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Jan. 5, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
56:17
Bowden! - 11 - The Forgotten War

Richard and Jonathan discuss the Iraq War (2003-2011), which not too long ago defined politics and the 24-hour news cycle in the Western world, and now has become history. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
Thank you.
Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard.
And welcome back, Jonathan Bowden.
How are you?
Yes, I'm fine.
Very well.
Today we're going to talk about an issue that was very much in the news over the past decade.
And indeed, I think one could say that it defined the mainstream media mass communications, the news, for at least five to seven years.
And yet now we're at a point in which this I'm referring to the Iraq War, and that's the 2003 invasion by the Bush administration and some allies.
And we're going to talk about...
The meaning, the relevancy of the Iraq War for today, as well as some origins of it, and we'll also speculate about the future of American foreign policy.
Will any lessons be learned?
So on and so forth.
So Jonathan, first off, I think it's always best to start at a point that...
That is most relevant for the here and now in the sense of what is the Iraq War like today?
And I think the Iraq War today is a quite ironic episode because much as I mentioned...
The debate over the rock and the debate over the surge and these news reports of the insurgency and violence of all kinds, that defined the news cycle in the United States and Europe for at least five years in the mid-2000s.
And it also defined the conservative movement.
That was their issue.
And it was a kind of shibboleth for the conservative movement.
You know, you were on board with the invasion and the freedom agenda, or you were kicked out.
And yet, we reach 2011-2012, and by the end of 2011, Barack Obama has more or less ended the Iraq War.
All of the troops are out.
In Afghanistan, the war is not completely ended, however.
There is a major drawdown.
Now, of course, there's some kind of presence there, and so on and so forth.
It's one of those wars that might never actually end, much like the Cold War, World War II, where you had these footprints that were remaining from these past conflicts, you know, still military bases in Germany and so forth.
However, more or less, it is over.
And yet there was no real debate.
There was a kind of minor debate about whether – I don't know if you heard about this, Jonathan, but whether we should have a ticker tape parade in New York City or something to celebrate this supposed victory.
That was a kind of minor debate, and I think even the military was a little bit embarrassed by the suggestion that they have a big mass parade to celebrate the Iraq War.
It's almost as if this was the most important thing in so many people's lives, on the left and right and the mainstream media and the conservative movement, and yet they've now kind of forgotten about it.
What do you think about this, Jonathan?
Yes, well, I think Iraq, in some ways, is the first postmodern war.
It's the first ironic and reflexive war, and there's an interconnected set of constituencies out there who are now wishing, in some ways, to forget it occurred, because the war was a grandiloquent failure in its own terms, certainly in the grandstanding terms that it was put forward to the American and to other peoples.
It changed the regime in Iraq, and the political set-up inside that Arab nation-state is now totally different.
However, it brought forces that were latent there anyway, even under Saddam.
So there has been a big change, but it's only for Iraq.
Nothing else has changed anywhere.
And all that's happened is the dictatorship was taken down a sort of Arab fascist...
This sort of government was taken down, really.
And the forces that were held down, these Shia forces in the south of the country, have now become a democratic mandated majority.
But they don't rule in a democratic way, in a way that the Americans thought they would.
They rule in a purely sectarian way, playing off the other two groups against them and dominating everything from their own point of view and doing to the other groups, in some respects, what Saddam did to them.
Which is not the reason why the war was fought.
And considering the amount of blood and material that was lost, the $3 trillion, the cost of the whole war from beginning to end, U.S. dollars, and the death total of around $160,000, that's the most lower case revisionist death total for higher ones in the anti-war movement.
And among certain historians of up to three-quarters of a million, about 27 million in Iraq as a whole.
So that's the sort of package that you're presented with, and the war has not been a success.
No, before we talk about how we got into the mess and the origins of the Iraq War, let's put a little more pressure on this aspect of democracy in itself.
And, you know, oftentimes Americans, the American public, are deemed naive.
They're made fun of.
And, you know, to be frank, and I'm speaking of American, in some ways I think a lot of these criticisms are valid.
I mean, I remember listening to talk radio in the mid-2000s.
These are just normal people.
I don't think this was, you know, manipulated propaganda.
Normal people calling up and being like, yeah, we're going to give them a democracy, and they're going to start shopping in malls and not worrying about radical Islam and this kind of thing.
You know, democracy itself was just this kind of vision.
Yeah.
You know, American postmodern nihilist or something where you spend your life buying shoes and, you know, working in a post-industrial cubicle or something like this.
But of course, you know, democracy, there's the crossy with not just the demos.
It's not just a kind of way of life.
It's a form of power.
And the great irony, particularly for the conservative movement and the neocons who are now obsessed with Iran, Is that the Shia Muslims, you know, Iran is a Shia Muslim country, have been empowered perhaps even beyond their wildest dreams before 2003.
In the sense that you had a, Saddam was a Sunni dictator, kind of.
