Le Show; 2016-04-10

From deep inside your audio device of choice. Ladies and gentlemen, there will be another La Show Versation. That is an ugly word. It is a remarkably ugly portmanteau. And it's even uglier when it's said right next to Portmanteau. That's a rabbit hole I could go down for another few minutes, but no. There will be another La Show conversation as promised, moments from now, but first a couple of things that may have escaped both your and my notice up to now. First news from outside the bubble. Well, that nutty old CIA seems to be full of shutter bugs. Or, at the very least, Instagram followers. They took, it turns out, naked photographs of people it sent to its foreign partners for torture, this according to the Guardian. A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as, quote, very gruesome, unquote, the naked imagery of CIA captives.

Raised his new questions about the seeming willingness of the United States to engage in what one medical and human rights expert called, quote, sexual humiliation. Remember the old Marvin Gaye song by that name? And it's post 9-11 captivity of terrorism suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential work crime. Unlike the video evidence of CIA torture at its undocumented black-site prisons that were destroyed in 2005, not the prisons, the photographs, by a senior official Jose Rodriguez. We remember you, Jose. The CIA is said to retain the naked photographs of the detainees held for extraordinary rendition in some of the photos, which remain classified. CIA captives are blindfolded, bound, and show visible bruises. That could happen to anybody. Some photographs also show people believe to be CIA

officials or contractors alongside the naked detainees, just to show how clothed people look by comparison. It's not publicly known how many people were caught in the CIA's web of extraordinary renditions. Human rights groups over the years have identified at least 50 going back to Bill Clinton's presidency. It's also unclear how many of those rendition targets the CIA photographed naked. The rationale for the naked photography, if you need one, was to insulate the CIA from legal or political ramifications stemming from their forthcoming brutal treatment in the hands of its partner intelligence agencies, even though the State Department had gotten pro-former assurances that the detainees to be rendered would not be tortured, but CIA lawyers don't necessarily trust the State Department. Stripping the victims of clothing was considered necessary to document the physical condition while in CIA custody, distinguishing them from what they would subsequently experience in foreign custody, you know, when the Syrians or the Egyptians were through with them. Pictures worth a thousand words, ladies and gentlemen, especially when

they're taken by the CIA. I wonder if, you know, they used like a real camera or an iPhone. Could we hack the CIA? Could the FBI hack the CIA's iPhone and get the pictures news from outside the bubble? A copyrighted feature of this broadcast and now news of the war, won't you? You're soaking in it. Soft glistening to the war, we can listen to the war. Aerial surveys of Australia's great barrier reef show it's not such a great barrier reef anymore. They revealed the worst bleaching on record in the pristine north of the iconic site. Scientists said with few corals escaping damage, worst bleaching then in a Beverly Hills salon.

Researchers said the view was devastating after surveying some 520 reefs via plain and helicopter between cans and the Tories straight north of Queensland. This will change the great barrier reef forever. It's an expert on coral reefs from James Cook University. We're seeing huge levels of bleaching in the northern thousand kilometer stretch of the Great Barrier Reef. The Australian government recently revealed bleaching at the world heritage listed site was severe but noted the southern area had escaped the worst. Bleaching occurs when abnormal environmental conditions such as oh you know warmer sea temperatures cause corals to expel tiny photosynthetic algae draining them of their color. The expert agreed in a statement that the southern reef had dodged a bullet due to cloudy weather but he said the far north the most remote and pristine areas almost without exception experienced bleaching of a very high consistently high level at every reef. Only four reefs in 4,000 kilometers had no bleaching. The severity is much greater than in earlier

bleaching events in 2002 or 1998. He said more surveys that are followed. The damage seen from the air in the north was severe falling into the highest category of level 4 meaning 60% of the coral was bleached. It's too early to know how many of the corals will die. They can recover if the water temperature drops and the algae are able to recolonize them but abnormally high temperatures are expected to continue in the northern reaches of the reef through at least the middle of April. The Great Barrier Reef is under pressure from the threat of climate change as well as farming runoff development and the coral eating crown of thorns starfish. Well you know what let's go kill the starfish because that's the easy it narrowly avoided being put on the UN World Heritage and Danger List last year did the Great Barrier Reef but this Ladies and Gentlemen is another year. I'm a shot gun filled with pain and I'm too big to operate and I just throw my limbs around

the ground. It's okay it's all right it's true terror in the middle of the night giving the first of forever so seren계, so seren계. And lately I'm feeling down and then my nice dream I could see your brows, it was bright yellow, and it made my day a goal

