PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington.
And we pick up our series of interviews with Larry Wilkerson. Thanks again for joining us.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Sure.
JAY: So in '93, Colin Powell retires and you go back to teaching. So pick up the story.
WILKERSON: Let me just back up a little bit and say that the first Gulf War, which of
course was Powell's first we're going to cut it off and then we're going to kill it, with
regard to the Iraqi army, opened my eyes to a certain extent about the Middle East and
about the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf and about Saudi Arabia and others. The
reason we fought that war was not to uphold UN mandates. It was not to prove that the
new world order was going to be established well by George Herbert Walker Bush. It was
to protect oil. The reason we put forces down in the desert early was to keep Saddam Hussein
from turning right and going into Saudi Arabia. We knew if he did, his tanks would roll over
the 82nd Airborne Division we'd put on the ground, but his tanks would be rolling over
US soldiers, and that would be cassus belli for sure. So my eyes began to be opened even
more in this pragmatic way as to why the United States was using force in the world these
days. In this case it was all about oil. Of course, that would come back again in 2003
when we re-invaded Iraq and threw out all kinds of aspersions for reasons to the contrary,
but we still were going back to oil, basically. So this is a continuity, if you will, that
gets established in terms of abusing me of my naivete, what little was left, as to why
the United States in the post-World War II period uses force so often.
JAY: Now, before we pick up the line of the narrative, let's just go back to one thing.
You grew up in a family that voted Republican. When you became of age to vote, you voted
Republican. You had a certain loyalty to the party. As you're getting to this stage and
as you're talking about the reasons for this first Gulf War, what's your thinking in terms
of politics and the Republican Party?
WILKERSON: The Republicans had always been, at least according to my father, and certainly
my belief, too, had always been for individualism, for hard work, for rising because of your
own talents and skills, for merit, for a country full of individualists who could do whatever
they wanted to do. They could be bums, or they could be president of Sears and Roebuck.
That was what my father used to say. And he got real close to being - .
JAY: All a matter of choice.
WILKERSON: Yeah. And he got real close to being president of Sears and Roebuck: vice
president. So I guess I'd have to say at the same time that I was being disabused of my
naivete with regard to the Armed Forces and what the country used them for, I was also
being disabused of my naivete about the Republican Party. Not to say that it hasn't transmogrified
in those years. It has. It's not nearly what it was. My icon in that would be Dwight Eisenhower.
Dwight Eisenhower - . And here again you had a man who merged both worlds, the ultimate
military responsibility with the ultimate civilian responsibility. We don't get those
kind of people very often. Now, here's a man who knew both worlds in a sense that he knew
the bad and the good from both worlds. He once said, according to his granddaughter
Susan Eisenhower, God help the United States if anybody ever sits in the Oval Office who
doesn't understand the military the way I do. This is a man who understood what was
happening to post-World War America, that it was turning into a military-industrial-congressional-dominated
national security state. And the Republicans have cheered that transmogrification - cheered
it. Indeed, they've gained their power, their political power, from helping it, from moving
it in the right direction when it needs to be moved, so that now you have guys like Mitch
McConnell and Darrell Issa and Eric Cantor from Virginia, my state.
JAY: And Kyl.
WILKERSON: And Kyl. They live, breathe, drink, and sleep the military-industrial complex.
They love war, they love this business, because it keeps them in power.
JAY: Now, where were you - what was your thinking during Reagan's days? Here's the ultimate
cold warrior, the ultimate deregulator, and started making major moves in terms of the
US economy, weakening union rights, and other kinds of things. At the time of Reagan, do
you share his vision of the world?
WILKERSON: I think it's fair to say that - I voted for Ronald Reagan both times. I think
it's fair to say that I shared his vision from the perspective of what I've just described
about the old Republican Party - rugged individualism, achieving on your own hard work and your own
merits and your own skill. It wasn't that I was a social - as Colin Powell once said,
I guess I'm a Republican for national security policy, foreign policy, and I'm a Democrat
for social policy. It wasn't that I wasn't from time to time a Democrat for social policy,
that I didn't see that there were a need for government programs, there was a need for
things to help poor people, to help people get a leg up, and so forth. I certainly did
see that. But I saw Reagan as coming after the Vietnam malaise, if you will, and particularly
after the immediate problem with the Carter presidency and the 444 days with our hostages
in Iran and so forth and sort of resurrecting the country. It was only later when I began
as an academic to study his presidential decision-making that I began to understand that he probably
of all the presidents was the one who started the most accelerated movement away from what
were the traditional political and cultural values of America, especially economically,
but at the same time masquerading it as or covering it, camouflaging it as a return to
the shining city on the hill and a return to previous values and so forth, which it
was anything but. I mean, just eliminating the regulation that he eliminated, leading
to what Clinton did in his eight years, where Bob Rubin was his most important player and
his most powerful player, both as secretary of the Treasury and head of the National Economic
Council, we essentially emasculated all the things that had been put in place prewar and
postwar in order to protect us from what I call predatory capitalism or the kind of capitalism
that runs amok and produces, as you and I were talking earlier, sociopaths. That's what
we've got today, and we're in a mess because of it. So my view, obviously, of Ronald Reagan
is quite different today as an academic studying his decision-making than it was at the time
when I voted for him.
JAY: Alright. Take us back. Ninety-three, Colin Powell retires and you go back to teaching.
And bring us up from there to when you go back in again.
WILKERSON: Well, I went to the Marine War College and taught there for four years. And
we went through the Balkans, we went through Kosovo, we went through the end of Somalia,
and so forth. So we got some real insights into - from serving marine and other officers
coming into my seminars, the continued use by America of military force. We often commented
that we were using the military, the Armed Forces more often in the post-Cold War than
we did during the Cold War. And was that all because of the relaxation of there not being
a superpower opponent out there? Or was it because the United States really was turning
into a national security state that increasingly turned to the only element of its bureaucracy
that it seemed to get to work for it, and that was the Armed Forces? I think it was
a mixed answer at that time. It's later, when I joined Powell at the State Department and
see Bush-Cheney up close, Rumsfeld up close, that I begin to understand that indeed we
have turned into a national security state. We do function for that national security
state, for its interest, and the old federal democratic republic is dying. What we have
today is not what we thought we would have post-World War II as we tried to design an
apparatus to deal with the immense power we'd accumulated as a result of World War II.
JAY: But you don't come to these conclusions by the end of the '90s like the way you're
articulating now.
WILKERSON: No, this is a slow - I'm a slow learner. This is a slow-growth process. It
takes a very vivid look inside the Cheney-Bush administration to understand that decision-making
had taken on a new tone and tint, if you will, with the Bushes, a tone and tint that President
Obama has to some extent erased. But the basic structure is still there and the basic reason
for operating the way we do is still there. We're in four wars today. We're in Afghanistan,
we're in Iraq, we're in the so-called global war on terror (and don't believe that's over;
we're still fighting in certain countries), and we were in Libya. And my God, we could
be in Syria tomorrow and Iran next week. This is crazy. This is what we do today. We do
war. And increasingly we do it with less than 1 percent of the population, less than 1 percent.
This is unconscionable. George Washington would not claim us today.
JAY: Okay. In the next segment of the interview, let's talk about the day you get a call from
Colin Powell. He says, I'm going to be the next secretary of state; come work for me.
And please join us for the next segment of our interview on The Real News Network.