(upbeat music) - Welcome to Curtain Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I am the editor in chief of current affairs magazine. Today I'm joined by Osama Khalil. He is a history professor at Syracuse University. He's also the author of the new book, A World of Enemies, America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden available from Harvard University. Press Professor Khalil. Thank you for joining us in Curtain Affairs today. - Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. - So you do something a little unusual in this book, which is hinted at there in the subtitle, which is we are used to thinking about America's Wars abroad and America's Wars at Home separately in different domains. We talk about the history of, you know, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, or we might talk about the war on drugs, but you put it all together. You see it as one kind of unified history, domestic and foreign. And perhaps you could tell us why you think we need to consider America's Wars to be one category that includes domestic and foreign. - Well, yeah, thanks for having me. And that's a great question. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, I struggled with is we tend to think of these as two distinct and separate spheres, right? The domestic sphere and the foreign policy sphere. And really what I wanted to get across was how much domestic politics and policy not only influenced foreign policy, but foreign policy has come home and influenced our own domestic politics and policy. So I wanted to trace that out from the Vietnam War era to the present. And, you know, one of the challenges was where do you begin this story? And, you know, I could have started in '45, but what I really, what struck me about these intersections between the wars on crime, drugs and terror, and was how influential that period was particularly with the baby boomers. You know, if you think about the United States in 1945 or even in 1959, the idea that American power was unbounded, that the American dream would be fulfilled for generations to come, that this was the American century. And so much of that is embodied in Kennedy's inauguration speech. And as I talk about in the book, you have a whole generation of baby boomers who come into government service, whether it's State Department, CIA, DOD, or even running for elected office. They're inspired by Kennedy, and Vietnam becomes their testing ground. And then on top of that, it is America's failure in Vietnam that I argue in the book has profound consequences, not just for how the United States, the policies it pursues at home and abroad, but also for how it views its place in the world and these perceptions of decline. And the continuing ramifications of those perceptions of decline to take us from Kennedy to Reagan to the Bush years. And then of course, eventually the Trump presidency. - Yeah, the, you know, you point out the shadow of Vietnam hangs over everything that comes after it. And Vietnam looms large in the story that you tell. So tell us a bit more about why you think as time goes on, the Vietnam War fades into history. America's probably no less and less about it. I hear statements made sometimes that I think perhaps wouldn't have been made 20 years ago. I'm thinking of John Federman said it was a war to defend democracy. And I'm like, well, that was something people believed in 1965, but I thought we'd gotten past that. So you encourage us to go back and understand what the Vietnam War was and why it mattered. So tell us a little bit more. - And I think that's, it's a great point you're making. It's one I've seen with my own students. So in fact, what's happening and in part that this book was important written for them, this younger generation that is getting very little history of the Vietnam War anymore, whether it's in high school and then unless they take a specific class in college, they're unlikely to get it. The Vietnam War has these profound implications, not just for how the United States views its place in the world. The idea that this is gonna be this great testing ground to your point, it's talked about at home as defending democracy. And then of course, one of the great revelations for many of the baby boomers is South Vietnam is not a democracy, that this is an insurgency, that this is not a civil war. It's being presented in certain ways the way the Kennedy and then Johnson and Nixon administration in some respects would talk about it was an invasion from the North. And so to see this as if this is a homegrown insurgency against a initially, a dictatorship, funded and supported by the United States and then a military junta and a homegrown insurgency against that. And so that's one issue. So the second issue is as the war is failing and the United States is throwing immense resources at again, this very poor, what we then have called a third world nation and not demonstrating an ability to defeat this insurgency. The United States seeks to contain the impact globally. Domestically, there's a second problem which is that it now coincides with rising eternal descent. And so now we start to see a number of aspects at home in dealing with this issue, including domestic surveillance that's connected to foreign surveillance. We're seeing attempts to quote unquote contain radicalism whether student protesters, the Black Power Movement or even the Movement for Civil Rights. And that is gonna have profound implications from the Johnson to the Nixon administration and then beyond. And then the third piece is again, as Vietnam is effectively the war ends. This idea that the American dream is no longer achievable, begins to be adopted and it starts to actually, Nixon is gonna run a bit on this. So this is gonna actually form Nixon's campaign in addition to things like law and order, very much tied to crime, drugs and of course, urban unrest and of course law and order abroad. And that's gonna again be about containing the impact of Vietnam. So there's the other aspect here, I think that's really important for your listeners to understand is there's policies that are implemented in Vietnam, counterinsurgency policies that are also applied domestically in the United States and then exported as well to different conflict zones. They will be revisited as I talk about in the book again and again in different conflict zones and much like Federman's quote that you began with, instead of actually looking at their failures in Vietnam, they will be presented as successes. So everything from key counterinsurgency aspects