Before I get into the heart of my remarks, let me just offer a few caveats, because as Ben has mentioned, I write for some websites, and when you write on these issues, you start getting certain types of hate mail, and after a while you realize the patterns, and okay, when you say something of a certain nature, a lot of people are going to assume that you mean that this is what you really meant, and so they fire off angry emails, so let me just make a few disclaimers before I get going, just to try to defuse some of that,
potential misunderstanding. So first the standard is claimed and the views that I'm going to express tonight are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the administration or perhaps other faculty members.
In particular, for those of you who might be freshmen, don't worry if you saw those signs and you thought, gee, I thought I was coming to Hillsdale to get away from these wacky liberals.
Don't worry, as we speak, there's a Hillsdale College Republican meeting going on just upstairs.
A second disclaimer I want to offer is let me admit up front that I don't claim to be some sort of expert on foreign policy or the Mideast in particular and in fact I'm sure as I go through I'm going to seriously mispronounce some names and places.
Having said that, I still feel confident to talk to you tonight on this subject because in my opinion, as I hope to convince you, the case against the invasion of Iraq and the current occupation is just so overwhelming that even an amateur like myself can get up here and talk for half an hour pointing out various problems with it.
Another caveat I want to mention is that let me just tell you that I did witness the World Trade Center attacks.
I was a graduate student at NYU at the time, and I lived in New Jersey, and out of my window, one of the selling points of the apartment was that you could see the World Trade Center, and we actually didn't get a cut in our rent after the attacks, even though that bond was gone.
Now, the reason for me mentioning this is not to say that, well, therefore I have some insight that people who weren't there don't have.
My point is that a lot of people, when I write articles saying that I don't think that war on terror is a good idea or that the invasion of Iraq was successful,
a lot of people write to me and say, oh, you just don't realize there are people out there who really intend us harm and want to kill us.
So, no, I saw with my own eyes the second tower collapsing. So, believe me, I understand there are dangerous people out there that wish to harm Americans.
Nonetheless, I'm still going to go ahead with this talk and try to show you why my position, I think, is consistent.
If you can realize there are terrorists out there trying to hurt Americans and yet think the war in Iraq was a terrible idea.
A few more caveats. The fact that I'm going to make these remarks does not in any way mean that I'm for John Kerry
I don't think Saddam Hussein is a nice guy. I'm going to admit all those things up front. Saddam Hussein was a brutal thug and he killed a lot of innocent people and not trying to downplay that or make light of it, but nonetheless, just because of that doesn't mean therefore the so-called regime change was a good idea.
Okay, so having gone through those caveats, let me now get into the heart of my remarks.
What I'm going to do, just to give you a rough outline, is present several quick objections that I would have to Operation Iraqi Freedom,
and then quickly try to address some of the counter responses.
So some things that people who have heard all that might say, okay, but what about these things?
And let me just try to address those possible alleged benefits.
The first objection is fairly simple. There were Iraqi civilians who died because of our invasion. It's hard to get accurate estimates, but I think a conservative number would be 10,000.
I was looking through and some estimates say that in the Battle of Baghdad alone, U.S. forces probably killed around 2,400-2,500 Iraqi civilians.
Now, that's not to say that the U.S. wasn't taking rather extraordinary precautions and measures to try to minimize so-called collateral damage relative to other military campaigns from around the world presently or throughout human history.
But nonetheless, when you invade another country, a lot of innocent people are going to get killed.
And so surely, that is a count against the invasion. That certainly is something that is a con.
In addition to civilian casualties, we've also got the troop casualties for both the Iraqi and allied forces.
Now, for the U.S. and the coalition forces, it's over 1,000.
The numbers I checked a few days ago, it was, I think, 973 U.S. troops dead and about 110 other coalition forces.
For the Iraqis, General Tommy Franks has said that we don't do body counts.
But some estimates, I've seen numbers as high as 60,000. I think that's probably overestimating, but I personally think 20,000 is a fairly safe estimate of the number of Iraqi troops who died trying to repel the U.S. invasion.
Okay, so again, however, you want to throw it into the calculus of objections against the war, certainly the fact that tens of thousands of people are dead certainly should be counted against it.
And also the fact that a thousand or more U.S. troops are going to die, that isn't the extent of the damage, because now the troops are committed there, they're certainly not going to be pulled out anytime soon, and there's really no end in sight.
So we've gotten used to the fact that, oh, every week there's going to be an attack on a checkpoint and two U.S. soldiers dead, okay, or there's going to be a car bombing and six U.S. soldiers dead.
to be aware of how big these numbers are. To date, the direct cost of the Iraq invasion occupation is about $130 billion, okay, two appropriations of 60 and change to continue the operations, alright, and the estimates are that right now to maintain the occupation is going to run about $6 billion per month, now those numbers are so big you don't even know how to make sense of them, and let me just make one observation, some people would say, okay, sure, but you know, freedom is not cheap,
That's what we have to pay to make our nation safe and so be it.
And, okay, even if that is your position, then let me just point out, there's a lot you can do with $130 billion,
besides the dubious, in my opinion, prospect of making us safe by toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.
You could spend that money.
The thing that the government really is doing a good job in general, fighting terrorism and so forth,
and so forth. The fact that the Iraqi invasion cost $130 billion so far is a strike against it, that, gee, is it really worth that financial expenditure? Terrorism and suicide bombings and so forth. That wasn't something that characterized Iraqi society before our invasion that was certainly prevalent in other parts of the Middle East, but not in Iraq. As bad as Saddam Hussein's regime was, you couldn't, as long as you didn't challenge him, you could certainly go to the store and buy fruit or whatever and go home without fear that there was going to be a car bomb, whereas that's no longer the case.
