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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:48
Syria, Rwanda and The Bloody Hypocrisy of American Interventionism - A Conversation with Ivan Eland
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm very happy to have, I think for the third time on, Ivan Elander.
He is an American defense analyst and author.
He is senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute.
And I dare say we can put you in the libertarian, and now you say non-interventionist, of course the enemies of liberty would call it isolationist.
Is that a fair approximation of your viewpoint?
Well, I don't consider myself an isolationist because I'm for a full interaction with other countries, trade, investment, cultural exchanges.
It's just that when the state gets involved with bombing other people, usually other governments or sometimes civilians and rebel movements, that's when I have a problem.
So I don't consider that isolationism.
The people who want to do these things usually say, well, if you're not for the bombing or attack that I'm for, you're an isolationist.
So I would say non-interventionist would be, or strategic independence would be a better term than isolationism.
Yeah, or just anti-violence.
It's kind of a weird thing.
It's like, I'm going to go down to the market.
Well, that's called being an isolationist.
I'm going to go and stab some guys.
Oh, well, that's not being an isolationist.
It's very strange the way they use this language, but I guess to their benefit.
Now, obviously, I'd like to talk a little bit about Syria, but before we do that, I wonder if we could just dig into a little bit of What is so often taken for granted, which is the world's policemen, the responsibility to protect doctrine, the indispensable nation doctrine that's been proposed by UN ambassador Samantha Powell and others.
Of course, it's against international law, and it sounds like international law then doesn't want you doing good things and helping people and so on, but could we unpack that a little bit?
Where did this idea of being the world's policeman, the indispensable nation, having a responsibility to protect, why does that fall to the U.S.?
That certainly was not part of the origin of the state.
Well, no, of course, the founders of the United States were very...
We're very for or proponents of military restraint.
They wanted to trade with all countries and have political relations and intrigue with none, or in that military action as well.
They realized that the U.S.
strategically is on the other side of the world for most of the violence.
And if Britain has had a great strategic position off the shore of Europe, we have an even better one because our motives We have two big moats, and they're bigger, and we also have relatively weak and friendly neighbors.
And so our strategic position is pretty good.
And if we don't go looking for trouble, we probably won't even get very many terrorist attacks, because most of the terrorist attacks either hit U.S.
embassies or try to hit the U.S.
homeland, which is difficult because of the distances.
But nonetheless, like on 9-11, we saw they were spectacularly successful.
But those attacks come from our intervention abroad, and if we pay it attention, to the groups that are doing it, we would find that out.
But of course, after 9/11, we didn't have such introspection.
We just had calls for doing more of the same.
Right.
So what was it that brought about this?
I mean, you could really argue up to the Second World War, certainly in the First World War, there was very little desire to get involved in what seemed like just another endless series of European conflicts.
And in the Second World War, there was that as well.
So what is it... I remember reading that when Wilson put in the draft for the First World War, over 200,000 American men just kind of fled from it, thinking like, what a ridiculous thing to get involved with.
There was a very strong sentiment towards this, which all seemed to change at the close of the Second World War.
At least that's my sort of take in it, I think, is to defer to your expertise in this area.
But what do you think changed?
What made it compelling in a way that it wasn't before?
Well, after World War I, everyone was disgusted with the carnage, because Woodrow Wilson essentially lied to the American people and said, you know, we're doing this to end all wars.
We're going to make a great international order afterwards, etc.
But he knew full well, even when he got it, before he got into the war, that his allies, the British and French, really had a secret plan to carve up the world after World War I and take the Ottoman Empires and the Germans colonies who lost the war.
And of course, he wanted to get into the war so he would have a place at the at the peace table so he could help shape the world after World War I.
And, of course, he really wanted the League of Nations, so he traded all that, traded off a lot of stuff to get to it.
And some of the things he traded off were he originally didn't want to rub Germany's nose in it with a war guilt clause, with reparations, with removing the Kaiser.
But, of course, he did all that, and he actually insisted on removing the Kaiser, which then brought Hitler, helped bring Hitler to power.
all those factors.
So the United States always uses, and the reason I'm going into this history is, we always start history of World War II and, oh, you know, Neal Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, He appeased Hitler, and that led to World War II.
