, but the last time around, Ron Paul did garner a lot of support within the military.
There are a lot of military people that, you know, it's the military.
Many military people are paying the price, you know, more so as far as, you know, repeat deployment and, you know, being wounded and and all the sacrifices they're making.
A lot of American troops are fed up as well.
Yeah, well, he got more.
He actually got more military donations last time than all the rest of the candidates combined in both parties.
Right.
And we have a tendency to think of, you know, military as military members as being sort of warmongers.
But, you know, and there certainly are a few.
But many, you know, since they're the since they're the ones who are actually doing the fighting and making the sacrifices, a lot of them find Ron Paul's message quite appealing.
Well, you know, my experience with military guys, the enlisted men consider themselves the people.
The government is the officers, but they're like, you know, they still sort of consider themselves the American militia called to duty by their government in a way.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And so, yeah, there's no reason why they ought to be caught up in the fantasies of the officers who apparently all just want more shiny little things for their shirt.
Yeah, no, I did.
I did hear I did hear from, you know, I I encourage readers, you know, to send me emails if they have feedback.
And and one person wrote to me and made a good point.
They said, you know, they remember talking to an officer and this is back in the 80s when, you know, when we didn't have as many wars, you know, thank goodness.
But I remember talking to the officer and saying, you know, I'm disappointed that I'm not, you know, that I'm not I need my war to fight.
I mean, there certainly are officers who and, you know, who are basically like I've trained for war for 10 years or 15 years.
I just I just hope a war come.
And there is that attitude, sadly.
But yeah, I mean, it's something that that we need to be on guard against for sure.
Well, and, you know, what Ron Paul actually always says about this is this isn't going to change because, you know, he finally gave just the right speech and everybody changed their mind.
The dollar will break and the empire will fall just the way the Soviet Union did a few years back.
And we can see it happening right before our eyes.
And the only question is, what are we going to give up first, the empire or everything else?
Right.
And hopefully hopefully we'll we'll smarten up.
Yeah, agreed.
All right.
Well, great piece and great interview.
Thanks very much.
William J.
Astore, everybody.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks, Scott.