that will then we will revisit after with the global war on terror that will then be presented as well, these were successes in Vietnam's in Vietnam rather and we're gonna apply it here in Iraq or in Afghanistan or elsewhere. And that includes everything from torture to assassination including full on assassination programs, the connection to, you know, as I talk about in the book, the attempts now to infuse a ton of money into Afghanistan and develop Afghanistan in a sense on the Vietnam experience and like in Vietnam, it fails. - That's a few things. And what you said that I wanted to mention, first we interviewed about a year ago a Vietnam veteran Bill Earhart who has written some great memoirs of the war and you know what he said on this program was he went to Vietnam with having seen all the, you know, Audie Murphy movies about World War II. He thought he was gonna be welcomed with open arms. He thought the women were gonna throw flowers at him because he understood America through the lens of the great heroic World War II story. And he got there and it was a profoundly disorienting experience that he was unable to process until years afterwards because he couldn't understand why he was hated. He couldn't understand what he was doing there. Nothing made sense to him, he said. He said nothing made sense. And then he was realized it was this horrendous atrocity in the image of the country just collapsed completely but it was very, very difficult for him to accept that the United States that he had believed so much and could in fact be doing what you laid out there, that this, I mean, even what you said there, I think against people still, I wanted to dwell on because you said that it wasn't a civil war. And I think people would say, no, it was a civil war, right? It was a civil war. No, no, no, it wasn't a civil war. There was no North and South Vietnam. These were artificial entities. So there's so much about that war that even the people who were in it had struggled to understand. When even you wouldn't even hear these discussions about, of course, whether it's the Kennedy and then of course the Johnson administration would not even talk about it in those, from that perspective. This was an invasion, right? And one of the things he would constantly talk about was infiltration from the North, which there was, but that there was also a strong domestic base of support in South Vietnam for the insurgency and of course opposed to the government of No Dundee-M and then the hunters that come in afterward. The other thing I would throw out is, even if you begin to talk about it as a civil war, as you start to see later, as a civil war within South Vietnam, not so much between these two countries. And that is, of course, a leap. It won't be until, for example, the Nixon administration, until we finally see an American president talk about recognizing the national liberation front, what the Americans called the Viet Cong, right? The VC, recognizing them as a political actor. And of course, this is, you know, this is a key, a fundamental piece of what North Vietnam wants, what the NLF wants, but the Americans refuse to recognize or deal with the NLF. I think the other thing that's really important there is, and you've tapped right into it, is there is such, and there, you know, a number of Vietnam veterans have talked about this, Ron Kovic, for example, the influence of John Wayne of Audie Murphy, the influence of those World War II movies. One of the other aspects that I think is important that is a thread that runs through the book is the idea of the quick victory. Few Americans realize that, of course, for the John's administration, they expected this to be a quick victory. How could it not? The world's most powerful military was gonna go fight against, quite frankly, as they would refer to a pajama-clad fighters with sandals and AK-47s. How could they stand up to us? And so one of the things that I get across in the book is not just kind of the arrogance of that, that persists through conflicts over the next six decades, including, for example, in Yemen today, you know, how much it informs policymakers and this desire for the quick victory, the use of overwhelming force to achieve a victory, and then when it doesn't happen, the decision is not made to back off. The decision is now made to increase force. And so, for example, one of the things I hope readers will take away, and your listeners will take away from this is the following. The United States in '64, '65, as President Johnson, is deliberately preparing for war. You know, so he's lying to the American public as he's going to the '64 campaign. He's preparing for war right after the election. And the idea here is to dictate terms of surrender to North Vietnam. So you have a military strategy that's connected to a political strategy in which, quite frankly, in which they will literally say, make the North, make North Vietnam beg for peace through this bombing campaign. So this is never about, you know, we're going to meet as equals at the negotiating table. We're going to dictate surrender, and we're going to see that again and again in different conflicts. So whether it is, if you think to, as I talk about in the book in 2003, when President Bush, you know, gives Saddam Hussein 48 hours to withdraw from Iraq to leave Iraq, take his sons and leave Iraq, or military action will commence. Or quite frankly, by December of 2023, when Secretary of State Blinken will say, you know, right after the humanitarian pause ends, then there's an exchange of hostages. There's really hostages for Palestinian prisoners. We'll say, all this could be over tomorrow. All this could be over tomorrow if Hamas just surrendered. So you still have this over and over again. And it's a really quite persistent belief from the United States that it can dictate terms of surrender. And when that doesn't happen, as I talk about in the book, that reinforces notions of decline. - Well, of course, in Afghanistan as well, the Taliban offered to surrender. And I think, I think Rumsfeld said, we don't negotiate surrenders in this country. And the Taliban, we have an offering to give up Osama bin Laden at that point. - Exactly, and then you'll have several moments, I talk about, there's another key moment with Afghanistan, for example, in 2008, where there is a, you know, feelers are put out for negotiation for a power sharing agreement, much like the United States has just done in Iraq, under the Bush administration. And this is rejected. It's rejected wholesale by Condoleezza Rice. And