United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace
2014-06-29 · Guest: Ivan Eland (Independent Institute) · 52:45
US intervention in the Middle East and Iraq
Bob Zadek and Ivan Eland discuss the history of United States intervention in the Middle East, focusing on the failures of the Iraq War and the concept of partitioning the country for long-term stability. Eland argues that US military presence often creates “blowback” and that the artificial borders created after World War I are a primary source of regional instability.
Topics: Iraq War, foreign policy, partitioning, Middle East, non-interventionism, blowback, oil politics, national defense, World War I, World War II
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Ivan Eland: Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute
- Caller (Jacob): Listener from San Jose
Introduction to US Involvement in the Middle East [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. I am your eponymous host, Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening. I’m certainly happy to be sharing a Sunday morning with you. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation this morning.
Today I thought it would be a light and breezy hour if we discussed war, peace, and perhaps a dose of isolationism. A nice way to start a sunny summer weekend day. We are, of course—we being our country—we are, of course, deeply involved in the geopolitical carryings-on in the world in general, and specifically in the Middle East. We are, of course, up to our eyeballs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Northern Africa, Libya, the Middle East, Israel, Lebanon. They’re in the news every day.
But what’s so interesting to me is we’ve been there so long, it’s—if you speak to either the average American, if there is such a thing, or a student of foreign policy, a student of defense, and you were to ask this group why exactly are we there? Why do we have troops there? Why are we spending the national treasure so involved in the Middle East? What are we doing there? And what is our goal? Why do we care? You get either blank stares or very different reasons, often incoherent reasons, and most of the reasons probably are wrong.
We have been fighting and involved in that region for so long, if there ever was a reason to be involved, we have forgotten it, or we have various reasons depending upon your worldview. I felt it was time I made an effort—we made an effort—to sort all of this out. And when you are trying to sort out a complex issue, the logical thing to do is to seek the help of an expert.
And that’s what I have done this morning. I’m happy to welcome for the first time on the show, Ivan Eland. Ivan is a senior fellow and director at the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute. The Independent Institute is a very active, very, very collectively brilliant group of scholars who study domestic and foreign affairs. They have a somewhat, perhaps a substantial libertarian perspective, but they provide an enormous wealth of objective information. Ivan is a graduate of Iowa State University and has his MBA in applied economics and a PhD in public policy from George Washington University. Ivan has been active at the Cato—he was the director of defense policy studies at Cato, and he spent 15 years up on the Hill working with Congress on these issues. Ivan authored Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq. Anybody who can give us a coherent exit strategy for Iraq certainly deserves our attention, and we need to learn what that exit strategy is. Ivan, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show this Sunday morning.
Ivan Eland: Thanks, Bob, and thanks for having me on.
Defining Peace and the Costs of War [04:53]
Bob Zadek: Now, Ivan, just some prelims. At the Independent Institute, which is located here in the Bay Area, you are the director of the Center on Peace and Liberty. Now, just before we get into the Middle East directly, everybody seems to be in favor of peace. That is, there is not a strong anti-peace movement in this country. But peace, of course, sometimes peace is unattainable. World War II, perhaps—the most peace-loving Americans would admit and would concede that there came a time we had to be involved in World War II. So sometimes you can’t have—you can’t achieve peace. So when the Institute has a division which is supportive of peace, of course it doesn’t mean peace at all costs. What exactly—put us in the big picture of what peace means in that context. What are the limitations on when you can have peace?
Ivan Eland: I think you’re absolutely right. People have a right to self-defense personally, and nations have a right of self-defense. And I think when you’re under attack, you have to answer that. And of course, in World War II, we were attacked and we did answer that, and most people would support World War II. However, I think what my center tries to do is it tries to bring home for people of all political persuasions—liberals, conservatives, libertarians, independents—the costs of war. Because a lot of times people don’t understand that.
A lot of people want peace now because we’ve had so many of these wars—these brushfire wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—haven’t really turned out the way we wanted to. And just after Vietnam, people are more against war than they are normally. But sometimes we get in US history, we’ve gotten swept away by war fever. And war is an intoxicating thing because people think, “Oh, we’re going to get glory, martial glory,” that sort of thing. But then sometimes—more often than not—either the war goes sour like in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, or there are hidden costs to war.
