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EDDY MORETTI: Hi, I'm Eddy Moretti.
Welcome to the Vice podcast.
My guest today is Reihan Salam from the National Review.
And we're going to talk about a couple things, mainly Iraq
and the anniversary of Iraq, and then your thoughts on
where we're at with the gun debate in the country.
And we're going to proudly self-promote for a second--
not shamelessly self-promote.
We have a new episode of our Vice show on HBO.
And we did segments on each of these issues.
And you've seen them.
So I'd like to get your reaction to them.
The anniversary of Iraq was this March.
We knew we wanted to do something to commemorate it or
to reflect on it.
And Jason and Shane had been doing some digging and came
upon this story in almost an anecdotal kind of reporting on
the rise of birth defects amongst Iraqi populations.
So they went over there, and they did this report.
I just wanted to gauge your feeling on the story, and if
you've ever come across this kind of reporting before.
REIHAN SALAM: I thought the report did a very good job of
introducing some of the stories that
have emerged in Iraq.
And I think that it also did a good job of acknowledging the
uncertainties surrounding these birth defects.
I think that it's very, very hard to determine precise
causality in this case.
And it's also very hard to see what actually had been the
rate of birth defects prior to the invasion
and what have you.
Could it be that we're actually doing a better job of
identifying these phenomena?
It's really, really tough.
What we do know--
and I think this is a larger issue about the
anniversary of Iraq--
is that for Americans, Iraq was something that happened by
and large very far away.
There was a number of military personnel and military
families who've been directly impacted by it.
But for most of us, it was over a decade during which
there wasn't this immediate, visceral kind of connection.
And so the fact that combat troops have left Iraq leaves
us thinking, well, that was an episode of American history
that is now over.
I think of it is as akin to agriculture.
There was a time when 70% of Americans worked in
agriculture just to feed the entire population.
Now it's a little bit less than 2%.
Similarly, if you think about the Second World War--
when we went out into the world to change the world, to
do terrible violence to other places--
justified or not--
it actually involved an enormous number of people.
Whereas now, it involves this much smaller number of people.
And frankly, it involves machines.
It's this very specialized activity.
And so I think that when you think about it that way--
or you think about drone strikes, for example-- you
could think of it as the cost of doing violence in faraway
places has plummeted.
So when the cost of anything plummets-- it's like if the
cost of crack *** is lower.
You do more of it.
EDDY MORETTI: You mean the human cost?
Or in real dollar--
REIHAN SALAM: Just the simple--
exactly.
The simple economic cost.
If the only way we could have conquered Saddam Hussein's
Iraq was by conscripting the sons and daughters of the
American elite--
if the only way we could have done that was by spending
staggering amounts of money-- we did it basically with one
hand tied behind our back.
It was something that was not very visible on the home front
for folks who were not related to military families.
EDDY MORETTI: We didn't feel it in a personal way unless we
had a family member in the military.
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly.
And I think that the beauty of this report is that it's
saying that actually, this thing that was marginal for
Americans--
this thing that connected with a handful of people but not
really the bulk of people--
is the whole story of Iraq.
Every single life in that country has
been touched by it.
And actually now, you and I probably both know people who
are Iraqi refugees.
For example, who wound up in Syria, Jordan-- some of whom
have wound up in the United States.
EDDY MORETTI: Millions, estimated.
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And the huge number of displaced within that country.
And the idea that there are going to be reverberations
from this war.
So obviously, you have birth defects.
And that's going to impact the lives of these kids for many
decades to come.
But also, there are going to be larger political,
historical reverberations.
And we don't really understand all of them, but it goes to
Shane's central point in that piece.
Which is when you go to war, it's never going to unfold
exactly as you expect.
And I think that has some obvious implications-- like
just don't do it.
It also has some funny implications, like what was
the alternative?
What were the counterfactuals?
How else might things have turned out?
EDDY MORETTI: Right.
Which is something that you wrote about recently--
the counterfactuals--
in your piece in "The Nation," you talked about--
REIHAN SALAM: In the "National Review."
EDDY MORETTI: Sorry, "National Review." Not "The Nation"--
big distinction, readers, listeners, viewers.
So in that piece, you talked about looking at the
counterfactuals to make an assessment on the historical
outcome of the war.
And you argued the O'Sullivan--
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah, Meghan O'Sullivan.
EDDY MORETTI: Meghan O'Sullivan, yeah--
that not doing something in Iraq could have had another
set of consequences that we should look at soberly in
order to assess the success of the invasion or not.
Why don't you explain to us what you wrote in that piece?
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah, I think that Meghan O'Sullivan is a
really fascinating person.
She was the Deputy National Security Advisor, and she was
in charge of Iraq and
Afghanistan, among other things.
And one of the things that she talks about is that when we're
assessing the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Iraq, we
tend to think about this counterfactual image-- well,
we could have just not gone.
And then things would have been basically the way they
were before.
And we would have contained Saddam Hussein, and that
would've been fine.
And the region would have been kind of ***, the way that
it has been, but not dramatically more so.
So basically, we unleashed this crazy whirlwind of
violence and destruction for basically no reason.
So that's one way to think about it.
And another way to think about it-- and
again, I have no idea.
No one can know.
But another possibility is that Saddam's regime was
actually quite vulnerable in a lot of ways.
But it was also quite violent and destructive.
So one scenario that she lays out, and others have laid out,
is that the sanctions were already slowly crumbling.
And had the sanctions continued to crumble, had he
kept relentlessly pursuing weapons of mass destruction,
perhaps he would have once again broken out of his cage.
EDDY MORETTI: Is that a fact?