in fact, much of what could have been achieved, perhaps with that power sharing agreement, would have avoided another almost a decade of war in the eventual victory of the Taliban. And so that could have been avoided as well. All of this, of course, some of this is what is documented, so it was documented in the book. And there's still more that we'll learn about. All of these missed roads and opportunities that were not taken, because quite frankly, the administration's a power new better or had another agenda, as in the case with Rumsfeld. - I mean, there's obviously an arrogance of power there in the belief that you don't need to make compromises because you can just inflict absolute defeat. But there's also a really deep, that there's a few kinds of racism, right? There's the racism of believing in the weakness and stupidity of your enemy. But there's also the racism of believing that you face an implacable foe who can't negotiate because they are ruthless, merciless, they are enemies. And you saw this kind of contradiction in, I think as early as the war against Japan and World War II, where the Japanese were both like weak foolish children, then they were also superhuman. So tell us a little bit about the way the conception of the enemy plays into this. - That's a great point. Yes, the dastardly villains, even the evil Japanese who are at the one hand, you know, the kind of innocent children that had to be molded and at the same time would stab you in the back. And I think that's a persistent threat. You know, I talk about in the book, there's a broader framework of the war for civilization. You're seeing some of that play out again today. How the United States talks about its enemies is often a reflection of how it talks about itself. We are civilized, they are savage. And we see that in the use of phrases like Indian country, for example, the fact that, you know, the US military still applies some of this phrasing and terminology that it used in the wars in the American West, its own wars of genocidal wars in the West against Native American tribes that have now been applied into 20th and 21st century. So that war for civilization rhetoric is really profound and it's consistent. It's the other thing that ties the wars on crime, drugs, and terror together. As I talk about in the book, because all three have been presented as these wars for civilization. Crime is, drugs, and then of course the war on terror. And then built within that is what happens to these areas that, as I talk about in the book, what the United States begins to refer to as badlands. And so the badlands is this really, and it's a really rich metaphor, as you can imagine from policymakers, because you can take what were, you know, areas that were laden with crime, quote unquote, at the turn of the century around prohibition era. So taking that myth from the American West of the Badlands and these areas of Native American violence to be subdued to America's inner cities for crime. And then as I talk about in the book, by the 90s for drugs. And then of course it's adapted into the global war on terror logic and the badlands are applied to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Gaza, Somalia, Yemen, and so forth. And they actually come back home by the late Bush administration with Mexico's war on drugs because the Southwest United States is now a badlands. And so so much of that this becomes really rich territory and it taps into this cavalcade, this rogue's gallery of evil doers. So whether it is El Chapo or it is Saddam Hussein or it's been laden, Americans are often presented with this rogue's gallery of enemies, much like with Ho Chi Minh, that can't be negotiated with, they can't be reasoned with, all we can do is fight them and we must fight until the bitter end. And sadly, what it's led to as I talk about in the book is a foreign policy that's fully militarized and not only innervated diplomacy, we don't even think about diplomacy anymore. We're almost always initially reliant on military force. - And because of that, because of that view, obviously opportunities for diplomatic resolution of conflicts are missed. Obviously, Hamas is now the most prominent example of the people talking about Hamas, the way they've talked about the Taliban and al-Qaeda after 9/11, they're pure evil, they can't be reasoned with, you just have to destroy them. And we miss the various kind of diplomatic feelers that were put out by Hamas for many years where they indicated maybe they'd be open to a two-state settlement, because we already know who these people are and so we deal with them accordingly and by adopting that perspective, in many ways, you create the threat that you think exists. I mean, you have this super striking thing that you mentioned in the book where you say that only a fraction of the dollars that were spent in the global war on terror were actually needed to secure the homeland. So we ended up spending a lot of money to increase the threat. So can you talk about the way in which adopting this view actually makes the threats that we perceive to be worse and more real? - Absolutely, and it's a great point. We, you know, on its face, and I think this is one of the things that's often missed, I just had this conversation recently where, you know, we've just passed another 9/11 anniversary. And what's striking is how little the younger generation who was born, either born on 9/11 or since, how little they know about that day and what happened and who was involved and, you know, even just some of the basic facts about it. And for example, as I talk about in the book, what's missed often in this discussion is that it was 19 hijackers armed with box cutters. They weren't agents of a superpower. They weren't even agents of another state actor. And in fact, much of this could have been avoided with locks on cabin doors. El Cada, as most Americans refer to it, had likely fewer than 1,000 members, maybe even fewer than 100. And yet the Bush administration completely blows this at a proportion in the sense that, and of course, it's for political reasons, as well as the shock and heart of the day, but in terms of now conflating a number of groups with El Cada. So tying in Hezbollah and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad along with a couple, a number of other groups in and around South Asia and claiming these are all organizations, global terrorist organizations that are either a threat to the United States or its allies and partners in the region and across the world. So that's one fundamental mistake. Even