Another point seems a little bit leftist and whiny to bring it up, but the fact that our troops were caught right-handed, sexually torturing prisoners.
That's certainly something to say, I don't really like the way this war has been conducted so far.
Especially when you think in terms of what we're supposed to be doing is projecting to the Arab world the fact that our way of life is better, you know, trust us, we're here to help you.
Can you imagine if someone, you know, the typical Arab is a little bit distrustful of the US.
He's got a bunch of his rabble-rouser friends telling him, you know, that these Americans are a bunch of imperialist warmongers and they're just a bunch of liars who don't trust them.
And then, you know, it comes in and the Americans at first, okay, we're going to give them a chance, and George Wish is making speeches about, you know, now Iraqis are free and no longer are they being tortured and so forth in these prisons under Saddam Hussein.
And then it turns out that perhaps at the very moment he was saying that American troops were sexually torturing prisoners in the very same prison that Saddam Hussein used against his political opponents.
Okay, so, beyond the mere fact that torture is bad, just the way that this all turned out, and given the political context, this was an extremely embarrassing and unfortunate turn of events.
Okay, so the things I've talked about so far could basically apply to just about any invasion.
Alright, now let me start tailoring my remarks more for the particular campaign against Iraq and why I think that the way it was conducted was less than desirable.
Okay, so first of all, this issue of preemption, so what was unique, to the extent that anything was unique about the invasion of Iraq,
it was the issue of preemption, the fact that the U.S. wasn't even alleging that Saddam Hussein or anyone from Iraq was currently doing anything illegal
or doing anything that invited a direct military response, whereas obviously the reason we declared war on Japan was after Pearl Harbor, they attacked us.
or even something where a lot of people were concerned about US imperialism, something like the war against Panama to capture Manuel Noriega.
Even there, the charge wasn't, oh, we're afraid he might start dealing cocaine in the future.
The idea was, no, he has been doing this and therefore we're going to go in and arrest him. It was like a large police operation.
So what was unique in terms of a doctrinal innovation was the fact that Bush was saying the reason we're going to go in, it's not that we directly tie Saddam Hussein to 9-11 or specific attacks, but what we're going to do is knock him out before he can hurt us.
And we have all this reliable intelligence and we're sure he's going to hurt us, and that's why we need to go take him out not preemptively.
All right, now why is that a problem? Well, I can focus on the fact that just in terms of justifying something, it's not really valid to say that, oh, just because I think someone might harm me, therefore I can use violence against them.
But if you're the sort of person who is right now thinking the war in Iraq is a good idea, I don't think that sort of abstract argument is going to persuade you.
So let me try a different tack and just say that George Bush and the friendly Republicans aren't going to always be in the White House.
At some point, the Democrats are going to win again.
And so even if you're a gung-ho Republican and you think there's nothing wrong with preemption per se,
well, just look now at the precedent that Bush has set for future Democratic presidents.
A lot of people believe that Bill Clinton, during the Monica Lewinsky hearings, used cruise missiles to blow up an aspirin factory, that it turned out to be in retrospect, claiming that this factory was being used to produce toxins for weapons of mass destruction that were being funneled to Osama bin Laden.
This stuff isn't brand new. Clinton did that and then it turned out, upon further investigation, that experts were sent to this pharmaceutical plant and they looked at the soil samples and so forth and it looked like,
So, it's like, oh, well, maybe he wasn't manufacturing those things, the person who owned this pharmaceutical plant,
but Clinton did that because it got the Monica Lewinsky stuff off the front page,
that, oh, there's terrorists out there, someone's manufacturing weapons,
and giving them a sound of alarm is scary.
So, the point is, when you're in charge of the federal government,
and you have the foremaking ability, and by its very nature,
a lot of the alleged military necessities are things that the public can digest,
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He's going to have the chance.
Okay, let's now spend a little bit of time on this Weapons of Mass Destruction.
This is the issue where my own writing is on the top on this topic that I have focused the most.
So I'm going to spend some time here.
Remember, if you will, what was the actual justification that the United States gave to the United Nations for the invasion of Iraq?
Remember, the UN was saying, look, give our inspectors more time, and the United States was saying, look, we've given you guys 12 years, you just keep dragging your feet, these multinational committees never do anything, it's up to us to enforce UN resolutions.
Saddam Hussein refuses to disarm, he keeps leading us around, he keeps saying, okay, giving us little concessions, then he backs off, and so on.
12 years to do it. What we're going to do, this is Bush telling the UN, we're going to enforce the UN sanctions against Iraq because Saddam is a material breach of those UN resolutions.
That was the official notification in terms of international law that the US gave to the UN.
So now it turns out that we've yet to discover these stockpiles of weapons.
of Weapons, and in a few minutes I'll read some quotes just to make sure we're all in agreement that it is the case that things didn't turn out the way the administration claimed they would.
And we'll go through a little bit of the rhetorical justification since it's hard to excuse that, but as Scott Ritter points out, and he remembers Scott Ritter is the former head UN weapons inspector and he resigned and he was going on and on
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Well then that means the US's entire legal case in terms of international law falls apart and we have no justification.
