The liberal MSNBC host argues that the country has gone off-track with its military policies.
Excerpt from Inforum’s “Rachel Maddow,” April 12, 2012.

RACHEL MADDOW, Host, “The Rachel Maddow Show”; Author, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
In conversation with DANIEL HANDLER aka Lemony Snicket Author; Screenwriter; Accordionist

MADDOW: The whole reason that I do TV – and the whole reason that I did radio – is that I have these ideas about what’s going on in the world, and I like to explain things, and this is something that I wanted to explain. It was an argument that I wanted to make, that I really felt like there was no way to do other than in print, in long form, and so therefore I had to write a book.

HANDLER: The founding of this nation had in it some mechanisms that made it difficult to go to war. But these devices have been circumvented to make it easier and to isolate war, in effect.

MADDOW: Yeah. I am not an originalist. I am not a person who thinks that the world is just like it was in the 1700s and that we have to do everything exactly the way that the founders meant. They didn’t have very smart things, for example, to say about intercontinental ballistic missiles, women voting and stuff. But I do think that it is foundational to this country that the colonists were very upset about being required to help the British Empire’s military adventures. There’s a lot of colonial consternation over the fact that there are too many frickin’ wars, and the colonists felt put upon to finance them. Why is that “quartering soldiers” thing – you don’t have to quarter soldiers – in our foundational documents? It’s because that was one of the things that we were really, really annoyed with. If we had not been annoyed by too much war and the necessity of paying for it, we might not have been a country in the first place. Because of that concern, the founders structured the Constitution in a way that was designed not to make us pacifist – and we never were; I mean, we did fight a war to make ourselves as a country; we were never designed to be pacifist, I don’t think – but we were designed to be sort of deliberately peaceable. Peace time would be normal, and war would be an aberration. They specifically put war-making powers in the Constitution not under the executive, but under the legislature, with the full knowledge that the legislature can often not get its act together.?

HANDLER: That’s so flattering that you would say, often.

MADDOW: They said, “Listen. We think that essentially it is a kingly oppression to wage war at the whim of one person, and kings are prone to that, and we don’t want a kingly system, and with studied care, we’re going to invest the questions of war and peace in the legislature,” because they are not as likely to make a dumb decision to go to war, if only because they’ll actually have to make an argument. They can’t just assert that we’re going; they have to defeat one another in argument in a legislative body, and that bias – that disinclination for war – is not a perfect prescription. It doesn’t tell us what to do in every instance, but I do think that that’s how they meant us to be inclined as a nation, and that creates a lot of hassle for presidents who want to wage war. As presidents have come up with ways to get around those hassles, we’ve kind of let them do that, and now we are in a position, in 2012, in which there are way too many work-arounds for those things that were supposed to impede a president bent on war.

HANDLER: It’s a conflict, in my mind, that we have a president who’s the commander- in-chief of the armed forces, and then a legislative branch that’s doing war. What is that difference?

MADDOW: Declaring war is Congress’s prerogative, but we go to war without declaring war all the time. There are commander-in-chief powers that I think even the founders envisioned. They would talk about things like having the power “to repel invasion.” You know, something happens; all of a sudden you need to act quickly; Congress is all in the 1700s equivalent of the Bahamas, or whatever, and so we need to do something. The president has sort of temporally limited ability to make decisions about national security, but it is meant to be an exception and it’s meant to be a time-limited thing. Congress is expected to make the decisions. It doesn’t mean that the president has no authority, but it does mean that he’s got to defer to Congress on the larger issues of war and peace. Does that always mean that it has to be a “declaration of war?” We have evolved in our national security state so that there almost never is one; now it’s an “authorization of the use of military force,” and all these other things –

HANDLER: – if we’re lucky.

MADDOW: Yeah; if we’re lucky. I’m not even so sure that it matters what you call it, but what I think was intended was the idea that it’s Congress’s call, and that if Congress says no, it doesn’t happen. We’ve seen that happen, even in modern times. Gerald Ford wanted to go back and start the Vietnam War again after we were gone, and Congress said no, and Democrats and Republicans said no, and when he still wanted to go – and he was very upset; he said he was “horrified” by their reaction – they not only said no, they used appropriations; they used money to say, “No; we’re not going to give you a nickel to do it.”
The debate before Gulf War I – which is in [the book] at length – we don’t remember having had, I think, a lot of national consternation about balance of power heading into that war, but it ended up being a totally robust, interesting debate that I think made the whole country pay a lot more attention and be a lot more invested in that war.