today, here we are 20 plus years, as I talk about in the book, we've settled for security theater at airports. I don't think anybody feels safer. We know, for example, based on the audits of TSA, that it's not a well-functioning organization. Anybody who's been through an airport knows that. We know that they fail audits rarely. We also know that less than 3% of cargo that comes into the United States has ever searched. So there's where we've diverted our money. And so of course, there's the war in Afghanistan, which is one, the occupation of Afghanistan for 20 years, in which the United States, even as its allies, particularly Afghan President Hamid Karz, I talked about bringing the Taliban into the government, finding a way to split this movement, this movement that has several different aspects to it that could have been divided and played against. Instead, the United States decided we will not do that. And then of course, the war in Iraq, which we often now just refer to it as a blunder. What that seems to, what that not just seems to, but what that does is it basically papers over how much of a criminal act this was. In terms of the liberal deception of the American public, of the international public, the drive for war and the way the war is conducted and the occupation that occurred, the number of lives lost, which we still don't know, and the profound implications for Iraqi society and the broader region. All of this comes with a cost. It comes for a cost both at home and abroad for America's not just standing in the world, but it's placed on the fact that we are still in Iraq today and still conducting military operations. In Iraq and around Iraq is telling about where we are 20 plus years later. But I think there's another aspect which brings us back to domestic politics is that much of that's been forgotten. You've seen it with the embrace, for example, of Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the war of Kamala Harris. You've seen it when you look at some of the key architects and proponents of the war, how they have now fully embraced the Democratic Party and want, in fact, more of this kind of policy, not just in the region, but globally. Even when you think about when President Biden announced that he was not gonna stay in the race, when he claims, I'm proud to be the only American president where we don't have soldiers at war. And yet the United States is active in several different war zones, including in Iraq. And so this is how profound implications, not just for our society, but how we think about what it means to be at war. And that's one of the things I want, hopefully you're listeners and you read this in the book to take away from. What are the trade-offs that we've done in order to pursue this kind of policy, to pursue endless war for decades without even thinking about what it means for the families that are involved? And we never think about, quite frankly, anything we never think about the populations overseas. They're invisible. - You mentioned that Al Qaeda, you know, a core group of about a thousand people, a small criminal organization that could have been dealt with accordingly. The global war on terror that was launched after 9/11, the Brown University costs of war project has tried to estimate the human toll of these wars. And Americans really don't understand the amount of direct and indirect consequence, the cascading consequences. They ultimately concluded that as a result of the wars that were spawned in the post-9/11 era, the human toll approaching a million direct deaths, indirect deaths, another three and a half million indirect deaths, and 38 million people displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. It's the greatest displacement of human beings since World War II, and essentially undiscussed in the United States. - No, we don't discuss this at all. In fact, to give one example of it, think about how little discussion there was of Afghanistan, and perhaps from Obama's second term, up until the peace agreement was signed during the Trump administration. This was rarely discussed in the press, particularly as it was failing. And the idea, number one, you had very few media based in Afghanistan. And that was from the Bush period on, so there was very not much media attention. When there was media, it was mostly focused on a particular military exercise, often what you would hear was this. The US went into like Hellman prophecy, the US military went in, they engaged with some Taliban fighters, but the Taliban fled only to re-emerge a month or two later, three months later, and reoccupied these areas. Without ever understanding why was the Taliban, why did they have so much support, especially in the rural areas versus the urban areas? So we've done a poor job, I think, and it's easy to blame the media, but the reality is Americans haven't been paying attention. Part of that has to do with the fact that we have a volunteer military. We no longer have a draft. This is one of the key difference between the Vietnam areas I talked about in the book. We have a volunteer military, which the footprint of those that are affected is small. The other aspect is that war has become deeply embedded in our economy and dual use, whether it's on the technology company, is your old standard military contractors, it's deeply embedded in a way that is often invisible to most Americans, and yet they benefit from it. You've had a recent example of this, quite frankly, earlier in the year, where the Wall Street Journal and President Biden, who agree on almost nothing, the one thing they agreed on is that foreign military assistance benefits comes back home in the form of American jobs. So when the Wall Street Journal is saying almost the same thing as President Biden, that should actually strike us, right? And that I think is quite telling, because back to the Brown study that you referenced, one of the things that they point out is the cost of this, the human cost and the financial cost, that was just for roughly 2020. If the wars continue, which they have, those costs keep compounding. The other thing is, we're still dealing with, and we will, a full generation of men and women who fought in these conflicts, and the wounds they sustained, the rehabilitation, the mental impact, all of this is going to last for decades. And the costs of that, both human and financial, is one that we have yet to even fully understand or engage with. We're seeing it, quite frankly, today, in and around the Red Sea. There was some recent reporting, for example, by the Associated