And many of the hidden costs that we explore are costs domestically that people don’t often attribute to war, like erosion of civil liberties, increasing executive power past what the Founders had ever intended. We now have an imperial presidency because of the wars of the 20th century and, I would say, partly into the 21st century here. So I think that’s what the peace and liberty—it’s the nexus between war and the erosion of liberty. So that’s what we study. We study all aspects of war, the international and the domestic.
Historical Context: WWI, WWII, and the Path to Iraq [08:00]
Ivan Eland: As for World War II, I think a lot of times Americans, we just wake up and say, “Well, Pearl Harbor. Wow, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.” Well, if you would ask Americans, “Well, why did they do that?” you’d get a lot of blank stares, as you were talking about before. And I think the same thing is true if you ask people, “Well, why did bin Laden attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11?” You get a lot of blank stares because people don’t know the history of what came before that.
And in World War II, World War II was just World War I, Part Two. And World War I was a much more historically important event than World War II, simply because it took us down the road of a new foreign policy. And this foreign policy—the real question is, did the United States have to get involved in World War I? We tipped the balance. We let our allies run roughshod over Germany with reparations and war guilt clauses. And of course, Woodrow Wilson, in his zeal to get the League of Nations, he let the French and the British, you know, rub Germany’s nose in the ground.
And also, Woodrow Wilson demanded the abdication of the King, the Kaiser Wilhelm II. And of course, this opened the path toward Hitler taking power later on, who was uncontested later on. And so we have to say, if the US would have stayed out of World War I, Germany would have probably won on a 15-round decision rather than a knockout. The borders, like all European wars, would have been readjusted, as all European wars were before the US had stayed out of them. And we would have had a much different 20th century, probably.
But of course, that’s water under the bridge. But my point here is that we need to go back further and look what happened. Already in the Iraq situation—and I know we’re going to get into that later—but we have these people who took us into Iraq saying that, well, Obama didn’t leave enough forces there. Well, we have to go back to going in in the first place. Al-Qaeda in Iraq originated as a result of our invasion of that country. We fractured a country that could only—an artificial country that was only held together by a dictator. And of course, this Al-Qaeda in Iraq has now morphed into Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is taking over the country. And so you have to go back in history farther than we often do to find the root causes of these events. And I think, certainly, we need to fight World War II if we’re attacked, but we also need to realize that Roosevelt declined to negotiate with the Japanese, and he had cut off their oil and metals and was trying to effectively, you know, starve them from fuel because he didn’t like their intervention in China. So there are root causes to things, and I think we need to go back in time and explore some of these historical causes.
The Shift to Perpetual War [12:08]
Bob Zadek: Now, just a reminder—of course, as a libertarian, as a student of history, a passionate student of history as I self-describe myself, and as an attorney with that training—war was very precise. War was something that an army fought. And war didn’t just happen on a whim. The President, who was the primary actor in foreign policy—the President, in the way the product was built, the way our country was built—the President, perceiving a need to go to war, which was a very formal act (you didn’t just—it wasn’t something which you arrived at by attrition, you went to war, that was a big deal)—the President would go to Congress and say, “I think war is required.” And the President would seek congressional approval to go to war and could not go to war and commit forces without it.
That, of course, has eroded. So now our army has become the private police force of the President, who can call out the cops whenever the President wishes. Congress has ceded that responsibility. And therefore, we are basically—we are basically, instead of having this war being a dramatic event which happens with a formality to it, we are in a state of perpetual war, so that war is now the natural condition in which we live. There are middle-aged Americans who have never lived during a period without war, and we’re so used to it, we don’t even know what it’s like not to be at war with somebody.
Oil and Fabricated Reasons for Intervention [14:20]
Bob Zadek: But okay, by way of that’s background. Now, in the Middle East, Ivan, we have been involved militarily in Iraq since Bush I, perhaps maybe before that, but militarily Bush I in the early 1990s during the presidency of Bush I, George Herbert Walker Bush. Now, what was the reason to, in the first instance, become involved in Iraq? Why did—if we accept the fact that we go to war, that our cabinet agency is called the Department of Defense (it no longer is called, and hasn’t since 1948, been called the Department of War; it used to be the War Department, then it became the Defense Department; I like Defense Department better than War Department, if they were true to that word)—so we have the Department of Defense. What was the national defensive issue that justified going to war in that country and that section of the globe?
