#478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex

Scott Horton: You'd be interested in this if you don't already know the subject is public choice theory. It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it, sitting here hashing it out across the table. Because what becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation. And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they? And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now. Ellsberg tells the story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense or whatever it is, or defense of the, no, state, I believe. And his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not. And then the hope is that next year he'll be in his boss's position and his boss will move up one. And then his job will be making his boss look good then. And he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this. My friend David Hardy, who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre. He said, there's truth and there's falsity. That's the world we live in. But in government work, there's our position. And our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity.

Scott Horton: It was a hell of a war for nine years, all through the 1980s, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein, except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran-Contra. So America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran. They did talk about, you know what we do is we support one side till they start getting ahead a little bit, then we support the other side a little bit more. That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other. There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the US and some of its allies provided Iraq with dual use technology, intelligence and materials, which facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program. The CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load to sell it to poor Americans, blacks, especially in LA. They made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy kooks. The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Contras for the CIA and into Bill Clinton's Arkansas. The same guy with the just say no, and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession. There are people who went to prison for decades for life for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in.

Scott Horton: It was an explicitly stated part of their thinking was, we have to defeat Vietnam syndrome. The reluctance of the American people to do things like this. We got to give them one that we can do. That'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy. We can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days. Rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post-Vietnam anti-militarist malaise. And Bush Sr. then after the fact said, by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all. So they can enforce what they called the New World Order. As George Bush Sr. himself said, what we say goes. It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it. The world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and we know what we're doing and we only have their best interests at heart.