MP3 here. (19:56)

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is co-author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism.

MP3 here. (27:06)

Gareth Porter is an independent historian and journalist. He is the author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. His articles appear on Counterpunch, Huffington Post, Inter Press Service News Agency and Antiwar.com.

MP3 here. (19:37)

Eli Clifton writes on U.S. foreign policy as well as trade and finance at the Washington bureau of IPS. His articles have also appeared on Right Web and in the South China Morning Post. Eli has a B.A. in Political Science from Bates College and an MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics.

MP3 here. (19:08)

Jason Ditz is the managing news editor at Antiwar.com.

MP3 here. (19:51)

David Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney.org, Washington Director of Democrats.com and a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, Voters for Peace and the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution. He was the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and worked three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

MP3 here. (44:03)

Michael O’Brien spent 14 months as a DoD (Department of Defense) contractor in Iraq. He was the Real Estate Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. Mike had previously spent over 20 years in commercial real estate, most of that time working in various areas of US Government real estate and facilities, to include nearly a decade with the US General Services Administration (GSA). Mike was assigned to the Ministry of Defense Transition Team (MODTT), part of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, or MNSTC-I. This was the Coalition command element responsible for ‘standing up’ the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior after they had been disbanded by Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

Mike O’Brien was on the Bush-Cheney 2000 Campaign in its national headquarters in Austin, Texas, and participated in the vote recounts in Florida. He was a political appointee in the administration of President George W. Bush, serving in the US State Department’s Overseas Buildings Operations Bureau, where he was responsible for the planning and development of US embassies and consulates around the world. He was in Dacca, Bangladesh, on September 11, 2001. After 9/11, Mike went to the White House as the Senior Director for Administration in the Office of Homeland Security, the predecessor to the Department of Homeland Security we have today. Mr. O’Brien was one of the first 50 staff to arrive there.

Michael O’Brien is a graduate of West Point and served in the Infantry in Fort Benning, Georgia; the Canal Zone, Republic of Panama; the Demilitarized Zone, Republic of South Korea and Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.  He is a graduate of the US Army Ranger and Airborne schools at Fort Benning, Georgia, and is a former commercial helicopter pilot. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

MP3 here. (18:36)

Michael Flynn is project director of IPS Right Web and a writer based in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the founder and lead researcher of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, a former associate editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a past fellow of the International Reporting Project (formerly the Pew International Journalism Program), and the recipient of multiple grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

His articles have been published by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Inter Press Service, Asia Times, and Mexico’s Reforma, among other media outlets. He holds a bachelor’s in philosophy from DePaul University and a master’s in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

MP3 here. (18:49)

Daniel McCarthy is editor of the American Conservative magazine.

MP3 here. (41:49) Transcript below.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he served as academic dean from 2002-2006. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the social science collegiate division and deputy dean of social sciences.

He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also been a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

Professor Walt is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W. W. Norton, 2005), and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

He presently serves as faculty chair of the international security program at the Belfer Center for Science and international affairs and as co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. He was elected as a fellow in the American academy of arts and sciences in May 2005.

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Transcript — Scott Horton Interviews Stephen M. Walt, July 20, 2010

Scott Horton: All right everybody, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. Appreciate y’all tuning in today. Our next guest on the show is Stephen M. Walt. He is a professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, previously taught at Princeton and the University of Chicago, was a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the book, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy, 2005, and co-author with John J. Mearsheimer of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, both the essay and the book all about it. Welcome to the show, how are you doing, Stephen?

Walt: I’m doing just fine. Nice to be here.

Horton: Well thank you very much for joining us. I really appreciate it. So, I guess let’s start with the video of Netanyahu that was released over the weekend. I’m sure you saw it and read the transcript and so forth, right?

Walt: I haven’t seen the video, but I have read about the remarks that were disseminated in it.

Horton: I wonder if you can kind of paint a portrait of what exactly the Oslo Accord was and at what stage they were — I guess what happened was Netanyahu became Prime Minister in ’96 and just set about a course to undo it, right?

Walt: The Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, and it was an agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, and essentially done independently, although the United States came in at the last minute. And the Palestinians recognized Israel’s right to exist, and the Israelis recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. And it set out a timetable that was supposed to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian community. The Oslo Accords — worth noting — do not ever talk about a Palestinian state, although many people believe that’s where it was headed. In any case, those negotiations proceeded through the 1990s, but there were several events — mistakes on both sides, on the Israeli and Palestinian sides — that delayed the process. Of course the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin being an important setback, a tragic fact there. And then finally when Bibi Netanyahu was elected in ’96, he had never been a supporter of the Oslo Accords, and basically dug-in his heels as much as possible to try and prevent that from happening.

Horton: And then, well, I guess I want to finish off the video here before we get into the nuts and bolts of the process here, but basically he’s ridiculing the American people for their support for whatever it is he does. He mocks us.

Walt: Well, the video that’s come out is a conversation, I believe, in Israel, with a community there and basically explaining how he’s not going to allow a two-state solution to occur. But the part that is most incendiary is a series of statements where he basically says, “You don’t have to worry about American pressure. You know, that’s something we can deal with.” And I think the key point to understand is twofold. First of all, Netanyahu is basically right; it has been decades since the United States has been willing to put any kind of meaningful or long-lasting pressure on Israel, particularly over the occupation. And secondly, that this policy is not good for the United States, but has also been quite harmful to Israel as well, because many Israelis now realize that the occupation has been a disaster for them. Not allowing the creation of a Palestinian state is threatening Israel’s long-term future, so the fact that we’re unable to act like an honest broker is in fact not good for either country, and of course not good for the Palestinians either.

Horton: Well, and this is a point you often make on your blog, which I guess I should have pointed out here, it’s at ForeignPolicy.com. You do point out often that the so-called pro-Israel policy — for example, [that promoted by] the neoconservative movement and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States — is the worst policy for Israel and has been for quite some time. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more?

Walt: Well, the main problem is that the attempt to create a Greater Israel, essentially to colonize the West Bank, has led to a situation now where Israel controls a very large number, you know, 4 to 5 million Palestinians. And over the long term, of course, this threatens Israel’s future as a Jewish state. If you either have one course or the other — either the Palestinians ultimately get a state of their own on the West Bank and in Gaza, or you’ll have a situation where virtually at least half and maybe a majority of the people under Israel’s control will not be Jewish and will, at the same time, not have any political rights, not have the right to vote. About 20 percent of Israel’s current population is Arab — that’s Israel prior to, within the ‘67 boundaries — and they do have the right to vote, although they don’t exercise much political power at all. But a world in which Israel controls the West Bank in perpetuity is a world in which ultimately they have to either become a multi-ethnic, truly liberal democracy where everybody has the right to vote — in which case it would no longer be a predominantly Jewish state — or they have to continue to deny the Palestinians any political rights, in which case they become an apartheid state. And unfortunately, this sort of unconditional US support and uncritical US support has allowed that situation to continue, thereby threatening Israel’s long-term future.