Well, of course, that's not really exactly what happened, but they don't go far enough and say, why should the US have gotten into World War I?
Would Hitler have ever been a factor?
And probably not, because Germany would have won that war.
They would have adjusted the boundaries, like all other European wars that the U.S.
stayed out of, for the most part.
They would have adjusted the borders.
Germany, we got a little more.
Everybody else got a little less, and we would have gone on, right?
But, of course, World War II should really be called World War I, Part II.
And when we trace history back to that far, then, of course, we get the opposite conclusion, that we intervened in a war that made no sense of that tremendous you know, unintended consequences, including the Bolshevik Revolution, the Cold War, and, of course, World War II.
But after World War II, we took this Munich model where, you know, we figured Chamberlain appeased Hitler, and that caused the problem.
So anywhere the Soviet Union went in the Cold War, no matter how insignificant, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, we felt we had to be there in some way, whether actually taking troops or supporting whoever they weren't supporting.
And we still have a little of that.
You see this in the Syrian thing, and I know we'll get into that later, but you have a lot of politicians say, well, the Russians are supporting the Syrians.
We can't let them dictate the situation here.
Well, it's not the Cold War anymore.
And the real question is, do we have strategic interests in Syria?
The Russians do, I think, and we don't.
And so therefore, it's not a contest between the two superpowers anymore.
It's more a question of should we be there or not.
And the answer in my book is no.
And I think we're taking the wrong paradigm from World War II and learning the wrong thing.
And that is that aggression anywhere has to be stopped or will snowball and somehow make it a threat here thousands of miles away in the U.S., which, as I mentioned earlier, the founders realized has a very strategic position.
Not everything is a Hitler, but you saw John Kerry with the Syrians, but we've done it to Muammar Gaddafi, we've done it to Milosevic, we've done it to Saddam Hussein, we demonize these people.
And when they start calling him Hitler, and they have in all those cases, then they start, they make him so bad that they have to bomb him.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are two little factors I would add into World War I. And the reason we talk about World War I is just to realize the dominoes that are set in motion, the unintended consequences of these kinds of interventions.
The first, of course, as you mentioned, is that the Allies and the Germans were fighting to exhaustion.
They were almost out of money, they were almost out of human beings, and so they would have all, I think, just gone home.
Because neither side had the ability to impose any kind of calamitous peace treaty on the other, or peace terms on the other.
When the Americans came piling in on the Western Front, it gave France and England the capacity to impose this kind of horrible Treaty of Versailles, where Germany would have paid reparations into the 80s.
in the 1980s.
They had no army, no air force, limited to 100,000 troops and so on.
So the fact that America piled in gave the Allies such overwhelming strength and power over Germany that they were able to impose this disastrous treaty, which was a huge spark to pay the reparations off.
They hyperinflated the currency, which destroyed the middle class and paved the way for Hitler and so on.
The other thing, of course, is that because when the Americans piled in on the Western Front, Germany knew they couldn't fight a two-front war.
They had to get rid of Russia on the Eastern Front.
And to do that, of course, they funded Lenin and armed him and gave him lots of money and sent him through Finland to go start a revolution.
So So really, in many ways, the Cold War can be traced back to, and the Second World War and the Cold War can be traced back to, though not morally laid at the feet of, the American intervention policy in the First World War, which, of course, as you know, Wilson was voted in to not go into war.
He specifically said that, and then, of course, he changed it once the vainglorious idea of moving human beings around like chess pieces took a hold of him.
But it is tragic, and so much, of course, of what happened in the 20th century can be traced back to the First World War.
And it really was a huge break with America's past, I would say.
Yes, and I think there's a similar parallel to the situation in Syria now.
As you mentioned, in World War I, both sides were exhausted.
I mean, if one had won over the other one, Germany probably might have eked out a victory, but everyone was so exhausted, it would be a 15-round decision rather than a knockout, and therefore you adjust the borders and go on.
But of course, one of the things that, in addition to the Germans helping Lenin out, You also had the Allies bribing the Russians to stay in for the second front.
And one of the reasons that Lenin said, if it hadn't been for the war and the exhaustion of the war in Russia, the Bolsheviks never would have taken over.
And so the Kerensky government, the British and the French, kept the Kerensky government in the war.