I just don't know.
I remember hearing--
and I remember Clinton being really criticized by the left
that these sanctions are destroying this country and
killing people and depriving them of medicine.
REIHAN SALAM: Causing starvation.
EDDY MORETTI: Causing starvation, et cetera.
And also unleashing terrible backlashes amongst the
Ba'athists in the country.
Because the no-fly zones irritated them in terms of
their interaction with the Kurds in the north.
And they were doing things on the ground that the no-fly
zone couldn't really prevent.
So it's news to me that the sanctions were crumbling.
REIHAN SALAM: It's a very complicated story, but
basically, by the time you get around to 2000, there is a
view-- a correct view, in my view--
that sanctions tend to actually strengthen the
regimes that are targeted.
EDDY MORETTI: Make them more surreptitious with their
pursuit of weapons?
REIHAN SALAM: That's one possibility.
But another thing is that basically, when you don't have
lots of channels coming into a country-- like when you don't
have lots of private economic transactions--
then basically the government has the chokehold.
So if you narrow the volume of transactions
coming to the country--
so in a way, in Iran, for example, we have these super
tight sanctions against Iran that have gotten a lot tighter
in recent years.
So what's happened is that the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps--
they've actually profited from the super tight sanctions.
Because basically, they're the ones who
could be blockade runners.
They can break the sanctions.
They're the ones who control the supply of valuable stuff
coming into the country when you're not actually having an
open, transparent trading system.
EDDY MORETTI: And then one step further would be looking
at North Korea.
Same situation, even tighter sanctions, even more
transactions
REIHAN SALAM: And that doesn't necessarily mean that
sanctions are always the wrong thing to do.
Usually we deploy sanctions because it's an alternative to
armed intervention.
So in that sense, it could be that well,
it's better than that.
Or maybe if they're sufficiently tight, maybe you
even actually undermine the regime in some of these ways.
You certainly undermine its legitimacy.
But it's also an argument people made about Cuba.
And the idea is that all we do by tightening these
sanctions--
by having these stiff US sanctions--
is actually increased the legitimacy
of the Cuban regime.
Because they can just say, well actually the fact that
you have a terrible life is not our fault.
It's the fault of these US sanctions, et cetera.
So I think there were people, by the time you get to 2000,
2001, before the 9/11 terror attacks who were like, these
sanctions are actually just strengthening Saddam.
And Saddam was the one who was actually using them
as a kind of weapon.
Because when he controls the food supply, he controls the
population.
So I think that there were actually, frankly legitimate
arguments about why you'd want to undermine those sanctions.
EDDY MORETTI: Where is the Republican
Party on that issue?
Where would they come out?
REIHAN SALAM: Well, I think that, again, you're talking
about the late '90s, 2000, and I think that there were
cross-cutting tendencies.
So you had one tendency--
late in the Clinton administration, you had a lot
of Democrats and Republicans who worked together on this
Iraq Liberation Act.
The idea is that we should continue working towards
overthrowing the Ba'athists.
EDDY MORETTI: This is the neocon--
REIHAN SALAM: It wasn't just neocons.
It was actually a broader coalition of people.
EDDY MORETTI: Birthed there, maybe, first?
Or not?
REIHAN SALAM: Well, the term "neocon" to me is not a super
useful one, just partly because it means so many
different things to different people.
But definitely hawkish people, yeah.
EDDY MORETTI: But those guys, Wolfowitz--
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah, exactly.
Sure, sure, sure.
Wolfowitz is someone who's been very invested in Saddam
Hussein being a terrible person for a long, long time.
EDDY MORETTI: Yeah-- and intervention as the--
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly.
And obviously, Saddam Hussein was someone who was at various
points embraced by right and left.
People never fully understood who and what he was when he
was fighting against the Iranians.
So that's a separate issue.
But basically among Republicans during that late
'90s, early 2000s period, you had some people--
again, before 9/11--
who were very committed to the idea that Saddam ought to be
overthrown.
And it's actually this grave injustice that
he's still in power.
But then you also had people in the oil and gas world who
were saying, well, wait a second.
These sanctions, all they mean is that we don't have this
country that could be an alternative to Saudi Arabia
that can actually increase global oil supplies.
So there were a lot of these establishment types who were
like, look, is this realistic?
Do we need smarter sanctions that are not as tight on Iraq?
So I think that it was both Democrats and Republicans who
were swirling around these sets of questions.
Like does this actually make sense?
Is Saddam as dangerous as we think he is?
And I think that--
so the counterfactual scenario is that, well, let's imagine
those sanctions actually did deteriorate over time.
And then Saddam--
let's say he remained as determined as ever.
Partly because he was living in a dangerous neighborhood.
The thing that we've realized is that even people in his
regime believed that he had more weapons than he did.
EDDY MORETTI: WMD, right.
REIHAN SALAM: And also the Iranians--
if the Iranians knew that he was as vulnerable as he was,
who knows how that geopolitical
tinderbox would look?
So there are all kinds of things we can't really know.
And that could've led to pretty awful scenarios.
EDDY MORETTI: And then I want to go back to the fact
that we did go in.
So that's the counterfactual to the counterfactuals.
And talk again about--
REIHAN SALAM: The factual.
EDDY MORETTI: Yeah, the factuals, and the potential
factuals of these people suffering and what we should
do about it.
But just staying on sanctions for a second, because it's so
important right now in terms of how we deal with Iran and
North Korea.
Where are American conservatives--
which includes the GOP, but doesn't necessarily
include them all--
where is the conservative movement on
the issue of sanctions?
The interventionism.