Horton: Well, I believe you linked to another blogger last week and an article that he wrote saying, “It’s already too late, get over it. There’s already too many so-called settlements, I guess colonies, in the West Bank, and the army would fall apart before it was able to even get them out of there. And the Bantustans have already been created, the walls have been built, and it’s basically a done deal — there never will be a two-state solution. Eventually it will be not just de facto, but an outright single state, and the Jewish character of the state will be destroyed.

Walt: Yeah, I don’t think anybody actually knows at what point this becomes irreversible. As you say, there are certainly many people — including a few Israelis, some Palestinians, some Americans, Europeans — who think that the moment has already been passed, that we’ve sort of gone past the point of no return, and that the future over the next ten to twenty to thirty years will be a struggle for political rights within Israel itself, that the two-state solution is really no longer possible. I don’t believe that yet, but I do think we are very rapidly approaching that point of no return. And the question people ought to be thinking about is, “What does an American president do at that point?”

Right now, President Obama, or President Bush before him, could talk about how they were in favor of a two-state solution, and they say this over and over again. But at some point, if we continue in the current course, that won’t be possible. It’ll sound silly if you say you’re in favor of a two-state solution because everyone will know it’s totally unreachable. And the question then becomes, “What is American policy?” Are we going to support an apartheid state in which nearly half the population is denied political rights? Or are we going to support “one person, one vote” which is very consistent with America’s political traditions, the idea that everyone should be considered an equal citizen, regardless of their background, regardless of their religion? If you don’t want an American president to face that very awkward choice, then you ought to be pushing very hard for a two-state solution, if it is in fact still possible.

Horton: Well now, can you tell us a little bit about the rights of Israeli Arabs? You know, Arabs who are Muslims or Christians but are citizens of Israel and how their treatment differs from Jewish Israelis?

Walt: Well first of all, the state is explicitly founded as a Jewish state. In fact, though, it is considered by Israelis to be the state of the Jewish people, so in a sense you’ve already declared the Arab population to be second-class citizens. It would be as though the United States said, “We are a Protestant state” or “We are a Christian nation,” and anybody who wasn’t would have to walk around knowing that they somehow didn’t quite fit in. Israeli Arabs who have the right to vote — and they do, they have the right to form political parties — but for example– and they are about 20% of the population. I believe in the entire history of Israel, there has been one member of an Israeli cabinet who was Arab. Despite the fact that they’re 20% of the population, they don’t really have much political representation — they certainly don’t have 20% of the seats in the Knesset. Moreover, there are all sorts of structural inequalities in Israeli society.

Horton: All right, I’m sorry. We’re going to have to hold the rest of that answer on the structural inequalities for when we get back from the break. Everyone, it’s Stephen Walt, Walt.ForeignPolicy.com. We’ll be right back after this.

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Horton: Alright y’all welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, I’m talking with Stephen M. Walt. He writes at ForeignPolicy.com — that’s Walt.ForeignPolicy.com. He’s the co-author, of course, of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, and when we were so rudely interrupted by the commercials there, you were about to begin discussing the structural differences in how non-Jewish Israeli citizens are treated inside the state of Israel — I’m not talking about Gaza and the West Bank now, but in the rest of Israel there.

Walt: Right, and as I said, Israeli Arab citizens have the right to vote and participate in politics, but, as is often the case with minorities in other societies, they are treated essentially as second-class citizens. They are not allowed to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, with a couple of exceptions. And because service in the military is compulsory for most Israeli citizens and is a route to advancement — it’s a way in which you move up in Israeli society — that cuts off one obvious route to rising. The school systems are not equal for the Arab citizens and the Israeli citizens. The amount of money devoted to Arab villages, Arab communities, bus service, things like that, is unequal as well. There have been actually several Israeli commissions looking at this, have been quite critical of the performance of the Israeli state in dealing with its own Arab minority. Now, that’s still much, much better than the treatment that Palestinian Arabs get in the West Bank and in Gaza, obviously, where they have essentially no political rights whatsoever and certainly no voice over the policies of the government that is occupying those territories and controlling their lives.

Horton: Well, I wonder whether the truth here gets all just mixed up by our point of view. In a sense, Israel expanded beyond those borders in 1967. The West Bank and Gaza are part of Israel. It already is a one-state solution there, it’s just that the people in Gaza and the West Bank don’t have any rights, that’s all.

Walt: Well, and there are a number of people, including many Israelis, who argue essentially that point, that a one-state system of control exists in de facto. I think, again, that there is still a difference in the status between occupied territories and Israel proper (pre-1967 borders). And if there’s going to be any hope of a peaceful settlement, reconciliation any time soon, it will still be along the lines of a two-state solution. The only question is whether or not the two sides can be brought to that, and that brings us to the role of the United States, which is probably the only country with sufficient potential leverage to actually bring something like that about before it’s too late.

Horton: Well now, tell me this. What is — can you give us your nutshell history of the last year and a half of the Obama administration here? Because I’ve got to admit I’m thrown for kind of a loop. I mean if he was smart, he would have just done what George Bush and Bill Clinton did which is wait until the end of his presidency and then, you know, give it his attempt to half-measure something. But he came out on this big roll, with this big Cairo speech and said, “No, I’m determined. We’re going to get this done and we want a freeze on the rate of the growth of the colonies in the West Bank and all this.” And now it seems that he has completely and totally backed down.

Walt: Yeah, I think that’s a fair characterization of it. I believe President Obama understood two things when he became President. I think that he understood that the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a huge problem for the United States. It undermined our image throughout the Arab and Islamic world, was ultimately not good for Israel’s long-term future as well, and that trying to bring that to a close was the right thing to do. I think he genuinely believed that, and of course he was right. And so, somewhat encouraging, the first six months, that he appointed a respected mediator in George Mitchell. He said a number of the right things, culminating in the Cairo speech. And you got the impression that he really meant it.

I think, in retrospect, it now appears that he and the people advising him were very naive. And they were naive in the following sense: they, I think, believed that if they took a very firm line at the very beginning, the Israeli government, and in particular Prime Minister Netanyahu, would not want to do anything to annoy a very popular US President and that he would therefore go along. And they never asked themselves the question, “What are we going to do if Netanyahu digs his heels in and says ‘No.’” I don’t think they even considered that option. And when that’s exactly what Netanyahu did, they suddenly realized they had a fight on their hands, and that was not a fight they were willing to face, particularly when they only had 60 votes in the Senate — they were trying to get health-care through. I think they began to realize that they could not buck the domestic political support, and in particular the power of various groups in the Israel lobby, and at that point it’s been one retreat after another, which is again not good for us, but I would argue not good for Israel either.