Arab fascist is not a bad way of describing him.
And he was ruling in some ways on behalf of a Sunni minority.
He was keeping the Shia in check.
He was keeping the country together.
Now you have an empowered Shia majority.
You have Iran, which has more influence in its neighboring country, you know, because democracy was put forth.
So do you think that that is kind of this, you know, the two sides of democracy, that this kind of hokey notion of democracy that everyone's happy and free and, you know, they're all shopaholics.
That's the kind of vulgar hokum that seems to be what was put forward by George Bush and was actually believed by a lot of Americans.
And then there's actually the kind of the democracy that's much more equivocal and is actually about power and has unintended consequences.
Do you think that people have learned anything by this?
Do you think that...
The foreign policy establishment gets it.
Do you think that the general public are maybe a little more cynical or realistic this time around?
Probably a little bit, although it will be marginal once the propaganda is cranked out yet again.
I think nothing that happened is particularly mysterious.
To experts on that area of the world in the State Department, that they're a tiny fraction of the educated American policy.
They could have predicted what would happen.
There are no bourgeois institutions.
There are no middle-ranked civic institutions in a country like Iraq.
So people will vote nakedly along sectional lines.
And they will vote along interest group lines.
They will vote along communitarian lines.
And you will basically just shift power from one group to another.
And the groups, although they reach concordance with each other, have no concept of sharing power in an equitable way, because it's about group domination.
And certain policies in the West have always resembled this.
Northern Ireland for a long time was not run along lines of left-right, non-communitarian democracy, individualized bourgeois democracy.
But whether you were a Unionist, whether you were Protestant, whether you were a nationalist, It's all that matters.
So what the United States of America succeeded in doing is they took down a particularly virulent form of Sunni elitism and they replaced it by mass tebucitri.
Shia democracy linked to Iran, and that is the dispensation which now ruled.
Now, if Americans were told that they'd go through this great expense of war, men, and materiel, never mind financing, to achieve such a limited I do think that the people are a little more chagrined afterwards.
The sort of Democratic Party side of the agenda, which always tends to be a bit more cynical, a bit more passive, a bit more disinterested in terms of foreign affairs, a bit more realistic about the realities of power and how it can be exercised in other societies with very different dynamics, that has largely won through.
But I don't know what shape the anti-war movement is like in the United States or whether in any respects it has collapsed.
Well, it's a very good question, because I mentioned how the Iraq War defined the conservative movement and was a kind of shibboleth within that movement.
But it also defined the left.
And there was a very strong anti-war left.
It might not have reached the peaks of...
The anti-Vietnam movement, which, you know, became a social movement and spilled over into all these areas.
In some ways, that revolution had already taken place.
But it was a very powerful thing.
And in some ways, I think, you know, so much of the anti-war movement was probably absorbed into Obama.
And, you know, now the notion, I mean, Obama, again, Obama is a very equivocal figure.
He hasn't more or less ended the war in Iraq, but then he's kind of taken on a foreign policy which is almost George W. Bush light.
It's like we won't spend $3 trillion on some lunatic crusade in Iraq.
We're going to spend...
So, you know, in some ways, it's just kind of the old boss, the new boss, same as the old boss, although maybe not as crazy.
It's hard to say that as a compliment.
So in some ways, the whole anti-war movement has just been absorbed into the system which it once supposed.
And to go back to what I mentioned before, I think a lot of this idea that people want to almost forget about the Iraq War is because much like 9-11 put the whole world on a new footing, whether that was justified or not, You can argue, but it did.
And I think the 2008 financial crisis put the world on a different footing.
I think social mood is fundamentally different.
I think people have different expectations.
They have different perceptions of the West on power now.
And so do you have any thoughts about that, of kind of this new...
I think we really are.
We're in a different social mood zone.
You know, pardon me for the clumsiness of that term.
We're in a different world.
Yes, I think the pretensions of the Bush presidency have been exploded.
I think the reason the Republicans lost to Obama can be placed at the door of George W. Bush.
I think there was, at the end of his regime, at the end of his second term, there was an enormous amount of sort of despair and onnui, particularly in conservative circles, about George W. Bush.
It's why McCain, who was almost as ardent in foreign policy terms, particularly about issues like Iran, couldn't pick up the baton there.
It was the fact that George had ruined it for them.
With what appear to be lies from the European perspective to get people into the war in the first instance.
But there were no weapons of mass destruction.
There was a high probability that there were none.
Many other countries, small countries like the Netherlands and Northern European societies who tend to be passed in orientation anyway, and therefore these judgments are not really listened to when the big brokers of power sit down glabally with each other.
But they had suspected for a long time that there were none of these weapons.
Most people thought there were such weapons or early systems to develop them because Saddam's was the sort of regime that would want them.
Right.
What appears to have happened is he was developing low-level chemical and biological weapons, which is a poor man's bomb, and had an extremely rudimentary nuclear program.