All from your head, all from your head It's okay, it's alright, it's true tear in the middle of the night It's okay, it's alright, it's true tear in the middle of the night It's alright, it's alright, it's alright

This is Lesho and a person might be excused watching what's been going on the last few years For thinking that we're trapped in an endlessly looping film regarding America's involvement in military adventures overseas It seems, if you've been paying attention for a while, that the front end of these things sounds the same and the back end of these things sounds the same So I've invited to be on my show today a man who's been writing a series of books about the relationship of the American military to the American society And has just come out with one which attempts to chronicle in historical context the last 40 or so years of this nation's adventures in the greater Middle East Professor Andrew Basavitch formerly from Boston University and now a full-time author and as I say America's War for the Greater Middle East is a military history as his latest book

But before we get into that, Professor Basavitch, I'd read your previous book, Breach of Trust, which was about the relationship of the American military to American society And since you spent some considerable amount of time in the American military, I thought you came at this from a very interesting perspective So if you can talk a little bit about how that relationship has evolved in the last few decades I think that the rhetoric of supporting the troops, which commands unanimous ascent and which provides the basis for all sorts of I think superficial displays, testimonials to our affection for the troops, that all that's essentially fraudulent That were the American people to genuinely care about the well-being of those who serve in uniform, then the American people would attend much more carefully to what the authorities in Washington send our soldiers off to do

And to my way of thinking, particularly in the Greater Middle East over the last three-plus decades, we have sent our soldiers off on what has come to be an exercise in futility And they have paid dearly, their families have paid dearly for next to nothing in return So my hope would be that, at some point the American people would recognize the futility of that exercise and would continue to support the troops but now begin to do it in a substantive way Okay, in your new book, you draw some fairly profound lines between how this all started and where we've ended up, and you talk about the initiative by Zbigniew-Berzynski, President Carter's National Security Advisor His desire to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan, what was all that about? Why was he trying to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan?

Well, if I could provide just a little bit more context in answering the question So my new book purports to be a history, albeit a very preliminary history, a history of an event that's still unfolding, a history of a three-plus-long decades American war in the Greater Middle East, in the Islamic world When that war began, and I dated from 1980 with the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in January of that year, when it began there was another war ongoing, and that was the Cold War This contest between the United States and the Soviet Union or the West and the Communist bloc centered on Europe to see which of those two politically ideologically would emerge triumphant In the context of that war, in 1979, Brzynski, then the National Security Advisor to President Carter, Brzynski and members of his staff came up with what they thought was a brilliant idea

And the brilliant idea was to suck the Soviet Union into an Afghanistan intervention that Brzynski and his colleagues hoped would become for the Soviets their equivalent of Vietnam And indeed that occurred, and viewed in the context of the Cold War, this Afghanistan war that we promoted was a great success Because clearly in retrospect, that was one of the things that didn't bring into Soviet Union down, the problem is that at that same time, the war for the Greater Middle East was beginning, and the intervention in Afghanistan that we helped to promote and that we then fueled with billions of dollars of weapons turned out to be a catastrophe for all involved How exactly did Brzynski propose to suck the Soviets into Afghanistan? What was the tactic?

To provide support, to get to the rubber meets the road, to provide weapons to Afghan militants who were opposed to the intrusion of the Soviet Union into Afghan affairs By December of 1979, that resulted in this effort to lure in the Soviets, December of 1979, the Soviets invaded and occupied Afghanistan, and then spent the next decade trying to pacify Afghanistan Much as we have spent the last 17 years, or 16 years trying to pacify Afghanistan, so we lured in the Soviets, and the Soviets paid dearly, a Cold War victory, but in the context of the war for the Greater Middle East, really the beginning of a line of great sorrows for which we must hold ourselves responsible You quote Ronald Reagan as calling the insurgents in Afghanistan, quote, nobles savages in some sort of a state of purity fighting for an abstract idea of freedom