And, of course, because they stayed in the war, that's how the Bolsheviks ended up taking power in Russia.
So there's a number of factors there.
And then, of course, after World War I, the allies, including the U.S., sent troops to Russia to battle the Bolsheviks, which created bad blood for decades after that.
But now what we see in Syria is a similar situation.
The United States should just stay out of it and let these two sides, Assad, who is admittedly a tyrant, a dictator, and a butcher, battle out the al-Qaeda dominated rebels, which could be even worse than al-Qaeda, or excuse me, Assad, if they would happen to get control of Syria.
But I think what we're going to see is a civil war for a long time.
And it may even be a tripartite civil war with the Kurds, because you have the same basic ethnic groups and ethno-sectarian groups as Iraq does.
And so I think the U.S.
should stay out of it when your enemies are fighting each other, and I think that applies to anyone.
We should have stayed out of World War I and let them exhaust themselves.
Right.
So, before we dip into some of the current events in Syria, I think it's reasonable to dip back a little bit into the sort of post-First World War colonial period where these pretty arbitrary, uninformed lines were drawn in Iraq and Syria and other countries by By the British and the French and so on, which would not drawn along lines of culture or religion or race or anything like that.
They're just sort of these franken countries pieced together on maps without particularly detailed local knowledge.
To what degree do you think that is creating Some of these problems and this desire for, you know, rebellion, revolution, the instability that occurs, these are not organic countries, and not like all organic countries are perfect, but they seem to be a lot more stable than what's going on in the Middle East.
Well, I think that has a big role in it.
Iraq is a totally artificial country.
Syria is a totally artificial country.
Lebanon is a totally artificial country.
And of course, then you have the Palestinian problem where you have a perceived occupation of a Western power.
The Arabs regard Israel as a Western neo-colonialist regime.
And you also have the legacy of colonialism in a lot of these places, because the British and the French took over from the Ottomans after the Ottoman Empire folded with, finally folded with World War I.
And so the colonialism, and it imbues everything, and that's why people don't like U.S. intervention, because it's just perceived as another colonial power.
So not only do we have the problem of these are all artificial states, we have the resistance to colonialism that we find, which is rooted in history as well.
All this goes back to World War One.
I think a lot of it, but the colonial colonialism and also the, of course, the colonialism goes But if you go to World War I, you see the British and the French taking over from the Ottomans.
And then the second factor is that these states were drawn by the British and French, and they have all sorts of different ethnic and sectarian mixes, and the groups don't get along with each other.
And what usually happens in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon is one group tries to use the apparatus of the state, including the security forces, to oppress the others, and the other groups resist.
That's what we saw in Iraq after the U.S. invaded.
And, of course, you know, we're getting the same thing in Syria.
So, you know, these are unstable states.
About the only thing you can do with them, I think, probably is decentralize them so that the central government is so weak that the countries, you know, the different groups provide their own security and judicial systems.
But, you know, that's a topic for another day, I guess.
Oh, juicy topic.
Let me just make a note there.
That's a good topic.
Now, what is Russia's interest in Syria and the region?
Why are they so neck deep in this conflict?
Well, I think it goes back, you know, people say Putin really resents the United States.
One of the reasons that Russia resents the U.S.
is because after the Soviet Union collapsed, and of course this gets no press in the West at all, the United States promised Mikhail Gorbachev they would not expand NATO.
And of course, that NATO is a hostile alliance to the Soviet Union.
And of course, the United States has expanded NATO right to the borders of the Soviet Union or what is now Russia.
The Balkan states are members, Romania, Bulgaria, all those countries over there are now members.
And so it's not so much that the Russians fear an imminent attack from NATO.
as they feel that everything fell apart on them and that the US took advantage of it.
They also feel that in the case of Libya, the United States and the West said, "Hey, we're just going to prevent a bunch of civilians from getting killed by Qaddafi's forces." Well, of course, this is an example of where war can get out of hand with unintended consequences, and you can get dragged into something.
Of course, the mission creep became, well, let's get rid of Gaddafi.
And they got lucky and did that without having to send in ground troops.
But it may not be so good and so easy in Syria because of all the ethnic groups.
Then you've got to stop a civil war, an ethnic sectarian civil war, after the first war with Assad is over, even if he's toppled.