Ivan Eland: Well, originally under the first Bush, of course, Saddam had invaded Kuwait. Then they said they had satellite photos of Iraq massing on the Saudi border, which of course turned out to be false because other satellites—French and Russian—didn’t pick up any border moves. So I think the real prize that they were trying to defend was Saudi Arabia rather than Kuwait. They were afraid Saddam might go into Saudi Arabia.
Of course, David Henderson, who was an economist under Ronald Reagan as president, did a study that showed even if Saddam Hussein had taken over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates—which there was really no threat of him doing—but even if he did that, the US GDP would be cut by less than half of a percent because, of course, Saddam has to sell the oil. That’s why he would have taken it; he wanted the revenues from oil to pay for his Iran-Iraq war, which lasted eight years.
And the same is true with ISIS in Syria. They’ve grabbed oil facilities and they’ve let the other opposition groups fight the government and they took all the casualties, making ISIS stronger. So if you can stay out of the fighting, you’re better off. And of course, they’ve stayed out of the fighting to some extent in this latest war by bribing the Iraqi military to take off their uniforms and walk away. So I think the ISIS—all these groups, if they get control of oil—the Iranians, they’re radical, they got control of oil, they sell it. And if you sell it into the market, of course, that’s not going to happen. So the original reason for the invasion or the first war with Iraq, it was quite questionable as just as the second one was.
Bob Zadek: What’s interesting is you talk about phony—whether it was intentionally phony—phony satellite photos. What’s fascinating is how many wars were imposed upon Americans by our government fabricating the reason: the Bay of Tonkin, Vietnam; Spanish-American War, “Remember the Maine,” a phony war. On and on, it is the political class…
Ivan Eland: The Mexican War.
Bob Zadek: Excuse me?
Ivan Eland: The Mexican War was also a deliberate provocation by the United States to go to war with Mexico to get the Mexicans to attack so that we could grab half their country or a third of their country. And also, of course, the latest war with Iraq was certainly—the reasons were fabricated for that.
Bob Zadek: So what we have is we have this shameful manipulation of the public by the political class in order to get us into war. That’s just part of our history that is a profound—it enrages me and it’s an embarrassment.
The “Blood for Oil” Argument and Neoconservative Goals [19:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, here we are. So we went into Iraq to begin with under questionable basis. If we acknowledge, as libertarians fervently do, that war is to be fought to defend us, not for any other goal, there was no threat—no threat, no specific threat to our country that would justify any involvement in the Middle East. So we went into Iraq to save—to protect Kuwait, to get Saddam out of Kuwait. We had this fabrication of weapons of mass destruction that maybe the government believed and maybe they didn’t believe. So we go into Iraq with not a clear goal except to sort of get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And how much was the politics of oil involved? We remember the bumper stickers, “No blood for oil.” How much was the economics of oil—how much of a role did that play in the decision, or was it merely the neoconservatives seeking to impose their worldview upon that section of the globe?
Ivan Eland: Well, I think in the first Gulf War, the elder Bush and his advisors were more honest about what they were doing. I think they had flawed logic, as I just mentioned, but I believe it was Jim Baker, who was an aide to the President of the first Bush, he said, “Well, it’s jobs, jobs, jobs,” meaning oil, you know, we’re going to lose jobs if the oil price goes up and etc. But of course, that’s not really how the oil market works.
But nonetheless, I think politicians—they were more honest about what they were doing if they were doing it for oil. Of course, the second war, the younger Bush denied doing it for oil and instead had this thing about weapons of mass destruction. When you—if you do an analysis of what was known at the time, it was clearly they were using that as a pretext for other reasons the second time.
Bob Zadek: Now, I would ask Americans to dig into their hearts and into their minds and ask themselves whether the economic issue of jobs and GDP and the economy—whether—now, our economy at its worst, at the worst extreme threat, was never threatened. We weren’t going to be driven to a halt. We were going to be, at best, even if the worst case happened with oil, we would be economically inconvenienced for a short period of time. Is that a reason to go to war? Libertarians say overwhelmingly no.
And this is an area—foreign policy is fascinating because it’s an area where libertarians or the libertarian view is so different than the view held by many mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians. When it comes to foreign policy, libertarians truly offer a third way that is different—actually a second way, because Democrats and Republicans tend to be equally willing to declare our resources, to spend our treasure to go to war, but not libertarians who are true to the founding principle that war is only to be done in our national defense. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Ivan Eland. We are discussing the Middle East, how we get there and how we get out. How we get out when we return. 800-345-5639 is the way to join the conversation.