HANDLER: You talk, in your book, about the kind of “ratcheting up,” so it’s always an emergency. We always have to rush back and have to decide in two and a half hours, and there’s hardly any time to address the American people, let alone have a debate on war. Do you think some of that is media- driven, Ms. Media Woman? Do you think that’s part of what builds an emergency state, this kind of drumbeat? When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we saw that on TV. We could see that happening, and that made everyone, I think, less in the mood to have a long conversation about whether or not we should do something about it.

MADDOW: Yeah, and I don’t think it’s just a modern dynamic. Because there’s an imbalance of information between people who are operating at sort of high-level national security positions and the rest of us, they can always say – as Reagan did regularly, for example – that they had secret information that if they could tell us, we would be just as horrified as they are, but we have to trust them that the urgency is there: “We’ll tell ya later.” They can always do that. They can always tell you that things are more urgent than they want to be, and we don’t have the information that they’ve got. I mean, particularly when it’s stuff that’s not actual wars – when it’s conflict with transnational actors, like terrorist groups – in that case, their actions or their threats are things that the intelligence community has, that spies have, and that we don’t have access to, and very few members of Congress do.

There is an imbalance of information, but I think that ultimately what we have to count on is winning the argument. Having to win the argument forces you to make a good argument. If all you have to do is assert that there is a great danger, and there’s a great imperative that we need to act, and you’re the one who gets to then decide if we’re going to act, it doesn’t matter what you say. You don’t even have to deliberately lie; you could just skew it the way that you see it. But if you actually have to persuade other people who don’t automatically agree with you of the rightness of your cause and then win a vote on it, your argument will be better – will be forced to be better; you’ll be forced to say more of what it is, and that process is designed to make bad arguments lose so we don’t do bad things justified by dumb arguments.?

HANDLER: It seems to me that the notion of when a war is over has just changed –

MADDOW: Well, they end a lot slower now than they used to. We’re in our 11th year in Afghanistan – the longest war in American history – [and we] simultaneously fought an eight-and-a-half year long war in Iraq while that 11-year Afghanistan war was going on.?

HANDLER: And that war ended 27 times.

MADDOW: Yeah. And when it really did end – when we really did leave, in December – the reaction here was, “Oh, is that still going on?” We think of National Guardsmen and Reservists as essentially full-time troops now – they’ve been deployed so much now, we think of them almost as active duty; they’re so separate from civilian life that we don’t have that sense of, “Oh, the Guard is coming home;” because we don’t notice what we are paying for; because we think that the military is fighting wars on their own, and not that the country is at war, the wars can kind of go on indefinitely. There’s no friction. That is part of why the wars get longer. We also have started to think about the military as being kind of superhuman, having any capability that we want to give to them. When you end up devoting that much of your budget to a resource like that for decades, they probably should be superhuman by now.

HANDLER: I’ll move on to the part about mercenaries; that’ll cheer everybody up. I don’t even really know how to begin with that. The mercenary chapter, for me, was the most fascinating and also the most distressing.
When is your sense that that began to get so completely out of control, that we have private companies... I mean, it’s even just impossible for me to imagine men and women, but mostly men, going over and being neither under the law of the country they’re in nor under United States law, and behaving unspeakably abominably, which I had trouble getting over. I could picture I might end up somewhere where I was neither under U.S. law nor the law of the country I was in, and I wouldn’t think, like, “Well, now it’s time for me to get a 14-year-old hooker.”

MADDOW: Yeah, but that is what happened. It was a very convenient falling through the cracks. If you’re working for a U.S. military operation, but you are working not for the U.S. military, and you are abroad and you are peeling potatoes or driving trucks or fixing helicopters or whatever it is on a contract, if you do something wrong – if you kill somebody, or whatever – you can’t be tried under the uniform code of military justice, because you are not in the military. Seems reasonable. The deal with the contract is that you can’t be charged under the local laws in the place that you are serving, because we can’t have these local police officers and law enforcement interfering with our contractors while they’re doing this thing for our military! And what U.S. court is going to prosecute things that happen in the Balkans somewhere, to somebody who is working on behalf of the U.S. government in a military theater? I mean, a U.S. court deciding that’s their jurisdiction is also very hard to imagine, and in that sort of legal free-fire zone, all sorts of really bad stuff happens, and happened from the very beginning.

We’ve always had some private companies involved in making war. There have always been some contracts associated with military operations. But what they decided in the ’90s was that...Dick Cheney was at the Defense Department then, and he decided that he would give a small contract – I think it was, like, a $4 million contract – to a company that he knew, and the contract would be to research whether it might be possible to have some logistics that are done now by uniformed members of the military – things like peeling potatoes; driving convoys; security for VIPs; building roads, bar- racks; running the kitchens and the PXes on the bases; all of that kind of stuff – couldn’t that be done in a privatized way? This little company that got the $4 million contract looked into it, and decided that yes, it could be done, but only they could do it.