Press, which talked to some of the sailors that were deployed. And one of the things they've talked about is, this is like the first major naval engagement the United States has had since the Second World War. And how stressful it was to actually be under fire every day, multiple times a day. And this is to keep in mind by effectively, the de facto government of Yemen, which only a decade ago was a non-state actor, that now has very low cost drones and low cost missiles, that the United States is countering by spending millions of dollars to shoot down low cost missiles and drones, millions, and effectively it'll be billions of dollars by the time we're done. And what they've shared, what the Houthi militia and the Ansar Allah movement has shown is that we can actually trade tit for tat with the strongest navy in the world and its air force, and we can cut the trade and traffic through the Red Sea and the Swiss canal dramatically. If not, there are some estimates that it's more than 50%, likely even higher the amount of trade that's been impacted in and out of the Red Sea. And no discernible benefit to US military action. None, right? So you have airstrikes in which you have US airstrikes against the Houthi militia that have not deterred them. You have the bombing of schools most recently by US airstrikes that have not deterred the Houthis. And there's a great moment, the book was published before October 7th and everything that's happened since. But there's this moment that it really sums up the book and its argument back in January where the United States begins these airstrikes against Yemen and President Biden has asked, are the airstrikes working? He says, you know, are the airstrikes working? Do you mean, are they deterring the Houthis? No, will they continue? Yes. And this fundamentally sums up US foreign policy where we are. All of US foreign policy in a nutshell, a 10 second nutshell. Is it working? No, will it continue? If I had known, I would have held off on the book, Nathan, I, you know, I just would have waited. If I had known he was gonna do that. I was gonna just wait three months, we'll have this. And what's sad about is that it has continued and we've gotten to a point just to bring us up to where we are take, 'cause that was January. US airstrikes have not deterred the Houthis, nor has the United States been willing to end Israel's invasion of Gaza, which is fully, not only fully supporting, but it's participating in. Now, the Houthis have made it clear, if you get a ceasefire in Gaza, we will end the interdiction of shipping. The Biden administration has sought to separate these two. And it has said, you know, the Gaza wars contained, there's nothing that, you know, it's kind of your typical, there's nothing to see your folks move along. There's nothing happening in Lebanon, there's nothing happening in Yemen, these are separate. At the same time, they know they're directly related. And what we're seeing is in typical fashion, we're now seeing op-eds being written, including one recently by a leading professor and someone at the American Enterprise Institute. Again, AEI is a think tank that the architects of the war in Iraq is basically shaped at AEI. And which he's arguing that right now, the United States is losing the war in the Red Sea. And he says that the issue here is Biden's not going to do anything. So this is an issue for the next president. And so this again, takes us back to the argument of the book. So what's the wrong lesson that's going to be applied? So what he's saying is that the United States actually needs now to amplify its actions in and around Yemen. - More force. - More force because we have to send a message to China, because we're sending the wrong message to China. We are weak now. Our standing in the world is weak. And what does the message to China will get? If we can't stand up to the Houthis in Yemen, what does it say about Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits? And so one of the key things I talk about in the book is policy that's often discussed as a success, that's actually a failure. And so, you know, a great example of that is, to take us away from the president, but to go back is Colombia in the '90s, in which you have this again, again about this idea of dictating terms of surrender. The Clinton administration is faced with, you know, a fairly thorny negotiation between the FARC, this left-wing rebel group and the Colombian government. And so instead of actually, you know, really engaging in diplomacy, we're going to launch a counter narcotics effort that's really counterinsurgency. And the way it's pitched at home is this. We are going to eliminate Colombian cocaine from American streets in three years, okay? So that's clearly, if that's the initial goal, we know that that has failed. And instead what ends up happening is, we have a massive infusion of force into Colombia that leads to broad human rights violations, the highest death rate in the world for three or four years. We shift from a counter narcotics campaign after 9/11 to a counterinsurgency, counter terrorism campaign, but here's what's remarkable. The same ambassador who's put in charge in Colombia by the Bush administration will be told, okay, you did such an amazing job in Colombia with your crop eradication. Go now to Afghanistan and do the same thing in Afghanistan. So we're going to take a failed policy in Colombia because obviously we didn't eradicate cocaine in Colombia. We're going to take it to Afghanistan where it will also fail. And at the same time, claim these were both successes. And since a remarkable statement about U.S. foreign policy and not only how it's militarized, but end up it also portrayed as a success when in fact it's a failure. - This idea, you would think that one of the central lessons of the Vietnam War would be that if your response to losing is well, we clearly need more bombs. We need more force, which is inevitably every Wall Street Journal op-ed, you know, what's the problem in Ukraine? The problem is we clearly need more force. How do we solve the problem with Iran? Well, clearly we just need to increase our threats. We need, we're not credible in our threats. Well, what's the problem in Gaza? Well, Israel is not being given enough destructive force. - They're fighting with one hand tied behind their back. I mean, this is part of the, I make this point in the book and it is the following, that not everybody who went to Vietnam obviously drew the same lessons from it. And I think it's important to remember when we talk about