And you don't have that problem.
Libya had a few tribes, and there's still a tribal problem there, but I don't think the divisions are as great.
So I think, you know, it's really, you know, these things have a lot of unintended consequences, which are, of course, unintended.
Right.
And of course, I mean, Russia, after being invaded from the West twice in And costing lives that we... It's hard to imagine.
I'm reading about what occurred on the Eastern Front in Stalingrad and the degree of losses that Russia suffered by basically cannon-firing peasants into the withering machine-gun fire of the Germans.
I mean, they really needed those buffer states.
And so when NATO was extended to those buffer states that they grabbed, I don't think they were particularly imperialistic at the end of the Second World War.
They were just tired of being invaded and needed some buffer states.
Then, of course, NATO extends there.
That's going to create a lot of conflict.
Would you also argue that...
It seems to me like intense irrational absolutes that you see in sectarian groups and religious groups and ethnic groups, that these intensely absolutist irrationalities almost seem to demand, I mean you were saying a very weak central government, it seems to me they almost seem to demand a very heavy-handed kind of government.
In other words, well you fear me more than the other group, or I'll keep everyone in line and therefore there won't be a civil war.
Would you say that's at all a factor in the politics of the Middle East?
I think when you have a fractured state among ethno-sectarian groups, if you want to keep it as a state, it can only be ruled by a strong man.
Saddam Hussein, Assad, the Yemeni ruler, the guy who's in charge of Bahrain.
Really, if you don't want to do that, then you almost have to decentralize it so nobody is threatened.
It's either all or nothing.
This idea that we're going to have a shared power or something really never works.
And you really have to have either decentralization or you have to accept the fact that the dictator is the only one that can harness all the problems.
The other thing about Russia is It's modern interest, and it goes back to the NATO thing.
Syria is their one last ally, and they don't want sand kicked in their face, because Syria is their only Middle Eastern ally now, and they have a small naval base there.
I mean, they could probably do without a Syrian ally, but they want to play in the Middle East, and they've had all their other allies either turn to NATO or be eliminated and go somewhere else, because of the end of the Cold War.
that I think it's pretty important.
They want to be a great power and be respected.
And I think that's really the issue here in Syria, that the US has done so much over time to make them a second rate power.
And they don't want to, that's part of it. - You wrote recently, and I thought it was a really good passage, chipping away at the moral claims that the US is making, basically that terrible things are happening, therefore we need to intervene.
I wonder if you could talk about a few of the far more egregious catastrophes and genocides that the U.S.
has not intervened in recently.
Well, I think, you know, this proves the hypocrisy of the position, because the The Congo Civil War has killed 5 million people and it's still ongoing.
We're not doing much about that.
There was Sudanese Civil War and George Bush did eventually try to broker A peace between South Sudan and Sudan, and that is an example of a decentralization or partition, which has at least, there's still a lot of tension there, but at least the civil war has stopped.
But we didn't invade with troops.
I have no problem with mediating if the two sides want to negotiate, even in the Syrian civil war, but that's not what we're doing.
Of course, we're trying to get in on one side.
So Sudan, we really didn't do anything militarily.
Rwanda, 800,000 people were killed in a civil war, did nothing there.
And in fact, you know, we say this chemical weapons international norm, because Assad has not violated international law by doing this, surprisingly.
But this international norm, we helped Saddam Hussein actually violate the norm.
and the law during the Iran-Iraq war.
It was a bitter war, and we were very scared that the Iranians were going to take over, you know, would win the war.
And they had had a fundamentalist Shiite Islamic revolution, and that was really the first fundamentalist revolution.
That was the modern-day fundamentalist revolution, which had occurred.
So we were very scared about that.
So we knew that Saddam Hussein was in desperate straits, and we knew he was going to use chemical weapons, but we gave him the intelligence to use four times to gas the Iranians.
And so the Iranians are in no favor of poison gas.
It's been used on them.
And then, of course, in 1988, Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, the Kurds, within his country.
And the United States not only didn't protest, but gave him a billion dollar loan six months after that.
So when we say we're sticking up for this norm against horrible weapons, we actively help the person use these weapons the last time around that it came up.
So the sanctimoniousness of this is a bit apparent.