And yet he abolished it because he feared the Americans would use any programs for mass death as an excuse to invade.
One of the ironies about all of these things, of course, is Saddam was a staunch ally of the United States.
And we've all seen the photos of Saddam in tuxedo and little ditty bow tie stood next to Rumsfeld laughing it up in Baghdad during the height of the Iran-Iraq war.
Gaddafi was an ally by the...
After the Iraq War, in the mid to late 2000s, he had ended his nuclear program.
He was making nice with Washington.
I think in some ways what Washington keeps...
Teaching the world is don't play nice with the United States.
It doesn't pay.
The U.S. will forget what you've done, and they might end up attacking you.
In some ways, you need to be a realistic policymaker.
You need to speak a language, so to speak, or you need to have a give and take.
There needs to be a rational discourse that we have certain ends we want to achieve.
If you help us, we'll give you this, so on and so forth.
With the United States, and I don't know if it has to do with, you know, sociopaths running the country or democracy itself, which is so fluid and influenced by emotion and so on and so forth.
But I don't think there's any rational reason for any foreign power to trust Washington.
No, but I don't think they do anyway.
I think some of the...
Saddam didn't either.
His basic mistake was Kuwait when the Americans put out conflicting signals.
But Saddam ought to have known that the Americans would not tolerate him taking Kuwait.
The whole purpose of these Arab gerontocracies and feudal states in the Gulf is to break up the possibility that dangerous Arab tendencies could emerge that might adopt an anti-Western and an anti-Israeli specificity.
And there is a degree to which...
Countries in the Middle East are kept supine under Yeah, under Arab giant regimes that are loyal to their Western paymasters.
And there's two premises upon which all of that is based: the flow of oil, and that it's kept so, with a minor quarrel to the effect that radical pan-nationalism in an Arab sense and Islamism should be avoided.
And the second one is that the regime should not be too dangerous for Israel's future existence.
Even though it's understood that the Arab masses loathes Israel and would like to destroy it.
And that is a reality of the Arab world and of the Muslim world in general and of Arab and Muslim politics.
But as long as those feelings can't actualize themselves in threatening parallel state agencies or stateful agencies, this is fine.
The trouble with Iran at the moment is Iran appears to be a second world state of threatening aspect.
That might pose, in the most lurid of circumstances, an existential threat to Israel's existence.
And all of the pressure which is being put upon Iran is purely because it's seen in that light, and the Israelis are calling in every favour they possibly can, particularly from the United States.
Netanyahu is turning up later this week again for more consultations, because Israel is obsessed with the idea that Iran is a threat to them, and the United States is obsessed with giving Israel what it wants.
in relation to Middle Eastern para diplomacy.
The correct position for the United States is the power, of course, is to be more even-handed and to have Arab allies.
But such is the fervor of pro-Israeli sentiment in the United States, not least orchestrated by tens of millions of ardent Christian Zionists, who are actually extraordinarily important, particularly to the Republican Party.
The interest of the United States as a state is itself skewed.
Because they have interests on the Arab side that perpetually get overlooked, despite key Arab allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Yes, without question.
I mean, it's a very complicated issue.
You obviously have a great deal of Jewish money supporting, not just Jewish money, but Jewish Zionist money supporting democratic candidates, and then you have the Christian Zionist base that...
It doesn't seem to be financial.
It seems to be, you know, emotional or spiritual.
Those are very powerful forces.
Let's talk a little bit about the origins of the war.
You know, I've mentioned before just how 9-11 put the world, Washington, on a new footing.
New things were thinkable after that campaign.
And certainly, the neocons had drawn up plans.
For an Iraq invasion, they actually issued a paper that was signed by all sorts of neocons and kind of beltway types, Dick Cheney type people of, you know, we need to attack Saddam.
And I think they even mentioned some things that are fodder for the 9-11 truth movement of, you know, barring a Pearl Harbor-like attack, this will be difficult to achieve, and so on and so forth.
But what do you think are the major factors?
I mean, in terms of the origins of the war, I think obviously 9-11 just kind of put everything on a new footing.
The oil question is a very difficult one.
You know, obviously oil has become immensely more expensive since the campaign.
Corporations like Exxon and so on and so forth have become wildly profitable.
Exxon is either the first or the second largest company in the United States in terms of market capitalization, so on and so forth.
So that must have made a factor, although it's a very difficult one.
It's not like the U.S. just wanted to grab the oil.
They haven't done that.
And then you also have the issue of Israel and Israel's fervent backers in the United States, the neocons.
How would you try to piece this together?
It's a difficult puzzle.
With something like this, I don't think it pays to be conspiratorial.
I've heard some people, George Bush wanted to invade Saddam because they attempted to assassinate his father.
I think that's just too cheap and easy.
I think this is a very complicated issue.
How, Jonathan, would you put some of these pieces together?
9-11, oil, Israel, and so forth.