kind of the lack of education about what happened in Vietnam today. And the same way that there's a lot of really strong and divisive opinions and differing opinions on the war on terror, there's also obviously still about Vietnam. So scholars are split on this, they're not evenly split, but you will still find a particular segment that will come and tell you that the war was winnable. You know, if we'd only listened to X, Y, or Z, individual often Edward Lansdale or someone else, we could have won that War Max Boot has a whole book about this, right? But also you will hear from military figures, including some of those that served, you know, politicians hurt us, the hippies back on campus, hurt us, the press hurt us. We were fighting with one hand tied behind our back. That's why we lost in Vietnam. They, the Viet Cong, quote unquote, never defeated us on the battlefield. So that's gonna become really important to some of these kingdoms as they stay in government service, particularly the OD-CIAA. And when I talk about them, the United States is time to contain the impact of Vietnam. They're gonna take some of these policies out into Latin America, into the Middle East, into Southern Africa, to try and apply them there. With mixed results, sometimes they're successful, most of the time they're not. But it's going to, and this takes us back to your earlier question, it's going to entrench these conflicts in a way that it removes certain options. So for example, it becomes far more difficult when we think about, I talk about in the Obama administration, the drone assassination campaign. And so even though key figures are being killed with the drone assassination campaign that are being replaced, and you're starting to get these differences within the administration, some of which just plays out in the press of saying, you know, what we're doing is killing people, but we don't really have an end game here. We don't know how this ends or where it ends. The other thing I would bring up, and this comes back to your point, is how this then of course plays out today, for example, in the media. Because it's the Wall Street Journal, you have the Atlanta Council, you'll have these, you know, the op-eds that are written by two or three figures of the Atlanta Council, where it's always, always more forced. All you have to do is switch out the headline, and you could switch out China and North Korea, with North Korea and Russia, with Russia and China, and just keep alternating Russian Iran of who to bomb next. So these alternating titles, and there's constantly a threat, and constantly some of the United States has to be preparing for, and so whether it is, you know, some of the Atlanta Council writing a foreign policy, or it's the National Review, or the National Interest, these journals that are tied often to the foreign policy establishment, and of course, military contractors, are shaping this public opinion of perpetual threat that can only be dealt with with military force. - You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a non-profit left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners, with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program, and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. 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(upbeat music) - You mentioned that you write a lot in the book about pop culture and movies, and the way that our policies shape the pop culture that we get, and then we imbibe it, and then we get this view that essentially, war is like it is in movies. First off, you don't have to look at the really gory. You don't have to see the worst parts of it. You don't have to see horrible things happen to children. You know, you just see people fall over. But also that war consists of you go out, you kill the enemy, and then you win the war. And there's this fundamental, in every case that you've mentioned, there's something, there's this basic fact about human beings that I feel like is missing in all of these accounts, in this story of the world of enemies, which is that human beings react like human beings to violence. So with Israel's recent pager attack in Lebanon, right? You're like, well, what is all the people who are traumatized by that? Do you think they're just gonna go home and not care? Or do you think they're gonna be angry and resentful? Do you think that all of the people in Gaza who survive what you do are not going to spend the rest of their lives despising you for this? Do you think in Afghanistan, when we were, you know, when we were dropping bombs on villages and calling them Taliban, the people in those villages know that you're lying? And do you think they don't despise you afterwards? Do you think they don't want to get back at you like a human being? What? It's crazy. You know, the challenge is, and there's a sharp separation, as I mentioned earlier, we rarely ever talk about the cost. Even if you think about the movies, the great Hollywood movies about Vietnam, and I think, you know, one of the things we miss is that there are few of any Vietnamese characters ever. Instead, it's all about the impact on the American soldier, right? The Dear Hunter does this, you know, in remarkable fashion. It's one of these movies that the standard for this approach. The other issue is this, that as I talk about in the book, is how much not only does pop culture influence action. So for example, you know, and borrowing on the reporting and investigation from others, I talk a little bit about the impact of a show like 24 on using torture and interrogations, and how that is then taken to Iraq and applied to individuals who are arrested and then tortured and scooped up in torture, because the soldiers believe that they're just acting out what they've seen key for Sutherland doing on the show 24. There's another aspect here where, if you look at like the press coverage, you brought up the pager attack, the exploding pagers, in which how it's being discussed in the media in the United States, and in some cases, Western Europe, is the following. Look at the technological marvel. And of course, everybody who had a pager, remarkably, was a quote unquote Hezbollah member, right? Not that this is a form of communication that's still used by doctors and nurses, that this is, we still don't know a lot about exactly how this happened, how widely available these pagers were that were attacked, and what else may be exploding in Lebanon, what the implications are of it. And instead, you're hearing a narrative of that the only ones who were killed were