[Sponsor Break Removed]
The Unnatural Borders of the Middle East [25:53]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation this morning with Ivan Eland. Ivan has spent a good deal of his adult life studying the Middle East, specifically Iraq. And Ivan is gracious enough to share his wisdom with us on how we got there and how we get out.
Ivan, thanks again for joining us on this Sunday morning. Now, Ivan, many of the countries of the world, many segments of the world, involve countries that were not created by the natural flow of events where people with something cultural, language in common, end up forming a border to separate themselves from another country, and or else the country is formed by natural boundaries, rivers or mountains or the like. But some countries—much of Africa, much of the Middle East, and indeed the old USSR—were formed unnaturally. They were formed with a bunch of—not in the case of Russia, but in other countries—they were formed by a bunch of European diplomats—the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and Americans—sitting around a conference room table with a map of the world and drawing lines and creating countries.
In other words, they were formed unnaturally rather than naturally. Now, since those countries are formed unnaturally, they are much less stable and ultimately history has shown us they fall apart. USSR fell apart because there wasn’t any commonality amongst all the people. Before that, Yugoslavia fell apart. The area of Bosnia in Central Europe fell apart. Africa falls apart. Is that also true of Iraq? Was Iraq, by my label, an unnaturally formed country just drawn on a map? And is that what’s going on there today with these factions that don’t feel they’re all Iraqis and they have something in common, but rather it’s all factionalized? And does that tell us what the solution is, if there is a solution in that section of the world?
Ivan Eland: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. After World War I, which we were discussing earlier, the Ottoman Empire was a loser on the losing side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. And of course, Austria-Hungary collapsed, that empire, and the Ottoman Empire collapsed. And the war essentially was a war where, despite Woodrow Wilson’s saying it was a war to end all wars, a war to spread democracy and self-determination, the opposite happened. We countenanced our allies grabbing more territory in the Middle East.
Well, the British wanted oil in Iraq, so they glued three provinces of the Ottoman Empire together. Now you say, “Well, weren’t those provinces close together?” Yes, they were, but of course they had little relationship to each other before the British glued them together. They all had a relationship with the central Ottoman government, but they were separate entities. And so, of course, we have this artificial country. Lebanon’s an artificial country in the same manner, although the colonial power was different, and so was Syria. They’re all artificially drawn on the map by the British and the French.
And so that’s what we’re faced with, this legacy. So in a book in 2009 called Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, I recommended that when the US would leave Iraq, but before they went, they would negotiate with the three different groups—the Sunnis, the Kurds, and the Shias in Iraq—and help them to moderate a partitioning of the country. Now you could still have an Iraq, but each group would control its own autonomous area and the central government would be weak.
Because what we’ve had a problem with in Iraq—and Syria is the same problem exactly with the same groups—is you have a government controlled by one group which oppresses the others. In Iraq for many decades since World War I, since the British established the monarchy there, they had Sunni rulers, and the Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, but the rulers were Sunni. The last one of which was Saddam Hussein. Well, he was overthrown. Now we have a Shia ruler, Maliki, who’s oppressing the Sunnis and the Kurds. So one group gets control of the central government, and it’s a strong central government. We’ve been trying to beef up the central government both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And what that does is it allows—then we’re surprised when the one group controlling the central government oppresses the others.
Well, if you have a partition into a loose confederation of autonomous states, you have a weak central government, so the groups don’t fight over it because they provide their own security, they provide their own judicial systems within their own autonomous areas. And if they want to, they can create this free trade area for a larger market or even a customs union economically like the Europeans have, but their security forces and their judicial systems are separate. They essentially govern their own autonomous areas.
Partitioning Iraq for Peace [31:26]
Bob Zadek: Ivan, you’re describing Europe before the EU, where you had NATO, which was sort of a mutual defense pact, but each country in Europe prior to the EU was separate, had its own currency, its own army, but they acknowledged they were part of a continent and they moved slowly towards sharing certain activities—NATO for defense, at least for Western Europe. So you are describing in Iraq having Iraq morph into the more natural condition instead of saying you are mandated to be one country, have it be something like Europe where each faction has its own territory. Now there are economic problems—who gets the oil, who gets the rivers, who gets the ports and stuff like that—but at least they are not given the power—given by the West, the power to rule over another region. Each region is separate. It’s like telling the French, “You have to subordinate your interest to the Italians, and the Italians will govern you.” That of course can’t work, and that’s what we’re trying to do in Iraq.