Yes, I think after 9 /11, America had a wake-up call and a call to arms against complacency and had a neo-imperial spasm.
And for a period of about five years after the 9 /11 attacks, became a much more right-wing imperialist nation-state, looking after itself much more, much rougher around the world.
It resiled from many liberal codices that restricted the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, restricted its ability to intervene in other countries, restricted its ability to engage in torture and black activities, restricted its activities in relation to kidnapping and taking people across borders without their consent and without the consent of the governments that prevailed in those areas.
So there was a tightening up and there was a ratcheting up.
of the sort of counter-revolutionary warfare, espionage-related and actual warfare that the Americans were there to fight.
And in the course of this, things became much more radicalized.
And ideas and sentiments along the lines of, we can't have errant third world dictators who used to be clients of ours, but then who militarily act against our interests, witness Kuwait, running around and developing weapons of mass destruction which could, in a certain type of circumstances, find their hands into parallel state actors like the Al-Qaeda network.
And I think this was the motivation for the war, which at moments...
Reconsideration reveals itself to be something that's like a tenth-rate policy paper that will be shot down by a much better policy one than some brainstorming session in the State Department.
Because firstly, Saddam is a Sunni dictator who is regarded as a secularist and almost a communist by Al-Qaeda.
There is no interconnection between those movements at all.
Indeed, Ba 'athism was considered by Islamists to be an enemy ideology.
They only have time for them when they fight against Western and Israeli interests.
There were no Al-Qaeda operatives whatsoever in Iraq.
Meetings between some of his security people, the Muhar Abad.
And Al-Qaeda were the meetings which go on all the time.
There were many meetings between the CIA and the network which became Al-Qaeda because they financed them to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, which is where they first got close to each other and where Osama cut his teeth prior to launching his crusade against the United States.
So foreign policy is a dangerous and complicated area.
But I personally think that the factors involving the attempted assassination of Bush Senior, which did occur by all accounts, the factors involving the oil wealth of the country and its privatisation after its nationalisation against Western commercial and corporate interests by the Barthes in the past, these are all minor.
They're all part of the mix.
But you don't go to war for reasons like this.
You also have a Churchillian psychology in relation to President Bush and the belief that the West must act and must do things in a decisive military way.
If a different president, if Gore had been president, I doubt the Iraq war would have occurred.
I'm not sure I agree with you, actually, on that last assertion.
You know, Gore was talking a big talk when Clinton actually did a kind of mini-Iraq war in the late 90s, where they were attacking Saddam over airspace.
I think there was actually, there obviously is an anti-war left and things like that.
But in terms of the neocons, neoliberals, there was a broad consensus about going to war in the early 2000s.
One that isn't there in the establishment now.
And you don't see the Council on Foreign Relations.
You see them actually talking against invading Iran.
One of the reasons why there is such reluctance to go on Iran, one of the reasons why America is in a non-militant posture in relation to Iran, It's because of Iraq.
The Iraqi war has been such a disaster and has burnt itself into the consciousness, not of the American population, who's soon forgotten it, unless they've got some direct military involvement through their own families and so on.
Iraq is not an issue for contemporary Americans now that, in a strange way, it's almost as if that war didn't occur.
That's the impression I've got, despite being in the United States, subsequent to the war.
But I think, in relation to Iraq, They are so mindful of the minefield of unexpected possibilities that loom as soon as you start using force in relation to these complicated areas, particularly to achieve tendentious and simplistic results.
Even in terms of planning, it's quite clear the Bush administration had no plan at all for poster damer arc.
They began with a blank sheet of paper.
And they made it up as they went along, consulting allies such as the British, who of course used to run Iraq and have a larger degree of practical knowledge about how you manipulate the groups inside the country in order to achieve any sort of stability.
So I think the fact that political parties will be set up, hundreds and hundreds of them that later merged into blocs.
The later hardened intersectional blocks caused Western policymakers to despair that they couldn't create a bourgeois democracy in a couple of years inside Iraq.
It would take centuries of democracy in these societies for them to develop middle-class, left-right polarities, such as those that exist in Western societies.
You've got to basically overcome group-based societies and populist politicians who play on that internally all of the time.
Yeah, perhaps even never.
I mean, I think there's...
Even never, yes.
Like India.
India has quite an advanced policy for an ex-third world society.
But all of India's politics is rooted in caste, rooted in communitarianism, rooted in religiosity.
If you're a mainstream Hindu, you vote for the Congress Party.
If you're a militant Hindu, you vote BJP.
If you're a communist, you've got a tiny little slot over to one side.
And the cluster of minorities, enormous minorities, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, and otherwise, vote for the Congress party because Congress is less militant and will put a lot of people Yeah, I think there's something to the idea that it is Northern Europeans, but Europeans as a whole, who have this abstract corporate notion of the state.
It's just something very different, and it might not...
It gets back to what we were talking about before, this hokey notion of democracy that George Bush put forth and Americans gobbled up, and the difference between the real existing democracy in the Arab world, just two very different things.