They weren't fighting for an abstract idea of freedom, they were fighting for precisely the same reason that the Taliban has been resisting the United States for low these many years And that is to get outsiders out, so that Afghans can be responsible for running their own society the way they want to, granted that the way they want to run Afghan society is very radically at odds with what we would view as enlightened values So, and I think many of us know that one of the people involved in mobilizing the Afghan insurgency was a gentleman by the name of Osama bin Laden Who when the Soviets ultimately withdrew in 1989 came to the conclusion that waging jihad against outside so-called great powers could end in victory, so to some considerable extent, the jihadist success against the Soviets in Afghanistan persuaded them that they could enjoy success against other powers To quickly go to the next sort of phase of the story as it unfolds, is it during the 1980s, at the same time that we're supporting the Soviets, excuse me, opposing the Soviets in Afghanistan, we are supporting the dictator who governs Iraq, guy named Saddam Hussein

Americans have totally forgotten the fact that from 1980 to 1988 an immense destructive murderous war between Iran and Iraq filled that decade, a war begun by Saddam Hussein as a war of aggression And Americans might think, well, guys, Saddam, we've always known Saddam Hussein as a bad guy, maybe so, but the Reagan administration supported Saddam indirectly and directly to the point that we were engaged in what has yet another forgotten war, a shooting war with Iran in the latter part of the 1980s Well, that war finally ends, it ends with Saddam out of money, but not out of ambition, and virtually as soon as that as the Iran war ends, he decides to go invade Kuwait That happens in August of 1990, we respond, suddenly now Saddam is our enemy, we liberate Kuwait, but unfortunately that war, what I call the second Gulf War, the first one being 1980 to 1988

The second Gulf War seems to end in a decisive victory that turns out not to be decisive, not decisive because Saddam Hussein survives, and so the United States then after 1991 nobody in the United States is paying attention begins to garrison on a permanent basis the Persian Gulf To include specifically maintaining substantial U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, the land of the two holy places, so here we have from bin Laden's perspective, infidel's occupying this sacred space, and that presence of the United States, aimed at containing Saddam now becomes one of the major sources of inspiring El Qaeda And setting in train, the sequence of events that of course leads to 9-11, it's an immense amount of blundering caused by many things, but caused in particular by an absence of clarity in the part of U.S. policy makers about what they were trying to do and who they were up against

You draw this back to the beginning of the 1980s and the promulgation of the Carter doctrine that when the U.S. began garrisoning large amounts of military personnel and equipment in Saudi Arabia, this was the culmination of the Carter doctrine, what was the Carter doctrine? Well, again, just to give a little bit more historical context here, if we look at the post-war period, the Cold War, the U.S. has chosen for the first time in its history after 1945 to maintain an a permanent basis, very substantial military power. We choose to become a military superpower, but in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the focus of strategic attention is on the defense of Western Europe and the defense of East Asia.

Those are the two places that we're willing to fight. During that entire period of time, minimal, minimal U.S. presence anywhere in the Islamic world, because we don't care that much about the Persian Gulf central Asia and the like. That changes in 1979 as a result of two events. The first event is the overthrow of the Shah, and the second event is the one I already alluded to, which was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Those two put together that inspired Jimmy Carter, who, in January of 1980, desperately hoping to win a second term, but being viewed as a weak and ineffective president, inspired him in January of 1980 to promigate the Carter doctrine, which is a specific statement that now defines the Persian Gulf as a vital U.S. national security interest, and what that means is that's a place we are willing to fight for. Just as we were then willing to fight for Western Europe or fight for Korea and Japan.

That statement then puts in motion what becomes a process of militarizing U.S. policy. Step by step, larger presence, greater willingness to intervene in conflicts, large and small, brief and protracted, leading us up to where we are today, which I think, in many people, I think, define as, in essence, a state of permanent war. The war has become a normal condition. Nobody expects that the war in which we are engaged, whatever you want to call it, if you don't want to call it the war for the greater Middle East, nobody expects that that war is going to end anytime soon. Indeed, I would argue that nobody in Washington has a clue about how to end that war. Jimmy Carter didn't just put on a blindfold and poke at the Persian Gulf with a pin out of sheer randomness that had followed the oil shock of the early 1970s. This was a ported response to that.