Horton: Well it seems like, from the very beginning, that he was willing to concede to them Iran policy: “Look just let me get some progress going on in the West Bank and Gaza, and I’ll go ahead and threaten Iran in whichever form is preferable to Likud.”

Walt: Well, again I think that oversimplifies it a little bit. I believe that when they came in, they wanted to open up to Iran. There were a number of gestures made in the first two months of the administration designed to indicate a greater willingness to negotiate with Iran, certainly –

Horton: That’s funny, I’d forgotten all about that.

Walt: Right, he sent this broadcast message. And remember that the Bush administration policy had been not to talk to Iran at all, have no contact whatsoever. And the Obama people, to their credit, they were willing to talk to them: “We’d like to see if we can work this out.” And I think they were hoping that the Iranian elections that happened last summer would go a different way, that they’d get a more flexible Iranian government, and of course they got the worst of all possible outcomes: a somewhat fraudulent election, domestic disturbances in Iran which had made the government even more rigid. So that was, I think, a bad break.

The problem is that ever since then they’ve reverted back to what you might call a sort of Bush-Light policy, which is attempting to basically ratchet up threats to Iran and repeatedly tell Iran, “Look, you give us what we want, which is the complete cessation of your nuclear program, and then we’ll talk about what you might want.”  And that’s essentially been the US position ever since last summer, and I think unfortunately we’ve tried that for the past ten years, and we know it’s not going to work. So we’re now back in a position where people are beginning to talk about using military force again, even though many people recognize that’s not going to solve the problem and probably will make things a lot worse. So, in a sense, it’s mostly been a — ever since that first few months — a remarkably unimaginative, one might even call a brain-dead, policy, where we’re just repeating policies that have failed in the past.

Horton: Well you know, we’ve been covering the Iran nuclear issue on this show for years and years now, and I one time asked Gareth Porter, “Look, if everybody in the world, including everybody in Mossad and in Netanyahu’s office, knows that there’s not really any kind of nuclear weapons program in Iran, then why [are they] so paranoid about what’s going on at Natanz?” And Gareth said he thought that a big part of it was Aliyah, and people are leaving Israel, and they’re not coming to it, and the idea is not that Iran would strike first with atomic weapons at Israel and then get completely extinct at the hands of Israeli retaliation — it’s that people would be afraid to move there, and this population problem in Palestine that we’ve been referring to — from their point of view — would become that much worse. And so that’s really what all this is about, or a big part of it.

Walt: If that’s true or not, and it may be true, and I know there are some Israelis who think along those lines, the point is that that’s a completely self-fulfilling problem — the more you talk about it the more scared you might make people and the worse the problem becomes.

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Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton and I’m talking with Stephen M. Walt. You can find his blog at Walt.ForeignPolicy.com. Of course he’s the author of the famous book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  Now Stephen when we went out to break, I had asked you about the motivation or the reason for such Israeli paranoia about Iran’s nuclear program, and Gareth’s idea that it has to do with the willingness of the Diaspora to move to Israel.

Walt: I think the thing to point out is there are lots of different reasons why Israelis would not like Iran to have nuclear weapons capability. Some of it may be concern that people won’t want to come to Israel or may leave because they may be scared. Certainly there has got to be some residual fear that they might use a weapon. I think that is very unlikely, but certainly we would feel the same way if a country near us was developing a nuclear weapon. And also, of course, raising that issue is a way of distracting everyone from other things like the occupation as well. I don’t think there is anything nefarious about an Israeli government preferring that Iran not get a nuclear capability. The question is: “What do you do in order to try and discourage them from doing that, and how serious a threat is it really?”

My argument would be that the United States would obviously like it if Iran never got nuclear weapons. We don’t know, by the way, if they are actively trying to do so now or not. We know they are trying to control the full fuel cycle, but whether they turn that into a weapons program is another question. The real issue is whether or not you are willing to go to war to prevent that from happening, and there, I think, it would be an enormous mistake. And what we ought to be trying is a much more creative set of diplomatic approaches to persuade Iran that it is in Iran’s best interests not to ever take it’s nuclear capacity and actually weaponize it. And what that ultimately gets linked to is a larger effort at creating some kind of nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, which would then bring the Israeli nuclear arsenal into play in those negotiations as, I think, another issue as well. The main problem is that our policy towards Iran in the last ten years or so has been very unimaginative, and it’s not surprising that we haven’t gotten anywhere.

Horton: Well, it was the goal of the hawks, was it not, in the Bush administration at least, to try to marginalize the moderates, to try to get Iran to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and break their Safeguards Agreement in the way that the North Koreans did? That’s what John Bolton said. It’s on YouTube.

Walt: I’m not surprised to hear that Ambassador Bolton might have said something like that. I think that early in the Bush administration, certainly about the time that we were going into Iraq, there was a pretty ambitious idea that we were really going to transform the entire region. And first we’d knock off Saddam Hussein, and then we’d turn on Iran or Syria and either threaten them into doing what we wanted or actually engage in more regime change as well. And that particular dream, I think, died in the sands of Iraq.

But it is quite clear that some of the same groups and the same people who dreamed up the idea of going into Iraq in the first place, way back in the late 1990s, are now the loudest voices calling for a very hard line, including the possible use of military force against Iran. I think if you pay attention over the next six months or so, you’re going to see a very similar kind of campaign being waged to try and persuade people that diplomacy is never going to work, that Iran simply has to be toppled and that the United States has to be willing to use military force to either destroy their nuclear facilities or possibly do more. Now, they don’t have George Bush in the White House. They don’t have Dick Cheney in the Vice President’s office. And that’s going to make it, I think, a harder sell. But there are people in the Obama administration who’ve been sympathetic to that kind of argument in the past. And it remains to be seen how President Obama and the rest of his government will respond as this campaign begins to ratchet itself up.

Horton: Well, you know, you base what you say on all these facts that you refer to and stuff about, well, you know, “they’re mastering the fuel cycle, but it remains to be seen whether they’re trying to make nuclear weapons or not,” that kind of thing, and yet that’s not really how the discussion about this issue goes on in the media. Even when the NIE came out in 2007 and it kind of stopped the war party in their tracks, at least for TV purposes, it only lasted two or three months, and we were right back to the Iranians are making nuclear weapons again.

Walt: Right. Well there’s an enormous amount of disinformation that goes on there and none of us know for 100% certainty what Iran is doing. The question you want to ask yourself is, first of all, what’s the most promising strategy for persuading Iran not to go down the nuclear weapons road? Not to ever test them, develop them, build a big arsenal, etc. And there may be ways to do that, none of which we really have explored, I think, very carefully. But the main point I’d make there is if you’re trying to persuade someone not to get nuclear weapons, continually threatening them, including threatening them with regime change, is not the way to do it. The only way to persuade them to not go down the nuclear road is if they feel reasonably secure, feel like the United States isn’t going to come after them.