And we can say, oh well Saddam is a thug, but if the US from the get-go had said, you know what, we don't like Saddam Hussein and that's why we're going to invade Iraq on top of his regime,
people would have said you can't do that, there's no basis in international law for that. So that's why Bush didn't make that argument at the time.
at the time, whereas it wasn't so much of a specious argument to say we're upholding
the sanctity of UN resolutions and we're going to put some backbone into it while you guys
bicker and keep sending envoys and so forth into inspection committees, we're going to
do something about it.
Now another ironic point when it comes to the fact that no WMD turned up is just think
of it this way, the United Nations was telling the US, don't invade Iraq, give our inspectors
The U.S. said no, we're going to invade, and the U.N. couldn't do anything because the U.S. obviously has the biggest military in the world.
And then it turned out that we weren't even upholding these U.N. resolutions telling Saddam to disarm because he already had been in compliance.
And so if you think about it this way, what is the one thing that the United Nations is supposed to be doing as an international body?
It's to prevent countries from going to war with each other.
I mean, if the U.N. is failing at that, it really isn't doing anything.
And so it's particularly ironic that Bush framed his case for war as upholding the UN and making sure that it continues to serve as a legitimate international body by flagrantly violating its polite request not to invade Iraq to do things that turn out to not even be upholding previous UN resolutions.
Okay, let me make a different point in terms of just strategic reasoning, because you might say, and I know many conservative Republicans think like this,
that look, the UN is a wishy-washy group of busybodies, and the US should just act in its own interest when it comes to foreign policy,
and we shouldn't be giving our sovereignty over to these foreigners.
Okay, and that's a perfectly defensible position, but the fact that Bush made the case the way he did is going to discredit the U.S. in the future.
So now, even if you have no problem with preemption, and you don't think the U.S. needs to get permission from anybody to go invade countries when we determine it's in our interest to do so, the fact that this happened with Iraq is going to discredit us.
Let's say in the future, five years down the road, there's some rogue nation that really does develop weapons and they really are giving suitcase nukes to terrorists who are going to come over and try to hit Manhattan subways.
And the CIA tells the president and then he goes to Congress and he says, okay, we need to go invade this country because our secret intelligence says they're developing weapons to be used against us.
Well, at that point, a lot of people are going to say, well, that's exactly what George Bush told us five years ago and look what happened then.
So the point is, even if you have no problem with the doctrine of preemption and so forth,
the fact that Bush made his case the way he did should trouble you.
If the argument for going into Iraq really was all along just that he's going to have those weapons at some point,
he doesn't have them right now, then that's what the case should have been.
And if the case is, look, the US does what it wants and we don't care about the UN,
Another observation on this issue is, remember what's going on in North Korea while all this
is happening, because I've heard some people make an argument along the following lines
that, like this, that, okay, look, it's these international busybodies wringing their hands
talking about the benefits of dialogue and so forth,
whereas we needed somebody like Bush to get in there and do the job, right?
But these dictators, they respect strength and not, we need liberals.
And so that's why Bush really stood up to aggression.
And he showed dictators the U.S. means business.
OK, so that's the type of argument people would make.
But let's actually look at if you were a Machiavellian dictator
and you were just observing U.S. policy and not listening to the fancy speeches
the people were making, but actually looking at U.S. behavior.
So right before the war, Bush kept demanding that Saddam turn over his hidden weapons.
I'm going to read some excerpts from the State of the Union, just in case there's any confusion on that, because that issue has been clouded recently.
All right, so Bush was demanding, saying, look, I don't want war, the U.S. is a peaceful nation, but Saddam has these hidden weapons,
and unless he turns them over, we're going to have to invade for the safety of the world.
and Saddam kept saying no we already are in compliance we yeah we used to have
a bunch of those weapons but we got rid of them all and look at we have inspectors
coming what more do you want me to do right that was Saddam Hussein's official position
of course everybody thought he was a liar because he's a brutal fuck at the same time
North Korea was announcing to the world hey we're developing nuclear weapons now
if we invaded North Korea to make the world safer no he opened a dialogue with
them and in fact we're cutting a deal but we're gonna funnel millions of
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The American public wouldn't stand for that.
Whereas if I really don't have any fancy weapons in my arsenal,
then the US can just come right in and I can't do anything.
There's no way I could stand up to the US in a conventional war,
And again, the fact that I'm in compliance with the US's alleged prescribed behavior for foreign dictators isn't going to save me as the case of Iraq shows.
And remember, Bush has even said, had he known that Saddam had fully disarmed, he still would have evaded.
Alright, let me just talk briefly about the response of conservative pundits on this WND issue, because this is really something that changed the way I view the American political landscape.
Because up till before the war, if you asked me, you know, do you like the guys who write for National Review or things like that, I would generally say, yeah, sure, on economic matters, we're basically on the same side there for smaller government,
and they like the freedom of individuals in terms of economic affairs
and I would have thought maybe they weren't so pure for my taste on certain issues
but basically those guys are all right, they're just not pure enough
whereas these people who are supporting Neil Gore in the election, those people are just crazy
well now I've changed and I now think that everybody's crazy
that the people who support Harry are nuts and the people who support George Bush are nuts
And specifically what it was is that I lost respect for many of these writers who previously, like I said, I thought maybe they were wishy-washy on certain issues, but I basically trusted their integrity.
And a lot of writers that I used to respect, I completely lost respect for because of this issue.
Because what they did, and I don't know if this was intentional or just a subconscious thing that just happens over the course of a year when your job is to write opinion pieces,
In the early days of coming out, people realized, oh wait a minute, it is going to be inevitable that Clinton is going to have to admit that he was completely lying about all this stuff.