REIHAN SALAM: It's a really good question right now,
because there's actually a big debate going on among
Republicans about sanctions and intervention more broadly.
So in a way, you could think of sanctions as a lighter
version of intervention.
So basically, we go in guns blazing.
Super expensive, difficult, very visible, military
personnel, military families experience it.
EDDY MORETTI: Bloody.
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And even, just to think about it crudely--
it's expensive.
Whereas when you think about sanctions, to a lot of people,
well, sanctions-- whatever.
We're not actually activating this big constituency.
You might have anti-war marches.
You're not going to have anti-sanctions marches.
So I think if you're a policy maker, you're like, that's
actually an option that's potentially very attractive
compared to big, expensive, and politically fraught armed
interventions.
But again, going back to the drone things.
The thing is that when you make something cheaper, you
make people more likely to use them.
You make them more likely to use them willy-nilly, even if
it actually leads to all kinds of blowback and destructive
consequences on its own.
So you now have people like Rand Paul and Ron Paul, who
are saying that not only are we anti-interventionists, but
we actually think that sanctions are generally not
the right way to go.
Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich just co-founded this little
thing called the Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which is
a new think tank that is just an anti-intervention,
anti-sanctions think tank.
And the whole idea is that the best way to advance peace is
through free and open trade.
That's what we want to do.
And so that view I think has gained some currency on the
right in recent years.
But then you have other people were saying that look, the
United States has a huge amount of economic
weight in the world.
We have a huge amount of power.
And we have a responsibility to protect the global commons.
And so when there are these countries other that are bad
actors, that are undermining global peace and security, we
need to do whatever it is we can.
Sanctions, if that's going to work.
Armed intervention, if that's what we need to do.
EDDY MORETTI: So you know the movement better than I do.
What's the potential future of this non-interventionist,
sanctions light strain.
Does it have a future?
REIHAN SALAM: I think it definitely has a future.
I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
But the reason I think it has a future is this--
I think that Americans really vacillate between being hyper
aggressive and like, we're going to go out there and just
remake the world in our image.
And then pivoting super hard in the other direction.
So I think that, in a way, when you think about 9/11, it
led to this period of about a decade of intense engagement
with the wider world, and that engagement through the form of
armed violence.
And then you think now, we're living with the consequence of
these military veterans coming back who are profoundly
disabled, who are struggling in all kinds of ways.
This is something we're going to live with
for decades and decades.
EDDY MORETTI: Yeah, and I don't think the country has
really come to face the challenges with the vet
population off the heels of these two wars, with the
prescription drug abuse or the psychological, the PTSD.
REIHAN SALAM: Well, yes and no.
I think that you're right, that actually we haven't fully
faced up to what are the long-term costs.
And people don't really think about it.
But I think that in these communities, at a gut level,
voters are like, wow.
We are not going to do that again.
We are not going to do that again,
certainly for a long time.
But then when you forget--
and I think that's what we're great at.
Americans are great at forgetting.
So then a few years pass, and then we forget.
And then suddenly, we learn again that, wow, not only is
the world a dangerous place, but that danger
can touch us directly.
And that doesn't necessarily mean that the reaction of
like, let's go invade another country.
That doesn't mean that reaction is right.
But in a way you'd hope that we'd hit some more mature,
sober equilibrium in the middle.
EDDY MORETTI: Great.
So that's my moment to jam Obama into this convo.
So what's your assessment of the Obama
doctrine on foreign policy?
Is he demonstrating a reaction to the intervention of the
Iraq invasion?
Or is he a mature response?
REIHAN SALAM: I think that it's fundamentally such a hard
job that I'm not inclined to be like, he's terrible, blah,
blah, blah.
And I also felt the same way about the previous President,
when you think about the scale of the challenges.
My own view is that the Obama foreign policy
has been really myopic.
And I think that it's been really
problematic in lots of ways.
But I think that it actually makes a lot of sense from a
different perspective.
It makes sense from this perspective.
If you're President Obama, and you're like, I am embroiled in
these huge conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I want to get out of them.
My core priority is domestic.
The country faces huge fiscal challenges.
And I basically just want to do the bare minimum of what I
have to do for it to not blow up in my face.
So when you think about Libya, for example.
Libya was a case where Britain and France were super
aggressive, and they went way out ahead.
And then the Obama administration was like,
either we're going to abandon them, or we're going to
basically do the bare minimum of what we have to do to keep
tabs, keep control of the situation.
And then Libya is in complete turmoil, and we're not going
to get more deeply involved.
EDDY MORETTI: No boots on the ground.
We're in a support role.
He got really criticized for that, though.
He got criticized for leading from behind.
REIHAN SALAM: He got criticized from both angles.
He got criticized by some people in the Paul wing and
other anti-interventionists who were like, don't even get
involved at all.
This is just a complete mess, and the more involved you are,
the worse it'll be.
And he also was criticized for, if you're going to be
involved, you want to be involved in a bigger way.
And Syria is another great case.
EDDY MORETTI: Which I wanted to get to.
REIHAN SALAM: So Syria is interesting, because Syria is
like, OK, we were in Iraq.
It was totally *** up.
And it actually got really bad.
And so that's a sign of like, let's just not get involved.
But here's the thing--
in a country where we are not involved at all, or involved
in a very minimal way, it's still massively screwed up.
You have massive sectarian conflict that threatens to
spill across borders.
EDDY MORETTI: And a lot of people dying.
A lot.
REIHAN SALAM: Staggering number of people dying, and
obviously you guys had a program devoted to this, child
soldiers and what have you.