It's something the American public just can't understand.
Again, the problems of democracy really affecting foreign policy.
There are two interesting issues that I want to talk about and ask you to speculate on.
One of those is the neoconservatives.
In the intellectual history of the American right, it's a very interesting topic.
A generation of Jews, mostly New York City, and it is a Jewish movement, much like Critical Theory or so on and so forth, who were essentially the Trotskyists, who would argue against the Stalinists and the other...
Alcove of the cafeteria of New York City College, as the story goes.
And I think that story is literally true.
They were essentially the anti-communist left, which definitely existed, Trotsky's left.
That kind of morphed into a – in the Cold War, into a neoliberal, liberal democratic kind of thing.
And then by the Reagan administration and onward, it shifted over to the Republican side.
It's an interesting story.
And they seem to have maintained a little bit of that Trotskyist, maybe even demonic spirit.
You have people.
We shouldn't overestimate that.
I don't know.
We seek chaos in the Middle East.
We seek creative destruction.
I think that's the term he used.
Much like America is an ever-progressive, creative, destructing force.
We must go and smash the Middle East and bring them to a higher level.
You have this very weird, Americanized form of Trotskyist revolutionary fervor.
I think that really played a part in the neocons.
Imagination.
And obviously, at another level, they're Israeli nationalists.
They're a firm Zionist.
Anyway, it's a very complicated issue.
But do you think, Jonathan, that in some ways the neocons have blown their wad?
They had their moment where you had the opportunity with 9-11 that everyone, again, they're on a new footing.
They're ready for war.
You had a president who...
Could be cajoled into this, could easily be influenced, not particularly intelligent.
You had the Christian Zionist community, which was kind of, you know...
It reached its peak in the mid-2000s and so on and so forth.
Do you think that it's in some ways over for them, or do you think that they too will stage a comeback of sorts?
Actually, my view, I think the neoconservative era might be really coming to a close.
I think it reached its peak with Bush, and I don't think they're going to get a chance to do anything.
Like they've done before.
But that's just my view.
I might be wrong in that.
What are your thoughts on the neocons and the future of the neocons, Jonathan?
Well, they're tied umbilically to Al-Qaeda and to 9-11 because that's what gave them their moment.
So if America suffered climactic terrorist attacks of a similar sort, if somebody exploded a nuclear weapon in an American city 15 years from now, Then that type of politicking can come back because it's entirely dependent upon events.
They will have their own caucuses.
They will have their own meetings.
They will try and press the flesh.
They will try and get money into the hands of politicians who are corruptible and can be induced in one direction as against another.
But they are now reduced to the ordinary level of middle-ranking politicking.
They no longer have the ear of anyone in power, and their thesis seem to have failed, because their thesis in Iraq were that a Western-style liberal democracy could be created in Iraq, which would make Israel safer, which seemed to be their premise looked at from abroad.
All of that seems to be utter nonsense.
The Maliki government in Iraq is as anti-Israeli as Saddam ever was.
When Maliki was asked at the White House, who do you support in the upsurge of the Hezbollah war or micro-war a couple of years ago between Hezbollah and Israel?
He said, Hezbollah are brothers of the Shia and there were extraordinarily pained faces around him in the White House press room because he's responding to a totally different constituency and he's not going to say anything.
In relation to, you know, sort of American allies who put him in power, which could in any sense deflect from the constituency he represents.
Inside Iraq and outside, because there's this phalanx of Shia power now that exists from Iran through the deserts of southern Iraq into Jordan and out into the Lebanon, which faces off directly against Israel's northern border and where Iran has a proxy army arranged with the Syrians in cohort called the Hezbollah militia.
The great unwritten fear in all of this, of course, is that weapons of mass destruction will be given to Hezbollah.
Who would use them?
Probably.
They're ten times more likely to be used than an Iranian state.
States are incredibly nervous because of the fear of retribution, which would occur if they used such weapons.
But the likelihood that a state would ever give an organisation as radical as Hezbollah's weapons of mass destruction is extremely unlikely, because it would be known almost instantly that they'd done this.
It's now pretty much known that the Pakistanis, of course, sold them.
The technology of the bomb illicitly to North Korea, which helped them to develop their tiny little device.
And Syria, to a degree, that of course was destroyed by an Israeli attack, but they only had one place to aim for, and the Syrians were anxious to cover it up.
And Libya.
Libya had quite an advanced nuclear program, far more advanced than the West thought they did, because Libya was always regarded as a very eccentric regime, led by a man who was regarded by the Western popular press as insane.
And it surprised the West how advanced their nuclear program was, but they bought it off the shelf from Pakistan.
So there is a danger of internal proliferation when these countries begin to get these weapons.
But nothing can stop these countries getting these weapons.
This is old technology.
This technology is between 70 and 80 years old.