Well, it wasn't just overnight that the change happened, but it was more of a gradual thing, so that by the time Clinton came out and admitted that yes, I did have relations and so on,
At that point, the defense wasn't now accusing the Republicans of being crazy and conspiracy theorists.
Rather, the charge was, oh, you puritanical Republicans, are we still worrying about this thing? Come on.
Over in Europe, there's government officials who go to social events with their mistresses.
It's only here where you Bible-thumping Republicans get all unhuff about somebody having an affair.
Let's talk about the issues.
So the rhetorical defense of Quentin had completely changed once they realized that we can't continue to deny this because it's just inevitable.
Alright, now the exact same thing happened with regards to the conservative defenders of Bush when it comes to the WMD.
At first, and like I said, I totally remember this happening because I was watching it carefully,
when the US troops first went in and no WMD turned up, some wacko left-wing critics were saying,
The standard response were things like, oh, give me a break. I want to see you go and look at a region the size of California and find stockpiles of weapons while people are still shooting at you.
So the idea was just give it time. These things will show up. Don Rumsfeld was on, I don't know which show he was on, but somebody asked him about the weapons and he said, yeah, we know where they are. They're in Tikrit. They're north, south and west of Tikrit.
And the other permutation of the rhetorical defense was to say, look, Bush and his subordinates never said Saddam actually had these stockpiles of weapons.
The claim was that he was developing them and that he had the potential.
And so that's why we needed to invade.
And I'm going to talk in a minute about why that's just not true.
Bush clearly did say that Saddam currently had these weapons.
So that was another phase of the defense.
And that's once the months were rolling on and people realized, you know what, these weapons might never turn up.
Then the last permutation, or the latest permutation, I should say, is particularly funny.
Because now the claim is, and I think Rush Limbaugh's been making this, I don't know how much has been picked up by other commentators,
and it goes like this, say, yeah, sure, George Bush made a mistake, he thought that they were going to find these weapons,
But, look, Saddam is still a bad guy, and, you know, so don't worry, we still would have gone in, Bush said he still would have gone in, so it's not like we need to worry about people dying in vain, because it would have happened anyway.
And, in terms of, is the, our intelligence, are they horrible, are they incompetent, and so forth? No, because, look, every other major intelligence agency from around the world thought the same thing.
So yeah, we goofed on this one, but what's the big deal?
And look, Kerry has now said that he would have evaded it too, so this is a non-issue.
So that's the rhetorical justification there.
So let me just, again, in case there are people who still might think that, no, we did find weapons.
Like I said, when I write articles like this, people email me and say, what are you talking about?
What do we have on the weapons? There's an issue here. What is this from?
What is this from? The USA Today, an interview with General Tommy Franks, the former head of the US and the Allied Forces and the question is,
how will the miscalculation on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction affect our future ability to go to war preemptively?
He says some stuff and then says, heck, I was wrong. I'm not sure there was anybody more surprised than myself.
We absolutely believe we would see WMD. So, to his credit, he's at least admitting that, yeah, they messed up.
So, the point is, why would we be admitting that if in fact it turned out that they had been fooled as to what they would find?
Now, as to this issue of did Bush say that he was going to, that Saddam was just developing capacity and we needed to preemptively knock that out,
or did he actually say that Saddam currently had weapons that were dangerous, let me just read you some excerpts from his State of the Union address.
This is Bush's State of the Union before the Iraq invasion where he's making the case to the American people as to why he needs to have the ability to go in and invade, assuming that Saddam forces his hand.
Of course, we're a peace-loving nation, but in the event that this brutal dictator doesn't succumb to international pressure, we need to have the ability to go to war because these people only respond to force.
12 years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had
started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction.
For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons. A little bit later, almost three months ago, the UN Security Council
The Security Council gauged Saddam his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, for the rest of the world, and for the opinion of the world.
A little later in Bush's speech,
It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.
A little bit later in his speech,
The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.
The U.S. will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February 5 to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world.
Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraq's illegal weapons programs,
Program, its attempt to hide those weapons from inspectors and its linked terrorist groups.
We will consult but let there be no misunderstanding. If Saddam Hussein is not fully disarmed for
the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm
him. So the reason again I'm harping on this stuff is people are denying, or at least were,
now they've switched. But for a while, for a month at least, the defense of the Bush
administration was, we never claimed that there were actually weapons in existence.
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So the current claim that, yeah, sure, Bush and the CIA made a mistake on this, but hey, so did everybody else.
There were no other responsible commentators who didn't also think that Saddam Hussein had all these weapons.
So what's ironic about that is you have to remember what the U.S.'s argument was.
Administration officials were claiming, look, we have solid informants inside Iraq, either defectors or spies or other sorts of satellite photos or whatever, assuring us.
And one person said, look, it's a slam dunk, meaning the fact that Saddam's got all these weapons.
But we can't tell you, we can't just publicize this information on national television because, of course, then Saddam would realize who in his regime is a defector and he would kill those people.
But just trust us, we have all this information and that's why we need to take him out.
So given that that was the line the administration was taking, what responsible person is going to say,
you know what, I think you're completely making all this up and you're going to go in there and there's not going to be any weapons.
No one's in a position to talk like that because they don't have access to these secret informants.
So everybody was, okay, that's what you guys say, maybe we should think about that we want to get in the fog line or so forth,
and so forth, but no responsible person is going to go out on a limb and accuse the administration of either being grossly incompetent or just outright lying.