Hezbollah members, which is, which must be quite reassuring for us as Americans. And I think one of the things, as I talked about in the book, this of course fits into a much broader, much broader theme. If we go back to Vietnam, keep in mind, body counts were the key measure for the US military. How are we defeating the insurgency, right? But this was also connected to promotion for both civilians and the military. If you go in and you're doing a search and destroy mission or a pacification mission, and you've killed 200 quote unquote VC, that's great for the company, commander down to the soldiers, how you get promoted. It's how you get your, your R&R, how you get everything up the line. And of course, from the company commander to the general in Saigon to back in the Pentagon, because it's a successful operation. Well, then it turns out that they weren't 200 VC. They were individual villagers. The only way you could justify this action was because you just killed a bunch of villagers and you've claimed that they were all VC. So then you take that and you create an assassination program, the Phoenix program, and you say, we're only going to target the quote unquote vehicle infrastructure. So vehicle infrastructure as the CIA comes with the comes up and you know, they'll have these amazing terms that you'll see repeated again and again and again. All this will sound familiar to, you know, your listeners as you see how it's repeated in different conflict zones. So the Viet Cong infrastructure, the CIA invents, literally invents some number that's based on what they believe are the number of people who were trained. And this is how they describe it. So these are the number of Viet men. So these are the original fighters who fought against the French who go up to the north to be trained from the south and then infiltrated back. And so the idea is, and this was on Great Nathan, there's 54,000. So if we set a goal within two years of eliminating 54,000 members of the VCI, that will crack the insurgency. So lo and behold, they institute this program and they start within the first six months. They are killing, you know, a certain number of individuals. And it looks like they're on track to kill 54,000. And then of course, what you finally get is the revelation. Oh, well, we now realize that we may not have been killing insurgents. And even if we were, it appears that our policies have actually created more than we were killing. So this takes us back to this hole and you will hear this again in Iraq. This is what makes David Petraeus famous and almost a presidential candidate. David Petraeus, the famous general, actually just has a, again, back to the Wall Street Journal, has a new piece in the Wall Street Journal about what we can do to win in Ukraine in which he'll talk about this kind of counterinsurgency math, which is that what you want to do is adopt policies in which you are not creating as many insurgents as your kill. What we're seeing today, quite frankly, whether it's the pager attack or it's the genocide in Gaza and, you know, think about this anywhere at a minimum, we're looking at 21,000 orphans in Gaza. All right, it's 21,000 orphans have been created in Gaza, at least a similar number of children. And these are, you know, children under the age of 16 have been killed. How many new members of Hamas do you think you've created or another organization when you have 17,000 orphans? Exactly. What's the future look like when you have completely devastated this coastal territory, which before was already under 17 years of siege, which 80% of the population are refugees as you as calculate refugees going back to the 1948 Palestine War and the NACMA, the creation of the Palestinian refugee community. So you have 80% of refugees. One of the poorest places on earth, one of the most densely populated and now it's been completely and devastated. So you have that calculus, you have to your point about the pager attacks, followed by the walkie talkie attacks, followed by everything else. How many new insurgents are you creating? Is it in the fivefold and the tenfold? You've already seen, for example, Hezbollah has helped train a number of different militias around the region, including in Iraq and in and the Houthis in Yemen, and Iraq came out and said, we will help the Qatab Hezbollah and Iraq has already said, we will help fill your ranks. We will volunteer to help fill your ranks for whoever was injured in these attacks. I want to point out one last thing, which is, if you take a look at Yemen, as I talk about in the book, and Yemen is such an interesting example, because here's a case where you had the Saudis come to the Obama administration, how much this was a push and how much was a pull is, of course, a discussion. But the Saudis who argue, we can defeat the Houthis in six weeks. That was a war that went on for over seven years, bordering again, in which there were open war crimes that were discussed, bordering on again on a genocide, and the Saudis failed. And that was with full U.S. and British and U.K. support of the Saudi campaign, the Saudis with the United Arab Emirates, several other allies, with the full support of the U.S. and the U.K. And instead, what it did was it turned the Houthis from this ragtag militia into a battle-harmed militia that then became the de facto government, as I talked about earlier, that is now openly challenging the strongest navy in the world. This should tell us something about these conflicts in which they were promised a quick and decisive victory, and instead what it turns into is a long drawn out and ultimately bitter defeat. Well, and just to conclude here, one of the things that struck me when I read and wrote about the Vietnam War is how there's an almost, I think of it as a kind of chain of logic that leads you to think that genocide is necessary, because if you do believe that the war is over once you've killed the enemy and your policies are turning more and more of the population into the enemy, then it's becoming more and more necessary to destroy the population itself. And of course, 3 million people died in the Vietnam War, right? I mean, it is arguably genocidal and its consequences, even if we don't think of it as having the requisite intent or what have you. And it strikes me that Israel's approach towards Palestine is very similar, right? When you create Palestinian resistance, you see that the resistance as a sign of a threat, you have to eliminate the threat. It means you have to eliminate the Palestinians. You create the situation in which