So the thing is that whether we're involved in this
thoroughgoing way or not, there are these conflicts
within countries that are spilling over, that are
causing massive problems.
And so the question is do we have some responsibility?
Because here's the thing--
Americans are like, we're responsible.
So that's why we should do something.
But for example with Iraq, there are many people who are
like, we shouldn't have gone in in the first place.
That's why we should just get out.
But another coherent view is that we shouldn't have gone in
in the first place, but wow.
We have this responsibility now that we're there to not
make it worse.
It's a very tricky thing, our attitude of when does a
responsibility begin and where does it end?
I think that the Obama administration has struggled
with this question.
EDDY MORETTI: So our story on the toxic aftereffects of the
invasion is a case in point.
If it's true, what is our responsibility?
What is the country's
responsibility in the aftermath?
REIHAN SALAM: I think that in my ideal world-- and I'm way,
way out of the political mainstream on this issue.
I personally think I would have wanted to have a larger
American presence in Iraq even now.
So one thing is that we didn't wind up negotiating a status
of forces agreement that would have kept a substantial number
of US military personnel in Iraq.
Now, this is a crazy view, right?
Because everyone is like, we want to wash our hands of
Iraq, period.
But it's not just that.
I think that I wish that we had kept military
personnel in Iraq.
And also that we were more involved in where the
country's going.
EDDY MORETTI: But that idea has some mainstream support.
Isn't that McCain's position?
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah, but McCain is, himself, an outlier on
this stuff.
EDDY MORETTI: He keeps inserting himself as the
mainstream of the GOP, but is he just fighting
to be at the middle?
REIHAN SALAM: I think most Republicans in the country are
just like Democrats-- just exhausted and want to wash
their hands of Iraq.
But to me, the military thing is actually not
the big piece, though.
The bigger piece is that actually, Americans should be
more engaged in Iraq in the future.
And I think that it's one of the things like after the
Afghan civil war--
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, what we thought
was the end of the Afghan civil war--
we were like, OK, cool.
The Soviet Union has collapsed.
Let's get out of here.
And it's totally fine now.
And oh wow, that's actually not quite true.
Now, that doesn't mean having a huge number of people there.
But it means, again, what I said before.
Americans are great at forgetting.
I wish we were little bit less good at forgetting, and a
little bit better at thinking, this is a place that is
enmeshed with us whether we like it or not.
Iraq and America-- we might want to wash our hands of it.
But just as those refugees, and those refugees whose lives
were deeply torn apart and traumatized by the United
States-- they are not going to forget us.
So when we forget them, it's not a two-way street.
And so my feeling is that part of this means that I think
that we want our civil society to be engaged in Iraq.
We want American scientists and public health folks and
these people to actually continue to be involved with
what's going on.
Now, the thing is that the Iraqis want to wash their
hands of us, too, as difficult as that is.
So that's why they didn't want American
military personnel there.
Fair enough.
But they also don't necessarily want Americans to
be kind of constantly in their face and constantly present.
So on some level, I think that many of them want to--
we're going to deal with this on our own.
And we're going to nurse these resentments, which are totally
valid-- totally legitimate in a lot of respects.
And so there's a standoff.
This thing that I think some Americans thought of as gosh,
we made these huge sacrifices for you guys.
They don't think of it-- some of them think of it that way.
But not all of them think about it that way, certainly.
So there's this deep resentment that's built up
between these two societies.
And that partly is a function of that isolation we have from
each other.
EDDY MORETTI: Which is, bad considering that Nouri
al-Maliki is close to the Iranian regime in some ways.
And does that present a real problem for us going forward?
Where does that relationship go?
REIHAN SALAM: Well, that's a really
fascinating authority question.
So it's true that Iran has a lot of influence in Iraq.
But there's also this nationalist resistance to
excessive Iranian power in Iraq, too.
Part of it--
remember that Iraq and Iran fought a bloody, brutal war in
which millions died for a decade.
And including among some Shia Iraqis, too, there's this
distrust of Iran and wanting to be controlled by Iran.
So there's that.
But look--
if Americans believed that a free and democratic Iraq was
going to be an ally of the United States, I think that
those hopes and expectations have been massively
disappointed.
And I think that doesn't necessarily mean that Iraq is
simply an Iranian cat's paw, simply an Iranian ally.
But it does mean that Iraq continues to be up for grabs.
And also, internally, you have an upsurge in violence.
You have this Sunni minority that continues to be very
resistant to the Maliki government.
You have Iraqi Kurdistan that's like, look, we want to
insulate ourselves from this chaos.
And of course they do!
EDDY MORETTI: And they've been doing a fairly
successful job of that.
It's a different country up there.
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly, exactly.
And there's been a lot of progress.
So I think that this is a country that continues to be
incredibly fragile, in which there was some progress in
establishing certain kinds of democratic norms.
And I think you see backsliding all the time.
And I think from a US geopolitical perspective,
Iraqi oil production is increasing.
EDDY MORETTI: Are we making money there?
Are those Chinese leases or American leases?
REIHAN SALAM: It's a mixed bag.
I think that the security situation is still not where
you'd want it to be for it to be a huge, huge contributor.
But that is steadily going up.
And I think the Chinese point you make is a really, really
good and important one.
Because basically, we had this era in which the United States
and the Soviets were competing for influence
in the Middle East.
And then the Soviet influence collapses.
And now you're once again coming to a point where
there's this bipolar situation, because the Chinese
obviously are going to want to secure oil and
gas supplies as well.
That's something that's crucial for their growth and
flourishing.
And so they're increasingly trying to flex their muscles.