And it is chilling, you know, we all think of these big geopolitical things, control of oil and other resources and so on, but it seems, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you seem to have hinted at the possibility that there's just a certain personal vanity involved on the part of Barack Obama, that he made these statements, the red line, the famous red line statement, he used these as red line, we can't allow to be crossed and so on.
And now he's either going to walk back that statement or he has to escalate.
And you drew a parallel between what Hussein said with regards to chemical weapons and what John F. Kennedy said with regards to the missiles in Cuba, which compared to the U.S.
missiles in Turkey didn't fundamentally alter the balance, but it became this crazy, world-threatening standoff because of a speech that couldn't be withdrawn.
Do you think that's much of a factor here?
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's personal vanity of Barack Obama and simply because I do mention the John F. Kennedy example, and there have been other examples where presidents have sort of said something that they shouldn't have done.
Now, Eisenhower is the opposite.
He would be very careful.
He would say, oh, that's not a crisis.
And of course, he only intervened one time.
During his whole presidency, at least overtly, he was too big on the covert operations.
But that's how you can handle these things if you really know what you're doing.
I think Barack Obama probably, he's just not very competent.
But I think presidents can box themselves into these types of things simply because everyone is concentrating on what the President of the United States says, since he has the most powerful army in the world.
And, you know, when we have a huge hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Now, of course, what we should be doing in this case of Assad is not attacking them militarily.
There's all sorts of things you could do, short of that, to, you know, say it's not good to gas your people.
And I think probably this was a rogue element, or even if it wasn't a rogue element, it was a really stupid move on the part of Syria, because they really don't need to have these weapons.
And I think the Russians are doing a valuable thing by taking advantage of Kerry's thing about, well, if they get rid of them, then we won't have to attack.
So the Russians and the Syrians both hopped on that, and then the UN Secretary General hopped on it as well.
So perhaps we can reach an end to this conflict if Assad just gives up his weapons and stores them.
He really doesn't need them to defend his country.
They're not that useful, except on a defensive basis on the battlefield.
So I think that's one area where you could do something short of this.
But I think presidents box themselves in with speeches and bellicose rhetoric because the United States always seems to have to respond militarily.
And when you make statements like John F. Kennedy did and Barack Obama did, you have to watch what you say as president because people are going to hold you to it.
And if this was a mistake by John Kerry, I don't think it is, because I think he discussed this with the Russians at the G8 summit as well, back in the back room there.
But if it is a slip of the tongue, John Kerry really needs to watch it, too, because these people are people pay attention to what the president of the United States says, and you can easily get yourself into a big problem.
And I think Barack Obama hasn't been very competent in this whole mess.
Yeah.
Now, of course it seems that this idea that there's just going to be a few limited bombs lobbed into Syria, I mean, it's not going to do anything that I can imagine.
I mean, and the possibility of there being problems coming out of it, oh, we accidentally hit a few Russian soldiers, where suddenly you have a huge problem on your hands.
The idea that they can target and find and strike at these weapons or punish the people involved with any degree of reliability and also without throwing these weapons up into the air doesn't seem to be possible.
And I agree with you.
I mean, what use are chemical weapons against guerrilla warfare?
Guerrilla warfare takes place in hiding among civilians, people darting in and out of doorways dressed like everyone else.
I don't see what possible value or use it would be.
It would seem to me that the rebels would have a great deal of use for it to get the U.S. to come and intervene.
And of course, I think the Russians fairly conclusively established that the last chemical attack that occurred in Syria in March of this year, they had a hundred page report that's been released where they seem to quite conclusively prove that it was in fact the rebels who released this, perhaps with the hopes of gaining some external intervention. - Okay.
Yes, I think the press has been very biased in not reporting the atrocities of the rebels.
Some of these are very nasty characters.
They're affiliated with al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups, etc.
Of course, Our media sort of takes the line of the cues from our government, even though we're supposed to have a free media.
But a lot of the major media sources, I think, at least take their cues from the government because they get information from the government, preferred information.
And so I think they've taken us, you know, how evil Assad is.
And there's no question about that.
Assad is not a, you know, a Democrat or whatever.
But I think they've ignored the atrocities of the rebels and that sort of thing.