The second thing, of course, is, if they were to go down that road, you have to ask yourself, is a preventive war the best way to deal with that or is reliance on deterrence, the same way we relied upon it against the Soviet Union and others in the past, recognizing, among other things, that Israel itself has several hundred nuclear weapons and an Iranian leader could never order an attack on Israel or any other close US ally without endangering his entire country and his own life? I don’t think deterrence is an ideal strategy, but I think it’s a better strategy than preventive war.

Horton: All right, well, I know I’m on the fringe on this, but what about just giving them a security guarantee and making friends? Like when Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton in the 1990s, and he committed the treason of going overseas to criticize his own government and said, “Bill Clinton and these unreasonable sanctions, this has got to end; I’m trying to do business here.” What if we were just friends with the Iranians? “No hard feelings.”

Walt: Well I think that should be our long-term objective. I think if we’re realistic about it, given the history of US-Iranian relations and all of the bad blood and misunderstanding going back now decades, it’s naïve to think you can turn that around in a month or six months or even a year. What we ought to be doing, though, is looking for opportunities to do that and certainly not doing anything that will make that harder to do down the road. There are actually many issues, including counterterrorism, including al-Qaeda, including stabilizing Afghanistan, where the United States and Iran have very similar interests. And, again, I don’t think anyone should be naïve about how easy it will be to unwind that spiral of hostility and suspicion, but I do think it’s possible, and the problem is we’re not being very creative in finding ways to do that. We’re actually making things worse progressively.

Horton: Well it seems like the case could be made that, look, the Iranians have been our best allies in fighting the Iraq war since 2003. That’s a pretty good plus in their book, isn’t it? Or have we been helping them fight it?

Walt: I think that again that oversimplifies it a little bit. Iran has probably done some things that undermine our effort in Iraq and has done some things to help as well. They have not exploited it as much as they might have. They certainly were very helpful to the United States back in 2001, 2002, after 9/11, both condemning the attack but also giving us active help when we went into Afghanistan after the Taliban and after al-Qaeda. And there were actually, I think, several opportunities there where we might have built upon those gestures of friendship. I might add that this is before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president, was even elected. And I think a good case can be made that he might never have been elected had we responded differently back in that early period.

Now it’s going to be even tougher to unwind things, but the way to do that is not by continuing to threaten them with regime change, being only willing to talk with them in the most sort of narrow way, and ultimately I think it would depend on, as you were suggesting, providing some sort of assurances to Iran that we’re no longer trying to overthrow their government, we’re not actively engaged in, you know, efforts to sabotage things inside Iran, and that we’re eager to sort of move past the bad relations of the past and build something more constructive. That’s going to require some movement on their part, too.

Horton: Right. Okay now, hold on just one second. Is it okay if I push it and try to keep you one more segment here, Stephen?

Walt: Okay, one more.

Horton: Okay, excellent. Everybody, it’s Stephen M. Walt. That’s Walt.ForeignPolicy.com, and down at your local bookstore; it’s The Israel Lobby.

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Horton: All right, y’all, we’re wrapping up Antiwar Radio for the day. I’m Scott Horton. Check out LRN.fm and Antiwar.com/radio and also Walt.ForeignPolicy.com, that’s the blog of our guest, Stephen M. Walt. He’s a professor of international affairs at Harvard. He’s the coauthor of the book and the essay, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy with John J. Mearshimer. And now we’re talking about Iran, and these hard breaks are pretty inconvenient sometimes, but you were saying that, well, I guess first of all it was oversimplification for me to say that the Iranians have been our best allies in Iraq this whole time. But then again it’s not that much of an oversimplification, considering that our war has been to install the Da’wa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council and Moqtada al-Sadr in power — at least we’ve been fighting for them if they haven’t been fighting for us there, huh?

Walt: Well, again, I think actually what it shows is what a boneheaded decision it was to go into Iraq in the first place. Certainly the goal of the United States was not to install a series of leaders who were very sympathetic to Iran. I mean, our policy up until then had been to be very hostile to both Iraq and Iran, and certainly, when George Bush ordered the troops in, he was not doing that because he thought he was going to do Tehran a big favor. I think one of the ways in which we see what a mistake that war was is the fact that we ended up improving the strategic position of the other main adversary we had in the region, and that was again because the people who dreamed that up didn’t understand the regional politics very well, were very cavalier in how easy it would be to knock off Saddam and put in place a pro-American government, and that’s, of course, you know, not what happened. But I don’t think one could argue that we did it in order to help the Iranians.

Horton: Oh no, I just meant, you know, in effect.

Walt: Well in effect, yes. But again it wasn’t our goal.

Horton: I mean Bush at some point said, “Look, I prefer Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to Moqtada al-Sadr,” because that was his choice. You know? And Abdul Aziz al-Hakim had been in exile in Iran for 30 years.

Walt: Right. And again, it’s because we ended up in a situation where we didn’t have any good choices and have been forced to try and make the best of it ever since. I think the larger point, though, is that the United States is going to have to find ways to start dealing with Iran as it is and try and hope that the democratic impulses that do exist — and I think are actually quite powerful within Iran — ultimately do come to the fore.

There’s actually quite an interesting book recently published by Stephen Kinzer, who’s an award-winning journalist formerly with the New York Times, arguing that over the longer term — not, again, in the next six months or so, but over the longer term — the United States should be trying to build very constructive and positive relations with both Iran and also with Turkey because these are countries in the Muslim world that do have strong democratic traditions, have been pursuing democracy now for a century or so, unlike some other countries in that part of the world, and therefore we have to start thinking much more creatively about how to get past all of the differences between ourselves and Iran and move in a much more constructive direction going forward. And again, if I faulted the Obama administration on this one, as I said before, it’s primarily because after some initial gestures they have fallen back on a set of approaches towards Iran that have never worked in the past and are unlikely to work in the future.

Horton: Now, when you talk about Iraq and all of this, the neoconservative movement, it all comes back to the Israel lobby. I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but Andrew Cockburn said that he defined the neoconservative movement not so much as former leftists and Democrats who became right-wingers so much as, “This is where the Israel lobby crosses with the military industrial complex.” And basically Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and all those companies needed to hire some intellectuals to come up with excuses for selling their weapons and so they made this kind of mob marriage with the neocons back in the ’70s, and so we have this immense power behind this neoconservative movement. It seems like a lot of the positions that you’re taking and explaining in a very reasonable fashion here on this show today are mostly not even really part of the discussion in DC, at least as far as I can tell. It seems like Bill Kristol gets to decide the terms of every debate.