But in fact, there were some people saying that. For example, Jude Wineski, who some of you may know, he was an instrumental in the supply-side revolution in the Reagan administration.
We even have a book by him in the library here called The Way the World Works, I think, so he's a conservative, actually now he's probably more of a libertarian commentator.
And he was saying from the get-go, from well before the invasion was underway, that Saddam Hussein is telling the truth on this, that yes, he's a brutal thug, but he's not lying on this issue.
And all these numerous CIA analysts and so forth coming through and making the case, look at this satellite photo, and this is a weapons and rape enrichment program, and this is this, and this is this.
What if he was quoting people and saying, no, no, that's not that. You know what that is? That's helium balloons. You know what this is? That's such and such, okay?
At the time, even I thought he was a little bit wacko. I was saying, come on, the administration wouldn't be just completely making this stuff up, or they couldn't be this wrong about everything.
And the reason I thought that was because I just thought, well, surely if the U.S. invades a country because there's alleged stockpiles of weapons and then they don't turn up, you'd get in trouble, wouldn't you?
That's what I thought at the time, but apparently you don't get in trouble.
So, in any event, I just want to point out that there were people who were saying quite openly before the invasion that no, this case is based on completely ridiculous evidence and so forth.
Let me... well, in the Q&A, if somebody wants to pick up that point, I've got some other arguments, but I need to keep going.
Okay, so, I've talked about the problems in terms of international affairs with the way the invasion and the occupation has been conducted.
Let me just briefly mention the fact that, and this isn't so much relevant to the war in Iraq, necessarily, but more generally the war on terror, that the growth of the state goes hand in hand with war, that many people call the welfare warfare state.
All right, so that another officer, person puts it and says that war is the health of the state, all right, so if you're concerned about civil liberties, if you're concerned about American freedom and so forth, then you really ought to be vigilant during a foreign war, okay, because people get whipped up into war friends, people get scared about, you know, funny looking foreigners amongst us, and they're willing to sacrifice their liberties in exchange for alleged safety.
So on this issue, let me just mention a few points. First of all, the American Republic, the vision of Jefferson and so forth that we're allegedly trying to spread to the world so they can share the benefits of our system, that really has been perverted, in the 20th century especially, into a modern empire.
Now, of course, no American president is going to use that phrase, but if you look at how many foreign countries we have troops in, that's one indicator.
If you want to make a comparison, say, between the United States and Rome.
And the reason I'm not giving you a specific number is because I think they're a bit misleading.
It's something like 115 countries have US troops stationed there, but that figure might be a little bit misleading since some of those countries,
In those countries, it's like we have an embassy and our troops are guarding the U.S. embassy, so that isn't the same as the fact that we have troops stationed in Western Europe to guard against the Soviet Union, even though the Soviet Union is not there anymore.
Alright, so that's one thing. Another issue, just go, if you just want to see something interesting, go to Google and type in a ranking of world military expenditures.
Okay, what you want to get is a listing of countries ranked by how much money they spend annually on their military,
and you'll find, depending on which list you get, the U.S. spends more on its military than the next 15 to 20 countries combined.
Okay, so what I'm saying is, if you look at the U.S. number right now, it's like 399 billion.
The next country is either China or Russia, and that's like 67 billion, and then it starts going down there.
And as you can imagine, once you get to the past like the 10th or 11th countries, the numbers get pretty small in terms of the federal government's level of spending.
And so you can add up like the second through the 19th or 20th countries and collectively they spend as much on their militaries as we spend on ours.
Okay, so this idea that we often have that we're alone in the world and we're really vulnerable and so forth,
Just imagine for a moment what the U.S. looks like to some average Arab person in the Middle East
when the U.S. is doing all this because we're afraid of people hurting us.
So again, it's just to... I think if you just took a moment not to say that the way they view things is justified or anything like that,
but just to understand why is it that these people are so suspicious of us and think that we're warmongers and so forth.
Well, one reason is that we spend more on our military than the next 20 countries put together.
Okay, what about the crackdown on civil liberties? We're all familiar with the Patriot Act and the arguments over that.
There's the case of Jose Padilla, who is a U.S. citizen who is being held. He's not allowed to speak to his lawyer unless it's being monitored to make sure that he's not telling his lawyer things to go tell terrorists to go out and do things.
I was walking around with M16s and I don't just mean near ground zero guarding the site, I just mean all over the place.
I was walking to my friend's apartment and there was a vehicle sitting there with troops there.
It's the sort of thing that Americans shouldn't be used to seeing.
Americans shouldn't know what it's like to be living amidst soldiers walking around with M16s.
That's not what America allegedly is about.
Okay, let me very quickly run through some of the alleged benefits of the war in Iraq.
Okay, so one thing people would say is, well, we liberated the Iraqis.
Okay, so yeah, maybe some people died and that was unfortunate and those other things you're talking about,
but come on, at least we eliminated this brutal regime of Saddam Hussein and now these people are free.
Well, they're not free yet. They're still occupied by foreign power, even though we have declared that, oh no, these 100,000 of our troops, they're here just to help you guys now, and we'll do whatever you say.
And Allawi is certainly not a democratically elected leader of Iraq. He is there because that's the person the U.S. has picked to run Iraq.
And if the US were to pull out, he wouldn't last more than a week, because the Iraqis don't support him.
In fact, I don't know if there's any single individual they would all pull us around.
Like I said, they'd probably break down into civil war.
So, at the very best, you could say that Iraq is in the process of being liberated,
and maybe at some point they will have constitutional guarantees and so forth,
and they will have due process for everyone.