And a society like Iraq that is, in a sense, up for grabs
is a society that Americans and Chinese are going to vie
for in terms of influence and much else.
So I think that it's very uncertain.
EDDY MORETTI: It's a wash, it seems, in terms of any
economic, long-term benefit to the United States, in terms of
the cynical view that we went in for oil.
REIHAN SALAM: I'd say that at best, it's a wash.
At best it's a wash, because you also have to consider-- so
we were talking about counterfactuals before.
The other counterfactual is if we spend--
you'd see many different estimates.
But something on the order of $3 trillion.
Not just Iraq, but post 9/11, on this Homeland Security,
invading these countries-- everything else.
We could've spent that money on a lot of other stuff.
Had we spent that money on making friends, air dropping
cash in the Middle East, and adopting babies.
And just generally being very friendly.
Who knows.
EDDY MORETTI: Not Russian babies, but yeah.
Everyone else's babies.
REIHAN SALAM: Or if we invested that money in
building a series of incredibly powerful cyborg
police officers who would keep our streets completely safe.
Whatever.
There are all kinds of things we could have done.
So you always have to think in terms of the foregone
resources, and also the number of people who died,
both here and there.
Think about the number of Iraqi civilian casualties.
I don't mean to be schmaltzy, but fundamentally, how many of
these young people would have grown up to be incredibly
talented, brilliant, creative people who would have done
great things?
And the same for the American military personnel who died.
It is possible that there will be some modest benefit that
will derive from Iraqi oil production increasing.
But of course, if you're Ron Paul or Rand Paul, you'll say,
well yeah, we could've also just eased the sanctions on
the previous regime.
And that would've undermined the authoritarian regime of
Saddam Hussein.
And the truth is that there are lots of strong arguments
on all sides of these questions.
What we do know, and what bothers me a little bit, is I
think people are very lazy in thinking about
what happened in Iraq.
EDDY MORETTI: Which people?
Who?
REIHAN SALAM: Everyone.
All of us.
Americans are lazy in thinking about it, because there's this
fear that had do we not done it, then things
would have been rad.
And I think that the thing is that Syria is the story.
Because Syria's a situation where we didn't go in, and
guess what?
Things aren't actually awesome at all.
Things are scary and horrible.
So you could say that the foolish thing that the United
States did is we increased our exposure to the societies that
are just tribal.
I don't mean to go for these cliches, but that just have
these intense historical resentments.
And so in a way we were like, hey, let's go in there in the
middle of these intense historical resentments and
just try to do our best to fix it.
So maybe you could say that at least with Syria, we're not
trying to get in the middle of it.
But these things are going to affect our
lives no matter what.
EDDY MORETTI: But the line has been drawn by
America now, by Obama.
It needs to be a clear and imminent threat to our
existence or our national interests in
order to use force.
REIHAN SALAM: Well, that's not quite right.
Libya was an example where it certainly was a clear and
imminent threat, but I think that that's the general
orientation.
You want to move in that direction.
I mean we intervene in all kinds of places.
Again, because the cost is lower.
But I think that certainly, the idea is
let's not just go wherever.
Let's be very cautious about that.
And that, in a way, is going back to what we used to call
the Weinberger doctrine under Reagan,
or the Powell doctrine.
The idea that you want to go in with overwhelming force.
You want to have an exit strategy, et cetera.
EDDY MORETTI: Which sounds responsible.
REIHAN SALAM: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
So what I want to get across is that there are a lot of
these cases that aren't very clear cut.
So if you have a situation where it's not quite worth it
for us to invade this country and occupy it and do all these
other things, but it might be worth it for us to send a
bunch of drones and vaporize people from the sky.
So that's actually what our policy
makers are dealing with.
They're dealing with that middle zone.
Because frankly, it's almost never to
go in and send bodies.
Just because it's expensive, because it's traumatic,
everything else.
And that middle zone doesn't make sense for us to mess with
it on some other level.
And that's exactly what we're talking about with Syria.
We're talking about arming the Syrian opposition and all this
other stuff.
Now, the problem is that we have this fantasy that we can
do that antiseptically.
All we have to do is beep, boop, bop, with a video game,
and just do that.
And that's not going to have blowback and consequences.
And then there's also the fantasy that if we do nothing,
that it won't actually touch our lives.
EDDY MORETTI: Yeah.
It's incredibly difficult to make a
move and make a decision.
REIHAN SALAM: Think about Bin Laden.
Think about the 9/11 terror attacks.
In a way, the whole point was Bin Laden had problems with
the Saudi government, the government in Egypt, these
other authoritarian governments where he was like,
these governments are corrupt and un-Islamic.
And these governments are backed by the United States.
So what we could do is we could attack Riyadh, or we
could attack Cairo, and attack these governments.
Or we could attack what he called "the far enemy."
So in a way, the United States, we were thinking, hey,
we're just going along to get along.
We're friends with the Saudis because we want oil,
basically, and like, whatever.
And the Egyptians--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
REIHAN SALAM: They're at peace with
Israel, so let's whatever.
We did that in 1979.
So we're just trying to be chill and keep these things
stable and whatever.
And then suddenly Bin Laden is like, actually, your desire to
stick with the status quo means that I'm
going to attack you.
So I think that in a way, we can get drawn into these
things because we're already so deeply
enmeshed in so many ways.
EDDY MORETTI: So I'm going to say something that maybe is
controversial.
Did 9/11--
did the invasion of Iraq actually
lead to the Arab Spring?
REIHAN SALAM: I think that they are related to each other
in complicated ways.
So I think that one view is that it has
nothing to do with it.