Walt: I don’t want to overstate Mr. Kristol’s power, but he’s obviously a very influential figure. And the most disturbing thing about the sort of role of neoconservatives is the complete lack of accountability. You would think that the architects of the Iraq War — and neoconservatives really were; they were the first people to talk repeatedly about the need to go to war in Iraq, and this began in the mid to late 1990s. These were the guys who dreamed up this whole idea. And you would think that, given the results of Iraq — a costly, protracted, disastrous war for the United States — you would think that no one would be taking them very seriously at all. But in fact — because there is in fact very little accountability in the sort of inside-the-beltway establishment, they are continuing to be on talk shows and have their journals of opinion and op-ed columns and, you know, forming new organizations, having founded old committees and projects and groups to try and advocate for war with Iraq — we now see the same people, same tactics, being used to try and push the United States into a war with Iran. As I said, you know, a half hour or so ago, they don’t have quite as sympathetic an environment, and certainly the 9/11 attacks certainly helped the cause, although they had to do an awful lot of distortion to exploit that, but nonetheless they’re trying to do the same things now, and it’s really remarkable, given the track record that they’ve had so far.

Horton: Well, a major part of this is brought to kind of the forefront with the new Emergency Committee for Israel. One of the prime members of it with Bill Kristol is Gary Bauer from the right-wing side, the religious right, I guess, the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson-John Hagee style of right-wing Protestantism. And I wonder if you could give us any kind of ballpark estimate as to how many millions of people count as that part of the Israel lobby?

Walt: I actually think it’s a much smaller number than people believe. You often hear the number, you know, sort of, 40 million people in the Evangelical movement, but the vast majority of them do not place the same priority on a sort of hard line pro-Israel position. Some of them do, and they have some political weight. They certainly help within the Republican Party, for example. I think in terms of our policy vis-à-vis Israel, still groups like AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, and some others have more clout on Capitol Hill, have more influence in Washington. Think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, American Enterprise Institute, now the Saban Center at Brookings, I think have more influence within Washington circles than the sort of Gary Bauer Christian Zionist groups.

But they’re not trivial, and they certainly do broaden the base of groups that want the United States to back Israel no matter what it does and in particular want the United States to oppose any kind of two-state solution. In the case of Christian Zionists, it’s based on their interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. And I’ve never thought the Old Testament was a particularly good guide to American foreign policy, whatever its merits as a religious document might be.

Horton: Well, now, in your book, Professor Mearshimer and yourself — and again, it’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy — in here you make it very clear that it’s perfectly legitimate for people to be lobbyists and for Americans to be lobbyists in favor of other countries that they like and what have you, and that sounds fair enough to me, as long as we have a democracy and all that. But it seems like, as you guys — really it’s the subject of your book: the balance of power is pretty out of whack when this tiny little country really has just an absolutely inordinate amount of influence over our government — and on issues where it seems pretty apparent, like when we’re talking about Iran here, that this isn’t in the interest of anybody in America, never mind Israel.

Walt: I think that that’s right. I mean, certainly, as you just said, it’s completely legitimate for Americans to have strong attachments to other countries, whatever that country might be, whether it’s Poland or Israel or Pakistan or India or Greece, whatever. We’re a melting pot society and lots of people have ties in lots of different places and they can manifest those ties and attachments in our political system. It is, however, a bad thing if the influence becomes so great that you really can’t even have a discussion about it, if it almost becomes reflexive and if politicians and others are scared or intimidated from voicing any questions or raising any doubts about it. But secondly, it’s also just not good for either the United States or for these other countries.

We’re now in a position where you can’t even have an honest discussion about it. If President Obama says anything critical about Prime Minister Netanyahu, he immediately gets a storm of criticism and lots of phone calls, things like that. And it’s not good if the United States cannot tell its friends, its allies, when they are making mistakes. You know, we all make mistakes, and you want your friends to be able to help you correct them when you do, and we’re now in a situation where even when Israel is doing something that’s not good for us but also not good for itself, American politicians can’t even say that, because, again, these groups and the lobby wield such power within our political system.

Horton: Well, and as anybody who saw when first the article and then the book came out, you suffered the brunt of this criticism and every kind of accusation about your character that could be made — you know, congratulations to you for bearing through that and standing by your positions there. So, is there any progress being made? I mean it seems like, geez, well, like you said before, it seems like the neocons really overplayed their hand with Iraq, that would have discredited them. Are we ever going to get to the point where it’s not “anti-Semitic,” quote unquote, to say, “Hey, America’s interests are different than Israel’s and we ought to take care of ourselves. They can take care of themselves fine, especially with all the weapons we already bought them.”

Walt: Well, I think there’s some good news here. There is, I think, a more open discussion on this subject than there was back when we wrote our original article. I think that we helped kicked that door a little bit open. I think the advent of the internet has made a big difference in sort of opening up the discussion. And I do think the accusation that anyone who is critical of Israeli policy, things that they’re doing, or thinks the United States should have a more normal relationship with Israel rather than this very odd special relationship we have — the accusation that those people are always just reflexively anti-Semitic no longer has quite the same power that it did, and that’s a good thing.

Anti-Semitism itself is a very bad thing, and it ought to be condemned, but not honest discussion, not honest criticism of policy. I think that that accusation is losing some of its power to intimidate. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the influence of these groups is still pretty profound; politicians are still very scared of them. President Obama, I think, understood that he couldn’t take it on and not get into real trouble in fundraising and in other ways as well, and that means that American policy hasn’t shifted yet. So we’re getting a more open discussion but we’ve still got a ways to go before we have a policy that would be better for the country and for our friend.

Horton: All right, everybody. That is Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He writes the blog at Walt.ForeignPolicy.com, and of course is the coauthor of the article and the book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, with John J. Mearshimer. Thank you so much for your time on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Walt: My pleasure.

MP3 here. (29:02)

Bruce Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and author of The American Empire: Before the Fall.

————–

Transcript – Scott Horton Interviews Bruce Fein July 19, 2010

Scott Horton: All right y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, and our next guest is Bruce Fein. He was the Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan, and he is the author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall. Welcome to the show, Bruce. How are you?

Fein: I’m doing well. Thank you for inviting me, Scott.

Horton: Well, I really appreciate you joining us here. So basically the book is structured around the farewell address of the first President, George Washington; a speech on July 4, 1821, I think it was, by John Quincy Adams; and of course the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And you take these as a mandate from the founders of the American federal government – the general government, as they called it back then – to stay out of the world’s affairs.

Fein: I think that’s a fair approximation. I call these the charter documents. The philosophy is the United States of America is about protecting and securing the blessings of liberty for Americans, that the influence of America abroad was by the force of example – period. No entangling alliances. We build defenses, defenses, defenses for United States citizens alone. If people want to volunteer to do Good Samaritan work abroad, that’s up to them. But the government of the United States has no right or authority to coerce an American to spend a dollar to fight for the liberty of somebody who doesn’t owe their loyalty to the United States.