These countries are 70 to 80 years behind the West in terms of the economic and technological cusp, and therefore it's inevitable they're going to get them.
Between now and 2050, a whole plethora of second and third world societies will achieve atomic weapons.
Yes, I agree.
And I also agree about the reluctance of the states to use them because they have a return address and retribution would be swift.
I think at some level all of these states are going to rationally calculate that they would only use such a weapon in an extreme exigent.
Let's talk about it.
I have two more issues that are both a little bit speculative.
Let's talk about this Christian Zionist issue.
You know, it's interesting when you look at it, because it is a purely American phenomenon.
It's very hard to find Christian Zionist anywhere in Europe.
Perhaps you could find some in England.
But what do you think the origins of this movement are and the larger meaning of it?
And do you think it's going to have a future of some sorts?
And I'll just mention that there are obviously a lot of dealings between...
Many of these, you know, fanatical Christian Zionist preachers like Haji or Pat Robertson and so on and so forth, where they're literally dealing with Israel.
They're being sent on trips to Israel.
I think Israel famously bought Jerry Falwell a plane, all this kind of stuff.
So obviously there's some, you know, pressing of the flesh that gets this relationship started.
But, you know, I don't think one should think that they don't sincerely believe in this.
I don't know what to call it, ideology or cult or something like this, where they believe that there's going to be some kind of Armageddon in the foreseeable future and that the Jews must inhabit the Holy Land and there'll be a rapture.
And I guess in some ways it's a very strange vision, which is almost anti-Semitic in its views.
But what do you think about the Christian Zionists?
Are they just kind of useful idiots of Israel?
Or is this something that might actually have a future?
What are your thoughts on this issue, Jonathan?
Yes, I think they are useful idiots, although I think they are totally sincere.
It's always wrong to think that people don't believe what is attested to them in terms of their beliefs.
And they come out of the semi-crazed world of millennial Protestantism inside the United States.
The Roman Catholic writer Flannery O 'Connor.
Wrote an extraordinary book about a time in the deep south of the United States amidst Protestant and revivalist cults called Wise Blood.
Wise Blood!
And it's about these good old boys who wrestle with serpents in church, literally have fights with pythons in church, fire into the ceiling of the church during ecstatic raptures when they're whipped up to frenzy by various Apocalypsean preachers.
And so on.
This is the politicisation of good old-time religion.
And it's always had a mass following in the United States because the United States is a Puritan country founded by English revolutionary Protestants and also Scottish brethren of the same who went over there because they couldn't create a theocratic state in England based upon these sorts of maxims.
So they believe all this.
And the active side of Protestantism does have millenarian and Apocalyptian features, whereby they want the end of the world or end times.
And Catholicism and Orthodox Protestantism are much more sedate.
Although Christianity is a millenarian religion, it's always believed.
That the world will come to an end at a particular time.
But that's so pushed far down the agenda in relation to mainstream Christianity that it's almost not there.
But with these fanatics, it's very much there and it's ever-present.
What they want, of course, completely diverges from Israeli interest, because in the end, these Israelis and Jews generally will all be converted to Christianity and to the Protestant version of Christianity of a particular sort anyway.
If not, they're all damned.
So it's not in their interests either.
But politically, they are a very potent force.
And when they're whipped up, they can be used by other people, even though they have quite transparently their own agendas.
It's like when there was Hollywood blocking of the distribution of the Christian film The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson.
Gibson went to Falwell and all the other leaders of the Protestant millenarian tendency in the United States.
And despite the fact that it's a very Catholic theological film, an ultra-Catholic theological film, they were so enraptured by it, they really had a rapture then and there, that they agreed to disseminate that film right across the Bible Belt and beyond.
And when they moved, they had enormous social power and a lot of money, and they were blocked by sort of cinemas in Texas and elsewhere, where every part of the multiplex would show The Passion of the Christ 12 screenings a day, and they would bus in their people from local churches so that the cinemas were always full, so everyone was a winner.
And Gibson did something incredibly clever there by tapping the energy of these people who, it would be otherwise thought, would have nothing to do with a sort of Hollywood sophisticate and sort of actor like Gibson.
But when these people move, they move and they're very well-oiled and they've got a lot of political abilities, obviously, to mobilize their own people.
And I suppose this outsider in the Republican race at the moment, who is giving Romney a run for his money...
Rick Santorum.
Yes, even though he's a Catholic, isn't he?
Well, you know, it's funny...
He's getting the support of these people.
I mean, it's quite obvious from the outside.
Oh, without question.
It is a funny thing, just to mention...
You have Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
You have others.
In a funny way, the snake-wrestling Baptist...
Christian Zionists, they look to Catholic leaders.
I've kind of noticed this trend.
There's another Catholic from Kansas named Sam Brownback who's thoroughly awful in every possible issue.
He wants mass immigration and we need to also send troops to Darfur.
I almost find myself agreeing with the kind of wishy-washy mainstream Episcopalians or something, which is, I guess, my religious background.