If anything, the invasion of Iraq actually made things
worse, because it discredited democracy.
That's one view, that actually, absolutely didn't
make anything better, et cetera.
Another view is that, seeing elections in
Iraq, seeing open--
which, again--
EDDY MORETTI: Well, seeing the deposition of a dictator.
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah, absolutely.
I think that to some degree, that might have been
empowering, to see--
but there are other dimensions, too.
If you look at these countries in the Gulf that are
incredibly rich, urban, becoming world leaders, there
are a ton of Egyptians and Tunisians and other Arabs who
are working in those societies who are like, the world has
more possibilities.
The kind of *** that we have to deal with in Egypt
right now, we don't necessarily have to deal with.
So I think that the Iraq invasion was one thing.
But then also, these other cultural and economic
developments were another thing that contributed to it.
So there's a lot going on.
EDDY MORETTI: I read something really remarkable about the
Egyptian revolution, that it was in part a meme on the
internet in Egypt before the revolution that was launched
by an analysis of Google Maps images.
Where they saw the country from space and could see the
compounds held by Mubarak and his cohorts in relationship to
the *** neighborhoods that they had to live in.
And that helped contribute to the revolutionary
consciousness.
REIHAN SALAM: I think that there's
definitely a lot to that.
There's another thing, to take it away from the Arab Spring.
In Myanmar, where you have this junta that has been very
solidly entrenched for a very long time.
They've just dramatically opened up.
And so one question is, why did that happen?
I spoke to a friend who's a correspondent who's been
covering Southeast Asia since the mid '80s.
And what she told me--
who knows.
But what she said is that actually, the Iraq invasion
had a profound effect on a lot of the folks in
the military regime.
And their view is that we're more vulnerable than we think.
And we actually want to head off
something along these lines.
So when there was external pressure--
Now, by the way, I want to emphasize, that does not
justify anything.
The fact that it might've led--
EDDY MORETTI: We're just talking here,
bouncing ideas around.
REIHAN SALAM: But I think that it's important
to underline that.
Because I think that whenever you suggest that the Iraq
invasion might have had not just bad consequences, but
somewhat good consequences, I think people flip out.
EDDY MORETTI: They do flip out.
I don't flip out, but they do.
REIHAN SALAM: I think that's to your credit.
But I think that fundamentally, we need to
understand it's this very deep thing.
Good things and bad things come wrapped in these packages
all the time.
And that's why foreign policy is such a struggle.
EDDY MORETTI: You have to accept it as being
dialectical.
Otherwise, you're going to be paralyzed.
We could talk about this forever and ever.
I guess let's put a pin on this Iraq conversation.
In the notion that--
do you think, pulling back and getting the bigger historical
narrative, that history is actually going to corroborate
what Bush said about the war?
That history will be the final judge.
REIHAN SALAM: I think that if Iraq is a flourishing and
stable democracy 20 years from now, I think that then, people
will say, that was miserable and horrible, but it was
ultimately worth it.
And I personally think that that is not
the likeliest outcome.
So I guess my answer is no.
But when you think about some of the countries that are the
richest, most successful democracies the world.
Think about a country like South Korea.
This is a country that faced grinding, miserable poverty.
There were people on the verge of starvation.
This was a society that was just absolutely and utterly
devastated.
And then went for a long period of authoritarian rule.
And then came out of it in incredibly strong shape.
And it's interesting when you think about how different
societies deal with that kind of collective trauma.
So I don't discount the possibility that Iraq could
get through this very difficult and ugly transition
in relatively good shape.
But I think that the headwinds are just against them so hard,
in the region and what have you.
So I think that fundamentally, what George W. Bush believed--
and I think what a lot of people who favored the Iraq
invasion, myself included-- believed, is that the idea
that democracy is only suited to some
countries is totally wrong.
The Arab world, once they're given an opportunity-- once
the Iraqis are given an opportunity, it will take.
And these will become modern, flourishing societies, just
like those in East Asia and elsewhere.
And I think that it's just--
if you go into the situation with deep, historical
ignorance, that doesn't mean that actually, democracy is
not possible.
Absolutely not.
I think it is very much possible.
But democracy is one thing.
And there are a million other things that you need to make a
society work and to build that civil peace that's the
foundation of prosperity and much else.
So my verdict is pessimistic.
EDDY MORETTI: And then just one last question.
Then we'll move on.
Is John Kerry's appointment going to signal a different
attitude towards post-war Iraq?
Or does it really matter at all?
REIHAN SALAM: It's a good question, because I think is
that Hillary Clinton was insanely good at certain
aspects of being Secretary of State.
Certainly, being a voice for the United States.
Her skills with public diplomacy were incredible.
She had enormous credibility.
And she was a very formidable person.
EDDY MORETTI: She was liked.
REIHAN SALAM: Incredibly well-liked, yeah.
And I think that Kerry is someone who--
I don't necessarily share his instincts on
all kinds of issues.
But he's been deeply enmeshed in these questions.
He has incredibly strong relationships with heads of
foreign governments and what have you.
And he is obviously deeply interested in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
So I think it's hard to tell.
Fundamentally, the Obama administration is just not as
engaged in Iraq as it might be, for all kinds of totally
fair reasons.
Except I think Syria is kind of dragging them back in,
partly because those countries are deeply intertwined.
And so I can't really say.
I think it's less Kerry's appointment and more the fact
that Syria is a bigger deal that will make the difference.
Because I imagine Hillary Clinton would have had to have
adapted to that circumstance as well.
EDDY MORETTI: We could really talk about
this forever and ever.
Well, let's turn to the gun debate and gun control
legislation.