Ivan Eland: Yes, and in this book I said the US should do this, create this, you know, help negotiate the groups to negotiate a soft partition, meaning by negotiation, or that the country would eventually be partitioned by war because it’s an artificial country, as you mentioned. And of course, that’s what we’re going to have now because this group is probably not going to be strong enough to take the Shia areas because you have to have some public support when you rule an area, or you just can’t do it.
And in fact, this group may run into—after the Sunnis who are tired of the Shia government’s oppression—after they get their own area, you may see the moderates again rein in this group since it’s quite a brutal group. But nonetheless, you’ll have a partition of Iraq by warfare. And unfortunately, that’s what I said would happen in my book if they didn’t do it peacefully by negotiation. So I think it’s unfortunate, but Syria is the same way. It’s been partitioned by war, same groups, and you have a Shia government. The only difference is in Iraq, the Shia have a majority, and in Syria, the Sunni have a majority.
But you have—this problem could spread because Lebanon also has groups—in addition, there’s Christians in Lebanon. So Lebanon had a civil war from 1976 to 1990. So all these countries are artificial, as you point out, and I think, frankly, eventually they may be more stable if they are partitioned or some sort of loose confederation.
But you see, nation-states, even though there’s an article in the New York Times today which says, “Well, Vice President Biden was right,” because he and I and one other—well, two other people advocated a partition, and everybody looked at us like we were crazy. I even went to a conference sponsored by Biden up on the Hill to talk about this on Capitol Hill. But of course, after he became Vice President, Obama wasn’t for it and the US government wasn’t for it, so Biden has quieted down. But there’s an article in the New York Times saying today, “Well, everybody realizes Biden was right now.”
But yet, Biden and Obama still cannot bring themselves to this solution. They’re still hoping for an inclusive government, which is just crazy in Iraq. There’s not going to be an inclusive government; there’s going to be a fake inclusive government and one of the groups, namely the Shia majority, is still going to oppress. And Maliki’s not even going along with the inclusive talk. He’s stubborn; he’s a Shia partisan and he always has been. And when the US put him in there, they should have realized that that’s what he was going to do.
So even now, the reason that they’re still reluctant to do this is nation-states don’t like to mess with national borders. That’s why Putin got in such trouble for grabbing Crimea, even though the people of Crimea probably want to be a part of Russia rather than the Ukraine, simply because when you alter borders, all these other countries think, “Well, gee, we have restive groups,” like China has restive groups, Spain has restive groups. We all know Ireland and Northern Ireland are restive. You have Belgium, which is not a real country either. So you have all these nation-states thinking, “Well, gee, we have groups that could do the same thing.”
So they’re very opposed. Now, the United States should be less reluctant than other countries to reach these partitioning solutions because we don’t have that problem here. We don’t have a certain people who want—separatists who want to run away from the country. But nonetheless, we’re still part of the international community, so I guess we take the conservative position that we shouldn’t do these types of things. But of course, we sort of violated that when we detached Kosovo from Serbia in 1999. So sometimes we don’t follow this rhetoric. And I think you’ll see a deviation—I always predicted that in the end this would be partitioned and they would have to accept it. And I think they may have to, but unfortunately, there’s going to be a lot of bloodshed before that happens.
Energy Resources and Global Influence [38:56]
Bob Zadek: What—we have a caller in a second, so we’ll go to calls in a moment. But one interesting observation is part of our ethos, part of our American DNA, is we fervently give lip service at least to supporting a people’s right of self-determination. People can pick the form of government they choose to live under. We respect the freedom—to use the Milton Friedman phrase—freedom to choose. And yet, our policy in Iraq is anti-self-determination because we are forcing the factions in Iraq to live under a government against their will, and we are giving the government who is imposing its will—the Maliki government in this case—the wherewithal, the arms to help him, if you will, suppress those people who want self-determination. So in many areas, we are so hypocritical in our own foreign policy. Now, with that observation, we have a caller. I’d like to try to hear from as many callers as we can. Jacob in San Jose. Good morning, Jacob. How are you this morning?