It was. One of the tragic elements of this story is that Carter himself did not wish to embark upon this military course of action. It was a very famous speech, worth reading, that he made in the summer of 1979. It's called his melee speech. It's an utterly inappropriate name to stick to it. But Carter goes on national TV, and in the context of this real concern about the American way of life, somehow being threatened because we no longer have guaranteed access to plentiful supplies of oil, he goes on national television. My fellow Americans, maybe the problem here is not that we don't have enough oil. Maybe the problem here is that we have bought into what is a false understanding of freedom. We've gone down the wrong path. We've become selfish. We've become materialistic. We have forfeited the values that in his opinion initially made America great. Carter was saying is, let's take on this challenge of an energy shortage by changing the way we live. Let's opt for virtue rather than for selfishness and materialism.

Of course, this had no appeal to the American people. Doesn't even sound good to me now. Well, you're right. I got a good idea. I want you to sacrifice. And Americans are not, we don't look to our politicians to say, calling us to sacrifice, except in some certain circumstances like World War II, we want the politicians to say there is going to be more tomorrow. And so Carter's attempt to avoid going down this path was derided. And I think basically the Carter doctrine speech of January 1980 was a concession of defeat on his part. The only way he thought he might have a chance to beat Reagan in the upcoming election was to get tough. And so without, there's no doubt in my mind that Carter had zero understanding of exactly what was going to evolve over the following decades, but he let loose the dogs of war. Just as a historical footnote, the US did have one moment when it took some interest in the Persian Gulf area prior to then because the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I overstated the point saying we didn't care. We didn't care enough to have that be a place that we were going to invest military power in doesn't mean that we were not involved in various sundry shenanigans. And of course, the episode you cite also ends up being an element in the in the narrative as it unfolds because the Iranian revolution of 1979. From the point of view of the Iranian revolutionaries was inspired in some respects by their not only their desire to get rid of of the Shah, but their determination to get rid of the of the American presence in Iran and influence in Iran, which they perceived whatever we think what they perceived to be utterly nefarious. So yes, that's also part of the story. Yeah, and another footnote while the United States was supporting and you point this out in your book while the United States was supporting Saddam during the Iran and Iraq war, it somewhat incoherently was also selling arms to Iran.

Well, not not only somewhat incoherently, utterly incoherently. I mean, the reason that's that's important to remember that I think is that is a prime illustration of of the absence of any strategic clarity with regard to purpose. I think one of the reasons I might have a hard time selling this idea of a war for the greater Middle East and that links a whole laundry list of military enterprises. One of the reasons I'll have a hard time is because people have become accustomed to simply seeing every one of these episodes is kind of a stand-alone proposition, whether it's peacekeepers in Lebanon or bombing Libya or humanitarian intervention in Somalia or going back time and again to Iraq, Afghanistan. So we have become conditioned to think of them as distinct episodes. The key argument I'm trying to make in the book is that only when we acknowledge that they are part of a larger enterprise can we then assess the extent of our failure.

There are things like the Iran Contra affair where where Ronald Reagan is illegally providing weapons to the Iranians, who while they're calling us the great Satan, at the same time that we're supporting Saddam Hussein against Iran, that's a classic illustration of the absence of any clear thinking by the people in Washington. Or is it meternickian balance of power taken to an ultimate extreme? King did not rise to the level of sophistication that invites a comparison with meternick. It began with a mix of cynicism and betrayal. It ended with an atrocity. Can you just briefly fill us in on what those two incidents were that book ended the Iran Iraq war from the United States perspective?

Well, we began to support Saddam Hussein against Iran as soon as it became apparent that Saddam's expectations of a quick easy victory weren't going to weren't going to pan out. And within the Reagan administration there was great fear that Iran indeed might emerge triumphant and therefore dominant in the Persian Gulf. So we began tilt in favor of Iraq in a variety of ways. Initially providing intelligence, providing so-called dual use technologies, turning a blind eye when Saddam went shopping for weapons throughout the West, letting all that, letting all that happen. The key episode that then begins to engage us directly military was when Saddam Hussein's military is therefore attacked the USS Stark. We had begun to have a larger naval presence in the Persian Gulf as the Iran war evolved.