And I think, as you were saying, what is this going to really accomplish?
In Kosovo, if we go back to Kosovo in 1979, they had ethnic cleansing by Milosevic and the Serbs against the ethnic Albanians in what was then a province of Yugoslavia and Serbia.
And what happened was we started bombing after some ethnic cleansing had occurred.
Well, Milosevic said, well, I have nothing to lose.
So he has stepped up the ethnic cleansing.
Most ethnic cleansing was done after NATO already started bombing.
Same thing, a similar thing could happen here with Assad.
If we hit him with a small strike, and Kerry says it's supposed to be a very small strike, which I don't know why you would tell your opponent in a war I'm not for the strike, but if you're going to strike, why would you say, well, this is really meaningless?
And the reason that, of course, they have to do that is because the American people do not want this.
And the American people will not support a long war or an in-depth war.
And so therefore, on the one hand, do they have to say that to the people?
Well, if you say that to basically tell the American people, well, you know, we're not going to be going in here with any heavy troops or heavy firepower.
This is just kind of a slap on the wrist.
Well, if you tell Assad, then he knows that the U.S.
is in a weak position.
So what does he do after the first attack?
In the Arab world, you get a lot of points, not for winning wars, but for standing up to a stronger opponent, because they're used to standing up to Israel all the time.
So what would Assad do?
He might say, well, I'm going to get political points out of this, get more prestige, it'll help me out in my civil war, so I'm either going to gas my you know, a bigger gas attack to just say in your face, or if I don't want to take that chance, I'm just going to start shelling with conventional weapons, which he has been doing anyway, in some of these areas.
And of course, you can kill a lot more people with shells than you can with chemical weapons.
And so, you know, it may accelerate the civilian deaths because we did the strike.
And certainly one other factor I think is that the U.S. could take terrorist attacks from a general increase in the terrorism level, not necessarily from civilian, from Assad or even Hetzbalah, but just, you know, this is our fourth attack on an Islamic country in the Middle you know, this is our fourth attack on an Islamic country in the Middle East, and we keep saying, well, we're not Well, we've been at war recently four times.
So, of course, you know, people think that's nonsense overseas.
We might believe it ourselves, but They don't believe it overseas.
And what happened during the Iraq war was you saw terrorism worldwide spike.
So all the jihadists out there and all the people who are Islamists may become Islamist terrorists because they're mad about the U.S.
striking Syria.
So they go hit a U.S.
embassy or they try to attack here like the Times Square bomber or the underwear bomber, etc.
So, you know, I think in the multiple Yeah, I mean, as far as I understand it, the whole purpose of Al-Qaeda is to provoke the U.S.
into spending so much blood and treasure in this unwinnable, global, made-up conflict that they simply go broke, the way the Russians did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The CIA trained them!
How do you bring down an empire?
You provoke them into a lopsided war, where they're spending far more than you are, and then they go broke, and then they go home.
Because that was the lesson that the Arab world learned with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the carve-up of the German overseas possessions, and also at the end of the Second World War, when the Allies abandoned pretty much all of their existing holdings, because they were broke from the Second World War.
This is something that besieged and beleaguered recipients of colonialism have learned bitterly.
I mentioned that the current example where these same jihadists caused the entire fall of the Soviet Union, or at least so they think by handing the Soviets a loss in Afghanistan.
So they see this example many times, and they think they can do it again.
Seems to be working to me.
I don't think the U.S.
could be following the jihadist recipe for what they want any closer if they tried.
I mean, to do the opposite would be close down all these military, 700-plus military bases and bring your troops home and focus on deregulating and lowering taxes and getting your economy back going and return back to the way it was.
Instead, falling into every single bear trap That you could possibly find laid by these people in terms of just getting involved in unwinnable conflicts, destroying your economy, posturing rhetoric, getting yourself caught into endless trouble, and provoking more hornets' nests overseas filled by crazy people who will stop at nothing to retaliate.
Sorry, I don't want to do a minor rant, but it's just kind of frustrating that they say, here's what you want to do, and America's like, hey, we're on it, let's do that until we go broke.
Well, even though Osama bin Laden said that it was easy to provoke George Bush into doing what he wanted him to do, but of course that didn't deter George Bush from doing it.