Caller (Jacob): Yes, good morning, Bob and Ivan. See, a question regarding your thoughts on the Middle East and the instability factors that cause the instability that becomes a problem for the whole world. But isn’t the reason—one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason—is that there is so much energy resource in that general area and the consumers of that resource want it? And you haven’t mentioned Turkey. Doesn’t Turkey—if you want to look at this in sort of like a crackpipe way—that they want to control the pipeline? They want to be the king of the gate, allowing Europe to have what they want.
Bob Zadek: So Ivan, how much of this is—and I sort of touched this a little earlier, but Jacob’s question I guess is—how much of this is about controlling the valuable natural resource of oil?
Ivan Eland: Well, I think a lot of our policy is based on oil, whether the government acknowledges it or not. I also wrote another book in 2011 called No War for Oil: US Dependency in the Middle East, where I debunked in a good libertarian fashion that the market is the best means to get oil. And to use imperial methods, which is what we’re doing by keeping all the forces in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf to guard this oil—supposedly guard it—well, there’s very few scenarios, and I—even when you talk to energy analysts—where they fear that the supply will be cut off.
And the reason is, people make money off this. The people who sell it actually have—despite all the OPEC scares of the early 70s, which that—those sanctions hurt the—you notice there haven’t been any more since because they hurt the cartel more than anything else. The cartel has very little effect on long-term pricing, maybe in the short term. But nations have been thinking that oil is a strategic commodity since the British transferred their warships from coal to oil back in 1911.
So we’ve all taken the British lead there as well because they had the largest navy at the time. But oil is not really a strategic commodity. It’s actually cheaper to buy the oil even if the price goes up because you have a periodic crisis or whatever. The supply is not going to be interrupted because too many people make money off it. Even radical governments like Iranians and this ISIS group has been selling oil as well. The Libyans have…
Bob Zadek: And don’t forget Venezuela. And Venezuela as well.
Ivan Eland: Venezuela, yes, right, exactly. So the real—the real reason that I think we keep troops over there is not to guard oil, but to keep our thumb on everybody else’s oil. The Chinese oil—they get a lot of oil from the Persian Gulf. We actually here in the United States don’t get all that much oil from the Persian Gulf. So of course, there’s a worldwide market, so if you take any oil off the market, the price is going to go up. If you put additional oil onto the market, as the US has been lately, the price will go down. So you do have periodic crises, but the market has contained this crisis. The price of oil hasn’t gone up yet. Maybe we’ll see it go up if Baghdad is taken, but that’ll be just a temporary symbolic type of thing. And the market will go—the market gets irrational from time to time, but then it goes back in the long term. And it’s actually—empire doesn’t pay from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, simply because—and I think the economists of the 18th and 19th centuries proved that, the classical economists—that it was just cheaper to buy things than to use your military to affect the price or to ensure the supplies, because you really don’t need to do that. So I really think our purpose of being the superpower with all the military in the Persian Gulf is actually to keep our thumb on other people’s oil, even our allies, the Europeans, but also China, etc. Jacob, did we answer your question, Jacob?
Caller (Jacob): Well, Ivan, doesn’t the military come into play with what’s happening between Europe and Russia? It seems that actually behind the scenes, it’s the United States that is wanting strife amongst the European countries. And you find John McCain going to Bulgaria fighting the South Stream pipeline. He doesn’t want a direct pipeline from Russia to Europe through Bulgaria. And they succeeded. The US pressured Europe to stop the South Stream and they succeeded. And it’s the pressure of the United States and the military might of the United States that won that deal. What do you think about that, Ivan?
Ivan Eland: Yeah, I mean, I think the United States wants to keep control over its European allies and it wants to minimize the influence of Russia, both in its own near abroad. You know, all we did with all the NATO expansion is—what should have been done after the Cold War was we should have let Russia into the European community of countries or into the West, if you will. And of course, whenever we’ve let people in, like after the Napoleonic Wars, we had a Congress of Vienna which let the French back in after Napoleon was defeated. After World War I, of course, we kept Germany out, and look what happened. We had World War II, Cold War, etc. And then after the Cold War, we’ve kept Russia out. And we really should have allowed them in. But of course, we expanded the frontier there. And oil is a big part of that, the Caspian Sea oil and as you mentioned these pipelines. We’re trying to get advantage over the Russians and we’re trying to reduce their influence in Europe and in the near abroad, even the areas around the country. And I think this is a struggle to keep Europe—under who gets more influence in Europe, Russia or the United States. Jacob, thank you so much. You’re really attentive on these issues. You know what you’re talking about. We appreciate your comments, Jacob. Thank you so much for being a listener.