What happened?
It got knocked down.
REIHAN SALAM: Yeah.
It was actually a very interesting development.
Because basically, it was a perfect storm.
This was the best case scenario for some kind of gun
legislation to pass.
Because the people-- so we're all talking about this
amendment, the Manchin-Toomey amendment to this larger
legislation effort.
And Manchin is a Democrat, but a very conservative Democrat
from West Virginia, which is a state that loves its guns.
So if you're a Republican or a Democrat from that state,
you're going to feel very strongly about gun rights.
And he absolutely does.
And he's someone who's known for making common cause with
Republicans on any number of issues.
And then Pat Toomey, the Senator from Pennsylvania, who
was a Tea Party stalwart, hardcore conservative.
He was the president of the anti-tax Club for Growth.
He has very strong credibility as a conservative but also on
gun rights.
And so they came together, and they were like, look.
President Obama wanted to do all kinds of things.
He wanted to ban certain assault rifles.
He wanted to ban high capacity magazines.
He wanted greatly expanded background checks.
Now, expanded background checks are very popular.
Like you've got over 80% of the population that wants
background checks.
So Manchin and Toomey were like, no assault weapons ban.
No ban on high capacity magazines.
EDDY MORETTI: Reduce the scope of the legislation.
REIHAN SALAM: Let's just focus on expanded background checks.
And not even universal-- not even close to universal
background checks.
Let's just have background checks that are expanded a
little bit for commercial transactions.
So if Eddy wanted to sell a gun to his daughter, for
example, you still wouldn't have to go through this
background check.
So that's still going to happen.
And they also very intelligently said, well,
we're not just going to expand background checks.
We're going to do some things that are actually
good for gun owners.
So basically, because we have very different gun laws, state
to state, if you're traveling from one jurisdiction to
another in the United States, sometimes you can run into
serious problems.
So even if you're like, I'm at the airport.
I'm checking in my hand gun.
I'm totally doing this in a totally legit, aboveboard way,
I could still have a situation where I got
bumped for my flight.
I'm sleeping overnight in a state where I'm not allowed to
have my firearms.
I had to actually uncheck my luggage.
I had to get it off the plane.
And then I could be in violation of the law.
And this kind of thing happens from time to time.
Not that often.
So they were thinking, hey, let's do something else that
actually benefits these guys, as well as something that is
seen as a restriction.
And so they got the support of a really large number of
senators, a majority of senators.
The last I saw was something in the order of 54 or 55.
But there were four Democrats who, in the end, defected.
Who were from rural states, and were like, we're not going
to go along with this.
And obviously, most Republicans were against it.
But you had, I believe four or five who were for it.
So it wasn't quite enough, because those Democrats
defected from the amendment.
And that is why the legislation itself failed.
EDDY MORETTI: What's behind the intransigence?
Is it a Second Amendment argument?
Or is it to your point, these are rural states?
And these people--
gun culture is just part of their life.
And they use them in different ways than someone in Chicago
or in New York City uses them.
REIHAN SALAM: So the most straightforward answer to the
question is that 17% of Americans live in rural areas.
And 56% of Americans who live in rural areas have a firearm
in their home.
And in the '70s, those numbers were different.
In the '70s it was like 27% lived in rural areas, and 70%
owned a firearm.
So the numbers are smaller.
But the thing is that rural areas are very well
represented.
If you look at the US Senate, for example.
The classic example is that Wyoming and California both
have two senators, but California has 66 times as
many people.
So a lot of these states that have big rural populations
have a lot of influence.
So that's the thing that a lot of people who advocate gun
control are like, and that's totally unfair, blah, blah.
But there's another way of looking at it, and I think
that I'm more sympathetic to your second view.
Which is that, OK, why do people in rural areas have
different attitudes?
In New York City, if you call the police and you report a
crime in progress, like a robbery in progress, or you
see a man with a gun, the police will
show up in 4.6 minutes.
If you are in a rural area that it's the state police or
it's the Sheriff's department--
EDDY MORETTI: Trooper John.
REIHAN SALAM: Trooper John.
Trooper John--
maybe it'll take him an hour to get there, if he's really
putting the pedal to the metal.
It could be that if you're in a very remote place, like if
you're talking about a little mountain town, it'll
be longer than that.
So then there's this mentality-- and again, it's
not just response times.
But it's this idea that the mentality is different.
The mentality is that we are our first line of defense.
EDDY MORETTI: Right.
It's a different America.
REIHAN SALAM: Exactly.
But there's another thing, which is that urban areas,
like big cities, have way more gun homicides then rural areas
on a per capita basis.
Rural areas have suicides.
They have gun accidents.
They have all this other stuff.
But they don't have a ton of gun homicides,
whereas urban areas do.
So in a way, we have this mismatch.
America is both this very urban country
that has urban problems.
It's also a country that has this small, rural minority
that has a lot of political heft.
And also our ideology, our way of thinking about ourselves,
has a lot to do with this idea that we are this country of
rugged individualists.
We're a country in which armed citizens are ultimately
responsible for themselves.
So those two things clash.
And when you're thinking about suburban vote--
these kind of people, they're kind of torn.
Some of them go in this direction
of we're city people.
Why would we have guns?
That's actually crazy.
That's uncivilized.
Whereas there's this other mentality that actually,
having a gun is the ultimate form of civilization.
Because it means that no one can coerce me.
EDDY MORETTI: But the laws that were proposed, even the
ones that got struck down by Toomey in that amendment, they
weren't really impinging on those essential
rights to bear arms.
REIHAN SALAM: I think you're right about that.