The problem I think you have is that politicians play to their home audience.
And sometimes falling into the enemy trap is useful back home and I think it was for Bush and to some extent it's the same for Obama.
I don't know if it will be in this case because I think overwhelmingly the American people have really become wiser after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
They're saying, listen, let's not get baited into this.
I mean, all you have to do is say, I think you can ruin their whole argument by saying what for intervention in Syria by saying, well, like the last three have worked out so wonderfully.
How do you think this is going to work out any better for us?
Yeah, particularly since there hasn't been, you know, when I was an entrepreneur, every time we do a project, we do a project post-mortem.
We say what went well, what went badly.
I mean, the only way you could possibly say things would go any different is if America and the military and the civilians and the military-industrial complex had all rigorously examined those two wars and said what went well, what went badly, and why.
But that kind of looking backward and the post-mortem never seems to happen, so nothing is going to change here.
So I'll go on.
I don't think that anything's going to happen.
I think they may lob a few bombs, but I don't think it's going to escalate from there.
I think that there is a certain sense of jaw-dropping.
Are you kidding me?
We cannot be doing this again when it comes to the American population and the view of Now, of course, they're in the aftereffects of war, which is a lot more sobering than that jingoistic, let's light up the sky stuff that happens before the bill, the butcher's bill, the economic bill becomes due.
A lot, of course, I think of what's happened to the American economy is the natural destruction of the free market and of wealth.
40% of American wealth destroyed over the last four or five years.
Yeah, some of it's the Federal Reserve and the housing and this and that.
A lot of it has to do with the cost of war and the destruction of human and economic capital.
So now, starting another war is okay.
If you've had some time to get over the last one, you can get back into crazy, jingoistic, wave the flag fervor.
But the war exhaustion, I think, is so palpable that I can't imagine that Americans would have anything.
I mean, they may trudge unwillingly towards this, but it's nothing like it was in, you know, one or even 03.
You know, I agree with you mostly, but there's one factor that's different, say, than Vietnam.
The reason that people protested Vietnam, it was all draped in moral language, but the real reason was that middle class students and other people of the same age were getting dragged off to, out of their potential career as dentists, lawyers, out of their potential career as dentists, lawyers, doctors, you know, attorneys, whatever, and they were being dragged to Vietnam to die.
And I think we have eliminated that link.
I'm not for a draft, but it's definitely, look, how long have we been in Afghanistan and Iraq?
You know, years and years.
And there hasn't been the type of intense, there's been opposition, and we have a passive opposition to these things now.
But what we really have is a group of professional soldiers who are.
A lot of them come from military families.
They volunteered for this and we all feel guilty about making them do it, but no one is screaming that their kid is over there involuntarily in some faraway place dying for no reason.
I think that we can still get into problems because we don't have that type of opposition.
We have a very passive opposition so the politicians don't feel the heat of the moment.
I think maybe they are feeling some heat when they went back to their town hall meetings that the president doesn't feel.
But a lot of these House members, when they come in, and maybe this won't even pass the Senate, I don't know.
But I think there is some anger out there that he's even thinking about doing this, and justifiably so.
So I'm still a little leery that we couldn't get soaked into this.
And also, one other thing.
McCain, he's perceived as a very important person to have on the president's side.
Well, he's already extracted some concessions from the president by more aid to the rebels.
And also, he wants these strikes to be heavier than just a punitive strike to slap the hand of Assad.
He wants an actual degradation of the Syrian armed forces.
Well, when you start talking about that, that really can suck you in because what if that doesn't work?
Then your goals have changed.
Then you say, well, gee whiz, that didn't work.
Now our prestige is really on the line.
So even if there's no support back home, and I think that is a major factor, hopefully that will do as you say, and we won't get sucked into this.
But there are other factors which make it at least plausible that we still might. - Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, I mean, with the fog of war, it seems to me everyone who goes into a war thinks that they're just fighting marionettes or statues or something.
But of course, what the enemy is going to do is something that you really can't predict.
And I mean, if I were an evil guy and a dictator in Syria, first thing I would do is I would move a whole bunch of women and children to wherever I thought was most likely that was going to get struck.
and then I would show all the footage to the world saying, "Look, America has lobbed these bombs and killed all these...