Intervention and the Threat of Blowback [46:11]
Bob Zadek: Now, Ivan, we only have a few minutes left. The question has to be asked. Given if you accept any kind of a conservative view of war and military, that the military exists, as the name suggests, for our defense, why are we or should we be as actively and militarily engaged in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq? If we just became totally militarily unengaged, make a worst case for what would happen to our country. What would be the threat? And in doing so, I remind the audience—my audience and our friends—we have been talking about that volatile section of the world for almost an hour, and the word “terrorist” has never entered the conversation. And maybe it will now, or maybe it will not. Ivan, why do we care?
Ivan Eland: Well, I think we need to formulate the question the exact opposite the way you formulated it. And if we formulate it the way you just formulated it, the people who want to do these interventions will have the upper hand. I think they’re the ones that have to justify the US interventions as being in US security. When you debate people on this subject, they talk about US vital interests or strategic interests. It’s very vague terminology. And you say, “No, why do we need to get involved? How does it affect our security here at home?”
Well, of course, when we get into these interventions overseas, empire is the opposite of security because Osama bin Laden—and this is a very touchy issue, nobody ever wants to go here—but it’s really true. And that’s not condoning what Osama bin Laden did on 9/11, but the primary reason that he was attacking the US is non-Muslim intervention in Muslim lands. It drives Muslims crazy. Even moderate Muslims are supposed to come to the defense of their faith. But of course, Osama bin Laden was not moderate. He saw the troops—US troops in Saudi Arabia after he came home from the Afghanistan war. Of course, he decided that—he saw that Ronald Reagan was thrown out of Lebanon by the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine barracks. So he said, “Well, you can get the US out by just doing terrorist attacks.”
And so, of course, when we do all these interventions—and it just doesn’t apply to the US—the problem of non-Muslim intervention in Muslim lands happens in Chechnya, Palestine, all over the place. And so this drives the jihadists crazy. And of course, after 9/11, what do we do? We invaded two Muslim countries. One you could make an argument for getting rid of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, although I would say we didn’t need to have a ground intervention and occupation. And then of course, the craziness of going into yet another Muslim country when that was the problem driving the terrorism in the first place when we invaded Iraq. And look at what that’s created, a mess that’s still going on.
And I would argue Libya is the same way. We’ve had terrorist blowback from there. We’ve had terrorist blowback from Yemen and Pakistan where we made new enemies there. So these interventions overseas are counterproductive to US security. And the more we try to get rid of terrorists, the more they start attacking the US because our forces are over there helping. Like in Lebanon, this has been documented in detail by journalists that the number of Al-Qaeda fighters has increased after the US got involved in helping the Yemen government. And of course, the underwear bomber with the guy who was trying to bomb the plane going to Detroit is a classic case of that.
So I think when we do these interventions, we get blowback at home. And so that empire is counterproductive to security. The first responsibility of any government, even libertarians would agree with this, is to protect the country and the people in it, and not be crusading around the world trying to mess with everybody else. But everyone says, the McCains and others say, “Well, we need to drain the swamp.” Well, every time we drain the swamp, the water goes somewhere else and the swamp gets bigger. So I think we need to pull back.
And if you doubt that that works, after the US left Lebanon in the 80s, Hezbollah attacks against US targets dissipated dramatically. So there are causes why these people attack the United States, and I think we could alleviate that. We don’t have a lot of terrorism here just normally because we’re so far away from the warfare centers that it’s hard to get here.
Bob Zadek: Ivan, we have a minute to go. I’ve got to sort of sign off and thank Ivan Eland for spending an hour with us. We should spend the entire morning; regretfully, we don’t have the time. My summary would be, to some degree, the threat of terrorism is a self-inflicted or self-induced wound. This was sort of the message of Ron Paul. He was ridiculed. I’m not so sure he was so far off. This is Bob Zadek thanking Ivan Eland from the Independent Institute for giving us an hour of his wisdom. I wish we had more time. Ivan, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us. I’ll be back next Sunday. Please join me next Sunday for another hour of libertarian thought and opinion. Enjoy the weekend.