They may be a little bit silly on gay marriage or something, but at least they're not bringing about the end of the world with some of their foreign policy desires.
It's a very strange thing, but I've always found...
I don't know.
It's hard for me to put into words.
I always find it a little bit odd that you have these Baptists, yet you have these Catholics leading them.
It's almost like they almost recognize their own silliness, and they look to a more establishment religion for their leaders.
I also think a lot of these intra-Christian rivalries of the past have gone.
One of the things that the Gibson, it's Christians against the rest now, and all of these interdenominational disputes amongst Protestants themselves that used to be so warm and fervid and kept many of the hateful fires burning in relation to between people who are fundamentally similar, partly given mass migration into the States by people who are not Christian at
all, and partly by the change in complexion of the world around them and the re-emergence of Islam as, after a sleep of the best part of a millennium, a major force in the non-Western modern world.
Christians have seen what unites them rather than what divides them, and it's all coming together of the clams, and it's all Christians against all the others now.
So I think that's why they're no longer bothered, the fact that sort of leading...
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think that's true.
And in some ways, from our radical and racialist perspective, I think that's a good thing.
I don't think any kind of war of religions is going to be do any good for European civilization.
I think getting over that is probably a positive step.
Let me talk a little bit about, to bring up one last issue before we end this very interesting conversation, a little bit about the notion of the nation and the state.
And, you know, I remember, I guess it was back in 2008 or 2009.
Scott McConnell, who was actually my boss in 2007 when I worked at the American Conservative magazine.
And he was actually kind of a former, he's Gentile, but he was a kind of former neocon or neocon ally.
And then with a lot of the actions in Kosovo and so on and so forth, I think he kind of recognized that this was leading to perpetual war for perpetual peace, so on and so forth.
He kind of became a Buchananite, although he always had a bit of a kind of liberal in a way.
I don't think he would get mad at me for saying that.
You know, kind of an oddball in some ways in the Buchananite movement, which has a lot more, you know, kind of staunch, Midwestern, Catholic, patriotic kind of people.
Anyway, he wrote an article, which I reacted strongly against back in 2008, where he was saying that more or less...
With mass immigration and with this new Latino population, maybe even African population, Asian population, this brings certain problems.
However, it will spell the end of a neoconform policy.
Because the neoconformed policy, at the end of the day, its base is the Protestant white population in Middle America and the South.
And in some ways, those are the only people who support it.
They're the only people who have a positive view of Israel, for instance.
Israel, within the Western world, certainly within elite institutions, universities within America, all over the world, it is a, if not a pariah, certainly people are quite skeptical of it and its actions.
The only place in the world is Israel itself and the Deep South.
What he was saying is that when you have this new multicultural population, that foreign policy will change.
And there's a great irony in the sense of a lot of paleoconservatives, so-called, like Pat Buchanan, would, you know, they oppose immigration, but they also oppose the Iraq War and the neocon agenda.
But there's a kind of irony where you, with mass immigration, you will actually get a more isolationist, pacifist foreign policy.
And obviously, I think a lot of people, when someone heard this argument, they kind of suspected that this is almost a pro-immigration argument, and I and others reacted strongly against that.
And I think I also mentioned an important criticism, which is that foreign policymaking is one of the most elite activities of government.
It is not, you know, only in rare cases like a big war.
We certainly saw this over the past 10 years.
But in rare cases like a big war, does it become a populist policy in the sense of you're going to rally the public on behalf of foreign policy?
Normally, it is basically something that is affected by elite institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations.
It's a very elite institution that in some ways is...
Buffered from emotional democracy and so on and so forth.
So, you know, I said, you know, we could have a worse of all possible worlds where, you know, we have a multicultural population, but then we still have this horrible neocon foreign policy because you have the same people that are actually running the show.
But, you know...
In some ways, I think McConnell made a good point, because at the end of the day, it is a democracy.
And even though democracies might be a sham in some way, they're run by elites, at the end of the day, the character of the people is going to affect government.
It just can't, you know, eventually it will.
It can't help itself but doing that.
And so I think there's a good question of the future of American foreign policy if current trends continue.
That is, if we continue to have the non-white population increases by about a half a percent a year, so increases about 2% every election cycle.
If this keeps going on like this linearly for, you know, let's say another decade or two, what foreign policy is going to be?
I mean, we might be in a situation that's dramatically different.
We might have a new focus in, say, South America or a new focus of our diplomatic relations with Mexico or something altogether different that's almost unimaginable.
So, Jonathan, what are some of your thoughts on this general idea about the nation affecting the state in the foreign policy realm and maybe some of your ideas about what American foreign policy is going to be like?
And also, if we project forward, a much more impoverished America, an America that can't really say with a straight face anymore that we are the wealthiest country on earth, everything here is prosperous, won't be able to say that with a straight face because it's not true.