And the reason why – although it seems to some as callous – the Founding Fathers undertook this particular posture was because when you go abroad in search of monsters to destroy – as John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State put it –you destroy the Republic. All power concentrates in the president. All due process is shattered. The money, the taxes, the contracts, the appointments, the desire for fame and remembrance – all pushes the President to inflate fear, to concoct excuses for war, and to destroy individual liberty at home in the name of having some particular obelisk built.

The Founding Fathers knew the executive branch was vulnerable to that temptation because that was their entire experience in observing the history of Europe prior to the Revolutionary War. It was the European monarchs that would fight for trivial causes. The Founding Fathers said, “No! We must stay away from these entanglements because it will destroy our republic.”

Horton: Well now, I guess it could be argued – I think I would argue – that the American state has really been at war since they created its power to raise armies and put taxes on people, and they hardly ever stopped. I mean, a lot of times we act like the Age of Empire began maybe when they stole Hawaii or something like that, but I think Noam Chomsky on this show called that the “saltwater fallacy,” and they waged war to seize this continent.

Fein: I think that that is an incomplete examination. I do think it’s fair to say that up until the Mexican-American War, the United States did expand – like the Louisiana Purchase that bought the land from Napoleon, from the French – and there certainly were clashes with Indians, but the major issue that destroyed the Republic is the legal architecture of war.

When you formally declare war, that’s the silence of the rule of law and the subordination of individual liberty. Up until the Mexican-American War – we did fight the War of 1812 over impressment and neutrality; the British had attacked, and they ultimately burned Washington on that occasion; but that was a war declared by the Congress of the United States. But until the Mexican-American War, I do not believe that we were using the legal architecture of war to justify the destruction of checks and balances and the securing of the unalienable right to life, liberty, and [the] pursuit of happiness, which is the goal of all government.

It was the Mexican-American War and this rather ridiculous idea of “manifest destiny” and a crusading spirit of bringing to all of the world United States’ values and free enterprise that launched us on the trajectory towards empire that now has reached its zenith, post-911, where we now have a military force in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which, if that ratio to the enemy was used in World War II, we would have had 3.4 billion Americans fighting Germany and Japan – which means multiplying the population by twenty-five and conscripting every one of them.

And I do believe that it was because the successors to the founding generation after Quincy Adams forgot the lessons, the creed of the founding Republic, that led them into this enterprise of domination for the sake of domination. That’s what we’ve got to get away from.

Our pride has to be in securing freedom for Americans, making us a more perfect union, and hoping the rest of the world, by emulation, may wish to copy us – but if not, that’s up to the rest of the world. We still have a union that treasures liberty – the individual as the center of the universe, not the government.

Horton: Well, and it’s fair enough that you focus on the consequences for the American people because, one, the American people don’t seem in majority, or in large measure anyway, to care about the lives of foreigners at all, so never mind the Indians or the Iraqis or the Pakistanis and what it’s like for them.

But you’re confronting one of the foundational myths of our entire civic religion in this society, which is that you and I couldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t for the Army killing Iraqis, and that, you know, it’s good for the economy, etc. – that all this empire is for us, that we benefit from it, it’s why we have the Bill of Rights – it’s not the biggest threat to the Bill of Rights. That’s what the people are told to believe on TV all day.

Fein: Yeah. Well, and of course the fact is [that] empires ultimately end up in self-destruction because the arrogance and the duplicity of their motivations cause resentment and what you might call “blowback,” which is exactly what, largely, Osama bin Laden/al Qaeda is about.

It’s very striking, Scott, that if you examine the reported colloquy that was had in a New York Federal District Court up in the Southern District of New York recently between Faisal Shahzad – he was the individual who pled guilty to having the car with a bomb in New York Times Square – and the attempted conspiracy, if you will, to kill Americans – and he was asked by the judge when he pled guilty, “Well, why did you do this?” He said, “Well, we are at war with Islam; that’s what the Afghanistan and Pakistan wars are about.” And she said, “Well, but why are you killing women and children if it’s a war?” And he says, “Well, your drones don’t make any distinction when they come crashing into Afghanistan and Pakistan between women and children – they kill anybody. So why are we to play by Queensberry rules where you engage in atrocities?” And she didn’t have an answer for that.

And this was an individual – Faisal – who was a U.S. citizen. He didn’t say, “I hate American liberty.” He didn’t say that he despised the fact that women didn’t have headscarves on or burqas that caused him to do what he did. It was retaliation for exactly what we’re doing abroad.

This is the stupidity – we are creating a hundred new enemies for every drone that kills one militant, if we even know how to define a militant. This is quite stupid, but that’s the stupidity of empire – ultimately to destruction, like Rome, the Ottomans, the British, etc.

Horton: In fact I just interviewed a writer, a journalist named Stephan Salisbury, about some of these entrapment cases, these bogus terrorism cases since September 11th. And he talks about how the informants always use Israeli policy, American policy in the Middle East as their talking points to try to provoke these people into saying something stupid into an open microphone so that they can be prosecuted. And they don’t ever say, “Don’t you hate it that women can wear skirts to a primary election?” Or something like that. They always say, “Look at what’s going on in the West Bank! How can you not fight back?” That’s what the provocateur says to entrap.

Fein: Yeah, exactly! Because they know that, no, even if these people don’t necessarily embrace the American form of democracy, they don’t wake up each day and think, “Oh, I’m so angry that someone has freedom, that a woman can go to school.” That’s ridiculous! They don’t care about that 5,000 miles away from Afghanistan or Pakistan. It’s a concoction made to dupe the American people into thinking that these are non-human beings and that there will be a caliphate in Washington D.C. unless we’re sending Predator drones into their wedding parties.

Horton: Right, and that is the strength of this book. Again, it’s called American Empire: Before the Fall. And it seems like we are really pretty much at least at the top of the decline here. It seems like the apex of American power was in the last administration. I think Pat Buchanan wrote that the “high tide” was Fallujah, when they turned us back, basically. It was a giant massacre for nothing.

All right, so hang on the phone, Bruce. It’s Antiwar Radio. The music’s playing, we’ll go out to break, and we’ll come back and talk more about this excellent book – I really recommend you all run out and get it – American Empire: Before the Fall. It’s Antiwar Radio.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton. I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He’s the author of the brand new book, American Empire: Before the Fall.

Now I want to ask you to kind of catalog, as you do so well in the book, the degradation of even the theory of the rule of law as binding the power of anybody in the government at all.

But first I want to pick a fight with you about what you say about how America should be unilaterally at peace – abandon collective security and all that stuff – and we should be unilaterally at peace, but we should threaten nuclear annihilation against anyone who ever attacks us. But it seems to me like, at the very worst, if we respond to somebody that attacks us, it should be proportional, not nuclear annihilation of women and children and other men who had nothing to do with the decisions of their politicians. That’s not any more fair than Iraq or Iran nuking us now for what we did to them.

Fein: Well, obviously you’ve got to – look, the purpose here of the threat is to try to deter war in the first instance. That’s the greatest tragedy.