You know, win the war of PR," which is, you know, as important in many ways as the ground war.
We don't know what these people are going to do.
We don't know what's going to come out of that.
You know, you let slip the dogs of war.
They run everywhere.
And sometimes they attack you and your own kids.
It is really the vanity of thinking you can just go march in there with bombs or lob them from the sea and know what's going to happen or where they're going to land or how it's going to be perceived or how it's going to be spun is quite mad.
And yeah, I do think, so do you think that there's some possibility that this will continue and also may escalate?
Well, I think there's a possibility of it, but as you point out, there's absolutely no support in it for the United States from people of both parties.
But there's enough wiggle room nowadays where politicians can get themselves into trouble.
And, you know, I mean, Lyndon Johnson never had to escalate the Vietnam War, He won a tremendous landslide in 1964, but he was still scared of being called a coward by Robert Kennedy and some of the conservatives.
So he escalates this war.
And of course, he could have just walked away from it.
At that point, nobody even heard of Vietnam or most Americans hadn't heard of it.
He had pledged not to send US boys over to fight in Asian rice paddies or whatever he said, similar to that, I don't have the exact quote.
And yet after the election was over, he felt compelled to not show weakness toward the Soviet Union and the world You know, presidents get wrapped up into this U.S.
prestige argument.
So whenever I hear prestige arguments, as we're hearing now in Syria, that means they have no other arguments.
And also it means that we're talking imperial language here, that we always have to, you know, maintain our prestige.
Of course, the U.S.
would have had more prestige had it gotten out of Vietnam We're never escalated in the first place, because U.S.
prestige was at a low in 1973 when we pulled out of Vietnam, and it had been going down for some time in the world's eyes.
So presidents get in their own little world about the prestige arguments and stuff, and so some of them do really dumb things even when they don't have any support.
There was no support in 1964 for escalating the Vietnam War, and yet Johnson felt that he had to do it to not be a coward.
And I think Barack Obama, liberal Democrats especially, have a problem with this.
If you had a conservative, a bellicose conservative in there, you know, they're not as vulnerable to being egged on.
But, of course, the Republicans, like McCain, some of the Republicans are egging Barack Obama on saying, you know, we've got to stick up our prestige.
We don't want to be seen as weak or a coward and that sort of thing.
So there's always potential to get ensnared.
And this president on this issue has not shown that he can stay out of the trap, I don't think. - Thank you.
Yeah, and of course, tragically, particularly among celebrities, the anti-war left is completely AWOL when it comes to this particular issue.
You know, they were very keen on protesting imperialistic or violent violations of international law, like aggression, when George Bush was hurling them around.
But with Barack Obama, they are Not even distant memories and they're nowhere to be seen waving their placards, which I think will, you know, diminish, I think, the possibility of getting some momentum with the anti-war stuff.
But I hope, I hope that they don't do anything.
I hope that everyone recognizes it's either going to be brutal yet ineffective or it's going to be the start of an incredibly slippery slope down towards another complete disaster.
And I would imagine close to the end of the U.S. economy in its current states.
So I hope the people will recognize that it is sometimes the most noble thing to walk back premature statements when on the other side is death and economic destruction.
So I hope that they will.
But listen, I could chat all night.
I really appreciate you coming back on the show.
It's always a real pleasure.
I like to advertise this when I have guests.
It's like, hey, Freedom Aid Radio, now with facts!
Always a plus.
So, thank you very much.
Is there a place on the web that you would like to mention where people can get a hold of your writings?
I know you're at independent.org.
Are there any other places where people can get a hold of your writings?
Yeah, well I have a new book out called The Failure of Counterinsurgency, Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom One, and of course the best place to get that is Amazon or Barnes and Noble on those sites.
Probably Amazon is even better.
They have all books, I think, or most of them.
So it really goes into why great powers such as the U.S.
should really be careful when they try to do these counterinsurgency wars.
I also write, I'm a contributor periodically for Huffington Post and also every week I write a column on www.antiwar.com.
Well, thank you very much.
We'll link everything that we can find.
I really appreciate your time and thank you so much for breaking it down to the general public.
I hope that we can do what we can to stop this bloody tide from advancing any further.
Thank you Ivan Alans so much.
I really appreciate your time.
Thank you.
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