But as it is right now, Alawi is threatening to impose martial law.
Marshall Locke, he's literally ordering US troops to go ahead and strike people, and what are they doing?
They're insurgents against his government.
So the current leader of Iraq is using people with guns to kill political opponents, the exact same thing that Saddam Hussein did.
The difference is the reason Saddam was a thug and the Iraqis now are free is that we like the person in charge of Iraq right now,
and it's us who's helping him kill his political opponents.
Alright, now I'm not saying this flippantly, but you can understand the sense in which that is true.
Ultimately, if you want to free the Iraqi people, the way that they're living right now is presumably not what you had in mind.
Okay, another possible benefit is that it prevents terrorism.
And here, again, this is something we'll never be able to prove, because the issue is, well, how much terrorism would we suffer had we not invaded Iraq?
And now how much are we going to suffer since we did evade Iraq? You can't know that. And no matter what happens, so if there is a terrorist attack, then all of the anti-war people are going to say, oh, see, you didn't make us safer.
And if there isn't, then the anti-war people could say, oh, see, there wasn't a danger, we didn't need to evade Iraq. So I'm admitting that it would be hard for somebody, either side, you could point to no matter what happens and say, see, you told yourself.
But let me just point out that there's not a fixed number of people in the world who right now have decided,
okay, I'm going to devote my life to hurting Americans, killing as many Americans as possible.
Those people need to be recruited.
So if in the process of knocking out certain terrorist training centers and so forth,
we cause more people to hate the United States than we might in the long run be causing the very problem of trying to prevent.
And these analogous, even conservative Republicans can understand how welfare spending in the long run can create poverty.
So even if the people spending these billions of dollars to eliminate poverty in the inner cities truly want to help those people,
and they can question that, we can see that none of those policies in the long run are counterproductive.
And so in the same way, even if we truly believe that the people invading these countries truly are doing it,
not with ulterior motives, but just to protect Americans.
We can see that maybe in the long run they're actually behaving counter-productively.
Let me just mention one last point on this about, you know, why do they hate us?
Okay, because some people say, oh, it's because of our freedom.
They don't like the fact that we're free over here, and that's why 19 people came over
and spent years of their lives, left their families to train to fly themselves into a building
because they don't like our freedom.
Well, I think that that's a bit simplistic. I think we should, if you want to understand why these people killing themselves just to harm us, I think you need to look at what are they themselves saying.
What are some of Osama bin Laden's criticisms? And one thing in particular is they were talking about the sanctions on Iraq, after the first Gulf War, the US and Britain imposed sanctions allegedly to cripple Saddam's regime, his war-making ability.
But things were happening like, you know, babies would get taken to a hospital in Baghdad and the doctor just wouldn't have the right type of medicine to treat the very common illness.
Okay, so the kid would end up dying not because the Iraqis were backwards but because the US was imposing these sanctions so they couldn't get the material they needed.
And some estimates are that in the 12 years after the first Gulf War that up to 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of that.
Now you might think that, oh come on, that's a crazy number, I don't believe that, but Madame Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State under Clinton was asked, I think it was on 60 Minutes, but she was asked on some national television show, you know, Madame Secretary, 500,000 dead Iraqi children is certainly a very high price, what do you think about that? And she said, yes, it's a high price, but we think it's worth it. And that, her concession there was broadcast all over Al Jazeera, that look at the U.S. Secretary of State is saying 500,000 dead Iraqi children
and Children are Worth It for the U.S. to achieve their objectives.
Alright, so you can understand if that's what she said.
And again, if you don't, by all means, because I checked it through Google, Madeline Albright,
The Price is Worth It, you'll see stories in case you haven't heard this and want to see the context.
And let me just mention, the first few hits are wacko sites, but if you scroll down,
you'll see normal looking websites, you know, not making this stuff up.
So, if that's the issue, then you can understand why these people get furious about the Americans going nuts about all these terrorists.
They kill innocent people to achieve their political objectives when that's exactly what Malin Albright admitted that we were doing.
Okay, so in conclusion, and then we'll open it up for questions, I've talked about the arguments against the war and dealt with some of the alleged benefits.
And let me just say that I don't think that America ought to be promoting its values by invading other countries.
No, I don't hate America. I do agree with the average conservative Republican and the U.S. system of limited government, individual liberties,
a much better system than most of the other ones we have around the world.
And that's precisely why I think we ought to spread that, not by sending our armies abroad, but by practicing at home
The moment is shown by example, the benefits of our way of life.
Yeah?
I agree that there are a lot of different, particularly in the United States,
a lot of non-common military or elected individuals that are called by animal conservatives.
I think there are actually some conservatives, and perhaps it's a problem in so many places,
There are some conservative institutions. One of the first will be, will occur, to war, oil, and he consistently said, I don't think the United States should postpone the ideology of democratic capitalism of the country.
Thank you. Canada has done a decent service. It provides for the products of Latin American culture, systems that think of themselves as encirclement against the law, and for the very reasons that you listed.
But this issue of nation-building that's more like Woodrow Wilson than it would be like a true conservative foreign policy, so I agree with you, but in terms of modern terminology, just like the Hillsdale liberals, they don't mean like current liberals, that what it means to be a conservative Republican or just a conservative perhaps is changing because so many self-described conservatives are doing things that you and I would say is far from conservative.
First off, I really like that sort of education we've kind of made for right now, especially in the U.S. this saying,
what we mean by topical regardless, when it comes to the U.N., that's exactly what they were saying.