That little pilot project expanded into not just a private company doing a thing here and there for the military, but taking over the basic logistics of what it meant to deploy U.S. troops abroad. Very quickly, under the Clinton administration, that expanded, so that not only are there the helicopter mechanics – in the case of the sex slave ring – working for private companies, but also, when Bill Clinton ran up against political constraints so that he could not do militarily what he wanted to do in the Balkans – he wanted to arm and train the Croatians – he couldn’t do that. Miraculously, a company called MPRI full of former military officials and others surfaced to get a contract to do this work that the U.S. government wanted, but did not want to take political responsibility for. This idea of who was going to peel the potatoes became “who was going to train the Croatians,” and all of a sudden a beautiful nonpartisan nexus was born of unaccountable, free-fire, lawless contractors who are making a lot of money and who can help elide all sorts of political constraints on what we want to do with our military.

That has been too attractive to any administration to get rid of. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in 2008, campaigning for the Democratic nomination, both said that they were going to get rid of contractors, essentially, in our overseas deployments, and that has not happened at all. It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done. It’s not like it’s been like this forever; they started doing it like this in the ’90s. We didn’t have this in the ’80s. We could go back.

HANDLER: Despite the fact that it’s happened very quickly, a lot of it seems completely intractable to me. It feels permanent. When [your book] says, for instance, “Going to war or being at war should be painful for the entire country from the start,” and, “Let’s do away with the secret military. Let’s quit asking the military to do things best left to our State Department, or the Peace Corps. Our Guard and Reserves need to be the Guard and Reserves again...” When I try to picture any politician campaigning on that, or standing up and making that [statement], it seems now impossible to me. When I try to imagine any politician saying, “The first thing we’re going to do is that the CIA is going to be a lot more transparent in its military operations,” I just think, “How’s that going to go down?” Much as I like a happy ending in a book.

MADDOW: Yes; you are known as Mr. Happy Book. Well, if this happens to Lemony Snicket, what does he do? [Laughter.] [In a] Washington Post-ABC poll, a majority of Republicans say that the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting. When Ron Paul used to campaign for president, he would say something anti-interventionist, something sort of isolationist, in his Ron Paul Republican way, and the, like, six Ron Paul guys in the corner would start screaming wildly and then they’d get kicked out and everybody else would boo them and go, “U.S.A.; U.S.A.!” It’s not like that anymore. Even in the Republican field for presidential candidates this year, as fun as it was to watch, one of the things that was sort of sobering and really interesting about it was to hear them talk about Afghanistan. To hear Newt Gingrich and even Rick Santorum, who’s been very, very hawkish over his career, and sometimes Mitt Romney – depending on the day of the week – and always John Huntsman, and always Ron Paul talking about needing to get the troops home and then getting a big round of applause from a Republican – rather, in some cases, rather rabid Republican audiences.

HANDLER: Is that just because someone else is in charge?

MADDOW: No; I don’t think so. I think that there is a legitimate –?

HANDLER: It seems like there’s a certain stripe of Republican that, if Barack Obama said, “You know what? I like babies,” they’d be like, “Ugh; babies.” [Laughter.]

MADDOW: I will not argue with you on that, but I do think that there is a libertarian- inflected conservative Republican mindset which is horrified by Hillary Clinton going to Pakistan, being asked by journalism students, I think it was, about drone strikes that had happened very recently before she got there, and her saying, “I can’t discuss that.” That is something that horrifies a lot of conservatives, and it ought to. If we are using the CIA as a branch of the military, which we are, first of all we should have had a debate about that. We should have had a fight about whether or not we were going to do that. We didn’t; it just happened. Second, that means that we now effectively have a secret military; we have a military, with an Air Force, committing acts of war in Americans’ names, and the elected officials who are directing that those things happen will not explain those things to the American people or even admit that they are happening.

Now, we didn’t have to have a secret military in order to become a superpower in the world. We did not have to have a secret military in order to win a lot of stuff that we’ve left long in the dust.

HANDLER: I agree. When I think of the history of places that have had a secret military and that have not had a secret military, it doesn’t seem to me that they go on as normal but just manage to cut out the secret military part. It seems more like they do away with the whole thing, which I’m not advocating, but that’s what concerns me. It’s what I always think about the Department of Homeland Security. What president is ever going to say, “We don’t need a Department of Homeland Security anymore” – ?

MADDOW: – But it’s not that old. We didn’t into a secret military over a century. We didn’t get the Department of Homeland Security from Abraham Lincoln. We got this stuff recently, under contested terms, by people who made some bad decisions – in many cases, admitting they were bad decisions now – and we can reverse those things, and we should. National security politics shouldn’t be beyond our reach, and it shouldn’t be beyond partisan fighting. We should see those things as within our power.