you've made your only option, genocidal. And that world of enemies, you know, that phrase, if the world is enemies, you can't win until you destroy the world. The extreme point here, you haven't mentioned that much nuclear weapons, but the threat to the world of if we have this view that we face people who just need to be destroyed, they can't be reasoned with, Putin can't be reasoned with, he has to be met with force, we escalate in response to him, we can't back down, so we have to send the long-range missiles. He escalates, well, then the only option is to continue escalating. This is a nuclear armed state, but we can't back down because no negotiations are possible. I mean, it leads you to this place where you've reasoned your way into creating just horrific destruction. So perhaps you could talk about the threat that this view of the world that we have entrenched in the United States now leads us towards. I think it's a great point and a great question you raised. And as I point out in the book, it's not only how we look at the enemies abroad, but how we look at our own domestic populations. That's one of the things that connects these badlands, how we think about, and again, those trade-offs about war, what aren't we spending this money on? When we look at our own domestic issues, our own inner cities and rural areas, where aren't we spending money? So much of this came together with the COVID pandemic, as I talk about at the end of the book, the fact that the United States, but the greatest military in the world was caught. Unburied after decades of warning about a public health and infrastructure that was weak and needed in huge investments of money, the fact that we responded so poorly to the COVID pandemic should itself lead us to raised questions and said what has led us to more divisiveness over things like masks and vaccines. When we should be asking much deeper questions about that on the destructive one of the issues. And I think that this takes us back. We spend a lot of time on Gaza and Yemen, but you're absolutely right about Ukraine because one of the things that was so striking about Secretary of State Blinken's initial reaction to Russia's invasion was we're not going to negotiate with Russia until the war is over. How do you expect the war to end? And it tells us once you get into that dynamic and the fact that what we've learned is that the US with its allies, particularly the UK, sought to then prevent any kind of negotiated settlement over the next six to nine months, including blocking when almost a month into the war, is remarkable, particularly where we sit today, where Russia actually has not been defeated on the battlefield. It hasn't been defeated by sanctions. It's close. It's tightened ties with China. And so at some point, we need to stop thinking about this from a constant world of threat into a world of cooperation, which that message has not gotten across. It's not going to get across with this book that doesn't seem to have gotten across. Even if you think about whether it's either presidential candidate and remarkably somehow Trump had the less warmongering speech than Kamala Harris did in terms of their acceptances. I think what's also remarkable and I think this also ties when we think about Blinken and tying Blinken from Ukraine to Gaza is this is shortly after October 7th, Blinken, of course, takes part in the Israeli war cabinet. And what hasn't been discussed about that is the following. Why is the US Secretary of State America's top diplomat in the Israeli war cabinet? That's not the place for him, right? That's for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's for the Secretary of Defense. That's not for the Secretary of State. He should be out negotiating a ceasefire. He should be out talking about the escalation. And in fact, we had the opposite. We have him by the end of that first week sending out memos to the State Department saying, we're not going to talk about the escalation. We're not going to talk about a ceasefire. This should tell us something about the militarization of foreign policy. And it's setting us on a path. And this is my concern for whether it is a Trump presidency or Harris presidency. We don't know what a Trump presidency will look like. We keep hearing these warnings about that he's going to be even more unhinged than he was the first term because he has nothing to lose. At the same time, my fear for Harris is we're not hearing from her the things that we should be hearing. Instead, what we're hearing as we've heard in her acceptance speech is a far more talkish approach. Now, that may just be this kind of idea. I have to talk this way for the election. The problem is that I talk about in the book. It's never just for one election because pretty soon we have the midterms and from the midterms, we have reelection. And then it's about my helping my successor. So this we have set ourselves up to your point. We are now tangling with and you can see this inch by inch, if not inch by inches is actually conservative. We are jumping well ahead in Ukraine and attempting now to continue to tangle and embed ourselves in a conflict with Russia, a nuclear armed state without an off ramp. And there have been several off ramps possible, but not one in which we are willing to accept a quote unquote defeat and a Russian victory. And we're seeing the same thing in Gaza. We won't accept anything but a quote unquote full defeat of Hamas, even though we also know that that's not possible, which leads us to more and more endless conflict. And quite frankly, the implications, not just for the globe, but for the populations, the populations there as well as for the broader globe are really profound and they're profound for us at home as well. Well, for background on how we got here and a crucial primer on the last 50 years of American foreign policy, as well as the parallels with American domestic policy and the way the two feed into each other, I hope our listeners and readers pick up Professor Osama Khalil's America's Wars at home and abroad from Kennedy to Biden available from Harvard University Press. Professor Khalil, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today. Thanks, Nathan. My pleasure. The current affairs podcast is a product of current affairs magazine. If you are not subscribed to current affairs magazine, visit current affairs dot org slash subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The current affairs podcast is released regularly every week on patreon.com slash current affairs. Thanks for listening. [Music]