And one of the other things I found, you find it sort of iconic that we have made it the same country twice,
Right, so in case you couldn't hear, he was asking about the fact that the U.S.
The US wasn't against, it wasn't aghast, the brutality of Saddam's regime back when he was fighting Iran and it served our interests.
And in fact, as I was checking things on Google just in case there were people arguing with me, this is kind of funny.
If you go to Google and you type in Rumsfeld, shaking hands, Saddam, you can get the picture where an 83 Rumsfeld's going over as a special envoy from Reagan to go visit Iraq and he is shaking Saddam's hand.
And that was after the alleged atrocity, I'm just saying alleged because I don't know the specifics of it, but when Saddam used chemical gas attacks on Iranian troops, and I think on the Kurds as well,
some of those things that modern proponents of the invasion are saying, you know, this guy was a brutal thug, we needed to take him out, and they cite, you know, all the people he killed.
A lot of that stuff happened before the U.S. re-normalized relations and then even dealt with Iraq and sold them some weapons and so forth. So, yes.
What sort of future implications does the Federal Reserve have?
The US government, according to the Constitution, the President really isn't allowed to just say,
you know what, I don't like those people, I think they're dangerous, let's go invade them.
He needs, Congress is supposed to formally declare war, and then the President, in his executive role,
is supposed to, you know, execute what the Congress has authorized.
And so, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I think technically the way they get around that is,
Congress does sort of give a blank check to the president, and then he hopefully executes it properly.
And so I certainly agree with what you're saying, that I think it's a dangerous innovation,
because it gives a lot of arbitrary power in the hands of a few individuals.
And even if, not to be sinister about it, but just to say, you know, what if they happen to screw up,
that it's, you know, just randomly picking people, you don't want to have five people or 100 people
with the power to decide that thousands of US troops are going to go invade somewhere,
Can you talk a little more specifically about how you think Iraq fits into the overall war on terrorism? If I'm not mistaken, it seems like I've heard of some pretty good connections between Saddam and funding terrorists. Maybe they weren't specifically anti-American. What do you think about that?
A personal position on it. Yes, people who are for the war were pointing out all these connections and so forth, and then I've seen writers that seem reasonable in other areas stating that not all these things are just as fabricated as anything else.
Let me just talk, so I'm admitting I don't know how to answer that particular question, but let me point out the reason I'm somewhat skeptical of some of these claims is that for those of you who remember, one of the issues was
In the State of the Union address, Bush said something like the British have recently learned that Iraq recently sought quantities of enriched uranium from Niger.
And that was a big brouhaha because it turned out that that intelligence report was based on forgeries, forged letters.
And so the issue was, oh, tainted evidence made its way into Bush's State of the Union.
And then the argument here was, okay, well, no, Bush didn't, you know, it wasn't us saying it, Bush said it, the British said it, so it was their fault.
Now, so there you can say, okay, it's blame-shifting, that's typical, but what's interesting is, let me just, I did some research on that, and when you say, okay, it was a forgery, what people were saying, the so-called experts were saying, that it was a crude forgery.
And so you might wonder, well, what does that mean?
And were they taking these letters?
What it was was an apparent letter from an official in Niger to an Iraqi official with a protocol of understanding about,
OK, when you guys are going to buy this uranium from us, this is the way the deal is going to go down.
And so the British analysts were pointing at this letter saying, aha, see Saddam is trying to acquire weapons.
And then it turned out that that was a forgery.
And you might think that, oh, you know, some expert, you know, in the CIA or something,
or the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, realized the subtle flaw in the document.
Now let's point out some of the reasons that they realized it was a forgery.
Let's see, so first of all, the handwriting experts said, for one of the letters that was allegedly signed by the President of Nigeria,
that obviously wasn't his handwriting, then there was a problem that in the letter,
The President of Nigeria referred to powers under a constitution that didn't exist at the time of alleged writing.
So, the constitution that existed, powers that existed when these accusations were being made,
but if you look at the date on the letter and people who knew the history of his country,
they'll actually know those powers he's referring to didn't exist at that date.
So, he said, okay, but maybe you need to be an expert on their history.
Well, no, because this is the funniest one.
What is even more, okay let's see, so it was a different letter now, dated October 10th, 2000, okay, so that in terms of the letter on it was written October 10th, 2000, but that was the protocol of understanding, but then on the outside the envelope of that letter was stamped, received, September 2000, okay, so in other words, this particular letter was received before it was written.
Now, I started saying something, and you're thinking either I'm making this up or I'm misunderstanding what's going on, but I encourage you, if you're at all skeptical, go ahead and look into this and see that that's exactly what happened.
So it was on the basis of those types of letters that the British analyst was saying, obviously we have evidence.
And that was the issue, incidentally, if you remember, in Britain where the one guy committed suicide and so forth,
The issue was British intelligence sexing up the documents to make the case for war.
It was particularly over that issue.
So, I don't know, specifically, I can't comment responsibly on, you know, can I make a blanket statement and say,
no, Saddam Hussein never had any dealing with terrorists? I don't know.
But I do believe that there were no firm links established between Iraq and September 11th.
I mean, if you were going to, in terms of fighting terrorism, if you were going to invade a country because of September 11th,
I just wanted to follow up on the point that Dr. Jordan made about the traditional significance of human events in the nation of Iraq, and there's a fantastic book on this right now, and it only came out a month or two ago, it's called America Alone, and it's published by Cambridge Press, written by two men,
and how the universal agenda is co-opted in the entire Republican Party.