Horton: Yeah, but then if somebody attacks us, we got to nuke ’em.

Fein: It’s hard to argue. Take, for example, Scott – was Hiroshima and Nagasaki disproportionate to Pearl Harbor and all the deaths that had happened in the interim?

Horton: Yes.

Fein: The main success is deterring war in the first instance. You want to promise, in my view, that someone who is the aggressor – and this is an aggressor state. An attack/war is not an individual who comes in and says, “I hate America” – that doesn’t justify a war response. I’m talking about an attack that’s an existential attack like Pearl Harbor with a country that’s got millions of people in the armed forces – Japan ultimately had over 10 million – a huge industrial base – that you want to prevent this catastrophe that comes in the first instance by saying, “Then you’re going to lose all of your power. Your country will be annihilated.” That’s the goal there.

Now you may disagree with regard to whether it will be effective. I think that’s far more beneficent towards mankind, to prevent war in the first instance, than saying, “Well, if you attack us, even if it’s unprovoked, we’ll only go back, and so you’ll suffer the same amount as we did.” I think that would be more encouraging to warfare, but we can debate that.

But I want to go back, if I can – well, I don’t want to cut you off. You may have a response to mine. It’s not fair for me to just say it without you responding to my observation.

Horton: Well, I mean, I would agree with you that the deterrence of having thousands of hydrogen bombs does work to prevent major-power war. It has worked. But it seems like at the same time we could absolutely annihilate the capital city of any major power that ever attacked us without nukes even. I mean, they’ve got all kinds of conventional weapons that can make life hell for anyone in the world without actually fusing hydrogen atoms together over their cities, you know?

Fein: Yes. Well, okay, let’s move on. I think we both agree that, whatever purposes, our posture ought to be defense and deterring war, not preemptive war.

Horton: Certainly. Now go ahead, go ahead, because time is limited.

Fein: Yeah. This would be just a catechism of all the lacerations of the rule of law. One, when war comes, the president claims – and he is claiming – a unilateral authority to identify Americans abroad who he says are an imminent danger and have them wiped out by assassination squads. We have one member that President Obama has identified as a U.S. citizen in Yemen who’s on the hit list for assassination. It’s a little bit like Vladimir Putin’s killing of one of his opponents, Mr. Litvinenko, in London with polonium-211.

The President then claims authority he can detain any American citizen, or noncitizen, without accusation, without a trial, as a so-called “enemy combatant.” So you just sit there and rot. It goes back to the days, pre-Magna Carta, where King John would throw people in the dungeon without any accusation to let them sit there until they turned into vassals or otherwise.

Then he claims the authority to use these military commissions, which combine judge, jury, and prosecutor in a single branch, for alleged “war crimes,” which include activities such as “conspiring to train in a terrorist training camp” even if you’ve never threatened an American at any time or any place. And military commissions are about as procedurally irregular as the Spanish Inquisition.

Then he claims he has absolute power, in fighting the war against international terrorism, to spy on us without warrant – that he’s gathering military intelligence on the battlefield when he undertakes this collection because with terrorism it can occur anywhere, so the geography of war is not limited, it’s everywhere on the planet. And he can collect “battlefield intelligence” with group warrants, or without warrants whatsoever.

He also claims the authority to act in secrecy. Congress has no ability to even subpoena a member of the executive branch and inquire as to how they’re running war. Which is of course is an enormously menacing proposition. We have government in secrecy instead of transparency. And we know that secrecy breeds abuses.

Let’s just think for a minute, Scott, about these Predator drones slamming into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Neither you, nor me, nor the audience, nor anyone in Congress, has any idea, how do these targets get selected? We read in the newspapers, “12 militants killed, and maybe some civilians.” Well how do we know there were 12 militants that were killed? Where’s the proof that that was accurate information? Where did you get it? Were the informants who you paid $10,000 the ones who you relied upon? Is the accuracy the same as the accuracy for detainees at Guantanamo Bay? Where 5 or 6 out of 7 get released once a court has an opportunity to examine the evidence, even if a bunch of it’s classified?

So this is basically running government in secrecy, which is the opposite of government by the consent of the governed. How can the people consent to government activity if you don’t even know what it is?

And this is truly, perhaps, the most destructive element of our entire constitutional system that has come into play with the so-called “war against international terrorism.” It’s all in secret. And I don’t know whether you read in today’s front page of the Washington Post about our new intelligence leviathan out there.

Horton: Yeah it was about [inaudible] part about how it says they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space. It’s the new post-9/11 only – never mind post-World War II – national security state, Bruce.

Fein: Yes, that’s right. And a million people with Top Secret security clearances that don’t even talk to each other. And what has resulted? You know, the recipients, the users, say this is useless. It doesn’t even give us any information that enables us to defeat the enemy, if you will, the terrorists. It’s utter and complete mindlessness, but you can imagine all the information that’s captured about American citizens, you know – to what end? Other than just make government bigger and giving them control over your life.

So that’s another element of the rule of law. And I suppose perhaps the most egregious comes to this issue of how we get into war in the first instance.

The Founding Fathers universally agreed that only Congress could be trusted with deciding whether to initiate war, because the president has such a temptation to concoct danger in order to get into clashes because war gives the President the taxes, the money, the contracts, the appointments, the fame, the jingoism that he thinks will let him profit politically and leave his mark in the footprints of time. And that was the statement of even the most aggressive proponent of the strong executive, Alexander Hamilton – the legislative branch decides on war or peace.

And now we’ve come in the empire phase where, no, the president unilaterally decides whether to go to war, or Congress delegates to the president, like the Iraqi War Resolution, “You decide, Mr. President, whether to go to war.” Same thing happened in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Same thing happened in Korea – President Truman unilaterally decided to call the Korean War a “police action” and said, “We don’t need any authority from Congress to fight this.”

Horton: Well let me ask you now, Bruce, is there any chance I can keep you for another 10-minute segment here?

Fein: Yes, you can.

Horton: Okay, great, hang on the line. Everybody, I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He used to be a lawyer in the Ronald Reagan administration, wrote the articles of impeachment of Bill Clinton, and wrote the book, American Empire: Before the Fall. We’ll be right back.

* * * * *

Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. It’s Antiwar Radio. I’m Scott Horton, and I’m talking with Bruce Fein. He’s the author of American Empire: Before the Fall. And you know, for those of you who have somebody that you’re trying to get the anti-empire point across to, this might be the one. In fact, I’m pretty sure this book will go down in history as part of the story of “Some Americans tried to fight this.”

But anyway, let me share a little bit of the table of contents with you guys:

One: Empire Without a Cause.

Two: How Far the Republic Has Fallen – From Lexington and Concord to the Korangal Valley.

Three: The Nation’s Charter Documents.

Four: America’s Descent into Empire: From the Mexican-American War to World War II.