Saddam's Air Force hits a US warship with two Exocet missiles, kills a bunch of Americans, wounds a bunch of Americans, cripples the ship. And within 24 hours the Reagan administration blames Iran for this Iraqi attack. And so the Iraqi attack on the Stark becomes the pretext for beginning a small but not insignificant maritime campaign against Iran. Basically the aim of the campaign was to make it difficult for Iran to interfere with shipping of oil in the Persian Gulf, which would of course then benefit Iraq. So that campaign is a tactical success. I mean, our Navy against the Iranian Navy, not exactly much of a contest. But then it culminates in the second atrocity, the second atrocity that US naval warship, the USS Vintens, Vincennes, shoots down an Iranian Airbus, killing all crew and passengers aboard.

Absolutely civilians. This is a civilian commercial airliner on a planned civilian route with an approved flight plan. The American authorities lie claiming that the that the airplane was descending in the direction of the warship when in fact it was gaining in altitude, claiming that it had violated the flight plan. And claiming also that the American warship was an international waters when in fact the warship was within Iranian territorial waters. So that it wasn't atrocity. We didn't apologize. And of course we Americans have tended to forget this episode which happened all way back in the 1980s. But from a point of view of understanding the historical evolution of evolution of this entire chapter, maybe we ought to recognize that the Iranians haven't forgot.

That the Iranians have grudges against us just as we have grudges against them, for example with regard to the hostage crisis. Just to finish up with the 1980s, there was the incident of the US Marines in Lebanon that you alluded to a moment ago. How did that fit into all of this? Well, mine is a military narrative. That is to say it's a military history. It's a history of unfolding military events. And the first such event really is the hostage rescue mission undertaken by Carter in April 1980, which of course ended in complete failure. Indeed, the failure occurred even before the plan itself unfolded. When Reagan became president in the wake of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, 1982, that utterly destabilized Lebanon. The Reagan administration decided that the United States had an interest in trying to restore peace and stability. And to do that, they sent basically a reinforced battalion of Marines to be quote unquote peacekeepers with the initial notion that the American presence in and of itself would sufficiently diffuse things, ensure the separation of Israeli and Lebanese

and PLO forces that things would calm down. That turned out not to be the case. Indeed, the longer the Marines stayed, the more they were actually drawn into this was both a Lebanese civil war and an Israeli occupation were drawn into it as combatants. And that then created the circumstances which culminated in the October 1983 terrorist attack on the Marine compound that killed, I think it was 214 Americans Reagan there after saying it's time for us to get the hell out of Dodge. The significance, I think, of that in the larger, in the context of the larger story is once again, what's the purpose? What are we trying to do? There was no clear understanding of what we were trying to do that made any sense in with regard to the specifics that existed on the ground.

And the second thing that matters is that whether Reagan supporters want to admit it or not in the in the aftermath of the bombing, he cut and run. And that sends a signal to our adversaries. You know, if you're going to go in and then at first time you take them serious losses, you're going to say, well, I'm out of here. Whether you like it or not, you're sending signals to people like Osama bin Laden or other militants that suggests that the United States doesn't have real staying power. In answer to the question, what the heck were we doing this for which could be asked about so many of these military ventures that we've been involved in the greater Middle East. We go back to the Carter doctrine, which was a reaction to the oil embargo. And your analysis is that most of this stuff was at least in the instant designed to preserve access to the oil of the Middle East via the free passage through the Persian Gulf. Well, you know, it was in an immediate and concrete sense that is to say at the outset, the war for the greater Middle East was a war for oil.

But my argument is that even from the outset, if not clearly articulated, it was about much more. It was about affirming our self-image as the dominant power in the world, not simply dominant in a military sense, but dominant in an ideological sense. There is a deep-seated, this is a part of American exceptionalism, there's a deep-seated conviction, certainly widely held in our political establishment, but also widely held among ordinary Americans that we define the future of humankind, that our values, our arrangements, our institutions, we can call it democracy using kind of a shorthand term, but it's much more than that. The American way of life determines the way the world is going. And events in 1979, citing the Iranian Revolution as a good example, but a multitude of events since, particularly in the Islamic world, challenge that notion, challenge that notion that we define the future.