In fact, I believe either today's Wall Street Journal or yesterday's Wall Street Journal,
it actually says, talking about this, that the Republican Party, as far as any practical aspect is concerned,
is immunoconservative today when it comes to foreign policy.
And that, I think, is a terrible, terrible development because immunoconservatives,
What this book does, it exposes them extremely effectively, it shows their roots, their desires, even after invading Iraq, they wanted to invade Iraq for many years now, since 1991 and involved in the first Gulf War.
This was not something that was done because of 9-11, but it was done because it was justified by 9-11, and it finally has become a justification for the way it passed.
And one thing that I just really wanted to introduce you to is to not think of what's going on right now as a conservative response to the foreign policy issues of today,
Because it is far from that. New conservatives are very far removed from the traditional conservative views of our politicians.
And this book is a crazy study. There's a lot more out there.
But this is an impartial book. It's written by two guys that know these new conservatives and leaders, including Paul Wolfitz, by the way, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, who is one of the leading new conservatives.
So, I just want to really urge people to take a look at that and educate themselves on this issue.
Oh yeah, it's a good one. It would have been far better had I been using the term neoconservative rather than conservative.
What is your direction going to do in our current situation?
Okay, this is where I sound like I'm crazy. I would say pull the troops out immediately.
and that, yeah, it's going to be terrible what happens there, but I don't think it's going to be made any better.
Maybe, in other words, as long as we stay, I think we're going to come just eventually to say,
okay, we've lost too many American troops at this point, and we're going to fall out eventually,
and so we might as well do it now before we cause further... Yeah.
I'm sorry, just one more point on that, actually. In this book, that I just mentioned, there's a lot of factors addressing this sort of issues, and, you know, what the authors try to do is try to take away Rabin's man-handle from the neoconservatives, who have very conveniently assumed it, and what they show, in fact, is that Rabin cannot be invoked by neoconservatives, who do not support these kinds of policies, judging from his own record,
One of the things that they showed is if you look at the 80s, for example, when in Lebanon we had marines stationed in Lebanon and there was a terrorist attack that killed something like 150 marines, what did they do? They pulled the marines out.
There was some kind of a retribution, just a pay-saving type of thing. Within a month, they were all gone.
Have we had any problems with Lebanon since then? No.
Libya, Libya engaged several terrorist attacks during the 80s.
We sent over some bombers who dropped a few bombs and we dropped about them, stopped dealing with them.
Lydia became, in fact, a nobody. They were not a threat to world order anymore once we actually started actively ignoring them and not dealing with them.
So, I just want to support this point you made. It makes a lot of sense. We just pulled out. We're getting to the end of the call.
One of the things I was kind of interested in is, do you think there's a positive relationship between the size of the military and perhaps the use of the military in the health of the population?
Yeah, I mean, I certainly, Bob Hayes is the author of the book Crisis in the Life, and he goes through it and shows how whenever there's a military intervention, the government ratchets up in size, then it comes back down a little bit and keeps going up.
And so over time, each successive military campaign, the average amount of civil liberties goes down.
And in his phrase, he calls it war as a consumption good, that our military is so advanced that we really can, you know, I mean, it's terrible that so many troops have died and so forth, but in the grand scheme to be able to go take over another country and put in our own friendlier government with only losing 973 troops, that's fairly impressive in terms of military campaigns.
And so he was saying that, yeah, Americans, it's war as a consumption, that they like to watch CNN and see us blowing up bridges and things like that.
And it's like, yeah, that's entertaining. And if you're a president, the way you keep people happy, you don't bring in gladiators to the Coliseum.
You go abroad and blow up foreign people. Now, that's, of course, a very simplistic way to look at it.
I look at it, he would certainly endorse that, but I think that's certainly an aspect of it.
There are certainly American people who, even though there were no weapons of measure, don't really care,
but you know, that was neat to watch those stealth bombers go out and do their thing.
It would be sort of a shame if we had all these cool weapons and we never got to use them.
Why don't we take one more question?
I've just got a quick question for you. Now, at the beginning of the war, I remember hearing some people saying it was going to be a war for oil. That was the real motivation behind it. Would you say, in fact, the team still stands up and is missing the real points? What kind of an effect has it had, as far as oil supplies and stuff?
To be honest, and this is particularly embarrassing since I'm an economist,
I don't understand why the price of oil and gasoline is so high right now.
I mean, I've seen people saying it's because of interruptions in supply and so forth,
and the uncertainty and speculators are bidding it up because they don't know what's going to happen.
And there are, of course, terrorists at the sabotage on the pipelines,
and so I think just the amount of crude that's being pumped out of Iraq is lower than it was.
As far as, you know, was it a war about oil? And again, or was it because of the neoconservative theory, theorizing and so forth?
I think it's a bit simplistic to say, you know, I got people emailing me and saying, oh, your articles are naive, it's the Council of Foreign Relations,
that if you look, there's these masons on this council and they're, you know, running everything, okay?
And so, to just say, you know, why did the war happen? I don't think you can just point to one thing.
Certainly, the fact that Halliburton, of whom Dick Cheney is closely related to, of course, they're getting, I think, they've got already $2 billion in reconstruction contracts.
And, you know, that certainly makes you a little bit suspicious. I don't think that's a coincidence that they're getting that much money.
But did we invade Iraq just to funnel taxpayer dollars into Halliburton? I think that would be too simplistic to say that.
So, no, I don't think the war was just about oil. I think it was about a lot of things.