Five: Twin Myths of the American Empire.

Six: Crucifying the Rule of Law on a National Security Cross.

And I’m going to skip ahead here to Chapter Nine: Restoring the American Republic. Bruce, how do you propose to do that?

Fein: Well, in some sense the ultimate solution, if you will, lies in the American people. We The People are still sovereign. It’s the first three words of the Constitution of the United States.

We have to insist, by our votes and by our opinions, that we withdraw all of our troops from abroad. Our military posture should be a thoroughly defensive one. We can spy and gather intelligence for defensive purposes, but we shouldn’t have a single soldier on any foreign soil.

We’ve got to renounce this idea that the President is there to make us safe. No, he’s there to give us freedom, along with Congress.

We have to restore checks and balances. We have to make certain that a member of Congress is not elected who will not impeach a president for unilaterally initiating war, who would not impeach a president if he withholds information and testimony from Congress, who will insist that we have a government that places the individual at the center of the universe, that protects privacy, that views the thrill of stealth government and transparency as the earmark of the United States, that differentiates us from citizens who are vassals and serfs of a leviathan at the federal level.

And that’s going to mean civic education. It’s going to mean a promotion of the idea that it is not great to dominate for the sake of domination. That is not the earmark of the destiny of the United States and of the Republic.

It’s America for Americans, not because we’re callous but because we recognize that by going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, we would destroy the Republic for ourselves. And the American people need to embrace this. We have to reject as a people the idea that absolute safety is what we crave more than anything else. We have to recognize that you have to take some limited degree of risk, because everybody is capable of evil – that is, no one can go and swear on Korans or Bibles or whatever that it’s impossible for them to do wrong.

That doesn’t mean we stick everybody in prison but that freedom and liberty thrive when there’s some measurable prudent risk out there that you can have a Timothy McVeigh. And that has got to be the creed of the United States of America.

Right now, Scott, all of the language, the grammar is, “Safe, safe, safe, safe.” It doesn’t matter how much you destroy the whole purpose of the enterprise, of freedoms. Just tell me it’s gonna make me safe, even if it doesn’t. Body scanners, whatever.

And one of the ironies of the gathering of the more information that was disclosed to be useless in the Washington Post today – you know, what is the government saying? “Give us even more analysts.” You know? And this makes the problem even worse, by creating even more useless information. That’s the kind of bureaucratic big government mentality that has to be repudiated.

But in the long run it’s got to be a change in the political culture. And that was what was so vibrant and thrilling about the founding generation. The American people understood and craved liberty over domination for the sake of domination.

When the Latin Americans and South American colonials erupted against Portugal and Spain, the American people didn’t say, “We have to go over there and run interference and engage in warfare.” No, we wished them well, but otherwise we remained Americans. America has to come first.

Otherwise I think the changes – the things that can be done incrementally by changing the laws – will not have the sustaining power to return to the Republic.

Just think, for instance, we have laws, Scott, against torture which includes waterboarding, which the president himself has said is torture. They don’t go enforced because we lack the political will to say, “Hey, this is the rule of law. If you want to pardon somebody and take accountability for committing torture, go ahead. But the president doesn’t have the authority to just ignore enforcing the law because he thinks it’s politically inconvenient.”

Horton: Well, yeah, and they’d have to repeal the Eighth Amendment to legalize torture, anyway, right?

Fein: They would have to do that, yeah. Or I suppose Congress could try to at least eliminate maybe criminal penalties, which they haven’t tried to do.

But that’s what the culture is about here in terms of restoring the Republic to what it was envisioned by the founding generation. We can’t just blame the individual leaders. We can complain about it, but it’s up to us to throw them out of office,  to give them a stigma. This is simply not acceptable.  Wedo not want the United States dropping Predator drones on wedding parties because there’s a one trillionth percent chance that someone might be a baby Osama bin Laden growing up in Kabul in the next 50 years coming as an individual and try to commit a terrorist attack.

No! We’re more than that. We care more about our freedom. We care more about transparency in government.  Even if it does [mean] taking some risks than it does domination for the sake of domination. The latter is the earmark of tyranny. It’s the earmark of the lion and the tiger in the jungle, just wanting to try to beat and brutalize and dominate for the thrill that’s rather visceral, a feeling that you’re the first guy on the block.

Horton: Well you know I think a lot of people would, you know, if you were one of the guys they talk to on TV all the time about these things, I think you could win people over to your position. In terms of what the people really want, I mean they’re mostly unconcerned with foreign policy anyway, but if you could truly offer them peace, I think they’d take it.

But what about the imperial court? You know, William S. Lind said on this show that you shouldn’t even call it Washington D.C.; it is simply an imperial court. And there are bazillions of uncounted, printed dollars flowing to specific extremely rich and powerful private interests that control the empire. And how are Americans supposed to believe that they can do anything about that? That’s why most people don’t care and don’t pay attention to these kinds of issues – it’s because they feel powerless. Why would they sit around and read Antiwar.com all day if all they’re going to do is shrug and pout and it does them no good?

Fein: Well, Scott, it’s certainly true that it’s an uphill battle. But the process of struggle itself is its own reward.

Just think about the initial effort in the United States to abolish slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, born in the place that I grew-up in – Boston, Massachusetts – he formed The Liberator magazine in 1831. He was tarred and feathered, driven out. He said people told him just what you told me – “Oh, slavery. There are too many monied interests involved here. It’s profitable. The North lends money to the South. The South gets the tobacco. They grow agricultural products at cut-rate prices with slavery. It’s hopeless.”

Lloyd Garrison, he came back despite being tarred and feathered. He was there when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified – abolished slavery in 1865 – then he shut down The Liberator magazine.

It’s true. Oftentimes it seems hopeless. But the quest itself, to do what is right, to pay rewards to the Founding Fathers, who had the right philosophy, has to be its own reward. You do it anyway even if it seems hopeless, like Lloyd Garrison did, because everything else would be ignoble. That’s why we fought at Valley Forge. It didn’t seem we were going to have a victory around the corner, but we persisted and ultimately prevailed.

But in some sense, Scott, even if we fail, it was worth it. Our legacy is our immortality in terms of the philosophy that will be there in future generations and maybe be taken up in more propitious times to carry the beacon of freedom and liberty, the way the Founding Fathers understood it to be there. That’s why we can never despair. We can never yield simply because it looks hopeless. We always fight and be uncompromised in our principles in knowing why we’re here between ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Horton: Wow. So that’s Bruce Fein. He worked for Ronald Reagan in the Justice Department back in the ’80s. He wrote up the articles of impeachment against the felon, William Jefferson Clinton, in the 1990s, and now he’s the author of the book American Empire: Before the Fall. And this is some really good stuff, y’all. I highly suggest you go out and read it. And I want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Bruce.

Fein: I’m really thankful, Scott, and I appreciate your audience being so patient. Thanks again.