Yes, I think that article that that chap wrote was right, that the timeframe is wrong.
I think it takes half a century to a century to make the nation to affect the state in that way, tripping up from the bottom.
Policy will still be made by the elites.
Indeed, there's been such a change from the Obama regime to the Obama regime, from the Bush one, that you can almost see the default position emerging there, because what will happen is that regimes in the future will be more like Obama than Obama is allowed to be himself.
Because my reading of Obama is Obama is not really an ally of the Israelis at all, but is completely hemmed in by the reality of...
Power and money directed to Democratic Party caucuses, without which he couldn't have got anywhere.
He also needs people who were allied in civil rights causes going back several generations now.
So he knows what he can do and what he can't do.
But I personally believe he debates with himself about Israeli power, dislikes having to argue negotiate so hard in such a hard and fast manner with Netanyahu.
And although they've given the Israelis everything they want short of absolute war and invasion of Iran, I believe that he will never invade Iran and there will not be a U.S. attack upon Iran because he axiomatically does not believe in doing so.
And all of this pressure is partly a pressure on the United States to go further and is partly Israeli irritation that Obama is holding And I think that as time goes on, American foreign policy will become more UN foreign policy and will become less Western and will become less American nationalist.
And we'll become more isolationist, but it won't be the old-scale isolationism of a century ago, which was an American first, a sort of white isolationism.
It will be an isolationism of the lowest common denominator, where you digitally wish to remain inside the U.S. unless you're attacked externally from abroad, which the Al-Qaeda attacks could be perceived as an attack from abroad, hence justifying the Afghanistan war the first time around.
But not the Iraqi war, and certainly not an Iranian war, maybe to come, maybe not.
So I believe that American foreign policy will just become the declining foreign policy of an increasingly second world country, particularly if there's a major contraction in America's superpower status in the next 20 to 25 years.
Countries in Central and Latin America and the Caribbean will become much more important.
You'll have a reversal of the Monroe Doctrine.
The Honor Doctrine was designed to prevent European powers from imperial meddling in the Americas and was designed to put the whole of the rest of the Americas under North American ages.
One of the reasons why Latinos have always fought cultural war against the United States and its influence is because they were felt cold-shouldered and belittled politically in terms of the royal power within the hemisphere.
But American interests will become hemispherical and will become centred on new factors of interest, such as India and China, as it becomes less and less of a forceful Western power.
One could always be wrong, but it could be that Bush's presidency, the second Bush, is a last hurrah of various forces, which are now replete and partly exhausted themselves in that particular war.
And it was a war which Obama described as a dumb war, didn't he?
And, of course, he was right.
It was an extraordinarily dumb war.
It was against the wrong regime at the wrong time for the wrong reasons that cost an enormous amount of money and achieved the opposite of what it set out to achieve.
It set out to achieve a westernized Iraq which would be impermeable to Islamism and not a threat to its neighbors and not a threat to Israel.
You now have an Iraq which is as anti-Israeli as it ever was.
Which is a sectional democracy, which is the only way democracy will work in those parts of the world, and which is a hotbed of Iranian influence.
And Iran has now replaced all the other regimes, including Cuba and North Korea and Syria, as the worst regime in the world from the perspective of the American neoconservatives.
But nobody other than them and their allies thinks of Iran in those terms.
Although people do not want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, they don't want Burma or...
Cuba to get nuclear weapons either.
They don't want Argentina and Brazil and South Africa, all of whom have got advanced nuclear programs to develop nuclear weapons either.
It's largely this, rather than any existential fear that the bulk of Gentiles have on Israel's behalf, this sort of teeth-wrenching sort of Zionist default position is held by nobody except certain Zionists themselves.
The political and money club in the United States and the Christian Zionist movement, which extends across the great swathe of Protestant radicalism.
Nobody else in the world perceives the world in this way.
When I open a copy of the London Times and it's full of this slightly watered-down neoconservative stuff, it's only because of the nature of the ownership of News International and the nature of the press comment that it draws upon from the United States.
So although that type of media is here, nobody in Britain has that sort of viewpoint.
There was overwhelming hostility to the Iraq War in Britain.
It cost the Blair government its moral legitimacy with its own side, and it didn't win them many friends and allies afterwards.
And the key killer weapon with the Blair regime was the weapons of mass destruction.
The entire British population is convinced that we went to war on the basis of a lie.
And nobody now even mentions Iraq.
And the people who said that they were in favour of it at the time were embarrassed.
So in Britain, who was the minor sidekick ally in relation to the Iraq war, there's a more radical disjoint in relation to the war and its aftermath than there is in the United States.
But the same panoply is discernible, the same adjustment of expectations, the same reluctance to admit mistakes, and partly a desire to forget the entire incident.
Yes.
Well, Jonathan, it's a very complicated issue, which we're going to have to take up again in the near future.
Thank you for being on Vanguard, and I look forward to talking with you again next week.
Thanks very much.
All the best.
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