I won’t belabor this more than I already have, but just on the issue of drones: Let’s say we’re not going to talk about whether or not drone warfare is an appropriate use of military force. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we think that ought to continue; there ought to be drones used to kill people that the American government wants dead around the world. I believe that even among the people who would concede that point, there’s going to be a good argument about why that can’t be the Air Force; why that has to be the CIA. The Air Force has drones. The Air Force also has a chain of command, and they also have public information officers. Does the CIA need to be doing all of these things? Operationally, the answer is no. There is no operational reason that the CIA has to be doing it; it is a legal reason. That means it’s about accountability to us, and so we ought to be pressing that.

HANDLER: [Audience member] Eileen asks, “In the beginning of your book, you say of Dick Cheney” – Well, the book is dedicated to Dick Cheney.?

MADDOW: Yes.?

HANDLER: You say, “Oh, please let me interview you,” and the question is, “If you did interview Dick Cheney, what’s the first question you would ask him?”

MADDOW: Oh! That’s good. Well, first I would ask him if me dedicating the book to him is why he finally said yes. “What can I give you, Dick Cheney? I give you this book.” I have been trying for a very long time to interview him. Can I tell you a little story about Dick Cheney, about why I’m interested in him?

HANDLER: Yeah. I think that’s kind of the whole idea.?

MADDOW: Good point.

Iran-Contra happens. It seems like a huge scandal, and then promptly disap-pears in a puff of Reagan hagiography. The Iran-Contra scandal, at the time, is a huge deal. Senior administration officials being indicted, being convicted; people going to prison. Reagan was told by Congress, “We know what you want to do in South America and in Central America, and we say no. You cannot do it. You cannot do it with this agency; you cannot do it with that agency; you can’t do it with any other agency that we can think of the name of right now. You can’t do it by any means. No!” Reagan said, “OK,” [whispering] I’ll do it secretly,” which was very illegal. What he did was very, very illegal and a huge scandal, and he paid for it by selling arms to the Iranians! Not only was that illegal, but he had been talking about how he would never do that. It was a really bad deal, and in order to save Reagan’s butt, at the end of Iran-Contra when, really, it was the scandal that was going to end his presidency, the administration came up – I think ad-hoc, on the spot – with this idea that it hadn’t really been illegal for Reagan to do these things, because he’s president, and a president can do anything they want on national security and it’s never illegal. It was like, Nixon [saying], “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” It was the same thing, except it was about war.

So, they came up with this defense, and Congress investigated Iran-Contra, and they said, “Are you kidding? That’s ridiculous! The president is not constrained by law when it comes to national security? That’s ridiculous; that’s not the American way that we do things.” There was a dissent from the congressional conclusion on this, who said, “Actually, the Reagan administration is right. Iran-Contra is fine. That wasn’t illegal. The president can do anything, regardless of the law and regardless of Congress on national security. I agree with them,” and that dissent was from a Wyoming congress- man named Dick Cheney. He had a really big idea, and nobody cared at the time, because he was this back-bench Wyoming Republican, and it was this minority report to the Iran-Contra investigation. I want to ask him about that.

HANDLER: Someone who doesn’t want to tell me their name asks what your prediction is for the outcome of the health care act.

MADDOW: Oh! That’s a good question. I am bad at predictions, so I don’t know. But I think that if the court strikes it down – in broad terms, with a five-four decision – it is going to change the way that Americans think about the court for a very long time. I think that the court is cognizant of that. I mean, when Justice Roberts gives speeches – like does the sort of “state of the court” speech that he does, and stuff – he’s been talking about his worries about the esteem of the court in the eyes of the American people, and so it seems to be on their mind –

HANDLER: – more than, say, it was in 2000? [Laughter.]

MADDOW: Yeah; or after Citizens United. If I am optimistic I want the decision to be not five-four, because I don’t want us to lose faith in the basic structure of our government. But I don’t know; it’s a pretty radical court.

HANDLER: “What advice would you give Obama” – and very few people put their names, so I’ll just pretend this is from my mother – “What advice would you give Obama about the world economy on our own, other than firing the banksters, who are his advisers?” That’s kind of a presumptuous question.

MADDOW: “Don’t ask Maddow about the world economy.” I don’t know.

HANDLER: Well, maybe this leads into this: “How did living in the Bay Area shape your views, and what do you miss most about San Francisco?”

MADDOW: I love San Francisco, and every time I come back here I remember that this is the only city in America that has magic in it. I’m sure some other people from other parts of the country feel that way about their city. I mean, I know friends from New Orleans who feel that way about New Orleans, but I go there and I don’t feel it the way that I feel it here. I think it may be an evolutionarily devised response to the fact that there are lots of vistas in San Francisco.