And I think psychologically, there's an enormous reluctance on the part of Americans. And again, I would emphasize, particularly Americans in the political establishment, to give up this claim to our specialness, our chosenness. There's a great reluctance to take on board the possibility that while we certainly are a great power, that maybe we are simply one nation among many in the long course of course of history. And so many of the efforts entered, I think this is in spades, true, after 9-11. George W. Bush is president, and immediately responds to the 9-11 attacks by saying a national television, look, we have faced this kind of adversary before. This is the equivalent of the hateful ideologies of the 20th century. This is Nazism, this is communism. And just as we destroyed those challenges, we will destroy this one. That is to say, we will demonstrate through the use of military power that we define the future.

And I think at root, that really has been one of the driving considerations in this entire enterprise, to affirm, to validate American exceptionalism. Additionally, very few of the military outcomes that we have been able to achieve, support that notion. I mean, at the present moment, where we look at Iraq, I mean, in my narrative, we're now in the 4th Gulf War. The 1st Gulf War was 80-88, the 2nd Gulf War was going after Saddam with Desert Storm. The 3rd Gulf War was the war of 2003 to 2011. Low and behold, here we are again once again involved in another Gulf War that may or may not end in success operationally. When you take those 4 Gulf Wars together, it sure the heck doesn't look like we're making a lot of progress in bringing harmony or democracy or even order to that place, which really is the focal point or the nexus of the war for the greater Middle East going back to 1980.

It seems that up till 9-11, the priority for the United States in addressing the greater Middle East was stability. And then following 9-11 and the assumption of power by the people around George W. Bush, the idea became to transform this area. There were speeches made in which Bush explicitly denounced the preservation of stability as a worthwhile goal. Yeah, I think this is tremendously important. Bush is a very divisive figure in the eyes of many Americans. And I believe that there will be many of our fellow citizens who would dismiss Bush's freedom and democracy rhetoric. He's so-called Freedom Agenda as completely totally cynical. I don't believe that's true. I believe that Bush, who prior to 9-11 had advertised himself as a realist who is in favor of what he called a humble foreign policy, that he underwent that 9-11 was a transformative experience.

And as a genuinely religious person, and we're getting here into like, you know, psychologist, but as a genuinely religious person, I think he turned back to matters of faith to help him understand what had occurred and what he should do next. And that found expression in Bush becoming a new Woodrow Wilson. I mean, somebody who now articulated, and if you read his speeches, I mean, they're in many respects, they're quite, quite eloquent. United States as the agent to bring freedom to the oppressed. United States has a country that would no longer give the Islamic world a pass on things like democratic practice and rights for women. So he was persuaded that he was called upon to take this, undertake this transformative mission. And unfortunately, he and those around him, people like Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Woolfwoods, they were also persuaded that American military supremacy was unchallengeable.

That we possess the military capability to bring about this kind of political, ideological, and cultural transformation. And that's what the third Gulf War, the Gulf War of 2003-2011 was all about. That was their attempt to validate this what American military supremacy properly employed could do. They thought it was going to be an easy win. They thought it was going to be quick. They thought that making Iraq into some kind of a functioning liberal democracy was going to happen rather quickly, and they were utterly, totally and completely wrong. So instead of a short, victorious war, we ended up with an immensely long, costly war that created havoc in its wake.

Following up on that, there is still a lively debate in this country about the role of the surge. And whether this, I talked at the beginning about how we keep hearing these echoes. And at the end of the Vietnam War, proponents of the war had a theory that we could have wanted if we hadn't been fighting with our hands, one of our hands tied behind our back. And we hear it again about the surge won the war, and then we withdrew, and all the place went to hell. That's right. Obama gave away the victory is the argument, which I think is utterly, totally bogus. So what was the surge, and what was its effect? Two points about the surge. And the first one is to appreciate the extent to which when Bush embarked upon the surge, which he didn't remember. He remembered he fired, Rumsfeld fired the architect, but what was supposed to be the war of liberation.