I think they did a very careful job.
And not only that, but they also had a provision.
So the big anxiety among many gun owners was that the
expanded background checks would lead to a
national gun registry--
a big master list of everyone who has guns, and which guns
they have, and where.
EDDY MORETTI: Which isn't a totally crazy idea.
There's a registry of all of our cars.
REIHAN SALAM: I think it's a reasonable thing to be
concerned about.
But the thing is, in this legislation, Manchin and
Toomey explicitly put in a provision there that said that
anyone who tries to use this to create a registry will have
to go to jail for 15 years.
So they were really trying to dramatically, and in an over
the top way, say there's not going to be a
gun registry here.
But what I'm trying to tell you is that that's where the
fear comes from.
And I think that the truth is that this legislation wouldn't
have done all that much to gun owners.
And it wouldn't have done that much for people who advocate
gun control, either.
EDDY MORETTI: It's not going to change the farmer with his
gun who needs to respond because Trooper John can't.
REIHAN SALAM: It's probably not going to stop a lot of gun
trafficking, either.
It's really--
here's what happened, Eddy.
This is just a very American thing.
Maybe it's just a democratic thing.
EDDY MORETTI: I'm not an American, so I
struggle with this one.
REIHAN SALAM: But it's also a Canadian thing, too.
But here's the thing.
I think that we, in a democracy,
we want to be cleansed.
When a bad thing happens that we don't understand, we want
to do something about it.
And we want to show that the moral order is intact.
That is fundamentally what it is.
So for example, after the big corporate scandals of the
2000s, we had this Sarbanes-Oxley legislation
that was passed.
Probably didn't really do anything.
After Nixon, after Watergate, we passed these campaign
finance regulations.
Did that lead to a political system free of corruption?
No.
But we passed a law.
We felt like-- whew.
EDDY MORETTI: We felt better.
REIHAN SALAM: We felt better.
We got rid of that.
And I think that in a way, after the financial crisis, we
didn't do something that really made us feel better
about ourselves.
And after Newtown, after these school shootings, now I think
a lot of people just-- let's just do something.
Let's just do something.
I don't even care if it's going to work or not.
Let's just do something.
EDDY MORETTI: I think that's where the
country's at, by the way.
REIHAN SALAM: I think that's where a huge--
well, the problem is actually that intensity.
EDDY MORETTI: The Congress isn't there.
I think everyone agrees the country is there.
The Congress isn't there.
But for reasons that you described, the
representation is skewed.
REIHAN SALAM: Well, yes and no.
So it's also about intensity, right?
Because I think the people who are very afraid and angry
about the idea of a gun registry--
they care a lot more about it than the people
who favor gun control.
EDDY MORETTI: So intensity opens the door for another--
and maybe the last question, because we're probably running
out of time.
So there's one point of view that believes that the
intensity for, or the puritanism around the Second
Amendment is fueling the reaction against these laws.
The other school of thought is that these people hate Obama.
And the fact that Obama has put himself on the line in
such an obvious way, in such a dramatic way, in such a
sincere way, probably--
that they're like, this isn't going to go.
Because now he's gotten way too
involved and exposed himself.
And I'm going to obstruct again.
REIHAN SALAM: Well, here's the way I think about it.
Starting in 2000, about, after the 2000 election, Democrats
really abandoned--
particularly at the national level--
gun control as a political argument.
Because they recognized that it was just hurting them with
a lot of rural voters.
And so if you're a Democrat who wants to win a Senate seat
in Missouri, all these swing states, being for gun control
efforts was just very problematic for you, long
before Obama came on the scene.
EDDY MORETTI: It's almost the way that being
anti-immigration reform is kind of bad
for Republicans now.
OK, let's not go down that tangent.
REIHAN SALAM: But the thing about President Obama is this.
President Obama--
he made his adult life in the south side of Chicago.
And that gives you a certain perspective on the world.
He is someone who is very much an urban person, who is really
rooted in urban concerns and anxieties.
So in American cities, it's not new.
American cities have been imposing gun regulations for
over 100 years.
This is not a new development.
If you look at the Wild West, these towns-- they said, check
your guns at the city limits.
So cities and urban people have tended to be more in
favor of gun control for a long time.
So I think that could be part of it.
George W. Bush was a President who-- in a way, he was himself
an urban guy as well.
But he had kind of a rural vibe, and he seemed to
understand rural America.
Whereas Barack Obama, I think to a lot of rural people,
seems like this dude is not about what we're about.
He does not get it at a visceral level.
He does not understand our needs and concerns.
He's a Chicago person, and he wants to impose laws for
Chicago on the country.
Now, that's not a fair characterization.
That's not what this legislation was, for example.
But I think that that's the perception of him.
And I think that that does contribute to the resistance.
But I think that the resistance would have been
there before.
It would have been there under a different President.
If Hillary had been President, if McCain had been President
and proposed the same thing, I think it would have happened.
EDDY MORETTI: I think the country might actually still
be playing out the East, West dialectic that we're familiar
with from Westerns, "The Big Country" or
something like that.
It's Gregory Peck coming from the East to this lawless,
Western territory, with beautiful big skies, but it
also has Charleton Heston, who is representing that other
side of America.
And it's kind of *** weird that that's where we're still
at today, in a lot of ways.
REIHAN SALAM: I think our politics is all psychodrama.
I think our politics is all psychodrama.
I think that if you understand that that's like 85% of it,
then these debates--
they don't stop being frustrating.
But they make a lot more sense.
EDDY MORETTI: Thanks for coming by.
It was great.
REIHAN SALAM: Thank you, Eddy.