And he replaced the then commander in Iraq, General Casey, with with General Patreas, that those changes alone showed that Bush was in effect abandoning the expectations that had informed the Iraq War into first place. That is to say, the freedom agenda, so-called freedom agenda, was now defunct. And that needs to be understood. The second point about the surge is what it did was to, and this is not a trivial achievement, what it did was to very substantially reduce the level of violence, which it did in part by the shrewd application of counterinsurgency methods, did in part because the additional presence of U.S. forces who undertook a exceedingly difficult task and did well. Probably most significant was a so-called SUNY awakening, that is to say that we paid for SUNY's to put on their arms or even come down to our side, because the SUNY's for their own reasons had decided that

they did not wish to see al-Qaeda in Iraq prevail in their country. So for all these reasons put together, the level of violence is reduced appreciably, but, and here's the point to emphasize, the insurgency had not been defeated. The insurgency continued. There was no conclusive victory. And so once the withdrawal occurred, and let us remember that Bush himself had committed his administration to with that withdrawal, simply that Obama followed through, once the U.S. withdrew, that created conditions for the insurgency then to erupt once again and put us on the path to where we are. So the notion that the surge is some kind of a victory that should stand alongside Gettysburg or Normandy is utterly absurd.

There is a moment where you point out what is fairly well known now that 15 of the 19 hijackers, 9-11, were Saudis. And you say that the Bush administration treated that question as off limits. It seems to me you're suggesting more than you say there. Well, I don't, I don't mean to be. I mean, I mean, well, maybe I, maybe, maybe I am, but, but, well, there are other people, there are other people who would take that a lot farther. Let's put it that way. The assumption that the Saudis are our friends, that these are allies, these are, this is a nation with whom we share values in common is misleading. What about interests in common?

Well, let's crank back to 1980. Yeah, we got interest in common. And the interest in common is they want to keep pumping oil. And given our energy situation at that point, the Americans keep wanting to importing that oil so we can put it in our, our, our cars. So the American way of life won't be compromised. But now let's fast forward to 2016. Well, the energy situation has radically changed. I mean, many of us, me included, would certainly like to see us begin to move to a post carbon based fuels economy. But we haven't in particular gone that far. We still need oil. We still all want our, we still want our cars. We still don't want to make any of the sacrifices Jimmy Carter called upon us to make. But guess what? We don't need Saudi oil anymore. We, we are for all practical purposes, energy self-sufficient relying on sources within the Western hemisphere. So if there's a place worth fighting for, there's a place where where we should be willing to send Americans to die on behalf of energy security, then we should be sending them to Canada or to Venezuela.

We're probably we'd have better luck rather than maintain this notion that dates back to 1980 that somehow the American way of life is intimately tied to our access to Saudi oil. Now, let me emphasize that doesn't mean that Saudi oil is globally unimportant. It's it is globally important. It's important to Europe. It's important to the Japanese. But quite frankly, if it's important to the Europeans, then let's let the Europeans start to pony up with a little bit of a larger commitment to maintaining security in the region, rather than outsourcing it to the United States, which as a practical matter, what, what, what, what's going to happen. Now, if I was, if I was a European, I'd be happy for the rules of the game as, as they have evolved to, to continue. But I'm not a European. And I think with many respects, we're getting our pocket picked. I don't think they're going to be such a thing as Europeans very much longer, but that's just, well, that could be two.

Going back to this as we, as we come to near the end of this conversation, the recurring themes through this whole adventure, and you, you keep pointing out at various junctures, the degree to which American policy makers and decision makers and military decision makers seem to be oblivious to issues of faith and history in the area of the greater Middle East. Well, I mean, you know, I could cite myself as an example. Back in 1980, when this, I was an Army officer at the time, my world was defined by the, by the Cold War. Military, my focal point was on the possibility of a war with the Soviet Union. I didn't think about unconventional wars, certainly didn't think about the possibility of war in, in the Islamic world. And quite frankly, didn't think about what that world was all about.

How, how, what we call the modern Middle East came into existence at the end of World War One as a function of your reckless European imperialist who thought they could carve up the Ottoman Empire to suit themselves. My knowledge of Islam, which today is not, is not great, was for all practical purposes, not existent back in 1980. And I have to say that I doubt if my ignorance was that much less than the ignorance of people sitting around the National Security Council, advising President Carter and then President Reagan and so on about, about what we ought to do. That has been a huge historical blindside. I mean, I think it was, it was Ambrose Beers, I think, who once said that the war is what the United States uses as the vehicle to learn about the rest of the world. And certainly as a consequence of the, of the various military interventions, large and small. Since 1980, we've now become to learn a lot about the geography, about the people, about the religion, the culture, the history. And you know, you makes you want to weep that we didn't have that kind of an understanding of the region back when we began this enterprise.

But isn't this the ultimate echo of Vietnam? We learned during the Vietnam era when we had these teachings where people who academics, basically, who were expert in the, in Southeast Asian and its history, pointed out that the version of Vietnam's role in the Cold War as being a pawn of China was at odds with the actual history of, of the movement as a nationalist movement fighting against French colonialism. And that we were basically the inheritors of the French Colonials, not of the, not of the side of freedom. And, and we're equally, or the policymakers, you suggest are equally ignorant about our role in taking over the British colonial role in the Middle East. There's, there's no question about it. You know, I've, I've long thought that, you know, we, we, we Americans continue to have this sentimental attitude with regard to Great Britain that I think somehow is traceable to these ancient memories of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt standing arm and arm facing down the Nazis.

But I think there's a great book to be written that really explains the contribution that Britain has made to creating such a gal dang mess in the world that is the direct consequence both of British imperialism, but also of British decline. You know, when they, when they had enough of India, they, they, they walked away from India, when they had enough of the, of the Palestine mandate, they walked away from, from that part of the world. And, and the, and the consequences have not been pretty. Now, I don't, I don't, I don't want to overstate that. It's not like great Britain is, Britain is responsible for all the world's eels, but, but, but there is a, a, a story that is complex.

And the, the habit that many Americans have of wanting to see history as a, as a morally uplifting tale, simply doesn't, doesn't get us very far with regard to that part of the world. I have the name for that book, the Great Skiedaddle. That is exactly right. The Great Skiedaddle. This book and by breach of trust as well, because I think you touch on these, these issues that are haunting us and apparently things we, we just can't shake in terms of our habits of mind and in terms of the way our officials run our business. You don't boast any credentials as a predictor, but what do you see, what do you see, where do you see this going?

Well, I go nowhere. I mean, I think, I think we are events are drifting. And, and, and the American people continue to sort of slumber. I've concluded, I think my last three books on a depressing note that says, boy, we're really in a deep sh**. And, and ain't going to get any better until the American people wake up, pay attention and start demanding change. And, and that doesn't seem likely to happen. I mean, I guess one could argue in the present political season, oh, they've woken up. They're demanding change. But if, if waking up and demanding change is Donald Trump, then I can't say that that that makes me very optimistic about what's going to happen next. Andrew Basovich, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East Military History and previously a breach of trust. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. Oh, thank you.

Oh, thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that's going to conclude this week's edition of the show the program it turns next week at the same time over the same stations of our NPR worldwide throughout Europe, the US and 440 cables system in Japan.

On the Mighty 104 in Berlin on Soho Radio in London, around the world via the internet at two different locations live an archive whenever you want at Harry Sherdas.com and kcsn.org around the world via the American Forces Network. Available for your smartphone through stitcher.com available as a free podcast from sound cloud side show network tune in.com iTunes and WWNO dot org. And we just like rethinking a 50 year war if you'd agree to join with me then would you already thank you very much. Uh-huh, Tiffit Lysho Shepo to the San Diego Pittsburgh Chicago and exile in Hawaii desks. Thanks as always to Pam Holsted and to Jenny Lawson at WWNO in New Orleans. Thanks also to Paul Kalo at WBUR in Boston and Mike Gilbert at Swelltown in New Orleans for production help today's broadcast.

The email address for this program play list of the music heard here on and your opportunity. Think of it as an opportunity to purchase cars I talk t-shirts all at harry share.com. I'm on Twitter at the harry share a live show up to the minute. Next week right here on Lysho. Lysho comes to century progress productions and originates through the facilities of WWNO New Orleans flagship station of the changes easy radio network.

So long from deep inside your audio device of choice.